Psychology explains that thoughts arise in the brain, and emotions from the heart. Irrespective of where they arise from, thoughts and emotions are inseparable. Ancient scriptures say that thoughts create us. So do emotions. We become what our emotions are. Managing our emotions is crucial to transforming our lives.

Whenever we look at something, the first thing we do is to calculate what we can get from it. It can be a person or an object, that doesn't matter. Our thoughts start functioning either through fear or through greed to calculate what there is in the situation for us. Our attention is centered on that object or person.

It is possible to turn our attention towards our own inner space and ask, 'What can I contribute?', 'What can I add?', 'How can I enrich others?' If the process is only to ask, 'What can I get out of it?' then it is driven by lust. If the process asks, 'How can I enrich it?' It is driven by love! Lust is an energy that demands. Love is an energy that gives.

Love is an intense experience in one's inner space. Many of us think love is a choice. We think experience and expression of love is a choice. We think that if we want to, we can handle love; otherwise we can let it go. No! It is not a choice as we think. It is a basic necessity of life.

When I say life, I don't mean just breathing and staying alive. I mean being alive at the innermost being level, as a live Consciousness. If you can express love, if you can experience love, that is the only way of being alive as a Consciousness. If you don't experience and express love, you may inhale and exhale, but you can't say you are a live being. There are so many animals, plants and other things that breathe day in and day out. You will continue to exist like them, that's all.

A disciple asked a Zen master 'Does an enlightened master speak?' The master said, 'No, an enlightened person never speaks. Only a person who doesn't know enlightenment speaks.'

Then the disciple asked, 'So does an enlightened master keep quiet?'

The master said, 'No, an enlightened master never keeps quiet. If he keeps quiet, then he is not enlightened. '

The disciple was puzzled. He asked, 'You say he neither speaks nor keeps quiet. What does he do?'

The master replied, 'He sings! His being sings. He neither speaks, nor keeps quiet. His very being sings.'

Love is the ultimate experience of a human being. When the experience happens, we will not be able to possess the experience, only the experience will possess us! That is what the master means. When the experience possesses us, whatever we do will be like a beautiful song. Any word that comes out will be poetry. Our being will be so light. We will simply float. Our walking will be a dance. Our body language will radiate grace. All our expressions will be of great service to humanity.

All human beings are born as loving beings. A new born baby radiates causeless love. Does she know anyone around her at birth?

No! Her energy is causeless love. As we grow, society instills fear and greed in us and we orient our love based on greed and fear. Then it is no longer causeless love. It is love with a reason. It becomes suffocating. We start feeling other emotions like jealousy, fear and anger. We experience only love with a cause, a reason. But with a little awareness and awakening, it is possible to reclaim our original love.

Love can never be made to happen with just your logical decision. Our mental setup itself should be created in such a way that we become love and our actions speak love. Our logic should start radiating a love that is beyond logic!

If you try to create love, it will be like forcing open the petals of a flower to make it bloom. Can it be called flowering? No. Love is a flower that blossoms deep within your being and sends out a sweet fragrance that we share with others.

A beautiful incident happened in the life of Ramanuja'. If you study the life of Ramanuja', you will see how he used every step of his life to move towards enlightenment.

When his teacher initiated Ramanuja', he gave him a special chant. The teacher told him not to pass on the chant to anybody and that if he did so, he would go to hell. Ramanuja asked him what would happen to the others with whom he might share it. The teacher said that they would be led to salvation.

What would we have done? Naturally we would have kept quiet, thinking, Why unnecessarily go to hell?'

Ramanuja immediately stood on a platform in a temple and called out to the whole village. He loudly pronounced the chant given by his teacher and told the people, 'Let you all go to heaven! I am not bothered about me going to hell. Let you all reach heaven!'

When you are deeply in love, you feel as if your whole being is open and you are ready to go to any extreme for the sake of anybody. You are ready to go to any boundary, as there is nothing to protect within your being. Your being is totally open. You don't feel insecure when you are wild with love. That is why people who are in love always do risky things. They take the risk because they feel they have nothing to lose. There is no insecurity about anything. They feel so expansive. Love gives tremendous courage and energy. It opens you up. It makes you finally available to yourself. As of now, you are not available to yourself. Love can make you available to yourself. When the teacher saw what Ramanuja did, he admitted that he learned a lesson from his disciple and declared that Ramanuja had reached greater heights than him. He told Ramanuja, 'You are in a different space now.'

The problem is that we have all practically become philosophers. We don't understand that life is not philosophy. It is spontaneous flowing energy. It is new every moment. Philosophy is all about repeating the same old things in different wa s, that's all. There's nothing fresh in it. Life is fresh every moment. Philosophy robs life of the freshness.

Ten philosophers were imprisoned in a country. They were kept together in one cell. They decided that somehow they should escape from the prison. They sat and made a big plan. They got the mold of the prison door key and made a duplicate key for the prison door.

Finally, they chose the date of escape. The whole plan was clearly laid out. They decided that on the particular night, two of them will open the prison door with the duplicate key and signal to the others. The others would escape and these two would follow after locking the door behind them.

The day of escape dawned and two of them went to open the door. The rest of them waited for the signal. They waited and waited but never got any signal. Three hours passed. Suddenly the two who had gone to open the door came back and said, 'We have to drop our plan to escape. It can't happen today. We will have to do it some other day. We will have to reschedule our escape.'

The others asked, 'Why, what happened?'

They replied, What to do? The foolish guards forgot to lock the prison door!'

Those who philosophize cannot think of anything new! It has to be the same old mental setup. If there is some change or some new situation, they cannot think creatively to deal with it, because they are not open. They are like a closed circuit.

We have also become like philosophers when dealing with our lives. We are stuck in patterns of the past. We are never in the moment. If anything new happens, we are at a loss.

With philosophy, you have fixed ideas and you become very assertive. When you are too assertive, you can't love. Assertion is aggressiveness that does not allow love to come in. When you are too sure and filled with preconceived ideas, then where is the space for love to enter? Love needs beautiful space in order to blossom. With philosophy, there is no room for love to settle in its existential state. It is like this: if you really want to experience the taste of nectar, can you experience it through just a set of ideas about it? No! You need to taste the nectar yourself, give it some space, allow it to fill you and settle in its existential state. Only then you will know its taste. In the same way, to experience love, just a few ideas alone will not help. You need to allow it to grow in its existential state in your inner space. Then you will know it. Allow it to happen in your heart, not in the head. Decide to be with the heart. Then it will grow and happen.

What was once a failure within the head can become a success within the heart! Love is really a success of the heart that every individual should experience. It is easy to stay in the head. It is, after all, a mundane and familiar intellect. It requires courage to come down to the heart, because with the heart nothing is familiar, everything is fresh. At the head level you have a solid identity and familiar patterns. At the heart level there is no identity, no pattern. It is an open space. To enter into it, you need tremendous courage. That is why love is fearful for many people. It is an unfamiliar zone. With the head, there is comfortable familiarity.

from our being. 'No' is darkness, 'yes' is light. 'No' is ego, 'yes' is egolessness.

If the cosmos is a grand ocean, we are all part of it. We are one with the ocean, not individual drops in the ocean. When we think of ourselves as individual drops, we feel separate in our boundaries and in our feelings. This is what is called ego. We become driven by feelings of 'I' and 'mine'. As long as this separation remains, we can never experience the energy of the ocean that is love. We never experience that causeless and surging love. As long as we remain a drop in the ocean, we say 'no' to life. We neither love nor trust. We don't feel blissful either, because bliss is possible only for those who know how to love and trust. It happens only to those who know how to feel part of the ocean. Bliss is possible only when our heart says 'yes', when the 'no' completely disappears

'No' is the way of the unconscious person. 'Yes' is the way of the awakened one. All the conflict, all the suffering in our life is because of our saying 'no'. 'No' is a fight, a war with Existence. 'Yes' is love, peace with Existence. 'Yes' is in deep accord with the totality of who we are — the ocean. Bliss is another name for that accord, that harmony.

The way to be in bliss is to dissolve into the ocean, not to be a drop but to merge with the ocean. To be a drop is to be a hindrance. To be a drop is to be with ego. The ego is the root of all misery. When the ego is absent, bliss reaches us from every nook and corner of the ocean of existence, as if it were just waiting for the ego to disappear.

Ego is a closed state of consciousness. All the windows and doors are closed. Life itself becomes insulated and encapsulated. Our ego surrounds us like a capsule. Our ego is like a sealed capsule, there is not even a small gap to allow anything to enter. It closes itself due to fear and shrinks into itself. That is how we create misery for ourselves.

Love is being in the flow with Existence, to be totally with it. Ego is like frozen ice. Love is like liquid water. Only when we are liquid do we become part of the ocean. Then we don't have any private goal or destination. Each moment is blissful, incredibly ecstatic, just going with the plan of the cosmos.

It is such sheer joy to simply exist and flow. Just 'to be' is enough. But we need to be sensitive to feel the joy of being. We need to grow feelers. The feelers are what we call love. Love feels the joy of just being. When you grow the feelers of love, life is no longer made of independent thoughts but becomes a continuous feeling. Then the ego starts to dissolve. Once we have moved from thinking to feeling, there is only one more step and that is from feeling to being, and that is very simple.

The first step is difficult: to move from thinking to feeling. The ego has trained the mind to think so much, that's why. The second step comes almost automatically. There's nothing we need to do for it to happen. From feeling to being, the distance is nothing at all. It can happen at any moment. The poet can become the mystic at any moment. He is almost there. The real problem is how to get out of our thinking and get more and more into feeling. Just follow the heart. Just love more, that's all! Feel more. Enjoy more so that you can feed your heart. Watch the sunrise, sunset, clouds, rainbows, birds, flowers, animals, rocks, and people, and watch them with awareness. Look into their eyes. Existence is so multidimensional. Look into every dimension like a poet. Praise it. Feel it. Be ecstatic! Expand your consciousness and experience every single detail of Existence with love. Slowly, the ego will lose its hold and disappear.

The only barrier to love is fear. When things start happening, we become fearful because with love we enter into a merger. This threatens the very basis of our ego. Ego is separateness while love is a merger. The fear we feel is nothing but the fear of the dissolving ego. Let the fear be there. It will hang around for a while. If we simply ignore it, the ego will leave us. It is a great day when fear of losing the ego leaves us. From then on growth becomes simple, easy and spontaneous. Then we are not, only love is.

Encounter any situation in life with deep love. Soon you will become pure love. Whether it is a person or your work or a passerby or god or anything, just encounter it with deep love for love's sake. If you are a painter, just be completely in love with painting. If you are a dancer, be completely in love with dancing. If you are working with your computer, treat it with utmost love and become lost in it. Just be completely sincere and completely in love every moment.

If you are painting and at the same time thinking about which gallery to put up the painting in or how much to sell it for, then be very clear, you are not lost in love. You are in love only with some particular thing, which is money in this case. If you are dancing while calculating what you will get once you finish the dance, then be very clear you are not lost in love. You create more and more bondage by doing this.

If you become lost in every moment, you become love. Then, when you work you work with the utmost focus because you are in deep love with it. This way, your very life becomes a deep meditative love.

Then you start feeling, relating and respecting everything as a living being, just as you are. You even start feeling the other person's thoughts. You start responding and relating to the other person without him or her opening up to you. You feel the cosmos as a translucent, ever living presence. You have tremendous intelligence. You know exactly how to connect to things. Such is the power of love.

The Sufi* mystic Jalaluddin Rumi' says, 'Wherever you are, whatever your condition is, always try to be a lover!' The whole of Existence is in a deep romance with itself. You are part of it. So it is your nature to be a lover every moment. Only by being that can you experience the real fulfillment of your original nature.

The big problem today is that most people don't love themselves. Society never teaches that it is possible to love ourselves. Understand that unless you love yourself, you cannot possibly love another person. Only when you lose yourself to yourself can you lose yourself to others. We are taught that we can only love even ourselves if we have a reason. If we perform well, we love ourselves. If we fail, we hate ourselves. We apply the same logic to others. We love them only because of something, never without a cause, without a reason.

When you don't love yourself, you become cynical and negative towards life.

For a few minutes every day, just sit by yourself and feel overflowing love towards yourself. Feel what a wonderful being you are. Feel how much you have taken yourself for granted. Feel yourself as part of Existence and love yourself for it. Melt with the feeling of love for yourself. If you practice this everyday you will see that where you were once hard and self-centered, now you have become soft and loving.

Then, when people love you, you don't feel guilty or unworthy because just as they love you, you love yourself too. You become ready to receive love from others. Usually when others show love to you, you feel guilty or

unworthy because you don't feel you are worth being loved. Once you settle within yourself with deep love, you will receive others' love with joy.

Existence is not a thing. It is a living energy being. Every single tree, every single stalk of a plant responds to your love and hate, your every thought.

Cleve Backster', a polygraph expert, has conducted several experiments to examine the response of plants to human emotions and thoughts. He discovered that plants would respond to human thought in a way similar to how a human being would respond. A simple thought by a person about burning the leaves of the plant would register erratic movement in the polygraph recording of the plant! Backster* called this response 'Primary Perception' - the ability of plant, animal and human cells to perceive and respond to any thought.

On one occasion, Backster' recorded graphs that registered a flat line that suggested the plants were in a state of shock. He asked the owner of the plant if she had done anything to hurt the plants. The lady told him, 'I roasted a few of its leaves to get their dry weight!'

When you start loving Existence, it begins responding to you in beautiful ways. You start rising above all of the differences around you - differences between people, situations, emotions, between anything and anything. Everything merges into unity. And that is the truth. Everything is part of one Whole. And love is the only thing that can make you realize this truth.

In Bharat, there is a tradition of spiritual wandering where people walk by foot the length and breadth of the country, visiting many temples and pilgrim centers. I used to wonder how they were able to do that, especially going through forests, sleeping with wild animals and begging for food. The secret is that they start feeling connected with nature so completely that nature protects them beautifully. Whether it rains or shines, the animals and trees, everything, takes care of them. Even though this may be logically difficult to understand, it is the truth.

If you begin to live with a little respect and love for Existence and all its creations, you will be able to recognize these things happening in your own life as well. Nature will simply reciprocate your love in many beautiful ways.

Very often, love is confused with respect. From a young age, children are brought up to always show respect but never to show love. You can hear people teach the children, 'You should respect your elders.' You will hardly hear, 'You should love your elders.' That is the problem.

Respect sows the first guilt in you that you are something inferior. It makes you feel separate from the other person to whom you show respect. On the other hand, love sows the seeds of joy and unity in you. It makes you feel connected with the other person and with everything in Existence. With respect, there is fear. With love, there is authentic respect as well as the scope for deep understanding to happen. With respect alone, not much understanding is possible. With love, there is a possibility for tremendous understanding and transformation to happen. Love by its very nature is transforming. It softens and melts you.

Respect creates distance between you and the other. Love bridges the distance between you and the other. Only because people themselves have not experienced love, do they give respect as the rule of acceptable behavior. Respect is easier but not real. Love might be difficult only because not many know how to go about it, but it is real. With love, respect lS automatic and authentic. With pure respect, the appearance of love is forced and may never be authentic.

Love is the original religion. It is the root of all spirituality. All other religions are offshoots. Love is like the root of the tree and all religions are like leaves or branches. Even the greatest religions are only big branches compared to the religion of love!

Love has no temple or scripture. It is like the roots that lie beneath the ground but provide the nourishment for life. Without it, the whole tree dies. Through love many branches and leaves are created. But what do we do? We cling to the branches and leaves instead of clinging to the root. When we cling to the root, we get the direct nourishment. When we cling to the branches, we enjoy only one dimension of the nourishment. When you become more loving, you will enter the invisible temple of love.

One day a master asked his disciples how they could tell when the night had ended and the day had begun.

One of them said, 'When you can look in the distance and tell whether the animal is a cow or a horse.' The master said, 'No.'

Another disciple said, 'When you can look at a tree in the distance and tell if it is a pine tree or a mango tree.'The master again said, 'No.'

The master replied, 'When you can look into the face of any man and recognize your brother in him. When you can look into the face of any woman and recognize your sister in her. If you cannot do this, then no matter what time of the day it is, it is still only night time.'

The master can give a few hints, a little hints here and there. Then we must find our own way carefully, cautiously. Love is just a hint, but if we follow love slowly, very slowly, we will be surprised that god becomes more and more of a reality. He is no longer just a thought, no longer simply an idea, but something that we can feel. The deeper we go into love, the closer we come to the feeling. The day we dissolve into love we merge with unity.

From time immemorial, the conclusion of many mystics has been that matter is glued together with love. An invisible force keeps atoms and molecules together. They do not fall apart because of this invisible force. Science has yet to discover this ultimate energy. It has detected a few of its manifestations such as gravitation and electricity but these are only gross manifestations. The day that science discovers love will be the day when religion and science will commune with each other in the same language.

For now, just rejoice because love is possible. Be joyful that love is your inner potential. You can rise to the ultimate heights with love. Nothing is impossible with love because love can transform itself into god.

Many people confuse lust with love. This is one of the greatest tragedies. The person who thinks lust is love remains confined to the physical plane. He never rises higher than that. He has no idea that there is a higher plane. He remains in the basement of his house. Sex is the base-ment. It is not the place to live in. You can use it for other purposes, but it can't be your home. Your home is above it.

Man has three planes of being: animal, human and divine. First is the plane of lust, which is the animal plane. It is a crude form of love. It is not that love is not present there. Love is mixed or polluted by gross greed and desire, that's all.

As our being becomes more refined, we enter the second plane, ordinary human love. Human love has traces of possessiveness and jealousy. Since human love is grounded in greater understanding than animal love, one does not simply use the other person for his or her own gain. Human love is capable of seeing the other as an end unto itself.

The third type of love is divine love. It is love in its highest form, almost like a prayer. There is no possessiveness. There is nothing earthly in it. It becomes an invisible but powerful force. This is when love becomes prayer and we feel restful contentment for the first time. I say restful because the other two types of love always keep reaching for more or keep missing something. There is no restfulness in them. When the third type of love happens, even sex becomes a deep and divine act beyond mere physical pleasure.

The first thing we need to understand is that relationships can happen causelessly, without any reason. Only then will we understand that the experience of love is much more important than the object of love.

You must have at least one relationship in your life that exists for no reason. If you don't have such a relationship, be very clear, even if you have money, deep down you are still poor.

From today onwards start relating with someone for no reason. There should be no monetary or physical benefit from the relationship. If you experience causeless love once, after that, if the money is shared, if the body is shared, it is okay. The quality is totally different. I am not against money or against marriage. I am not against the physical relationship, but if it becomes the center of your life, you are missing something very important. That is what I want to convey here. You miss a major dimension or energy center of your being.

I always tell people, 'Do some work for half hour everyday that does not bring you money or name and fame. Just for half an hour, go to some temple or church, clean and sweep the floor, offer some service. Don't plan to become a committee member in that place! Don't think that it will fetch you good credit and a place in heaven... no. Don't look any further than that work for half an hour.'

Initially you may think, 'This half hour is a waste of time. After a few days you will realize that only in that half hour are you really alive! Only for that half hour you are not driven by fear or greed. You smile at the people around you without any calculation. You feel strangely sincere in a way that you never felt before.

If you observe yourself at other times, you will see that you even smile only after some mental calculation. Even before laughing you will see who is the person next to you. Based on that, you decide how many inches to open your mouth, how polite you should be, how you should project yourself. As of now, every action of yours is driven by fear and greed. You are fuelled by fear and greed. That's why you feel lonely and tired.

If you try this technique, you will suddenly see that your body and mind start functioning without the need for fear and greed! Once you learn this simple knack of how to move your body without fear and greed, be very clear, you can enter into love. You learn how to tap into the energy of love. You learn how to run your life on the beautiful energy of love. Only then will you know what is meant by the word 'love'.

A new center will be awakened in you. A new energy will start radiating in you. Then you will understand how loving and causeless relationships are possible.

Hatred and love are opposite sides of the same coin as long as love is conditional. Love can flip into hatred the moment we feel that our expectations are threatened. In love of this type, it remains love only as long as the conditions remain as expected. The moment the conditions change, the love also changes.

Often what we believe as love is actually related to time and space. So long as the distance between lovers is large and the time of contact is minimal, they feel love towards each other. However, once they get closer and spend more time together, they feel that they are not so much in love after all! That is why they say familiarity breeds contempt'. Familiarity can also convert love into hatred. To transcend both love and hatred, we first need to drop expectations. Expectation is the first enemy of love.

We all go through several stages of relationships in our lifetime. If you observe very closely, whichever stage we are in, when we ask for love we are actually asking only for the other person's attention. When we say a person doesn't love us, we actually mean that the other person doesn't give us enough attention. The basic need for any human being is attention from others. The attention-need, along with our dependency on others for survival, is what we experience as love.

The dependency on others might be psychological, physical or spiritual. For example, when you expect someone to lend you a shoulder to cry on, you are dependent upon that person psychologically. When you expect someone to provide you with money or fulfill your bodily pleasures, you are dependent upon them physically. In whatever way people may fulfill this dependency, what it boils down to is the attention that they give us! The whole idea of love is nothing but getting the attention of the other in some way.

In the first session of our meditation camp, I ask people to make an honest list of at least one or two persons in their lives who they really love. Usually in the beginning, people come up with a big list: husband, wife, father, mother, brother, sister and so on. They include people whom they would like to please or need to please in order to be happy themselves. As they hear me talk about real love, they start crossing out names from their list one by one! Understand, if you cross out something, then it was not truly there in the first place.

Many people include certain people in their love list because these people give them a 'feel good' feeling. What do I mean by a 'feel good' feeling? It is a certificate saying, 'You are good. You are this, you are that' etc. We love anyone who pays us compliments, is it not? We think twice before arguing with them. We secretly nurture our good name with them in the name of love. If they go back on their approval of us, we might fall into depression, so we continue to please them and love them. Like this, there is always some hidden reason for our love. Some people tell me, 'No Swamiji, I don't love my son or daughter for any of these reasons.' I ask them, 'Alright, if your son suddenly starts to make his own decisions, if he suddenly doesn't fit into your framework, ifhe doesn't follow your guidance, ifhe doesn't live according to your rules, will your love for him be the same?'

They tell me, 'No, it will not. My love will be reduced a little!'

What does this mean? We love our next generation as long as they are extensions of our life. As long as they fall into our pattern of thinking, as long as they live in accordance with our conventions, we love them. We simply fulfill our own desires through them. We fulfill our lives through them. Whatever we couldn't accomplish in our youth, we try to accomplish through them. If we wanted to be a doctor and couldn't for some reason, we inspire them to be a doctor. As long as they act and live as an extension of our life, the relationship is beautiful. But the moment they start deciding on their own, the moment they feel we are suffocating them, the moment they stand up and say 'no', the relationship takes a different turn.

As long as our love happens towards a particular object, even if the object is a person, we will try to reduce that person only to the level of an object. That is exactly what we do when we feel possessive or attached to another person. In the way that we try to possess furniture or a house or any object, we try to possess the person also. We want the person to be just how we want him or her to be, which means we are actually reducing the person to sheer matter.

So understand, whenever our love or our attention is towards something in particular, we will be only materialistic, creating suffering for ourselves and for others. We will only suffocate the object or person. Instead, if we turn our attention towards the experience of love itself, we will be liberating the object and we too will be liberated from the object. That is the beauty of love that happens just as love and not for the sake of any object.

When you start possessing someone, you bind yourself also. If you are walking holding your dog's leash, be very clear that you are also bound. Don't think only the dog is bound; you are also bound. Don't think that only the dog cannot run away, you too cannot run away! You may be thinking that you are holding the rope and the dog may be thinking that he is holding the rope. Who knows?

The next time you are with someone, when you are with your friend with whom you are completely open, remember to practice this technique.

Just sit next to him or her. Don't bother about what you are going to do or what you are going to say. Just sit, that's all! That is the technique. Actually, speaking is nothing but avoiding the other person. Because you cannot look into the other person's eyes, you go on speaking. That is the truth. The other person listens so that he can start speaking whenever you take a break! If a person is listening to you, it means that he is either thinking of something else or he is preparing for his turn. He sits there so that he can start once you finish.

Now if you try this technique, it can take you to a different space altogether. When you are with the master or your friend or your beloved, whoever you feel deeply connected with, whoever you are very open with, you can try this technique. It will straightaway lead you to enlightenment. Be very clear, I am not teaching this technique for you to have better relationships or for you to develop your personality. No! I am giving it to you to straightaway experience the pure love that can lead you to enlightenment.

This technique will take you through a quantum jump from the form to the formless, from possessive love to causeless love.

When love happens as causeless overflowing, you simply liberate yourself and the other person from your own attachment and possessiveness, because possessiveness as you know it, binds not only the other person but you as well. It tortures the other person as well as you! Real love simply liberates both of you. It gives freedom to you and the other person.

When I travel around the world, people ask me,'Swamiji, did you sleep well last night? It is a new place for you.' I tell them, 'Only when you have attachment to a particular house does another house become a new place for you and you struggle. When you don't have attachment to any house, you feel at home wherever you go!'

I never feel any place is mine or not mine. I feel totally at home anywhere. The comfort is always within us, never outside us. When there is no comfort within us, we look for comfort outside us. Feeling comfortable within us is the result of the causeless love energy.

When we don't feel attached to one home, we feel at home in the entire world. We are totally relaxed anywhere in the world.

In real life, we always look to express our love towards others in some tangible way. Only if love is demonstrated in tangible form, it is considered to be love nowadays.

True love is like a communion. It is a resonance between two beings. It can be felt without any expression. It doesn't need communication because it is already happening as a communion.

If you really love a person, then your very body language will show it. It will be too much to express in words. You will feel that any words are inadequate and will only bring down the love that you feel. But if you are using words, then somewhere the love has not really happened. When you have to speak to express love, then somewhere there is a lie in it! You are using the words just to decorate the lie.

Real love liberates because it doesn't compel you to express it all the time. It just is. Real love also gives you the freedom to freely express what you want to express. You can easily express anything like disapproval or anger and it will not be mistaken for reduced love.

Not only that, with real love, there will be no domination or power play in relationships. Each person will be like a beautiful flower that has blossomed to radiate its unique fragrance, that's all.

With real love, there will be no fear or insecurity either. In normal love, physical distance between two people causes a lot of insecurity and a lack of trust.

A small story:

A young soldier went to his senior officer and said, 'Sir my friend is not yet back from the battlefield. I request permission to go out and get him.'

The officer said, 'Permission refused. Your friend is most probably dead. I don't want you to risk your life going there.'

The young soldier went all the same and came back mortally wounded and carrying the corpse of his friend.

The officer was furious. He shouted, 'I told you he was dead. Now I have lost both of you. Tell me, was it worth going out there to bring a corpse?'

On the verge of dying, the soldier replied, 'It was, Sir. When I got there he was still alive. He said to me, I was sure you would come.'

Real love doesn't look for utility. It operates on sheer trust and is also beyond space and time.

These days I see people gifting each other with so many things to show their love. Gifting has become an expression of love. If the gifting happens as causeless overflowing, it is okay.

But if it is a condition to be fulfilled, it becomes a problem! Then it becomes a poor substitute for real love.

As long as real love is there, no relationship can become boring. One of the aadheenavasis asked me one day, 'Everyday you see all of us, all our mistakes and confusions. It is the same thing for you every day. Are you not bored by us?' It was a very honest question! I told them, 'For enlightened beings, just because of their very love, they feel everybody is unique. They do not look at people as mere numbers. They see each one as unique.'

That is why, with so much patience, masters continue to work with everybody. If it were just a matter of numbers, it would be very different. When you have this love, your inner space is such that there is no logical reason behind your actions. You will just feel connected and you radiate love, that's all!

Not only that, causeless overflowing love is always total in its expression. It doesn't carry the usual dilutions of greed or fear. So any person whom you love, you will love totally without any reservations. Irrespective of the way he is, you will love him. When you love this way, even if the person leaves your life, you will not grieve. When a person passes away, you grieve only because you regret not having loved him completely. You can love him completely only when your love itself is complete. It doesn't have to do anything with the other person. It doesn't matter what kind of person he is. That is the beauty of real love.

It loves for the sake of love, not for the sake of the other person.

If you are grieving for the loss ofa person, be very clear, you are grieving because you missed loving him in totality. If you had loved him in totality, you would say good-bye to him with complete restfulness, not with grief. You grieve only because you missed something somewhere. Even if it is your own father or husband or wife, it is the same. If you had radiated your causeless love to them when they were alive, then when they left there would not be any regret. But if you had loved them with rationalizations, then when they left, the incompleteness of your love towards them would create a hangover, and that hangover is what you feel as grief.

Sit down comfortably by yourself and close your eyes.

Focus on your heart region. Exclude everything else. Focus only on the heart.

Visualize your heart as an endless reservoir from where blessings can flow.

Feel every heartbeat deeply. Let every beat resound throughout you.

Between the heartbeats, feel the energy of love happening.

In the deepest parts of and soul, the love energy acknowledged.

Invite the love energy of the heart to flow and fill these deepest parts of your body, mind and soul. Slowly open your eyes.

We talked of love so far. Love is about our relationship with others. Love is also about our relationship with us. Without loving ourselves we cannot love others. What prevents us from loving our own self is the constant worry or irritation that we generate within us. Whether things go right or wrong we worry. There is nothing more corrosive to our self-esteem than worry. What is this worry?

A small story:

A man walked into a bar looking worried and upset.

The bartender asked him, What's the matter? You look very worried about something.'

The man said, 'My wife and I had a fight and she told me that she wouldn't talk to me for a month.'

The bartender consoled him, 'It's okay. One month isn't that long.'

The man said, 'I know. The month is up today!'

Everyone has his or her own set of worries! If I ask you what you worry about, you will tell me, 'I don't have a job, that's my worry.'Your neighbor will say, 'My job is my main worry!' Someone else will say, 'My children are my worry.' Another person will say, 'I don't have children, that's my worry!' One person's dream is another person's worry! You will not find any logic in it at all.

What is meant by 'worry'? Worry arises whenever things are not happening as you want them to happen. It is the discrepancy between your expectations and reality. For example, you feel your son should stay at home with you, whereas he feels he should be by himself - away from you. You want to finish your project by a certain time. But things are happening too slowly and it seems an impossible task. These are all causes for worry. What you want and expect does not match what others want and expect

Worry takes root from your own thoughts or words. There are two things that continuously happen in you. The first is dialogue, and the second is monologue —what I call 'inner chatter'. You either talk to people outside you or you continuously chatter within you. In any case, words and thoughts are the 'building blocks' that make up worry.

When you speak to others, what you say is strictly governed by societal rules. You automatically don't use prohibited or 'politically incorrect' words. But what you say inside yourself, no one except you knows. The thoughts that you generate inside constitute your real worries.

It is like this: there is a continuous current of chatter happening in you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. From this current a few spikes rise. These spikes are what you feel and express as worries. Worries are nothing but spikes in the current of thoughts constantly moving within you.

These thoughts are mostly negative. That's the problem. If I ask you to write your life story in a few pages, you will write a few incidents highlighting how and when you struggled. You will not highlight the many joyful incidents that happened in between. The mind is trained to record only negative things. Even when something joyful happens, you remember only the moment when it ended, never the moments when you felt joy. Because even when you are at the peak of joy, you are always worrying about when the joy will end! The mind is trained from a very young age to think that life moves from one worry to the other, or from one pain to another, never from one joy to another.

In a classroom, the teacher found that one boy was sitting with a very sad face.

She asked him, 'What happened? Why do you look so worried?'

The boy said, 'It's my parents. My dad works all day to provide good clothes and an excellent education for me. He buys me anything I want. My mother cooks the best food for me and takes care of me from morning until I go to bed.'

The teacher asked, 'Then what is your problem? Why are you worried?'

The boy replied, 'I am afraid they might run away.'

The mind has a clear identity only with pain, never with joy! That is why recalling even joyful moments becomes painful.

Joy never gets recorded as thoughts, but pain does. That's why our internal recordings are always negative thoughts. Joy is like a blank recording! For example, if your entire life is like a time shaft, on that shaft the joyful moments are simply empty spaces! There won't be any recording corresponding to it. But the moments of worry and suffering will be clearly recorded as black impressions.

Buddha', the enlightened master, used the word tathata - seeing what is as it IS. It is seeing what is there as it is without any judgment.

But most of the time we see things only through our worry. There is a common saying, 'We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are.' If you feel there is something wrong with what you are seeing, then you should look back in at yourself because what you see outside is only a reflection of what is inside you. If you feel pure love inside, then you see only pure love outside. It always has to do with you, not with what you are seeing.

How can you keep thoughts away from what truly IS? How can you enjoy each moment all the time?

Try this small technique. When you see something — say a person, or a situation, or a book, or anything normally old thoughts and familiar reactions immediately rise in you. Bring awareness that these conditioned thoughts and memories cloud your judgment and visualize shattering those thoughts. Next, see the situation, or person, or object now with a fresh eye, as though you are seeing it for the first time! Suddenly you see how much you missed, because of your own worry and thoughts.

Even when you see your husband, wife, brother, or anyone, look at them as though you are seeing them for the first time. Suddenly, you realize that not only does worry not arise, but also that you will start seeing everyone alike — whether they are strangers or familiar to you. That is the right way. No one is familiar or unchanging. Even your wife is not known to you. Everyone is constantly changing every moment along with Existence. Only your mind is trying to make them appear to be permanent.

Once you start seeing what is as it is, all your energy will integrate within you. There is no more worry, no more conflict.

Someone asked J. Krishnamurti, the famous Hindu philosopher, how to fall in tune with what IS. He beautifully says, 'Just don't name it, you will find you are in tune with it!'

Usually, when we see something, we either try to identify with it or we try to condemn it. For example, if you are told you are arrogant, you either accept it or you try not to be arrogant! You never understand or go beyond arrogance. You can only understand within your frame of reference, what you are familiar with. Because of this, you are caught in a limited view of possibilities. To really understand, you need to go beyond this limited pointof-view. To do that, you have to stop naming it arrogance , that's all! There will be no more arrogance. Only by naming it, you start the conflict. That is how you see what IS— by not naming it.

When you see what is as it is, you are in heaven. When you want to see what you want to see, you are in hell. If you understand that everything is auspiciousness, you will drop expectation and see things as they are, because everything is auspiciousness.

A small story:

One disciple kept asking the master 'Master where is paradise?'

Finally one day, the master asked him, 'Do you really want to know?'

The disciple sat up and said, 'Yes!'

The master said, 'Alright, my first disciple Hemachandra is in paradise.'After saying these words the master closed his eyes and went into meditation.

The disciple knew it would be a long time before the master opened his eyes. So, he went and asked some of the disciples ifthey knew where Hemachandra lived. No one seemed to know.

Finally one disciple said, 'I know how to guide you there, but I have never been there myself. It is in a deep valley beyond a range of ice covered mountains. '

The disciple wrote down the directions carefully and went back to the master. He told him, 'Master, I wish to pay a visit to Hemachandra!'

The master was absorbed deeply in some work. Without even looking up he said, 'Go ahead.'

The disciple started on his journey. He walked for many days, passing through sun, rain, snow, and what not. He became exhausted, on the verge ofdeath. It took him one hundred days to reach the valley. When he finally reached it he looked at the valley and thought, 'This valley doesn't look all that great. I have seen many more beautiful valleys. Why did the master call this paradise?'

He looked around and walked further and fin ally fo und He mac handra 's hut. Hemachandra was very pleased to see him. He served him food and asked how the master and other disciples were doing.

All along, the disciple was thinking to himself, 'Master called this place paradise? I can't believe it.'

After a week-long stay he left and returned to his master.

He went straight to the master and stated, 'You said that the place is paradise. But what I saw was the most ordinary place ever!'

The master said, 'Oh god! At the time of your enquiry, had you been more explicit about your intention, I would have told you the truth.'

The disciple asked, 'What is the truth?'

The master replied, 'Hemachandra is not in paradise. Paradise is in him!'

When you live close to Existence, without any expectation, seeing what is as it is and finding the blessings in it, you will carry heaven in you! Heaven is not geographical, it is psychological. It is not physical, it is mental. If you decide, you can be in heaven right now.

Worry is an unwanted legacy passed down from grandparents to parents to children. Children are like sponges. They simply absorb the body language and attitude of the parents. The parents are not even aware this is happening. For example, if a child hears the mother repeating a certain worry four or five times, the child simply internalizes the habit. He grows up repeating statements unnecessarily, which is one attribute of worry.

Ultimately he carries the worry with him into marriage and then both he and his new wife must deal with it, even though it was originally his mother's concern. They will then hand it down to their children, unless they stop naming it and learn to live with what IS.

One man was pushing his baby in a pram. The baby was screaming at the top of his voice. All the while the man kept repeating quietly, 'Keep calm George. Don't scream. It will be okay.'

His wife told him to keep quiet.

A woman who was watching this said to the wife, 'Why are you so rude to him? He is really doing his best to pacify your son!'

The wife looked at her with resentment, pointed to her husband and told her 'He is George.'

When parents express constant worry, children grow up thinking life goes on only because of worry! Understand that life goes on not because of us, but in spite of us!

The problem is that parents expect their children to worry! If they don't worry, they brand them as uncaring. It is possible to care without worrying. Care is doing, worry is chattering. There is no use chattering. Chattering is like trying to cross a bridge before it comes.

A young boy was driving his mother to the neighboring village. They were nearing the village when they remembered a particular bridge th at used to be very old and unusable.

The mother got very anxious and said, 'I will never cross that bridge by car.'

The son said, 'Let's see how it looks when we come to it.'

The mother said, 'I'm sure the bridge will break if we attempt to cross it.'

The son replied, 'Let's see how strong it is. We won't cross it without checking it carefully.'

The mother said, 'If something happens to you or me, your father will never forgive me.' She kept going on like this, becoming more and more upset.

Soon they reached the spot where the bridge stood. The bridge had been replaced with a new one! There are two things to understand: chronological planning and psychological worry. Chronological planning is needed to set up a schedule for tasks or projects to be completed. For example, you decide, 'I will wake up at six a.m., do my meditation, then take a shower at seven a.m., and leave for the office by eight a.m. I'll finish work by five p.m. and return home by six p.m.'

This type of planning is perfectly alright. But before you come to each task on your list, you start creating anxiety about it. You think of the pros and cons of each, etc. This is called psychological worry! This is not needed. Chronological planning is fine, but psychological worry is not needed. It is like trying to cross a bridge before it comes.

So much energy is spent worrying and it is all of no use. In the story I just narrated, it does not mean that the son does not care. He cares without worry, that's all. Why contemplate over the bridge even before it comes?

You can clean the physical parts of your house, your carpets and floors, but what about the space inside your house? This space is the energy that circulates throughout your house. It captures all the thoughts you radiate. It sets the very mood of the house. Your worries rest like cobwebs in the space of your house. That is why when you enter your house, you experience a familiar pattern of worry. The patterns remaining in the space of your house grip you when you return to it. Understand that your mental setup settles into the space of your house.

The big problem is that you become so used to your patterns of worries that you end up like an island that is cut off from the fragrance of the mainland. You are cut off from the fragrance of Existence because of your worries. You miss the miracles of Existence that are continuously happening around you. You forget to appreciate and remember only to complain. You forget laughter and remember only anxiety. You forget bliss and remember only stress. Remembering these negative things becomes a mere habit.

What is the solution to this distorted software of the mind?

Deep awareness is the solution. Deep awareness is like a benign virus, if such a thing exists! Once awareness enters your system, the more you work with the mind, the more the awareness gets into the worry software and destroys it!

Awareness is nothing but bringing our focus to exactly what is happening in and around us. It is witnessing. Anything that we watch with awareness will dissolve. That is the power of awareness; whether it is physical pain, mental pain, worry, or something else. When we watch with awareness, we stop the conflict somewhere within us. We start moving with the natural flow of things.

When we watch worry with awareness, we focus light on exactly how worry is created, how it exists. Once this happens, the worry starts to dissolve and clarity starts happening.

There is a small story about Buddha and his disciples:

One day Buddha arrived for his usual morning discourse with his disciples. He had a knotted handkerchief in his hand. He showed the handkerchief to the disciples and asked if any of them could come up and untie the knot.

One disciple went up and tried to untie it. He pulled and pulled and the knot tightened. Another disciple went up, he looked at the knot %r a few seconds and easily untied it.

All he did was look at the knot and immediately he knew how the knot was made in the first place. So, he just reversed the whole thing and untied it! The knot itself taught him how to untie it.

In life worries are the knots in the handkerchief. If we look at them with awareness, we will know how to dissolve them. We will see exactly how the worry was created and then know how to 'untie' it. The worry itself will teach us how to release it.

If you observe closely, you will see that goals always create worry in us. When we move toward any goal, we move only with the worry about the results.

Krishna, an enlightened master from ancient Bharat, beautifully says in the ancient Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita', 'The person who does not expect gain or loss from anything works happily with no need even for motivation.'

When you are worried about the results, the very worry affects the results. Because when you worry, your doing is affected. Work should always be done out of inspiration, never out of worry. The motivation for any work should be inspiration, not worry. Inspiration is an overflowing energy that expands your capacity to do things. It is completely energizing. Worry, on the other hand, is something that shrinks your capacity. It limits what you are capable of really doing because it takes away your energy.

When you work out of worry, you are always bothered about the results. When you work out of inspiration, you are not bothered about the results. You are bothered only about doing the task to the fullest. Any task done with the energy of inspiration always turns out good results. Even if it doesn't give the expected results, you won't feel bad about it because you have received fulfillment simply by doing it. The 'doing' itself will fulfill you.

When you live without expectation, you are already fulfilled. There is no space for worry or discontent to thrive. When you don't have worry, you see things as they are. You don't worry about what might be or might not be. Worry exists only if you give it space. The space for worry is the past or future. The present doesn't hold any space for it.

A mother was preparing a meal for her young son. She emptied a tin of beans into a saucepan and put them on the stove to cook. Just then the phone rang. She was expecting the call and wanted to take it, but she was concerned that her son would be left alone for those few minutes while she was out of the room.

She told him, 'Stay here while I answer the phone. I'll be back soon. Don't misbehave, and whatever you do, don't put those beans up your nose...'

We always worry about what is happening and what might happen, also! The boy might not have even thought about putting beans up his nose! Now his mother has planted the idea in him. Worry infuses life into many

things that never existed in the first place. Now, when the boy puts the beans in his nose, her worry turns out to be true! She concludes that her worries are always right.

If you look into worries, you will observe that they arise out of deep ignorance of the truth that Existence is running the whole show. If you look, you will see that all worries are mere illusion. You can understand this by observing what happens at the time of death. When you are alive, you may have one hundred worries, but suppose you are dying. At that moment, how many worries do you think will dominate you the way they did earlier? Surely only one worry will be foremost — that you are going to die. None of the earlier worries will exert any great influence. All the outer world situations remain the same, but still the worries disappear! Only loving thoughts remain for the people around you who are dear to you.

How is this possible? It is possible only because your worries were never a part of you in the first place. They were merely a part of your mind. They were nothing solid. If they were solid, they would definitely exert some amount of influence over you at the time of your death as well.

The nature of worry is such that it always goes behind something that is not present. If you have wealth, it will go after relationships, if you have relationships, it will go after education, if you have education it will go after good looks. If everything is present, it will suspect what is present!

When you clearly understand that you are part of the grand plan of Existence, no worry can take root in you. Existence is a live energy being. It has tremendous intelligence with which it runs the whole show. We are all part of it. The same intelligence that conducts Existence is available to us too. If we tune in to it, our actions will be fluid and spontaneous like the happenings of Existence. If we don't tune into 1t, we will harbor worry and fear and remain closed.

There is so much to learn from Existence! Take animals for example. Have you ever heard of worried sheep or cows? No! They conduct their lives like you; they are born, they reproduce, they find food, and they face death just like human beings. You may say, 'They don't have to face the challenges that we have to face.' What about their other activities like reproduction, facing death, etc? Are they worried about all that? No! But these things happen to them too. So understand that Existence is running this whole macrocosm. It can surely take care of you as well!

Surrendering to the laws of Existence is the greatest relaxation from worry.

If you seriously analyze every worry that arises in you, you will see that ninety nine percent of your worries are baseless. But the problem is that the ego is not willing to accept that. The ego has invested too much in worry. Worry can't be discarded just like that! Just try telling someone that his or her worries are not worth anything. They will get very offended. You would expect that a person would feel happy if you tell him his worries are not true. But it won't be so! He will feel offended. The ego feels offended whenever its worries are not acknowledged with due respect.

The ego is what sustains the worry. The worry is created out of ignorance, but sustained by ego. Worry becomes an axis around which the ego revolves. If worry is taken away, the ego suffers. The worry of work and the worry of responsibility are classic examples of this.

If you watch some people, they simply magnify their situation to prove that they have the greatest worries on planet earth! If you try to oppose them, they feel very hurt.

Even worrying about what others will say about us is a problem of the ego. The ego is constantly worried that its self-image might be spoiled by someone. It is because of the ego that we feel we want to be somebody special all the time. We spend considerable time just worrying about our self-image. Understand that the greatest blessing is being a nobody and yet being blissful. That is the greatest specialty. It is said that the most extraordinary thing about an enlightened being is that he thinks he is ordinary! So, understand that enlightenment itself is a journey to relax into yourself. You are someone special all the time, only when you drop worry and ego.

If you really want to come out of your worries, you will come out right now, without trying tojustify any of your worries.

The thing is, our very worries become our comfort zone. We hide in them. Hiding and merely talking about them helps us to remain lazy.

Someone asks Mahavira', an enlightened Jain master from Bharat, 'Who is the one who has worries?'

He beautifully replies, 'The person who is worried.'

They ask him, 'What is the cause of worry?' He replies, 'Laziness.'

Then they ask him, 'Who ends worries?' He replies, 'Man himself.'

They ask him, 'How can worry be ended?' He replies, 'By dropping laziness.'

If you drop laziness, you fall into right action. And when you fall into right action, you drop worry. Your comfort with worry can be understood even from the way you react to other people's worries. If you keenly watch, you will observe that whenever a person talks to you about his worries, you first tell them, 'What can you do... That's just the way it happens...' You never straightaway give a solution to them. When you do this, be very clear, you are not only encouraging them, but you are also encouraging yourself to remain comfortably in the worry zone.

If you really observe, we love to worry and talk about it. It makes us feel that we are shouldering a lot of problems. It makes us feel important, like the world can't make it without us to take care of it.

When you see a problem, if you want a solution, you never dwell upon the problem even for a second. You simply switch to the solution, that's all! In the same way, for every worry there is an instant solution. You have to want it; that is the key.

Most of the time, you prefer to stay in the comfort zone of your worry. It keeps you settled. For example, let's say you are visiting your child at college. You see a few students keeping their rooms all messy, or exchanging clothes and wearing them. You record the whole scene in your mind and assume that is the way of life in the dorm itself. You advise your child to keep her things neat and not to wear others' clothes. Even if she tells you her things are in order and that she doesn't wear others' clothes, you will not readily erase or reprogram your recording. You stick with the earlier recording of what you observed.

There probably were many other beautiful things to record in the dorm — like the joy of the students, the campus itself, etc., but every time you think of your daughter, only this one recording comes up and you worry about her. Not only that, anyone you meet, you talk about how things are a mess in her dorm and how everyone exchanges clothes and wears them! The recording itself is not the truth. But you choose to have it as your comfort zone. You reinforce it.

Even your worry related to wealth is like this. If making money is the worry, then it clearly means, somewhere laziness is pulling you back into the comfort of worry. If you discard laziness and move, you make money. There are a million opportunities in today's world to make money.

When you create more thoughts inside you through worry, the load on the navel region increases. It is from the navel region that thoughts or worries arise. When you create more and more thoughts, you feel the heaviness in your stomach. There is an energy center in the navel area called the manipuraka chakra'. This energy center starts shrinking with the heaviness of worry.

This energy centre responds directly to worry, and affects the stomach. That is why when you worry about something your stomach starts becoming uneasy. Or when you hear shocking news you say, 'I can't digest it...'Any disturbing news causes your stomach to churn. The stomach is very sensitive to thoughts.

There was a doctor famous for his extraordinary and effective treatment of arthritis. He always had a waiting room full of people.

There was a doctor famous for his extraordinary and effective treatment of arthritis. He always had a waiting room full of people.

One day an old lady with her back badly bent walking entered the office with the aid of a stick. When her turn came, she went into the doctor's room and amazingly, came out within five minutes, walking completely erect with her head high.

A woman in the waiting room ran to her and said, 'It's a miracle! You walked in bent in half and now you are walking erect! What did that doctor do?'

The old lady replied, 'He gave me a longer cane.'

Sometimes we are so used to living a certain way that we can't see a better way to live. Worry is that habit that keeps us from living to our full potential and invites disease into the body. Disease starts in the mind.

There are extreme forms of worry that may become habitual and slow down the functioning of the individual. This form of worry is diagnosed as Generalized Anxiety Disorder, called GAD. It is much more than the normal anxiety people experience day to day. According to research done by the National Institute of Mental Health in the USA, GAD affects about 6.8 million adult Americans and about twice as many women as men.

Once worry happens, we visit psychiatrists. The cause of worry is in the mind, not outside. Then how will medicine alone help?

A large number of the people in the world visit psychiatrists for the treatment of worry. Medication is all right, but for psychosomatic conditions like worry, meditation is also needed.

Meditation softens you. When you soften, love and gratitude start happening in you. Then slowly, there is no room for worry. Worry is also a form of violence. It is a subtle form of violence. It is a disguised agitation in the system.

Meditation also tremendously increases awareness. When awareness increases, outwardly you might be completely involved in the outer world, but inwardly you will be untouched by anything that happens. That is the real worry-free life.

Worry and stress are closely interrelated. They are like parent and child. One cannot exist without the other. What works for one works for the other as well. However, given that stress is considered the biggest destroyer of health in today's world, it is worth going into more depth on this subject.

Four hundred years ago the French philosopher Rene Descartes declared, 'I think, therefore I exist.' This has formed the basis of modern thinking. Billions of people in this world have followed Descartes for generations believing that unless each one out thinks the other they cannot succeed in this world.

Descartes was right, and he was wrong. He was right in that the human system does not know how to live without its mind, without thinking. As a result human beings become slaves to their minds. They live in bondage.

Many centuries before Descartes, a vedic sage declared that man does not begin to exist till he stops thinking. Adi Shankara, at the age of eight, faced his future master across the waters of the holy Tungabhadra river. The master asked him, 'Who are you?'

In response Shankara said, 'I am not the mind, I am not the intellect, I am not the ego and I am not the senses. I am beyond all that. I am pure consciousness.'

We are merely a bio-machine as long as we think we are mind and body. We are just a shade better than the animals we ascended from as long as we allow our senses to guide us. But the true potential of human beings is not merely to think and prove that we are superior to animals. The purpose of human life is to transcend the mind and ascend to a higher state of consciousness. In that state we are truly in the divinity that we descended from.

Till we reach that state of unity with what we truly are, we are in turmoil. This turmoil, this confusion between our true nature and what we pretend and strive to be is what we call stress or tension.

According to vedic psychology, we are not disturbed. We are indeed the source of that disturbance. Understand this well, you are not tensed but you are tension. You are not stressed but you are the source of stress. There is a big difference between the two. Let us look deeply into it. Then you will understand. You are not in tension. You are the tension. There is a very big difference between 'you are disturbed' and you are disturbance.

A group of reputed and experienced scientists, after doing research for many years, have now come up to say this. They say: We cannot make man responsible for his actions unless we teach him how to manage his emotions by managing what is happening inside him.

Whatever the vedic' scriptures said five thousand years ago is the same thing that the modern scientists are saying now. These scriptures also provide the solution and answer for this age-old problem. They can bridge the gap between the Western psychology and the vedic psychology.

Western psychology continuously gives us the hope that we can be brought back to normalcy, retaining I as I. For example, if we are feeling hot in this room, we can fix the air conditioning and make it cool to be comfortable. But we forget an important factor. The moment we bring air conditioning into this room, we need to maintain that. That brings additional tension. That brings additional problems. Now we need electricity, we need to pay the bills and for all these facilities we need money. When you go out to work, you no longer enjoy this room. The room and its air conditioning exist, but you are elsewhere working to pay the bills for the air conditioner! We forget an important factor. You as you are, is a disease. The concept of mind, according to Western psychology, is a machine. According to vedic psychology, it is a process. Mind is not a machine but a process. It is constantly happening. The word 'manas', which is the Sanskrit word for mind, means a constant happening, something that is not passive and dead but something that is dynamic and alive.

Western psychology insists on this one idea that the mind is a biomechanical machine. We all believe unconsciously that mind is matter, a thing or a machine. That is why constantly we connect all the past happenings of the mind as a chain, and start believing our mind is a solid thing.

Let me give you an example. The low mood that you experienced ten years ago, the low mood that you experienced nine years ago, the low mood that you experienced eight years ago, the low mood that you experienced seven years ago and the low mood that you experienced yesterday are completely unconnected and independent incidents. All these happened for different purposes, different reasons, at different times and situations. You connect all these unconnected incidents and say, My life itself is a depression.'

The low mood that you experienced years ago, months ago, weeks ago or days ago are all unconnected and independent incidents. Fifteen years ago, you would have felt the low mood and felt depressed because your toys were lost. Nine years ago, you would have felt depressed because your girlfriend was lost. Few years ago you would have felt depressed or disturbed because your son was not listening to you. The reasons were different, situations were different, and the cause was totally different. However, when you connect all these low moods and decide, 'My life is full of depression, you have created hell for yourself!

The moment you start believing that your life is depressed, your life indeed becomes depression. Please understand that it is only what you believe to be your past that you will reproduce in future. We all know that we can't fly from our past experience. How can we believe that we can start flying from tomorrow onwards? No, we can't. Whatever we believe to be our past, only that we will believe can be our future. So once we start believing that our past was filled with depression, we have created the unconscious faith that our future will also be depression.

When we believe that the mind is just a thing, a bio-machine, we have created hell for ourselves. Fortunately for us, the mind is not a thing. There is hope. The truth is that mind is not a thing as we all have been taught; it is a process. It is not a noun but a verb.

When we believe the mind is a thing, be very clear, we create problems that do not exist.

A man goes to a psychiatric doctor and says, 'Doctor my life is full of problems'. The doctor says, 'Everybody's life is a problem. Don't worry. Every week we will have three sessions and you will be charged hundred dollars.'

The man says, 'Doctor three sessions per week each at hundred dollars will solve your problem. What about my problem!'

Understand, the moment we start believing that the mind is only a machine, we become helpless. No psychiatrist can help. No psychoanalyst can help. No other method can help, because the basic belief is wrong. The moment we bring a wrong belief, whatever is built on that has to go wrong. It cannot be the truth. We need to understand the basic truth that the mind is a process; we are not in tension but we are tension.

Only about ten percent of what we perceive through our senses gets recorded in our conscious mind. Everything else goes directly into our unconscious mind. This is why many times we do not even remember a place that we pass every day. So long as this sensory perception does not interest us in some way it does not get recorded.

Let us now see what happens to those sensory perceptions that do get recorded in our conscious mind. These impressions are sorted out by parts of our mind and identified. Your conscious mind records whether the person you see in front of you is known to you or whether he is an unknown stranger. How you would like to interact with him is no longer a decision made at the conscious level. In case you know him, your attitude towards him and your action would be based on the engraved memories that are grooved in your mind. In case he is unknown

to you also, the very appearance of that person would trigger unconscious responses. Either way the file moves into your unconscious for a decision about what you should do.

For most of us, less than ten percent of the mind is conscious. Less than ten percent of what you perceive through your senses gets recorded consciously. It is possible that less than one percent of what you decide is a rational decision!

There are two ways we can regain control. The first is to reduce the conditioning that binds us. In our meditation programs, we work on the removal and dissolution of these samskaras' that bind us. The second way is to be in the present moment, in total awareness and control.

Your thoughts are always about your past or your future. You can only think about what happened in the past or what will happen in the future. Your thoughts of the past are usually regrets about what you did not do or guilt about what you did. Thoughts of the future are about what you wish to do.

Please understand, neither the past nor the future is real. The past is dead and gone. Most often we do not even learn from the past. All we try to do is use our past to steer the future. It is like driving a car looking only at the rear view mirror! You know for sure where you will end up!

The future is even more unreal. It has not happened. You have very little control over your future the way you are, because all your actions are steered by the unconscious mind. You are driven by the embedded memories of your past. Your thoughts are nothing but the movement of your mind between past and future. Your mind never wants to rest. If it rested you will know you can do without it!

If only you allowed the mind to rest or even persuaded your mind to rest, you will find that you reach a blissful state. That state is the present moment. All your future has to happen in this present moment. It is what you decide now in this present moment that makes your future. Once you take care of the present moment, once you live this present moment consciously, you no longer will have cause to regret your past or feel guilty about it.

The shaft in the center represents 'time'. At any given time, the greater your TPS or Thoughts Per Second, the more far-flung you are from consciousness of the present moment. You are simply worrying about the future thus allowing it to slip into the past, without ever getting a glimpse of the present. When your TPS comes down, you enter more and more into the present and when this happens, you have a clearer vision of the past and the future. You may wonder what is there to be clear about the past. One can understand that the future may not be clear, but why the past? I have lived it, so why should it be unclear! You need to understand that what you now remember of the past is your judgment of the past, not the way it happened. How many times do we talk about the golden past? How much has been written about the 'golden past'! There is nothing golden about the past. We just choose to remember the good parts, so it looks golden.

When you are in the intuitive state, be very clear: for those few moments, your TPS has dropped and you are more in the present. When your TPS is zero, you can clearly see the entire past and future.

The point where the future meets the past is the present. This is where your thought frequency is zero and you are in a no-mind state. You have not merely controlled or suppressed the mind, which is impossible. You have transcended the mind, which is possible.

Meditation brings the mind to rest. Meditation disengages the mind so that the mind cannot play games. We can also reach this state in the master's presence. The master is always in a no-mind state, which is the zero TPS state. When you are in his awareness, whether physically or otherwise, your own TPS also drops. You can reach zero TPS just by being in the master's presence. The presence of the master is meditation. Awareness of the master is meditation.

We have looked at what the scriptures say and what I think about why stress is created. Let us now look at what science says.

We all have a part of our brain that controls our actions such as breathing, digestion and such activities that the body does automatically, involuntarily. Nature has designed a fail-safe system in a part of our brain called hypothalamus. This part of the brain also includes what biologists refer to as the reptilian brain.

Behavioral scientists often talk about the fight or flight response. When the body-mind perceives a danger to our survival the hypothalamus is alerted by our unconscious mind. The unconscious mind functions at speeds a million times faster than the conscious mind. So even before we consciously become aware of danger, we instinctively become alert. The hypothalamus activates the pituitary gland, the master gland, which then activates the adrenalin glands that secrete the adrenalin hormone, which is pumped into our extremities, the hands and legs. We then get ready for the 'fight or flight' reaction — either the energy prepares us to fight the threat or to run away from the threat. The unconscious reptilian brain takes the decision to release chemicals into our body to protect us. This worked very well in the days of the caveman when he faced lions and tigers. He had to be ready even without thinking to fight or run away.

To study the effect of adrenalin on human beings today, experiments were carried out on athletes. Sprinters were lined up at the starting block and moments before the pistol was raised to signal to them to start running the umpire lowered his arm. So, the sprinters had to fall back and reposition themselves. This was repeated six times. Without even running a meter the sprinters collapsed at the starting block! The adrenalin level in their bodies had become dangerously high. The life saving adrenalin can become a killer when it is produced without reason.

The chances of our meeting a tiger or a lion are quite slim these days. Nevertheless our unconscious mind keeps sending signals of such danger. These are called 'fear strokes'. Psychologists estimate that we face at least half a dozen such fear strokes every day. These fear strokes produce large quantities of adrenalin in us. It has been established that depression is a direct result of such adrenalin production. Depression in turn is considered to be the main cause of many chronic and fatal illnesses.

Medical research has found that many young people in rich countries, even teenagers, have arteries so badly blocked that their arteries are similar to sixty-year-old people! Doctors have established that the physical condition is only one part of the problem. A much larger part is the emotional condition. It is now fairly well established that an emotional trigger causes the immediate onset of a heart attack or stroke, even though the physical condition may have been present for a long time.

In an IT company the Chief Executive received an enquiry for a project. He sent it down for a proposal. The team that worked on such projects did a full review and said that they could do the job in six months at a cost of a million dollars. The manager in charge of the team reviewed this and said the team can do this in 4 months at a cost of three quarter million dollars.

The proposal went up to a General Manager. The General Manager called everyone, gave them a pep talk and said, 'We should be able to do this for half a million dOllars frI three months.' Then he sent this as his proposal to the Chief Executive.

People who work in corporations can relate with this incident. People who make decisions and commitments are often out of touch with ground reality. Once such decisions are made their egos are in play. Anything can be sacrificed but not the ego! A simple study of corporate history can show how many companies have failed because of the egos of the people who led them.

I am told by some of my disciples in the corporate field about something called Level 5 Leadership. This is about those corporate leaders who put themselves behind the needs of the company and the people who work for them rather than placing their own ego needs first. Research has shown that the Chief Executives of companies that have been commercially successful consistently are hardly known to the outside world! These leaders are so humble, and focused inwards.

Stress at the workplace starts with our education system. We start ranking children from a very young age. When in a group three people are graded as heroes, the rest of the group feels useless. We are taught to compete from a very early age. This comparison continues into the workplace and converts it into a battlefield.

The so-called Human Resource programs specify that people must be categorized. I am told that in many corporations it is necessary to show that ten or fifteen percent of the people are bad performers. People are reduced to statistics! In order to survive people are forced to make others victims. This is probably why they call these offices 'concrete jungles' !

As long as people are driven by fear and greed, they cannot be inspired. They can be controlled and made to perform routine tasks but they cannot be inspired to do the impossible. This is the dilemma today's corporations face. They need people to perform but their kit of motivational techniques is not enough. It contains the whip and the carrot, nothing more.

A well known psychologist built a model of how human beings move up in their desires. This is now named after him as Maslow's' hierarchy of needs. At the base of this pyramid are one's survival needs of food, shelter and other material essentials. People then look for fulfillment in the society they live in, such as building a network and so on. They then seek love and attention. Then they look for respect, name and fame. After all this they are still dissatisfied. They feel that there is something still missing in their lives.

That something is within. Maslow called it self-actualization. This is the zone where we flow free of stress. This is the zone of inner realization. This is the zone where you know that you are one with the universal energy. Whether you work at home, in an office or factory or you do not work at all, you still look forward to this state where you are centered. This is what we teach in our basic Life Bliss Program courses. The five levels of the pyramid that Maslow* drew correspond to the seven levels of energy that we carry within us. These seven centers of energy are called chakras' in the vedic system. Each chakra represents an emotional state as well as a state of desire. As we fulfill the needs of each chakra we move up in energy till we reach a state of fulfillment. It is a process many thousands of people have gone through with remarkable effect. We have taught these programs in many corporations worldwide. I call this a 'Guaranteed Solution'.

This is a simple and yet a powerful technique to clear stress. We teach this technique in our Life Bliss Programs for unblocking the manipuraka chakra' or navel energy center, which is the seat of stress. This technique should always be practised before a meal, when the stomach is empty and a few hours before sleep.

While standing, shout, scream, rave and rant in a language that you do not know. If anyone is listening, it should also not make any sense to them. Be aggressive in letting out all your emotions and feelings that will start pouring out of you once you start. Cry if you so wish. Roll on the floor if your emotions drive you.

This technique is a powerful meditation. It unblocks your unconscious and allows all the negativities stored inside to dissolve. Typical psychoanalytical sessions when patients talk to their analysts, or even throw things around for catharsis, are still conscious processes. Only ten percent of your stored memories will be released. Processes such as hypnosis are through the unconscious and you have no control. This technique is a superconscious process in which you retain awareness while cleansing yourself.

Practice this technique for twenty minutes. Then sit down and allow the energy to spread within you in silence for ten minutes. During this silence just be a witness to your thoughts. Do not suppress them or chase them.

What is Fear? Fear is a deeper dimension of worry. Worry can cause ulcers. Fear on the other hand can even destroy life. However, unlike worry without which life is possible, fear seems woven into our lives. It is possible to face fear without fear. A person who we call courageous is not one without fear, but one who has learnt to face fear without fear. Fear is a form of energy inside us. That is why it cannot be destroyed. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be changed from one form to another. Understand, your fear is directly connected to your life energy. Whenever you are facing a survival threat, you will see your fear rising and the adrenalin release happening in your body. That adrenalin release gives you so much energy that you can almost fly. We call it the fight or flight response; either you face the fear and fight, or you run away. There will be so much energy in your body the moment you face a survival threat. Whenever that threat is real, the swadhishthāna chakra, the seat of life, gets completely shaken! Big Bang and Black Hole inside you When there is pure desire or pure greed in you without any object in particular, it becomes the overflowing energy of creation, expansion, or Big Bang! For no reason, you simply explode with energy. In the same way, when there is pure fear in you without any object in particular, it becomes contraction, black hole. Fear is your nature, but don't direct it towards any object. Having fear is natural. But connecting the fear to an object is societal. Pure fear helps in survival and it is spontaneous. Enormous energy radiating from you for no reason is pure greed. If it is because of an object, it becomes ordinary greed. In the same way, energy settling back within you for no reason is pure fear. If it is because of an object, it becomes ordinary fear. Unless the black hole happens, the Big Bang cannot happen. It is part of life, part of the drama, part of the game. Pure fear means you are relaxing into yourself, settling inside you. That is what we call destruction. The birth of this cosmos is the Big Bang, and death is the black hole*. Birth of your being is a big bang for you. Death of your being is black hole for you. The inhaling breath is pure desire. The exhaling breath is pure fear. Prana – the life energy that enters along with the air - goes into you because of the Big Bang. Prana leaving your system with the outgoing air is the black hole. When you resist or fight with the Big Bang or black hole, you create disturbance in your system. When fear happens, when the black hole happens, it means that you are turning towards peace or getting ready for the Big Bang. Whenever pure fear happens, you become rejuvenated with a tremendous relaxation which surges as courage and energy in you!

Whenever you are afraid of losing something that you have, or you fear you cannot achieve something that you want to have, there is a fight going on between your potentiality and your negative approach to the future. If you are sure there is no possibility of achieving something, that you don't have the potentiality, you will not have fear. If you are sure that you can achieve something, then also, you don't have fear. Fear is the fight between faith and belief in oneself on one hand, versus the negative idea or expectation you have about your future on the other hand. You are literally fighting with your own positive and negative energies. If you are very sure you don't have the potentiality that you can't achieve, then you won't have fear. If you are very confident you are going to achieve, then also you won't have fear. However, if there is something you want to achieve, but you are not sure that you can achieve it, then you will have fear. The fight between these two ideas, the dilemma is what we call fear. There are two ways to escape fear. One way is to block all possibility. This means you can die, then there won't be any more fear! The second way to escape fear is to break the boundary of possibilities. If there is infinite possibility, if there is no boundary, if there is nothing that limits you, then you become fearless. Just by having this understanding, something will click in you and so many fears will disappear from your being!

People come and say to me, 'I have too many fears. What can I do?' I tell them, 'If you have too many fears, the possibility for enlightenment is more. So many doors are available to you!' For a person who doesn't have too many fears, the possibility, the number of doors is also fewer because he leads a dull life. A person who leads a dull life will not have much fear. He has nothing much to lose, nothing much to decide. He is not taking many risks. All you need to do is this: every time you feel fear, do not disrespect yourself. Do not lose confidence or condemn yourself thinking, 'What kind of a being am I?' Actually people who can face their fears do not have so many problems. People who are afraid of their fears create more problems for themselves. When you brood too much about your fears, you start thinking you have problems. Sometimes, just by switching your attention to something else, you can come out of fear. But that is not fearlessness. Fearlessness means taking a quantum jump into the consciousness where you will never experience fear of losing anything! Be very clear: the fears that you have about your life - fear of failure, fear of losing your near and dear ones, fear of losing your wealth, fear of the unknown - every fear can be used as a door to enlightenment. Another important truth you should know: There is something within you that never dies which is your source of energy. There is also something within you that dies; something that is actually never alive, even now. The fear of death exists in you because you think there is something you have now that will be taken away from you. No! Anything that you have now cannot be taken away. Anything that can be taken away, you never had in the first place. Anything that can die can never occupy your inner space.

You cannot conquer fear. Fearlessness means intelligence to live the intense fear without directing it towards any object. When there is no object to be afraid of, the intense fear will give such an intense relaxation and peace. Fear is a powerful energy which gives a deep relaxation, self-centeredness. The fear center is the rejuvenation center. Be very clear: fearlessness does not mean non-existence of fear. It means the fear is there, but you have tremendous energy or courage to live with it and face it. Fearlessness means having the energy or the courage to live even with the maximum fear – going beyond that fear and being neither attached to nor detached from the fear. One more important thing you should know is fear is part of the nature of life. You can be fearless if you are already in your grave! Then there is no need to be afraid of anything because you have nothing to lose! If you have something to lose, you will have fear. That is the nature of life itself. Fear does not exist when things are definite and known. Fear exists only when things are not definite, when they are mere possibilities and unknown in that sense. For example, death is a possibility. As an incident it is definite, but when and how it might happen, is not clear. So there is always fear associated with it. If you can just look into the darkness, the fear, with awareness, you will live through it and get over it.

The biggest fear human beings have is the fear of losing their identity. Even the fear of losing one's life is not as great as the fear of losing the identity. The fear of losing your identity is much worse than the fear of death.

All our fears – losing physical health, mental stability, wealth, name and fame, or loved ones - are actually fear of death under various disguises. The social fear – fear of being rejected by society – makes us do things to please society, even when it is not good for us. In this process, many times, we sacrifice what our being really wants to do. That fear of not being accepted by society is just another form of the fear of death – death of the ego. Every act of ours is unconsciously related to death and the fear of dying. Understanding death can change your entire perception of life. It can simply transform the way you handle all your fears*.*

Fear is what leads to anger. Fear is the passive form of the energy while anger is the active expression. When you are angry, just look into the anger. At the root of it, you will find a deep fear. Try this for yourself: if you are feeling fear, express anger at that time. Throw your hands, stamp your feet – express the energy. You will see the fear disappears. You will see for yourself how fear can simply transform to anger. Similarly, fear can also transform to hate. You just need to be aware of yourself and witness how the emotions subtly change from one form to another. When you understand this play, you can easily get out of the game.

Psychologists talk about fear strokes. Say you are walking in the garden in the dark, and you see a coil of rope you start shivering, imagining it to be a snake. That sudden shock you get before realizing it is just a rope and not a snake, is what is called a fear stroke. A fear stroke is like shaking a rose plant from its roots - if you keep shaking it long enough, it will die. It is said that we undergo six to twelve fear strokes every day and night, in dreams and also in wakefulness. Imagine what happens to our being! Fear strokes originate from unconsciousness. When they are viewed with awareness and consciousness, they can be substantially reduced.

When you are faced with fear, don't try to resist it or suppress it. Just look at the fear, note the fear and accept it. Acceptance of the fear dissolves the fear. Allow the fear to shake you. If your body trembles, let it tremble. If your eyes water, let the tears come. Just be like a blade of grass in the wind - bending without resistance. If you can face your fears, you see they have no depth. Because you magnify the fears, you imagine them to be an abyss. It is your choice, to let go of the branch, the fear, or to keep clinging onto it and torturing yourself. Acceptance is the only way to conquer inevitable things. When you accept, suddenly you see the fear disappear. The moment you accept, fear loses its power to frighten you. When you don't fight with it, you will see fear as deep peace. When the fear stroke happens, just live it. That is the only way. When you have an object connected to fear, accept it. That acceptance transforms. The more you fight, the more you empower fear. Diverting your attention away from the fear is also not the way because then the fear still remains with you. It does not mean that you are out of fear. Allow the fear to take over itself. Go into the fear two to three times. Live the fear intensely without any reservations. Suddenly you will find that it doesn't touch you anymore!

Fear is associated with the swadhishthāna chakra, the subtle energy center two inches below the navel region.

A very powerful way of overcoming fear is to visualize going through that fear as clearly as you can. The beauty with this technique is that it can be used when you are not in the fear situation, when you are calm and able to handle yourself. You can sit by yourself and visualize the situation that causes fear. Feel clearly the fear coming up in you; face the fear with deep awareness. If you suffer, if your body feels uncomfortable, it is fine. Don't suppress the fear, just allow it to happen. When you experience something completely, you drop it.

This is a very powerful technique that can be used twenty-four hours a day. Whenever you are attacked by fear, just sit back and relax. Put your awareness only on your exhaling breath. Repeat the word 'sah' silently as you exhale; that is, with the outgoing breath. Exhaling is like relaxing and letting go anything that can die. While inhaling you will be constantly trying to hold on to something. Exhaling is like letting go. Focus on exhaling without bothering about inhaling. When you inhale, repeat 'ham' silently. Place more awareness and energy on the exhalation. Help yourself exhale deeper. Let the inhalation happen automatically through the body. Place your energy, attention and effort only on exhaling. It is a silent intonation of 'ham…sah…., ham…sah'. Silent intonation of this hamsa mantra will suddenly take you into the awareness, the relaxation that never dies. Whatever can die will leave your system, your inner space. This technique can also be practiced at other times when you are not faced by fear - while you are sitting, talking, walking, eating, even while you are sleeping. It is a very powerful technique. Constantly, all twenty four hours, place your attention on exhaling and just intone the hamsa mantra silently – 'hamsah', 'hamsah', 'hamsah'. When you inhale, intone 'ham' and when you exhale, intone 'sah'. Understand, when constantly intoning this mantra, it will become ajapa japa - chanting without effort. Chanting with effort is called japa. Chanting without effort is ajapa. It means that which goes on automatically in you. You just need to intone, that's all. Fall in tune, that's all. The whole day it will be resounding within you. Whatever can die will leave your system, and you will realize whatever can die can never be part of you. If you are identifying yourself with something that can die, that identification will be disconnected and you will be unclutched. Whatever can never die, you will feel connected to that. Whatever cannot die is your very being. Try this technique for just three days. You will suddenly see that the fear of losing your wealth, parts of your body or your health, or your near and dear ones, or the fear of the unknown – all the fears will disappear. When you put your awareness on exhaling, whatever is occupying your inner space as a part of you that can die, will simply leave your inner space. You will be liberated.

Often, fear manifests itself as pain. The most frightening thing in the world is pain. All living beings are afraid of one thing, and that is pain. If you look deeply, you will find that people don't fear even death as much as they fear the pain and agony they will undergo at the time of death! Many are afraid of poverty, many of relationships, and many others fear disease. The root cause of all these fears is the pain that happens while going through these things. All these fears are because of the fear of pain.

Pain can be physical, mental or emotional. Physical pain is a basic necessity for the body. Just imagine, if we could feel no pain in our body we might accidentally hurt ourselves or start styling our faces, hands, and legs the way we style our hair today! Actually, pain is a letter of request, written by the body to the mind, saying, 'Please pay attention to me!' because attention is energy. When attention is given to a particular area, that attention becomes energy for that area. When the body communicates pain, it is actually asking for attention or energy, which will help it heal. Mental or emotional pain is the psychological feeling that arises when you are faced with something you don't like. Research shows that emotional pain can deeply disturb the physical body. For example, the psychological feelings that arise with sexual repression can result in lower back disorders, or the pain of shouldering too much responsibility can cause pain in the shoulders. Whether physical or emotional pain, an important thing you need to understand is that pain is always born from resistance to the present moment.

If a painful incident happens in one's life – the loss of a child, the husband or wife leaving the spouse, the breakup of a close friendship – one suffers, but slowly accepts it over time. One may cry and brood many days and nights, but then one comes to accept what happened. Time heals. It is a common saying. Understand that time is needed for healing only because you were not ready to face the pain and suffering in a conscious and aware manner at the time the incident happened. If you can just look at the pain, if you can witness the emotion with awareness and see the play of the mind while experiencing pain, then the understanding dawns and instant healing happens. Time is needed because you are not ready to have the understanding. So you suffer a great deal. Over time, after some weeks, months, or even years, the incident fades and becomes a distant memory. However, the pain is not completely gone from your system. If you come across a person who even distantly reminds you of your lost child or husband, it comes up. For example, if the person has a similar style of talking, walking, or laughing, the wound reopens. It hurts because you carry the memory of the past. Because of this, you feel life is too heavy a burden to bear. You choose to hold onto your entire past: when you were a child, when you were a teenager, when you first went to work. You hold onto all the stages of life with all the experiences, pains, and mistakes. That burden and load of your emotions associated with the past, is what causes you pain every time you experience it. If you decide to drop the past and look at every situation with a fresh perspective, then you will not have so much pain. You will heal instantly. You will not need so much time.

The root of pain and pleasure are the same. It is the same sensation with two names. It is like this: two people receive a body massage from the same person. One concludes that it was a beautiful rejuvenating process while the other decided that it hurt! The same massage will appear like pain or pleasure depending on the person receiving it. Life has both of these opposites – pleasure and pain. Both pleasure and pain are from the mind. The mind always moves from one extreme to the other. It rarely falls into the middle path. From pleasure you move to pain, from pain you move to pleasure. As we saw earlier, pleasure and pain are completely dependent on the person feeling the pleasure or pain. Something may seem like pleasure to you while the same experience may be painful to someone else.

In the Bhagavad Gita, the great scripture that teaches the various paths to Self realization, the enlightened master Krishna says beautifully, 'He who regards alike pleasure and pain, and looks on a lump of earth, a stone, and a piece of gold with an equal eye, who is wise and holds praise and blame to be the same, who is unchanged in honor and dishonor, and who treats friend and foe alike, is said to have gone beyond the modes of nature. Pleasure and pain are the same to him and he is ready for enlightenment.'

Buddha, an enlightened master, says, 'Free yourself from both pleasure and pain.' Craving for pleasure and nursing pain are both different aspects of the same experience. Both are chains. Pain may look like an ugly chain and pleasure a beautiful chain. Just as the day follows night and night follows day, pain and pleasure will always follow each other. When you understand that pleasure and pain are both creations of the mind, you will realize that they are both temporary, they come and go like soap bubbles. Nobody is needed to take away your pleasure, because your mind by its very nature will move like a pendulum to the other extreme called pain! The only way is to go beyond both pleasure and pain. This doesn't mean suppressing pleasure or forgetting about pain. It is an awareness that transforms pain to bliss – the energy that exists no matter what the external situation may be. Bliss is your very nature and cannot be lost. Just because of your resistance to what is happening, you feel pain and your natural bliss is forgotten.

Pain, whether physical, mental, or emotional, has only a negative existence like darkness. Darkness exists only in the absence of light. As such, it has no positive existence of its own. In the same way, pain exists only in the absence of awareness. Just as darkness disappears automatically when light is brought into a room, pain dissolves automatically when the energy of your awareness is focused on it. Any mental or emotional pain that you carry is just the tip of the iceberg. You need to go into the root where it starts. You need to work on the root cause for it and heal it. Otherwise, there is a distinct danger that you will inflict that pain on someone else or hurt yourself more with it. I always tell people, 'If you have pain, just drop everything and work on it. See that its root is healed. Only then you can be in a safe zone. Otherwise neither you nor the people living around you are in a safe zone.' When you face any pain with awareness you become aware that you are not just the body. You become aware that no pain can touch the real 'you'. Once you realize that you are beyond pain, you rise above pain to become a dukkha ateeta* (one who has gone beyond suffering). You experience the rare freedom that arises with nonattachment to the body. You will carry this freedom all your life. You leave mundane life behind and enter into a spiritual plane. The whole material world disappears and another world arises, one of incomparable beauty, innocence, joy and compassion. The pain will evaporate of its own accord when you see the nature and cause of pain with intense inner clarity because the clarity evaporates the reasons for the pain to exist in you. This realization brings with it a state of absolute bliss, which is the state of enlightenment.

There have been recorded instances of 'phantom pain' which is pain in a part of the body that does not exist. Once in the Second World War, a soldier's leg had to be amputated because it was badly damaged. The strange thing was that when he became conscious again he was still complaining about the pain in the leg. He was covered with a blanket so he had no idea that the leg had been removed. The blanket was removed and he was shown that his leg was not there anymore. He was shocked! Further research then showed that each part of the body is related to a certain part of the brain. When a certain part of the body feels pain, the corresponding brain center shows activity. In this case, the related brain center was still vibrating in the same way it was vibrating when the leg was a part of the body. There are many such instances of people who feel pain in the empty space where their limbs were amputated. This is called 'phantom pain'.

The mind has tremendous influence over the body. Even the perception of physical pain can be changed by the mind. In science they call it the 'placebo effect' when a simple sugar pill gives the same effect as a painkiller, just because the person is made to believe that the sugar pill is a painkiller! The other day, I was reading about research done at the University of Michigan in the USA that appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience. The research was done on a group of young men who agreed to let researchers inject their jaw muscles with a concentrated saline solution, causing pain. The brain's response to the pain was studied using PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans that showed the activity of the body's natural painkillers, called endorphins. In one scan, the men were told they were being given a painkiller but actually what was given was just a placebo – a substance that had no painkilling properties. Then they were asked to rate the intensity of the pain they felt on a scale of 0 to 100. Also, the PET scan would indicate the brain activity related to pain. The researchers were able to study both the response of the brain and what the men actually felt. The amazing observation was that when the men were given a placebo, meaning not a painkiller but just a neutral substance, the pain they felt was actually less. It was as if they had been given the painkiller itself! The PET scans indicated that the endorphin (natural painkiller) system in the brain was activated.

Fear and desire are the fundamental energies that drive our lives. We act either out of a desire to achieve something or reach somewhere, or out of a fear of not wanting to experience something. Attraction and repulsion are not merely forces of molecules, but also essential to human behavior.

One of the major driving forces in human life is desire. If you look into your life, you can see most of the time we are driven by either desire or fear. We have so many desires and many times we feel we don't have energy to fulfill them. According to the Jain tradition, the Divine sends us with enough energy and capacity to fulfill all our desires. But most of us don't feel this way. Why? There is a difference between our true desires and 'borrowed' desires. Our true desires are called our 'needs'. Borrowed desires are called our 'wants'. We have enough energy to fulfill our true desires or needs. What are our true desires? During the Life Bliss Program Level 2 (THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM Spurana Program), we have a session where people are asked to make a list of their desires, their needs and wants. Then they meditate on these desires. At the end of the meditation, I ask them to recollect from memory their list of desires. What they can recollect is usually a fraction of what they have written! It is as if they started with a large tree full of leaves, their desires, and during this meditation the tree sheds almost all its leaves, as if the leaves were dried and dead. What leaves the tree retains glow like golden leaves. If you can understand which desire is innate and which is accumulated, spiritual growth happens automatically. When our desires are our own true desires, when they reflect our real needs, when they express themselves in our inner energy, we don't feel any desperation about trying to achieve them. The realization comes that, as a matter of natural course of events, these desires will be fulfilled.

When you have a headache, you are not comfortable with that state - because you know that it is not your true nature. Your true nature is having no headache. In the same way, when you have some desire, you immediately want to come out of it - because deep fulfillment is your very nature and desire causes an imbalance in that fulfillment.

Two important truths you need to understand:

1. Your whole life is a long chain of events performed towards the one goal that is fulfillment. Whatever you may do, whether it is eating or drinking or having relationships, wealth or joy, it is all to experience fulfillment. In different directions you seek fulfillment instead of seeking it directly.

2. Fulfillment is within you, it is your very nature. That is why you are trying to come out of non-fulfillment. The fact that you are searching for fulfillment means that fulfillment is known to you. Otherwise you would not search for it! In the instances in your life when you have felt some fulfillment, there is also a hope that you will experience it again. That is why you extend your life.

The desire that is pure and not directed towards any particular object or person is simply an overflowing energy that is called iccha shakti or the 'desire energy'. From the navel, energy comes as pure energy. In the heart region, this energy gets converted to the power of desire. This further gets converted into words in the throat region. When this energy gets converted into words, it is called vak or the 'speech energy'. To give an analogy, the energy that comes from the navel is like loose cotton. The cotton becomes thread in the throat region. Or you can imagine it this way: the energy that comes from the navel is like molten iron. The throat is like a forge where the product is formed! Anyhow, the speech energy moves further to the brain. There it stays as knowledge or gets converted into a command. In the brain, the energy could stay as the power of knowledge or gnana shakti. For example, the desire energy related to the body can become knowledge of the body. The other option is, the words get converted to a command and get executed as well. The command goes to the entire body and moves you. This is called the power of action or kriya shakti. For example, the desire energy related to your body can express as the power of action like moving your body. Pure iccha shakti or desire energy which comes from your being gets converted in the throat region to gnana shakti - power of knowledge and kriya shakti - power of action. If the energy is not processed and channeled properly, the knowledge and action become disconnected from the power of the pure desire energy. The knowledge and action should be in tune with the desire energy. Then it forms a virtuous circle of desire leading to better knowledge and action, which in turn leads to clearer desires! Let us say you have a desire to make a million dollars. If it gets converted properly as knowledge, you will have a clear plan and do the right actions to become a millionaire. If the desire energy gets converted as too much knowledge and less action, then you will end up only thinking more and more, building castles in the air. On the other hand, if the desire energy gets converted as too much action and less knowledge, then you will end up working blindly. For example, you may work really hard like driving a truck from Los Angeles to New York, but can you become a millionaire this way? There is action but not the right knowledge. So the proper conversion of the desire to knowledge and action has to happen. The reason why this conversion doesn't happen properly is lack of awareness. When you are honest and integrated with the desire, there is no conflict and the conversion happens properly.

You might have even experienced some incidents like this in your life. A girl who is afraid to cross a busy street, if she sees her child run across the road will just jump onto the road to save the child without a thought about her own safety. We should understand how she has lost her fear all of a sudden. The reason is that the love for her child has awakened the dimension of motherliness in her. It is the same thing with every relationship of love. If the feeling of love blossoms in somebody, immediately all the fear will leave the person's inner space. Understand, love has tremendous power and so does lust. If you have a lot of energy in your muladhara chakra, it will override the other chakras immediately. There will not be any fear in your swadhishthana chakra" and there will not be any worries in your manipuraka chakra. These higher chakras will not work when the muladhara chakra has the full power. Without the person's knowledge, it will unleash the latent unknown potential in him. It will spread his potential to the outer world too. If you have a son or daughter, then the dimension of motherliness will be awakened in you. If your mind is ready to receive the experience of different dimensions, those dimensions will blossom in you. If you are completely open-minded, every person you meet in your life will cause you to blossom further. But if you are egoistic, even your spouse or your lover cannot cause you to blossom. Please understand, you have a great responsibility to create an open and non- egoistic mind before entering into a relationship such as between husband and wife or between lovers. Then the very feeling will transform you eternally. If this eternal transformation does not happen, you miss a major dimension of your life. Why are we not able to feel true love? It is because of our samskaras, our emotional attachment to the past memories. Your inner space is filled with too many things related to the past. So your inner space is not available to the present moment. You can only love or feel connected to the people or objects falling in tune with the past memories you loved. If you can drop the emotional attachments to the past, suddenly you will see you have so much of inner space available to you. You can then directl open up to anybody who is in front of you w1t hout asking for his or her past.

Lust is a primal emotion provided by nature for continuation of the species. To go beyond lust is the first major step in realizing the ultimate potential of human life. Humans are forever confused between love and lust. They think only animals are lustful. Actually, only animals are capable of pure lust when they mate! Humans, with their rationalization, can neither be lustful nor loving. That is why they feel dissatisfied and unfulfilled. Sex is carbon, love is diamond. Sex is mud and love is the lotus that blooms in the mud. It is the same substance — the only thing is, you should know how to process it. Just drop your expectations, and you will find a tremendous upsurge of energy.

Today, we know biologically that no man is 100% man, and no woman is 100% woman. A man may be 51% man and 49% woman. Likewise, a woman may be 51% woman, and 49% man; just a difference of 1%, may be more. You have taken birth from the energies of your father and mother. Then, how can you be only male or only female? Whether we accept it or not, we are an embodiment of both male and female energies. We are whole, not divided. Right from the moment of birth, society labels you as either male or female. And it expects you to start behaving accordingly. Inherent human nature is fulfillment. She starts looking to the outside world for a substitute for her own lost half. The male child starts searching for a female presence, and the female child for a male presence. This is where the whole idea of sex starts. The search starts with the idea of how our 'would-be' should be.

One 90-year old man used to sit every day at the beach from morning to evening, watching people going by. Another man who noticed this went up to him and asked him, "What do you actually do sitting here everyday? "The old man replied, "I am searching for a woman to be my wife." The man was simply shocked at this reply and asked him, "Why did you not search in your youth? "The old man replied, "I have been searching since I was 30 years old." The man was astonished and asked him, "What sort of a woman are you searching for?"He replied, "I am searching for a prefect woman." "The man asked, "You havent found one yet?" "I found one woman who matched what I had in mind but it didn"t work out well with her replied the old man. The man asked why. The old man replied, "She was searching for a perfect man!"

This is what happens when we try to get a perfect match for the image that we carry inside us. But after a long search, we suddenly find a person who seems to match our mental image — from a distance. What happens at this point is what is called falling in love'. This is the science behind falling in love. Note that it is always 'falling' in love, never 'rising' in love! Because of our own strong needs and expectations, we see things as we want to see them. As long as this distance is maintained, things go on smoothly. We continue to project our imagination upon each other. But, as the person slowly comes closer we find that fantasy and reality are totally different. 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! No image can be matched with reality, because at the end of the day, it is only an image, a fantasy!

What is alchemy? The process of changing a lower level metal such as copper or iron into gold is alchemy. In the same way, when our being is ripe the base feeling of lust transforms to love, the highest emotion we are capable of. In the same way, remove the impurity of your fantasies, add the purity of

friendliness in your relationship and process this with your patience. In the beginning, people may not be able to understand the change in you. Just continue with belief and confidence in yourself. Your sincerity and strength has no way but to touch others around you positively. Add friendliness to love. As of now, our lust is deep-rooted violence to possess the other person. Add friendliness to the relationship. Welcome the partner as he or she is; do not just accept him or her. Welcome and accept the mind, body and being as it is. Then you can see lust turns to love and your being is in eternal bliss. Love adds life even to the person. With love the person is a spirit, life! Without love the person is reduced to a thing, utility! Without love, when you look at a beautiful man or woman and plan for what you can get out of that person, you reduce him or her to a thing. Only when you look at that person with love, the person is a spirit, a living being. Celibacy is nothing but not craving for the suppressed half that is inside you, that's all. If you are a male, you need to experience such fulfillment unto yourself that you no longer miss the suppressed half or female inside you. If you are a female, you are so enough unto yourself that you don't look outside to experience this fulfillment. When you achieve this fulfillment, whether you are married or not, there will be peace in your mind. It is then that you can be celibate even in married life! This is true celibacy.

This meditation technique will bring out all the suppressed emotions in you. Breathing is very closely related to the mind. If your thinking is calm, your breath will be relaxed. If your thinking is aggressive, your breathing will also be aggressive. You may practice this technique on an empty stomach, preferably in the morning. 21 days of Dukkhaharana will transform your being and bring a glow to your face and body.

Stand with your eyes closed. In the first part of this meditation, your mental system is made fully alive by deep breathing. This energy will melt all the repressed emotions like melting ice.

Breathe deeply and chaotically from the depths of your body, always through your nose with your mouth closed. Move your hands, flex your knees, lower yourself 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, in line with your breathing.

Do the movements gently and synchronize your inhalation with upward movement and exhalation with downward movement.

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. Start with your feet; then 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. Relax each part of your entire body before you move to the next part. At the end of these ten minutes, you will become vacant inside; you will become cool, calm and composed.

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.

The first two parts of this technique are actually a preparation for the 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. 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.

When you have desires you have guilt as well. Guilt is the opposite face of desire. Sometimes you feel guilty about desiring something because you feel it is not right to desire it. Other times you feel guilty when your desires are fulfilled because you feel you are not deserving of what you receive. When your desires do not come true you feel guilty because you feel you have not done what you ought to have. Desires invariably lead to guilt.

Guilt is nothing but your past decisions and actions being reviewed with your updated intelligence.

For example, when you were in school, you might have said a few mean things to one of your friends which caused a relationship to break. Now, this many years later, with the intelligence that you have, is it right to review that incident and feel guilty? No! At that time you had only that much intelligence, so you behaved in that fashion. Now, you have updated intelligence.

It doesn't make sense to review the past with your present intelligence.

What is gone is gone. What has been done is done. You cannot undo it. Now if you constantly think about the past and feel guilty, you destroy your present and your future too. Nothing can be done about it, so guilt is useless. What can you do? All that you can do is not repeat the same pattern again, that's all. At that time with whatever intelligence you had, you acted, that's all.

Our past is always past, it is always dead. That is why it is called past. Yet, we always let the past affect us. How do we allow the past to affect us? In two ways:

1. If you review your past incidents or decisions using the present intelligence, you will create guilt in your being.

2. If you take the present decisions based on past experiences, you will be repeating the same past into the future also, maybe in a little updated fashion!

3. Even though you might not commit exactly the same mistake, you will be moving in the same experiential level, in the same plane.

4. Our mind falls into a groove, a track, a mindset that forces it to do what it has always done. So we keep making the same mistakes as well.

There are three kinds of guilt that take root in us and kill our intelligence:

• 1. Guilt created by immediate family
• 2. Guilt created by social laws
• 3. Guilt created by ourselves

Before the age of seven, guilt is created by your immediate family. If you don't do according to your parents' wishes, they instill guilt in you. They tell you that god will not approve of what you are doing. Poor god, he has to support whatever anyone says about him! Or your parents tell you that you should respect their wishes as parents. Immediately you feel guilty of making them unhappy. In this way, family sows the first guilt in you. You in turn pass it on to your child. Like a crown, it is passed on over generations.

Because you don't have the knowledge to explain why things have to be done in a certain way, you change it to a rule and impose it on the child and create guilt through it. For example, children love whirling. They love moving and flowing with the body. It is a natural way for them to center their energy. But what do we do? We stop the child and put the fear in him that he may fall. We don't stop our efforts until we make the child stiff, frozen and dull like us!

The child may want to go outside and play in the sun or collect some flowers or just jump around in the fresh air. If you think about it, it is not much the child is asking for. But the mother says 'no' - he may fall ill due to the hot sun. If you look a little deep, you can see that by saying 'no' she gets a subtle feeling of power, of being in control. She might say it is the sun but it is subtler than that.

The 'no' by the mother actually has a deep impact on the child. It creates guilt in the child. Now, the child may force himself to stay in or he may escape from his mother's eyes and step out. But either way his raw energy is being suppressed. Ifhe forces himself to stay in, his energy is not being allowed to express. If he goes out, he will feel guilty, he will be afraid that somebody might spot him. And all this for nothing big - just for playing in the sun!

As the child grows, this deep engram of guilt will actually settle inside him. Even after he grows up into a man and becomes independent, he may be sitting in the lawn under the sun and those childhood memories may be triggered. He may feel guilty and uneasy for no reason. There is nothing to feel guilty about just sitting in the lawn but the old memories are awakened.

This is how guilt arises. Small incidents like this collect and make guilt your natural way of life.

Why can't we enjoy and encourage the natural joy and happiness the child lives in?

If you look a little deep, you can see that happiness itself has become associated with guilt. A small child knows nothing of guilt - he is just wild and natural. That is why seeing a small child can be so captivating. He is total in whatever he does. He has not been introduced to the mask of civilization. He is still wild. That is why he is so full of energy. He is overflowing with joy and curiosity; he is just vibrating with the energy bubbling inside him.

The child wants to enjoy everything but the parents are filled with the conditionings of society — guilt, seriousness, hypocrisy. The child wants to shout and jump and dance - that is his natural expression. But the adults stop him, 'Don't shout! It is bad manners. You should be civilized. You should carry yourself well like us.' By and by, the notion of being free and happy is itself associated with feelings of guilt.

From seven to fourteen, society creates guilt in you through its rules. The guilt based on fear is created by social laws. Till the age of fourteen, family and society create guilt for you. An important guilt in this is the guilt of sex. Parents or family never open out topic of sex.

When there is a chemical change happening in you, you feel your body is new. A lot of questions arise and clarity is needed but no one is prepared to give it.

And to add to the confusion and desire, the media around you constantly bombards you with fantasies in that vulnerable age of change.

To add to it, society instills in you the feeling that you are not enough unto yourself. It makes you feel guilty of what you are, what you do. Once it convinces you that you are a sinner, you are caught in its grips. Then you cannot enjoy the joy of life any more.

According to me, guilt is the greatest sin. At least other sins will punish you after your death. Guilt will punish you when you are alive.

'My religion is to live - and die - without regret.'

You are called a saint or a sinner only by society. As long as society labels you a saint, you are a saint. The moment society labels you a sinner, you are a sinner. If you kill someone in society, you will be called a murderer, you will be punished. But if you kill someone on the battlefield you will be called a hero, you will be given a big award! So there is no absolute scale to decide what is right and what is wrong. It is society's own logic.

A very subtle and cunning way of sowing guilt today is through the idea of heaven and hell. People exploit your fear and greed by showing you ideas of hell and heaven. They create in you greed for heaven and fear for hell. They create so many concepts of hell and heaven and sell them to you. They say, 'If you practice these types of things, you will be rewarded with heaven; if you practice otherwise, you will be punished with hell.' When you are given rules based on greed and fear, you automatically start creating deep guilt in you.

A small story: Once a military general asked a Zen master, "Master what are heaven and hell?" The master asked, "What do you do for a

The general replied, "I am a general." The master just laughed, "Which idiot asked you to be a general? You look more like a butcher!"

The general was furious and took out his sword shouting, "I will cut you to pieces."

The master just raised his hand and said, "These are the gates of hell." The general realized his folly and bowed down deeply to the master for forgiveness. The master continued, "These are the gates of heaven."

Be very clear, heaven and hell are not physical locations. They are psychological states of your mind. One instant the mind may be in hell and the next it may be in heaven — the gates to heaven and hell open and close at any time alternately.

Till the age of twenty one, knowledge from family and society creates guilt. After twenty one, the guilt sown in you by family and society grows roots inside you. Then you start creating guilt for yourself without any reason. Guilt becomes a permanent guest in your being!

The guilt created by family and the guilt created by society are imposed guilt; they are like a crown that is passed on from one generation to another. The third guilt is the worst - that which you create for yourself. When you internalize guilt based on greed and fear, you create new types of guilt for yourself.

The moment you start feeling guilty about something, you can be exploited. That too when you start fighting with yourself it is easier to exploit you.

If you look into your life you can see how every moment you are subtly looking for some reason to fight with yourself, to feel discontent with yourself. You cannot remain without some conflict, you want to create misery for yourself because that is what you have been taught — happiness is a sin.

You are designed to move like a freely flowing river. Guilt is like the rocks in the

path of the water. Society has subtly branded happiness as a sin. That is the problem. That is why you will notice, when everything is going smoothly and happily, there will be a lurking feeling of guilt in you. You are taught by society that being happy and enjoying life is being irresponsible in a way. So you feel guilty.

But when you feel sad and depressed, do you ever feel guilty? No! You are taught that life is a chain of suffering and endurance, with happiness stepping in once in a while.

This is also why people can't take it when you are happy and smiling all the time. They try their best to bring you back to the so-called reality - by instilling guilt in you.

When you are enjoying, dancing or relaxing at the beach for example, suddenly you will observe guilt starts rising in you about all the work that is pending, about all the responsibilities that need to be fulfilled.

Guilt has no basis but it can destroy your whole life. If you can live without guilt, you will enjoy every moment without any regret and still fulfill all your responsibilities.

The problem is that your being is a crowd of voices that don't belong to you. It is a totality of your mother's voice, your father's voice, your teacher's voice, your neighbor's voice and what not! All these voices are in there. If there is only one voice, you will never have any problem. Your mind will move like a river. But there are so many voices telling you so many things and creating the rocks of guilt in your path.

As long as you flow like a river, you will express extraordinary intelligence in your life.

You will live with an energy that is overflowing every minute. The moment you allow guilt in you, the moment you are stopped in your free flow, you create energy clots inside your being.

Once you become aware of how you are driven by guilt, you can start practicing to come out of it. When you start practicing anything, naturally you will slip a few times. When you practice to be without guilt, you are bound to slip back into the older patterns of greed and fear. Then suddenly you will remember, 'Oh, I started working out of fear, 'I started working out of greed.' Then you will start afresh. When you start working, naturally you will see these things happening.

A monk from a big spiritual organization was sent to a remote tribal area for doing service. Suddenly, the headquarters received a lot of complaint letters about the monk.

The president after reading the letters said, "We have posted the right person." The secretary asked him, "What is this Sir? We are getting complaints about him. How do you say we have posted the right person?"

The president replied, "If we are getting complaints, it means he has started working, there is something happening!"

When you start something new you will have three phases - the first is resistance. The next is just avoidance — people will neither care nor resist. The third is acceptance. In the same way, when you start doing anything inside your system, you will start growing but these three phases will be there. The first phase will be resistance. You will feel the new practice is a difficult change in your current system. Because of this, the next thing that happens is you start avoiding opportunities where you should be practicing the change. Again and again you will go back to your older ways. Your system will resist, it will try to create all kinds of complications, all possible arguments. If you allow the resistance to grow, you become your own enemy. Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita', 'Let you lift yourself by yourself. If you don't, you will be your worst enemy.' It is up to you to help yourself as your best friend or hurt yourself as your worst enemy.

Be very clear: nobody can hurt you unless you allow. Nobody can help you unless you allow.

If you have forgotten the practice, remember and again and again lift yourself. Don't fall into depression, don't have guilt. Don't think you will not be able to do it. Even in the life of Buddha if you read, he was about to leave the body when his disciples asked him to give his ultimate message, and he said Appo deepo bhava — Let you be your own light, let you be guided by yourself.

To feel guilty is to be in sin. In fact that is the only sin. The hell that we talk about is not in another time and space. It is within us when we feel guilty, without doing anything to change our mindset.

All your guilt, all your pain, everything is a pure imaginary shaft you create inside your head. The mistake you did ten years ago, the mistake you did seven years ago and the mistake you did three years ago, are independent and unconnected incidents. But when you connect them and start thinking

about it, naturally you start creating guilt. You start feeling like a continuous sinner. This is one approach.

There is another approach. When you commit a mistake, see objectively why you committed it, how you committed it. Watch as an observer how and why it is getting repeated. Look scientifically into the mechanism of guilt. Just this awareness will open a new door and you will never commit the same mistake again - because once you look into it, and you find the cause, it will disappear. To know a thing totally is to be free of it.

Please understand that morality should happen out of integrity, not out of guilt.

What do I mean by integrity? Integrity is being in the present moment and being only one solid personality and not many conflicting personalities. It is seeing reality without the play of the mind. Once the mind steps in, duality also steps in. Just by being intensely aware of the present moment, you can achieve integrity where there is only one and not two or three or many personalities fighting in you. Only when the mind flits between the past and future, you become split personalities and integrity doesn't set in. If the mind is on the present, automatically you become unified and integrity sets in.

One day, a priest knelt before god and started crying loudly, "I am a sinner. Please have mercy on me, O god."A man who was praying silently got inspired by this and also knelt down next to the priest and started praying. Now, another man also went down on his knees and started crying. Seeing this, the priest nudged the first man saying, "Look who thinks he is a sinner!"

All our humility, our morality, is more or less a pretence to others and to ourselves. We pretend because we are not solidly integrated within us. We ourselves don't know which personality within us is authentic and so we get caught in such games. If we are integrated, we will be authentic in every action, and automatically we will be moral.

Please understand, you will never make mistakes if you are deeply aware at the time of making them. When you are aware, you will be one solid personality and moral as well. When you stray from awareness, you will be many personalities and immoral also. Morality has to do with awareness, not with any other social rules. Awareness is the only way to be naturally moral. Awareness causes you to spontaneously take the right action in the right situation. Morality can cause you to do the wrong action in the right situation because it doesn't have the right base. Its base is not its own, it is built up by society. So you don't feel connected to it. When you don't feel connected, you cannot act with confidence. Once you integrate yourself, you will be centered upon awareness. If you remain fragmented, there will be no awareness and you will depend on morality for guidance.

When you start internalizing the laws of society, you create a deep wound in your being. You destroy your innate intelligence. According to me, children can be given a set of rules initially so they don't move from the path of consciousness. But soon they have to be given the understanding of life and the need to operate from consciousness instead of conscience.

If you live with consciousness, you will automatically live a moral life. To start understanding the need to live with consciousness, just look into your morality. Morality is only skin deep, whereas consciousness comes from the very being. Your consciousness tries to break through your conscience. Your consciousness continuously fights with your conscience. Conscience is societal. Consciousness is natural. Conscience is a poor substitute for consciousness.

People ask me, 'Master, what is this? You are pulling down the whole social structure. Then how can we all live morally?' I tell them, 'Be very clear, it is only for kids that you need a forced morality. For them you need to say, 'Keep quiet, I will give you candy.' Of course, nowadays kids reply, 'I am happy. I don't need your candy. Who cares for your candy!' For a child you can say that you will give candy and restrict him. You can impose morality on him based on fear or greed. But for you, it is time to grow up. You are not kids anymore. Just stand up with consciousness. When I say consciousness, I mean the intelligent energy of your being.

When anything is a forced rule, you always try to get around it. For example, you always speed when you don't see the policeman.

A policeman pulls over a car on the highway for speeding. When he asks for the driver"s license, the driver replies, "But officer I was only trying to keep a safe distance between my car and the car behind me!"

When you follow rules blindly without understanding their spirit, this is what happens — you just wait for an excuse to break them.

Honestly answer yourself: if there were no rules, no regulating authority to keep a check on what you did, would you be the same person as you are now? Would you be doing things in the same way as you do now? If your answer is no, be very clear that the rule is coming from your conscience, not from your consciousness. You have not internalized the spirit of the rule or you do not agree with the rule. That is the reason you are not doing things in a way natural to you.

You can see, when you tell children not to do something, they will be most tempted to do it. As long as you don't mention anything about doing it or not doing it, they may not even be bothered about it. But the moment you tell them not to do something, they will be looking to do it.

One man says, "I found three ways to get things done."His friend asks, "What are the three ways?" The man replies, "First, do it yourself. Second, hire someone to do it. Third, tell your kids not to do it. That"s all, it will be done!"

Actually there is a taste, a thrill in doing what you are not supposed to do. Most of the time, you develop an instant urge for something if you are asked not to do it. You feel a kind of joy or satisfaction by doing it. That is the basic tendency in every human being.

Once a shopkeeper was trying hard to increase his sales. He trfed various options — discounts, catchy advertisements, better customer service. Nothing worked. Then one day, he hung a black curtain on his shop window and made a small hole on it. Under the hole he put up a board, "Peeping strictly forbidden." From that day, he saw crowds gathering at his shop, each one curious to peep through the hole to see what was there! His shop sales automatically increased because people now actually saw the variety of grocery items his shop carried.

When you are told not to do something, the basic human tendency is to do exactly that. As a teenager, when you say 'no' to your parents, you feel you have proved you are independent. When you say 'no', you feel you have proved you are somebody special, somebody different. As long as you say 'yes', you feel you are only a child. When you start saying 'no', you feel you have become an adult.

You feel that you are a man only when you say 'no' to your father. Till then you feel you are a child. Just to prove that you are a man you start saying 'no' to your father. This is basic psychology. When you say 'no' you think you are somebody, until then you think you are nobody. So please be very clear, to whatever you say, your grown up son is going to say 'no', because he wants to be somebody.

In the course of time, many regulations that had meaning earlier become blind rules - without any meaning. In Bharat, during the times before electricity was invented, tailors would sew by hand with a needle with the help of dim lanterns. So clothes would not be sewn after sunset since sewing in the dim light of the candle or lantern would cause strain on the eye. So the work was always confined to daylight hours.

But even now in Bharat, the elderly people in the house will say, 'It is not a good thing to sew after dusk!' The very reason for not sewing at night doesn't even exist anymore! Electricity and bright lights are there. But it has become a ritual for them, with no connection to its original purpose.

A small story:

Once a paratrooper was being interviewed on television. The interviewer said, "Your life must be really adventurous."

The paratrooper replied, "Yes, it does have its scary moments."

The interviewer asked, "What is the most anxious experience in your life?"

The paratrooper replied, When I was coming down on the lawn of a house and the sign read, "Keep off the grass!"

When you don't have the right intelligence or understanding, things become dead rules in your life.

When you have understanding, any correct rule can become a friendly technique to live life happily. Rules and rituals are actually techniques for your own enlightenment. When I say enlightenment, I mean a blissful life full of clarity. Of course, when pursued deeply, it will lead to the ultimate state of enlightenment.

A railway official reported a murder on a train, "The murderer entered the compartment, stabbed the victim multiple times. Then he left the train through the opposite door jumping onto the railway track — there by violating the railway regulations."

When you don't have the right understanding, you will miss the whole thing and end up acting in a foolish way. When you are given the right understanding, you will understand that any rule was created just for you and others around you to live a happy and blissful life.

When the spirit of the rule is understood, there won't be any problem falling in line with it. By falling in tune, there will only be juice in your action; there will only be a blissful commitment to it. But if the spirit is missed, everything is missed. Life will seem dull and lifeless.

Take meditation for example. Meditation itself is done to go inwards irrespective of the outer world noise and situations. I have seen that some people, before starting their meditation routine, will first try to create a noiseless situation outside. They will go around telling everyone to keep quiet. They will practically freeze people in their normal routine just because they are going to meditate.

Only when the spirit is missed, things become dead rituals. You miss and mess! All rules and regulations were created for a harmonious life with the understanding that you will not kill me and I will not kill you, and both of us will live happily. That was the basic understanding

behind them. However in the course of time, they became laws. All rules and regulations were created to live a harmonious and happy life, but the moment you internalize the rules without the understanding, you create guilt. As long as you follow the rules with an understanding, you will be happy. When you start following the words instead of the spirit, you will start creating guilt.

When you want to escape from the law, what do you do? You just catch on to the words of the law and drop the spirit behind them. Then you legally work around the words and escape from the law. When you catch the words, you become a bureaucrat and you miss the spirit. Only when you catch the spirit, you can be an intelligent being without guilt.

There is a certain guilt that is useful for you, a guilt which if pursued intelligently can cause you to move forward in life. It is like this: when you see that you have the potential to do something, when you feel that you have so much potential which you are not using at all, then if you are intelligent, guilt will happen in you. This guilt can spur you to start doing things that will actualize your entire potential.

Sometimes we see the state of things around us and we know in one corner of our mind that we can very well help turn the situation around. But either due to laziness or due to the fear of confrontation, or due to the fear of taking responsibility, we just keep quiet and watch. This type of situation can cause deep guilt in us. This guilt is significant. If we take steps to correct the situation by doing what we really feel we should do, then the guilt will disappear and we will also move forward.

This type of guilt has the ability to drive you to do what needs to be done. Because of lts very nature, you cannot harbor this guilt for long. You have to get over it. And the way to get over it is by doing what needs to be done. Once it is done, the guilt also disappears. How long you wish to harbor this guilt without taking steps, for that long you suffer from it. This is the simple logic of this guilt.

Another manifestation of this guilt happens when you can feel your ego surfacing in certain situations and you are unable to help it. When you can smell your ego but you are unable to control it, this guilt

arises in you. This guilt is also good since it is a sign of the deep awareness of your own ego. It facilitates you to sincerely work towards eliminating that ego.

Guilt is the sure killer of intelligence. According to me, guilt is the worst killer of intelligence. It will never let you move in your life.

Once one of our devotees had a tumor at the base of her spinal cord. For twenty years she suffered with the tumor. She came to me complaining, "Please help me, heal me. I am suffering with this tumor for so many years. After undergoing surgery, it has reappeared. "I started talking to her slowly to trace the origin of the problem. I asked her a few questions at the end of which she finally opened up and started weeping. I asked her "Do you have any guilt related to your sex energy? "She slowly opened up.

She said she was physically abused when she was very young. One of her close relatives had abused her for many years. That guilt stayed with her. She said, "I started hating that part of my body. I started feeling that that part of the body should not exist in me. I felt that part of my body was not my being. My hatred towards that person turned towards my own body."

Her hatred was so deep. I continued speaking to her. Slowly she opened up more and more. When she brought the guilt out, she came out of the guilt. She was psychologically healed.

I gave her a small meditation technique to meditate on that area. I told her "Express your anger towards that man. Weep, shout, cry, hit. Close the doors, take a pillow, imagine that it is him and show your anger on it. After that sit silently and feel that part of your body also as your own. Feel love towards that part of the body."

You will be surprised that in just ten days the tumor disappeared! It never recurred. Most of our ailments are due to psychological disturbances where guilt plays a major role. Most of the time, our energy flow gets blocked because of guilt. If you look deep, wherever you are not able to move, wherever you are not able to take decisions, wherever you have fear, there will be some guilt lurking.

Acceptance is a wonderful tool to relieve yourself of the pull and push between the past and future. With acceptance you fall into the present straightaway. The first thing is to accept all the happenings of the outer world and all the happenings of the inner world. Whatever problems you have in the outer world and whatever problems you have in the inner world, just accept them in their entirety. Summarize all that you experience as problems and accept them in totality.

Accept all guilt, all mistakes and all failures. Even if you cannot accept, accept that you cannot accept. You will then relax and guilt will drop from your mind.

Just try this small experiment:

Just relax for three days with complete acceptance. If you relax for three days without the pull and push in the inner and outer worlds, are you going to lose all your wealth? Surely not! So there is no problem. In three days you are not going to lose anything. Why don't you give it a try? Just for three days, sincerely, utterly, accept everything in your life one hundred percent!

If you are not able to accept one hundred percent then accept that you are not able to accept one hundred percent. Even the acceptance of 'I am not able to accept myself in the inner world and outer world' will make you drop from the pull and push between the past and future. The moment you understand, 'I am unable to free myself from the pull and push of desires and fears, I am not able to accept my reality, that very understanding will start doing its job.

If you can fall into the present moment, relaxing from the outer world and inner world things, in three days you will have a glimpse: What is life? What does it mean to live in the present moment? If this happens to you, you will experience such ecstasy, such a different space, such a different life that you have never experienced before.

You have lived based on your philosophy for maybe the last thirty years. Just for three days, don't try to alter anybody in the outer world. You will see that when you experiment with such great techniques, they work miracles in your being. They start a great alchemy process in your being. If you are not able to be sincere, accept that you are not able to be sincere. Even that sincerity is enough. You will start seeing a different space in you.

From Head to Heart

Sit down and close your eyes. Take slow and deep breaths, just for a few minutes. Along with it, feel that your head is being pressed into your heart, into the chest region. Become totally headless. You have no head now. You are headless.

Feel that you are breathing from the heart. Feel that you are seeing through the heart. Feel that you are smelling through your heart. Feel very clearly that you are breathing through the heart. Listen through the heart, see through the heart, and feel through the heart.

Stand up. Have the consciousness from the heart and let your movements be as slow as possible. Don't walk. Just move your body around slowly. Remember that you are moving from the heart. Your center is the heart, not the head. Again and again, forget the head. Move from the heart. Remember you are a headless being.

Stand in one place. Now, increase the speed slowly, very slowly. Remember to move from the heart, not from the head. Forget your head. You are a headless being moving. (After few minutes)

Sit down where you are. Just be without the head. Sit only with your heart. Relax.

(After few minutes) Slowly, very slowly, open your eyes.

Part 2: The Sacred Text of Hinduism - Jeevan Mukti Bhashya

Emotions of fear, desire and guilt are subjective emotions. What I mean by this is that you do not need another person or even an object to create these emotions. Imagine that you are in a sound proofed room with your eyes closed and with nothing to touch, taste or smell. You can still feel the emotions of fear or desire. But to compare yourself with another person and to feel jealous of him, you need the presence of another person. Jealousy is therefore an objective emotion. It needs an object to be activated.

A small story:

One evening a man was sitting with his wife on a park bench. Without noticing them, a young man and life girlfriend sat down next to them. The young man started talking to his girlfriend in a very loving manner.

Hearing this, the wife whispered to husband, "I think he is going to propose to her. Maybe you should cough or do something to warn him!"

The husband replied, "Why should I warn him? Nobody ever warned me!"

Jealousy starts from comparison. We always compare ourselves with others in various fields — looks, wealth, knowledge, name and fame and friends to name a few. When we compare ourselves with others we feel that somebody else has something more than what we have and, we get caught in jealousy.

Comparison is the seed and jealousy is the fruit!

Why exactly do we compare ourselves with others?

First, we compare ourselves because we have never understood ourselves. We are not aware of who we are and what we have.

Second, society has conditioned us from our birth to evaluate ourselves based upon others. From childhood the comparison starts. In school, the grading system introduces a child to competition and comparison with others.

There are standard benchmarks to measure a child's qualities such as mathematical ability, scientific aptitude, artistic skill, athletic ability, musical talent and so on. But, what we don't realize is that when we try to measure a quality using a standardized benchmark, it is nothing but using comparison as the scale to measure the child himself. We are literally punishing all children with the reward systems we use in schools.

The child gets used to judging and knowing himself by looking at others and comparing himself with them. He has no understanding of himself based on what he is. He knows himself only based on others.

A small story:

Once a man was testifying in court about a road accident. Suddenly, the man noticed that the court reporter was writing while he spoke. As the man started speaking faster and faster he noticed that the reporter was writing faster and faster. Suddenly the man said to the court reporter, "Please don't write so fast. I am not able to keep up with you!"

Every judgment you make about yourself is based on some comparison. But why does the idea of the other enter into your mind? It is because you have not looked in and realized who you are. You have not experienced the bliss and tremendous potential you have inside you. You feel incomplete because you have not been able to express yourself as you are. So, the emptiness and lack of fulfillment inside makes you feel inferior to others.

Buddha says, 'Nothing exists except in relationship.' Suppose you were the only person on a new planet, how could you compare yourself with anyone? Could you call yourself tall or short, ugly or beautiful, rich or poor, intelligent or dumb? No! When there is no one with whom to compare ourselves, we just are!

Understand, even now, there is no scale to compare you with anybody. Each individual is unique.

Can you compare a lion and a horse? Do we ever compare ourselves with flowers or birds or mountains? Then why do we have to compare ourselves with other human beings! A beautiful Zen story:

A king once went to a master to ask for a technique to become more powerful than his neighboring kings. He sat in front of the master and started telling him the purpose of his visit. The master listened patiently to the king.

He then told him to go into the royal garden where a rose plant and a cypress plant were growing side by side. He told the king, "They are your teachers. They can teach you what you need to learn."

The king went into the garden, saw the two plants but could not understand what he was meant to learn from them. He went back to the master and asked, What do you mean, master? I am not able to understand what and how these plants will teach me."

The master took the king to the plants and explained, "This cypress plant has been next to the rose plant for so many years. Never once has it even aspired to become a rose plant. Similarly, the rose plant has never ever aspired to become a cypress plant. If man had been the cypress plant, he would have compared himself with the rose and felt jealous at the attention that the rose plant was getting from people. Or if man were the rose plant, he would have looked at the cypress plant enviously thinking how peaceful the plant was without the torture of getting plucked by people all day!"

The two plants prospered because they used all of their energy for their own growth instead of using it to compare themselves with the other.

The moment you stop comparing, all jealousy disappears. Instead, you will start feeling contented in yourself and grateful to Existence for having given you so much and for making you unique. Instead, if you feel jealous of others, you will suffer. You will constantly fight with others openly or inside yourself. If somebody laughs, you think he is laughing at you. If somebody is friendly towards another person you feel lonely and jealous of that person. Actually, you are just waiting for someone to hurt you. The jealousy you allow inside you is like a raw wound. Any action done with no intention to hurt you also touches the wound and hurts.

So when you feel hurt, understand that you have a wound. Don't throw the responsibility of the suffering on the other person. The wound needs to be healed and the jealousy has to be dissolved. Then nobody can hurt you. Be very clear, nobody can hurt you without your silent permission.

You compare yourself to each other because you feel that you are somehow lacking. Honestly, you have no idea of your true, unique potential! If you did, you wouldn't spend one second looking outside yourself for answers about how to live a creative, fulfilling life. All of the confidence, intelligence, and vibrant energy that you need already exist inside you. You have the potential to live like god on earth. Don't believe the limiting things that you have been made to believe about yourself. Just look in! Experiment, explore and discover the truth for yourself. Then you will simply radiate all of these qualities effortlessly.

Suppose there was a huge ladder and everybody in the world was asked to stand on it in ascending order of success in any field such as beauty or intelligence. You would probably position yourself somewhere in the middle of the ladder. There are many people above you but there are also many people below you. Seeing the people above you causes you to feel jealous. So, you constantly try to become better than them in order to move further up the ladder.

Now, at some point in your life, you may realize the uselessness of this never-ending game. Then you want to jump off the ladder. And you look down. Now what do you see? There are so many people below you. Suddenly you start feeling happy to see so many people below you and you feel hopeful because you are not as inferior as you thought you were when you were looking at the people above you.

This is where the fight starts. When you look up, you feel miserable, but when you look down, you feel happy. Now even though you begin to realize the futility of spending your life just climbing the ladder, still you are not able to jump off the ladder because if you jump off, you will be left alone. There will be nobody above you or below you.

We all function around these three axes of doing, having and being . Doing for having, without enjoying being, IS the sole cause of all our misery. Doing never catches up with having! Every time you work hard and fulfill one desire, suddenly that desire loses its pull over you.

As enlightened master, Ramana Maharishi', says beautifully, 'The mind is such that it shows a tiny mustard seed to be a huge mountain until it is attained. As soon as it has been attained, even a mountain appears as insignificant as a mustard seed!'

As soon as a desire is fulfilled, another one starts pulling at you. You don't even have time to enjoy it and feel satisfied. You may think, 'Let me get this one more thing also. Then I can relax and enjoy what I have.' Be very clear, your mind will never let it happen.

The only way to really live and enjoy life is to enjoy the very doing itself. Then automatically the doing, having and being, will be integrated and will happen.

Nature has its own unique way of growth for each of us. Take the Chinese bamboo for example. When it sprouts, it doesn't show much growth for the first four years. Then in the fifth year, the bamboo grows ninety feet in six weeks! It was not that the tree was not growing in the first four years.

Though the growth was not visible, the roots were being strengthened to make it possible for the plant to grow fast and safely into a huge tree!

Like the bamboo's growth, there is no scale to measure yourself with anyone other than your own self. If you spend all your energy looking in and competing with yourself, you will progress in leaps and bounds.

First of all, understand that god is an artist, not an engineer. If He was an engineer, He would have made one perfect man and one perfect woman and then made millions of copies from that mould! No. God has made each one of us unique in every way. It does not matter whether you are a rose or a lily or a wild flower. The important thing is that the wild flower should realize its ultimate potential as a wild flower just as the rose should actualize its inherent potential. The fragrance of you realizing your unique potential is what radiates and, without effort, touches everyone around you.

Whether it is beauty or intelligence, you are unique. It is only when you don't respect your uniqueness that you start comparing yourself with others. Even if your favorite cinema star or model is very beautiful, can you enjoy drinking even a cup of water from that body? No! You can only enjoy using your own body your best friend. Accept and welcome it.

There is a beautiful verse in the ancient scriptures that says the power of māyā, the energy which runs the universe, uses jealousy as a tool to make you do whatever it wants you to do.

In Bharat, there are people who do circus shows with monkeys in the street. They will have a small stick. Once they pick up the stick, the monkey will do whatever they say. If they just gesture to the monkey, it won't listen. Even though it knows that the man can pick up the stick at any time, unless he picks up the stick, the monkey won't listen. If he picks up the stick and tells the monkey to walk straight, it will walk straight. If the man tells the monkey to jump three times, it will jump three times.

The man will use the stick like the ringmaster uses it in the circus. In the same way, the power of māyā uses peer pressure and jealousy as a stick to make you do whatever it wants. Understand, peer pressure is just a big ego game. Actually, it is not at all necessary for you to grow. There is enough food, shelter, medical care and clothing in the world to satisfy all of our basic needs. There is no need to compete!

Jealousy is closely related to many negative emotions such as anger, greed, possessiveness and depression. All of these emotions will dissolve when we break this cycle of jealousy.

Jealousy cannot be overcome either by escaping from it or hating the object of jealousy. All you need to do is just be fully aware when the feeling of jealousy arises. You will be surprised that it simply disappears.

The enlightened master, Buddha says, 'Destroy those envying roots and enjoy lasting peace.' Just be aware and destroy the jealousy, competition, envy and comparison that have robbed you of your very nature which is bliss. Use the light of awareness to reveal the shadow nature of these negative emotions. Otherwise, you are just caught in the rat race. I always tell people, even if you win the rat race, you are still just a rat!

Understand, the way out of jealousy is not by suppressing it or denying its existence. Expressing and encouraging it is also not the way because then you are not ready to face the jealousy with awareness.

Just watch how jealousy arises in you, how it develops into hatred for the object of jealousy, how it creates restlessness and frustration inside you and makes you lose all your peace and calm.

Be aware of the jealousy instead of hating it or the object of your jealousy. Just watch, as if you have nothing to do with it. Look at it with a scientific attitude. What do I mean by a scientific attitude?

When a scientist is experimenting, he simply experiments without any judgment, without any predetermined conclusion. If he has a conclusion already in his mind, that means he is not a scientist because his conclusion may influence the experiment.

Now, you are the scientist in the laboratory of the inner world science. Be a scientist in your inner world and let your mind be your laboratory. Just be aware and witness without any prejudice.

Don't condemn the emotion saying it is bad because that is what you have been taught. It has not become your experience. If it is your experience that jealousy is a negative emotion you will drop it automatically. It has not become your own experience. It lS only something that you have picked up from others.

Unless it becomes an experiential understanding in you that jealousy and comparison are negative, it will not become a part of you.

Don't condemn the object of jealousy. The object has not generated the emotion from outside. The jealousy is happening inside you.

Once you see your jealousy with awareness, you will realize that it does not have a basis for existence at all. When this happens, jealousy will drop automatically.

You won't have to drop it.

A woman once hired a professional artist to paint her portrait. The artist carefully made a large portrait and then presented it to her saying, "How do you like it?" The lady looked at it and said, "Yes, very nice. But can you add a few things? I want you to add a glittering diamond necklace, a gold watch and bracelet, em erald earrings and beautiful pearl rings on the fingers. The artist was surprised and said, "But madam, the portrait looks simple and beautiful as it is. Why do you want to add all the jewelry and clutter it?" The woman re plied, "I want my rich neighbors to see the painting and go crazy when they see all the jewelry that they will think I have."

The fire of jealousy can just consume you completely if you don't control it with the fire extinguisher of your awareness.

Jealousy does not allow you to experience your true nature of love and bliss. It arises out of misunderstanding life and yourself. You misunderstand love to be something outside of you that has to be acquired. Not only that, you think love is a quantity that needs to be shared. That is why you are afraid, thinking that if you share your love, your share will be reduced.

Love is a quality inside you. It is not a limited quantity. It is an unending happening overflowing from within you. It cannot be blocked by anything or anybody except you because it is your very nature.

Once love starts flowing, jealousy and possessiveness and all that simply become non-existent. If you accept yourself just as you are, you can accept others also as they are.

All our comparison with other people begins with what we think of ourselves. Jealousy disappears when we understand our uniqueness. We may then create another problem. We may believe ourselves to be so special that we start taking ourselves far too seriously. What is seriousness?

Seriousness is nothing but paying undue importance to something, at the cost of everything else. It arises from the inability to see that all of life is just a drama that is unfolding every minute. Seriousness is the result of over-expectation from life.

Two boys were building sand castles on the beach. They suddenly had a quarrel and one of the boys got angry and kicked the sand castle. The other boy went and complained to the king about his serious problem. The king began to laugh at him for getting so upset over silly sand castles. But the king's advisor a Zen monk, started laughing at the king.

He asked, "When you can fight battles and lose sleep over stone castles, why do you laugh at these boys for fighting over sand castles!"

All our seriousness is just about sandcastles! For the child, at that young age, sand castles seem precious, whereas at our age, stone castles seem precious, that's all. Whether it is a sand castle or a stone castle, the seriousness behind it is the same. The object may be different, but the seriousness is the same. So, don't laugh when children fight over sand castles.

Seriousness closes your mind to the openness and freedom of life. It makes you dull and dead. It curbs your thinking and makes you stick to the familiar patterns that you know and use all the time.

In a Zen monastery, there was a competition among disciples over who had maintained the best garden. One disciple was ofa very serious nature. He took the competition quite seriously. He always kept his garden neat, clean, and well-swept. All the grass was of the same height. All the bushes were neatly trimmed. He was sure that he would get the first prize.

On the day of the competition, the master went around all the gardens. Then he came back and ranked the gardens. This disciple"s garden got the lowest ranking. Everyone was shocked. The disciple could not contain himself and asked, "Master what is wrong with my garden? Why did you rank me the lowest? "The master looked at him and asked, "Where are all the dead leaves? A garden maintained in such a way is no longer alive! It is dead."

Seriousness kills spontaneity. Seriousness destroys creativity. Science has proved that when you perform a task in a relaxed and light manner, your thinking and decision-making capacity is automatically enhanced. The same task when performed in a serious manner dulls your mind. When you do something too seriously, when you are too concerned about the result, you are actually not allowing yourself to perform at the optimum level.

Of course, you need to make plans, and you need to think ahead. But do it with sincerity, not with seriousness. Seriousness is not the same as sincerity. Sincerity is focusing on the task with enthusiasm and youthfulness. Sincerity is giving the task your best without worrying excessively about the result!

When you are serious, you don't enjoy, you don't laugh. How can you laugh when you are serious!

Perfectionism always comes from your mind. It becomes a goal for you. You work towards it as a goal. When you work towards it as a goal, it becomes dead and mundane. But when you are total, when you are established in your heart, it becomes a deep experience. The outcome has to be beautiful, and it will give you joy. Then, whatever you do, you will be in tune with Existence. Whatever you do, do it wholly, totally, and it will be total. You won't have to worry about perfectionism at all.

Perfectionism never gives you joy; it only fulfills your ego. Even if you feel fulfilled at the end of it, it is only a fulfillment of your ego, never a fulfillment of your being. Be very clear, perfectionists are the biggest egoists. They miss the dimension of being total. Totality is possible when you enter into something deeply. Perfectionism is never possible because it is in your mind, and your mind keeps changing its definition of perfection!

Most of us unconsciously believe that life is filled with incidents that are under the control of our logic. But life again and again reminds you of the truth that life is beyond your logic. You are reminded of this fact, especially when some near and dear friend or family member dies or when something unexpected happens. If you lose your job, suddenly you see that life is not under your control. You suddenly wake up to the reality that life is beyond your logic. Then you start seeking the Truth.

Especially if you live in the city, your routine is almost fixed. From morning until night, you know exactly how your day will unfold. You know where you will go, what you will do or not do, and what and when you will eat.

Practically, your ego gives an idea, your logic gives you the feeling that your life is under the control of your logic. That is why whenever some incident happens that is beyond your logic, that is not under your control, you are totally shaken. You are not able to handle it. You don't know what to do. Either you fall into depression or you just suffer.

There is an important truth, an ultimate secret that you must understand. Never think things are going smoothly because of you. In spite of you, things are going smoothly! This is one of the important secrets. As long as you think it is because of you that things are going smoothly, you will be constantly suffering with ego.

According to the Upaniṣads, as long as you think that life has a purpose and you run behind that purpose, you are an egoistic person. When you realize the beauty of the purposelessness of life, you have dropped your ego. The master is the one who makes you understand the purposelessness of life. Whatever you think as being worthy now is not actually the true and worthy thing. A man with ego searches with purpose and misses reality.

Death clearly shows that whatever mind you lived with has no real existence. When you realize the purposelessness of life, a new consciousness starts blossoming in you. The moment you experience

that there is nothing to be achieved, that the diamonds you are protecting are not diamonds but stones, and that all your great things in life are mere toys, you will understand the purposelessness of life.

The real purpose of life cannot be understood by the ego. When the ego is dropped, you will understand the Divine purpose of life, the līlās or the Divine play; you will enjoy the drama. If you keep thinking that life has a purpose and wait to achieve something, you will miss life itself.

Life itself is the path and the goal. When you have a goal, you will run. Your feet will not touch the ground and you will miss the beauty of Existence or nature. When or while driving. You feel boosted in ego when you say 'no' to rules. You can see this with small children. The moment you say they are not meant to have certain things, they will ask only for those things! you drop the goal, the emphasis will be on the path.

When you understand the purposelessness of life, you understand the meaning of living. Until then, you are just a 'living dead' person. A person in a coma lying in the hospital bed and a normal person who has not realized the Truth, both live without proper consciousness. The master is the one who makes you realize this truth. The meaning of living is the meaning of life or Existence.

Drop the goal and enjoy life. Meditate on this teaching again and again. The Truth will dawn on you and the nithyananda state will flower in you, the state that is the very meaning of life.

Many times, you may have seen that whenever someone says something to you, the first reaction inside you is a certain resistance, a 'no'. When you say 'no', it is ego-fulfilling. You feel solid and firm inside yourself. When you say 'yes', you feel liquid and vulnerable. Your ego feels submissive, which is uncomfortable, so you say 'no'.

This is also why you feel good when you break rules at home, school, in the workplace,

Whenever you try to live for your ego, you make your life and others' lives miserable. Most of the time the miseries you face in your life are not created by others. They are unknowingly created by you. You may not even derive any benefits from them. But just to prove your ego, you create them.

An enlightened master Suzuki, lived in Japan. When his master passed away, he started weeping profusely. One person asked him, "You are an enlightened person. Why are you crying on your master's passing away?" Suzuki replied, "My master was the most extraordinary man on planet earth." The person was puzzled and asked him,

"What was so extraordinary about him?" Suzuki replied, "I have never seen such an extraordinary person who thought he was the most ordinary man!"

In ordinary life, every average person thinks he is extraordinary. When you feel that you have undergone the maximum suffering, your ego feels good that you have been able to handle a tough life. Only when your enemy is big, you feel big. When your enemy is small, you feel small.

For the same reason, if your suffering is big, you feel good. Your ego feels satisfied. You measure life with the amount of your suffering. Unknowingly, you torture others as well as yourself. Suzuki's master was extraordinary because he thought he was the most ordinary, whereas in this world, every other person thinks he is extraordinary.

If you want to check whether you are average or not, do this experiment. If you feel extraordinary, be very clear: you are average. If you feel ordinary, you are extraordinary!

You all play different roles and use different masks in your day-to-day lives. You use one mask with your mother, a different mask with your father, a different one with your boss and so on. As long as you use the right masks with the right people, it is alright. The moment you use the wrong mask with a person, be aware that your ego has stepped in.

All you have to do is switch masks efficiently and enjoy the show. Then you are a watcher. You can do this only when you know that you are something beyond the mask. Otherwise, you will get carried away by the mask and lose the whole charm of life. When you know that you are only using masks, your desires drop.

Just like when you grow up, you automatically drop your toys, in the same way, when you look at these masks intelligently, you don't have any desire for them and simply use

If you are a strong egoistic person, you don't need a separate hell because the mind can exist only in conflict and discontentment. With contentment, with satisfaction, you will lose your boundary. That is why you don't want joy or bliss. Please never think you want bliss. No! Actually you are afraid of joy and bliss. Whenever you go through a peaceful, no-worry feeling, just watch yourself. You feel you are missing something when there is nothing to think about! Unless you have something strong to brood over, you don't have a clear-cut boundary in your inner space.

Your mind exists when it hits the corners of your suffering. You don't feel your boundary or your identity unless you have enough suffering. If you look a little deeper, you will understand that many times you feel lonely if you don't have anything to worry or suffer about. That is the way you believe yourselves to be, because by its nature, the mind can record only negative things. The mind can flourish, it can create more thoughts, it can more clearly identify with suffering, dissatisfaction and discontentment. The quality of joy is boundarylessness. When you are in joy, you won't feel your boundary. Whenever you don't feel your boundary, you are in a state of joy, in a satisfied and contented mood.

Your ego cannot exist without your suffering. Suffering is the root of your ego. This is an important thing you need to understand. We always think that the ego is disturbed by suffering. No! Ego is enriched by suffering. One more important thing is that if your suffering is less, your ego is less. You feel you are too small, so you increase your suffering so that you can feel you are somebody.

The less the suffering, the weaker is the ego. The more you suffer, the stronger your ego becomes. So, you always exaggerate your suffering. The problem is that after some time you forget that you exaggerated. Then you are also caught in the same net. You might disagree and say, 'No, you don't know my life; you don't know my suffering.' But be very clear, after some time you are caught in the same net that you yourself created!

We all have two identities, the identity that we project to the outer world, and the identity that we believe to be us in the inner world. The identity that you believe to be you inside your mind is called mamakar' in Sanskrit. It will always be much smaller than what you really are. You will carry or remember all your failures, past mistakes and guilt, constantly trying to work on them.

The identity that you project to the outer world is called ahankar". Ahankar' is your visiting card. You print on it everything that you want others to know about yourself. This is based on the identity you show to the outer world. It will always be more than what you have, more than what you are. It will always be much more than what you are because you think you have to sell yourself. It becomes a basic need to do this, especially in the societies where you have to market yourself.

Ahankar' will be based on a superiority complex. Mamakar" will be based on an inferiority complex. Ahankar will be based on fear. Mamakar' will be based on greed.

The basic truth is that you are much more than these two identities. When you unclutch from these two identities, you will suddenly realize that you are beyond the two identities. When that happens, these two identities can never bind you again.

An incident from the life of Ramana Maharishi':

One of Ramana Maharishi's disciples translated one of his books into another language. In the translation, inside the book, his name was also published as the translator. When the disciple saw the book, he was shocked to see this. He went to the concerned authorities and scolded them for this mistake. He then went and told Ramana Maharishi, "Bhagavan, they should not have put my name. I don't feel my name should be publicized. I am not that kind of person." Bhagavan said, "The ego that asks for the name to be there and the ego that asks that the name not be there are one and the same.

Relax."

Be very clear, the inferior ego that is trying to show humbleness is also ego. With a superiority complex, with a violent aggressive ego, at least society will teach you. This ego is very visible. With the humble ego, you will escape from society. That is more dangerous. It is the cunning ego that can nicely save itself. Ego is just the identity you carry about yourself.

Types of Ego

The active ego is easy to recognize. People with an active ego will behave in a highhanded fashion; they will claim self- importance openly. They will be arrogant. This ego is actually easy for a master to deal with. He just needs to bang on it a few times and it will break!

A small story:

A psychiatrist asks his patient if he is suffering from fantasies of self-importance. The man replies, "Absolutely not. In fact, I think much less of myself than I really am! "

A person with an active ego will not be willing to let go of it at any cost.

Passive ego is very subtle and cunning. People who have a passive ego will pose as being very humble, lacking courage to face people, and shying away from taking credit. The worst part of this is that they think they are like this because they are not egoistic. Actually, they are so carefully guarding their ego from getting hurt by unconsciously thinking they are humble!

People with active ego are like dried, hard twigs. They can be broken easily. People with passive ego are like fresh, green twigs. Each time their ego is hit, they bend but don't break! Their ego is so well safeguarded that it becomes difficult to deal with. Actually, they work very hard to safeguard it but in a sweet and passive way.

'I' is the ego, the root of fear. 'Mine', 'this is my house', 'that is my car', 'these are my friends', is the root of greed. 'I' means continuously doing. 'Mine' means continuously having. Continuously you try to expand your boundary. Continuously you try to change the things outside. You want to expand your boundary of'mine'. For example, you have a basic car now but you want to have a more luxurious car; you may want more than one car. You have a house to live in, but you want a bigger house. This kind of personality is based on having. Such people feel happy, secure and relaxed only when they continuously possess more and more things.

The deep feeling of insecurity, that fear, drives us to more greed, to continuously try to possess more things. Continuously possessing things is nothing but a feeling of deep insecurity. You can see the idea of continuously possessing more and more things is just because of fear and insecurity. We usually feel more secure if we have more friends, more relatives, and more things around us. With more security, we feel we will not be taken away from this world.

People ask me, 'Why do we have to follow masters?' I tell them, 'You don't have to follow masters. But if you don't follow masters, you will be following your ego, that's all. There are only two options. Either you listen to the master or you listen to the ego.'

Master is the being who has already achieved eternal bliss, nithya ananda. If you follow him you will also reach that state. As for your ego, you know what it has achieved so far and what it is heading towards! If you are happy, comfortable, contented and blissful in the path in which your ego is already leading

you, then you can follow your ego. Nothing is wrong with that. If you are a little uncomfortable, if you want to change, then follow the master's path. There are only two to follow: master and the mind. If you follow the master, you cannot follow the mind. If you follow the mind, you cannot follow the master. There is a beautiful word, "na maha". It means, 'not mine', 'I am not' - I surrender the 'I' and 'mine' at the feet of the master or god.

1. Third Eye Meditation Total Duration: 25 minutes

This is an extremely powerful technique, most effective when practiced in the master's presence or in front of a picture of the master's eyes.

With your eyes closed, just see through your eyes, whatever images you are seeing behind the closed eyes.

Step 2: Duration: 5 minutes Now open your eyes and through your third eye, look intensely at the master's third eye in the picture. Look through your eyes.

With your eyes closed, just see through your eyes, whatever images you are seeing behind the closed eyes.

Now open your eyes and through your third eye, look intensely at the master's third eye in the picture. Look through your eyes.

With your eyes closed, just see through your eyes, whatever images you are seeing behind the closed eyes.

During this meditation, you may see visions of your favorite deities, or you may find that the master's form is replaced by a beam of light. Sometimes you may see total emptiness where his picture was. Don't be alarmed or lose your awareness at these moments. It is not hypnosis! In fact, it is a dehypnotizing process. Your superconscious is being awakened. If you see only light or emptiness, it is a sign that you have done the meditation with deep sincerity. That is the truth of our nature - we are all nothing but energy.

Seeing through the eye, you can achieve the 'I'. Currently, you are making up your own reality. If you see through the eyes, you will wake up from it and see reality as it is!

When we recognize that we are part of the total scheme of Existence, and that we are lovingly taken care of by Existence every minute, we are overcome with gratitude. We become truly thankful for what we receive every moment, even if it is as basic as the use of our very limbs and senses.

Gratitude is your response to recognizing the abundance of Existence. It is a wonderful flowering energy within you.

If there is one energy that takes care of everything in your life, it is the energy of gratitude! If you ever feel that there is something missing in your life, it is because you feel less gratitude.

Gratitude should become your very breath. Gratitude is a transforming energy. It transforms the happenings in you and around you. It is an energy that harmonizes you with the energy of the universe and brings back tremendous prosperity to you. With gratitude you will see that Existence simply responds to you —as if it is a live being. It is the channel to commune with Existence!

When gratitude happens, it works beautifully through the law of attraction and attracts great prosperity to you. How is this possible?

A small story:

Akbar, a great king from ancient Bharat, and Birbal", his advisor were walking together on the street one day.

They passed by a sandalwood dealer and Akbar told Birbal', "I don"t know why but I feel like hanging this man."

One month passed and the two of them walked past the same sandalwood dealer again.

This time Akbar" said, "It's strange but I feel like giving this man some endowment today! How is it possible? "

Birbal replied, "O King! A month back, the sandalwood dealer's business was suffering and when he saw you walking past he thought to himself, "If the king dies, the courtiers would come to buy a lot of sandalwood from me for his funeral pyre."

He sent out these negative vibrations which prompted von to feel hatred towards him. That is why last time you felt like hanging him without any real reason. I immediately purchased a lot of sandalwood from him to make tables and chairs for our kingdom. It made him very happy. Today, he feels very grateful to you for it. You are now struck by these positive vibrations from him and therefore you feel like giving him some endowment!"

According to the Law of Attraction, like energy attracts like energy. How does this apply to gratitude? Understand this: when you feel gratitude towards everything, it means you feel fulfilled, you feel blissful. So when you radiate gratitude, your energy of fulfillment attracts fulfillment back to you in the form of material gains, good relationships, good health and so on. This is how it works.

The main thing is that gratitude makes you resonate with Existence and transforms you into a beautiful human being.

Psychologists have studied the effects of the feeling of gratitude on people. In their first study, two researchers, Dr. Michael McCollough of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and Dr. Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis, California, concluded that gratitude played a major role in a person's well-being.

The results of the study indicated that daily gratitude exercises resulted in higher reported levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, optimism, energy, lesser depression and stress. They further suggested that anyone could increase their sense of well-being and create positive social effects just from counting their blessings.

When I tell people to live with a sense of gratitude, they immediately start looking for reasons. Real gratitude can never have a reason. It happens as a causeless flowering within you. Does the flower bloom for a reason? No! It blooms because it is its very nature. Gratitude is our real nature. It has been covered by layers of conditioning from society.

The problem is, society doesn't know the language of gratitude. It knows only the language of utility. It straightaway instills greed and fear in you so that you will give it the needed results. Society doesn't know there is a path of gratitude that will give much better results than the paths of fear and greed.

There are endless reasons to feel gratitude. This life itself is a gift that we have received. Did any of us work for it and receive it? No. To be born with human consciousness is the first blessing we have received. Our gratitude should start right from there. Just for being we should feel grateful.

A young girl sat at the dinner table to eat. She started eating when her mother suddenly stopped her. She asked her "Did you say grace before eating?"

The girl replied, "But there is nothing on this plate that I have not already thanked god for at least once."

Understand, if ever you feel life is dull, that it is not as juicy as it should be, it is because gratitude has not happened in you. Gratitude is the energy that makes your life intense and exciting every moment. This is a basic secret of life.

The main reason why you miss experiencing gratitude is that you take everything for granted. You feel anything that people do for you is your birthright. Understand, people could be doing something else instead of doing things for you. So it is really a gift from them to you. You have to thank them for it.

Receive every small thing in life as a gift. When you sit down to eat, have you ever thanked your fingers? There are people who don't have fingers with which to eat! Have we ever thought about that? Never! We only look at those who have a diamond ring on their finger. We never look at those who don't have fingers.

When we start feeling grateful for small things, our whole sensitivity will increase. We will become more refined.

A small story:

A man was narrating to his friend how he got lost in a desert one day.

He told the friend, "In sheer despair I knelt down and prayed that I should be guided out of the desert." The friend was awed by the story and asked, "So did god answer your prayer?"

The man replied, "Oh, no! Before that an explorer appeared from nowhere and showed me the way."

This is how insensitive we are in life! We keep taking everything for granted. If we sensitized ourselves with gratitude, we would never take anything for granted — not our fingers, not our wealth, and not the timely benevolence of Existence. When sensitivity happens, every moment passes in deep awe of the happenings in Existence.

The first thing we need to understand is that no person has taken birth only to serve us. Every other person is also on the path of life just as we are. As a kind gesture, out of love, they do things for us.

Especially between partners, a lot of things are taken for granted. Somehow, this idea has taken root very deeply in our society. Because of this, many marriages fall apart today. I tell you, even during a physical relationship there can be such deep gratitude for the other person's body. It will make the whole thing a divine experience instead of mere physical pleasure. When you can derive so much pleasure because of the other, why not feel gratitude towards the other for it? If the other is deeply respected from the beginning, many marriages can be saved.

One man prayed to god, "Oh lord, please have mercy on me. I work so hard while my wife stays at home. She enjoys staying at home while I slog the whole day. Please grant me a boon whereby I become my wife and she becomes me. I want to teach her a lesson on how tough a man's life is.

The next morning, the man who was now the woman, woke up early in the morning, packed lunch for the children, made breakfast, got the children ready and drove them to school. She then came back and put the clothes in the washing machine, went to the bank and cashed the checks, paid the electricity and phone bills. Next she went to the market and bought some groceries, put the clothes out to dry, picked up the children from school, sorted out all their problems, helped them with their homework, watched television and ironed clothes at the same time. Then she prepared dinner, fed the children, put them to sleep, had dinner and went to bed.

The next morning the man prayed to god again, "Oh lord, I don't think I can handle this tomorrow. I beg you to please switch me back to a man.

God replied, "Of course I will switch you back to yourself but you will have to wait nine months because you are now carrying a child!"

Each individual plays an equal part in life. No one should be taken for granted. There has to be some gratitude for every person on planet earth. I always tell people that even if things don't work out between you and your wife and you have to part, part with gratitude.

The problem is that somewhere we feel people are waiting to hurt us. It is not so. It is only our own insecurity which we project on others.

So many people feel ungrateful to their parents and society for conditioning them in certain ways. Please understand that with the intelligence that you have now, you are able to see that you did not

receive the right kind of mental setup earlier. Those who gave us this body and mind did not have any intention to deprive us or disturb us in any way. Whatever they knew as their best, they just gave to us; that's all. We are going beyond it now because we have become more intelligent. Just feel grateful to them, that is enough.

One more thing: whenever you feel truly grateful to the people in your relationships, you will never try to possess them. You will look at them as beautiful individuals and leave it at that. Possessiveness happens only when you think of the other person as an object and not as an individual. With gratitude, you will allow the person to have his or her own space.

Decide consciously that you will respond with pure love and gratitude for the next couple of days, whatever the situation may be. Automatically you will start seeing each and every person as a unique creation of Existence, as a reflection of the Divine.

Not only that, you will find tremendous compassion towards everything around you. If you were a person who gets angry easily, you will find the anger disappearing. All the energy that was invested in other negative emotions will get released with this growing gratitude. You will be a compassionate and loving person.

A middle aged woman suffered a heart attack and was taken to the hospital. While on the operating table, she had a near death experience. During the experience, she happened to see god. She asked him if this was the end of her life.

God replied that she had another thirty or forty more years to live.

Once she recovered, she decided to stay in the hospital to undergo multiple surgeries such as a face lift, jaw reconstruction, a nose job and removal of excess fat. She also colored her hair. She thought that since she was going to live for thirty more years, she would start with a fresh look. She finished the surgeries and was about to walk out of the hospital when she was run over by the hospital ambulance and killed. She arrived before god and asked him, "God, I thought you told me I had another thirty years to live."

God replied, "Sorry, but I didn't recognize you"

Each human being is a unique masterpiece of god. That is why no two bodies look alike. God is not an engineer. He is an artist. That is why each of us looks different. If he was an engineer, he would have made us all with the same mold, like in a production line! He has uniquely created each one of us. But we never feel that we are beautiful enough. We constantly compare ourselves with others and try to look like them. We never make our body feel it is beautiful.

Our body is influenced by the thoughts we entertain about it. Every cell responds to our thoughts and feelings about it. If we feel gratitude towards our body, our body responds by improving our health. If we hate our body, the body responds by shrinking with disease. In the Sufi* tradition, body gratitude is done as an everyday meditation itself where every part of the body is felt with love and thanked.

One thing has to be understood very clearly. The whole of Existence is an auspicious happening. You are part of Existence, so everything happening around you is also auspicious. This is the truth of

Existence. Nothing that happens in Existence is inauspicious. Everything is only a blessing, for which we have to feel grateful. If this is understood clearly, there is nothing to complain about in life. If this is understood clearly, your very eye becomes a grateful eye. It sees everything as extraordinary. Nothing appears mundane. Everything appears as a miracle.

One day a duck hunter went to the market to buy a bird retriever dog. To his amazement he found a dog that could walk on water! He immediately took it home.

He invited one of his friends to hunt the next day and took the dog. When a flock of ducks came near, he took aim, fired and silently watched. The dog walked on the water and retrieved the bird. He looked at his friend for a reaction but the friend remained silent. He asked him, "Do you see anything unusual about my dog? " The friend replied, "Yes, your dog is unable to swim. "

Miracles are continuously happening in front of our eyes. But we continuously miss them! Only because we miss them, life itself appears to be dull sometimes. When we start perceiving them, our entire life becomes a miracle. The truth is, there are too many miracles happening around us in our lives.

Just accept and celebrate Existence with all its different dimensions and paradoxes. Don't judge anything. You continuously judge what is going on. You feel something is right or something is wrong, something should have happened this way or something should not have happened this way. Become aware that whatever happens in Existence is auspicious. In the whole world there are only two kinds of people. The first kind feels that whatever is happening in the world is auspicious. The second kind feels everything is happening against their will and things have to be slightly altered all the time. Such people will try to alter, judge, criticize and develop the things happening in the world according to their ideas. These people continuously suffer because of trying to change things all the time.

Understand: everything has a message for us including death and disease. Everything has something to teach us. Every incident raises our intelligence, raises our frequency of consciousness.

You need to know one important thing: there is no qualitative or quantitative difference between you and an enlightened being except that he feels contented in the outer and inner worlds while you don't feel that way. You feel something is missing all the time. Just like how Existence wants him to be here on this planet, Existence wants you too to be here. You are not an accident here; you are an incident. You are a miracle of Existence. This is the straightforward and simple truth. Don't think this is positive thinking. No. This is the plain truth. If you trust this truth, you will automatically become positive, that's all.

Understand that you are a fulfillment for Existence. If you are not here, Existence will miss you. All your wealth, relations etc are not an accident. Existence wants you to have all these; it wants to live through you, fulfill itself through you! Understand this.

There was a certain village isolated and surrounded by acres of cornfields. The city was very far from it, so it remained very quiet. One morning the villagers saw a sage whom they had never seen in the village. He was seated under a banyan tree. They asked him where he came from. He told them, "I have come to spend a few days with all of you whom I consider my own brothers."

The villagers were happy to hear this and built a small hut for him. Soon the sage started healing and solving many problems of the villagers.

Once an epidemic struck the village and killed many birds there. The villagers reported this to the sage. He said, "It is sad that you lost so many birds but if you have faith in Existence and pray, the loss may actually be a matter of gain."

The villagers didn't agree fully with him but since they respected him they went away. The next week, suddenly, all the dogs in the village ran away. The villagers got upset again because the dogs used to guard the village against burglars. They went to the sage and reported this to him. He only repeated his message, "If you have faith in Existence and pray, even this loss may prove to be again."

A few days later a very strange thing happened. In those days, there were no matchboxes. People used to rub two stones together to make fire or keep a fire alive in their ovens continuously. One day, all the fires in all the households went out. They tried to start a fire by rubbing stones but nothing happened. They got very disturbed.

They went to the sage again and told him what was happening. The sage told them, "It looks like some very special phenomenon is taking place. "

The villagers started doubting the sage. They started wondering in what way the sage was superior to them and whether he was in any way qualified to tell them such things. Some of the villagers proceeded to the next village to get some fire but the sage stopped them, sternly saying that they should not go.

Early next morning some of the villagers started making their way to the next village anyway. Suddenly they saw something like a sandstorm in the distance. After a few moments they could see it was actually a large invading army on horseback. They were on their way plundering the city and the villages surrounding it. The villagers hid behind trees and watched them. The army stopped ahead of the village and one of them screamed, "Let us invade this village too!"

Another person said, "No use will come out of it. There is no bird that chirps even so early in the morning, no dog barks, no smoke comes out of the chimney of any house. It doesn't look like a single soul lives there."

The army turned back and went away. The hiding villagers ran back to the village and told the villagers what had happened. They suddenly realized how true the sage was all along! They went to the sage"s hut to tell him everything but the hut was empty. The sage had left.

Nobody knew where he had gone. Existence is not an accident. It is independent intelligence. When you understand that it is an independent intelligence, when you understand that it is a profound mystery to be experienced and not solved, everything in your life will open itself and reveal to you the lesson it has brought with it.

Some people ask me, "Swamiji, how do we express our deep gratitude to you?' I tell them that the only way to express their gratitude is to live enlightenment the way I have just described it to you. That is the best you can do for me and that I can do for you. People ask me, 'What service can we do for the mission?' I tell them, the greatest service one can do to the world is working for the flowering of one's own consciousness. Once this happens, automatically, you will serve where required, not out of ego or to gain credit, but because you are celebrating and overflowing. Then it is not called service. It is just an overflowing. That is the way service should happen not as a giving, but as a spontaneous sharing.

Sufism is completely a gratitude-based religion. If I have to reduce the whole of Sufism to one word, it is gratitude. You can see it in all the poems of the great Sufi™ masters like Jalaluddin Rumi' and others. You can see the flowing energy of gratitude in their words. Gratitude makes you a nobody, just flowing energy.

Gratitude is like a fire that can burn all your karmas. What is karma? It is an unfulfilled action on your part that pulls you again and again to fulfill it. In order to fulfill and exhaust all such karmas" that we have accumulated, we take birth again and again on this planet. Just by being with the energy of gratitude, these karmas get burnt! Such is the power of gratitude.

When your prayer becomes gratitude, you attract more benevolence to you. Gratitude is the ultimate prayer that can bring us more than we can imagine. Real prayer is not reading prayer books, it is not offering material things to god, it is not donating money to temples, it is deep and silent gratitude to the whole of Existence for being what it is. It is the undaunted trust that Existence is taking care.

Many people think prayer and gratitude are bondage. No. They are the greatest liberators. They liberate you from the bondage of discontentment. Prayer should be an overflowing of the gratitude and fulfillment in you. Some people ask, 'Why do we go to the temple and pray?' Understand, prayer is a celebration of the benevolence of Existence. When our prayer is this way, Existence responds. When Existence responds, it comes to you as more benevolence in your life. This is the virtuous cycle of prayer and blessing!

I always tell people a wonderful story of a Sufi saint. Sufism is a religion rooted in gratitude. It is nothing but gratitude towards the whole of Existence.

One Sufi saint and his disciples were in their spiritual wandering. They went without food for three days. On the fourth day they were even chased away by the villagers and so they slept in a graveyard that night. The next morning, the saint as usual started to say his prayer of thanksgiving to god. His disciples could not believe their eyes. They had gone without food and shelter for so many days and their master was thanking god. They refused to follow suit.

The disciples asked the saint, "Why should we thank the lord when we were refused food and a place to stay for three days?"

The saint replied, "You have been fed and given a place to stay for thirty years. What about thanking Him for that?"

Prayer is gratitude for the continuous showering of Existence upon us.

Try to sit down and make two lists. Let one be of all the things that you have and one of all the things that you don't have. The first list should include every single thing that you have, starting from your eyes, ears, hands and legs, because there are people who don't have some of these. Include all your physical and mental faculties before moving to material things. If you write very sincerely without leaving out anything, you will not be able to complete the first list! That is the truth. If you find you are unable to finish the first list, it means gratitude has started happening in you!

The problem is that there is a continuous expectation in us all the time. That is why gratitude doesn't happen easily. Working with expectation is like pouring clarified butter into the fire to quench it. Can you quench fire by pouring clarified butter into it? Never! In the same way, you can never feel fulfilled if your actions are rooted in expectation. You will only tire your senses.

You can live either in expectation or in gratitude, never in both. With expectation there is a desire to possess things. You become the owner. With gratitude, you become the enjoyer. When you are the owner you enjoy only the few things that you own. When you are the enjoyer, you enjoy everything in Existence. When you look to own, nothing will seem enough. When you enjoy, everything seems to be overflowing! That is the difference.

In a village, the night guard was on his rounds blowing his whistle periodically.

He had an earthen pipe that he smoked. He filled it with tobacco and searched for a match box. He didn't have one.

He went to the nearby hut where an old lady lived and asked if she could give him some ember from her oven. The old lady said her stove had not been lit for the past three days and that she herself was managing with the little food they gave in the temple.

He tried in several places but it was of no use. He finally went to the village chief's house and asked the maids for fire to light his pipe.

One of the girls looked at him and asked, "Fire to light your pipe? Why not use the lantern you are carrying? "

The guard couldn't believe his eyes. He had been carrying a lantern all along while searching for a matchbox!

When we believe that what we need is always only outside of us, we live in eternal expectation and we will continue searching like the night guard! When we believe that Existence always gives us what we need, we will find everything within us all the time.

When we work with expectation all the time, we carry a subtle violence in our body language; not deliberate violence, but inherent violence. If we become a little sensitive to our body language, we will be able to catch this.

Watch yourself when you type on the computer, when you handle phone calls, how you place the phone receiver back in its cradle, with what aggression you walk ... everything. You will see that everything carries a subtle violence in it.

With gratitude, your entire body language changes. When you start experiencing deep gratitude, your responses to situations change. You start resonating with Existence. Your body will flow with that resonance, with a cool grace and softness. All your actions will arise Only joy will be flowing. Then anything you out of this grace. There will be no violence. do will only make life sweeter.

We have thus far looked at the basic emotions that drive us. When these emotions are negatively expressed, we destroy the energy within us and block ourselves from receiving energy from without. If you have practised the techniques that have been given with each of the preceding chapters, you would also have seen how you could overcome these negative energies and unblock yourself.

Let us now look at a few other issues, which if we understand well, can change the way we live. These understandings can transform us.

Let us start with something very simple, something that we all take for granted. Let us look at the way our mind really works.

Try a very simple experiment for just ten minutes.

Take a sheet of paper and a pen. Sit down alone. Write down whatever thought comes to mind — as if a transcribing software has been connected to your mind; transcribe exactly what you think. Do not edit or suppress any thoughts. It is an experiment only for you. No one else is going to look at what you have written. Just like how the transcribing software which is connected to a taped speech transcribes everything, transcribe whatever is going on in your mind verbatim. At the end of ten minutes, read what you wrote just once. You will be amazed! You can clearly see that there is no logic in the way thoughts form in your mind!

For example, you see a dog on the street. Immediately you remember the dog you were afraid of when you were young, or the one you used to play with when you were young. The next thought could be about your childhood. The third may be about the teacher and the room you used to sit in at school. The fourth may be about the house where your teacher used to live.

There is no logical connection between the dog that you recently saw on the street and the teacher who taught you in school. However, in a few seconds you simply jumped from seeing the dog to your childhood teacher.

You can see that your thoughts are just moving, drifting from one thing to another. We can't even call this 'thinking'. It is just 'association', that's all. You associate the dog with your childhood, your childhood with the teacher, and so on.

Actually, if you do this exercise just once, the very understanding that it gives you will transform the way you think about yourself, and how you treat yourself and others. Your whole life will be transformed.

How does our mind work? How do we create thoughts and how do we give meaning to them? How do we experience life?

Let me give you a simple diagram to understand how thoughts flow in the mind and how you connect them.

Each thought in your mind is shown here as a square or rectangle. Each is a different shape, size, and color. Different thoughts are continuously flowing in you. One may be related to pain or a painful experience. Another may be related to joy or a joyful experience. The next one may be related to joy, but you think of it as pain. It is referred to as JP on the chart —joyful experience, painful impression.

Similarly you may have a thought that is related to a painful experience, but you think of it as joy. It is referred to as PJ painful experience, joyful impression.

Generally, all your thoughts are related to something about the past or the future. You cannot have thoughts about the present. In the present moment you can have only consciousness, no thoughts. Thoughts are either related to some joyful experiences that you had in the past and want to have in the future, or painful experiences that you had in the past and don't want to have again.

Even at the time of some serious problem, you will suddenly have a positive thought. Even in the peak of joy, you will have some unconnected negative thought. Each thought is completely independent, completely unconnected to the previous thought. That is why you are able to have a happy thought amidst sad thoughts and vice versa.

Understand that no two thoughts are logically connected. No thought is responsible for the creation of another thought. They all appear randomly, independently, and illogically. How do you 'unclutch' from this random stream of thoughts? We will be using the word 'unclutch' again and again. Let's clearly define what is meant by 'unclutch'. When we change gears while driving a car, whether we change from first to second, or second to third, or any gear for that matter, we have to pass through neutral every time. We have to completely depress the clutch, or 'unclutch', move through neutral, and only then we can go to the next gear, right? In the same way, we experience a neutral space between any two thoughts in our mind. That neutral space, that silence that exists between two thoughts, is peace and bliss. When we no longer grab onto thoughts and connect them to the past or future, we remain 'unclutched.'As we remain 'unclutched' from our thoughts we become more aware of the neutral spaces between thoughts. The gap between the thoughts will automatically extend when we remain 'unclutched' from the stream of thoughts. We will dwell in the neutral space longer and experience more and more peace and bliss.

When you suddenly become aware, any thought that flows in front of you becomes your life for that moment. You start giving attention to it, either to fulfill it or to escape from it. It is like slides on a projector. Any slide that is kept in front of the projector light is seen as reality on the screen. The problem is that in your inner space, the projector light is not continuously on. When I say projector light, I mean your awareness. It just comes and goes, comes and goes — you are not fully, continuously aware.

Many times, even though your eyes are open and your body is moving, you are not aware of your existence. An example from everyday life is like when you get into your car and drive for half an hour to the office. It is only after you reach the office, park the car, and get out, do you suddenly realize, 'Oh, I have reached the office!' It means that in those moments of driving, the projector light was off most of the time.

Any slide that is placed in front of the projector during moments that the projector light, your awareness, is off is not part of your life. You don't remember it at all. When the light comes on again, when your awareness comes back again, whatever thought you have at that time becomes a part of

you. Understand that this is a very subtle truth. Your life is the totality of all the thoughts you have when you are aware and unaware.

Unfortunately, many times there are thoughts, many major decisions, and life- changing incidents that happen when you are not aware. These are also part of your life, part of your biography. Unfortunately, you are not aware of these scenes, decisions, or thoughts when they come up. Without your knowledge they have contributed significantly to your life.

Be very clear, every moment that passes in your life without you being aware of it, without your presence, is suffering. You will either directly or indirectly create situations for suffering. Just like when the turn indicator light in your car blinks, your consciousness blinks also. But, because of your lack of awareness, you do not know when it is on and when it IS off. You do not remember your biography as it happened. You remember it only as you want it. Just take a simple example. Your life is filled with different kinds of incidents relating to joy, suffering, guilt, pain, and depression.

I read a joke the other day:

One man got into his car and started the engine. He flipped on the turn indicator and asked his son to see if the light blinked in the rear of the car. His son shouted back, "Yes, it"s on...no, it"s not on...yes it"s on...no it"s off...now it"s on!"

If you just see the thought flow in front of you, suddenly you will realize, 'Oh god, all these things are actually going on in me! I don't have a clue where I am heading. I don't know what is happening in me!'

You are not aware, but constantly you believe you are aware. That is the first illusion. If you become aware continuously, you open up to reality for the first time. It might be a bit intense initially, because until now, you have spent most of your time in unawareness. Ultimately, it will lead you to experience only joy and bliss.

This is the first truth — you are not aware of all the things that are happening in front of You don't look at life as it is. What do you usually do? You collect only the incidents related to suffering and create a shaft, connecting only these ideas, and you think your life is nothing but suffering. You think that your life is a long chain of suffering, a pain shaft.

Very rarely, you create a joy shaft. It is very rare that you collect joyful incidents, create a joy shaft, and feel life is joy. It is rare not only in the number of joyful shafts, but also in the quality of them. Most of the time you collect all the painful memories and incidents, and create the idea that life is only pain. The moment you believe life is continuous painful occurrences, unconsciously you try to strengthen that belief, even though consciously you try to break the pain shaft. Please understand, your belief that life is a pain shaft or a joy shaft will stay only as long as you are unconscious, not when you are aware.

If you normally enjoy lustful thoughts, then whenever lustful thoughts cross your system, you come to the awareness, 'I exist'. If you normally enjoy violent thoughts, whenever violent thoughts come into your system, you come to life and know that you exist. This is what I call a vicious circle: you powering negativity and negativity bringing you back to life; you empowering more negativity, and more negativity bringing to life perceived excitement.

There is a very beautiful analogy by Ramana Maharishi, an enlightened master from Bharat. A dog will chew a dry bone. As it chews, fragments of the bone will poke into its mouth making it bleed. The dog thinks the blood is coming from the bone and it enjoys the blood. It continues to chew on the bone for the pleasure of the blood! It doesn't realize that the blood is coming from its own mouth and not at all from the bone.

If violence excites you, you wait for that kind of incident in your life. If pain excites you, if you believe life is a pain shaft, you wait for that kind of incident in your life in order to strengthen and reinforce your belief. That is the general human psychology. Although people claim they want to break the violence shaft or pain shaft, they secretly nurture it.

Let me provide a deeper understanding. The pain that you had ten years ago, the pain that you had nine years ago, the pain that you experienced seven years ago, the pain that you experienced three years ago, and the pain that you experienced yesterday are all unconnected, independent, individual incidents. But you start connecting all of them and create a shaft of pain. You connect all these thought shafts and create one big shaft. You start thinking and believing, 'My life is pain.' Is that true? No! What happened to all the sweet incidents of joy that you experienced in between? Surely, there must have been at least a few moments of joy in between? They are simply forgotten. They are never picked to form a shaft. So the shaft, any shaft, is never true, because it focuses on only a fragment of your complete biography.

First, you start archiving the painful memories for utility purpose. You archive all your pains, probably for medical history sake or to tell your doctor. By and by, you start believing that all these pains that happened in your life are connected. You decide that your life is pain; your life is suffering. The moment you come to the decision that your life is pain or your life is suffering, you create hell for yourself.

For example, until yesterday you were only walking, you were not able to fly. You know in your past you never flew, you only walked. Can you believe you can start flying from tomorrow onwards? You can't. You know tomorrow you will still only be walking. You rely solely on your remembered past experiences to predict your future, eliminating many new possibilities.

The joy that you experienced ten years ago, the joy that you experienced nine years ago, the joy that you experienced three years ago, and the joy that you experienced one year ago are all independent, individual, unconnected thought shafts. At the present time, you connect all of those thoughts and create a big shaft of joy.

You may identify your joy with an object, a person, or a space, like a particular vacation resort. Now you will try again and again to bring that back in your life, to bring that person, that object, that space, or that same incident back in your life. Try as you might, you will not be able to experience the same joy again. This puts you in further pain!

In life, we constantly create either shafts of pain or joy. Once you create a shaft of pain, you try to break it. If you create the shaft of joy, you try to elongate it! But you don't understand that you can neither elongate the joy shaft nor break the pain shaft - simply because the shaft itself doesn't exist. It is just selective memory. The very shaft is your imagination.

There is no linear connection between one thought that we have and another thought that we have. The only relationship between thoughts is that they come from the same source. But we constantly connect one thought and the next thought in a linear manner.

Just as bubbles in a fish tank rise from the bottom, our thoughts also rise in the same manner. When one bubble comes and reaches the surface of the water, the next bubble starts and then the third bubble starts. Because the bubbles are rising at a high speed, they look like a continuous stream! Actually there is always a gap between two bubbles.

Like the bubbles, we also experience a neutral space between two thoughts. Since the gap or the neutral space between two thoughts is so small, we think all thoughts are connected and form a shaft. But there is always a gap between two thoughts. But we constantly connect one thought and the next thought in a linear manner.

Just as bubbles in a fish tank rise from the bottom, our thoughts also rise in the same manner. When one bubble comes and reaches the surface of the water, the next bubble starts and then the third bubble starts. Because the bubbles are rising at a high speed, they look like a continuous stream! Actually there is always a gap between two bubbles.

Like the bubbles, we also experience a neutral space between two thoughts. Since the gap or the neutral space between two thoughts is so small, we think all thoughts are connected and form a shaft. But there is always a gap between two thoughts.

Let me tell you about an incident that happened:

A middle aged man came to me and said, "I am going to divorce my wife. Please bless me!"One gentleman around forty five years of age came up to me and said, "Swamiji, I am going to divorce my wife, please bless me." I told him, "I only bless people for marriages. Why do you want me to bless you for a divorce? " He replied, "No, you have to bless me, because I have suffered so much. " I told him, "I on1y bless individuals for marriages. What made you come and ask me to bless you for a divorce? " He replied, "No, no, Swamiji, you have to bless me, because I have suffered too much. " I

said, "Suffering is always give-and-take. It is never just taking. You must have given your wife enough suffering too. So, please tell me the truth about what happened and then we will analyze the situation. "

He replied, "How do I decide which incidents to tell you, and which ones to leave out? There are so many of them! From day one she has been torturing me. You don't know how much torture I have gone through!" Then he narrated an incident from the day of his marriage!

In Hindu villages, when a wedding takes place, the newly married couple plays games after the marriage ceremony. For one of the games, a ring is dropped inside a pot filled with water. The husband and wife put their hands inside and compete to pick up the ring. Whoever grabs it first wins. These sma1l games were created mainly to reduce the unfamiliarity between the couple because in arranged marriages the bride and groom first meet during the wedding ceremony.

They have small games to reduce the distance between the couple because they are new to each other. This man said, "During that game, she scratched my hand. With her nails, she scratched my hand! " And he started a big story about everything that she had done to him since that day! For all practical purposes, he had kept a file, like a police report from the first day of his marriage.

After two or three incidents, I told him, "Please stop! If this is the case, she should be happier than you to part ways. It is very difficult to live with someone who keeps such large and detailed files in his head! " Any time she does something, this man will always be looking through the files.

Then he told me the immediate reason for the divorce. He said, "She spilled some coffee on my clothes! " I told him, "Spilling coffee on your clothes cannot be a reason for a divorce! " He said, "No, you don't know. Today she poured coffee, " tomorrow she will pour acid! " He really said this. I did not understand the connection. I asked him how he could possibly connect coffee and acid. Again he said, "No, no Swamiji, you don't know."

He may seem extreme and you may laugh when you hear this. But just look intensely at your own life. You are doing the same thing - constantly creating illogical connections. You forget to see incidents as being independent of each other. You forget to see thoughts as independent.

If you just learn this one simple technique of unclutching, you will be able to retain a significant amount of energy in your system, in your being. As a result, you will be many times more productive and creative. Your relationships will be much friendlier because you will not clutch incidents that are not related. You will not feel suffocated by people or their expectations of you. You will have tremendous inner space available to you to fulfill your needs, as well as others' needs. You will also have tremendous compassion to know why others are suffering. It is only when you don't understand why the other person is suffering that you are harsh with them. When you unclutch, you are able to accommodate that person in your inner space. You are automatically compassionate. Your very life has a different quality and you become a different person in the world.

Every single happening in our lives is unconnected, even our everyday activities like eating and drinking. Each and every experience is independent by its own right. Drinking water yesterday and drinking water today are two completely different incidents.

The food that you ate yesterday and the food that you eat today are different, even if they seem physically the same! But your mind creates the shaft between these two incidents and says, 'I eat the same food every day.' Please be very clear, you don't eat the same food every day. You may use the same word 'eating' for both the experiences, but they are not the same experience. Do not be cheated by the words that you use.

Yesterday's eating, today's eating, and tomorrow's eating are separate incidents, separate experiences. They are completely independent and unattached.

A beautiful incident from the life of an enlightened master from central Bharat: During the last ten years of his life, the doctors asked the master to eat a particular kind 0 ff ood. He was not allowed to eat anything else. He had to eat the same kind of food three times a day, everyday.

After two years the person who cooked for him came and complained, "Master I am bored with cooking the same food. How are you able to eat the same? The master just laughed and said, "I am not eating the same food every day. How can I eat the same food every day? I can only eat this food today. Tomorrow's food is totally different!"

Life is new every moment. It is the mind that makes it look repetitive, dull and mundane.

You may think, 'How can a bird be trapped with a small stick? How is it possible?'

I saw this in my days of spiritual wandering. In the forests of Northern Bharat the hunters use a trap to catch birds. They tie a rope between two trees. In the middle of the rope, they secure a wooden stick. The rope is tied at the midpoint of the stick. This is actually a hunter's trap for birds.

You may think, 'How can a bird be trapped with a small stick? How is it possible?' Actually, all they do is just hang the stick between two trees using a rope, that's all. When a bird comes and sits on the stick, the bird's own weight turns the whole stick upside down; it turns topsy-turvy. The bird is now hanging upside down, clinging to the stick.

The moment it turns upside down and loses its sense of balance it feels totally shaken and tightens its grip on the stick. It simply holds onto the stick as if its life depends on it. Because it is hanging upside down, it thinks, 'If l unclutch from this stick, what will happen? I will fall and die.'

There is no record that any bird has ever fallen and broken its head! But the bird does not have the intelligence to realize this. It keeps hanging on. By not letting go, not only does it lose lts freedom, it loses its life too, because ultimately the hunter traps it.

Just like the bird, you don't realize that if you just drop your mind, at that moment you can become a paramahamsa". That very moment you can be liberated. You can simply start flying.

The same fear that the bird clinging to the stick had, you have now. Your fear and the bird's fear are one and the same. The bird believes that it can't let go; if it does it will die. Similarly, you hold on to your mind and feel, 'I can't let go. If I start trusting that I am unconnected, unclutched, independent and illogical thoughts, I might be lost.'

The hunter comes leisurely, after four or five hours, takes the bird, puts it in the cage, and leaves. Now the bird neither has the freedom to fly nor the stick to balance. The foolish bird doesn't know that if it had just let go of the stick, it could have simply flown away!

In the same way, you hold on to whatever you think is your identity and security — your education, your mind, your life, your relationships, or your bank balance. Yama, the god of death, ultimately comes to remove the stick — that is your identity. Then you are neither a Paramahamsa', a liberated soul, nor are you able to hold on to your identity. You will neither have the freedom, nor will you have the stick of your identity that you are clutching, because the stick itself is an illusion.

Let me tell you, if the bird lets go and relaxes, it may flutter to balance for a moment or two. It may take one or two moments to balance itself, but it will never fall and die. When it leaves the stick, maybe for a few seconds it will fall, but then it will adjust itself and start flying.

Be very clear, let go and you will never fall and die. You will only become a Paramahamsa!

This moment, trust yourself. Don't bother about losing your identity. Just trust yourself and let go of your identity. You will immediately become a Paramahamsa and be liberated. All you need to do is trust that you are unclutched - even if you don't trust that it is still the truth!

When you unclutch, there will be some revolutionary changes in your life, in your day- to-day thinking, your decision-making, and your daily routine - your lifestyle. Courageously going through that revolution, going through the transformation that happens in you, is what I call tapas - penance.

On rare occasions during my wanderings, I have seen a bird hanging on the stick. Another bird that was once stuck in the trap, but had the courage to let go and open up, comes back. It pokes the hanging bird and says, 'Hey, let go! Relax! I was like you. I had the same problem. When I relaxed I just started flying. All it takes is just two or three seconds to balance. When I opened up, I never fell and broke my head or died. I only became liberated. I only became a free bird. Come on...' But the hanging bird will not believe it.

When you unclutch, there will be some revolutionary changes in your life, in your day- to-day thinking, your decision-making, and your daily routine - your lifestyle. Courageously going through that revolution, going through the transformation that happens in you, is what I call tapas - penance.

On rare occasions during my wanderings, I have seen a bird hanging on the stick. Another bird that was once stuck in the trap, but had the courage to let go and open up, comes back. It pokes the hanging bird and says, 'Hey, let go! Relax! I was like you. I had the same problem. When I relaxed I just started flying. All it takes is just two or three seconds to balance. When I opened up, I never fell and broke my head or died. I only became liberated. I only became a free bird. Come on...' But the hanging bird will not believe it. Understand that the responsibility of the free bird is to go about freeing other birds. It is the responsibility of the free bird to go and poke the bird trapped on the stick and say, 'Free yourself.' I am that free bird and I have created a safety net. Even if you fall, you won't hurt yourself. Relax! Let go, you will only fly! See, the sangha, the community of the master, is the net. Even if you fall, you will not hurt yourself.

First of all, you will not fall. But just to give you the deeper assurance, the sangha, the spiritual community, is created. So, I invite all of you to come and experience the sangha.

Understand that it's a free bird's responsibility to liberate all the trapped birds, to help them, to inspire them to free themselves.

Similar to the bird trap, hunters also have a trap to catch monkeys. They catch monkeys using a small box for a trap. They place some sweets inside a box that has a small opening. The monkey puts its hand inside the box and grabs the sweet. As long as the monkey holds onto the sweet, it will not be able to take its hand out because its fist is larger than the hole!

If the monkey lets go of the sweet, it can remove or slide its hand out immediately. But the monkey is not intelligent enough to realize that. It holds onto the sweet - and just because it is holding on, it is not able to take its hand out. If it just lets go of the sweet, it can take its hand out and be free. If you allow the understanding of this story to happen in you, you will instantly unclutch from your shafts and be free this very moment.

Fortunately, by your very nature, you can have only one thought at a time. The moment a new thought comes inside your system, it means that the old thought has lost its power or influence over you. If the new thought has entered you, it means the old thought has been renounced because you can't have two thoughts at a time. You can have only one thought at a time. If you say that the old thought is also there, it only means that for that moment, the new thought has been renounced!

There is a beautiful story by Ramakrishna Paramahamsa':

A king who was inside a huge fort, was once attacked by an army that was two million strong. The king only had two or three people around him and got very frightened. He told his advisor "Two million people, and I am all alone. They will kill me!"

The royal advisor said, "Don't worry, King. Open only one door. Surely through one door only one person can come in at a time. As they come in, stand on this side of the door and kill them one by one. Over! Do not try to fight with the whole crowd"

If you think all your enemies are gathered together, you will start having unnecessary fears. You cannot have two thoughts at a time. You can only have one thought at a time. This means that every thought is replaced by the next thought.

I'll repeat: the first thing is that you can have only one thought at a time.

The second thing is that unless the old thought is pushed out, the second thought cannot come.

The third thing is that if somebody can push me out and sit here, he is surely more powerful than me! Any thought that comes in and pushes the old thought out is more powerful than the old thought. This means that any thought that is coming now is rooted in the present moment. It has more power than the thought that is

being renounced, whatever that thought may be about. By your very nature you are renouncing.

You don't need to learn renunciation. Every moment you are renouncing. What do I mean by the word 'renouncing' here? I mean that at every moment you are letting go of one thought after another. Only then is it possible to allow new thoughts to keep entering your system. Every moment your inner space is getting cleared of the old thought.

Thoughts are constantly getting renounced by themselves. The only issue is that when you create the belief your thoughts are connected, you have the problem of linked suffering, the shaft. Your belief that you have some problem is your only problem.

Every moment your inner space is purified by the new incoming thoughts. If you allow this process to continue, it will happen by itself and clean itself also. There is no need for you to clean your mind. All you need to do is just get out - just get out of the system so that the system can proceed on its own.

One important truth you should know is that even if you want, even if you try consciously, you cannot possess or hold onto your suffering for long.

Even if you try to hold it, you cannot hold your suffering because continuously, your thought that creates suffering is also replaced by newer thoughts! In fact, to hold onto suffering will require a lot of effort on your part because thoughts are continuously flowing.

Be very clear, your power to bring on a new thought itself proves you have the power to drop the old thought. The problem is, instead of just watching the new thoughts flowing through you, you try to bring back old thoughts into your system. It is like picking up your trashed emails and bringing them back to the inbox. Is there any need to bring back trashed emails? No! If you constantly look to bring back the old thoughts, you will create only suffering.

Understand that if you nurture the fact that any suffering can be replaced by a stream of fresh thoughts then that becomes reality for you. And there is no suffering. If you are nurturing the thought, 'No, however much I allow replacing, the suffering comes back, you will make that into reality. If you mother the thought that the suffering is going to come back, it will come back. If you mother the thought that it is going to go away, it will go away.

All you need to understand is that if even once you can replace a thought in your inner space without returning to the previous thought, you will get the confidence, 'I have replaced it once. I can do it again.' Then you can tell yourself, 'If the old thought comes back ten times, let me replace it ten times!' that's all. Soon you will see the old thought will stop coming back.

There is a very beautiful incident in Buddha's life:

Buddha says, "Whenever I said in meditation, "I am going to get up after a few hours", I never became enlightened. Once I decided, "If I am not going to become in this very place. Until I become enlightened, I am not going to get up from this seat. I am not going to move." Buddha says that the moment he created that strong clarity, the authentic sankalpa" - vow, the next second, he became enlightened!

When you sit down to replace your suffering and think, 'Today I will replace it ten times. If it comes back the eleventh time, I can try again tomorrow, then nothing will happen. No transformation will take place for you. Decide very clearly, 'Until it stops coming, I am going to replace the negative thoughts.' That is what I call courage. When you sit down to replace your suffering and think, 'Today I will replace it ten times. If it comes back the eleventh time, I can try again tomorrow, then nothing will happen. No transformation will take place for you. Decide very clearly, 'Until it stops coming, I am going to replace the negative thoughts.' That is what I call courage.

When we unclutch, the first thing that will happen to us will be an inner healing effect - a deep silence and peace in us.

Second, that inner healing will start radiating as physical wellbeing, which is our health.

Third, naturally it will start radiating in our relationships also.

Fourth, because these three are going beautifully, we will be creative and productive!

People come and tell me, "Swamiyi, for the last twenty years I have had knee pain.' No, it cannot be! Please understand that in reality it cannot be. I am not disrespecting you or adding more suffering to you by saying all your problems are only in your head. I am just telling the truth: all your problems are in your head! I am just stating the truth.

The knee pain you experienced two years ago, the knee pain you experienced one year ago, the knee pain you experienced two months ago, and the knee pain you experienced two hours ago are independent experiences. Only because you connect all of them, you conclude that you have been having knee pain for twenty years. Is it really true that you have knee pain continuously for twenty years? What happens to the moments of'no knee pain' in between? The important thing you need to understand is that because you connect and see all these as one continuous incident, you block the possibility of self-healing.

The depression that happened one month ago, the depression that happened one year ago, and the depression that happened three years ago are independent, individual, unconnected, and unclutched. The problem is the same as with physical pain. You start connecting them and concluding that you are having the same depression continuously. You create an idea that your life is depression. Then you start fighting with it. That only gives more life to the depressive thoughts.

When you strongly believe that your last ten years have been filled with suffering and depression, you create a strong mental setup surrounding it. Naturally you start thinking that your future is also going to be painful and filled with depression.

Suppose there is a person sitting in front of you who you think is an enemy. Suddenly if you notice that his head is separate, his legs are separate and his hands are separate, would you even feel like fighting with him? No! He is not even worth fighting! He doesn't even have a solid existence, as you imagined him to have. So what is there to fight?

In the same way, only when you imagine you have a huge problem in front of you, that a big person is in front of you, you start fighting and getting into more trouble. Your depression is not the huge enemy that you think it is. It is just like the person with disjointed body parts. It is you who joined the parts and gave it life. Your fighting with depression is the root cause of your depression.

In Ramayana there is a beautiful story. Whoever stands in front of the monkey king Vali and fights with him, loses half of his power to him. In the same way, whoever stands in front of the thought shaft and starts fighting with that shaft, half of their power will go away to that shaft.

The moment you unclutch from the shaft, you experience the neutral space, and inner healing starts. The moment inner healing starts, physically also you are healed.

Do not try to renounce your depression, because by your very nature it is getting renounced, flowing away from you. By your very nature just as joy disappears from your mind, depression also disappears from your mind. The moment you try to eliminate the depression, you will extend it and give it more life.

See, if you have a deep depression, will you stop going to the office? No! You may carry the depression in your mind but your body moves. You work. You may not be that productive or efficient. But your body still moves. Instead of 'living depression', I am saying, 'live unclutched'.

When we live in depression, we don't have all these questions, 'If I am depressed, how can my body move?' We don't have such questions. The depression becomes part of our life. In the beginning you may have questions, 'How can I live unclutched? How will I even move my body?' Understand that the constant remembrance of unclutching does not interfere with your mind or body movements. It only removes the depression because it lets the depression thoughts rise and fall without clutching to them.

What is addiction? It is a behavior or action that if you don't do it, you will feel terrible that you are missing something. But, if you do it you won't feel any joy, it will only be mechanical. Addiction means believing that joy or ecstasy happens due to some object, person, or situation.

Understand that this is the definition of addiction: trying to elongate the joy shaft by recreating it. You bring the same persons, situations, incidents, or happenings into your life again and again, knowing that the same joy is not going to happen. Some people are addicted to partying, some to smoking, and some to drinking — there are so many addictions.

Remember that anything you bring to your life again and again will not give you the same excitement as it gave you the first time. It can only lead to addiction, not happiness. The first time you enjoy a sweet, it is a wonderful experience. The excitement is totally different. But if you keep eating more of the same sweet, the same experience is not there anymore. Eventually if you eat enough sweets you will not even like the sight of them. You Will look at them and say, Oh no, not more sweets. They make me feel terrible.' In the same way, when meeting a person for the first time, the excitement is totally different. Later on, the excitement falls off.

People come and ask me, 'How can I break my habits?' See, habit is a beautiful word. If you remove 'h', 'a bit' will remain. If you remove 'b', 'it' will remain. Only when you remove the 'I', the shaft 'it' will die. Only when you remove 'I', only when you throw 'I' away, will it completely die. Be very clear, your smoking two days ago, ten years ago, and twenty years ago - all these three incidents are completely independent. They are not connected. Mentally, when you start connecting, when you start believing that you have the habit of smoking and that you are addicted to it, the belief creates a shaft. Then you start fighting with it. That is what I mean when I say the 'I' has to be dropped. It is your belief that makes it a habit. If you drop the belief, the habit drops.

If you believe it is a joyful experience, you continue to smoke more and more. If you believe it is a painful experience you start fighting with the shaft. Either way you don't win. Even if you believe that smoking is joyful, try to smoke without restraint and see for yourself how you feel. When you smoke and inhale, it can never be a pleasurable experience. It is never really joyful.

When you smoke, in that moment, just see what is happening in your inner space. You

are not enjoying anything. You are just trying to escape from something. You merely believe that smoking is joyful. Even if you don't feel joyful when you are smoking, you try to squeeze joy out of it.

If you deeply scan your life and see, you will understand that whether it is smoking, or sex, or money, or any other pleasure, even if you don't feel the same joy as you felt the first time, you try to squeeze joy out of it. You try to console yourself, 'No, this is joy. What else is joy?' You try to cover the frustration by believing it is joy. You want to believe it is joy.

Try your best to drop some addiction. You can never be successful. Even if you drop it you may be dropping it out of some fear or greed, which is a much bigger addiction. If you drop smoking out of some fear or greed, you are not doing anything good to your consciousness, to your inner space. You are only damaging yourself more.

You might have dropped smoking, but the fear or greed that made you drop it will be added to your inner space. At least with smoking, you will destroy only this body. With fear or greed you will destroy your whole being, life after life! In the next body, you will carry over the fear and greed. The smoking habit may not carry over to the next body but the emotions of fear and greed will be carried with you to the next body. So the best way is to drop the idea that you have an addiction, and it will drop.

The moment you hear you are unclutched, the first fear that arises in you is, 'If I start living without connecting my thoughts, who will pay my bills? I could lose all my wealth. I could forget where I keep all my money. I may not be able to live successfully in society. How will I do my job? How will I take care of my things? Won't I not just lie down in my bed without doing anything? Why would I want to go to my office?'

I ask, 'Why wouldn't you go to your office?' The moment you ask that, it means that you inherently have a little hatred or a little vengeance against your office work! This is why the moment you find some excuse you want to escape from your work. By asking this question, you are only expressing your anger, your violence against your routine, nothing else! The question has nothing to do with unclutching.

If you have such questions, just unclutch and sleep for ten days. There's nothing wrong with that. Have a vacation for ten days. Decide, 'I am going to unclutch from both the identities.' How many days do you think you can sleep? How many days do you think the cessation of activity can continue in you? Only until the tamas energy in you is exhausted. After that you will automatically start doing something. So, even if you feel it is a lack of responsibility or defeatist behavior, be unclutched for a few days. You will then understand and experience that when you are unclutched you will not have a lazy or passive attitude. Mentally you will be silent, but physically you will be active and alive. When you are in that space of irresponsibility or defeatist attitude, mentally you are very active but physically you are tired. When you are unclutched, physically you are active and alive, but mentally you are silent.

You see, 33% of the body is sattva, pure silence. 33% of the body is rajas, restlessness and 33% of the body is tamas, deep sleep, laziness. Right now the first fear that happens in you is if you unclutch, you may become tamasic, a lazy person.

Unclutch. That 33% of your laziness will quickly be exhausted. It will disappear from your system within a few days. Then you will automatically start working from your innate intelligence. You don't have to be driven by fear and greed to live your day-to-day life.

I am not saying you should stop thinking completely. I am only saying, when you are unclutched, whatever thoughts have to happen will happen automatically. Initially when you are unclutched you will feel as if no thoughts are happening. Later you will understand, even after unclutching, whenever thinking is necessary, the mind is clutched. Whenever thinking is not necessary, the mind is unclutched. Your mind is being used as an instrument, not as a master.

We can live purely from inspiration. But the problem is, we are never given that confidence. We are never given the courage that we can live simply by inspiration. Sometimes you can see that for no reason you radiate excitement; for no reason you radiate intelligence. That is what I call inspiration. It may last only for a few moments, but you need to realize that those few moments can become a way of life for you. If we remain unclutched, then continuous inspiration will happen in our lives. Unclutching directly kindles the energy of the being. This energy is the energy of inspiration, the energy of unclutching.

Understand one important thing, we have an automatic intelligence that can run our lives, that can take care of our day-to-day responsibilities. Not only can it run our lives, it can maintain, extend, and expand our lives as well.

But society conditions you from a young age. You are taught that you cannot run without planning, without fear or greed. Your self- respect is taken away from you. You are made to lose trust that you can lead your life spontaneously, without fear or greed. That is why constantly you try to infuse greed or fear into yourself. You try to use fear and greed as fuel to make your life run, to make your life alive.

Be very clear, you cannot run your life based on fear and greed. If you are driven by fear and greed, you will carry a constant irritation in you. From morning until night, from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep, you will carry a constant irritation in you. You just wait for a reason to explode. Just one small touch is enough, and you are ready to jump on the other person. He does not even need to make any mistake; just coming in front of you is enough to trigger you! This happens because of the strain of running your life through fear and greed.

If you just relax, the automatic intelligence of Existence will run your life beautifully for you. Your actions will be automatically propelled by the energy of Existence.

Ashtavakra says, You who have been bitten by the great black serpent of egoism 'I am the doer' Drink the nectar of the faith, 'I am not the doer' and be happy.

Ashtavakra' gives this technique to the king and seeker, Janaka. Please understand that simply thinking that 'I am not the doer' or having faith that 'I am not the doer' will not liberate you directly. This technique by itself will not liberate you. It will just make you tired! You are not able to remember that you are not the doer continuously without a break. The moment you understand that you are not able to remember 'I am not the doer' all the time, you will be completely frustrated and you will just drop the mind. The moment you drop the mind, the truth that you are not the doer will simply become reality! That is the technique suggested here.

This is a very simple understanding of unclutching. All you need to do is remember to unclutch whenever you start giving meaning to old thoughts or whenever you connect with old thoughts and allow them to bother you.

Do not create, maintain or destroy any thought. If you don't do any of these three things, you are the Supreme Self, Parabrahma! Unclutching is like a self-purifying method. For any technique to be self-purifying and become subtle, by itself. Unclutching is one such technique.

The technique that does not become subtle by itself stays in the gross level. If it is not able to kill itself, if the technique is not able to commit suicide, it will kill you! The beauty with the technique of unclutching is that it will become subtler and subtler by itself as you become subtler. Finally, it will dissolve.

Unclutching — Anytime Anywhere

When you sit, naturally some thoughts will come. The moment you see a thought coming, do not give meaning to it. You give it meaning only if you connect it with your past. Without giving meaning to it just remember to unclutch and see what happens. The moment you remember, 'Let me unclutch from this thought; let me not give meaning to it, for a few seconds there will be a small silent gap. The moment you are aware that there is a silence, it will become one more thought. Then unclutch from that thought also. Then, again there will be a gap of a few seconds. Then, one more thought will come, 'I am in silence or 'I am unclutching'. Unclutch from that thought also. Just the gap or the silence should become longer and longer. That is the whole idea.

Naturally it is the nature of the mind to wander somewhere after a few minutes. The moment you remember or become aware that the mind has wandered, unclutch. There is no need to have guilt or be agitated that the mind has wandered. The moment you remember, unclutch, that's all.

If we are able to truly manage our mind with the understanding that it is our mind that connects thoughts to form shafts of pain and pleasure and if we stay unclutched, we can stay in what Buddha calls mindfulness. We can stay in awareness and in the present moment. It is our thought process that constantly takes us from past to future and back again and does not allow us to rest in the present moment.

Understand this clearly, when we are in the present moment we can stay out of trouble without fear and desire. We can act without fear and desire. You may ask how. How can I be motivated to do something if I do not desire it? There is no need for motivation. Do you think that it is motivation that makes you breathe or digest your food? It is the intelligence of the energy that is within and without us that makes it possible for us to live and grow. We live not because of us but in spite of us.

When we act without attachment, there is no consequence to our actions, there is no karma arising from our actions.

There is a very beautiful verse in the Isa Vasya Upanishad:

Om poornamadah poornamidam

Poornaat poornamudachyate

Poornasya poornamaadaaya

Poornamevaavashishyate

From the Whole came the Whole. If you remove the Whole from the Whole, only the Whole remains. By very nature we seek the Wholeness. By very nature we seek fulfillment in anything we do.

Whether it is eating, drinking, jumping, reading, talking, sleeping, or meditating, in any activity that we engage, our being yearns to completely experience the activity and be fully involved in it. Are we fully conscious of every action we engage in? Are we aware every moment of our life?

A small story:

A man was travelling by cab to the airport. The cab driver was driving very fast even around corners and sharp turns. The passenger was getting terrified with his driving. Finally, the cab driver, seeing the terrified passenger, said, "Why don't you do what I do when I take turns? Just shut your eyes!"

When you are not completely aware and involved in the action you are engaged in, your being remains unfulfilled in that experience. The unfulfilled experience remains inside you and keeps pulling you to do the action again with intensity to fulfill it. This is karma.

Karma is the collection of unfulfilled experiences that stay in us and constantly pull us to fulfill them.

Anything that we do and experience intensely and deeply will always leave our system. It will liberate us. Any experience that we did not go through completely, through which we did not have complete fulfillment, that did not get our full energy, attention and awareness, remains inside us as karma.

Even though we carry some karma, basically we are complete fulfillment, Wholeness. So any karma that has not been fulfilled cannot rest inside us for too long. It will try its best to fulfill itself. It will drive us again and again to go through the same activity so that it can be fulfilled. Any desire, any

experience, which has not become complete in our system, will remain as karma and push us again and again to make us go through the same experience until it is fulfilled.

We think, speak and do things without clarity, without fulfillment and with deep ignorance. All these thoughts, words and actions collectively contribute towards our karmic baggage because none of them gives rise to fulfillment in us. When they do not give rise to fulfillment our karma pushes us to somehow fulfill them.

Our own thoughts, words and deeds become our karma and drive us to reach fulfillment in some way.

Understand clearly that now you are reading this book because of all your past decisions. You decided to pay attention to the book on display. You decided to buy it. You decided to sit down and read this book now. The totality of all these decisions contributes to your sitting here.

The totality of all these past decisions is your present moment. Now, applying the same logic, the totality of your present decisions will be your future.

This is the essence of karma theory: the totality of all your past is the present, and the totality of your present is your future.

The totality of all your past is the present. The totality of your present will be your future. The problem is that we make most of our decisions unconsciously. We take thousands of decisions unconsciously. That is the reason why we are not able to connect the cause with the effect. Flood more awareness, more intelligence into your thinking system. Flood more awareness, more consciousness into your decision-making system. In any given moment, the future is predestined but conditionally. It will be a certain future according to all the totality of events till that time - this is the predestined future. But it is conditional. There is an important factor that can and will change i—t your consciousness, your will.

Once, two brothers met a sage who was known to be able to look into the future. The brothers paid their respect to the sage and asked him if he could tell them about their future. The hermit advised them, "It may not be good for you to know your future. Besides, your future can change later even if I tell you now."

The brothers insisted on knowing their future. The sage looked at the elder brother and said, "You will become a king ft a year." Looking at the younger brother he said,

"You are destined to die in the hands of a murderer in a year "s time." The brothers started walking back home. The elder brother was overjoyed while the younger one was depressed.

Now the elder brother started creating his fantasy world dreaming of becoming a king. The younger brother who was destined to have less than a year to live, started spending his time in spiritual activities. He used his time to serve everyone and soon came out of his depression.

Eleven months passed. One day, the elder brother invited the younger one to his house. He wanted to look out for land for a grand palace he was planning to build since very soon he would become a king. They were walking on a huge open piece of land when the younger brother stumbled on a halfburied pot. The brothers dug the pot and removed it. It was a huge pot of gold coins.

The elder brother was thrilled and started shouting, "This treasure is just for me! It is for me to set up my palace and kingdom! "Just then, a bandit jumped out from a bush, gave a blow on the elder brother's head and tried to snatch the pot from him. The younger brother jumped at the bandit to protect his brother. But the bandit attacked him with a dagger he had in his hand. During the struggle the bandit dropped the pot and ran away.

The elder brother was very thankful to his younger brother for saving his life and offered him half the gold coins. The younger brother politely refused saying he was not going to live much longer in any case. The elder brother with his new treasure started living a lavish life, eating, drinking and being merry.

One year passed. There was no sign of any crown in sight. The younger brother was also enjoying good health. They decided to visit the sage again. They met him and asked, "How did your predictions go wrong? "The sage was also surprised and went into meditation. He then explained, "I told you, your destiny can be changed. "

He looked at the elder brother and said, "Your destiny changed because of your irresponsible actions over the past months. The crown that you were to get was reduced to a pot of gold."

He looked at the younger brother and said, "Your spiritual life, trust and surrender to the Divine changed your destiny also. Death in the murderer's hand was reduced to only being wounded by him."

Understand, destiny is not something written in stone. It very much depends on how you choose to respond to every situation life presents to you. Your awareness will give you the intelligence and the courage to change the flow of events in your life.

If you don't know your past completely, you will repeat the same things in the future. If your Thoughts Per Second (TPS) can come down and you know your past as it happened, you won't repeat the same past in the future. You will then become a karma mukta, liberated from karma. As of now you are a karma bandha, bonded to karma because you have not lived your past completely.

For example, your childhood always seems golden. It is the golden past. You may feel your life in college was great, but when you were actually in college, you didn't really feel that way. Why? Because your suffering has become much more now and in comparison, the past seems very nice! Now you attribute joy to your past and if given a chance you want to repeat it. When you lived through it, did you actually experience it? No!

If you can relax in the present moment, at zero TPS, for at least 11 kshanas, you will penetrate the time shaft. If you can stay in zero TPS for 21 kshanas, you will penetrate the time shaft and can alter the future. This is in your hands.

All meditation techniques are ways to bring down your TPS so that you can penetrate the time shaft.

It is important to understand the concept o kshana. There is no equivalent for this word in the English language. So, let me explain to you what kshana means. Kshana is a measure of time. It is not a second or a minute as many people believe.

The gap between two thoughts is one kshana. We are used to thinking of time in an absolute sense. But a kshana is absolutely relative! The thoughts of every person and the rate at which they come in a person are dependent on that person. Kshana varies from person to person.

If a person is restless and gets too many thoughts in a span of one second, his kshana is shorter because the gap between two thoughts is less.

If a person is calm and collected like a meditator is, he gets fewer thoughts in a given span of time. His kshana is longer because the gap between two thoughts is more.

Your life is nothing but the totality of the conscious choices that you continuously make. Whether you want to or not, directly or indirectly, you are choosing everything. Someone else does not choose. It is you who chooses.

A small story: An employee approached his boss, "Sir my wife said I should ask you for a raise."

The boss replied, "Oh, I will ask my wife tonight whether or not I should give you a raise!"

Understand, continuously it is your choice, your decision. You may think somebody else decides. But it is only you who is deciding.

A small example can make you understand the basic truth. If somebody criticizes you, you choose to get offended. If somebody praises you, you choose to get flattered. Because of your habit, you may choose it unconsciously. It is not someone else who chooses, it is you who choose. Because it has become your habit to think that someone else influences your decisions, you have forgotten that you are choosing.

Every time someone criticizes you, you choose to get upset. Every time someone praises you, you choose to get flattered. It is nobody else's choice but your own. You can decide either way. When someone criticizes you, you can choose not to get offended and you can choose to remain calm and relaxed. It is just your choice to feel offended or not.

All your continuous choices every minute put together decide your life. If you don't decide and if you allow incidents to decide your life you go into a mode of 'paralysis'. Our lives as of now are nothing but paralysis. It is only when you decide to live your life without any outside events, situations or decisions being forced on you, you actually decide to live. As long as you don't understand life is your choice, your living is just paralysis.

There are three interrelated concepts, termed vasana, samskara and karma, in Sanskrit.

Vasana

Vasana is the seed of desire. For example, you are walking and you happen to see a dazzling necklace displayed outside a shop. A desire arises inside you to possess it. This is vasana.

Samskara is the plant that grows when the seed of vasana sprouts. When you see that necklace again and again, the desire to possess it becomes stronger in you. When you feed the desire to possess the necklace, it is like supplying water and nutrition to the seed of vasana.

The comiption that happens to the inner space is what I call samskara or engraved memories. They are the memories that go and sit in your inner space and pull you to go through the same experience repeatedly. They pull you to do the same kind of actions repeatedly, pull you to run through the same kind of thought patterns, even if you don't want to. Those memories are what I call samskaras.

Any samskara that is operating in your conscious or unconscious layer is nothing but a hindrance to the fulfillment of your life. There is no such thing as good or bad samskara. No samskara is good. An inner space filled with samskaras is hell. An inner space without samskaras is heaven. Do not try to classify samskaras as good or bad.

A samskara by itself, by its very nature, is negative. By its very nature samskara is depressive. Anything done out of samskaras will reduce everything to boring emptiness. Anything that happens with a deep understanding, just out of your pure inner space, always adds value to you. Anything done out of samskaras adds more and more bondage to you.

From our young age we collect so many different samskaras in so many ways. We accumulate them and also reproduce them. Samskaras do reproduce themselves even without any further action from our part.

Samskaras get strengthened in different ways. There are some samskaras that get strengthened only by action, when you repeat the action. There are some samskaras that get strengthened just by receiving information with regard to them, when you receive input from the world about them. There are some other samskaras that need neither action nor information, just remembrance is enough, and they get strengthened!

We collect these different levels of samskaras, engraved memories, and store them in our system and expand them.

Finally when driven by the desire you execute the action and it becomes karma. The power of desire drives you into finally buying the necklace. That is the action — the karma.

Anything half done leaves a samskara (engraved memory) in your being. Anything not lived fully leaves an imprint or samskara in your being, which time and again pulls you, attracts you to travel the same path and fulfill it.

The cause of addiction is also related to samskaras. In my own experience of having worked with many people personally, at least a few thousand cases of addiction have been healed by meditation. The basic truth about addiction is that you have lived your life vaguely, not fully or with the whole being. Unfulfilled desires create a samskara in you pulling you back to fulfill the desire by re- experiencing the same desire again and again.

Any emotion lived intensely simply liberates you of that emotion - be it anger, fear, desire to eat or attachment to any object or person. You are liberated fully of anything when you live it fully. If a person keeps going back to a problem time and again, it only means that he or she has not lived out the problem fully.

When we live, half our mind is somewhere else. Patanjali says beautifully, 'The more the quantity, the less the quality.' The moment the quality of enjoyment of any object increases, its quantity decreases in direct proportion, of its own accord. Therefore, it is the quality that needs to be increased.

Life is not a brief candle. It is a bright shining torch. Make it burn as brightly as possible in your life.

There are three types of karma - agamya, prarabdha and sanchita.

Sanchita karma is like a bank, a reserve bank. Understand, this may not be the first time you have taken a body and come to planet earth. You may have taken millions of bodies before! In those millions of bodies, whatever thoughts you had, whatever you spoke, whatever you did, all those unfulfilled experiences have become your engrams — engraved memories. Put together, they are like a bank called sanchita karma. When I say 'bank', it is not a collection or saving, it is debt! You will have to pay back all the loans!

The next type of karma is prarabdha' karma. Prarabdha' means this: from the sanchita bank of karma you take some karma out of which you create your present body.

You then decide to enjoy and exhaust all those karmas that you brought with you through that body. So prarabdha is just a small bit of the accumulated sanchita karma account that you have brought into this life. You have planned to enjoy or exhaust these through this body of yours.

The third type of karma is the worst. It is the agamya karma, the karma that you start collecting after coming down to planet earth, because of fresh thoughts, words and deeds.

Anybody who lands on planet earth has to exhaust his prarabdha karma before he dies. For example, let us say you have 1000 karmas in your sanchita bank. Out of these 1000 karmas, suppose you take only ten karmas with you as your prarabdha karma when you take up your body saying, 'Let me finish these ten karmas this time.' However, after coming down, instead of exhausting your own prarabdha karmas, you start watching others and collecting karma based on their desires. These are desires that you have borrowed from others around you. Because of these borrowed desires, you create certain thoughts, words and actions.

For example, if you see someone more beautiful than you, your thoughts multiply due to comparison and jealousy. You create karma based on thoughts. Sometimes you talk ill of others, without knowing any of the related facts. When you do this, you accumulate karma based on words.

Let me explain the three types of karma from a different angle. You see, if you take all the possibilities that you are aware of and that are available to you in the cosmos, we call that as agamya. There are all kinds of possibilities. You can become a fish, you can become a snake, you can become a man, or you can become a god. All these are possibilities. We call that as agamya.

There are also other possibilities that are available to you. These are not only within the field of your awareness like the things that you know such as fish, monkey, dog, donkey and man, but also many other possibilities that are unknown to you. Those we call sanchita, the whole range of known and unknown possibilities.

The whole is sanchita and the possibilities that lie in front of you are agamya. You then decide to play only with certain boundaries of these possibilities when you come into this body. That is what we call prarabdha. See when you came down, you decided to play inside certain boundaries. That boundary is what we can call prarabdha.

After coming here you see many possibilities before you that you try to accumulate, that you try to acquire. Those possibilities can be called as agamya.

This prarabdha that you brought with you has the intelligence to run your life. One big difficulty is that you see too many agamya, too many possibilities in front of you. Because of that, your trust over your prarabdha or your own preselected possibilities reduces. You think your prarabdha may not be that powerful to run your life because of the agamya, the possibilities, which are in front of your eyes.

Let me tell you this. Trusting prarabdha is powerful. Fulfilling your prarabdha will take away one very negative aspect of your life - the continuous irritation. The constant irritation that you carry from morning till night is the gift of agamya.

From morning till night, from the moment you come out of your bed till the moment you fall asleep, you feel a constant irritation. We just need somebody to make some mistake and we jump on them! We are just waiting. Anybody who comes in our presence will have our 'blessing'! That constant irritation is because we are centered on agamya.

If our energy, our inner space is centered on prarabdha, we will not be carrying the constant irritation that we carry now. It is not that we will not be working or relating with the possibilities. It is not that we will stop working, no! We will continue to work but our base will be our prarabdha.

You see, the mood of constantly rejecting everything, constantly being irritated, happens because of our agamya, because of the possibilities we see around us. We are running behind the choices, the possibilities, the agamya. But we forget that the prarabdha is very intelligent, very powerful.

In the whole world, there are only two kinds of people, people whose inner space is centered on agamya and people whose inner space is centered on prarabdha, that's all. People whose inner space is centered on prarabdha live their life in restful awareness.

The mind that is based on agamya will be inspired only by fear or greed. You can see this when you wake up. You will come out of your dream state only if you have a desire or if you are caught by some fear. For example, you may get inspired to wake up because you wish to send your child to school so that she gets a good education and has a bright future. Or you may get up out of fear of getting late for office because you are afraid of losing your job. Moving the physical body out of fear or greed is what I call living your life based on agamya.

All your actions are invariably driven by greed or fear and therefore end up being superficial actions, adding to your karma.

In this way, you end up collecting more karmas. By the time you go back, what will happen? Your "karma bank balance' would have increased by the number of your agamya karma!

Say you came down with ten karmas, you did not exhaust these ten karmas With which you came, but you collected 200 more!

What will happen the next time you take the body? Your sanchita is now 1000 added to the 200 new agamya karmas you collected now. You now have 200 karmas more than in your last birth. Again

you take ten out of that collection and come down with another body. But you only collect more and go back. This becomes a vicious circle. This is what we call janma marana chakra, life-and-death cycle, continuously taking a body and dying, again and again.

Instead, while you are living, if somebody gives you the knowledge that you are not just the body or the mind and it is karma that is influencing you, then the influence of that karma over you will begin to come down. You will then start exhausting the prarabdha karma that you came down with.

Let us say you brought ten prarabdha karmas with you when you took this body and came down. Suppose in these ten prarabdha karmas, you have three samskaras or three engrams that have the power to put you into depression. If you continue to obey those engrams and fall into depression, they will not remain just three, but will probably become ten. The additional seven karmas are the agamya karmas. If instead of exhausting your prarabdha you decide to remain with them, you collect agamya.

If on the other hand, whenever these three engrams put you in depression you have learned some technique to come out of the depression, then these three will start losing their power over you. So, over time, of the ten karmas, three will leave you. Whenever you reduce the influence of prarabdha on yourself, not only will the prarabdha get burnt, but the chances of accumulating new karma, the agamya karma, will also come down.

You stop collecting agamya when the prarabdha loses its influence over you. When the influence of these ten prarabdha engrams over you stops, the agamya collection will also stop because it is these ten engrams that are responsible for the collection of further engrams or karma.

Now let us come to the sanchita karma. Understand, you can't do anything directly with your sanchita karma bank. For sanchita to burn out, only Guru Krupa, grace of the master, will work. Only the master's grace can do anything to burn out your sanchita.

A beautiful story from the devotional vedic scripture Bhagavatam:

Krishna reached the banks of river Yamuna with the gopis, his milkmaid friends. They wanted to cross the river but there was no way to cross. Krishna declared, "If I am true brahmachari' (celibate), then let the Yamuna part and let us go across. The Yamuna parted.

Outwardly, it may seem that Krishna was with the girls like other ordinary men. But Krishna was beyond the body-mind. His actions did not carry the intention of an ordinary man. It is the intention of any act that matters, not the act itself.

Intention is the baggage, the karma, not the action. If action creates intention, it becomes the baggage. Pure action with no end objective is not karma.

See, whatever you are doing in the presence of the master, you are doing for the master. You know it is in no way going to build your name or fame. So, the action happens without intention. There is no intention. The intention is the master's. The action is yours. Intention is in the being of the person who has no intentions!

You see, the total sanchita karma can be yours or mine. Mine is divine play. Yours is suffering. When it started, your total sanchita karma also started as a divine play. But, after gathering more and more agamya karma, it became dirty.

Because I have no karma, when you flow with me you will also act without intention. Action without intention is living enlightenment.

If a person has committed ten murders, the quantity of murders will not be recorded. But the intensity of the murderer will be recorded. It is the quality, the mindset, and the attitude, that carries the karmic burden.

That is why Krishna says again and again in the Bhagavad Gita that intention is much more important than action. That is the message of the whole Gita. He says, 'When you are without intention I will take care.'

Action does not get recorded. Only intention gets recorded. The Mahabharata' tells us the beautiful story of a courtesan and a monk.

There was a monk who lived across a courtesan's house. He used to keep a count of the men coming to her house and used to imagine all kinds of things about her lifestyle. The woman spent all her free time praying to Krishna to redeem her from her miserable

One day, they both died at the same time. Both reached the court of Yama", the god of death. Yama" looked at the record of their lives and gave the decision. the monk should go to hell and the woman should go to heaven. The monk was shocked and started protesting, "I lived such a pious life while she lived such an immoral life! How can I be sent to hell and she to heaven!"

Yama replied, 'In my court of judgment, your actions are of no value, only your intent matters. You wore a monk's robes and lived a good life outwardly but your inner space was filled with lust. So in the outer world, your body is now being buried with honor but you have to suffer hell. The woman's heart was forever with Krishna even while her body was sold to men. So her body doesn't have anybody to even do the last rites but she is going to heaven.'

It is the intention and attitude that counts.

An enlightened being, an incarnation, is one with Existence. An enlightened being can only operate in tune with Existence. He can never be out of tune. The actions of an enlightened master can never be without awareness and compassion.

Since we do not have the consciousness or awareness, we cannot justify our actions by saying they are similar to those of an enlightened being. Be very clear, the action may look similar outwardly but the intention, the inner space, the attitude, is completely different.

A beautiful story from the life of Adi Shankara:

Once while Shankara was wandering with his disciples, he suddenly felt thirsty. They were in the middle of nowhere. They traveled further and finally came across one shop. Shankara went up to the man in the shop and asked for some water to drink. The man said, "I am sorry but I have nothing to offer you except liquor. That is all 1 have."

Shankara replied, "Alright, please give me some. " He drank a glass of liquor and thanked the man. The disciples were shocked to see their master drink liquor! The thirsty disciples decided to follow the master and they all drank liquor to their heart"s content.

When they resumed the journey, Shankara continued to walk normally but the disciples under the effect of the liquour were not even able to keep next step properly. They went up further and after some distance, came across an iron forge.

Shankara went upto the man who was pouring molten iron into the cast. He asked him for a glass of water. The man apologized saying he didn"t have any water to offer. Shankara said, "Alright. Please give me the molten iron then."

The man and Shankara"s disciples were all shocked. The man gave Shankara the hot molten iron which he just poured into his mouth as if it was water!

Understand, the very plane on which enlightened beings exist is different from the normal human plane of existence. So they do not need to and cannot do things according to usual logic. Their intention is what is important, which cannot be explained in terms of ordinary logic.

An enlightened being has no personal interest because he has no individual identity — his identity is dissolved in the identity of the whole universe.

We have seven layers or seven bodies of energy, which are physical, pranic, mental, etheric, causal, pleasure and nirvanic. Please understand, in the causal layer our gathered agamya karma is completely available for us. See, in the causal body, you may have the skills to play cricket, golf and tennis. But if you get up from deep sleep with a strong will or intention to play cricket, then you will also bring from the causal body the intelligence to play cricket. You will be naturally led into the situations, the atmosphere and the intelligence for it. If you go to sleep at night with a strong intention to play golf and you wake up in the morning with the strong intention to play golf, then you will bring with you that intelligence to play golf.

The causal layer is an exchange place. It is like monetary exchange. In the causal layer you can exchange anything. When you go to the causal layer the karma of this birth itself can be changed if you have that strong intention every day. This is true freedom. Strong intention has the capacity to change the gathered agamya karma and the prarabdha karma of this birth. It cannot change the total sanchita karma. Sanchita karma can only be changed by the grace of the master — one who is without karmas.

Reaching out to the master, doing what the master says and acting without intention, are what the whole game of life is all about.

Action without intention is mission. If you are acting with intention, you are like a machine. If you are acting without intention, you are the mission. Machine or mission, the choice is yours. Till you act with my intention without adding your intention, I will keep training you. Just do what I say without asking inspiration from your intention, from your greed and fear. Pure action without intention will lead to fulfillment.

Karma is not a law of reward and punishment. It is not a way god uses to punish people for committing sins. It is a reflection of your own mental state giving you the experience of 'heaven' and 'hell'.

A traffic policeman caught a man speeding. He was about to issue him a speeding ticket. Suddenly a woman started screaming from the back seat, "See, I told you that you will get caught! Who asked you to drive so fast? And when I tell you to be careful, slow down and watch out, you tell me to shut up. Now see you got caught!" The cop asked the driver "Who is she?"The driver sighed, "My wife". The cop tore up the ticket and said, "Drive on. You have been punished enough!"

When you are angry, it is not that you will incur sin and pay for it in your next life. You are suffering with your anger now. That itself is the hell you suffer! You are suffering inside in the same way that you are torturing the person you are angry with.

The fire you spit outside will burn with the same intensity inside you also. No matter whether it burns the other person or not, the fire of anger will surely burn you. The sword used to cut someone outside will cut you inside with the same intensity. Remember, it is a double edged sword.

A man once came and spat on Buddha's face. Buddha wiped his face and asked the man, "Do you want to say something more, or is this all? " Ananda, his close disciple, was very angry. He was fuming that some man came and just spat on his master and that too for no reason at all. He said to Buddha, "Master if you give me permission, I will handle the man."

Buddha replied, "Have you forgotten that you are a monk, a sannyasi' (renunciate)? That poor man is already suffering with his anger. See his angry face, his body shaking with that anger. And before spitting on me, do you think he would have been celebrating and dancing? He is mad with his own anger. In that state of madness, he came and spat on me.

What is a bigger punishment for him than being in such a state? And what harm has he done to me? I just had to wipe the spit off my face. Now you don"t get agitated, otherwise you are building the same anger inside you. Why are you punishing yourself. That is foolishness. Feel compassion for the poor man instead."

The man was listening and was surprised and confused to see Buddha behave in this way. He was expecting Buddha to become angry. That is what he wanted. Instead the compassion and understanding Buddha showed was just too shocking for him!

Buddha said to him, "Go home. You look tired, you have punished yourself enough. Forget about what you did to me. You did not harm me. This body will return to the earth and people will do all kinds of things like spitting. Go home and relax."

The man was completely shaken by Buddha's response. He went back home. He came back that evening, fell at Buddha's feet and cried, "Please forgive me!"

Buddha calmly said, "I was not angry in the first place. How can I forgive you? But I am happy to see you relieved from the anger and in a state of harmony. Just remember. never do such acts again, this is how you create hell for yourself. "

Once the life force leaves the body, within three kshanas, it chooses the next body. At the time of death the three most enjoyed experiences in that lifetime stand out as one's last thoughts. The choice of the next body arises from the mindset based on these three experiences.

These three thoughts will be based on one from each of the total karma (sanchita), this birth karma (prarabdha) and gathered karma (agamya). Based on this, the prarabdha karma will take shape for this birth.

Practicing spiritual life solutions in one's lifetime will reduce the gathered sanchita karma of that life because these understandings will help one to live with awareness.

Meditation helps to reduce the prarabdha karma. It acts not only upon the conscious and physical levels but also has the capacity to penetrate and clean the unconscious on a physical, mental and being level.

However, the largest balance in the bank of karma, the total sanchita karma, can only be dissolved through the master's grace.

The more these three karmas are reduced, the less the constraints of choice for the next body. Since each of the three karmas will dictate a corresponding intense experience to be lived, the next body will need to provide a space for these experiences to be lived.

It is like this. If I say, 'Let me meet a person who can speak English, I have more choice than if I say, 'Let me meet a person who can speak English, Spanish and German.'

Similarly, if you have all the three types of karma, there are more constraints on your next birth.

For example, the desire influenced by your total sanchita karma may be, 'I want to be beautiful.' The desire influenced by your karma of this birth, prarabdha, may be, 'I want to be rich.' The desire influenced by your gathered or agamya karma, may be, 'I want to settle down in USA.'

It is more difficult to get a body for your life energy's next birth that will lead to the satisfaction of all the three desires within the short gap of three kshanas. So, it ends up choosing a body that satisfies the strongest desire amongst the three desires. The combined desires, the mindset, with which the life energy leaves the previous body is the vasana, the seeds of desire we earlier talked about.

These three desires, these three thoughts will be seen in one glimpse in three kshanas, as one vasana . The vasana is like a television channel and the body that attracts the vasana is like the television set

tuned to this channel. The depth of the vasana and the body that matches the vasana attracts the life energy. Just like a television set tuned to the satellite channe1's frequency receives the corresponding electromagnetic waves, in the same way, the vasana is attracted by the body.

The life energy, the spirit, departing from the previous body enters the new body that it selected, as that body leaves the womb of the mother. It enters the body in the birth canal. The darkness of the causal layer that it left from the previous body corresponds to the darkness of the mother's birth canal. Since the body has been prepared by the energies of the parents, the life energy chooses the combined energies of the parents based on the desires, the vasanas, the mental attitude, with which it leaves the previous body. So the parents do not choose the child. It is the child that chooses its parents.

Having chosen a particular body, the spirit or life force has to satisfy the other two desires it had but could not choose an appropriate body for. However, during its transition through the darkness, the deep pain experienced by the spirit erases all memories of the vasana it carries before it enters the new body. The new entity no longer remembers the desires with which it left the previous body. Instead of fulfilling the desires with which it left the previous body, since it has forgotten them, the life energy in the new body seeks new desires and collects more karma.

Now, of the three types of karma, if one of them is gone, the choice constraints are fewer and the life force can be more focused in the choices. Cleaning the gathered agamya karma and this birth's prarabdha karma can be done by the individual by understanding about life and by meditating. The master's grace will reduce the total sanchita karma.

Once the total sanchita karma is cleansed, there is no reason to take another body. Then, if the next birth still happens, it is for no reason but out of overflowing joy and bliss. The birth is thus chosen consciously because there is no pull of karma. The life lived is a leela or reasonless play of an avatar or incarnation.

For all of us, our total sanchita karma initially was a divine play. For an enlightened master, it is still a divine play as he has no karma at all. Playing because you can play is the divine play.

We took birth out of choice. We forgot our prarabdha karma, started gathering agamya karma and expanded the total sanchita karma. Then, to exhaust the increased load we had to take another birth where we collected more desires and karma. This is how the cycle of life and death continues.

Please understand, your gathered agamya karma is your bondage. The total karma and this birth karma can be a divine play. The result of this play is the karma of that birth. After birth, if we play without gathered karma, it will continue to be a divine play. The bondage comes with gathered karma.

This is a very good question. Let me boldly declare this truth and clear all the myths that have been surrounding this one question on the wheel of karma!

When a human being takes birth as human once, he will continue taking the life of a human unless he has acted against his consciousness like torturing others or committed violent acts in the physical, mental or verbal forms against Existence which is in the form of the master, nature and human

Part 3: The Sacred Text of Hinduism - Jeevan Mukti Bhashya_English_part_3.md

consciousness. The intensity of these acts is what gets recorded in the cosmic karwic record. Understand, it is not the act itself but the intensity of the act that matters.

When a person spends his whole life in lower consciousness, he can be reborn as an animal. For example, if he spends his whole life in only eating or sleeping, he can be reborn as an animal.

See, if the person has not experienced the unique human qualities like falling in love, seeking enlightenment, even once in his lifetime, he will be reborn as an animal because he had a human body but the channels of human experience have not been awakened.

No. You can change your prarabdha through a simple, strong will or sankalpa'. The strength of the sankalpa' can cause a rebirth in you in this birth itself. The next birth can happen now itself. For example, people, especially householder disciples who feel they are caught up in their responsibilities ask me, "Swamiyi, please bless me that I should be with you at least in my next birth.' There are so many examples where they have been able to come and live in the ashram' just a few months later. It is just the strength of the will.

You are like a wave in the ocean of Existence. The wave rises up from the ocean but it is still connected to the ocean. It may think it has an individual existence but that is just a myth. Whether it is rising, above the ocean or falling down, it is still a part of the ocean.

On its own, because of joy, when the wave takes the body, there will be no gathered or agamya karma. When agamya karma is acquired, it will corrupt the total sanchita karma that was pure. This sanchita karma has to be exhausted in the next birth. Comipted total sanchita karma generates the cycle of life and birth— this is how the wheel of Parsa starts.

The new body that the life energy occupies does not remember the prarabdha karma that the life energy brought with it when it took the body. So, you do not remember the desires with which you left your previous body.

Reminding yourself of those desires again and fulfilling them in this birth is what doing tapas (penance) and becoming enlightened is all about.

So what happens when you forget at birth that you have come through divine play? When the total karma weight becomes excessive, you realize, There is some problem somewhere. Immediately you wake up and get enlightened again. The rewinding and coming back is enlightenment.

Sometimes, if you get a really bad dream, only a thought like 'I am dreaming' will come at first. Then, you actually wake up. That thought of 'I am dreaming' coming is turning towards enlightenment. Waking up is getting enlightened.

That thought of 'I am dreaming. This whole world is a dream' and then renouncing the false world and catching the reality is enlightenment. In this world, the same experiences repeat making you tired and bored. It gives rise to the suspicion, 'I am seeing a dream.' Then, you start doubting the world, doubting the promise the world gives.

It is like the newspaper ads about some beachside resort that show the beach, the table, the food, all looking like heaven, giving a promise of luxury. You doubt that promise, because you realize that if hundred people see this and go, not many will actually feel the ecstasy promised. Similarly in life also, you doubt the promises your mind has been making all along but never fulfilling any.

Till now, what we discussed was a preventive measure for incurring karma. As a curative for karma, I will give you a simple technique. Right from this moment, try and remember all the incidents in your life. Start going backwards from this moment to your childhood days. Remember what you can.

Do not bother about what you cannot. Understand: what you cannot remember is only a hangover. It has not touched you deeply. That is why it is not retained in your memory. Try this technique for a year. Re-living is a wonderful way of relieving.

Our second level Life Bliss meditation program —the Nithyananda Spurana Program (NSP) is focused on just this method of exhausting one's karma. It is like a complete spiritual bath in the presence of an enlightened master.

There is a way to again and again remind ourselves not to collect karma and to live without the influence of the earlier incurred karma. The first step is to have a clear understanding that karma is powerless in the presence of an elevated consciousness.

There is an important difference between normal human beings and enlightened masters. A normal person does not have the ability to make his body alive out of his will. His body is either alive or it is dead, that's all. It is not under his control.

But for an enlightened person, it is under his control. He can either make his body alive, or relax. Because of this ability, he can also make another body alive! When an enlightened being chooses to make a stone or metal alive, that stone or metal becomes a representation of his very self. All the deities in our major traditional temples are energized by enlightened masters. Masters like Arunagiri Yogeeshwara* from Tiruvannamalai', Patanjali' from Chidambaram', Karurar* from Thanjavur', Konganavar* from Tirupati' and Meenakshi' from Madurai' have energized the deities in these temples.

Deities are therefore considered to be the very bodies of the enlightened masters. Disciples continue serving the deities even after the masters leave their physical body. The body of the deity is considered to be the body of the master himself. That is the reason why the deities receive the same respect offered to an enlightened master.

For example, all the disciples initiated by Arunagiri Yogeeshwara' will worship the Arunachala temple for generations together. You will see that whatever is offered to the master will be offered to the deity also.

Masters, even after they decide to leave the body, are continuously available to the disciples through the deities that they energized. For example, even during my lifetime, my physical presence is not

possible everywhere at the same time. So these deities are programmed to do my work where I am physically not present! They are my representatives!

The deities possess independent intelligence. Energizing the deities is a big process. It is like giving birth to a child. These energized deities will directly respond to your prayers. They will directly relate with you if you are open in relating with them.

If you see our puja" (offering) and our ashram* routine, you will see that in the morning, they play the wakeup song to wake up the presiding deity. Then they give a small cup of oil for His hair and a small cup of tooth powder for Him to brush His teeth! Then, they give Him a bath and offer fresh, ironed clothes, just like how they offer to the master. They offer food and perform the evening arati'. In the night, they put the deity to bed again in a ceremonious way.

Understand, all this does not add anything to the deity or to the master. It adds only to us! This is what is living with god. This is what is practicing the presence of god. Practicing the presence of the master is Puja. It is done every day because it is a technique to remember the presence of god every day.

What is needed so as not to collect gathered agamya karma, is life solutions, what I call nithyam (eternal) because you practice them daily. To dissolve the karma of this birth, you need meditation or dhyanam. That is why you see that most of our meditations are based on breathing. Altering the breathing, making it fast, slow, silent etc is what our meditation techniques are all about. The only thing that can dissolve the total karma is the master's grace or anandam (bliss).

So understand, karma is simply the effects of thoughts, words and deeds that stem from deep ignorance and cause you to again and again tread familiar patterns of misery. The way to break this cycle is to tune into the clicks received from the master and live in an elevated zone of consciousness.

You need to see the motivation for the social service. Honestly look at yourself in the face. What do you want by doing the service?

Do you feel motivated by the fear ofhaving to go to hell if you don't do good deeds? Is it the desire for a good name and publicity? Or is it just to do something to keep yourselfbusy? Is it the greed of a good afterlife after death? Is it a better next birth?

If you are driven by fear or greed, you can never intensely enjoy doing the service. One part of you will be doing the act of service. Another part of you will be caught in thinking about the benefits of the service. So you are not integrated in that action. You are not completely fulfilled through it.

This action also binds. Outwardly, socially, it looks good and free from bondage. But inside your inner space, you can see it is not. The whole of mankind is swinging around result-oriented action. This is extended to service as well. At least in service, do not think of dollars or fame. Do not plan to impress. Do not plan to make your presence felt.

Do the work for the work itself! Do not plan anything. Just do any service anywhere. This kind of service will infuse tremendous power into your being. For at least half an hour a day do something

selfless, without any thought of results or benefits for yourself. You can then experience the true joy of service.

Karma can be exhausted only through deep understanding, awareness and at least one glimpse of consciousness.

In the case of premature death, the soul has to wait for the time it was destined to live, before it can take a new body. In the case of suicide, the suffering is much more intense than what would have been if the spirit had continued living. It is like when you have a plate of food in front of you but you don't have hands or a body to enjoy it!

In the case of accidents, the spirit has to be without body. But there is no suffering as in the case of suicide. The spirit lives in the same consciousness it would have lived had it been alive. It just waits to get the next body.

Past life regression should not be done except by an enlightened being. It has such a strong influence it can affect this birth. For example, if you had been a blind person in a past life, when regression happens, you can become blind in this birth!

An unenlightened being doing the regression will also suffer the karmas of the person he is doing the regression for.

To clear past life regression, one should know how to handle it, clear the past samskaras and close it.

When the master removes the karma, you call that feeling pain. Actually, the master would be removing in a second the suffering of many births, what would have otherwise taken many births to dissolve. So, it is practically no suffering in comparison.

Sharada Devi says, the master clearing the samskaras is like you facing a thorn prick instead of suffering a fracture!

Our concern for karma is rooted in our fear of death. It is a primal fear, that of the unknown. Our actions in this life are for the most part driven by the desire to be in a better place after death or the fear not to be in a worse place after death. This fear of leaving the body and mind has existed through the ages.

There is a nice story in Mahabharata', the great Hindu epic:

There was once a king by the name ofYayati. He lived extremely well for hundred years, enjoying his kingdom and all the physical and mental comforts of li[e. At the end of 100 years, Yama, the lord of death, came to take him away as it was time for him to leave the earth. The king was shocked to see Yama and started crying, "Why have you come so fast and that too suddenly without any notice? I have not lived my life fully yet. Please give me some more time to live." Yama replied that there is no extension possible to one"s life. But Yayati pleaded with him and begged for more time. Yama finally agreed that if any one of his sons was ready to give up his life for Yayati, then the king could live for that much more time.

Yayati called one of his sons. The son agreed, "I will give up my life, let my father live." He gave up his life. Yama extended Yayati"s life by a hundred years.

Yayati continued to enjoy all the material comforts in the same way as before and lived another hundred years. At the end of this period Yama returned to take him. This time too Yayati was shocked to see Yama again so soon. He felt he had hardly lived his life and begged Yama saying that he was not prepared to die and wantedsome more time.

Yama gave him another chance; another of Yayati's sons gave up his life for his father and Yayati got a lease of another hundred years of life.

Yayati enjoyed another hundred years and again Yama came back to take him. Again as before, Yayati asked for more time but this time Yama refused to play the same game again. Instead of agreeing to the king"s plea, this time Yama asked Yayati compassionately, "O king! Do you think you can put a fire out by pouring oil into it? Do you think that you can fulfill your desires by living them out more and more?" In just a few beautiful words Yama explained the whole purpose of life to Yayati. Yayati finally realized the Truth, followed Yama and rested at the feet of the Divine.

You cannot feel fulfilled by offering sense pleasures to the senses. You cannot feel that you are ready for death if you never lived intensely. Trying to satisfy the senses, pouring pleasures into your senses, or living as you want does not mean living intensely. When you really live intensely, automatically you will be liberated.

We are afraid because instinctively we resist change and death is an abrupt change in life. The master Chuang Tzu says beautifully, 'Man's thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.'

We are afraid because we do not know who we are. We hold an identity of ourselves inside us, based on our family, relationships, job, wealth, social image etc. Death removes this very foundation on which our identity is built, so we feel death snatches everything that is ours.

Our understanding about death, or rather our misunderstanding about death, makes death a fearful, frightening experience. The man who resists death dies even while he lives. He dies every moment because he is tortured by the very idea of death. When I say 'death', I don't mean only physical death. Losing anything is a form of death. Losing your comfortable life is one form of death, losing your relatives is another. Please understand that loss in any form is nothing but death.

There are two issues: the incident of death that happens at the end of our lives, and psychological death. Real death happens only once, but psychological death, the fear of death, permeates our life. The idea and fear of death decides our entire life structure.

Every part of your body is connected to someone or the other. Your being is not an individual being. It is not alone, separate, as you think. We are all interlinked. That is why we undergo terrible suffering when we lose someone or something. Every missing that you experience, no matter of whom or what is what I call death. Fear of death is just the fear of continuity or discontinuity. We are afraid about the 'what next'.

Once, in USA, a young lady asked the great Hindu monk Vivekananda, "What is life?" Vivekananda said, "Come with me to Bharat. I will teach you." She asked, "What will you teach me?" He said, "I will teach you how to die." If you know the secret of death, the quality of your life will be different. Your very understanding and attitude towards everything will change.

Death is not a mere incident at the end of your life. It is a profound knowing. If you know how to die, you know how to live. Living and leaving are two sides of the same thing. Your life will be totally different once you understand death.

Almost all the traditions have tried to conquer death, to outlive death. But one group of really intelligent, intuitive people understood after much struggle that we were approaching death in a completely wrong direction. They decided to take a 180-degree turn. They started working with death in a different way. They used meditation as a technique to take them where others had not dared to go before. Those few intelligent ones were the rishis" of the Upanishad' age. The report they submitted on their research into the phenomenon of death is called the Kathopanishad.

These rishis researched deeply on death and finally came to the conclusion that death cannot be understood or overcome by resistance. By resisting death, you cannot go beyond death. The only way to break free from the vicious cycle of birth and death is by becoming enlightened - entering into death, dropping the fear.

Please understand that death has power over you because of your belief, your faith in it, that's all. If you take a little time and look into your fear of death you will see that it has the power to transform your life in the most positive way. You will realize that it is not contradictory to life but complementary to life.

Death is a deep relaxation. It is the ultimate 'letting go'. It is the dropping of the old and starting with the new. When your being recognizes that it cannot achieve what it wants to through this body it decides to move on.

This 'moving on', this 'passing over' is what is called death.

When your brand new house becomes old after the passage of years, you either try to repair it or if that is too inconvenient and frustrating, you decide to sell the house and move into a new one. In the same way when you feel that you have not lived your life totally in the way you wanted to, you leave this body to take a new one. Your choice to start all over again is what is called death.

There is a beautiful story in the great Hindu epic, Mahabharata': The prince Yudhishtra" was asked by a yaksha (demigod), What is the most mysterious thing on planet earth? " Yudhishtra replied, "Every day so many lives are going to the abode of Yama, the lord of death, yet the people who stay here think they are going to live forever."

We always think that it is someone else who will die, not us. Death is truly the mystery of all mysteries.

There are only two things that are certain about death. One is that we will die at some point in time. The other is that it is uncertain when or how we will die. Everything that is born has to die. That is the nature of life.

A beautiful story from the life of Buddha:

Once a woman came with her dead son to Buddha. She was mad with grief at the death of her only son. She cried to Buddha, "Master please give me some medicine that will get my boy back to life." Buddha replied, "Get me a handful of mustard seed." The woman got up immediately and rushed to get a handful of mustard seed. Then Buddha added, "The mustard seed must be from a house where no one has lost a dear one — child, husband, parent, friend."

The woman went from house to house. Out of pity for the desperately crying woman, people gave her mustard seed from their house. But when she asked whether they had lost a dear one, they had someone or the other who had died in the house. She went from house to house till sunset but found no house where a death had not happened. Slowly the truth started dawning on her — death is inevitable. She buried her son"s body and returned to Buddha. She fell at the feet of Buddha and asked hinn, "Master please teach me the truth. What is death? What exists beyond death?"

She became Buddha"s disciple and allowed Buddha for the rest of her life.

There is a beautiful saying, 'Tomorrow or the next life, which comes first, we never know.' The topic of rebirth is not popular because it cannot be proven by science. Ofcourse, now Near Death Experience (NDE) has become a hot subject as many doctors and psychologists have recorded their experiences. There are many people who have recorded thousands ofNDEs, almost all of which fall into a similar pattern. They all relive the events of their lives. Hypnotists have regressed people into their past lives. These too fall into a pattern. They are similar to what the rishis said over 5000 years ago about what happens when you die, which is recorded in the Kathopanishad.

This incident is from the days of my spiritual journey before enlightenment.

I was near a small village in North Bharat called Ghaziabad, a place near Varanasi, the spiritual headquarters of Hindus. Hindus traditionally visit Varanasi at least once in their lifetime. The city has a floating population of at least two hundred thousand people every day.

I was there with an old monk who had been hospitalized and was in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). According to the vedic tradition, young monks take care of the elderly monks and sannyasis". As a young monk staying in that village, I started taking care of the elderly monk.

One day, while I was attending to him, suddenly it became obvious that the man in the bed next to his was about to die. He started struggling for life. I was able to see very clearly what was happening inside him. By that time I had had my deep spiritual experience or satori but I had not become fully enlightened; the realization of the purpose ofmy life had not happened. I was still seeking and my body was getting prepared for the explosion of energy that was to happen after enlightenment.

Several doctors were trying to give him critical medical care and support. The man was gasping for breath. I could see very clearly how death was happening in him. I could see very clearly how the life source was moving away from the body.

That is the strongest experience that has happened in my life outside my body. Inside my body, the strongest experience that happened was realizing the mission!

I was able to see what was happening, but I was not able to bear it. An important thing you should know is, if you see somebody in physical pain, it will affect you only about thirty to forty percent. But if you see somebody in depression and you can relate to the person and feel the depression, it will affect you more - say around sixty percent. Further, if it is emotional pain and if you are able to connect and understand the pain, it will affect you much more - about eighty percent. The more subtle the pain, the more you will be affected.

I saw not only the physical, mental or emotional pains of the dying man, but I also saw the being level pain. It was almost like I was going through the pain myself. I wanted to just run away from there but the elderly monk got afraid and just held my hand begging me to stay. I had been taking care of him for two to three months, so he had got really attached to me.

Since a young age, I have loved serving monks. I used to take food and clothes from my house and give it away to the monks! Serving monks has always been my passion. I have always felt that this whole vedic tradition is alive even today only because of such monks. They have kept this science alive.

For doing research in any science, you need great support in many areas. For example, in the West, a lot of research happens in the outer world science because there are people and organizations to support it. If it is research on medicines, a pharmaceutical company may support the research. If it is some research related to space and astronomy, the government may sponsor and support it.

In the same way, in Bharat, the whole country supports and sponsors spiritual science research. The whole country has taken up the responsibility to support an inner world scientist by providing him food, shelter and clothes so that he can continue his research in the inner world without spending time for basic outer world requirements. So I have always felt that it is my responsibility to take care of the monks and inner world scientists.

The elderly monk who I was taking care of in the ICU did not want me to leave because he was afraid seeing the man next to him dying. The man was going through such a hard time. It was like the whole six feet ofhis body was being torn apart! Imagine the pain if you have a small cut in your finger. Now imagine how painful it would be if the skin on your whole body is literally being peeled. It is something like a thousand scorpions stinging at the same time! I could clearly see the pain the man was going through.

On one side, the individual soul associated with all the unfulfilled emotions like desire, greed and guilt was undergoing terrible suffering. The individual soul wanted to stay in the body and fulfill these, but the body was tired and wanted to relax! It was a fight between the body and individual soul. It was as if the body wanted to leave but the individual soul was trying to hold onto it. If the right hand was gone, the soul was trying to hold onto the left. If the right leg was dead and gone, the

individual soul was trying to hold onto the left leg. Whichever part of the body it could hold on to, the individual soul was trying to hold onto it.

Part by part the body was dying. I saw that with the lower body there was not much struggle. But when it came to the upper body, the whole body was vibrating and pulsating with pain.

Slowly the individual soul started moving out of the physical body. Understand, when the breathing stops, that is the moment when the individual soul actually leaves the physical body. There are seven layers or bodies in you. The body of flesh, bones and blood that you see is the physical body. The energy moving in you as prana" or life energy is the pranic" body. There are five kinds of prana or air movements that happen in the body: air that enters into the body, air that circulates inside the body, air that spreads all over the body as life force, air that comes out of the body, and air that cleanses. These form the second body or the pranic" body.

The third body is the body where inner chatter continuously happens. Inner chatter is nothing but the continuous stream of words or thoughts that move within you.

The fourth body is made up of emotions like fear, anger and greed which spread as feelings all over the body without even words coming into play. An emotion by itself can simply shake you. This is the emotional layer.

The fifth layer is the body that you experience in deep sleep. This is where all the engraved memories or engrams are stored in the seed or causal level. The engrams are not active but they are not dead either. It is like a deep coma where you are neither living what you want nor are you dead. You are just stuck in this layer.

From the causal body, the individual soul moves to the cosmic body. The sixth layer is the cosmic body where you experience bliss. This is what continuously inspires you to be a seeker. If you are a seeker, understand that this layer is strong in you. If you enrich this layer, your life will be blissful. If you have any engram remaining in this layer, you will assume another body and come back.

If you continuously enjoy pleasurable experiences, then you are said to be in heaven. If you are stuck in pain, then you are said to be in hell. Depending on how much pain you experienced in life, you will stay that long in the pain body or hell at the time of death. Depending on how much pleasure you experienced in life, you will stay that long in the cosmic body or heaven. Hell and heaven are purely psychological. This is the truth. Based on what engrams you have, you experience heaven and hell. That is why different cultures visualize heaven in their own way - because heaven is not a place, it is an experience.

The seventh layer is the nirvanic" layer which corresponds to enlightenment.

At the time of death, there is a powerful fight between the owner or the individual soul and the object or the body. The object says, 'I am tired, I can't function any more.' The owner says, 'No, I want to use you.' When the object wins, the physical body dies and the individual soul moves to the next layer, the pranic body. This is the layer you are in when you normally dream. While dreaming, your logic loses its power over you but your desires remain active. The very definition of dream is the state where logic has no power but desires and engrams remain active. Even when you are unconscious or in coma, your logic will not be active.

As long as you are in the physical body, you will have desires with the logic to analyze whether the desires are needed or not and which one of the desires should be fulfilled etc. Desires are under your control; there is a balancing mechanism. But when the desires exist without the supporting logic, the individual soul will be kicked around like a football by the desires. On one side there will be guilt and on the other side, desires that play on the individual soul.

When I saw the man dying, I could see that the individual soul was slowly moving out layer by layer. I could see the soul suffering intensely when it went through the unfulfilled desires. The soul was literally being eaten by guilt when it realized, 'I did not fulfill the purpose and mission ofmy life.' Understand, you will remember the purpose of your birth only during death.

When you are born, your body travels through the birth canal of the mother, and because of the intense pain that you go through, you go into coma or the deepest unconscious state, and you forget the whole purpose of taking birth. It is like this: you booked the flight ticket and sat inside the aircraft also, but during the flight you were put in coma and so when you landed, you forgot all about why you came to that particular place! Only when you leave the place and board the flight again, you suddenly remember why you had come to that place!

In the same way, when you die, you feel the strong guilt of not fulfilling the purpose of your birth or what we call the prarabdha karma.

After passing through this guilt, next, all the pain experiences of your life will come up. So at the time of death, you first pass through physical pain, then through all desires, next through all guilt, then through all emotional pain and finally through all the pleasures that you experienced in this birth.

Normally, as soon as you reach the cosmic body or the sixth layer itself, you return to assume the next body, the next birth. That is, the individual soul returns to assume the next body. Sometimes, rarely, you go beyond the sixth layer into the nirvanic' body. Then you don't come back to assume another body.

When you travel through these various bodies and experience your unfulfilled desires, deep guilt and intense pain, you decide strongly, 'Let me take another body, another birth. When I do, I will not forget the purpose of my life and get caught in these illusive games. I will straightaway follow the path of Truth.' But when you actually take birth the next time, again because of the intense pain during birth, you drop into coma and forget all about your decision!

Finally, the man died. But the experience left a strong scar in me. It left a very strong impression in my mind. The fortunate thing was that the elderly monk became alright and he was discharged from the hospital. I continued my journey, and after a few months, I had my own death experience and I became enlightened, thus realizing the mission and purpose ofmy life. My life as a liberated being started at the age of twelve itself when I had my deep spiritual experience. But the clarity about the mission, and what was exactly going to happen through my body, dawned when I became enlightened.

After my enlightenment, I came back to South Bharat. I was in Bangalore in a devotee's house, healing people who sought me out. At that time, a devotee was admitted in the ICU and I was requested to heal him.

There again, while healing, the person in the bed next to the devotee started dying! The moment I saw that the person was about to die, the first thing I felt like doing was to move away from the suffering that was about to come! But the devotee was afraid and not ready to leave me!

Suddenly I saw that this person who was dying, was not going through any suffering like the earlier person. I was shocked, and I became very curious. Earlier, the movement of the individual soul from

layer to layer was great suffering and torture for it. But this soul was moving so smoothly from layer to layer just like how a knife moves through butter, or a snowball rolls down!

In the first layer or physical body, there was a little pain. Then suddenly the pain disappeared and the individual soul moved to the pranic layer. It moved from layer to layer like a royal guest! It was so empowered, that the desires, guilt and pain were not able to attack it at all. Even in the causal layer, it did not fall asleep. It was so energetic, and it finally entered the nirvanic layer, relaxed and just disappeared!

I thought that this person must be an evolved being. I asked his relatives whether he was a spiritual person or a meditator. The family was surprised and replied that the man had never meditated or done any spiritual practice in all his life! He had lived a completely materialistic life.

I contemplated as to why the first death I had witnessed was terrible while the second one was so wonderful. What I am about to tell you now is the honest and straight truth, and I am saying it because I have the great responsibility of telling it to you. When I meditated to know the difference between the two deaths, the revelation happened: at the time of the second death I was an enlightened person. The second person had died in the presence of an enlightened being! In the case of the first death, my presence could not help,because I could not radiate the energy of enlightenment at that time. So the first person died an ordinary death, while the second person died a wonderful death in the presence of an enlightened being who had realized the Truth.

When this revelation happened, I saw a deep compassion coming out of my being. I felt that if at all I can give this as a gift to every individual, my mission will be accomplished. A peaceful death is such a powerful and wonderful gift which nobody but an enlightened being can give. I started meditating as to how I can give this gift to everyone. Obviously I can't be in the ICU of all the hospitals and wait for people to die! I contemplated on the science behind the whole thing, and understood what really happens at the time of death.

Let me explain:

As long as you hold onto your ordinary logic and remain in the physical layer, the master is just a simple faith for you. The material world appears more solid and real. But when you travel to the deeper layers, the master becomes reality while the material world becomes vague and blurred.

It is like how during your night dream, the dream world looks real and the waking world looks vague, whereas when you are awake, that is when you are with a higher consciousness, the dream world becomes imagination while the waking world becomes reality. In the dream state, the dream world that you see appears alive, like a 4D colour film! When you come out of the dream, the whole dream appears black and white.

In the same way, if you are raised to a still higher consciousness, this waking world will become dull, while things like spiritual truths and the master will become alive and real! When you disconnect from the body and rise into higher consciousness, the master and the superconscious energy will become a gross reality.

When the second death happened, the intense enlightened presence straightaway caused him to connect strongly to it.

Understand, as you sit now and here, what is stopping you from connecting with the enlightened energy of the master and merging with it? Only your own logic and reasons. As you sit here, there are still doubts in your unconscious like, If I drop my possessions and surrender, the master may take it away!' The other problem is, presently, as of now all other things in this world also appear as reality, and you think the master is also real to that same depth.

You experience me as the same frequency as the rest of the material world. In the case of the second dying person, all his outer world things became inaccessible to him at the time of death. He could not

sign his checkbook or drive his car! Whatever was holding him back in the material world was automatically being taken away from him. When he looked around, only I, the enlightened energy was there! He saw the strong light energy and just held on to me! The surrender automatically happened to him because I was there at that moment. Even in his case, if he had seen me while he was alive, he may have struggled to surrender and connect to me! Only when everything was taken away from him, there was nothing to hold him back from connecting to me.

There is a beautiful story in the Bhagavatam' which is a beautiful account of the enlightened master Krishna's life: There was once a rich devotee. He asked Krishna, I want more wealth and possessions.' Krishna granted him his wish. There was also a poor lady, who had a cow and a small house. Krishna once visited her house, ate the food she served, blessed her and left. That very same day, her cow died.

Somebody asked Krishna about the strange happening of how a rich person got more wealth while the poor lady was deprived of her only source of income!

Krishna beautifully explains, 'The king was already in heavy illusion of the material world. So I gave him what he wanted so that he will ultimately get tired of material things and turn towards enlightenment. In the case of the poor lady, there was only one thing that she really wanted, and that was to connect to Me. And the only thing that was stopping her from that was the cow. I took away the cow so that she could completely merge into Me!'

In the same way, in the case of the second death, the cow was taken away. In the physical layer, the man was not able to connect. But in the pranic layer, the consciousness entered a different space, and the man was able to clearly see me there.

The master's presence is such an intense light. It is much stronger and of a higher frequency than this world, just like how this world is ofa higher frequency than your dream world.

The man realized that there is something of a higher frequency and he completely surrendered to it. When he surrendered, all his other engraved memories lost their power over him. The individual consciousness became empowered. Desires, guilt, pain, pleasure, everything bowed down. Straightaway, the individual soul's frequency increased.

Understand, when the seer is strong, the seen has no power over you. This is the science of death.

In the case of the first death, the seen was stronger than the seer. In the second death, the seer was stronger than the seen.

I intensely meditated how to transmit this science to people. Suddenly, a revelation happened to me. Understand, energy is not constrained by space and time. It is just like the satellite waves that are present in space. If you have a set-top box converter, you can see the channel that you tune into. An enlightened master's energy pervades the whole cosmos. I just need to place the set-top box in people. It is like a pacemaker, just that this is a peacemaker! Once it is placed, the person can connect to it while leaving the body.

There is a beautiful story in the Upanishads', the sacred Vedic texts: A rishi called Jadabharatha somehow became attached to a deer he had rescued. He was living the life of a renunciate but he got attached to this deer.

From morning till night, he used to spend his time taking care of that deer. When he was dying, he was not able to forget the animal. He started worrying about the deer "Oh! Who will take care of the deer? What will happen to it after my death?" When he died, in the next birth, he was born as a deer.

Beautifully the verse in the Upanishad says that whatever you think in your last moment - you become that!

Some people think very cleverly, 'Let me live my whole life the way I want to live. In the last few moments, I will remember god and chant His name and enter heaven somehow.' Please be very clear, only that which you thought of in your whole life, will come up when you leave the body. Don't think that at that last moment you can play the game! No!

Actually, when you leave the body your whole system will be in such agony, because 80 or 90 years of your life will be run through in a fast-forward mode. All that will be seen are the scenes being fastforwarded. Whatever experience you had intensely, only that will come up before you. Your spiritual experiences will come up in multicolor.

Please understand that 'thoughtless awareness' is the strongest experience you can have in your life. Even for a single moment, if you had that experience, it is enough. Naturally, when you leave the body that will come up. That will act as a light and you will be able to move into the Consciousness.

I always used to think that I should have an experience of death, that I should face death directly. But somehow, that thought never became a priority. For any experience to happen, the related thought has to become the topmost priority. It should not just be in one corner of your mind. Usually on our "to do lists, we have washing, cleaning, paying the rent and phone bill, and finally if time perm its, enlightenment also! No! Enlightenment will not happen if it is this way. Only when it becomes a top priority, only when the urge becomes urgent, everything around you will start aligning itself for the experience to happen in you. This is the case not just with enlightenment. With anything, it is true.

Understand, if at all you are complaining that what you wish to happen is not happening, it is because it has not become the topmost on your priority list, nothing else. Nothing else and no one else should be blamed for it. You will see that the moment it becomes the topmost priority, there will be an energy play that comes into being and it will simply happen. Until then, it will wait for you, that's all. The death experience was not my top priority and so somehow, it was getting postponed.

In my wandering days, I had been to Varanasi, the holy city for Hindus, which has an estimated 300,000 daily floating population. Further, every day around 100 dead bodies are estimated to be burnt in a place called Manikarnika Ghat on the banks of the sacred river Ganga". It is traditionally believed that of somebody dies or somebody's body is burnt in that area, they will be liberated. They will have direct enlightenment.

It is not just a traditional belief. THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM confirms it with his own experience. He says, "I saw very clearly Shiva" himself going near every burning body, taking the soul, unclutching it from the body-mind and liberating it! " So, you can't say that it is a mythological belief. It is a solid experience of an enlightened master.

I had the fortune of going to Manikarnika Ghat. Traditionally, it is not only believed, but it is true that for the last 2000 years, the fire that is used to light the pyres has never been put off.

Whether it rains or shines or floods, people never bring fire when they come with the dead body to Manikarnika Ghat. The fire will already be burning there and they will just take it to light the dead body, that's all. The fire just continuously burns the bodies as they arrive. Sometimes I would see that two to three bodies are burnt at the same time, so many bodies keep coming!

Especially in the evenings, the bodies will be more in number. From the place where the person dies they will walk carrying the dead body, chanting mantras 'such as, "Ram naam satya hai, Ram naam satya hai (Lord Rama's name is the ultimate and eternal truth). By evening they will reach manikarnika Ghat.

The scene there, the very experience of just being there, I cannot describe to you verbally. You have to be there to experience it!

To tell you honestly, by just being there, the fear of death just disappeared from my system. You see so many bodies continuously being burned every day. You feel, "I am also going to go like this one day...all right", that's all! You feel there are so many people giving you company! It is like one more trip that you make, that's all. You don't feel lonely about death at all.

In your life, you may see one or two bodies being burnt, so you still have the fear of death. But at Manikarnika Ghat, there will be no ritual done. They will bring the body and straightaway dip it in the river Ganga' three times while chanting, "Ram naam satya hai, Ram naam satya hai, Ram naam satya hai". By this time, the fire will be ready, and the wood will be arranged. They will bring the body straight from the water and burn it, that's all!

One strange thing that you see there is that none of the relatives will stay there and do any further rituals. The moment they dip the body in the Ganga' and place the body for burning, they will go away, that's all! The people who maintain the ghat will take care of the rest. You will not know how long it will take for the body that you brought to be burnt completely. There will be a queue and bodies will be burning continuously.

I thought to myself, "Let me try to sit here and see what goes on." I sat at the Ghat. In just an hour's time, I felt that death is no more a strange incident which happens once in a while only for some relative or friend. I was sitting there watching bodies arriving one after another. It was like any other queue, that's all. Different sizes, genders, ages, and communities of people arrived to be consumed by the same burning flame. When you continuously see dead bodies being burnt you actually lose respect for death! As of now, you have too much respect, too many ideas about death. That is the problem. Death is actually nothing but this. The breath that goes inside the body doesn't come out, that's all. Nothing much can be done about it. Neither can you rewind it nor fast-forward it. As I was watching this scene continuously, initially the little fear that I had about death also disappeared and slowly it actually became interesting to watch. I went near the people who maintain the fire and started helping them. As I was helping them, I was thinking to myself, "After all, one day this body of mine is also going to become like this dead body that is burning now."

When you remember that death is going to happen to you, the respect that you carry for your ego will come down. Because, whenever you think that something should leave you, it is just the ego, nothing else. When you know for sure that everything is going to leave you, then the respect for the ego just drops drastically. The respect I had for my ego just dropped from me.

Then I decided, "After all I am going to die. Either I should have a conscious death experience now itself and live the rest of my life without the death-fear or really die, that's all. "I decided that I have to see death happening to me one way or the other.

There was a small Shiva temple around the corner and a small tower above the temple. I went and sat in that tower so that nobody would disturb me. I sat in that tower and from there I started seeing the dead bodies being burnt.

I still remember the strong click, the deep understanding and instant realization that triggered the whole experience that was to follow. An elderly lady's body was being burnt. She had a big belly. Her clothes were being consumed by the fire and then the fat that was in the belly started melting and flowing. Sorry for describing this so vividly but I have to explain the strong experience! I could see clearly that because of the fat flowing, the fire was burning with even more intensity. That gave a very strong click to me and I said, "God! Yes, the very same thing is going to happen to this body also!"

That click opened up a deep fear of death inside me. The fear spread all over the body. But I faced the fear consciously. I could see very clearly the fear spreading all over the body, and when the fear hit my awareness, that became the experience of death. I went through a conscious experience of my own death and came out of it.

Understand, whenever your fear is suppressed, it stays inside you. Whenever the fear comes out and you are not consciously facing it, it becomes a fear stroke, and shakes your whole nervous and breaks it down. When the fear is faced consciously, it becomes the death experience, that's all!

I was able to see very clearly the fear that arose. When I faced it consciously with awareness, it became my death experience. The body was dead. It was not moving. For two and a half days I had no food, no water no thought, no question, no doubt. The body alone was there. Only after the experience had passed, I realized that I had been like that for two and a half days! I could see with closed eyes that the body was dead and there was no movement. Suddenly, after two and a half days, the click happened again, "God! The body is dead but I still exist! I am there! That clarity, when it clicked, became such an intense ecstasy in me! The fear of death had left me once and for all.

I was in such deep ecstasy, such joy, and such bliss! I slowly opened my eyes and I was able to move the body. The first thing I felt was such a surge of ecstasy and gratitude. I went down to the Ganga, sprinkled a little Ganga water on myself, took the Ganga water in the kamandalu, took ash from the fire, and went straight to the Kashi Vishwanath temple. I went up to the Shiva linga, offered the ash I had brought and did the puja (worship) with such inexpressible gratitude. I saw that Vishwanath was simply alive there!

Understand, because I died Vishwanath became alive! Until the day before that, because I was still alive, Vishwanath was always an ordinary stone. I used to feel that to touch this stone, thousands of people are coming every day from so far away... what foolishness! I always felt that the Vishwanath deity was an ordinary stone. I felt that way because I was still alive. When I died, I saw clearly, He became alive!

Only one can be alive, either Him or you. When you see the Truth, He will become alive. You will not be alive anymore as you now think. The fear of death left me once and for all. I can say that this is one of the very strong experiences that transformed me to search for the ultimate experience of enlightenment.

Only an enlightened being, a person who has gone through death consciously and come back anew, can exactly explain what happens during death.

I am going to reveal the mystery of death now. This may be surprising, even shocking to many of you. But this is the truth. Whether you believe it or not, accept it or not, this is what happens at the time of death.

We do not just have one body. The physical body is just one of the seven bodies we have. It is only the gross body that can be felt and seen in space-time. However, we actually have seven layers or bodies or planes of existence. Since these layers have a subtle existence they cannot be seen or felt by the ordinary eye

A simple representation of the seven bodies is shown below.

Each of the bodies holds a corresponding emotion. For example, the pranic body holds all the desires that arise in life. The mental body holds all the feelings of guilt experienced in life. The etheric body holds the experiences of mental pain felt in life.

When the spirit leaves the body it crosses all the seven body layers. The physical body dies. But, the remaining six bodies do not totally die. If you are holding a lot of desires in your life, all those unfulfilled desires are held in the pranic body. So even though the physical body dies, the pranic body does not die. When the life force leaves the pranic body, the being experiences tremendous suffering.

When you leave the physical body, your consciousness will be torn from the body and you will immediately fall into coma. According to doctors, coma is the automatic mechanism to make you not to feel the pain. It is automatic anesthesia. If the pain becomes too much, you can't bear and you automatically fall into coma.

When you move from the first body layer to the second body layer, all the unfulfilled desires, all the ways in which you wanted to live but did not live come up. When this happens, it is almost as if ten people are standing in a room kicking a football around. What will happen? Just like how the football is kicked from corner to corner, your consciousness will be kicked from all corners. In each corner, some desire will be standing and kicking it. At the time your consciousness is trying to leave the body, all your desires will be forcing you to re-enter the body so that you can enjoy them further and fulfill them.

On one side, the desires will be forcing you to enter the body again so that you can live and enjoy, while on the other side, the body will say, 'No! I am tired. I can't host you anymore, just leave!' That is what causes the pulling and pushing at the time of death. The pulling and pushing is nothing but the fight between your desires and your body.

Somehow, you manage to move away from the pranic body, and enter next into the mental body. When you enter into the mental body all your guilt rises. All the guilt about the way you felt you should have lived your life but never lived, all the mistakes committed, all the regrets, everything comes up.

Please understand desire is about the future and guilt is about the past. But actually, both are one and the same. The way in which we want to live is desire, and the way in which we wanted to live but didnt, is guilt. Guilt is nothing but reviewing our past decisions with updated intelligence. Like this, step by step, you move through different body layers.

The less the unfulfilled desires, the lighter is the pranic body and the easier it is to leave this body. Similarly, the less the guilt, the lighter is the mental body and the easier it is to leave this body.

One more thing, when the desires, guilt and pain are less intense, you not only have an easy death with less suffering but you also age gracefully. Ageing gracefully 1S what vanaprastha sannyas" is all about. Being able to live in fulfillment in the latter part of life is the tremendous gift of vanaprastha sannyas".

All the guilt that we collect over our lives rises as we pass through the mental body. Then we come to the etheric body which is related to all our sufferings. All the suffering that we went through during our life is stored here.

The first four bodies are related to the physical body-mind system. They store all the engrams related to desires, guilt and pain experienced during that lifetime. The fifth body is experienced during deep sleep and when leaving the body. The sixth body is associated with happy memories and the seventh body is beyond sorrows and happiness, the ultimate consciousness.

Please understand, even attachment to happy memories brings us back into the cycle of birth and death. The desire to experience more and more similar incidents that are happy and joyful pulls us back and we take more births.

Happiness is a temporary feeling created by the mind. Bliss, the seventh body, is the true reality. It is the causeless, unending happening inside you of spontaneous energy, joy and auspiciousness. It is like a fountain that continuously happens inside you for no reason.

Actually, the reason your favorite candy gives you happiness is that it acts as a trigger to put you into this space of bliss that is your true nature. But you mistake the happiness to be because of the candy, the external object. The happiness is because for those few moments, you come in touch with your inner bliss.

The cleaner the bodies, the lighter they are and the easier it is for the life force to leave the body. Just like its peel comes off a ripe banana, the life force easily moves out of the body.

In the seven bodies, the first four bodies - physical, pranic, mental and etheric, collapse into the causal body every time you go to sleep. The darkness of the causal body is associated with the deep sleep state, which is what rejuvenates you every day. So till you cross the fifth body, this 'death' happens every day. This is what happens when you fall into your daily sleep.

When the departing spirit moves beyond the fifth layer of causal body into the sixth layer, which is the cosmic body, the process of death is complete.

If the life force does not have to take another body to fulfill its remaining desires it then enters the seventh layer of nirvanic body, which is enlightenment. If the life force has to come back assuming another body to fulfill its desires, it is death.

One more thing: when you enter into the dream state and start dreaming, this whole world in which you live now becomes black and white because you are in the dream world. You forget this whole

world of your waking state and the dream world becomes very real and seen in multicolor. If you come out of the dream, this whole world that you wake up to is again seen in four dimensions, 4D.

Now when you are in this physical body and in the waking state, you experience this world as 4D, in multi-color. When you are in the dream world, you experience that world as 4D. So, when you are here, the dream world becomes black and white, and this world becomes 4D, and when you are there, the dream becomes 4D, and this world becomes black and white.

In the same way, when you move away from the physical body to the pranic body at the time of death, this whole physical world will become unreal and be seen in black and white. All your achievements, your pride, your efforts, your sorrow, your happiness, everything will no longer have any meaning and will appear in black and white. You will wonder, 'Why did I do all this work? Why did I think of all this as a base for my life?'

Let me explain why this happens. When you are alive you invest in your personality. You build up your personality based upon a few pillars - money, name and fame, relationships, pride that you have a big community, support circle, and so on.

When you move from the physical body, all these pillars, all these foundations will be completely shaken. You can't sign your name on your checks any more. Your signature is not accepted. Your bank balance is no more related to you. You can't handle your bank account. Your car will not be useful to you. At the most, only the ambulance will be useful!

Only the conscious glimpse can come with you. Whatever has been the foundation for your being will be shaken. When the foundation is shaken, naturally you won't have anything to hold on to.

As of now, this whole world will appear in 4D. All this talk about spirituality, meditation, growing the inner being, consciousness etc. will appear as black and white. That is why, when I call people for meditation, they tell me, 'I don't have time to meditate. Let me finish all my work and then come. I have a few more years to think about it.'

Be very clear, never say, 'I don't have time to meditate.' Be very clear to yourself and say, 'I don't feel that it is that important in my life right now.' If you are not ready to meditate and say, 'I don't think meditation is so important in my life, then you are honest. But if you say, 'I don't have time, then you are just fooling yourself. Everyone has got the same 24 hours on hand to do what they feel they should. It is not that the few who are meditating are jobless. It is just a question of priority, of what you really want in your life. If spirituality and meditation appear as black and white to you now, you will not divert your energy in that area, that's all.

There is a beautiful Zen saying, 'Learning the art of dying is the real and the ultimate knowledge that we can learn in our life.' A small Zen story:

One day, an enlightened master suddenly declared that he was going to die the next day morning around 6 o"clock. Of course, enlightened people always know about their death. They can declare beforehand when they are going to die. He declared that he was going to die around 6 o"clock in the morning.

His disciples said, "No, no, please wait for 2-3 hours. It will be too cold early in the morning. Why don"t you wait for a few hours so that we can prepare for the last rites?" The master agreed and told the disciples that he would pass away around 12 o"clock. Exactly at 12 noon, he greeted them all and left the body

The great master from Bharat, Paramahamsa Yogananda", had moved to USA in 1920 and settled there. How he left the body is very interesting. Till the last moment he was doing his routine of giving discourses and attending programs.

On the day of his passing away, he was attending a banquet in honor of the then visiting Hindu Ambassador to USA, Binay Ranjan Sen, in Los Angeles. At the conclusion of his speech, he just relaxed from his body and died.

His body did not deteriorate for more than twenty days. No odor of decay came from his dead body at any time. There is a beautiful write-up about his death in his autobiography as an appendix. It was such a beautiful experience. Even his death was auspicious for him.

You see, now we are in two dimensions, the material world and spirituality. Right now, what is happening is that however many pillars we build our personalities and life upon, all those pillars are based on the material world which appears to be 4D. Not a single pillar is based on consciousness or our inner space. Our whole personality is built only based on the outer space - our name and fame, what society speaks about us, etc. If everyone's opinion of us is that we are great, we think we are great. If everybody says, 'You are useless', we start getting depressed.This happens because not even a single pillar of our building, our inner core or our being, is based on spirituality. The entire structure is based on the outer space. That is the reason that when those pillars are shaken by anybody, we start suffering terribly. If we have even one pillar based on consciousness, we can depend on that to stand straight without suffering. If we build at least one pillar based on our inner space, this pillar will shine in 4D at the time of death and help us leave the body beautifully.

You are not the eyes. The eyes are just an instrument. Many times you can see, your eyes may be open but you are not seeing, not registering the scene you are seeing.

Just remember you are seeing through the eyes. If you look through the eyes, suddenly you will see you are witnessing everything. You are not the two 'holes' called the eyes. You are only seeing through the two holes called eyes.

If you feel you are the two eyes, you are caught in ego. In your dream, as long as the attention is on the objects, you will continue to dream. When your attention is turned towards yourself— that is from the seen to the seer, you will be awakened.

The moment you realize you are something beyond the eyes, your attention is turned to the seer. Then you realize that this world is made of the same stuff of which your dream is made.

As long as you think you are seeing, the whole attention is on the seen. That is what I call ego. When you step back and realize you are seeing through the eyes, the whole attention is on the seer. That is what I call innocence. Innocence means having a clear understanding that whatever you see in the outer world is made of the same stuff out of which your dreams are made.

These are the steps: the first is getting the idea that what you see is a dream. The next is having the shakti, the energy, to change the dream. The third is the buddhi, the intelligence to know it is a dream and so there is no need to change it!

To understand this powerful, life- transforming truth, we need to understand about this stuff of which the dream world and this world are made of. We need to know about prāṇa, the life energy that sustains us.

Understand, the air you breathe is just a vehicle in which the prāṇa comes in and goes out. Prāṇa is the life force, the energy itself. Understand this one example. If a truck comes inside this campus and leaves something and goes out, the truck is like the air, the breath. The product that is delivered is prāṇa.

One more thing: as long as the incoming breath is bringing in more prāṇa and going out as an empty vehicle, your life will be strengthened.

If the reverse starts happening, if the air comes with less prāṇa and goes out with more prāṇa, it means death is nearing or the life energy is going towards death. When death nears, just the empty air will enter but when it goes out, it will go with the prāṇa

There is a beautiful concept in Āyurveda called as the 'peak age' which is based on this science of prāṇa. Till a particular age, the person will be receiving more prāṇa through the incoming breath and less prāṇa will be going out through the outgoing breath. The moment the outgoing breath starts carrying more prāṇa than the incoming breath, they know now the person is moving towards death.

Constantly, life is slipping and entering into death. Life slipping into death is what we usually call living. Please understand, actually we don't live. We are just waiting for death to happen. Ordinary human beings don't live. Life just slips into death, disappears into death. That is the reason however many years you may live, you don't feel satisfied, and you don't feel you have lived your life because you don't even know what life is.

When you become conscious of life, when you start thinking, contemplating about your life, when you bring awareness into your life, you create a new center in your being. Between this life and death, when you bring more awareness into the life, you create a new center, a new space in your life - that is what I call consciousness Whenever you are conscious, you will start deciding about your life. For example, the more you become aware, the more you start designing or choosing what type of car you should drive, what type of house you

should live in, and what type of life you want. You start deciding every inch. You become conscious about everything: how you should talk, how you should behave, how you should think, every inch you start becoming aware.

The moment you start becoming aware, you start deciding, and you start controlling your life. When you become completely aware you will start controlling your death also.

These two events of life and death then happen at the conscious level. If you are consciously thinking, it is life. If your consciousness can't think, it is death.

In the unconscious level, two things happen as well, dream and deep sleep. In the unconscious level, if you are aware, it is dream. If you are able to see anything, if you are able to sense anything, if you are able to feel anything, if you are able to experience any movement, then it is called dream. If you are not aware of anything, if you are not able to feel anything, if you are not able to understand any movement, it is deep sleep.

In the waking state, when you are aware or you are in what psychology calls as conscious state, it is life. If you are not aware, it is death. When you bring more awareness into your life, you take charge of your life. In the same way, in the dream, if you start bringing in more awareness, you will take charge of your dreams and deep sleep.

Controlling life and death and controlling dream and deep sleep both require one important condition: awareness. Awareness Is the main requirement to control life and death and to control dream and deep sleep.

Bringing awareness into your dreams can not only help you control the dream and deep sleep, it can also help you control life and death.

The moment you start moving towards the dream state, the prana starts coming towards the vishuddhi', throat center. The more you move towards the deep sleep state, it moves towards the anahata', heart center.

It is the same in the case of life and death as well. The more you are alive and energetic, the more the prana accumulates and gets centered in the forehead.

When the incoming breath is bringing more prana and the outgoing breath is going empty your prana will be centered on the forehead. If the incoming breath is getting less prana and the outgoing breath is taking more prana, slowly the prana will slip into vishuddhi", throat center. If the incoming breath is not bringing Prana at all and only the outgoing breath is taking the prana, you will fall completely into the heart center.

Actually, falling from life to death, falling from the waking state to the deep sleep state, are both directly related to prana movement. If the prana movements of inhalation and exhalation are handled properly, you can handle life and death as well as dream and deep sleep. Dream and sleep, life and death can all be handled by this single key, single thread called prana.

If you can be aware when you fall into the dream state, when your consciousness is slowly fading away, when you are falling asleep, you will be able to change the dream itself.

If you are able to you be very clear, the first thing you will do is you will stop dreaming. You will stop dreaming because you know the uselessness of dreams. You know you are wasting time and energy in dreams. Person who is aware of dreams will never dream. He will simply stop dreaming.

Person who is aware of life will simply stop the cycle of birth and death. He will not take one more body.

You need to understand this: when I use the word death, I don't mean you will commit suicide. When I say that when you become aware of life you enter into death, it does not mean that you will commit suicide. You will stop living in the normal way. You will stop living with identity. You won't give importance to identity. You will be reborn.

If you can be aware when the prana falls into the heart center every day, you can stop, alter and manage your dreams and deep sleep. If you are aware of prana slipping from ajna to anahata" each time you go to sleep, it means that at the end of the life you will be able to change your life and death. If you want, you can bring it a little early. If you want, you can postpone. You can play in whatever way you want.

This technique has two parts: one that you do when you fall asleep, when you are lying in the bed and the second one that you do whenever you can remember during the whole day. The first one will create more energy to do the second part and vice versa. They are complementary to each other.

First part: when you lie down, before falling asleep, just remember the area near the ajna chakra' or the third eye, the center of the forehead. Do not concentrate. If you force yourself, if you start concentrating, your sleep will be disturbed and you will have a headache. Just remember that area in a relaxed way, the way you look at a flower, just casually. Slowly, you will see that you are relaxing, you are slowly dropping into the deep sleep state.

Just be aware of this movement into deep sleep, that is enough. First day, you may feel that you are not falling asleep at all and that your sleep is getting delayed by ten or fifteen minutes. Don't bother about it. Just be aware of the prana movement in the ajna chakra'.

You will be aware that you are dreaming. If you want to continue the dream, you will continue. If you don't feel like it, you will come out. There will be no intensity to the dream.

The next step, you will start having the dreamless sleep. That is the deeper level. Once you start having the dreamless sleep you will also start having the dreamless day.

Dreamless day means that your energy will be conserved without day-dreaming.

If you are aware of the prana, that is enough. It will automatically come back to the higher energy, and your body will heal itself as the flow of prana is directly related to all your diseases. Above all, when you are able to change your dream, when you are able to handle your dream, you will have the intense power and energy to handle the incidents of your life.

Our second level meditation program, LBP Level 2-NSP journeys you through your own life, simultaneously revealing the secrets of death. It makes your inner space pure and clean by unloading the baggage of emotions that you usually carry with you. It teaches you to live blissfully and leave peacefully. It puts death in the right perspective so that your life becomes more joyful and meaningful.

It is opening up your energy layers one by one. Your pains, pleasures, guilt and desires are opened up. Once these open up and get healed, you experience a glimpse of god within you.

To be free from the fear of death, which is really the fear of losing our identity, we need to be aware that we are something more than this body and mind. We need intelligence to understand this. We then come to these questions: What exactly is intelligence?

Are some of us more intelligent than others? Can we increase the level of our intelligence?

Intelligence is not something to attain; every single being is endowed with intelligence. Every one of us has intelligence. It is an inherent, inborn quality of life just as fire is hot and ice is cold.

I am reminded of a joke on 'intelligent' people:

Once there were four men travelling in a private airplane. Suddenly, there was an emergency as the tail of the aircraft caught fire. Unfortunately for the four passengers, there were only three parachutes available.

The first person in a panic took a parachute saying, "I just got married. My wife is waiting for me."And he jumped. The second person declared, "I am the most intelligent person on earth. Planet earth needs my intelligence. " He jumped as well. One of the passengers was an old man, he told the other remaining person, "I am old already but you have your whole life ahead of you. You take this parachute and jump." The young man quipped, "You can also come, Sir. We can both go. The most intelligent person on planet earth just jumped off with my back-pack!"

Most ofus have lost touch with our natural intelligence; that is why we are not able to live life to its fullest potential. We mistake our acquired knowledge for intelligence; we are like the man who jumped with the backpack as a parachute!

Every single being in nature has been endowed with inherent intelligence. Birds have a natural intelligence that enables them to fly. It is amazing to see the migratory birds travel thousands of miles in the sky - with no map or guide and retrace their paths back when the season changes!

Patanjali, an enlightened master from Bharat and father of the ancient science of Yoga, says that man has in him the intelligence of all the lower forms of consciousness such as the trees, birds and animals.

Man has the capacity to produce food just like trees. He has the capacity to live by himself right from the time he is born - just like animals and birds. By nature we have all the intelligence in our human body. The difficulty is we strongly believe we are limited. We have been conditioned to think that we have only limited capabilities, that 'we cannot.' so we have forgotten how to use these capabilities. And because of this, we are not tuned to the technique to tap into all the dimensions of our being.

A small story:

One boy came back from school and told his mother "You said the school dentist would be painless but he was not!" His mother became worried and asked him, "Did he hurt you?"The boy replied, "No, but he screamed when I bit his finger!"

Children are born intelligent. They are so spontaneous and enthusiastic. But the family, society and conventional school destroy the natural intelligence within the child with the undue importance they pay to logic, memory and competition. The price the child pays for education is too heavy as he sacrifices his priceless creativity and uniqueness and he is not even aware of it.

The other day, I read a statement on a teenager's T-shirt, I was intelligent until education ruined me.'

Allow your complete being to simply express itself - and you will see your natural intelligence flowering beautifully. This is what I call being integrated and fulfilled.

We think we are very intelligent and so we try to mould our children to become intelligent like us. When we start this process, we first teach the child the logic of running in life driven by either fear or greed.

Either he has to do something to achieve more, or he has to do something to prevent what he doesn't want to happen. When you want something to happen, it is greed. When you are afraid that something will happen, it is fear.

Either he has to study so he can get better grades and win admission in a good college - this is being driven by greed. Or he has to study so he is not left behind in his future professional life - this is being driven by fear.

The motivation for the child is greed or fear, never inner fulfillment. Naturally, the child gets into the rat race and just keeps running - with no time to even look whether he is running for what he really wants. He does not even know that he can enjoy the run! He has been taught that with any other diversion, precious time will be wasted in reaching the goal.

But how many people have felt fulfilled after reaching the 'goal'? When you reach the goal you have set, you realize the goalpost is no longer there. It has moved further and you want something else now!

Understand, if you are living your life based on just seeing what others are doing, you are just wasting your precious life. This is what they call 'herd mentality' — joining the rat race because everybody else is a part of it. You may even win the rat race but you are still a rat!

Can we measure intelligence? Is there a standard to measure intelligence? Right from school, we use standard benchmarks to determine a person's so-called level of intelligence. In the grading system used from elementary school through college, we compare and grade all children for various skills and aptitudes.

We need to understand an important thing here: one kind of intelligence is needed to be a scientist and another kind of intelligence is needed to be a poet. To be an Olympic swimmer one needs yet another kind of intelligence! Intelligence is the ability to respond to a situation or challenge. Everyone is born intelligent; it is a question of just discovering each one's unique dimension of intelligence

You have a natural, spontaneous intelligence inside you. You have tasted it as a child. As a child, you looked at things in a very simple, straightforward way. That is why you were so spontaneous. What took away that spontaneity as you grew up? The societal conditioning that has been telling you right from when you were a child, 'You are not enough...' Because of this, you are constantly trying to become something else, prove something to others. By constantly thinking that you are not enough, you try to imitate others and waste the wonderful natural energy bubbling inside you.

I read one funny one liner on a company's notice board Death will be accepted as an excuse, but we would like two weeks notice, as we feel it is your duty to teach someone your job prior to your death. Note: this new benefit program began yesterday.

If you blindly imitate another person's performance or behavior instead of acting from your own inner spontaneity, your own intelligence, you will be cheating yourself out of wonderful possibilities.

Once there was a statistics student who, while driving, would always accelerate before coming to any junction, and then drive fast past the junction and slow down again once he passed the junction.

One day, he was travelling with his friend. They passed a junction in his usual way. The friend asked him in surprise, "Why do you drive so fast across junctions when you are actually supposed to slow down?"

Th e statistics student rep lied, Well, statistically speaking, you are more likely to have an accident at a junction, so I just make sure I spend less time there!"

Knowledge is good only when applied intelligently. It is intelligence that gives the real result, not the knowledge itself. When knowledge is applied in the right place at the right time, it is intelligence. Spontaneity is when we easily express our knowledge in the right place at the right time; in other words, using our intelligence.

One boy was learning a lot of new things at school and home. One day, he told the teacher "Yesterday I killed three female and two male flies. The curious teacher asked, "How did you know which were males and which were females?" The boy replied, "Simple. Three of them were on the mirror and two were on the cigarette box!"

Intelligence is being aware and spontaneous. Understand an important thing: when you are deeply aware, you cannot make mistakes!

With awareness, you don't rely on what others have taught you. You don't rely on the past conditioning that has gone on inside you for many years. You act just out of the fresh intelligence that comes with awareness.

The light of awareness is enough to remove the darkness created by years of living by habit. The whole key lies in being aware so that your intelligence can function. Living every moment in total awareness is what meditation is all about.

Once, a sergeant in his training session asked the recruits why walnut wood was used for making the rifie. The recruits thought hard and one of them answered, "Because walnut is harder than other types of nuts." The sergeant brushed him off saying, Wrong! " Ano ther recru it ventured, "Because it is more durable."The sergeant"s voice boomed, "Wrong!"A third person tried his luck, "Because it is waterproof." The sergeant, tired of the answers by now, replied, "You boys surely have a lot to learn. Simple reason. that is what is laid down in the rule book!"

In life, because it is easy to place responsibility on others, you blindly follow other people's directions instead of relying on your own intelligence.

Talking about responsibility, a small joke on how people understand responsibility:

Once, a convict was scolding his lawyer "You are a useless lawyer. You don"t even understand your responsibility of when to raise an objection." The puzzled lawyer asked him, "I don't understand. When do you think I should have raised an objection that I did not?" The convict replied, "When the opposing lawyer spoke, you objected. But, when the judge declared me guilty, you kept your big mouth shut. That was the time to do all the objecting!"

It is always easy to put the blame on the whole world for what happens in your life. But, if you just look a little deeper, you can see how you are completely responsible for what is happening in your life!

Being intelligent requires the effort to be yourself, which you are not used to. So you choose to react based on your past experiences.

Usually, we only react like programmed machines; we do not respond to situations. Someone insults you and you become angry even before becoming aware of what you are doing.

A beautiful story from the life of Buddha, an enlightened master from Bharat:

Once a person insulted Buddha openly. His disciple Ananda said, "I was getting so angry with the person. Why did you keep quiet? At least I would have given him a piece of my mind." Buddha calmly replied, "You surprise me. What he was saying was comp lete1y irrelevant and you know that. Then why are you getting angry? You are punishing yourself. It is foolishness. When somebody else has made the mistake, why are you suffering for it?"

Moving with time, flowing with life, becoming a fluid process instead of being a solid ego is called intelligence.

Once, a father and son checked into a cheap motel at night. The father tucked in the son to sleep and switched off the light assuring the son, "Don't be afraid son. The angels are watching over you. "

"I know, "said the boy. "Two of them just bit me! "

Operating with intelligence is the process of going back to the innocence you were born with. It is not a process of becoming. It is not attaining something new; it is discovering your very being. It is the true door to knowing you as you truly are.

When you are intellectual, you operate purely from the head, from logic.

A man was working on his doctorate in philosophy. He was so involved in his studies and research, his wife thought he would forget her if he was not reminded of her once in a while. So one day, she casually mentioned to him, "Honey, what is the one reason you love me so much? " The man asked very seriously, "When you say "so much "are you referring to the depth, quality, quantity or mode of expression?

When you are too caught in the head, you start thinking that your logic, your head, can understand the whole of life. You try to frame everything in this universe with your head.

Once, a student had freshly graduated in a course on plumbing. He went with his friends on a sightseeing tour to Niagara Falls. He took a look at the huge Falls and said, "I think I can fix it!"

Your knowledge gives you the false illusion of knowing everything that exists. It keeps you firmly rooted in the head.

When your intelligence awakens, you drop from the head to the heart, from logic to love. Then, you operate neither from pure intellect nor from pure sentimental love. You operate just from loving intelligence, and you automatically radiate compassion to all of those around you.

Once, three wise men set out on a travel journey to the city with the hope that they would learn more about life. They entered a big city and were surprised to see a very tall building - a skyscraper- in the distance. They wondered what it might be.

They grouped and discussed what to do. They were afarid to go near and see for themselves, thinking it may have something dangerous in it. What if they did not know how to come out? So, they decided it was better to find out before they ventured inside.

They analyzed and came up with all the things it could possibly be, based on all their past experiences. Finally, they concluded it was something too big for human beings and it must belong to giants. So, it was not safe for them to be in this city of giants.

Very satisfied that they had gained this new knowledge, they picked up their bags and went back to their village!

So, you see there is not much you can understand from past knowledge. You cannot think about something in the mind and try to understand everything about it in that way. You need to see it, to experience it in order to fully understand.

One more thing: you can only think about what you have known, what you have experienced. Can you think about anything unknown? You may fantasize about what the unknown could be, but that is still based on what you have seen in the past.

With thinking, the energy of intelligence and truth is not there, so the answer will be based on your limited experience and it will always lead to further questions and doubts.

Not falling back on the answers rising from the past memory but functioning from your present consciousness is called understanding.

Thinking arises from the mind, which is actually one of the most marvelous mechanisms. But the problem arises when the mind becomes your master instead of a tool in your hands.

A small story:

There lived a king who had a very faithful servant. He was so loyal he had even risked his own life to save the life of the king on a couple of occasions.

On one such occasion, the king highly pleased with the servant asked him for anything he wanted. The servant humbly replied, "I don't need anything, O King. You have given me everything I need. " But the king insisted. Finally, the servant said, "Ok. If you really want to give me something, please make me the king for one day. " The king was a bit uncomfortable but he had already promised and had to keep it up.

The morning of the day the servant became the king. He simply pointed to the king and ordered the royal guards, "Kill him! " The king was shocked and asked the servant, "Do you know what you are saying?" The servant calmly replied, "I am the king today. I can do what I wish to The king was killed and the servant remained king forever.

Understand: in this same way, when we give the power of attorney to our mind, it takes entire control over us.

How many of us realize the tremendous intelligence that our body possesses?

Take the example of our digestive system. The whole process of converting bread to blood is such a complex and delicate one - requiring fine intelligence to convert the different types of food into energy to run the body.

What is achieved through a few feet of coiled intestine would need a few miles, if it were an industry outside of the body!

The process of digestion starts from our mouth. We chew the food and the saliva we secrete starts the digestion. There are so many big and small body elements that perform amazing functions in the process. We swallow the food and it passes through the throat into the food pipe. Beautifully the food is blocked from going into the wind pipe instead of the food pipe - by the epiglottis. The food enters into the stomach, which is like an elastic bag and has a delicate and powerful digestive mechanism. Depending on the type of food taken in like carbohydrates, proteins or fats, the digestive mechanism varies.

The digestive fire in us, what we call jataraagni in Sanskrit, is related to the acid in the stomach. The stomach is such a delicate organ but it actually contains this powerful acid needed to digest the food we eat. The stomach itself is beautifully protected from this acid by a thick mucus layer around its wall which neutralizes the acid.

All the complex foods we eat take just a few hours to digest and get absorbed into our system. Imagine not even a single process has to be consciously thought about! It is managed automatically and so precisely - adapting itself so beautifully to accommodate all our diets.

After the stomach, the food passes into the small intestine where the majority of the digestion takes place. It is actually a long structure but so efficiently fitted in a small area with many folds which increases the surface area of absorption. Most of the nutrients get absorbed in the small intestine. The main function of the small intestine is absorption of nutrients. The complex products like carbohydrates and proteins are broken down into basic elements and absorbed. The nutrients that are absorbed are carried to the liver for further processing.

Then the food moves into the large intestine where mostly water absorption occurs. Then, the food that cannot be absorbed, like fiber for example, is mixed with other waste products from the body and thrown out as waste matter. This is just a basic explanation of digestion. But in the body it is such a complex, well-organized and adaptive mechanism.

The human body starts from a single cell which replicates and becomes about 250 different types of cells.

Imagine, one cell transforms into so many different specialized cells that form the complex parts of the body! Not only do these cells do their specialized job, their very maintenance needs millions of things to be done in a second. And all their activities have to be coordinated for the body to function as a single organism. It is the best example of distributed intelligence.

We have been taught that the center of our intelligence is in our brain. We think that we control the body through our brain. Science has all along been saying that the brain controls respiration, digestion, blood circulation, and all such activities of the body.

Now, cutting-edge research has given rise to a new field called epigenetics. One of the pioneers in this field, Dr. Bruce Lipton', an eminent biologist, has been doing research in the field of epigenetics for over ten years. In his book, 'The Biology of Belief', he states that our brain does not control our body. In fact, there is evidence of intelligence in every cell, even in the cell's membrane!

Recent research at Sandia Nati-onal Laboratories, USA, supports cellular intelligence theory. Scientists there studied how cells responded to a harmful substance called an antigen that attacked the cells in the body. They concluded that even the cell membrane had a beautiful and complex structure to fight the antigen, and that the cell membrane was not a simple structure as it was earlier believed

that our body is not a simple centralized system of intelligence controlled by the brain. The human body is a highly evolved distributed system of intelligence beautifully and seamlessly orchestrated.

An important thing to understand which may shock you: You have an independent intelligence in your system which runs your life without your interference.

Right now, you think you need to interfere with your intelligence in order to run your life happily. But the truth is the intelligence with which you came down to planet earth, the intelligence which created your very body, can run your life beautifully for you.

The intelligence or the energy based on which you created your body at birth, is called your biomemory. You need to understand this important truth here: it is you who designed your own body to enjoy specific things, to live for a particular number of years, and to do particular things when you take birth, you decide your life, your enjoyments, whatever you want to do, based upon what you think is the 'juice' of life. That same bio-memory has enough intelligence to live, run and expand your life. That tremendous intelligence is operating every single moment whether you believe it or not, whether you accept it or not. But our limited understanding prevents us from realizing this - and we constantly feel that life has to be different from what it is at the present moment.

Trusting that intelligence and relaxing is what I call devotion. Surrendering to that higher intelligence is true surrender. Living in harmony with our natural intelligence is living a spiritual life.

Please sit straight. Close your eyes and be in a relaxed way without moving the body. Body movements will create thoughts. So if your body is stable without movement, it can take you to a deeper silence.

Very consciously and intensely, create an intention that you are accepting yourself as you are in the outer world and the inner world, this moment.

Tell yourself, 'I have enough nice things in the outer world, enough possessions. I have enough good qualities in the inner world, my inner feelings. I am accepting myself completely. There is no need to develop myself in the outer world or in the inner world. If I have ego, that is ok. If I have guilt, that is ok. If I have fear, that is ok. If I have greed, that is ok. Whatever I have been told I have, is ok. Even if I am going to die the next minute, it is ok.' Decide consciously, 'I accept everything.' Don't bother whether it is right or wrong. Whatever objection your mind raises, accept that also.

Accept the present moment. Accept all the future moments. Whatever your mind thinks as the worst thing that can happen to your life, accept even those moments. If it happens, you cannot avoid it. It is inevitable. Understand the inevitability and accept everything. Do this for 21 minutes.

Your intelligence will simply awaken and show you how to relate with every moment, how to relate in every situation, in every relationship.

This may be a surprising revelation, but the truth is that universal or cosmic intelligence responds to every thought of ours.

Interesting research by Japanese scientist, Dr. Masaru Emoto* shows this point very clearly.

Dr. Masaru Emoto' did experiments on water. He collected water samples from different sources and exposed them to various kinds of thoughts. Then he froze the samples and studied their crystalline structure through a microscope with the help of high-speed photography. Thousands of these crystals were studied under tightly regulated conditions of temperature, cooling time and lighting.

He did various experiments on these water samples — playing different types of music to the water, talking to the water, reading out from ancient life teachings, praying with a certain intention etc. He found that when the water samples were exposed to healing music, the water crystals that formed were very beautiful and graceful. The water exposed to negative feelings or thoughts did not form crystals but rather an irregular structure which reflected the emotions of the person handling them.

Our body is about seventy percent water. Planet earth is covered with over seventy percent water. After studying the effect of mental thoughts on water, just imagine the tremendous effect our thoughts, words and intentions have on the planet and us!

When Bharat was under British rule, the British soldiers found that when they carried water from England to Bharat in their ships, the water got spoiled even while on the ship. But when they carried water back from Bharat to England, the water not only stayed fresh through the voyage, but also remained fresh until they consumed all of it back in England! When scientists studied this surprising phenomenon, they found that this fresh water was from the sacred river Ganga in Calcutta which was worshipped by millions of people from around the world. It had the natural properties of neutralizing harmful bacteria and purifying itself.

Billions of people have been praying to Ganga for over thousands of years. Naturally they have left their prayerful thoughts as imprints on this water which is so energizing and self-healing.

Even in Egypt, the river Nile* has been studied by the Egyptians over thousands of years by measuring its flow, level, turbulence etc. They have found that many times these parameters reflected the calamities like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis, that have happened or are about to happen in even distant parts of the world.

What makes us become insensitive to nature? The moment our ego comes into play we become insensitive to nature.

There was a beautiful story I was reading about a poet who in his young age used to go and play with the wild animals near his house. His father used to warn him that he should not play with the wild animals because they might harm him.

But, he still used to go and sit with the wf/d animals when he could. He would say,

"When I was self-conscious and afraid that there was a possibility that the animals might harm me, they would never come near me," the communication never happened, the relationship never happened.

But, whenever I had courage or I was in a very playful mood, whenever I did not have the fear or the self-consciousness, the communication and relationship used to be so strong. I could feel very clearly the animals were connecting with me andl was connecting with them."

Understand, what I mean when I say your ego becomes strong, it means when your identity that you are a 'separate person' is felt strongly. When this happens, your connection with nature is disturbed. The innocent way of relating is lost. The feeling of being connected is lost. This is one of the big losses that can happen to a human being.

It is similar to how a person who is born blind can never be made to understand what he is missing. In the same way, the man who has forgotten the way of relating with the heart can never be made to understand what he has lost.

I was reading about an experiment where some years back scientists used an electroencephalograph' (EEG) to measure the brain waves of two people meditating together. It was found that certain pairs of people showed a strong correlation in their brain wave patterns. These strongly bonded pairs were asked to meditate side by side for some time. Then, they were moved to different rooms.

Then one of each meditating pair was stimulated by bright lights flashing in the room. The EEG brain wave recording showed activity in the brain of that meditator as expected; but, surprisingly it also showed that the paired meditator in the other room who was not stimulated by the lights also showed the same activity in the brain automatically and instantly!

Understand: what happens in your mind affects not only you but also those around you. Space is not a criterion for thoughts. They simply travel in air. That is why in your house, if you express worry and negative thoughts a lot, the very atmosphere for your family members becomes heavy. They are affected by the negativity that you radiate.

Our entire educational system is based upon evaluation of information, not intelligence. It is driven by intellect and verbalization, not visualization.

When you try to move on the basis of information you lose the ability to be intelligent. In fact, if you are logically logical you will understand that logic itself is not logical. Life is not logical. It cannot be explained with the mundane logic and intellect. It happens in a plane much higher than the intellect.

The intelligent person lives moment to moment, not through logic. He does not believe in borrowed answers. He sees the challenge of the situation and directly responds to it. The intellectual person is like a photograph; he has the imprint of the past on him. The intelligent person is like a mirror; he reflects and responds to reality and is therefore spontaneous.

The intellect is a beautiful mechanism but only as long as it remains a tool. It should not become the controlling factor. When you put your intellect aside, a deeper intelligence awakens inside you. You start functioning from your center instead of from the periphery. And your center is pure intelligent energy.

Intelligence can be rediscovered. The only way to rediscover it is meditation. Meditation destroys all the barriers, all the blocks which society has created, that prevent you from being intelligent. Like in a flowing river, it's as if meditation removes the rocks so that the water can flow smoothly.

Intelligence requires tremendous courage; it needs a love for adventure! When you are always going into the unknown, then intelligence grows, it becomes sharpened. It grows only when it encounters the unknown every moment.

Intellect is only a mental game; it cannot be creative. Intellect is imaginative, but not creative. Intelligence is creative because it is a part of the divine energy.

Just try this for the next 48 hours. Consciously decide you are not going to think about your problems. Drop your intellect which continuously tells you that you do not have enough intelligence to solve your problems spontaneously, that you do not have the capacity to produce that much spontaneity.

Work on solving your problems boldly and with simple awareness and you will see that a higher intelligence comes into play. One lesson you will learn is that without your knowledge, the higher intelligence comes in to do things for you. When you become sensitive to this happening, your awareness will take a quantum jump. Then you no longer need to work to dissolve your problems. Problems will simply dissolve with the play of spontaneous intelligence in your life.

With the intelligence gained about who we are and what we are doing here, comes the feeling of responsibility for others. We know then that we are not independent of others but interlinked to each other.

Some years back, there was an epidemic of tuberculosis in Tamil Nadu in South Bharat. Finally, medicines were found and the epidemic was contained. The officials responsible for eradicating it proudly claimed that they were the ones responsible for curing it. But did they take up the responsibility for the fact that it was allowed to spread all over the town in the first place? No! They were actually responsible for allowing the tuberculosis to spread also, right? They should have prevented it to begin with and not just taken credit for managing the crisis!

Likewise, in our lives we claim responsibility for anything good that happens, but we don't take responsibility for anything bad that happens. We take up responsibility with discrimination. Only if we take up responsibility for everything that happens in our lives will we start growing.

Vivekananda' beautifully says, 'Take as much responsibility as you can shoulder. The more responsibility you take, the more you expand. Expansion is the only growth. Without expansion, you will contract and die.'

Once a man was giving a talk on Responsibility at the Charity Club. He gave an example of what happened a few days back. He said, "A friend and I were walking down the street towards the park when we saw a helpless man lying unconscious on the road. " He paused and looked at the concerned faces of the audience. Then he continued, "Nobody had bothered to help him. Not only that, when we came back after our walk, the poor man was still lying there!"

Instead of blaming others, let us look into ourselves and see what we are doing about the problem. The more responsibility you take up, the more you grow. Only when you feel responsible for all that is happening around you do you become a leader. Until then you are just a follower.

One of my disciples once asked me, "Swamiji, how is it that so much energy constantly flows through you?'

When you feel compassion towards others' suffering, the whole thing takes the shape of responsibility and expresses itself as energy, that's all. For that matter, when anyone takes up the responsibility of suffering, they will immediately start radiating energy.

Be very clear, you can stand up only if you feel responsible for people's growth, only if you feel responsible for uplifting them. When you can say that you will do whatever you can for people, when you stand up with responsibility, you expand and the divine energy flows through you. Contemplate on this concept so that you can deeply understand it.

When you are free from ego and stand up with responsibility, the expansion happens and you become like the bamboo flute. Then, just as the air that enters the bamboo leaves it as music, so too will the air that enters you flow through you as energy!

When you take up responsibility, a cognitive shift happens in you. Your mental setup changes. Many of us live life like slaves. For example, if you work eight hours in your office just following orders you will feel dull and tired. Instead, if you take up responsibility and initiative, that same eight hours will become much easier and more enjoyable.

For example, take the case of a person who is running his own business and another person who is working for a company. The owner of the business has the full responsibility of his business, but the person who is working for some other company does not really feel the full responsibility. If he does not feel the responsibility, the whole job becomes like a burden on him. There is little or no selfmotivation. He keeps looking at his watch to see if it is time to leave! For him, only the first of every month is sweet, since it is payday! In a month, he sacrifices twenty nine days of his life for one day of joy. A sense of personal responsibility can help turn around any situation. A sense of personal responsibility can achieve great things.

When you stand up with responsibility, you become a solid force. Until then, you remain a burden for yourself and for others. We often think that we are in an ordinary job. We wonder why we should take up more responsibility when our higher authorities at work are not doing so.

Let me tell you, in an office, when a janitor does all his duties perfectly, he will inspire people. You see, the head of the organization has to be responsible. No credit is given to him for that! But someone in a lesser position demonstrating such responsibility is a true inspiration.

There is a greater chance of people at a lower post inspiring others through their sense of responsibility than people at a higher level doing so. So don't wait to get some authority to become responsible.

Secondly, don't think that you are in a lesser post, and therefore you need not be responsible.

Thirdly, allow the cognitive shift to happen in you.

There is a beautiful story about Buddha. It is said that when Buddha went to beg, He would appear like a king, and the kings who gave Him alms would appear like beggars! Appearing like a beggar or a king is not because of your status or the property that you own. It is because of the state inside you.

When you take up responsibility for the entire cosmos, you will expand and look like a leader, you will become a leader. Even if a leader sits on his throne and does not take responsibility, but instead points his finger at others for responsibility, he will appear small. The state is that which gets the status. The status can never get the state. The state of THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM is different from the status of THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM.

When you stand up feeling responsible, your problems will dissolve. A new intelligence will awaken in ou. Don't think you are being egoistic. Ego is different from responsibility. When you feel responsible, you will take the initiative, you will not feel egoistic. Only when you think that you

would have done better than the other person will ego come into play. When ego comes into play, you will not take up responsibility.

I always tell people, 'Do not think you have a certain amount of energy and you will work according to that energy. No. Whatever work and responsibility you take up, the energy starts expressing accordingly. You will have energy according to the responsibilities which you take up. Whatever responsibility you take upon yourself, you will see that your inner space expands to that extent and energy flows through you!'

If you feel responsible for whatever is happening around you, you suddenly become a leader. You start transforming your life and others' lives. Responsibility is one of the ways to consciously grow.

You only need to do two things: trust that life is good and know that you can expand to the responsibilities that you take up.

Another thing: When that expansion happens, just hold on and have patience during the transformation process. Patience during the transformation process is what I call tapas or penance. There is a beautiful phrase of the teachings of Shirdi Sai Baba*: Shraddha Saburi" —* trust and patience. This is the essence of life.

Why don't we allow big breakthroughs in our life? Because we don't trust that life leads us into a new space. Have trust and patience. The simple truth is that when you take more responsibility, you just expand and more energy starts expressing through you.

Understand, enlightenment comes with a tremendous responsibility. It comes with a tremendous 'pressured' compassion. 'Pressured' is the right word to use! Your whole being will be vibrating with an intense compassion, with a very deep compassion.

Early one morning, Vivekananda suddenly got up and said, "I have a deep pain in the right hand. "At that time, he was lying down on a bed. He said, "On this side of the ocean, some country is suffering from some natural calamity. Please find out where we are needed, and send our swamis" to go and do the relief work. " The next morning, they received the news that there was an earthquake on a nearby island. All the swamis rushed to do the relief work.

Vivekananda was sensitive to and actually felt the pain felt by people so many miles away! With enlightenment, practically the whole cosmos is felt inside your body. A deep pressured compassion lands on you along with the enlightenment experience. Understand, it is a great responsibility. It is not just freedom. It is a great responsibility too.

Most of us wait for the status to come in order to take up the responsibility. Be very clear, it doesn't work that way. Only if you take up responsibility will the status come. Those who wait for the status will not take up responsibility even after they get the status! They will simply find another reason or excuse, that's all.

Be very clear, responsibility is a consciousness.

Many people think that if they get enlightened, they will get a golden throne. They think that somebody will give them food and a place to stay. They think that people will worship their photograph. If you see the status of the enlightened master and try to achieve enlightenment for that, you will feel cheated! If you see the state of the enlightened master and try to achieve it, you will be successful. You will be happy. You will enjoy it. That is the difference between state and status.

When we become responsible for others, we no longer are focused on us. We move towards serving other people. Serving other people is leadership. Pandering to one's own needs without a care about others is absence of leadership.

There are so many books these days about leadership and how it is an important part of making an organization successful. There are so many so-called leadership gurus who teach and train people in organizations to 'develop' leadership. Yet when we look at all organizations, whether they are doing business to make a profit, or in government service or in the area of social services, true leaders are rare.

If you look at any organization you will find that less than 1% tends to become the so-called leaders in the organization. If you look at business organizations, we can say that there are probably only 1% of these organizations that can claim to be true leaders in their fields who are excelling in all areas of their business—making profit, delivering good products and services, providing service to society, providing satisfaction to their employees, etc.

So, we can say, true leaders are actually 1% of the 1% of successful business organizations. It means just 0.01% of the overall working population actually has true leadership qualities in them! We can say the same about organizations in other fields. This is what I mean when I say true leaders are rare.

Let us now try and understand why this is the case. For this, we need to understand:

• 1. What is Leadership?
• 2. Can leaders be 'created' or do you have to be a born leader?
• 3. What are the key ingredients that make a successful leader?
• 4. Why do some individuals effortlessly and 'naturally' lead and most others struggle?
• 5. How do we start the process of our individual journey to become leaders?

Let us now understand step by step all these points.

So many books have been written on this subject of leadership by management gurus, professors and consultants. Most of them have spoken about how a successful leader should be. There are a lot of courses conducted by companies on leadership, team work, etc.

My disciples who have come from the corporate world have described to me how these courses are conducted and what they have been striving to achieve through these courses. They have also told me that while the courses have been helpful to them, the effect from the courses tends to wear off within a short period after the courses are completed.

I am told of weekend boot camps where team spirit is built by climbing ropes, playing games, creating a sense of friendship, etc. The gist I picked up from hearing my disciples is that these training programs tend to work on the outer attributes but do little to change or improve the 'inner software' of the individuals so that leadership can radiate from the individual. Leadership to me is not a quality, but an experience that can radiate from an individual who has experienced personal growth and transformation.

Now let me give you some explanations of how leadership is described traditionally. If you search the internet under the terms 'Leadership' and 'Leader', you will be amazed at the millions of hits that come up! Just recently when I typed the word 'Leadership' on Google it had 156 million hits and the word 'Leader' had 278 million hits!

So whatever needs to be written or said on these topics has been said! So I am here to mainly give you a few examples from the leading management gurus and their concepts of a leader and more importantly to give you the real understanding, tools and techniques on how to become a leader and how anyone can radiate leadership as a result of personal transformation!

Understand, every human being is a potential leader. Leadership is not a quality only some people have been born with as is viewed and understood currently. Everyone can become a leader and the quality of leadership arises from one's ability to take responsibility for a particular organization, a situation or a particular group.

A lot has been said by many people on what a leader should be. But there is very little that has been said about actually how to get there. What exactly do I mean by this? Is leadership some quality you have to be born with or can it be cultivated? How can one develop leadership skills? Can a person truly lead an organization ifhe or she is caught up in personal struggles and confusions?

Before we get into these details, let me first say that leadership skills CAN be cultivated. It is all about achieving the state of consciousness of a leader and not the status that is achieved by becoming a leader.

Firstly, understand that every civilization has focused its energies in certain fields. In the West, they focused their efforts on the outer world science, innovation, discovery and creation of products and services to improve the quality of life and comforts. These outer world scientists have discovered so many products and services which have greatly benefited humanity and improved the quality of life of humans all over the world.

Just as there is science of the outer world, there is a vast science of the inner world, something that lies within all of us. The scientists of the inner world or rishis worked on various tools and techniques to handle the different emotions we experience and our mind. Over the last ten thousand years, these scientists of the inner world have created tools and techniques that help us handle our emotions and overcome the stress and depression from emotions. They have created techniques for us to live blissfully with ourselves. These tools and techniques are what I call meditation techniques.

So most of my discussion on leadership will be focused on giving an understanding of human emotions, the mind and how we can use these simple understandings from the inner scientists to help us lead a successful and fulfilling life.

In most organizations, those who have become leaders have achieved the status of the leader. They may not have necessarily achieved the state of the leader. What do I mean by this? To understand this, first let us understand the key ingredients that make a successful leader.

There was once a great war between two countries. The war had been going on for some time and the soldiers were starting to feel tired of the long battle.

On a hot afternoon, a man in civilian clothes was riding past a small group of tired soldiers digging a huge pit. The group leader was shouting orders and threatening punishment if the work was not completed within the hour. The man riding the horse stopped and asked,

"Sir, why are you only shouting orders? Why can't you help them yourself." asked the stranger on horseback. The group leader looked at him and replied, "What do you mean? I am the leader. The men do as I tell them." He then added, "I[ you feel so strongly about helping them, you are welcome to do so yourself!"

The man got down from his horse and started walking up to the soldiers at work. The group leader was simply shocked! The man took up the tools and started helping the soldiers and worked with them till the job was finished!

Before leaving the man congratulated the soldiers for their work, and approached the group leader. He said, "The next time your status prevents you from supporting your people, you should inform your higher authorities, and I will provide a more permanent solution."

The group leader was now completely surprised. Only now he looked closely at the man"and realized that the man was the army general!

We now need to ask ourselves how many so-called leaders in organizations exhibit the qualities of the group leader. And how many people do you know who exhibit the qualities of the army general?

Regardless of the status in an organization, you will agree that the majority of the so-called leaders exhibit the qualities of the group leader. They achieve the status of the leader but not the state of the leader.

There are very few people who are ready to really help get the work done.

The army general exhibited some of the key qualities that are important for a true leader:

• 1. Honesty and Responsibility
• 2. Caring genuinely about people
• 3. Confidence
• 4. Efficiency and lateral thinking skills
• 5. Attention to detail
• 6. Efficiency and Effectiveness
• 7. Broad-based thinking and doing

I will discuss these traits in greater detail in the following sections.

What do I mean by this term, 'Leader Consciousness'?

Most of us achieve the status of a leader, but not the state. State is totally different from status. Status comes from society. When you are leading a group of people, if you are forced to take the responsibility of some department or if you take the responsibility out of your greed, the status comes. But the state is totally different.

When I use the word 'state' I mean your inner space or your being should be mature enough to handle what you are entering or the responsibility which you are assuming. When we just get the status without achieving the state, all the problems which exist in the corporate world start - stress and tension in the personal level, and backbiting and politics in the level of the team. All these problems start when you don't achieve the state but just achieve the status.

Here I am trying to express to you the truths from the great traditions of the East - how to achieve leader consciousness, how to achieve the state of the leader and not just the status. See, status is very easy, state is something which we really need to achieve.

Status will simply follow a man who has achieved the state of a leader. Even if the status takes its own time, he will not be bothered, he will live like a king! His very life will be totally fulfilled. The invaluable feeling of fulfillment happens to beings who achieve leader consciousness.

What do I mean by the word, 'state of the leader'?

A true leader is a person who is ready to take responsibility consciously, who is ready to handle life consciously, who is not constantly dependent on the past or his memory. If you are dependent on your memory, if you are dependent on the past to take decisions, please be very clear, you will be a follower. You cannot be a leader.

Responding spontaneously to situations is what I call responsibility.

A responsible leader is a person who is able to respond spontaneously to situations, who is fresh and continuously keeps himself alive, who is not caught in the past.

Let me try to give you a small diagram on how the mind works, how the state of a leader is achieved, how leader consciousness happens in us. Let us understand how the mind works - how we receive data, process it and make decisions.

For example, you are seeing something through your eye. Of course, you receive information through all the five senses - eyes, ears, nose, tongue and touch. For now, let us take the example of the eye. When you see with your eyes, immediately the file goes to a space called the chakshu", it is just like a Digital Signal Processor (DSP). Whatever you are seeing through the eye is converted to a bio-signal, just like a digital signal file. This file moves to a space called chitta in Sanskrit which is just like memory in a time', or 'I read similar books but did not feel any benefit, if you feel negative you will decide not to continue reading. The ego decides based on your past experiences. This is the way your mind functions.

Now, the important thing which you need to understand is, the decision is taken unconsciously. If the process happens like this, in a straightforward way, you will not have

computer. Here the process of identification starts. For example, you are now seeing this book - the whole file goes to the DSP, chakshu', and the whole file is converted into a bio-signal file, and then it moves to chitta, memory.

The memory starts analyzing - 'This is not a stone, this is not a tree, this is not an animal...' The elimination process happens in the memory. This process of elimination happens in the memory. Next, the identification, 'This is a book, happens in the mind or manas". In the mind, you start identifying, 'This is a book, 'It is a book on spirituality, 'It is written by an enlightened being.'

After identification, the file then moves to a space which I call 'ego', the decision-making center. In the ego you start thinking, 'In what way am I connected to this situation?' If your past experiences with similar books were good, you decide to continue to read. If your past experiences were not good, if you felt Oh, this is not worth it, I felt very bored last any problem and things will go very smoothly in your life. Everything will be clear and straight!

But this process does not always happen in a straightforward way. Sometimes things start happening in an unconscious way. For example, if you were hurt or disturbed by something that was said in a similar book you read before, the moment you see this book, unconsciously that memory will be awakened.

You see, in your life, if you are hurt or disturbed in a particular place, or by a particular situation, or by a person wearing a particular colored dress, the next time when you go to that place, or the next time you see another person wearing the same colored dress, you will go through the same low mood even if you know logically that the place or that person has nothing to do with your past experiences. You will have that same memory again in your mind. You will again have that same experience. This is what I call "samskaras" or 'engraved memories'.

These engraved memories distort or disturb your decision-making capacity. You see, if the whole process of the mind map I just described happens consciously, then it is a straightforward and logical process. But due to the unconscious mind, a lot of times, the process is not straightforward. As I described earlier, we tend to get biased based on our experiences we have had with a particular person or a particular situation. This is the space where politics happens! This is the space where things move illogically. This is the space where the past memories or engrams will be sitting and you do not even know what decision you are making!

Let me give you one more example to give you more understanding of the unconscious mind. If we analyze logically or consciously, all of you know that smoking is injurious to health. If we follow through the process from eye to the mind, you know clearly that smoking is injurious to health, according to the data collected b your senses. But suddenly, even though logIC tells us not to smoke, you decide to smoke, beyond your logic and consciousness. This is where the unconscious engrams are sitting.

Even though you consciously know that smoking is injurious to health, when the data moves to the ego, when the file takes a quantum leap, you just decide to smoke. Maybe some memory, or some experience which you had in the past must have made you feel relaxed when you smoked. Or maybe when you smoked during your youth, you may have felt like a hero. So these engrams have been associated with this habit, and suddenly, because of this engram you decide to smoke, even if you consciously know that smoking is injurious to health.

In the same way, many times in your life, even if you know what is right, simply you decide unconsciously because of your engrams. Your life is under the control of unconscious engrams, it is not under your control. You may think that you are taking the decision, but your unconscious engrams are taking the decisions!

These samskaras or engrams are the root cause of our behavior. They are the reason why we behave in a certain way with certain people. The engrams tend to cloud our judgments when we have to take decisions. They influence how we accomplish our tasks in an organization. It is these engrams that

dictate our productivity, interpersonal skills, teamwork, judgment and all our responses and behavior. But engrams are never understood and more importantly given any importance in the field of corporate training and leadership development.

The Eastern mystics and inner scientists have spent thousands of years developing tools and meditation techniques to cleanse us from these engraved memories. These samskaras can be effectively erased through meditation techniques.

Recently I visited one of my devotee's houses and saw a beautiful one-liner in the living room: 'I am the boss of this house, I have my wife's permission to say so!'

Similarly, you may think you are the boss, but your unconscious engrams are leading you! As long as you are caught by these unconscious samskaras, you can never achieve the state of a leader. You may achieve the status of a leader with a lot of suffering and struggle.

Be very clear, if you sit in the leader's chair with a lot of suffering and struggle, you will tend to create the same suffering and struggle for your subordinates!

Again, and again, your mind will say, 'When I suffered and struggled so much, why not them!' You will just reproduce your old mental setup on others. This can be a very de-motivating factor in organizations.

A small story:

Once a boss asks his employee, "Why did it take you six months to complete such a simple task?" The employee replies, "Because of your confusing directions, continuous changes and short work days!"

The boss replies, "I was looking for something like you being lazy!"

So much has been written and said about productivity in organizations. Productivity has become the mantra in organizations for the last two or three decades. As a result of invention of computers and new communications technologies such as the internet and cell phone, the world has become a much smaller place. While there has been an increase in productivity in companies, it has often come at a huge price on the health (physical and mental) and wellbeing of the employees. Let us now start to understand what is productivity and how productivity can be enhanced without the side effects of stress.

In simple terms, productivity can be measured as:

Productivity = Output / Input

The measure of output may be certain number of tasks completed by a particular individual or team or revenue in the case of a manufacturing company. The measure of input may include the number of hours worked on a particular project, manufacturing costs etc.

Billions of dollars are spent by companies globally to enhance human productivity. Most of these efforts are centered on providing new skills specific to training in a particular area of the organization's focus or improving technology such as use of computers, internet or other forms of media and communications. Some companies also invest in developing 'softer skills' such as interpersonal skills, team- building skills, etc. But most of these trainings tend to address the

conscious mind - actions, behaviors and perceptions that are just on the surface. But over 90% of our emotions and behaviors reside deep under the surface of our mind. This is what the psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, calls the unconscious mind.

If we look at the mind, there are thoughts and perceptions which are accumulated in our mind at a conscious level. But there are deeper memories and stored knowledge that we use to help us solve problems. Then there is a whole range of emotions and experiences that are embedded in the unconscious level. This is where the saṃskāras or engraved memories reside.

Most corporate training programs focus on the conscious mind to impart knowledge or particular skills. But actually it is as though we are sitting on a volcano of emotions that is just waiting to burst and erupt any time! These hidden emotions are what make us behave inefficiently and even illogically at times!

So saṃskāras or engraved memories interfere with the decision-making process, these can be called the inefficiencies present in the mind! The more the number of engrams, the more clouded is our thought process, and the lower is the output. In other words, to produce a particular output, having more saṃskāras will require more time or people or costs. So this results in lower productivity.

Most readers who have studied psychology are familiar with the Freudian interpretation of the mind. Traditional training and skills development in various organizations address only the conscious mind which is just ten percent of your potential. Ninety percent of the potential can be actualized only when we address saṃskāras. This huge potential can be experienced through meditation techniques.

To give you an example of what I just described, I would like you to take fifteen minutes of your time on a simple exercise. Take a white sheet of paper and just write down whatever comes to your mind. Please do not edit, filter or pass judgment on any of the thoughts that come to your mind. Just behave as though a 'thought recorder' (just like a voice recorder) is attached to you and you are jotting down whatever comes to your mind. Now after fifteen minutes put the pen aside and read what you have just written.

If you have honestly recorded whatever came to your mind, you will realize the kind of stray, unconnected, illogical thoughts that go through the mind. These thoughts are like friction in a machine. They make the machine very inefficient and unproductive. This is the root cause of low productivity.

Several of my disciples, who have gone through this process and consciously worked on eliminating their saṃskāras, always come and tell me that they are now finding so much time in their busy lives since they are no longer troubled by the wavering mind and illogical thoughts.

The tool for elimination of these stray thoughts arising from saṃskāras is what I call meditation. Once these thoughts are eliminated, it is like reducing the friction in a machine and allowing the machine to be more efficient, saṃskāras that may be 'haunting' us.

Without the load of these saṃskāras, you will find that your innate intellect and the skills you have developed through your education, training or life experiences will directly be used more productive.

Thousands of people from all races, nationalities, social and economic background have gone through this process of eliminating saṃskāras in our meditation programs. People come and tell me that in addition to improving their overall productivity, they are able to maintain better interpersonal relationships, feel less stress, and be more creative and innovative in their personal and professional lives. I have also had interesting conversations with leading corporate leaders and Nobel

Laureates on this subject where they have shared amazing evidences of improved innovation and intuitive skills developed as a result of becoming free of saṃskāras.

So, we can now elaborate on the equation to describe productivity. We can restate the equation as follows:

Productivity = Output/Input

Input = (Intellect + Technical Skills +Saṃskāras)

As you know, we live with our mind 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. For most people, the mind is constantly running, analyzing, passing judgment on individuals, having various emotions and responding to situations, all of which is dependent on the level of in delivering the output instead of being knocked around by your mind. You will see the productivity simply shoots up!

This is an area that has mostly not been looked at by companies and organizations. But there are simple tools and techniques from the Eastern mystics who have developed techniques to cleanse the mind of these saṃskāras.

Sometimes people ask me, If we are free of saṃskāras, will we stop thinking? Will we become lazy and complacent?' I tell you, it is actually the opposite. Please refer again to the experiment I gave you a while back on jotting down your thoughts on apiece of paper for fifteen minutes. If the mind is free from the effects of saṃskāras, you will see a quantum jump in intelligence and you will be creative and a whole new zone of intelligence will emerge. You will see that all of a sudden you will be able to develop skills of intuition and innovation that emerge from your being.

Understand, this is not a mystical zone you are going to enter into. Be very clear, the skills of intuition reside in all of us. They have been clouded by the impact of saṃskāras. Let me now describe how a mind-body system that is free from saṃskāras will improve intuition and innovation.

Intuition is a wonderful subject. If you ask modern day CEOs how they took major decisions in their lives, what caused the turning point in their lives, again and again their answer surprises us. Again and again they tell us that their success came from something beyond their intellect that gave them the energy or the guts to take the decisions. This is not just the case with successful CEOs, it is the same with scientists also.

The other day I had a chance to have lunch with Dr Charles Townes', Nobel laureate in the field of Laser and maser. I asked him, 'Sir, how did your discovery happen? How were you able to do it?' He answered in a beautiful way, 'I was just sitting in a park in Washington DC and suddenly something happened. The conclusion was there in me. Suddenly the conclusion was revealed to me. I penned down what I experienced. Now I had a big difficulty. I had the conclusion but not the steps. I was not able to present this to anybody else because I knew only the conclusion but I didn't know the steps.'

This happened not only with Charles Townes*, it had also happened with Albert Einstein*. He says, 'Whatever new happened to me, came through intuition and not through intellect.' He summed it up beautifully, saying, 'The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.'

Whether we believe it or not or accept it or not, there is something called intuition. Of course, even Einstein* says this is a gift, because we are not sure when it will come and whether it will come or not.

But yogis, the mystics, say again and again, you can work for it and you can be sure about it. You don't have to think that intuition is a gift. You can work for it. It can become a part of your life.

Whatever new things have happened, have happened only through intuition, only when something has happened beyond your intellect and your whole being is integrated.

When you are at your peak, something opens. You may call it revelation or intuition, which happens beyond intellect. Mystics have again and again said that it is a science. If you can tune yourself to this intuition or this energy, which is continuously available in your being, you can use this in your regular life. Mystics again and again say it is an incident and you can make it happen. They know how to make it happen. We will see how you can awaken that power inside your being. We will see how the intuitive skills can be linked to the workings of the mind which I discussed earlier.

Before we discuss intuition in greater detail, let us first dispel the myths that intuition is some kind of a fluke of nature. I would like you to understand that intuition is a skill, That can be developed just as any other skills that you acquire. It comes from you, from no one else! Because we have not experienced that zone, that part, that dimension of our being, we have forgotten it.

Someone asked me in a meditation program, 'I remember someone and the next moment the phone rings and he is there on the line. I remember someone at a party and next moment I see him.' I asked the people in the program if this kind of an incidence had happened to them at least once in their lifetime. More than seventy percent of the people said this had happened! If it happens in one person's life once, you can say it is a coincidence. But if it happens with seventy percent of people, it cannot be called a coincidence! There is more to it. There is some logic behind it. We may not be able to know logically but we cannot brush it aside. When you know the logic, you call it an incident. When you don't know the logic, you call it a coincidence. Nothing can happen without a cause on planet earth. It is always cause and effect. When you know the cause and effect link, you call it an incident. When you don't know, you call it a coincidence.

In trying to understand the process of intuition, let us refer back to the mind map we discussed earlier. We talked about how the process of taking information from a sense such as the eye works through chakṣu' (Digital Signal Processor), chitta (memory), manas' (mind) and then takes a quantum jump to the ego where the decisions are clouded by saṃskāras or engraved memories. The process in the gap between the eye and mind is conscious. You are aware of this process. It happens with your awareness. But the mind to ego process — you are not aware about it. Many a time, the process happens without your awareness. You decide against your logic. You decide against your thought process. For example, according to the data that you have collected, you know that smoking is injurious to health, it is not good for your body or mind. But when the mind takes an unconscious leap to the ego, you simply take the decision to smoke! The conscious process says, 'No, it is not good for health.' But the unconscious process says...it doesn't even say, it just takes the decision and you execute. These decisions are not under your control because the unconscious is very powerful.The unconscious can be used in three ways at the instinct level, intellect level and intuition level. As long as the unconscious is filled with negative memories and restlessness, it works at the instinct level. You decide just instinctively. You don't even know why you are angry. Suddenly you burst. Sometimes, when you see some activities or some words that you speak, you feel it is not you. You do something and then you think, 'This is not me, how did I do it? How did I allow this to happen?' This happens because the unconscious is working in the instinct level.

Many times, you just associate things without even any logical connection. For example, if you have been disturbed by somebody who was wearing a white dress, the moment you see somebody wearing a white dress, the past memory comes up and you feel the anger. This is the instinct level. Without your conscious mind, without even you understanding, just like that it happens.

If your unconscious is loaded with saṃskāras, if your unconscious is restless, you will be at the instinct level. The next is the intellect level. You are conscious but you don't have enough enthusiasm. You just go with a conscious mind but you are not creative, not innovative. You don't take big steps, you don't grow. It is just like a faithful servant as Einstein' says. The intellect is a faithful servant. You can be a servant throughout your life. You can be just a servant, but nothing more or big can happen through you. You will be collecting the data, processing it and delivering it

— nothing more than a computer. If you are standing only at the intellect level, you are not using your potential to the maximum, to the extent to which it is supposed to be used.

The next is intuition. To understand intuition, you need to go deep into the whole science; only then you will be able to understand what I mean by the word 'intuition'. Intuition is something which happens to you beyond your intellect. Suddenly you know for sure that this is the right thing and you have enough energy also to do it but you don't know the step how you came to the conclusion but you know for sure this is right.

This energy is needed whenever you are faced with a situation where there is no precedence - when you are stuck with minimum data and you need to take decisions or you have a lot of choices and you are not able to decide what you are supposed to do. In these types of situations, the intuition energy can help you. The intuitive power can give you the courage or give you the right choice. Intuition again and again gives you the energy not only to decide but to execute what you have decided.

People ask me, 'How do I find out whether I am having intuition or I am just intellectual? Sometimes I am confused about whether it is intellect or intuition.' I tell them, be very clear, if you are confused, it is only intellect. The very confusion shows that it is only intellect. When you experience intuition, not only you get the intellectual clarity, the answer, but you also get enough power to execute it. The potential power which is inside your being is just unleashed. You open up and just like that you start expressing it, executing it.

Now the next question: How to awaken the intuition? How to awaken the intuitive power? If you can consciously give rest to it for a while, the energy which is in that unconscious level will open up. And usually when the unconscious level energy opens up, first whatever we suppressed will come out. Next, a pure energy which we call intuition will start to express.

When pure energy starts expressing from the unconscious level, you don't use the unconscious at the instinct level or intellectual level. You use it for intuition. The higher level energy starts happening in you. And of course, above all, the mystics demonstrated to us over thousands of years that the higher level energy heals you physically, mentally and emotionally. Apart from healing, this can help reduce the stress and help decide spontaneously.

Spontaneity has nothing to do with data which you collect; it is something to do with the way in which you process the data. The same data, same information can be processed in many ways. Intuition is all about how you process and how you come to the conclusion beyond your intellect.

We can prepare ourselves, we can tune ourselves to this intuitive energy through techniques and methods which we call meditation. In the East we use the word 'meditation' to tune ourselves with the higher energy, which is in our being, which continuously invites you again and again to experience it. Whenever we find time, sit by yourself. You can always see, we give appointment to everybody, but never give appointment to ourselves. If you have given appointment to yourself, you can always see that some part of your being wants to express, wants to do something more, but we never give chance or time to that part, to that portion of our being. We are so caught up with our intellect. We think that our intellect is the ultimate, but again and again mystics prove something more than intellect is possible.

In any discovery or invention, you can see that the role of intuition is always there. Whether it is Albert Einstein or Issac Newton*, they have had something beyond intellect. Something beyond intellect has happened in them. This same energy exists in all of us. This energy can also express in all of us if we can tune ourselves to that energy. Tuning ourselves to that energy is what I call meditation.

The Mahamantra meditation is an ancient Tibetan Buddhist technique to awaken the anahata chakra", located at the heart center.

This meditation makes your mind firm and stable. Your mind is all the time oscillating with thoughts. This meditation makes your mind still by making it enter into the zone of no-mind. It is like a jumping board into infinity.

It should be done on an empty stomach, preferably early in the morning, or two hours after any meal. It can be done either alone or with a group. When done with a group, it effectively energizes the place where it is done.

Total Duration. 30 minutes

Sit cross-legged in a comfortable position on the floor. Your head, neck and spine should be in a straight line. If you are not able to sit on the floor, you may sit on a chair. Feel relaxed and close your eyes. Even after we close our eyes, we see forms and images from behind the eyelids. To handle this, imagine that your eyeballs have become stone-like. Just harden them with mental pressure, then the images will die. The movement of our eyes is very closely related to the movement of thoughts in our mind. That is why you are asked to arrest the movement of your eyeballs. Don't be too worried about keeping them arrested. Just proceed with the meditation.

Keep your lips together and produce the sound 'Mmmm...' from inside. If you were to put your face inside an empty aluminum vessel and make a humming sound, the sound generated would be like this. Note that this is not 'Hum...' or 'Om...', it is simply keeping your lips together and producing the sound 'Mmmm...'. This humming should be as lengthy as possible before taking the next breath. It should also be as deep as possible, from the navel center, and as loud as possible.

Don't make an effort to take in a deep breath after every 'Mmmm'. The body itself will take breaths when needed. Don't become tensed. Put in your whole being and energy into creating this vibration. Just become the humming. Let your whole body be filled with the vibration of the humming. After some time, you will feel that the humming continues without your effort and that you have become simply a listener to it!

The humming is a powerful means of bringing your awareness to the present moment. If you hum intensely, you cannot have any thought at that time. So your Thoughts Per Second (TPS) automatically comes down. The energy generated by the humming cleanses the energy blocks in the mind-body system.

When you are intensely humming, all the ideas which you have about you will be completely shaken. Like an earthquake, this is a technique for a 'mind-quake !

After stopping the humming, keep your eyes closed and remain silent and inactive with a smiling face and blissful mood. If any thought comes to you, let it come. Simply watch your mind as if you are watching television, without resisting your thoughts or passing any judgment on them. Remain silent and blissful. During this time, the energy created by the humming will enter all the corners of your

being and awareness is all that is needed to dissolve the cleanse it deeply. It establishes you in the negativities, bring clarity and enable you to awareness of the present moment. This experience your true potential.

Part 4: The Sacred Text of Hinduism - Jeevan Mukti Bhashya

Whether we lead or whether we follow, in order to be fulfilled in whatever we do, we need to be intense.

A Zen master and a disciple were walking along the banks of a river. The disciple, as he had done a few times before, asked the master very longingly, "Master please give me enlightenment. "Suddenly the master turned, held the disciple's head in his hand and pushed it into the river. The disciple was shocked and started struggling to get his head above water. The master continued to strongly hold his head in the water. Now the disciple started gasping for breath. The master then released the surprised and completely shaken disciple.

The master asked, "Do you feel you want enlightenment with the same intensity that you felt you needed air to breathe when your head was in the water?"

Only when the urge becomes urgent, when the question becomes a quest, does the Ultimate happen. The key factor needed for enlightenment to happen is intensity.

You see, usually we feel a terrible restlessness towards the outer world, 'I have not done this, I have not done that' and so on. The same restlessness when directed to the inner world is called intensity.

You do not know what is happening, you do not know what should be done, but the deep dissatisfaction about what is there in the inner space is what I call intensity.

You may be wondering why I am teaching dissatisfaction. I am supposed to teach satisfaction, right? I tell you, your dissatisfaction, which is now directed towards the outer world, has to turn towards the inner world, and only then it will lead to satisfaction.

First thing which needs to happen is not satisfaction but the turning of direction, the psychological revolution. Restlessness should become intensity. If it is towards the outer world, if your consciousness is constantly moving towards the outer world, it is called restlessness. If it is moving towards the inner world, it is called intensity.

The meaning of intensity is that desperate feeling that something needs to be done immediately, to break free from the clutches, or to break free in the inner world Intensity is not emotion. When you are intense, one part of it may be emotional. But intensity cannot be called emotion. It is like heat. The part of intensity that melts and comes out can be called emotion. For example, when you integrate yourself with intensity, one part of you melts. Let us say the heart melts, then that can be called emotion. Along with your heart, your intellect will also melt, your being will also melt. The side-effect of intensity is emotion.

Do not bother about what your intensity should be about. Do not bother about 'towards what'. It should become a quality. Anything you do, whether you touch something or somebody or some object, let the intensity be there, even in that touch.

If you are talking, let the intensity be there. In your relationships, in your decisions, in your memory, in your thinking, in your desires, even in your fears, be intense without escaping from this moment. That is what I call intensity.

Intensity means radiating the energy that does not create any conflict inside and outside. Intensity is intensely being inside you. Intensity does not create conflict inside or outside. It flows smoothly and yet very strongly. We always think if it is flowing smoothly.

We always think if it is flowing smoothly like a river, it will not have intensity, and if it is intense like a stone it will not be flowing freely. No. Intensity is like a flood which is intense and flowing.

I have seen some people intensely creating conflict every moment! Anything you tell them to do, they will be ready to create a conflict.

A prisoner escaped from prison after twelve years and reached his home. The moment his wife opened the door she started shouting, "How dare you come so late! You escaped from prison twent y four hours before. Where have you been? You should have come straight back home!"

All that the woman was bothered about was why he was not back home right after he had escaped. She certainly was intense, but only in creating conflicts.

Real intensity does not create conflicts. It is flowing but intense.

Intensity is integration. Intensity is focus. Intensity is sincerity.

Usually intensity leads to a solid feeling. You may be intense but you may have lost the ability to flow. Or you may be flowing but may have lost the intensity.

See, you may be intense but you may have lost the ability to flow - because you are driven by your ego. You are determined to achieve what you want but you have your own rigid ideas about how to get there. You fail to understand then that Existence can make events happen in a much more beautiful and effective way than you can plan.

I tell my disciples, plan in the best way to the best of your ability. Then, leave it. It may seem that all your plans are being completely trampled - don't get frustrated at that point, something much more beautiful than what you had planned will come to life.

The other possibility is that you may be flowing but may have lost the intensity. This is the case with people who have no focus and waste their energies getting distracted by anything that comes by. Understand, water becomes steam only at 100 degrees Celsius. Even at 99 degrees C, it is still water; it does not transform to steam. Same way, if you are not integrated in seeking, all your energies are not integrated. The total transformation cannot happen.

Take up something and follow it with full intensity. Intensity does not mean acting rigidly without scope for updating and change. Only when you are open to change you can make your way like the river flowing intensely towards the ocean.

What is being? Being complete, total, integrated, expressing your full energy, is what I call 'being'. If you are partial in your experience or expression, be very clear you are being hypocritical.

Even your anger is hypocritical.You just choose whether to express your anger or not. Your anger is also directly related to your logic.

You never get angry beyond your logic. It is always managed by your logic. You analyze, am I going to lose anything here in this situation?' If you are sure you are going to lose something, you just suppress your anger. If you are clear, I am not going to lose anything. I can shout at this person. What can he do?' then you just explode and express much more anger than what is necessary. Whatever you have stored in stock, you open up everything and give!

Be very clear, when your logic manages your anger, you will have two problems. First, you unnecessarily shout or unnecessarily show your anger when it is not necessary. Second, even when you are not expressing, you will be suppressing it.

First, if you are expressing, you will be expressing too much, much more than what is necessary. Next, if you are not expressing, you will be suppressing it. Be very clear, both are wrong.

Suppressing and expressing both are not going to help. You may ask, 'Then what are we supposed to do?' You are not asked to do anything, just be.

Modern mystic, J. Krishnamurthi, says beautifully, whenever an emotion overtakes you, if even once you can just be without moving your body, without co-operating with your emotion, you will be liberated from that emotion.

If you stay without moving your body when you are flooded or overpowered by any emotion, even once, immediately you will be liberated from that emotion. I am not saying you have to constantly practice this. No, just once, only once, and you will be liberated from that very emotion.

Intensity does not depend on the nature of the work or action. It can be as complex as running a billion dollar company or as simple as cleaning the floor. It is not the 'what' that is important, but the 'how' that is important.

If you can do what you are doing with a totality and intensity that you are completely lost in the action, you have caught the thread of intensity.

The moment you are lost in the action, you become like a flute on the lips of Existence itself. The air that goes into the flute comes out as music because you become a channel for the energy of Existence to flow through you. Be total and intense. That is all that is needed for the arrow to hit the target, whatever it may be.

What qualifies to be called as intensity? What is the difference between intensity and interest? An interest can be lost, but never the intensity. Interest comes from the mind. Intensity comes from the being.

After a while, maybe short or long, you get fed up with your own interest. With intensity, it is a thirst of your being. It transcends the rationale of your logic. Intensity is a call from deep within. The more you have to wait for it, the more the thirst grows, the more the fire flares up.

See the difference between light and laser. Both are made up of the same light rays but the singlepointed intense focus of the laser comes from the coherence and the common frequency of the light rays.

The power of this intensity is what gives the laser the tremendous power to even burn a hole through metal. At the same time it is a controlled focus. This is what gives it the power to do even a delicate task like removing a cataract in the eye.

If in a desert your thirst for water becomes really intense, you are ready to pay with your life for a glass of water. When your thirst for realization becomes that intense, you are ready to pay with your life for the Truth.

A student approached a Zen teacher to learn Zen. The teacher told him, "Hear the sound of one hand clapping." The student tried for three years and did not succeed. He was depressed that he could not do what his teacher had told him. He came in tears to the teacher saying he had to leave because he could not do what he had been told. The teacher said, "Wait for one more week. Meditate constantly." The student stayed for one more week and meditated. Nothing happened. The teacher said, "Try for five more days." When your whole being is burning with the single intense desire to realize the Ultimate, you will simply absorb the master's instructions. The magic of transformation is bound to happen. Only then will you be open to receive him. Till then it is just an interest.

The student stayed further. yet nothing happened. The student came in despair begging to be released. Then the teacher said, "Meditate for three more days. If you don"t get enlightened, you had better kill yourself." The second day, the student was enlightened.

When your whole being is burning with the single intense desire to realize the Ultimate, you will simply absorb the master's instructions. The magic of transformation is bound to happen. Only then will you be open to receive him. Till then it is just an interest.

Tantra', the mystical science of meditation techniques, says that to know the truth one needs only one condition — intensity. Be total in what you are, what you do.

Live intensely in the moment and taste the real life. Otherwise, you are not living. You are just waiting for death.

When you eat, intensely eat. Let your whole attention and energy be on the food. Do not divert your attention and thoughts to what you need to get done at work tomorrow or where you want to go for your next vacation.

Enjoy the food with all your senses. Taste the food in your mouth, enjoy the feast in front of your eyes, touch the food with love, and smell the aroma of the food. When you eat this way totally, you will enjoy every morsel and you will actually feed into your system the living energy the food is meant to give.

If you are drinking water, drink it intensely. Become the thirst. Feel the coolness of the water going into your mouth, throat and down your food pipe. Let each drop of water that goes into your mouth give you the feeling of fulfillment.

The Tamil classic, Periya Puranam", describes the stories of the Nayanmars', the ardent devotees of Lord Shiva*. There are so many instances of the devotees realizing the Ultimate by simple activities like making garlands for the Lord. An example is Gananaatha Nayanaar, a devotee of the Lord, engaged in simple services like plucking flowers for worship, making garlands for the Lord, sweeping and washing the floor of the temple and keeping the lamps in the temple burning. Just this simple life led him to reaching the Ultimate and brought him his name Gananaatha' meaning the chief of the ganas (attendants) of Lord Shiva.

When you pray, be real and spontaneous. Whatever you feel, feel totally and offer it to the Divine. Don't cheat yourself and be hypocritical by not admitting what you feel. You cannot hide anything from the Divine. He knows you better than you know yourself.

Your intensity is the only thing that decides when your object of seeking will happen. If the intensity is total, it will happen that moment. If the intensity is not integrated and total, it will take more time because the intensity has to gain strength in that time.

If you are intense enough, it does not need time to reach the Ultimate. Where you are, who are you is irrelevant. You can reach here and now.

There was a dreaded bandit who was a terror in the kingdom. After looting a large number of people, he started feeling restless and uncomfortable with his actions. He approached a master and asked hinn, "Master I am a sinner. Is there any way out for me? Can I be liberated?" The master looked at the bandit and asked him what he was good at. The bandit replied, "Nothing." The master asked, "Nothing? You must be good at something!" The bandit thought for a long time and then said, "Master I only know stealing, that is what I have done all my life." The master smiled and said, "Good! Then you will use exactly that now. Go to a quiet place and rob all your perceptions and ideas and opinions. Steal all the trees and rocks and rivers on planet earth. Steal all the planets and stars in the sky. And dissolve them in the vast emptiness inside you." The bandit sincerely followed exactly the instructions of the master. Within 21 days, the bandit realized his true nature — he became enlightened.

There are four states of consciousness.

When you have 'I' Consciousness and thoughts, you are in the waking state, the state in which you are right now. In this state, 'I' has more frequency than your thoughts. So you can control your thoughts.

When you are without 'I' consciousness but having thoughts, you are in the dream state. In the dream state, your thoughts are at a higher frequency than your 'I' consciousness. That is why you have thoughts in your dreams but you are not able to control them.

When you are without 'I' Consciousness and not having any thoughts, you are in the deep sleep state. Normally, we are aware of only these three states — waking, dream and deep sleep. The fourth state is where you have I consciousness but no thoughts – Turiya

Intensity means being intense every moment in whatever you do. So first you need to be aware of yourself in all the states. Then only you can be intense throughout.

Now you experience who you are with awareness only during the waking state. You feel, 'I am a doctor', 'I am a lawyer', 'I am an engineer' and so on. Only if we are aware of the identities that we carry and enjoy in all the three states, we have caught the thread, the center line of all the three states of waking, dream and deep sleep. When we catch the thread of all these three states, suddenly we realize our identity in all the three states.

Somebody asked me, 'I don't think that in the deep sleep state I am aware.' Then who is the person who comes back and says it was deep peace during my deep sleep? Who is the person who is reminiscing about it saying, 'It was filled with darkness. It was as if I was not there at all'? Who is coming back and remembering even this idea, 'I was not there at all'?

If the person is not there in that state, then who is coming back to connect all these three states? No, we cannot say we were not there in the deep sleep state. We were there, but we were not aware of the identity that we had in that state.

Understand, a person who is aware of all these three states is conscious. If we are aware of the identity in all these three states, then we are conscious enough, our seeking is intense enough to be answered, we are intense enough to be initiated and blessed.

If we are not already aware of all these three states, if we have not experienced all these three states with the same identity, then naturally we need to now intensify our seeking. An intense seeker will carry the identity about himself throughout all these three states. If even once or twice you have experienced your waking identity in the dream state then you are intense.

In the dream state suddenly sometimes you remember that you are beyond the identity which you think as you in the dream state. I have seen seekers going through this experience in the dream state. They will be dreaming and suddenly they will identify themselves with their identity of the waking state. Then they will think about the dream state, 'Hey, this is too small. This is nothing.'

If you have had the experience of your waking state identity in the dream state, understand, then you have the intensity. Your seeking is intense.

Understand: Question is a word. Quest is a feeling.

Man is born as a quest. The rest of Existence cannot reflect the Divine like man can. Man is like a mirror. He has the choice to face and reflect the Divine or to turn away. Man can make a conscious choice, which is why he can grow. Man can choose to realize the Divine through his human form. No other being in Existence has this choice.

If these words, How do I get enlightenment? I want to... real bad and urgently, have come out, if this question has come out as a deep quest, then you don't need anything. Just boil, let the whole being burn with this quest. That is enough. Nothing else needs to be done. Let this boiling be intense.

Allow this boiling. Allow this burning. Allow this intensity. Allow this urgency. Let the urge become urgent. Let the question become your quest. Let it just eat your ego, eat your inner space.

People ask me, Have you been enlightened by the divine grace or by your effort or by your quest?'

I tell them, your having the quest is the first sign that you are having the divine grace. Unless you have the divine grace, you will not have the quest.

Understand, the quest or seeking is like a seed. It is a seed feeling suffocated inside the shell. See, the life that is inside the seed, unless it feels suffocated inside the shell, it won't open and become a tree.

The moment the seed starts that it should open up, the moment it starts feeling the seeking, the urgency and the quest to open up to become a tree, it means that already the tree inside the seed has started expressing itself.

If you have the feeling that you should get enlightened, the Buddha in you has opened his eyes. The Buddha in you has started waking up. All you need to do is open your eyes! Allow this seeking. From morning till night let it boil, let it create a deep dissatisfaction in you. Let every pore in your skin, every nerve in your body, every cell in you vibrate with that intensity. Let it swallow all your depressions you may have in life. In life you may have so many other depressions and sufferings of not having so many things. Let all those sufferings be swallowed by this one suffering.

A Zen student was intensely studying under her master but she was not able to experience true meditation for a very long time. One full moon night, she was carrying a bucket of water suspended on a bamboo stick. She saw the rejection of the moon in the bucket. Suddenly, the bamboo broke. The water fell out of the bucket. The rejection of the moon disappeared and so did her ego

When the seeking is intense, it will remove the juice from your ego. The green grass becomes like a haystack. Just a match is enough to bum the whole haystack down. The Ultimate can happen in a split second through a simple happening.

So understand, let this seeking, let this quest, your saying, 'How to get enlightened? I want to...real bad and urgently', let this seeking burn all your other sufferings, all your other depressions, all your other desires, all your other concerns about life.

Let it happen and suddenly you will see that the seeking suddenly disappears, it is not there. When the seeking disappears, you are enlightened. You have achieved what you are seeking.

The Upanishads, the ancient vedic texts by the sages and mystics that happened as revelations, say that for the person who is initiated the whole world is heaven. Understand the word 'initiation'. It does not mean doing some ceremony or ritual.

Initiation means that click happening in you. When a master expressed the truth, if the click, the realization, happens in you and if you suddenly feel, 'O god! What he says is right. I was always

thinking exactly this. He put it in the right way, that is what initiation is. If you feel whatever I am speaking is what you always thought about but I am verbalizing it and properly putting it in words, the initiation has happened.

Please understand, only after all the preparation is done and only when you are in the state of high intensity, the truth uttered by the master just clicks.

When the master says there is no need for any seeking any more and just liberate yourself right now, you will be able to do so only if you have done enough of seeking and created the intensity. That is the paradox!

The technique is to get the right attitude of intensity. Actually, if you have high intense energy, you will automatically have the right listening. You will be just waiting to catch one glimpse. You will be just waiting to listen. You will be just waiting to imbibe.

That is why masters speak again and again and again for years over years. I started speaking only a few years ago. Buddha spoke for over forty years. But, the message was the same. His first sermon and the last sermon are almost the same.

You may then think why thousands of disciples sat everyday and heard the same sermon again and again. Because, the click happens only when you are in intense energy. Only with intensity it clicks. You just catch the flame and the awakening happens

For the spiritual experience to happen, two conditions need to be fulfilled. One is that you must be completely open and available to the surroundings. The other is the intense energy field. Sometimes even if you are open, if you are not in the intense energy field, the first cracking of the coconut of your ego does not happen. The first spiritual experience is just like breaking open a coconut. Once the first opening happens, it is not difficult to break the rest of the coconut. The first opening needs an intense spiritual energy field.

These two factors are what resulted in my first spiritual experience. I was open and available to the surroundings, and I was in the intense energy field of Arunachala.

Fortunately, I was attracted to the beauty of that hill. Normally, if you see a hill or a river or an ocean every day, you will take it for granted. Somehow I never took that hill for granted. I never thought I know about it. I was continuously open, available.

Understand, being open and available every time, seeing it every morning with the eyes of freshness or with the mind of openness is what I am calling 'being open and available'. Many times, we completely close ourselves to the society.

We just come to some conclusion, some understanding and after that we never update our understanding or our effort with the result.

Every day, the Arunachala hill was living for me. Everyday it was never the same old hill that I saw yesterday. I had a very funny routine. In the morning when I got up I would not open my eyes. I

would slowly walk from my room to outside the house holding the parapet wall. I would come out and stand in a place from where I knew the hill could be seen. Only then I would open my eyes so that the first thing that I saw in the morning would be that hill.

Somehow my brothers knew that the first thing that I wanted to see was the hill. They would want to have fun teasing me. When they knew that I was out from my bed and slowly walking, they would come and stand in front of me.

If I opened my eyes and did not see the hill and instead saw their faces, I would go back and lie down again. I would lie down again, sleep for half an hour, then again get up and slowly walk back to see the hill and open my eyes. Only if I saw the hill the first thing in the morning, I would carry on with my routine.

It may look funny and superstitious but I always felt I took birth, I took this body, because of that attraction and pull that hill has got for enlightened beings.

There is a very beautiful verse in Tamil that describes the hill as 'the hill that attracts enlightened beings around it'. The hill is especially respected for attracting enlightened beings not only from this planet earth, but also from other planets and spaces, towards planet earth. I never took the hill for granted. It was an ever-living presence.

One day I was trying to sit and meditate. It was a full moon day (Poornima) and the moon was rising as the sun was setting. I was just sitting on a rock on Arunachala hill, trying the meditation technique that the disciple of Ram ana Maharishi and enlightened master Annamalai Swamigal', had initiated me into.

I was sitting on the rock trying to find the source from where the feeling of "I" was rising. On that day I was sitting for a particularly long time trying to find the source in a deep way. Suddenly something happened and I felt like I was being sucked inside, pulled inside. I was sitting with closed eyes but I saw very clearly that something opened inside. The moment that opened inside, I was able to see whole 360 degrees around me. My eyes were closed but I was able to see complete 360 degrees, whatever was happening in all the directions - front, side, back, up, and Not only was I able to see, but I was also able to feel very clearly with the same intensity how we all feel alive inside our skin, that I was alive in everything I was able to see.

I was able to see whatever was around me — the plants, rocks, trees and everything. I was able to feel that I am alive in everything. In the same way you, all feel you are alive inside your body I felt alive with the whole cosmos, with the whole Existence. Till then I was just a mere body. After that, I realized I am body also. Understand, "I am body also".

It was a very deep experience. If it was just a word or imagination, it won't have that much impact on the inner space. It was an intense conscious experience.

You see, now you know you are inside your skin. Now you will listen to anything as long as it does not disturb you. Naturally you know how to protect yourself because you are alive inside your body and that is your conscious experience.

No matter however many people teach you that you are not just your body you will only listen but you will not allow them to work on you! Because your conscious experience is your body.

My experience that 'I am this whole Existence' became my truth. That is why I started living according to that.

People are surprised that I lived such a strong intense life in such a young age. They feel that it is very difficult and unimaginable. It is unimaginable for you because it is not your conscious experience. It is easy for me because feeling the whole cosmos is me became a very solid experience.

Look at the biography of enlightened master and founder of Buddhism, Gautam Buddha. He searched for six long years. He tried various paths but the beauty is that in every attempt he put in his whole being.

Whatever he decided to follow, he did with complete, unwavering intensity. He tried various techniques such as fasting, continuous penance, chanting and many such methods. He tried all possible techniques but nothing worked.

During his seeking, a teacher told him to eat only one grain of rice per da Or three months. Buddha sincerely followed his instructions. He was reduced to skin and bones and became extremely weak. One day, he stepped into the river to bathe. He had become so weak that he couldn't even move his legs and was being swept away by the current. He caught hold of a tree branch and while hanging onto it he suddenly realized the fruitlessness of all his efforts. He had been mortifying the body but in the process, he had only lost his bodily strength.

He felt a deep depression that he could not achieve anything in the inner world and he had nothing meaningful in the outer world.

He came out of the river and sat under the tree. He was frustrated but the difference between ordinary frustration and Buddha's frustration was he was complete and intense in his frustration as well.

There was not even a grain of hope he had. He completely gave up. There was nothing to achieve, nothing to look forward to.

It is said that on that night as he looked at the sky ready to sleep, he attained nirvana'. The one factor that resulted in Buddha achieving It is intensity. So many of us claim we are doing everything but nothing is happening. Look little deeper and see how integrated you are in your thirst and seeking. Whatever you may seek, integrate your energies completely and go for it. You will then see the universe open up to you completely.

I had mentioned about my deep spiritual experience where I felt one with Existence and had a 360 degree vision of everything around me. There are so many people practicing so many different meditation techniques. What is the difference, what is the reason why the experience happened to a small boy?

I can say that one important reason is that my whole inner space was ripe, ready for this small technique to awaken and open it. Constantly I used to be in that high frequency of the masters without even my conscious awareness.

See, especially in the young age, whoever inspires or impresses you becomes the hero of your inner space. These great masters impressed me so much that in every situation I would think, How would

these great masters behave?' For example, if I had some fear, I would remember, 'How will Annamalai Swamigal face this fear? He won't bother. He is enlightened. Let me also be like that.'

The inner space was so inspired and impressed by these great masters, that before every step I took in my life I would think, 'How will he behave? Let me also do that.' The inner space was so pure also at the young age and I had no heroes other than the masters. At every step I used to think, 'How will he behave? Let me behave like that. How he will do? Let me do like that.'

I used to go for a circumambulation of the Arunachala hill. It is more than 12 kilometers around the hill. I used to go late at night. When I had a little fear I used to say, 'How will Annamalai Swamigal' behave? He won't bother about fear. Then let me also be like that.'

Let me tell you about one incident.

It was raining heavily that night as I went around the hill. I had some fear seeing the heavy rain, thunder and lightning. Immediately I thought, "How will Annamalai Swamigal behave? He won"t bother. He will just walk. Let me also do the same way."

I was walking through the traditional crematorium. In Bharat both cremation and burial are done in the same place. I was walking in that place because when you go around the hill the path goes through that crematorium.

Suddenly I saw a dog biting something and eating*. When I went near the dog started barking at me. At first when the fear came up I though t, "How will Annamalai Swamigal behave? He won't bother. Let me just go. "I started moving. Anyhow when I started moving the dog got scared and ran away.*

When I got nearer, I saw that it was a dead body which was not completely buried. It had come out in the rain and it was lying on the road. Just imagine a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy, alone at midnight, seeing a dead body without a head, since the dog had the head in its mouth.

The fear started but it did not even reach my being completely. The shock, the fear stroke did not even happen completely. As soon as the first thought started coming up, with intense awareness I thought, "How will Annamalai Swamigal react now? He will just walk around and go. Just walk around and go. "

I continued to walk. That's all. I took a detour and walked away. I did not even turn back and see. The [ear stroke, which was like a bubble, which was about to start, did not even open up, did not even reach my body. The heat or the shivering from fear was not even there in the body. It just died.

Intensely, the whole conscious inner space was ready. That is the reason, just a punch, just a small inspiration was able to put me into that experience. That is what I call 'Living Enlightenment'.

When you live the master's body language you live enlightenment. Whenever any thought came into my inner space, whether it was related to clothes or food or anything, the first thing I would think was, 'How will Annamalai Swamigal behave? Naturally he won't have any desire. Then forget about it!'

If I felt a little lazy to meditate or to circumambulate the hill, I would think, 'How will Annamalai Swamigal think? How will he handle this situation? Naturally he will not bother about this laziness. He will just get up and meditate, that's all! So just do that!' So constantly, from morning until night, these masters became the reference. They became my life center.

I asked Annamalai Swamigal once, "I saw Devi' in my dream. Do you also see her in the dream? Annamalai Swamigal replied, "No, I don't have dreams. "I was shocked, "You don't have dream! Then how can I have dream! "

That night I said to myself, 'Now, no dream. Annamalai Swamigal said 'no dream' so I cannot have dream.'You will be surprised, that night when some dream started happening, I said clearly from inside the dream, 'No! Annamalai Swamigal doesn't have dreams. How can I have dreams?'

The dream disappeared. Just the dream disappeared. The inner space was so thorough, so innocent, so direct, it just happened.

Even if I felt cold or anything, I would remember, 'How will Annamalai Swamigal behave? He won't bother. Then don't bother. That's all.' There were no further questions or arguments inside.

You can also use this simple, powerful technique. It is so simple your mind cannot find any excuse to escape.

In any situation, ask yourself, 'How will master respond? How will master face this situation?' Do the same. You will see that a new door opens. This is what I call 'Living Enlightenment'. You don't need anything else. This one thing is enough.

Even if you are sitting, if thoughts come up, ask your mind, 'If master is sitting what will be coming up? Naturally silence. Then why are you thinking? Silent!' That's all. Nothing else.

If your mind says, 'No, no, I know it is true. I know this but it is too much.' Then think, If master's mind says this, how he will behave?' He would have finished the mind that moment! That's all. Just be very clear.

Take this one message and let this message become life in you, the message of Living Enlightenment. Understand, from the age often when I was inspired and impressed by Annamalai Swamigal, I started doing this technique. I didn't even know then that it was a meditation technique.

It just started, 'How will Annamalai Swamigal behave in this situation?'As a boy,many times in my homeI have seen my brothers or family fighting for some share in something and I would think, 'How will Annamalai Swamigal behave? He won't even bother! Forget about it. Let them have.' That's all

Actually, this is what I call relationship with the master. Relationship with the master is not just doing some worship or putting some flowers or worshipping him once in a while. No! Relationship happens when you are thoroughly impressed by the master. Whenever anything comes up, say fear or insecurity or greed or anger, just see, 'How will master behave?' Simply it will disappear. It will just disappear.

Many times I tell people, just feeling strongly connected with the master is enough. You don't need anything else. It is not just your ordinary relationship. In an ordinary relationship, you neither try to understand nor imbibe the master. Just some feeling is there. I can't even call that as a relationship. It is an ordinary, regular interaction.

Feeling connected to the master means just living him. When you live the master, then you feel intensely connected to him. Only then you are expanding. Only then something is happening to you. This has not happened in most of us because of so many other relationships. So many other persons occupy your inner space and so many others have inspired you or impressed you or given the idea that they are heroes. Just fil1 your inner space with the master and watch your problems simply dissolve.

Be intense in whatever you do. Whether you eat, sing, dance, pray or work, be completely into that, in the moment.

Intensity is enlightenment. As of now, some part of you is intense while some part of you is lazy. Being hundred percent intense is enlightenment.

The first thing you need for living enlightenment is intensity. Intensity is the sword with which you can break the mind.

It is just like awakening from the dream. The first thing you need is the intention, the idea that you should wake up. So now you need to have the intense idea to wake up.

Understand, the intensity with which you work towards wealth, relations etc., if you just turn a little towards enlightenment, you will awaken.

Intensely decide, 'I will wake up from this life that I call life.' Create an intense will or prayer. When you create a will and direct it towards you, it is called a will. When you create a will and direct it towards the Divine, it is called a prayer.

Intensity is a strong intention to wake up, the strong intention for fulfillment, for living enlightenment, for eternal bliss. The only gap between you and enlightenment is intensity.

Remember how intensely and anxiously you run behind things that give you joy. Suppose I tell now that whoever prays intensely will get a ten-million-dollar prize, you will show the intensity of your life, is it not? Just because you think there is some product that will fulfill you, you are intense. With

जिस प्रकार आप जानते हैं कि पैसा आपके जीवन में कुछ जोड़ने वाला है, उसी प्रकार प्रबुद्धता भी आपके जीवन में कुछ जोड़ने वाली है।

प्रबुद्धता के प्रति तीव्रता लाने के लिए, आप उन चीजों के प्रति तीव्रता पैदा करके शुरुआत कर सकते हैं जिनकी ओर आपने इच्छा का अनुभव किया है। उदाहरण के लिए, यदि आप स्वास्थ्य या धन की इच्छा रखते हैं, तो उसके बारे में तीव्र बनें। वह लालसा एकीकृत हो जाएगी और अज्ञात, प्रबुद्धता की ओर निर्देशित हो जाएगी। इतना ही नहीं, आपकी अतृप्त इच्छाएँ तीव्रता से जल भी सकती हैं।

आप जिस भी पूर्ति का अनुभव करते हैं, उसके लिए लालायित रहें। तीव्र लालसा ही पर्याप्त है, यह आपको वाष्पित कर देगी। और जो पूर्ति आप अनुभव करते हैं वह उस पूर्ति से कई गुना अधिक होगी जिसका आपने पहले कभी अनुभव किया होगा।

यह शिव सूत्रों से एक बहुत ही शक्तिशाली तकनीक है। सूत्र कहता है, उस अनंत शून्य में मर जाओ जहाँ तुम नहीं हो, इंद्रियों से परे शिव चेतना में जाओ। इस तकनीक को शनमुखी मुद्रा कहा जाता है।

चूंकि इस मुद्रा को लंबे समय तक बनाए रखना मुश्किल होगा, इसलिए आप जमीन पर बैठ सकते हैं और आराम बनाए रखने के लिए अपने हाथों को कुर्सी पर टिका सकते हैं। आप अपने हाथ को सहारा देने के लिए अपने सामने एक कुर्सी रख सकते हैं और उसे अपनी ओर मोड़ सकते हैं। वैकल्पिक रूप से, आप कुर्सी पर बैठ सकते हैं और अपने हाथों को सहारा देने के लिए अपने सामने वाली कुर्सी का उपयोग कर सकते हैं। कुर्सी पर अपने हाथों को सहारा देकर, आप कंधे के दर्द से बचेंगे।

यह तकनीक आपकी इंद्रियों के प्रवेश द्वारों को बंद कर देती है। इसका अभ्यास केवल उन लोगों द्वारा किया जाना चाहिए जिनके पास ध्यान का कुछ अनुभव है। सभी ध्यान की तरह आराम से पैरों को क्रॉस करके या कुर्सी पर बैठें, जिसमें पीठ, गर्दन और सिर एक ऊर्ध्वाधर रेखा में हों।

जब आप शनमुखी मुद्रा में होते हैं, तो चेहरे के सात छिद्रों (दो कान, दो आँखें, दो नासिकाएँ और एक मुँह) के माध्यम से बाहरी दुनिया में ऊर्जा का प्रवाह अवरुद्ध हो जाता है और भीतर की ओर मुड़ जाता है। आपके हाथ बहुत शक्तिशाली हैं। हाथों में ऊर्जा केंद्र इतने शक्तिशाली हैं कि वे ऊर्जा के प्रवाह को रोक सकते हैं, इसे ऊर्जा की एक केंद्रित किरण में बदल सकते हैं और इसे आज्ञा चक्र या तीसरी आंख की ओर निर्देशित कर सकते हैं।

आम तौर पर हमारी श्वास अव्यवस्थित रूप से अंदर और बाहर जाती है। अपनी उंगलियों से नासिका छिद्रों को आंशिक रूप से बंद करके, आप हवा के प्रवाह को कम कर सकते हैं और इसे संतुलित कर सकते हैं।

शनमुखी मुद्रा सबसे पहले बाहर की ओर ऊर्जा के प्रवाह को रोकती है। दूसरा, हम इंद्रियों को भीतर की ओर मोड़ रहे हैं।

तीसरा, हम उन्हें तीसरी आंख की ओर केंद्रित करते हैं।

निर्देश:

यदि आप चश्मा पहनते हैं, तो उन्हें हटा दें। अपनी उंगलियों को इस प्रकार रखें: अंगूठे छोटे कान के लोबों पर तब तक दबाएं जब तक कि आपको गुनगुनाने की आवाज न सुनाई दे। तर्जनी दोनों आंखों पर हल्के से। मध्यमा उंगली नाक के पुल पर। अनामिका नासिका छिद्रों के नीचे हल्के से। छोटी उंगलियां होंठों पर।

अगले 21 मिनट तक, नीचे दिए गए चरणों का पालन करें:

नाक को आंशिक रूप से बंद करें। बस प्राण के प्रवाह को कम करें। जब आपका मन अपने आप शांत हो जाए, तो प्राण का प्रवाह कम हो जाएगा। शनमुखी मुद्रा में रहें और जितना संभव हो उतना धीरे-धीरे और जितना संभव हो उतना गहराई से श्वास लें और छोड़ें। अपना मुँह कसकर बंद रखें। कल्पना करें कि आपकी दोनों आँखें पत्थर बन गई हैं और उन्हें हिलने न दें।

अपनी जागरूकता को तीव्र करें। तनाव न पैदा करें - गहरी जागरूकता के साथ प्रवेश करने का प्रयास करें। दबाव न बनाएं, केवल जागरूकता पैदा करें। तीव्रता से कल्पना करें जैसे कि आप अपनी तीसरी आंख में प्रवेश कर रहे हैं। गहराई से कल्पना करें जैसे कि आप एक ड्रिल बिट से अपनी तीसरी आंख में प्रवेश कर रहे हैं। आराम करें। अपनी आँखें धीरे-धीरे खोलें।

शनमुखी मुद्रा में रहने के लिए खुद को ठीक से सहारा देकर सहज बनाना महत्वपूर्ण है। आप अपनी तीसरी आंख में जबरदस्त ऊर्जा का निर्माण देखेंगे, अपनी अंतर्ज्ञान को जगाने के लिए। जब आप सहज होंगे, तो आप देखेंगे कि आप गहरी ऊर्जा या उच्च चेतना में प्रवेश कर रहे हैं।

तीव्रता के बारे में बात करने के बाद निर्दोषता के बारे में बात करना अजीब लग सकता है, लेकिन सच्चे अर्थों में, आप जो कुछ भी करते हैं उसमें तब तक तीव्र नहीं हो सकते जब तक कि आप अन्य एजेंडा के प्रति निर्दोष न हों। मैं जिस निर्दोषता की बात कर रहा हूँ, वह वह नहीं हो सकती जो आपकी अपनी शब्दकोश में निर्दोषता के रूप में परिभाषित है। मैं जिस बारे में बात कर रहा हूँ वह एक बच्चे की निर्दोषता है। एक बच्चा जो कुछ भी करता है उसके बारे में तीव्र होता है। वयस्कों ने वह शक्ति खो दी है, लेकिन इसे पुनः प्राप्त किया जा सकता है।

निर्दोषता क्या है?

निर्दोषता का अर्थ है आंतरिक स्थान की शुद्धता, विचारों या उकेरी गई यादों से प्रभावित न होना। आपको बहुत स्पष्ट होने दें, भले ही आप अपनी भावनाओं जैसे क्रोध, लालच और वासना को व्यक्त नहीं कर रहे हैं, यदि वे आपकी आंतरिक जगह में मौजूद हैं, तो आप अभी तक एक पूर्ण और निर्दोष व्यक्ति नहीं हैं। सामाजिक रूप से आप शुद्ध हो सकते हैं, बस इतना ही। दूसरी ओर यदि आप अपने क्रोध, वासना और लालच को व्यक्त करते हैं लेकिन कुछ भी आपकी आंतरिक जगह को नहीं छूता है और आप एक निर्दोष बच्चे की तरह रहते हैं, तो बहुत स्पष्ट रहें, आप एक शुद्ध प्राणी हैं।

आप बच्चों को गुस्सा करते देख सकते हैं। बच्चे लालची भी होते हैं। वे ज्यादातर लालच पर अपना व्यक्तित्व बनाते हैं। इसीलिए वे 'मेरा' रवैये के प्रति इतने जागरूक और सचेत रहते हैं। एक बच्चे से एक खिलौना छीनने की कोशिश करें। बच्चा ऐसा व्यवहार करेगा जैसे उसकी जान ले ली गई हो। वह चीखेगा और चिल्लाएगा। ऐसा इसलिए है क्योंकि उसका पूरा व्यक्तित्व 'मेरा' रवैये पर बना है। बच्चों में लालच और क्रोध होता है, लेकिन आप उन्हें अशुद्ध नहीं कह सकते। ऐसा इसलिए है क्योंकि जिसे आप अशुद्धता के रूप में सोचते हैं वह उनकी आंतरिक जगह को प्रभावित नहीं करता है। वे बैठेंगे और अपने खिलौनों से खेलेंगे और कुछ घंटों के बाद वे उन्हें फेंक देंगे और चले जाएंगे। वे अपने अंदर कुछ भी नहीं रखते। उनका आंतरिक स्थान सुंदर और शुद्ध है।

निर्दोषता सीधे आंतरिक स्थान से संबंधित है। यह किसी भी तरह से बाहरी दुनिया से संबंधित नहीं है। शिव सूत्र में, शिव हमें इस निर्दोषता को प्राप्त करने के लिए तकनीक देते हैं। यदि आप शिव के जीवन का अनुसरण करते हैं जैसा कि हिंदू पौराणिक कथाओं में वर्णित है, तो आप उनमें कोई सामाजिक या पारंपरिक निर्दोषता नहीं देख पाएंगे। लेकिन शुद्ध और परम निर्दोषता होगी। वह स्थान जहाँ वह रहता है या जिस तरह से वह रहता है, वह सीधे तौर पर उसकी शुद्धता या निर्दोषता से संबंधित नहीं है। शिव एक कब्रिस्तान में रहते हैं जहाँ शवों का दाह संस्कार किया जाता है, जो आत्माओं और भूतों से घिरा होता है।

संस्कृत में शिव शब्द का अर्थ है अकारण शुभता। यह अकारण शुभता, जहां भी वह है, जहां भी होता है, आनंद पैदा करने की ऊर्जा, उसके निर्दोष आंतरिक स्थान से उत्पन्न होती है।

वैदिक परंपरा में, उपनिषद नामक शास्त्र लेखन हैं। संस्कृत में उपनिषद शब्द का अर्थ है एक गुरु की शिक्षाएं उसके शिष्यों को जब वे उसके साथ बैठे थे। ऐसे 108 उपनिषद हैं। वे वैदिक काल के महान आचार्यों द्वारा सौंपी गई प्रबुद्धता विज्ञान का सार हैं। इनमें से एक, छांदोग्य उपनिषद एक सुंदर कहानी का वर्णन करता है:

सत्यकाम नामक एक लड़का प्रबुद्धता की तलाश में एक गुरु के पास जाता है। गुरु उसे चार सौ गायें देते हुए कहता है, "इन गायों को ले जाओ। जंगल में रहो और उनकी देखभाल करो। जब ये बढ़कर एक हजार गायें हो जाएं तो उन्हें मेरे पास वापस ले आओ। " सत्यकाम जंगल में जाता है और गायों के साथ रहता है, उनके बढ़ने का इंतजार करता है। गायों को एक हजार गुना बढ़ने में कई साल लग जाते हैं। उन सभी वर्षों तक वह चुपचाप बैठा रहता है, किसी से बात नहीं करता, बस गायों के साथ रहता है। जल्द ही, वह मानव भाषा भूल जाता है। गहरी चुप्पी में, किसी भी इंसान से संबंध न रखते हुए, वह धीरे-धीरे अपनी बाहरी दुनिया की पहचान खो देता है।

जब तक एक हजार गायें हो जाती हैं, वह गिनना भूल जाता है। वह बस एक सुंदर आनंद की भावना के साथ इंतजार करता हुआ बैठा रहता है। अंत में, एक गाय उसके पास आती है और कहती है, "श्रीमान, अब हम एक हजार हो गए हैं। हम गुरु के पास वापस जा सकते हैं। " वह उत्तर देता है, "क्या ऐसा है? ठीक है। " सत्यकाम परमानंद में है। वह वापस जाने का रास्ता भूल गया है। गायें रास्ता दिखाती हैं। रास्ते में, जानवर, पक्षी और यहां तक कि आग जो वह अपना भोजन पकाने के लिए जलाता है, उसे ब्रह्म के स्वभाव के बारे में, परम सत्य के बारे में बताते हैं।

जब सत्यकाम गुरु के पास लौटता है तो गुरु उसकी ओर देखता है और मुस्कुराता है। वह कहता है, "तुम सत्य के ज्ञाता सत्यकाम की तरह इतने तेजस्वी दिखते हो। तुम्हें किसने सिखाया? " सत्यकाम उसे बताता है कि उसने जानवरों और पक्षियों के माध्यम से सत्य को कैसे समझा और गुरु से अपने शब्दों में सत्य सिखाने का अनुरोध किया।

गुरु कहते हैं, "तुम पहले से ही सत्य जानते हो, और उसे आशीर्वाद देते हैं।

कहानी कहती है कि केवल होने से, केवल प्रकृति को क्या कहना है, यह सुनने से, सत्यकाम ने खुद को सत्य में स्थापित किया। वह प्रबुद्ध हो गया।

कुल निर्दोषता प्रबुद्धता की ओर ले जाती है।

सत्यकाम प्रबुद्धता के लिए गुरु से पूछता है और गुरु उसे गायों को बढ़ाने के लिए कहता है! आप में से कई लोग पूछेंगे कि गायों का प्रबुद्धता से क्या लेना-देना है? सौभाग्य से, सत्यकाम इतना बौद्धिक नहीं था। सौभाग्य से, उसे औपचारिक बौद्धिक शिक्षा नहीं मिली। इसलिए उसने यह सवाल नहीं पूछा! वह सरल, निर्दोष और विनम्र था, परिवर्तन होने के लिए तैयार था। उसके पास उपयोग करने के लिए कोई तर्क नहीं था।

समझें, जब तक आप बिना तर्क के नहीं होते, या तर्क से थक नहीं जाते, तब तक आप परिवर्तन के लिए तैयार नहीं हो सकते। तर्क आपको अपने जीवन को भी समझने में मदद नहीं कर सकता। तर्क आपको अपने मन में भी देखने में मदद नहीं कर सकता। यह आपको बदलने में कैसे मदद कर सकता है?

लोग मुझसे पूछते हैं, "स्वामीजी, आप तर्क के खिलाफ क्यों हैं?' मैं तर्क के खिलाफ नहीं हूं। मैं केवल आपको बता रहा हूं कि आपके सभी दुख बुद्धि के बिना तर्क के कारण हैं। आपका तर्क सुबह से शाम तक आपके अंदर इतनी राजनीति पैदा करता है।

राजनीति क्या है? यह एक ही विषय पर अलग-अलग राय के अलावा और कुछ नहीं है, है ना? अब अपने मन को देखो। यह सुबह एक बात कहता है और शाम को उसी विषय पर एक अलग बात कहता है। यह आपके मन में दुविधा पैदा करता है। आपका मन ही ऐसी दुविधा है।

लोग कहते हैं कि सभी आध्यात्मिक संगठनों में बहुत राजनीति होती है। मैं उनसे पूछता हूं, 'तुम्हारा क्या मतलब है?' जो लोग यह बयान देते हैं, उनके अंदर ही राजनीति है! राजनीति बनाने के लिए आपको दो लोगों की भी जरूरत नहीं है। एक व्यक्ति ही काफी है। तर्क वाला एक व्यक्ति ही काफी है क्योंकि सुबह उसका तर्क कुछ कहेगा और शाम को कुछ और कहेगा! और स्वाभाविक रूप से आप और आप के बीच लड़ाई ही राजनीति है! क्या मैं सही हूँ? तो आप यह बयान क्यों दे रहे हैं कि आध्यात्मिक संगठनों में भी राजनीति होती है?

यदि आप सुबह लिए गए निर्णयों और शाम को लिए गए निर्णयों को एक साथ अपने सामने रखते हैं, तो आपको अपने अंदर एक राजनेता बैठा हुआ दिखाई देगा!

तर्क आपको सरल और निर्दोष होने की अनुमति नहीं देता है। यह परिवर्तन को आसानी से होने की अनुमति नहीं देता है। परिवर्तन होने के लिए तर्क को दूर करना होगा। केवल जब कोई तर्क नहीं होता है तो निर्दोषता हो सकती है। निर्दोषता परिवर्तन होने के लिए स्थान है।

सत्यकाम के मामले में, सौभाग्य से उसे तर्क ने नहीं काटा था। शिष्य प्रबुद्धता के लिए गुरु के पास जाता है और गुरु उसे कहता है, 'ठीक है, इन गायों को ले जाओ, जंगल में जाओ और तब तक वहीं रहो जब तक वे एक हजार गायें नहीं हो जातीं। फिर वापस आओ!' यदि आज का साधक उस शिष्य के स्थान पर होता तो वह कहता, 'मुझे लगता है कि गुरु मेरा शोषण करने की कोशिश कर रहा है। उसे एक हजार गायें चाहिए, इसलिए वह मुझसे यह काम करने के लिए कह रहा है। वह अपना काम करवाने के लिए मेरा इस्तेमाल कर रहा है। ' निर्दोषता तर्क से खो जाती है! इसीलिए आधुनिक युग के किसी भी साधक को ऐसी अद्भुत तकनीकें नहीं मिलती हैं।

समझें, यह मात्र एक कहानी नहीं है। इसके पीछे एक महान सत्य छिपा है। निर्दोषता के साथ, सत्यकाम ने बस वही किया जो गुरु ने कहा था। इसके अलावा, उसने गिनती का अपना तर्क खो दिया। वह पूरी तरह से परमानंद और आनंद में खो गया था। मन ने काम करना बंद कर दिया। उसे एक हजार या दो हजार की परवाह नहीं थी। केवल निर्दोषता और स्वीकृति के कारण ही उसमें सबसे बड़ी घटना घटी - प्रबुद्धता! जब आप पूरी तरह से स्वीकार करते हैं, तो आपको मन की आवश्यकता नहीं होती है। मन तभी आवश्यक है जब आप संघर्षों के साथ जीते हैं, केवल तभी जब आप लड़ रहे होते हैं। बस इस पल में बाहरी दुनिया और आंतरिक दुनिया में खुद को स्वीकार करें। आप प्रबुद्ध होकर बाहर निकलेंगे।

इतने वर्षों तक, गुरु ने जो कहा उसे पूरी तरह से स्वीकार करते हुए, सत्यकाम बस था। उसके साथ प्रबुद्धता के अलावा और क्या हो सकता है?

आप सोच सकते हैं, 'सरल स्वीकृति इतना बड़ा काम कैसे कर सकती है?' समस्या यह है कि यहां तक कि आध्यात्मिक ज्ञान को भी हम एक बौद्धिक मन के स्थान से अपनाते हैं। यह उस बौद्धिक स्थान से है जिससे हम 'कैसे' पूछते हैं। बुद्धि हमेशा सवाल करती है। निर्दोषता सीधे तौर पर गुरु जो कहते हैं उसका अभ्यास करना शुरू कर देती है। यही अंतर है।

जब आप पूरी तरह से निर्दोष और खुले होते हैं, तो दीक्षा ही प्रबुद्धता है। केवल एक शब्द ही प्रबुद्ध करने के लिए पर्याप्त है। शिव शिव सूत्र में कहते हैं, 'जब गुरु सत्य व्यक्त कर रहे हों तो बस सुनो, और प्रबुद्ध हो जाओ!'

केवल सुनने से ही प्रबुद्धता कैसे मिल सकती है? यह सत्यकाम के साथ क्यों हुआ जब यह हमारे साथ नहीं हो रहा है? पहली बात: वह निर्दोष था और इसलिए गुरु के निर्देश को प्राप्त करने के लिए बुद्धिमान था। दूसरा: वह इसके साथ जीने के लिए काफी साहसी था। उसे गुरु पर पूरा भरोसा था। निर्दोषता हमेशा भरोसे के साथ आती है।

मैं आपको एक हजार गायें लाने के लिए नहीं कह रहा हूँ। नहीं! मैं आपसे उसी मनोदशा के साथ आने के लिए कह रहा हूँ जैसे सत्यकाम थे। उसी निर्दोषता के साथ आओ। आपको बिल्कुल वही करने की ज़रूरत नहीं है जो सत्यकाम ने किया था। लेकिन आपको सत्यकाम की तरह बनना होगा। यदि आपका अस्तित्व ऐसा है, तो इस क्षण में परिवर्तन हो सकता है। बस इस क्षण में प्रकाश का संचार हो सकता है।

उपनिषद शब्द का अर्थ है 'गुरु के चरणों में बैठना'। प्राचीन भारत में, गुरुओं और शिष्यों की गुरुकुल परंपरा थी। बच्चे सात साल की उम्र में गुरु के पास छोड़ दिए जाते थे और वे खूबसूरती से अपनी चेतना में केंद्रित होकर बड़े होते थे। गुरु शास्त्रीय सत्यों के जीवित प्रतीक हैं। उनके विचार, शब्द और कर्म परम सत्य से उत्पन्न होते हैं। शिष्य बस उनके आसपास रहकर सत्य को सीखते हैं।

भारत के एक प्रबुद्ध गुरु स्वामी श्री युक्तेश्वर गिरि कहते हैं, 'गुरु के साथ बैठना केवल उनकी शारीरिक उपस्थिति में होना नहीं है, बल्कि उन्हें अपने हृदय में रखना, सिद्धांत रूप में उनके साथ एक होना और स्वयं को उनके साथ जोड़ना है।' यह उपनिषद की पूरी तकनीक है। गुरु अतिचेतन ऊर्जा है। जब आप उससे जुड़ते हैं, तो आप उस ऊर्जा से जुड़ते हैं। आप केवल निर्दोषता, खुलेपन के माध्यम से ही जुड़ सकते हैं।

खुलापन खालीपन है। ज्ञान को अपने अंदर न भरने दें। ज्ञान तो बस एक साधन है, आपका सार नहीं। सभी ज्ञान को 'यह नहीं है', 'यह नहीं है' के रूप में अस्वीकार करें। जब मैं अस्वीकार करने के लिए कहता हूं, तो मेरा मतलब है कि परम सत्य को छोड़कर किसी भी मध्यवर्ती ज्ञान से समझौता न करें। क्योंकि जब आप लगातार अपने अंदर उठने वाली हर चीज को छोड़ देते हैं, तो आपके पास कोई और रास्ता नहीं होता है। आपको वापस अपने आप में फेंक दिया जाता है और वहीं आपको परम सत्य मिलेगा। तब आप सत्य से भरने के लिए तैयार होते हैं। केवल वही उपनिषद को घटित कर सकता है।

यदि आप बच्चों को देखते हैं, तो उनकी आँखें हर समय आश्चर्य और ताजगी से भरी रहेंगी। वे अंदर से इतने खाली हैं। वे किसी भी चीज़ के बारे में कोई राय नहीं रखते हैं। वे प्राप्त करने के लिए तैयार हैं। उनकी तत्परता उनकी आँखों में व्यक्त होती है। क्या आपने कभी किसी वयस्क को ऐसी आँखों से देखा है? जैसे-जैसे हम बड़े होते हैं, आँखें अपनी चमक खो देती हैं क्योंकि हम जो जानना शुरू करते हैं उससे सुस्त हो जाते हैं। ज्ञान हमें सुस्त बना देता है। हम कई बातें जान सकते हैं, लेकिन जानने से हमें किसी भी तरह से सुस्त नहीं होना चाहिए। हमें हमेशा आत्मा में खाली रहना चाहिए।

If you just look at life without any opinions, without any words of description, without any fixed ideas, then you are like an empty teacup into which the brewed tea can be poured. You receive because you hold nothing, because you are empty. Then you never lose your enthusiasm. You are never bored. You are like a child, innocent and fresh.

A young girl was writing something on a piece of paper. Her father asked her what it was. She said, "I am writing a letter." He asked, "To whom?" "To me," she replied. "What does the letter say?" He asked.

She replied, "How do I know? I have not mailed it and I have not received it yet."

There is so much freshness behind innocence. Life becomes an unfolding mystery every moment with it. That is the truth. Life is an ever unfolding mystery. It is the mind that typecasts it. The mind always wants life on its own specific terms. Innocence embraces life with life's own terms.

If you play hide and seek with children, you will see that they will hide in the same place as you hid the last time! Not just once but most of the time! How is this possible? Because of one thing: they move with innocence. They don't have any idea in their head. They simply follow their heart. They have great trust in you, so they simply hide where you hid, not even suspecting you will look there! That is the beauty.

Innocence trusts. Innocence does not worry about being exploited. Neuroscientists have explanations for this now. They say that till about the age of five or six, a child's brain wave patterns are in the theta and delta states. These are extremely impressionable states of mind in which we dream and sleep. These are states of no identity. Till the age of twelve they say that brain waves are in alpha state, still very impressionable. This is why children believe most of what adults say to them. In their innocence they trust.

When you see with empty eyes, everything you see goes deep and causes fresh insight. Life becomes an eternally unfolding mystery. The very nature of your questioning changes. The nature of the questioning reveals the depth of innocence of the questioner.

There are three ways to ask a question: you can ask out of innocence, or you can ask out of knowledge to show that you too know, and third, you can ask to confirm that what you know is correct. When you ask out of innocence, you are completely ready to receive the answer. When you ask out of knowledge, you completely miss the answer. When you ask for confirmation, you simply resist the answer. The fundamental secret of proper learning and knowing is to function from a state of innocence.

The problem is that those who are not empty never recognize that they are not empty. You cannot tell them they are full. They will neither understand nor accept it. But a man of innocence can say, 'Because of my knowing I missed it. I actually don't know. I am now eager to know.' The moment this space is created, the learning continues to happen. In this space there is no ego of knowing. The resistance is dropped and there is pure receptivity.

J. Krishnamurti', the great philosopher, beautifully says, 'There can be freedom from knowledge only when the motivation for gathering of knowledge is understood.'

What is generally the motivation for knowledge? You see: the present is an unfolding miracle and mystery of Existence. We try to grasp it with the net of knowledge. That is the motivation for knowledge. But it can never happen! The unknown can never be trapped with the known. The unknown can be known only by surrendering to it. That surrender is what is called intelligence!

Intelligence recognizes the mystery of the present moment and surrenders to it joyfully. That joy is the joy of innocence.

Knowledge on the other hand denies the mystery of the present moment. It tries to ascertain it every minute and the present can never be ascertained. So you continuously remain with what is called fear of the unknown'. It is through the process of trying to ascertain the present moment that the fear of the unknown takes root. Otherwise, you have no fear! You are very clear that the present moment is a mystery!

Through knowledge, you somehow try to escape from the 'not-knowing' of the moment. To the ego, not-knowing means being nothing. It cannot handle being nothing. But innocence is being nothing and enjoying the present! The present is an unopened gift. But knowledge robs it of its suspense. When knowledge understands that the ways of the Self are yet to be discovered, then it doesn't hinder the process of the ultimate Knowing. Then it behaves as a tool that comes into play when actually required and does not stand in the way of embracing the mysteries of life.

Once knowledge solidifies in the being there is no space left for experiencing. There is scope only for replay of knowledge. Everything becomes a reflection of some past knowledge or some past conclusion. The future becomes a continuation of the past patterns and experiences. You already know the fragrance of a flower. You already know the sound of the waves.

Existence is not a continuation of anything. It is fresh every minute. So it is not possible to know anything. What do you know of what will happen the next second? If this is understood, all knowing can be dropped. Then there is only wisdom and wisdom is innocent intelligence. It allows the experience to happen without knowledge hindering. Then the great discoveries of the Self and that which is around the Self as well as the mysteries that link both happen.

J. Krishnamurti rightly says that belief discards so many possibilities and urges you into one particular activity. Since the mind is constantly looking for activity you go behind belief. We base our whole life on beliefs. Because of this we are immersed in activity, but not action. Activity needs constant fueling through beliefs. Activity cannot afford to stop. If it stops, the mind falls into depression. Action happens as and when required and stops. Activity happens out of belief. Action happens out of understanding. Activity causes fatigue while action creates energy and inspiration. What you need is action, not activity.

Just understand that belief is nothing but your own understanding of something and not the truth. In any given situation, four different people can conclude differently with four different beliefs. There is no absolute reality in belief. It is merely an individual perception. But innocence keeps the perception open. That is the beauty of it. It doesn't conclude and close the doors on anything.

There are innumerable interpretations to anything. Not holding onto any one interpretation is the essence of innocence. Then the spirit is kept alive.

When you are with innocence you simply enjoy the moment. If you watch innocent people, they will never appear to be with any great purpose. They will simply revel in the moment with a totality, with simplicity. Innocence grasps the moment while knowledge misses it. Knowledge knows only purpose while innocence knows the beauty of purposelessness.

If you set aside your knowledge, you are ready to grasp the moment and the Truth. The present holds the truth in it. The problem is that today education teaches only knowledge and how to be clever. It doesn't educate on innocence. Where in the universities do they teach innocence?

There is such a pressure to be clever today. Children lose their innocence to the conditioning that they receive in the name of 'how to be clever'. Over time, like this small boy, even innocence is used only to make up for cleverness!

A father introduced his son proudly to his colleagues at office for the first time. All his colleagues were standing around the boy and the father said, "Son, why don"t you tell them how old you are?" The child promptly said, "When I am at home I am seven. But when I am on a bus, I am five."

This is how children are trained today. They are trained to see utility in everything. Education evaluates you by your own utility. But you are not your utility. You are your being. The being can never be evaluated. Only the mind can be, and mind itself is a myth! Society creates a myth, which is your mind, and holds it as the yardstick to evaluate you. That is the reason why knowledge is so popular today.

Four friends lived in a town. They spent a lot of time together. Three ofthem were very learned. The fourth was not as learned but he was wise. One day, they decided to travel to other lands to exhibit their learning to men and earn money.

The fourth friend had nothing to boast of, but expressed his wish to accompany them. The first friend said, "You don"t know much. If you accompany us, we will have to unnecessarily share our money with you."

The second friend said, "Yes, that is true. It is better you stay back." The third friend was more kind. He said, "We grew up together all these years. It is not right to tell him to stay back. He should come along."

They passed through a dense forest. They saw many wild animals and experienced many exciting moments. Suddenly one day, they came across a heap of animal bones. One of them said, "I think this is a wonderful way to put our knowledge to test. Let us bring this animal back to life."

The two other friends agreed, but the fourth one said, "I feel these are the bones of a very big animal, so we should not attempt to do such things." The other three laughed at him and called him a coward. They said, "If you had knowledge like we do, you will not feel so afraid of such things. Keep quiet and watch us. The three proceeded with the experiment.

One of them arranged the bones in a way that it looked like a proper animal. Then he chanted some verses, sprinkled holy water on it and the bones suddenly took the shape of a skeleton. They were amazed by the power of their knowledge.

The second one came forward, chanted a few more verses and sprinkled more water on it. The skeleton suddenly got covered with muscles, fiesh, blood and a coat of fur. It was a lion and lacked only life.

The friends were amazed at themselves. The third friend came forward and said he would infuse life into it. The fourth friend gave another warning but they laughed at him. He then slowly 6'lfmbed up a tree and sat there watching.

The third friend waved life into the lion"s body and the lion came to life. With one roar the lion advanced towards the three of them. They looked up to see where the fourth friend was. He was perched up on the tree watching the whole scene.

The lion made short work of them. Knowledge is a tool. It doesn't directly lead to intelligence. It is just a tool. As long as we use it as a powerful tool where needed, it is good. It can do amazing things. The mistake we do is giving our whole lives to the hands of knowledge. On the other hand, innocence leads directly to pure intelligence.

Innocence grasps dimensions that cleverness misses. Innocence may miss the facts but it catches the Truths. Cleverness is too busy with facts. When cleverness combines with innocence, it becomes a rare combination of intelligence and innocence. Setting aside knowledge for the sake of innocence is intelligence. I don't mean that you have to stop gathering knowledge. Just understand that knowledge cannot substitute innocence.

If you observe villagers who are not educated you will see that they exhibit pure intelligence! That is why you will find that when you are stuck, a villager effortlessly pitches in and helps you out! Innocent intelligence has that capacity.

Today all universities work on sharpening the intellectual faculty of the individual. They teach us how to make ourselves more useful to society and how to be productive or effective. There is nothing wrong in being productive and effective, but in the process we forget how to be innocent and receptive. We forget how to open up to the cosmos, to Existence. We forget how to move in synchronicity with the cosmos, how to make productivity happen in tune with the cosmic plan, which is the source of all productivity. This happens because we are caught in 'doing' and 'having', we forget the "being".

There are three important states: being, doing and having. Right now, we move from doing to having. We continuously 'do' things. We learn and we put the learning into useful action. We then 'have' what we want, whether it is money, relationships, comfort, and what not. Then we want to have better things or have more things and so we continue doing. We are all the time between doing and having. In the process, the being is forgotten. Our real restfulness lies only in the state of being. Because of this, however much we do and have, we still search for restfulness. This feeling is the 'call of the being'.

If we nurture the being and cause the doing to happen from the quality of the being, then we don't have to work so much for the having. That will simply happen as a byproduct. This is the secret of Existence. But this is not seen as a direct utility to society by the universities. That is the problem. But this is what gives the real utility of every individual, not only to society but to the whole of the cosmos. We should always be concerned about the Whole.

In the ancient Hindu universities like 'Takshila and Nalanda', the preparation of the students was always at the being level. Outer world learning happened as a natural consequence. Bharat has always focused on nurturing the innocence of the being because only that will lead to strength of the being. When there is strength of the being, anything can be achieved.

THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM beautifully describes the intent of spiritual learning. He says, there are trillions of cells in the body. Every cell is like an intelligent being. Every cell has the DNA* substance in it which has the information and intelligence to grow a whole new body and brain. This dormant intelligence needs to be awakened so that the mind doesn't move towards suffering and remains in bliss.

He goes on to say that spiritual education magnetizes the cells by sending life current around the brain and spine, ensuring evolutionary advancement of the individual. With this divine magnetism, every cell becomes a brain alive and ready to grasp every bit of knowledge. With these awakened brains, the mental capacity of the individual multiplies multi fold and all sorts of knowledge can be effortlessly comprehended! Such is the impact of spiritual learning.

Alexander the emperor of Greece, had conquered three fourths of the world and traveled downward to Asia to conquer it. He settled down in the banks of the river Sindhu to conquer Bharat.

As Alexander and his army passed by, the hermit was meditating and did not stand up to salute him Alexander felt humiliated and shouted at him, "How dare you do not salute me!"And he took out his sword to chop his head off.

Alexander was shocked. He asked,"I am going to kill you and you are laughing? " The hermit said, "I wonder what you are trying to kill! I can never be killed. I am inn mortal, eternal and imperishable. Weapons cannot cut, fire cannot burn, water cannot wet, wind cannot dry up this soul." He quoted from the Bhagavad Gita. Alexander dropped the sword and saluted the hermit saying, "Bharat has such great people who are [earless about death. after my salutations to this great country. " He retreated from the Hindu soil a wiser man.

The teachings of olden day universities created the possibility for supreme knowledge and confidence to flower in individuals, at the same time preserving their innocence. Then every student acquired the quality of a sage. A sage has the vast knowledge of the outer world and the utter innocence of the inner world.

A person may go on and on reading something here and there, and entertain himself. If his intention is just reading books it can be good entertainment, but not enlightenment. Entertainment is different from enlightenment. Just because he has been entertained by some good books, it doesn't mean that he is enlightened. The books which help you sharpen your logic give you the feeling that you know. There starts the problem.

One more thing: one cannot blame modernization for loss of innocence also. Lord Krishna says, "I am Time." When Krishna says that, you need to understand that modernization is also the divine play of Existence. Man should understand modernization in the right light and not take it as a replacement to the ancient foundation of growing.

When you are innocent, you are vulnerable to everything that Existence wants to teach you! If you are closed, you create a wall around you. The wall neither allows fresh breeze to touch your being nor does it allow you to step out and touch the cool breeze. Vulnerability is breaking the wall and inviting the cool breeze to touch your very being every time it blows.

Vulnerability is allowing everything to touch your being. The entire cosmos comes to you when you are vulnerable.

Vulnerability is not weakness. The wall when broken will not cause you danger. The wall itself was built out of a deep fear of exposing your reality. Your reality is your vulnerability and you are so afraid of opening it to the cosmos. You know deep down that if you let go and open up you will simply be swept away in innocence. So you close yourself up. But it is suffocating to be in there because it is the same air that IS circulating. You experience the same patterns that the mind knows. Then of what use is the wall? When the wall is broken, you will realize that nothing leaves you. Instead, you only gain freshness of life.

Two astrologers met on the road on a beautiful autumn day. One of them commented, "Beautiful autumn. It is something we have never seen earlier." The other replied, "True. I am reminded of the autumn of 2070."

When you are vulnerable, you experience everything at the being level. Otherwise, it becomes an experience through the head. The being is poetry, the head is prose. Life is poetry. One night a wife found her husband standing over their baby"s crib.

As he stood looking down upon the baby in the cradle, she saw his face assuming a mixture of emotions of disbelief, awe, skepticism, doubt, amazement and what not. She slowly went up to him, put her arm around him and said, "A penny /or your thoughts. "The husband replied, "It's amazing. I can't imagine how anyone can make a crib like that for just 45 dollars! "

With the head you cannot be vulnerable! And when you are not vulnerable, you are sitting behind the great wall of your house. Life has not yet started. Life happens with vulnerability. With vulnerability you move towards the truth in a different path, in a joyful path because every moment you are receiving directly from Existence. Existence is able to give you because you are vulnerable and ready to receive it! Existence has its own ethics. Enlightened masters have their own ethics. When there is vulnerability, they can simply shower on you. When there is a wall, it becomes difficult. Their ethics does not permit them to penetrate. So they wait for the wall to break.

When you become vulnerable, you are saying a 'yes' to Existence. Existence is the greatest mystery and the eternal teacher. When you say yes to it, your energy starts moving in a new direction. It moves from the head to the heart and you start receiving the teachings from your very being. Whatever you said 'no' to earlier will start becoming a yes. Then you will see that the world is very different from what you thought.

People ask me how to 'be' in my presence. Just be completely vulnerable and innocent. With openness, you can receive the truth directly in your being. The master is a pure expression of Existence. By allowing him, you are allowing Existence to enter into you. When Existence enters it leaves an impression of the truth in your being. With every darshan or touch from the master, the impression becomes deeper. This impression is greater than any teaching he can impart to you.

A master can't teach you spirituality, but you can learn by being open and trusting towards him. Spirituality has nothing to do with words. It is an experience. You need to imbibe it by watching the master's body language, by smelling the enlightenment that radiates from him. You can catch it if you are aware.

When you are vulnerable, you are open in your entire response system. You are not in a hurry to ask your questions. You give space for the intelligence of the cosmos to act through you.

To just express with vulnerability is to be free like a bird, not worried about any past or future, to just be. That is what Zen masters taught their disciples.

Immense trust leads to surrender. Surrender is simplicity of the heart. It is the knowing that you do not have to decide about the Truth, that you just have to go by it. When you awaken to the powerful presence of the Truth, surrender happens.

If you observe your pet dog, you will find that even if you cheat him once in a while, he will come back to you with utmost trust. His trust is absolute and innocent. The trust comes with no reason. He has no questions, so no answers need to be given. He sees no utility in anything. He just exists like an open book, that's all.

It is only innocence that is capable of taking the leap into trust and surrender. Knowledge somehow sees utility in everything. It looks for reason in everything. Surrender and reason are mutually exclusive.

possible only out of innocence, because out of innocence arises trust.

Out of surrender arises deep relaxation. Out of surrender arises a fresh intelligence that knows on a different plane. On this plane, there is no worry of result, there is only action driven by pure energy. And energy is intelligence. Trust does not mean inaction. It means continuing to be in action with intelligence instead of intellect. It is having trust in thought, and intelligence in action.

A disciple came riding on his camel to the tent of a Sufi master. He dismounted from the camel, walked into the master"s tent, bowed down low andsaid, "Master so great is my trust in god that I have left my camel outside untied, convinced that god protects the interests of those who love him." The master shouted, "Go tie your camel you fool! God cannot be bothered doing for you what you are perfectly capable of doing yourself.

Trust is an attitude. It is not a substitute for appropriate action. The spirit of trust is the essence of life. It leads to innocence, surrender, relaxation and bliss. If it is followed out of complete understanding, there is nothing to lose in its path. Until then, you are still on the path to trust.

Enlightened masters are established in the knowing that nothing is impossible in the space of Existence. They are living embodiments of trust. Their bliss is an expression of this. They have access to all the knowledge of the world but are yet utterly innocent. They know that their knowledge is the knowledge of Existence. Their knowledge is not knowledge but a flowing experience of the truth of the moment.

We too have knowledge. But the problem is that we think our knowledge is the only right knowledge and all other knowledge is wrong. Understand: the ultimate knowledge is the same for everyone. Anything in between is just a bunch of borrowed ideas. If this is known clearly, surrender will happen and we will drop the burden of knowledge and become innocent.

How to start knowing that we don't know? Mere clarity that we don't know is enough. Just meditate on Existence, the source of all knowledge. Be in a prayerful and surrendering mood to it all the time. Be firm in surrendering to the knowledge of Existence. You will see that miracles start happening around you.

There is a story about Hanuman', the monkey god in Hindu mythology who was a devout disciple of Lord Rama". Hanuman"was once asked what day of the lunar month it was. He replied, "I don"t know anything about the day of the month or the positions of the stars. I think of Rama" alone."

When you are established in the wonder of the Truth, you become so innocent, that your very life becomes meditative and miraculous. It was Hanuman* who crossed the ocean from Bharat to Sri Lanka with just one leap by chanting the name of Rama'. Rama himself had to build a bridge to cross over with his army! Such is the power of innocent surrender to Existence and all its forms.

One more thing: when you are trusting and surrendering, it becomes difficult to cheat you. Innocent trust always protects from deceit. It radiates that kind of energy.

There was a great Sufi Saint by name Habib Ajami. He went to bathe in the river one day leaving his coat on the bank of the river unattended.

One man passed by at that time and saw the coat. Thinking someone had left it there carelessly and ff had to be protected, he decided to stand guard over it till the owner came by.

Habib came back looking for his coat. The man asked him, "In whose care did you leave the coat when you went to bathe?" It might as well have been stolen!"

Habib replied, "I left it in the care of Him who gave you the task of guarding over it!" When trust happens with the utmost understanding, nothing can be lost. In the quality of trust is its true essence. I always tell my disciples about the monks I have seen in the Himalayas during my spiritual wandering days. The monks come to the Himalayas to meditate leaving everything behind. But there they fight for their small water pots! Just the object of possessiveness changes, that's all! Understand this. When you trust, all material possessions will seem like they belong to Existence. The very attitude of possessing then drops. That relaxes the mind. That is the space for relaxing.

In the year 2004, we went as a small group to the Himalayas. In a lifetime at least once you should visit the Himalayas. We went to Gomukh*, which is the source of the sacred river Ganga. The trek is on mule back taking almost five hours up and five hours down. The path is just four feet wide. If you miss your footing you will go into the gushing Ganga river beneath! Once we reached Gomukh* we spent some time there, and the group returned while I stayed back with a few disciples.

The group that returned started at dusk. I told them not to worry and that Existence will take care. Through pitch darkness, not knowing if the mule was taking the bend of the mountain or going straight ahead into the darkness, the entire group made its way back. The next day, I asked them how the experience was. One of them said, "Swamiji, we experienced what blind trust means!' If those trusting moments could be extended, they can be the very essence of your life. Then, you can simply do,leaving the result to Existence.

Another important thing is unless innocence happens, intimacy cannot happen. Intimacy is the language of Existence. The mind doesn't know intimacy. Only the being knows it. With intimacy there is openness and you can say and do everything that you feel genuinely and earnestly about. There will be authenticity in your words and actions. You will radiate energy that spurs the others around you to be innocent and open. Then the real beauty of Existence can be experienced.

Immense trust leads to surrender. Surrender is simplicity of the heart. It is the knowing that you do not have to decide about the Truth, that you just have to go by it. When you awaken to the powerful presence of the Truth, surrender happens.

If you observe your pet dog, you will find that even if you cheat him once in a while, he will come back to you with utmost trust. His trust is absolute and innocent. The trust comes with no reason. He has no questions, so no answers need to be given. He sees no utility in anything. He just exists like an open book, that's all.

Two gold fish were in a water tank. One asked the other "Do you trust in god?" The other replied, "But of course. Who do you think changes our water everyday?" It is only innocence that is capable of taking the leap into trust and surrender. Knowledge somehow sees utility in everything. It looks for reason in everything. Surrender and reason are mutually exclusive.

Surrender is to do with trust. Surrender is possible only out of innocence, because out of innocence arises trust.

Out of surrender arises deep relaxation. Out of surrender arises a fresh intelligence that knows on a different plane. On this plane, there is no worry of result, there is only action driven by pure energy. And energy is intelligence. Trust does not mean inaction. It means continuing to be in action with intelligence instead of intellect. It is having trust in thought, and intelligence in action.

A disciple came riding on his camel to the tent of a Sufi master. He dismounted from the camel, walked into the master's tent, bowed down low and said, "Master so great is my trust in god that I have left my camel outside untied, convinced that god protects the interests of those who love him." The master shouted, "Go tie your camel you fool! God cannot be bothered doing for you what you are perfectly capable of doing yourself.

Trust is an attitude. It is not a substitute for appropriate action. The spirit of trust is the essence of life. It leads to innocence, surrender, relaxation and bliss. If it is followed out of complete understanding, there is nothing to lose in its path. Until then, you are still on the path to trust.

Enlightened masters are established in the knowing that nothing is impossible in the space of Existence. They are living embodiments of trust. Their bliss is an expression of this. They have access to all the knowledge of the world but are yet utterly innocent. They know that their knowledge is the knowledge of Existence. Their knowledge is not knowledge but a flowing experience of the truth of the moment.

We too have knowledge. But the problem is that we think our knowledge is the only right knowledge and all other knowledge is wrong. Understand: the ultimate knowledge is the same for everyone. Anything in between is just a bunch of borrowed ideas. If this is known clearly, surrender will happen and we will drop the burden of knowledge and become innocent.

How to start knowing that we don't know? Mere clarity that we don't know is enough. Just meditate on Existence, the source of all knowledge. Be in a prayerful and surrendering mood to it all the time. Be firm in surrendering to the knowledge of Existence. You will see that miracles start happening around you.

There is a story about Hanuman, the monkey god in Hindu mythology who was a devout disciple of Lord Rama. Hanuman was once asked what day of the lunar month it was.

He replied, "I don't know anything about the day of the month or the positions of the stars. I think of Rama alone."

When you are established in the wonder of the Truth, you become so innocent, that your very life becomes meditative and miraculous. It was Hanuman who crossed the ocean from Bharat to Sri Lanka with just one leap by chanting the name of Rama. Rama himself had to build a bridge to cross over with his army! Such is the power of innocent surrender to Existence and all its forms.

One more thing: when you are trusting and surrendering, it becomes difficult to cheat you. Innocent trust always protects from deceit. It radiates that kind of energy.

There was a great Sufi Saint by name Habib Ajami. He went to bathe in the river one day leaving his coat on the bank of the river unattended.

One man passed by at that time and saw the coat. Thinking someone had left it there carelessly and had to be protected, he decided to stand guard over it till the owner came by.

Habib came back looking for his coat. The man asked him, "In whose care did you leave the coat when you went to bathe?" It might as well have been stolen!"

Habib replied, "I left it in the care of Him who gave you the task of guarding over it!"

When trust happens with the utmost understanding, nothing can be lost. In the quality of trust is its true essence. I always tell my disciples about the monks I have seen in the Himalayas during my spiritual wandering days. The monks come to the Himalayas to meditate leaving everything behind. But there they fight for their small water pots! Just the object of possessiveness changes, that's all! Understand this. When you trust, all material possessions will seem like they belong to Existence. The very attitude of possessing then drops. That relaxes the mind. That is the space for relaxing.

In the year 2004, we went as a small group to the Himalayas. In a lifetime at least once you should visit the Himalayas. We went to Gomukh, which is the source of the sacred river Ganga. The trek is on mule back taking almost five hours up and five hours down. The path is just four feet wide. If you miss your footing you will go into the gushing Ganga river beneath! Once we reached Gomukh we spent some time there, and the group returned while I stayed back with a few disciples.

The group that returned started at dusk. I told them not to worry and that Existence will take care. Through pitch darkness, not knowing if the mule was taking the bend of the mountain or going straight ahead into the darkness, the entire group made its way back. The next day, I asked them how the experience was. One of them said, "Swamiji, we experienced what blind trust means!' If those trusting moments could be extended, they can be the very essence of your life. Then, you can simply do, leaving the result to Existence.

Another important thing is unless innocence happens, intimacy cannot happen. Intimacy is the language of Existence. The mind doesn't know intimacy. Only the being knows it. With intimacy there is openness and you can say and do everything that you feel genuinely and earnestly about. There will be authenticity in your words and actions. You will radiate energy that spurs the others around you to be innocent and open. Then the real beauty of Existence can be experienced.

There is a famous saying, 'If you worry, then you didn't pray. If you prayed, then don't worry.' Spirituality is a straight path to surrender worry and be free. It is a tremendous relief for the modern day man. It is a proven science. In today's world of science and knowledge, the call of the being needs to be addressed compassionately and immediately.

Spirituality is the way. Spirituality restores the cosmos with its sanctity and mysticism. It reminds man that he is not the greatest creature on the planet. It reminds him of the powerful Existential Energy that pervades the universe. It creates not-knowing and innocent surrender in the mind.

Spirituality is not a ritual. It is the science of merging with Existence. From time immemorial, the first thing that all world religions did was to create a space for the Divine to become a part of life. A temple is a space to reconnect with the cosmic energy and be restful in it. That was the core purpose of all world religions. And when the connection deepened, it became a blissful space within oneself. Religion was a clear stepping stone to spirituality.

When man pursues science alone, he becomes too knowing because his inventions and discoveries seem to be his own findings. Everything seems to fall under the purview of his intellect. Spirituality on the other hand keeps the mystery of the cosmos alive. It creates humble obeisance towards a life force that is mightier than the intellect. That is why spirituality can restore innocence.

There is an immediate need to pay obeisance to the cosmic force and calm the intellect. With obeisance comes fresh intelligence that sees the cosmic consciousness as the central core of activity. Then, man will no more be afraid of the unfathomable cosmos. He will simply fall in tune with it with deep devotion, love and in ecstasy.

The greatest saints of Bharat who had the power of willing the cosmos to lovingly respond achieved this power through spirituality.

There was a man by name Muruganar who was an ardent devotee of Shiva. Every day before break of dawn he would bathe in the cool waters of the river gather flowers from trees, fields, the river and creepers and make garlands for the Shiva deity in the temple. He would walk to the temple every day taking care while walking not to disturb the flowers in their setting in the garland! After offering them to the deity he would chant sacred verses for long hours.

It is said that he attained enlightenment through just this innocent worship.

Today he is worshipped as one of the 63 saints called Nayanmars' who attained enlightenment through innocent devotion to god.

Those who shun spirituality are those who have not tasted its transforming sweetness. They are the ones who think spirituality is seriousness. No! God is always an embodiment of bliss, then how can spirituality be seriousness? Man has made it serious by reducing it to mundane rituals.

Our masters have even specified the times in which to connect to the deeper realms of our being through prayer. They have said it is good to pray in the early morning. What is the reason for this? The intellect has rested well in the night and does not as yet start functioning in the morning. When spirituality is practiced at that time, the impact on the mind is greater. The impact is made while the mind is still fresh and innocent, while the mind has not yet started chewing on the intellect. Not for nothing have the great masters gifted spirituality to us. When the intent is understood, spirituality becomes a straight route to restoring innocence and trust.

A small story:

One evening, a farmer on his way back from the market found himself without his prayer book. The wheel of his cart came off right in the middle of the woods and he felt sad that the day should pass without having said his prayers.

So he made up a prayer to god. He spoke aloud, "Oh god, I have done something very foolish. I have left behind my prayer books today. And my memory is so poor that I can't recites a single prayer without the book. So this is what I am going to do. I will recite the letters of the alphabet five times very slowly and you, who knows all the prayers, please put the letters together to form the prayers I can't remember." And god said to his angels that day, "Of all the prayers I have heard today, this one was undoubtedly the best because it came from a heart that was simple and sincere."

Spirituality is an opening to express innocence in its purest form. Innocence itself is an offering to god. Innocence itself is the greatest prayer to god.

Religion is by itself not any belief as it is made out to be. Every religion is the result of the deep spiritual experience of the great master who founded it. What they experienced, they gave as a

religion to humanity, through which humanity can get the same experience. There was no other intent. If this is understood, any person can practice any religion. That is the beauty of all original religions.

The same is true when you are around a master. Be in a mood of innocent surrender. When you are innocent and prayerful, the master's silence penetrates your being. The religion of silence is the greatest religion. It is the religion of the great masters and disciples. That is true spirituality also.

Dhamma- pada says:

Light the lamp within, strive hard to attain wisdom. Become pure and innocent, and live in the world of light.

When you came into the world, you came as an innocent infant. You radiated the beauty of your innocence until society gave you the mind. Now, you want to get rid of your mind and become innocent again. The regained innocence is what is called maturity. It is possible to regain it. Just believe that you were innocent once upon a time. Trust that the innocence is still within you. Then it is possible to start radiating it again. This understanding will start the process again.

Maturity causes us to live in totality. Totality is functioning out of immense innocence and giving your whole to the moment. There is no opinion, no judgment, no fragments within you. There is only intense enthusiasm for the moment. The openness to the moment is the innocence.

To become mature, you need to go in first, because maturity is all about falling at ease with your true nature with no pretensions. Making your natural self to be your very nature is maturity. The best way to become your natural self is to keep your core at ease.

Let the core of you be at ease all the time, irrespective of where you might be or what you may be doing. Then you can retain your purity. Always feel your natural self at your core with no strain, with no effort or pretensions.

The problem of falsity comes because society teaches you to be someone special all the time. There is no need to be someone special all the time. It is an immature idea to be someone special all the time. Once this idea is renounced, the mind relaxes. It feels no pressure to be shrewd. This relaxation gives birth to innocence.

To feel the urge to regain your innocence you may have to go astray, because when you go astray and face the consequences, introspection starts. The introspection triggers the need to regain innocence. Don't condemn yourself for going astray. Just bring in the awareness to integrate yourself into the right path forever. If maturity is going to happen this way it is definitely worth it.

Maturity is taking a strong decision not to delude yourself anymore. It is to awaken to the consciousness within. It is to integrate yourself with honesty. When this happens, you start to become a child again. As a child, you were innocent but not with awareness. Somewhere in the process of growing up you lost the innocence. You are regaining it now. The new innocence will be with full awareness and that is the real innocence.

When you regain the innocence, you flower with the understanding that there is nothing more priceless than becoming childlike again. That is the process of enlightenment.

That is why a child's innocence is to be nurtured with utmost care. For every innocent observation that a child makes, if we can be without imposing our knowledge on it, the child will grow up preserving its innocence. For example, if the child asks, 'Why is it that the sky is blue sometimes and white sometimes?' just tell the child that the sky is blue sometimes and white sometimes. He will anyway learn that in his lessons in school. But if you can tell him they are just the way they are, he will straightaway understand the spontaneity of nature. He will not be looking for further knowledge to feed himself with. The universities take care of that anyway.

At home, when you are still the most influential person in his life, if you make him understand that this is the way things are, that there is no need to know it all with knowledge, the innocence in him survives. He doesn't catch the thread of passing judgment on nature. He learns to see without bringing words in. He learns to just see and be. The moment words are brought in, the innocence is lost. Then it is no more seeing. It becomes looking. The whole beauty of it is then lost.

Growing up is always considered to be a serious thing. If you grow up in seriousness you only grow old. If you grow up in playfulness, you remain young! It is a good thing to see what children, animals and other creatures are doing at times because they all live with innocence and playfulness. It will help understand and reconnect with innocence.

Childlike innocence discovers many things but cannot understand most of it. It enjoys it at the level of its innocence, that's all. Whereas innocence regained not only discovers these new things, but also understands all of them. That is the difference.

Childlike innocence is beautiful but not enough. It has to be lost to life and regained with complete awareness and maturity.

It is said that a mad man and a mystic look alike. Both of them will be eccentric in their ways, laughing abruptly and doing things incomprehensible. But they are actually at the extreme two ends of the same spectrum! Extremes always look alike. Outwardly they appear to be the same, that's all. Similarly, a child and a saint may look alike in their innocence, but they are actually at the two extreme ends of the same spectrum. The child has not even started its achievement of regained innocence, while the saint has finished it.

The innocence of the child is still the god given innocence he came with, not the innocence that he regained through life. The innocence of a child can be easily disturbed, whereas the innocence of a sage can never be disturbed. Getting the innocence disturbed and working to regain it permanently is the process of maturity. That is the travel through to the other end of the spectrum in becoming a saint.

With innocence regained, you will once again be able to look into the eyes of the other. Your innocence not only makes you vulnerable, it also makes you integrated. With knowledge, you are fragmented within you. With regained innocence, you are integrated and honest to yourself and to others. That honesty will radiate from your eyes and touch the other. That honesty is maturity.

Just the longing to become innocent again is enough. It will start destroying all that is not you inside you. After all, it is just layers of conditioning. But it is important to hold your will strong until the process is complete. The will is a constant reminder to be sincere and honest without cunningness. Decide not to rest until the de-conditioning is total.

The beauty of maturity is that it allows you to function as a mature person when required and as a child at all other times. It easily allows you to flow from one to the other so that you are in perfect harmony with the Whole.

When you regain your innocence, you are called dvija, reborn, mature. The key is not to give up in your effort in regaining your innocence. The journey may be frustrating at times, because it is taking time and not happening. It is so because society has conditioned you with many layers. The onion has to be peeled layer after layer to reach the center. Frustration is a precondition to burst open with

transformation. So don't relax, that is enough. It will happen. Remember, innocence is already in you. It is not about any end objective outside. Just this remembrance will give you the relaxation after every frustration.

Everyday just sit for a few moments, sit by yourself and calmly go into your innocence. Feel the innocence in you. Feel the purity in you. Feel the overflowing from within you. Let it spread through your body, mind and being. Feel how beautiful you are in your innocence. Do this every day. Soon you will see that you will awaken to it as your very nature. All that is not you will be burnt and the real you will emerge.

Innocence has a totality about it. This totality is called grace. That is why enlightened masters appear to be so graceful and beautiful all the time. Innocence manifests itself as wondrous beauty to the eyes of the beholder. It is so total that even the most cunning mind cannot deny it. It simply defies all logic and touches you.

We always think children are immature. We think that the grownups who cry are immature. We are conditioned to believe that expression of any emotion is immature. Expressing the emotions in an unfiltered way is a sign of innocence. The cunning ones edit even their emotions. Once in a while it is good to cry in front of people. What is wrong with it? What are you trying to hide? By crying you are only expressing your true feelings. What is there to hide? The problem is that society has always taught us to hide our true nature and show only our projected personality. That is why with time we forget what our nature is. We forget how to be innocent.

One teacher told the parent during the parent teacher meeting, "Your daughter is very good in all her activities. She is just a little emotionally immature. But she will be alright. "The parent looked at her in a puzzled way and asked, "At three, how else do you expect her to be?"

Just by being with children as their friend, as their playmate, it is possible to get back in touch with the innocence. When you are with them don't pretend to be like a child. Take it really seriously and become a child! It is the greatest favor you can do to yourself.

There are umpteen ways to rediscover the child hiding in you. Just play hide and seek with children or learn how to make cookies or watch Tom and Jerry cartoons or eat different color cotton candies or make mud dolls! All these will bring out the child in you. Your solid identity will dissolve. You will become fluid like a river and flow. The weight of your seriousness will drop and you will become light and blissful.

Seriousness is ego. When you are afraid of getting hurt, when you are afraid of losing your control or power, you become serious. When you are too centered on yourself this happens. When you let go and play and touch your innocence again, you will suddenly enjoy a break from yourself. That break is the falling of your seriousness. In that gap you will realize there is nothing to hold on to. There is only free spirit. When you become aware of this you can work on it consciously and move towards becoming completely innocent and sincere.

Innocence is keeping the consciousness at the level of the heart, not allowing it to settle in the head.

We now move to a slightly more complex subject. It is about the relationship that we have with the world around us. Why do we see what we see? How do we see what we see? How do we fit into the scheme of Existence?

What is this world made up of? Our five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch are our gateways to perceiving this world. They tell us that this world is made up of matter — objects in various forms, shapes, colors and qualities.

We see ourselves living in a three dimensional world fundamentally made up of the five basic elements - earth, water, fire, air and space. We see all the objects in this world undergoing change with time. They all undergo creation, sustenance and dissolution with the passage of time.

Classical physics tells us that matter is governed by the laws of physics like the three laws of motion, the law of gravity, the laws of fluid dynamics and so on. All objects are considered to be made up of molecules, which are made up of atoms, which in turn are made of three types of particles - protons, neutrons and electrons. We learned all these fundamental things in school.

But according to modern science, the world is not fundamentally made up of matter; the fundamental particles are not protons, neutrons and electrons. Modern science says matter itself is actually energy! Albert Einstein's famous equation, E=mc° (where E is energy, m is mass of the object and c is the speed of light) proves the equivalence of matter and energy. I was reading a very recent article, also published in the US Journal Science on a research that proved Einstein's equation. The fundamental particles in the nucleus themselves are considered to be made of smaller particles called quarks, which are bound by gluons. The surprising thing is the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five percent. The study says, the missing 95 percent comes from the energy of the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons. So, energy and mass are equivalent. gross body. An important thing to be understood here is that the perception of the world varies from person to person because the functioning of the mind varies from person to person!

Even interactions between people are only energy interactions. For example, an atom that This truth discovered by science a few decades ago, was declared by the Eastern rishis' in the Upanishads' - the essence of the vedic knowledge. The very first line of the Īśa Vāsya Upanishad", written thousands of years ago, declares, Īśāvasyam idaṁ sarvam which means all that exists is energy!

Matter is actually energy vibrating at various frequencies and manifesting itself in various forms. We are not able to see this vibration with our eyes because the frequencies of vibration are too high. It is just as when movement is too fast, the eye cannot perceive the moving objects as independent frames. The eye sees the objects merging into each other continuously.

In the same way, the vibration of energy cannot be perceived by the eye. It appears to be solid matter! Energy in gross form is matter. Matter in subtle form is energy. The body is the gross manifestation of the subtle mind. The mind is the subtle manifestation of the body. The atom consists of a nucleus with a cloud of electrons around it that can be compared to a football field. The nucleus is like a peanut in the center of a football field and the cloud of electrons is like the empty space in the field. Another comparison I came across is, if you were to remove all the space between all the atoms on planet earth, the remaining matter would come to just about the size of a sugar cube!

What we see as solid matter, as the football field in this example, is actually the electron clouds - huge empty spaces - interacting with each other. In the same way, our interactions and contact with other people and objects are also only interaction of energies. There is an exchange of energy that happens. You give some of your energy and you get energy from that person or object!

Now, what is the origin of matter and energy? What is the origin of the body and mind? From where does the energy in all objects arise? What then is the reality behind this perceived world? If we are not able to see reality as it exists through the senses, what is the nature of reality?

This question is asked in the Śiva Sūtras, an ancient vedic scripture on the science of enlightenment. Shiva's consort Devi asks Him, 'What is the nature of this wonder-filled universe?' As a response, Shiva delivers 112 enlightenment techniques which, when practiced, give the answer as a direct experience!

This question about reality leads us to a world beyond matter and energy, beyond the limitations of space and time. This is the world where all the possibilities exist as seed. It is the essence and the origin of thoughts, and it is the essence and origin of events in the material world.

In this world-beyond, ordinary logic does not exist. Cause and effect relationships do not exist. The happening of one event does not cause another event to happen, but it is correlated with the other event that happens. This correlation has no dependence on space and time. So what we call the seed is the ocean of infinite possibilities from which the waves of events arise.

This whole Existence and all its events happen as causeless auspiciousness, like waves arising in an ocean. Existence is an ocean of bliss and ecstasy. Out of the causeless, overflowing ecstasy, the wave of Creation rises in the ocean of Existence! That is how things happen. The Divine, playing with its infinite manifestations in innumerable universes is called sustenance. Dropping from the play and relaxing into Itself is called dissolution. Dissolution is the settling back into the Absolute or Parabrahma" state. Then... for no logical reason, the play starts again.! This continues. What we see as results are the infinite happenings in the universe.

We see this causeless and ecstatic play of Existence through our own individual perception! Our very perception collapses the beautiful happening into a localized reality. Each individual 'boils down' the beautiful happening into his own individual reality.

Someone asked me, 'I see this table here. All the people in this room see this same table. Then how can you say that this table is not a reality?' Please understand that what you see as this table here is not the same as what the other person sees! Each person in this room sees this table differently! That is the truth. That is what I am trying to explain here.

As long as the mind tries to perceive, what is perceived is not the ultimate reality. Only an infinite being can perceive Reality exactly as it is happening. He cannot explain it in words because words cannot describe what is beyond space and time. He can only tell you to wait for it to become your own experience! That is why Shiva answers not with philosophy but with techniques. He directly gives techniques for Devi 'to experience the Reality— the nature of the universe.

Let me explain this concept based on the energy-matter idea. We saw that matter is actually energy. Classical physics said that the electron is a particle. However, quantum physics says that it is a wave. Actually, the electron exhibits the properties of both a particle and a wave in different situations. Physicists have now concluded that the electron has a dual nature as a 'particle- wave'!

Since the electron is a particle, what is the location of the electron? Since it is a wave, what is the momentum of the wave? The answers to these questions lead to a very surprising discovery that the particle-wave can be either a particle or a wave or even both at the same time. But you cannot determine both the location and the momentum of the electron at the same time, because the very act of observing the location of the electron will change its momentum, and the very act of determining the momentum of the electron will change its location! This is what is known in science as the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle.

The particle-wave is both a particle and wave at the same time until the act of observation comes into play. This act of observation can now be connected with our act of observing the causeless happenings of Existence. When we observe, we observe through our own set of conditioning or what we call engrams which are preconceived and deeply engraved memories and conclusions. Each individual's act of observation is colored by his own conditioning or engrams. Based upon that, he boils down the happening to suit his own experience of reality!

In the case of the particle-wave, the very act of observation collapses' the wave- particle to a particle or wave. This leads us to a deep understanding that both possibilities exist simultaneously, and it is the very act of observation that changes the possibility into a particular reality.

Let me give another scientific experiment that highlights how the very act of measuring distorts the beautiful reality. You may have heard of the double-slit experiment with light. In this experiment, a beam of light is aimed at a barrier with two vertical slits. On the other side of the barrier is a photographic plate that is used to record the light as it falls on it after passing through the barrier. If only one slit is open, the pattern on the photographic plate is as expected, which is a single line of light aligned with the slit. If both the slits are open, we would expect two lines of light on the plate aligned with the slits, but what is observed are multiple lines of light and darkness in varying degrees. This is the principle of interference where light beams behave as waves that interfere with each other.

Now, if the light beam is slowed down enough so that instead of a stream of light particles or photons hitting the plate, each photon individually hits the plate, then there should be no interference and the plate should show a light pattern aligned with the slit. But, the resulting pattern still showed interference!

How is this possible? There is only this one photon, what can it be interfering with... other than itself? It was concluded that each photon not only goes through both the slits, but also simultaneously takes every possible path on the way to the target!

To see how this can occur, experiments were done to track the individual photon paths. But what happened was that the measurement in some way disrupted the paths of the photons. Whenever an attempt was made to observe, there were only two bright lines on the photographic plate aligned with the slits! If they didn't attempt to measure, again the pattern became the multiple lines of light and darkness!

Understand each photon moves simultaneously in a number of paths. But an effort to measure the paths causes it to collapse to a single path! In the same way, our very effort to perceive the infinite risings of the ocean of Existence causes it to appear as what our limited mind perceives!

Once a student asked a Zen master "What is the path? "The master replied, "Everyday life is the path." The student asked, "Can it be studied?" The master said, "If you try to study, you will be far from it. " The student asked, "If l do not study, how can I know it is the path?"

The master said, "The path does not belong to the perception world. Neither does it belong to the non-perception world. Perception is a delusion and non-perception is senseless. If you want to reach the true path beyond doubt, place yourself in the same freedom as the sky. You name it neither good nor not-good."

Let us start with what really happens on a physical level when we perceive things.

When there is a perception of physical reality, the various parts of the brain show a change in neural activity as the neurons, which are the basic building blocks of the nervous system, fire in synchronicity. This results in the random visual patterns of light being perceived as specific shapes and forms. This is how the input from each of our senses is perceived, as an experience of particular sound, touch, smell, taste or sight.

If you now step back and look, you can see that before the observation or the perception, both the world as well as you, that is the seen and the seer, existed in a dynamic and chaotic state of activity. The act of perception changes that chaotic state into some sort of an order that becomes both, the seen in the outside world and the process of seeing in the seer (as the activity in the nervous system) at the same time. At the moment of seeing, the probability of what is seen collapses into a specific form.

In the Bhagavad Gita', Krishna, the lord and master, chooses to give Arjuna* the experience of Krishna's cosmic form. Until then, Arjuna had seen Krishna only as the six foot tall, handsome friend. But upon Arjuna's request, and after Krishna sees that Arjuna is ready to receive the cosmic form experience, He decides to give it to him. Arjuna then sees Krishna as the manifestation of the entire cosmos — in all its seeming chaos.

He cries out, 'O Lord! I can see all the gods and deities in Your body. I can see all the sages and divine serpents. O Lord of the Universe, I see many arms, stomachs, faces, eyes and your limitless form. O Universal Form, I cannot see your beginning, middle or end.'

Arjuna is unable to bear the experience because he loses his intellectual control over things! He begs for equilibrium, meaning he wants his mind to be under his intellectual control again. He wants to know the cause and effect of things and feel that they are in his control, because the experience rips him away from his perception of the cause-and- effect logic itself.

As long as cause and effect logic is under your control, you feel you are perceiving reality! Your ego is strong and steady. But the moment the logic is shaken, you feel tremendous fear. You feel you are just a drop in an ocean. What Arjuna sees is the absolute Reality, but he is afraid of that very Reality because it doesn't conform to his logic. He begs to revert to the earlier state of perception through his five senses alone, through his own solid identity, his own solid ego.

Perception of space-time

Let us analyze what space is. The 1D, 2D and 3D worlds Take a basic element, a point, a one- dimensional object. When a point traces across a direction, it generates a line.

Now, let us trace the motion of a line, a two-dimensional object. If it moves in the same direction as it is in, of course it will just continue to be a line. If it moves in a direction not contained in it, it traces a surface or a plane.

Similarly, if a surface or a plane moves in a direction not contained in it, it will trace a solid, a threedimensional object.

So, a line is an infinite number of points. A surface is an infinite number of lines. A solid is infinite number of surfaces. Similarly, we can imagine a four dimensional space as an infinite number of three dimensional spaces.

Now, just as we built up these higher dimensions from the lower dimensions, we can also see the lower dimensions as parts or sections of a higher dimension space. For example, a point is the intersection of two lines. So, a point is a section of a line.

A line is a section of a surface. A surface is a section of a solid.

Extending this, we can say a solid is a section of a four-dimensional body. Our three dimensional space is a section of a four dimensional space. P.D.Ouspensky, in his book Tertium Organum, explains these very beautifully. He extends this to say that many separate three dimensional bodies, like humans for instance, may actually be the sections or parts of one four dimensional body!

He explains this with a simple example. Suppose a horizontal plane intersects the top of a tree, parallel to the surface of the earth. Now, on this plane, the sections of branches seem to be all separate, not connected to each other. But, from the three-dimensional space, we can see that these are all sections of branches of one single tree.

In our four-dimensional world, the maximum dimensions in space can be only three. We can call this fourth-dimension time. So, the four-dimensional world can be looked at as a space-time continuum. It can be said that time is the fourth dimension of space.

We understand time in three forms — past, present and future. We think that the past is over and does not exist anymore. The future has not yet happened; hence it does not exist. The present thus happens at the transition of the non-existent future to another non- existence, the past.

In the three-dimensional world, we see that the seemingly separate sections of the tree in the twodimensional world are actually joined in the third dimension. In the same way, if we imagine a consciousness that can rise above our plane of living, this consciousness can also see the continuity in the fourth dimension of time - past, present and future all existing simultaneously. This consciousness sees the simultaneous happening of events, which the ordinary consciousness sees as distinct events separated by periods of time.

A three-dimensional body, moving in time, traces a four-dimensional body. Across time, we can see the motion as we grow from a child to youth, to adult, to elderly person. But we are not able to see or feel this four- dimensional body' because of our limited perception. Being in the same threedimensional world, we see only the section of the four-dimensional body that is the normal threedimensional body. It is like one of a series of pictures on a cinema roll.

To understand how a four-dimensional world is perceived in three-dimensional form, let us first see how a three-dimensional happening is seen in a two-dimensional world.

Suppose you are in a two-dimensional world, the world of planes and surfaces. Your life, your perception is restricted to a plane, like a vertical wall. Now, imagine a wheel with each of its spokes painted in a different color is rotating perpendicular to the plane in which you live.

How will you perceive the motion of this wheel? When a spoke of the wheel intersects the plane, you will see a line of a certain color at the intersection of the wheel and the plane. Then, after one spoke passes, there will be a gap when you will not see anything. Then, the next spoke ofa different color will pass through the plane. So, you will perceive the motion of the wheel as lines of different colors happening at regular intervals of time.

What is happening is that the limited perception in a lower dimensional world is changing the perception of space to a phenomenon in time!

Since you can see only two of the three dimensions of space, you see the third dimension only when it becomes manifest on your plane over time. Hence, you see it as unrelated to your two dimensions of space, and you call it a phenomenon in time.

Now, imagine when a green spoke passes through the plane, simultaneously another independent phenomenon occurs, say the barking ofa dog. In the two dimensional world, it will be seen as a correlation between the appearance of the green line and the sound of a dog barking, when in reality it is not!

It is not possible for the two-dimensional being to believe that there can be a rise of events outside his plane of perception. That means, to understand the three-dimensional world, he cannot be in the twodimensional consciousness, he has to rise to the three- dimensional consciousness. Similarly, to understand the four-dimensional world, we have to be in the fourth-dimensional consciousness.

Is this possible? Is it possible for us to go beyond the perception of the senses which give us only a three dimensional view? Can we actually see reality instead of mere glimpses of reality as phenomena in the time? The answer is YES.

Through in depth research and development, the Eastern mystics and sages have discovered that it is possible to understand Reality as it exists and to experience it also. This can happen as a natural way of life, not just as a chance happening. This experience has happened in them.

Through meditation, it is possible for us to experience this same state of awareness.

Once, two soldiers were looking at a flag flying in the wind. One of them said, "The flag is moving. " The second one said, "No, it is the wind that is moving. "

A Zen master passing by saw the argument going on. The soldiers requested the master to help them resolve this serious issue.

One of the soldiers asked, "Master I say the flag is moving. But he says the wind is moving Which is correct? "

The master says, "Neither is correct. Only consciousness is moving. "

As of now, what we feel as reality everyday of our life is also a 'virtual' reality. It is only a perception of things being separate in space and time. If you look deeply, you can see how our very perception of the world itself is questionable. From whatever quality of consciousness, we see, THAT appears as our reality, not the absolute Reality.

We think we live in a world of the three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension of time. However, there are actually eleven dimensions. The fundamental dimensions are length, breadth, depth, time and consciousness. The higher dimensions are combinations of these fundamental dimensions.

For example, a stick has length, breadth and depth. It is in time and space. Now, if we keep length and breadth and just remove the depth, the stick will be seen, but the hand will pass through the stick. You can also keep the depth and remove the length and breadth. Then nothing will be seen, but the hand will hit something if you try to pass it through.

In this way, there are various combinations leading to the eleven dimensions that make up the universe. When you are in a plane above the four dimensional space-time you can currently perceive, you can see these eleven dimensions, you can see Reality as enlightened beings can.

Whether it is the energy in the atom or the energy in the cosmos, there is a big chaos in the energy play. Within that chaos, there is an order that you cannot even imagine.

Anything in chaos is wild and energetic. Anything that has order is dull. Any rule curbs freedom, reduces the energy. Any regulation brings your energy down. Even in your house, if somebody says, 'Do not sit in that place, you will feel like sitting only in that place. But until that rule is made, you will never even bother to sit there!

Even habits like smoking are maintained for the subtle mental satisfaction that you are wild, that you are not bound. If you scan yourself consciously, you will understand that almost all of your happiness comes only when you break some rules, when you are chaotic!

The whole of Existence is chaos. In the universe, so many planets are moving. There are no traffic signs or cops or sign-boards! Yet, the planets are moving so beautifully in order. In the same way, in quantum physics, the smallest elements are not even particles; they are both particles and waves, and a multitude of probabilities! But there is an order in that chaos.

If the universe is chaos without any order, it will head toward destruction. 'Chaos in order' is what I call 'cosmic intelligence'. I had an opportunity to meet Dr. Charles Townes', the Nobel laureate and physicist, who is well-known for his work on the laser and maser devices. He told me so beautifully, 'I feel the whole universe is something special, the whole universe is a spiritual being. It has its own intelligence. Even though I am not able to specifically prove it with mere words, I feel it is an intelligent and spiritual being.'

The cosmos is not just a force. It is 'force plus intelligence . It responds to your thoughts, to your prayers, to your being - because it is intelligence. Once somebody asked Buddha, 'Who is the creator of this universe?' Buddha replied, 'The universe itself is its creator.'

If the creator and the created are two separate entities, it means only the creator is intelligent and the created is not intelligent. The cosmos itself is the creator because it has its own intelligence. The cosmos is a living energy. You are sitting inside a living energy.

Believing the world is just matter is the basic mistake. This belief is the root of all terrorism and violence on planet earth. As long as we believe the universe is just dead matter, it is going to create only more and more thirst for power.

Only when we realize that the universe has its own intelligence, when we realize the universe is a spiritual being, the seed of peace is sown. Only when we understand that our thoughts are responded to, our way of life is rewarded, our prayers are answered, there is a living intelligent force and there is an order in the chaos, only then we can realize and work for peace, bliss and spirituality. Then, instead of trying to own or expand our boundaries and borders, we will try to expand our consciousness. The moment we start believing or trusting that the universe is intelligence', we can simply relax, trusting It.

• A disciple goes to a Zen master and asks, "Master, please explain to me how you started, how you traveled the path, how you attained the ultimate experience. " The master says, "When I started, mountain was a mountain, river was a river and tree was a tree. When I was traveling, mountain was not a mountain, river was not a river and tree was a tree. Again, when I attained, mountain is a mountain, river is a river and tree is a tree."

Before achieving, even though you think you are extraordinary, you are ordinary. After achieving, even though you are extraordinary, you understand you are ordinary.

You are not just a simple body. You are not just a microcosm. You are the macrocosm in miniature form. You realize you are the ultimate, endless ocean of potential energy just like the universe. Only when you realize the cosmic consciousness in your body, the macrocosm in your microcosm, you will really become orderly, you will really learn how to be orderly without reducing your energy. As long as you try to become orderly, you will not only suppress your energy, and you will also be suppressing everyone else.

First, when you realize the order in the chaos, you will become a spiritual being, you will experience love and bliss. When you realize the chaos in the order, you will become a compassionate being. When you realize the order in the chaos, you will experience the experience part of love, bliss. When you realize the chaos in the order, you will express the expression part of love which is compassion.

We see two things in the process of seeing' - the seer and the seen object. Actually, what is happening in the process of seeing? (Though the example of eyes is taken here, it applies for all the senses.)

From the seer, consciousness takes a jump continuously to the seen, because it is not able to relax into the seer itself. Because of its restlessness, it gives life to the seen.

The continuous jump that happens between the seer and seen - from the seer to the seen, from the seen to the seer, again from the seer to the seen and again from the seen to the seer - is what is SEEING.

When the seer is not completely in bliss within himself, he starts becoming restless - and jumps. When he jumps, he gives life to the seen. Because he gives life to the seen, the process of jumping becomes SEEING.

There are two ways to drop this process of seeing. Either the seer or the seen has to drop for the process of seeing to stop.

When the seen is renounced, it loses its power over the seer. There is no point in jumping because there is nothing to be seen. When there is no place to jump, the seer relaxes in the seer himself, then seeing does not happen. When seeing is not there, the seer is enlightened A person who stops this jump by dropping the 'seen' is a renouncer, a sannyasi. He takes away all his desire to see things, to believe that any of the sense objects hold value for him. The seen becomes unexciting, and the jumping stops. He becomes enlightened through renouncing. This is true selfknowledge — gnana'. In the path of gnana", the seer experiences detachment and a complete witnessing of life. In this way he tries to discover Reality. The main objective is the development of a sharp and pure intelligence through which Reality can be experienced.

On the other hand, when the seer himself drops, what remains is the seen, and again the jumping between the seer and the seen stops. Reality is seen.

The seer becomes enlightened through devotion or bhakti".

When the identity of the seer drops, dissolves into the seen, deep devotion to Existence happens! Everything becomes an exciting manifestation of Existence for him! His identity is no longer there. He merges into Existence itself. That is why enlightened saints like Meerabai' from Bharat, who went on the path of bhakti, were in a trance all the time, merged into the god consciousness, forgetting their own identity. Meerabai just sang praises of god and walked around on the streets, with no selfconsciousness whatsoever. So, in some way, either the seer or the seen has to drop. Only then the jumping between the seer and the seen will stop. When the jumping stops, the process of seeing also stops.

Whether you are stuck with the seer or with the seen, get completely stuck - and you are enlightened! If you are jumping between the seer and the seen, not relaxed in either, you are under the illusion of a separate existence of the seer and seen. This jumping is what manifests as your individual seeing.

When the frequency of the seen is more than the seer, the seer can be changed or manipulated by the seen. When the frequency of the seer is more than the seen, the seen can be changed or manipulated by the seer.

We are not disconnected and separate islands as we think. Maybe in the physical layer, we all seem like individual islands. But whether we like it or not, whether we accept it or not, whether we want it or not, we are all interlinked by the collective consciousness.

It is like this: if the food is poisoned, only the person who eats it will suffer, not everyone. In this sense, you can think of yourself as an individual. But as you move towards the subtler levels of Existence, you can see our interconnectedness more clearly. For example, if the air is poisoned, whoever is breathing it will suffer, even if they are a long distance from each other. This connection is at the breath level. This means that in the subtler energy layers, the distance between us is reduced.

Even more than the physical and breath levels, we are connected more closely at the mental level. When I say mental level, I mean the level of thoughts. Our thoughts affect not only us but also everyone around us and beyond. Your thoughts are more infectious than your cold. In fact, people may escape from your cold, but they cannot escape from your thoughts.

If an individual mind is polluted, not only the individual, but a much bigger group suffers. For example, if one person who has a disturbed mind sits as a leader of a city, the whole city will be affected by the decisions that he makes! His disturbed thinking will result in wrong decisions and hence will be harmful for the whole city.

Going a step further, if one corrupted visualization leads to a particular action, the action can have tremendous impact on a huge population, not just on that person with the corruption. For example, take the case of the atom bomb. It is nothing but a 'visualization' of the nuclear theory! The basis of the nuclear bomb can be found in the famous formula E=mc2 that was discovered by the physicist, Albert Einstein. But corrupted visualization of this formula led to disturbance of the whole planet earth. We are all now threatened by this one theory, by this one invention. Today, planet earth has enough atomic weapons to bum itself 700 times, over and over again.

Just see this diagram here. I shall try to explain the truth on the basis of this diagram. These seven circles represent the seven energy layers in us. The first layer is the physical body, the body that you can feel as your hands, legs, etc. The second layer is pranic body, the body in which your prana or life energy or breath circulates. Like this, there are seven energy layers that make up the total body, with the physical body being just one of those layers.

Now, in the physical layer, you, god and I can be represented as three different points in the circle. In the physical level, the distance between us is great.

If you go inward a little to the pranic level, the distance between us is reduced. If you go in deeper to the mental level, the distances are further reduced. When you go deeper and deeper, it finally merges into one. You can see that at the innermost point of all these layers, god, you, and I are one. There is no distance. That is the Truth even at the gross level! It is only your perception that causes you to think you are a separate entity. Once you become aware and realize that you are a part of the collective consciousness, that you don't have an individual identity, that you don't have a separate ego, you don't suffer.

If you have observed a school of fish swimming or a flock of birds flying together, you will see a fleeting synchronicity in their motion. There may be hundreds of birds flying together in a V-shaped formation, but when they have to change direction, they will all do so at the same time, with no confusion or time delay! Scientists have been trying to understand how this is possible. Even studies of insects and animals have shown that when faced with threats, their responses are so fast that they cannot be explained by normal methods of communication.

An interesting experiment was done to study the power of thought on dogs. The dog owners were asked to leave the house with no intention of going to any particular place. After leaving the house, they were given instructions to go to specific places and then at random times, they were asked to come back. It was found that at the time the owner started back home, almost always at the same time, the dog would go to the door and wait for the owner.

In the huge tsunami that rocked the Andaman and Nicobar islands of Bharat, it was found that before the tsunami hit the islands, all the animals, including the huge ones like elephants, had all moved to higher grounds, safely away from the ocean. There have been a number of accounts of animals and insects being aware of upcoming earthquakes minutes before the earthquake actually strikes. What is

the difference between these animals and us? It is their connection with nature! Being in tune with nature enables them to sense nature's signals. In the case of humans, because of our false sense of identity and ego, we have lost touch with nature and have become insensitive to the direct signals of nature.

You can see so many instances in history where the same discovery was made at about the same time by people in different parts of the globe and by people who did not even know each other. The reason is that the ideas are floating in the collective consciousness. It is like this: there are hundreds of electromagnetic waves in the air but your television set picks u only the waves of the frequency to which it 1S tuned. Similarly, the minds that are ready and waiting for the floating ideas will tune in and convert that potentiality into reality!

Just as the universe gives us so many hints of its existence as one being, we can find hints from nature about the nature of reality. In a series of experiments in the 1920s, it was found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain was removed, the rat still retained its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to the surgery. The rat's brain actually showed holographic memory. Scientists proposed that memories are encoded not in neurons, but in the patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the brain, similar to how a hologram is formed by various patterns of laser light crisscrossing each other. This might explain how the human brain can store up to ten billion bits of information in the brain, which is the small size of two fists!

The universe is a hologram and we are a part of that hologram. In a hologram, every single part of the hologram, even if split, reflects the totality of that hologram. Likewise, we too reflect the totality of the universe. The universe is not an assortment of living and dead matter. It is a huge interconnected Whole. You are very much connected to your fellow beings around you and the trees, animals, birds and rocks on earth, as well as the planets, stars and galaxies in the universe. Whether you perceive it or not depends on the plane of consciousness from which you perceive it all.

When we realize our role in the Existential scheme of things, we can no longer feel separate from all those around us. We can only feel separated when we feel unconscious of our role, when we are unaware.

The time has come to create a critical mass of enlightened people on planet earth. Only by creating more and more people who are awakened, who are enlightened, can the collective influence of individual negativity be destroyed. All calamities around the world are created only by unconscious human beings. Global warming, HIV, religious terrorism, fanaticism, and piles of atomic weapons, are all because of this negativity. Today we are facing so many dangers that unless we create a peaceful, blissful, joyful, and enlightened society, we will not be able to preserve this beautiful planet earth.

My mission is to create a peaceful, joyful, blissful, conscious, enlightened society.

Actually, a majority of us are caught up in fighting with our own selves. We are caught in a web of self-contradictory thoughts and desires. Our thoughts and words are so powerful, but we use them so casually.

For example, say you have a headache, what do you do? You tell yourself, 'How I wish this headache would go away!' By uttering these words, you give as much power to the word 'headache' as you give to the words 'go away'. This is what I mean by self- contradictory thoughts. By your very thought, you contradict your original desire. Even your positive intention is caught in the fight, the dilemma of your own thoughts and words.

You will then ask, 'How do I get rid of this headache?' Just say, 'Let me be healed!' that's all.

When we infuse healing thoughts into our system again and again, we give power to positive words and thoughts. They get embedded in our very muscle memory. So at times of low mood and depression, these healing thoughts will automatically come up in our inner space and pull us out of the low mood.

A beautiful story from the life of Buddha:

Devadatta, a cousin of Buddha, joined Buddha"s order of monks. He was hungry for power and status. He wanted to become the head of the order of monks. But Buddha would not allow such an immature person, who was running after status instead of enlightenment, to lead his mission. So Devadatta harbored jealo usy and ill feelings towards Buddha and even made several attempts to kill him.

Once Devadatta persuaded the royal elephant-keepers to release a fierce elephant on to Buddha"s path. The elephant was intoxicated and let loose on the streets where Buddha used to walk regularly. The mad elephant ran wildly. People panicked and fled in all directions.

The elephant came upon Buddha. Buddha kept walking, radiating the same peace and calm even in the face of this danger. His bliss and peace was not at all affected by the threat of the wild elephant. The elephant came rushing towards Buddha in a mad fury. Once it reached Buddha, it immediately calmed down completely. Its wild nature simply dissolved in Buddha"s enlightened presence. Buddha touched the elephant"s forehead and stroked it gently. Calmed by the patting, the elephant bent on its knees and bowed down to Buddha.

The waves of bliss radiating from a peaceful person naturally and automatically touch the people, animals, trees, and rocks and affects everything nearby.

To make the whole world blissful and happy, you don't have to do anything. Just change your center. When you are seeing a horror movie, your world will be filled with fear. But if you just change the channel to say a comedy movie, you can see how your whole world changes!

When the inner awakening happens, the higher emotions happen. It all finally boils down to your own experience of what is happening. If you want to save the world, all you need to do is save yourself!

Everything is actually happening in this world — great spiritual sessions where enlightenment is being shared and at the same time terrorist training camps where violence is being shared. According to what you tune with, the world that you attract and see will also appear to be. You will attract the same type of people and situations in your life

Even one person struggling for enlightenment, seeking, raises the consciousness of at least a million people.

First, we have to understand that every major decision taken at the higher level of power and governance is an expression of collective positivity or collective negativity, because it is the mass consciousness or collective consciousness that creates the leaders. So before blaming others, be they leaders, politicians, or officials, if we can put a little bit of energy towards ourselves and start working to create more positive consciousness in our inner space, we will be doing something really useful.

It is time... Let us create more positivity from our side. Let us bring more love to our actions.

Let us increase the frequency of our individual consciousness.

Instead of getting upset or disturbed by negative decisions, just create positive energy so that the people around you and around the world are also affected by this positive consciousness. Then you will see that it radiates through the leaders also. When more and more people begin to transform themselves, the collective positivity has to express itself through the right politicians and the right leaders.

If you get upset and disturbed, what is going to happen? Nothing will happen except that you will have a little more depression, a little more negativity. And because of that, you yourself will add more negativity to the world, you will add more mass to the negative consciousness.

So revolution is not the way. Evolution is the way.

Every revolution promised the truth or the ultimate solution. But what do we see if we look back? In the last 3000 years of the history of planet earth, we have had 5000 recorded wars! Researchers have estimated that in the last 3000 years of the history of planet earth, there have been at least 9000 peace treaties, and the average life span of these treaties was just 8 years!

Just create positive energy so that the people around you and around the world are also affected by this positive consciousness. Then you will see that it radiates through the leaders as well.

Various studies have been done to measure the effects of group meditation on communities. Some studies observed the effect of a critical mass of people who meditated using the technique of Transcendental Meditation TM. These studies showed an eight percent decrease in the crime rate in the cities where group meditation was conducted. Other reports showed a significant seventeen percent reduction in acts of violence and a thirteen percent increase in cooperative, helpful acts. In warstricken areas there was more than fifty percent drop in daily war deaths and more than twenty five percent drop in war injuries. The overall statistics showed reduced crime rates, fewer hospital admissions, and reduced violence, leading to an increase in the overall quality of life.

21 September is observed as the International Peace Day. Millions of people worldwide come together in prayer, meditation, celebration and collaboration for world peace and global harmony. On this occasion every year, THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM Mission's centers conduct collective group meditations worldwide. The collective consciousness is raised in a much more powerful way when meditation is done as a group.

When matter is shared, it reduces in size. For example, if an apple has to be shared by four people, it has to be cut into four pieces. It reduces in size. When it comes to electrical energy, when the voltage is shared, it does not reduce, it remains the same. For example, if we have ten volts of electricity in a wire, one person touching the wire will feel ten volts, and four people touching the same wire will also feel ten volts.

But it is different in the case of the powerful, subtle energy of meditation. When meditation is done by a group of people, it multiplies! Rather than diminishing or staying the same, the benefit is shared and amplified among the entire group and beyond. If one person meditating generates 10 'volts' of energy, then 100 people sitting together in a collective meditation generates 10 x 100 or 1000 'volts' of energy. Just imagine! The strength of energy that is generated will simply cleanse the entire space where the meditation is done. That is why collective, group meditation is encouraged.

Th ere was a bandit by the name of Angulimala. He used to live in a forest that many people had to cross. He used to ambush the people and rob them of their valuables. Then he would cut off the little finger of the person and make a garland of all such fingers. That is why he was called Angulimala garland of fingers.

Once when traveling, Buddha was about to cross the forest. People warned him about the terrifying Angulimala. But Buddha was unperturbed and continued walking. Deep inside the forest, Angulimala jumped out of the bushes and shouted threateningly at Buddha, "Stand still!"

May you be still."Angulimala for the first time in his life was shaken to his very being. Something about Buddha touched him deeply. He could not even force himself to attack Buddha. His hands froze. He just fell at the feet of Buddha crying and begging for forgiveness!

This story illustrates one of the truths of the impact of enlightened beings. Without effort or intention, an enlightened being simply radiates tremendous peace and compassion which has the power to simply transform others.

This effect is not limited just to human beings. Even animals are touched by the pure love and compassion radiated by an enlightened being. Everything is changed when it is exposed to that high frequency energy field.

There is a beautiful story from the life of Adi Shankara, an enlightened master from ancient Bharat:Shankara was wandering in South Bharat in the town of Shringeri. One day, a strange and beautiful scene happened in front of him. Two frogs were sitting on a rock. It became very hot, so the frogs were about to jump into the water. Just then a cobra raised its hood and spread it over the two frogs giving them shade. The frogs enjoyed the cool shade and sat back for sometime. After sometime, they plunged into the water. The cobra also folded back its hood and went away.

Shankara was watching this and was amazed. He was a very sharp intellectual person. He did not leave the incident at that. He immediately recognized that unless the place was sanctified in some way by some higher energy, it was not possible for animals to forget their enmity and co-exist in such a beautiful fashion. He went around and asked for details about the place. He learned that some time in the past, a great enlightened sage had established his ashram, there for many years!

Shankara was so moved by the whole incident that he decided that someday he too would be set up his mission in that very place. Years later when he was passing by the same place, he stopped and established his first ashram there, called Shringeri Math. To this day it stands as one of the key seats of spiritual wisdom in the world!

An enlightened being effortlessly radiates his all-encompassing inner space, which create a collective positivism.

As Patanjali says in the Yoga Sutras, 'In the presence of an enlightened being even natural enemies lose their enmity

My advent on the planet earth is to create a new cycle of individual consciousness causing Collective Consciousness to enter the Superconscious zone.

To achieve this, One hundred thousand people will be initiated to live as Jeevan Muktas – liberated beings experiencing "living enlightenment".

One billion people will be initiated into Nithya Dhyaan – Life Bliss Meditation – designed to cause a positive shift in the individual consciousness on planet earth.

The way to achieve global peace is to create individual peace. The meditation for global peace is a collective meditation. This is a very simple but very powerful meditation.

Sit in one circle or concentric circles hold hands so that you hold the hand of the person on your right with your right hand – palm facing down – signifying 'giving' peace and bliss, while you offer your left hand – palm facing up – to 'receive' peace and bliss from the person on your left. This connected circle of people generates a powerful energy cycle. The meditative energy of one person is shared by all others. This meditation can be done for at least 21

Our ability to be in tune with others and Existence depends entirely upon how we conduct ourselves. It depends on the priorities we choose in life. What if we do not choose? What if we accept things as they happen to us?

It is time to talk about renunciation. Renunciation is not running away from life. Renunciation is flowing with life without resistance. The Sanskrit word sannyas refers to this state of trust with Existence that allows us to let go all other things in life.

There is a beautiful story from the life of Buddha: After enlightenment, Buddha visited many places preaching his dhamma or teachings, and initiating people into spiritual life.

On his way, he entered Kapilavastu, his birth place. He walked on the streets with his disciples, wearing the saffron robe.

Everyone watched him with great wonder. Buddha's wife, Yashodhara, heard the noise in the street and asked what it was. Her maids told her that it was none other than her own husband who had returned as the Buddha, the enlightened soul. She did not go to meet him. Instead, she called for her son Rahul. Rahul was born the night that Buddha left home in search of enlightenment.

She asked Rahul, "Do you see that radiant figure there who holds a begging bowl and yet looks like a king? He is your father. Go and ask him for your inheritance. " The young boy ran downstairs and pushed his way through to where Buddha stood. He fell at Buddha's feet and boldly repeated what his mother had told him. Buddha lifted him up gently with a smile and looked at him. He simply removed the gold hemmed cloth the boy was wearing and replaced it with a saffron one.

The boy, seven years of age, was given his inheritance. He was the first and only child allowed into the monastic order of the Buddha.

Someone asked me, If everything in life is evolving naturally by the process of evolution like monkey into man, and bad into good, would man not ultimately evolve into god? When then is the need for the meditation, sannyas…where then is the need for inspiration?'

I replied, 'It took five thousand It took five thousand years for the monkey to become man, and it would take equally long for man to become god. If you are willing to wait that long, it is alright with me!'

On the other hand, you can decide to live consciously with a clear understanding about life, the laws and structure of the universe, and meditation. You can revolutionize the process of your evolution. The right revolution leads to evolution or enlightenment. That is sannyas, the greatest revolution of an individual. It is to live like a Paramahamsa, like an enlightened being.

Adi Shankara, the enlightened master from Bharat, beautifully says in his work Vivekachoodamani*: For all living creatures, a human birth is rare, and even rarer is to have a sattvic [goodness] attitude, and more so to have steadfastness on the path of spiritual activity as explained in the Vedas"...

These words had a very powerful effect on the life of Swami Vivekananda, an enlightened master from Bharat who lived thousands of years after Adi Shankara. When Swami Vivekananda was preparing for his law examination, these very words landed on him like a thunderbolt. He could not read further. He left his books and started running along the road. He was running to his master, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. While he was running, the truth of Adi Shankara's words was ringing in his very being. He thought to himself, 'I have gained all these three: I have been born as a human being. I have gained the desire for liberation. I have got a great master. then why am I still wasting my life?

Why am I still wasting my life?' Again and again, these words were haunting him. Swami Vivekananda went on to become enlightened and spread Ramakrishna Paramahamsa's mission worldwide.

Sannyas is the path for those who want to win over themselves, who want to be free of the clutches of jealousy, anger, stress and depression forever. People think sannyas is chosen by losers. No. Of course, sometimes those who don't know what to do with their lives take up sannyas. But that is not the spirit of sannyas.

Sannyas is the effort to become conscious for the first time, conscious of the mechanism that surrounds you as a human being. You are part of Existence. Existence moves with its own mechanism, with its own music. Falling in tune with it is the science of sannyas. Sannyas is a being level relationship, being in tune with the whole of Existence. That is the shortest path to success in life.

To hear the song of Existence, you need to start moving in the right space. To find that space, you need to first drop any other thing you know, and listen to the song with deep awareness. You will find it. In that space, life will flow like a river moving towards the sea. Any other path will take longer.

When life becomes a flowing river, it has to merge with the sea. There is no other way. Sannyas is the science of flowing with the natural course of Existence and finally merging with it.

The river heads only towards the sea. It does not stagnate anywhere. A sannyasi heads only towards his goal of enlightenment. He knows no distractions. The river flows blissfully, whatever be the things thrown into it on its way. So many things are thrown into the river — flowers, twigs, food, animals, birds, dead bodies, etc. But the river flows, not bothering about anything. Similarly, a sannyasi moves blissfully, untouched by anything that comes his way. The current pulls the river over its obstacles, and it gurgles with a constant music, moving towards the sea. The cosmic intelligence pulls the sannyasi over obstacles as he moves towards the ultimate goal. He knows not what obstacles are. For him, they are all stepping stones on the path to bliss.

One Zen master was asked, "What is Zen?" He replied, "Walk on!"

Zen Buddhism beautifully says, life is like the river that flows and fills each form, and bursts its own limitations to expand its capacity. This is the essence of life, and sannyas. Sannyas is learning in action as life moves, not philosophizing. It is a force, not a dogma. For a real sannyasi, life simply moves in the right direction. The learning happens during the movement, not as a separate thing.

Sannyas is nothing but straightaway practicing the truths every passing moment. There is enough philosophy in the world but no one to follow it. Sannyas is simply a conscious decision to live the truth immediately in your life.

Part 5: The Sacred Text of Hinduism - Jeevan Mukti Bhashya

A Zen master tells his disciple very beautifully, Studying the truth as a philosophy is just collecting preaching material. Remember that unless you practice constantly, your light of truth may go out.'

Practice is nothing but continuously flowing in the right direction without stagnating. Even in stagnation there will be movement around the obstacle-trying to find the flow again. There is no stopping.

A sannyasi continuously moves with the intelligence of Existence with an attitude of surrender. By surrender, I don't mean inaction. I mean action with an attitude of surrender. There is no stopping. He lives in the moment, spontaneously and according to the need of the moment, which is what is called fluidity.

Sannyas has always been wrongly associated with renunciation. You don't have to renounce anything. You just need to understand that you are a temporary custodian of some wealth, which is a part of Existence, just as you are as well. Then you won't need to renounce because you never possessed anything in the first place! Even if you have to part with wealth, you will not feel that you are giving away or losing your possessions. The problem starts with the attitude of possessing, with the feeling of 'mine'.

Neither does a sannyasi need to renounce the world nor does a samsari need to be afraid of renouncing. Just the plain understanding that Existence gives and takes at the right moment is enough. Then you know that what is happening is the right thing for the moment and life is flowing as it should. This creates a mental gap between you and your wealth and that gap is called renunciation! It is just a gap, a break in the attitude of possessing, nothing else. It has been wrongly used in the context of sannyas.

A small story:

Two monks were traveling together. One of them strongly believed in acquiring wealth. He practiced spirituality through it. The other strongly followed the path of renunciation. They were discussing the two ways of life. As they were discussing, it became nighttime and they reached a river that they had to cross.

The one who believed in renunciation did not have money with him. He said, "We don't have money to cross the river. Let us spend the night here and someone will take us across the river tomorrow morning. "

The other one replied, "That is not possible. We will be eaten by wild animals if we spend the night here. I have money with me. Let us pay the boatman and cross the river. " Once they crossed the river safely, he asked his companion, "Now do you understand the value of money? Ifl too had been a man o[renunciation, what would have happened to us?"

The first one re plied, "It was your renunciation that brought us across safely. You parted with your money to cross the river!"

Renouncing is 'having' without the idea of having, and 'parting' without the idea of parting. Otherwise, by merely renouncing outer wealth, you will not gain anything. You will only feel the pain of sacrificing the 'mine'. Sannyas is not escaping from the 'mine'. It is going beyond the 'mine'. And that is possible only through a proper understanding. If you renounce with understanding, it is okay. Otherwise, the 'mine' will simply persist wherever you go. Not only that, if you renounce with the

idea that you are renouncing 'yours', it becomes the right action but for the wrong reason! By merely renouncing outer wealth, you can never be a sannyasi. Sannyas is a change in the inner mental setup, not a change in the outer material setup. Renouncing outer wealth to be a sannyasi is like doing the right action but for the wrong reason.

Wealth and sannyas are not mutually exclusive. In fact, sannyas is the art and science of creating wealth flawlessly.

If you read the vedic scriptures you will see that they always talk only about the abundance of life. They never teach escaping from it. They teach loosening the attachment over possessions, not renouncing or hating it. Sannyas is seeing the vast abundance of life as one whole, and therefore not being attached to your own small possessions. It is knowing that wealth is also a manifestation of Existence and not the essence of life itself.

Sannyas is not suicide. It is life. Sannyas is living in tremendous beauty, both inside and outside you.

Understand, outer beauty and wealth are not enemies to the path of sannyasi*.* They are complementary. Sannyas adds inner wealth and beauty to your outer wealth and beauty. It gives us the intelligence to handle the outer wealth and beauty without any suffering related to it.

Samsar literally means the 'world' or the 'path'. It refers to the worldly life that causes endless cycles of birth and death.

There are two ways to move in any path: either with baggage and people or by yourself. In the first case, you may have to wait for a long time. In the second case, you can reach even this very minute.

Sannyas is the decision not to carry any baggage while moving. You can have everything, but you don't have to carry it. When you don't carry anything, Existence brings to you what you need for the moment. That is sannyas!

There is a beautiful story from the life of Buddha. . .

Buddha's disciples gathered around him one day and asked him to teach them the essence of sannyas. He told them a small story

One man was living on an island by himself. Suddenly he got the feeling it was time to move from the island. He did not have a boat. So he made one with some twigs, branches, leaves and whatever he could find. It was a difficult journey but somehow he crossed and reached the other side.

Buddha asked the disciples, After reaching the other side, should the man keep the boat or discard it?'

The disciples came out with different answers.

Buddha continued, "The man of sannyas discards the boat knowing that he will be provided for as needed in the future. The man of samsar keeps it so that his effort doesn't go waste if he wants to journey back!"

A sannyasi walks with his thought on Existence. A samsari walks with his thoughts on how to exist. A sannyasi uses the boat to cross the ocean of life. A samsari carries the boat even beyond the time it is needed, not knowing he can drop it. That is the difference. There is nothing right or wrong in this. It is just two different ways to live.

Let me explain sannyas in the context of karma because sannyas is the shortcut to exhausting karma.

Karma is nothing but the unfulfilled actions of your past that pull you again and again to take birth to fulfill them. It is the very cause of the cycle of birth and death. It makes you take birth again and again in this world until it is exhausted.

There are three types of karma sanchita', prarabdha and agamya". Sanchita' karma is your entire bank balance of unfulfilled actions {karma) accumulated over many lives. Prarabdha karma is that portion of sanch ita that you bring and come to exhaust in this one birth. Every time you take birth, you bring with you a small portion of sanchita as your prarabdha to exhaust. It includes all your unfulfilled desires, lust, anger, fear, and such things. The third or agamya" karma is the new karma that you create in this birth because of new, unfulfilled actions.

Ultimately, these three things need to be done in order to exhaust all karma completely. First, the new agamya' should not get created because it only adds to the bank balance or the sanchita at the end of the lifetime. Second, the prarabdha with which you came should get exhausted, or fulfilled, in this life completely without a trace. Third, the volume of the sanchita itself should somehow be burnt so that the number of times you take birth reduces. This happens by fulfilling the prarabdha without accumulating the agamya in a lifetime.

If the prarabdha is exhausted in the right way, agamya will not get created. The same intelligence that properly exhausts the prarabdha will take care of not creating new agamya. The sanchita itself can be exhausted only by the grace of an enlightened master.

Now understand clearly: if the fantasy of your prarabdha is greater than your intelligence, then samsar (marriage) is the path for you. If the fantasy of your prarabdha is lesser than your intelligence, then sannyas is the path for you! In the path of sannyas, your intelligence wins over your prarabdha and brings it to control and exhaust it. In the path of samsar, life teaches you in different ways and you exhaust your prarabdha through millions of births.

In Patanjali's Yoga Sutras', there is an eightfold path to enlightenment. All eight parts have to be followed simultaneously. Three of the parts are pratyahara, dharana and dhyana. Pratyahara is drawing the mind inwards, away from the five senses. The next is dharana, the merging of the mind with the inner Self. The third is dhyana, meditation.

Withdrawing the mind from the five senses itself can happen only when the mind merges with the inner Self! For example, you can release the foot from the lower rung of the ladder only after establishing yourself in the higher rung, is it not? You can let go of the lower branch of the tree only after clinging to the higher branch. We all think that only after renouncing worldly attachments, we can attain god. No! The truth is, only after attaining god can you really shake off the worldly things.

Only after you experience THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM or eternal bliss, you can shake off mithyananda or worldly fantasies.

If you can become aware of and hold on more firmly to the higher rung you may let go of the lower rung more easily. That awareness is called sannyas. It is the process of understanding and moving to the higher rung and leaving the lower rung. As you move, renunciation happens as a byproduct. Because you realize that to climb higher you don't need anything but yourself! Anything you take with you is only going to make it more difficult to climb.

A samsari moves to pursue his fantasies. He goes to places to see the beauty of Existence. A sannyasi sees everything around him as already divine and beautiful! He is fantasized by what he sees! When the samsari starts turning inward, he becomes a sannyasi. Until he finds the burning need for that, it is better for him to continue with what he is doing. For a sannyasi, the mind is happy all the time. What he gets is what he wants. He is always living in the mood of grateful and welcome acceptance. For a samsari, the mind is occupied with too many conflicts. He keeps trying to get what he wants. With intelligence, the samsari can awaken to the truth, that what he is getting is what he needs for that moment and for his ultimate fulfillment.

The samsari is concerned with material things and living life in a limited way. The sannyasi is concerned about death — death of all that is not him, which is his ego, possessiveness, lust, anger, fear, jealousy and discontent. He knows he is something beyond all this. His whole quest is to find this, because once he finds it, he has found the higher rung of the ladder and he can leave the lower rung where the constant push and pull of all these emotions and material things reside.

The great enlightened masters who founded the world religions have said repeatedly, "Aham Brahmasmi meaning, 'I am That' in the Hindu tradition, or 'Be still and know that I am god' in the Christian tradition, or Anal-Haq meaning 'I am the Truth' in the Islam tradition. Experiencing that you are god is the purpose of human life.

Once this purpose is experienced, the inner bliss that all these great masters talk about starts happening. Then you understand that the outer world is a beautiful stage where the divine play is happening. There is ultimate freedom from all worldly difficulties. You do, and yet you don't do, you speak and yet you don't speak. You cry and yet you don't cry.

Your inner Self remains untouched. You are in 'eternal bliss' — nithya ananda. The problem is that people generally think sannyas is a hindrance to worldly life. They think sannyas is seriousness. No! Sannyas is a certain quality for living life to its optimum. Seriousness will never help one live life to its full potential. Only sincerity and laughter will help. Laughter is the greatest spiritual quality.

A master was seated with his disciples. He was in an expansive mood and his disciples decided to ask him about the various stages he passed through to reach the Divine. The master beautifully started explaining...

"God held me by the hand and first took me to the Land of Action. I stayed there for several years. Then god returned and took me to the Land of Sorrow. I fell into deep sorrows but eventually went beyond them. I felt happy. Then, suddenly I found that god put me in the Land of Love. I went through burning emotions and %und myself cleansed thoroughly. Then, he took me to the Land o[ Silence. There I learned the mysteries of life and death." The disciples asked, "Was that the final stage of your quest?"

The master said, "No. One day god said, Today I will take you to my very heart... and he led me to the Land of Laughter. " Sannyas is your very energy. How can it be a hindrance to anything? Not only that, with the energy o sannyas, you are always young. With the energy of sannyas, you are ready for the challenges of life.

People ask me, 'Why can't we continue in samsar and live with the consciousness of a sannyasi? " You see, the nature of man is such that unless a conscious decision is taken, it is difficult to bring about a permanent transformation in the consciousness. Sannyas is a conscious decision to transform the consciousness. Sannyas is a conscious decision. That is why sannyas needs to be taken. With a conscious decision, there is continued awareness. Continued awareness decreases the chance of slipping back. Without it, there is nothing binding one to keep on the path. It becomes easy to slip.

With sannyas, you will continue to do what you are doing but in a much better way. With sannyas, you start watching everything. You become a witness. Because of this witnessing, a gap is created between you and the other person. That gap is misunderstood as renunciation'. If you notice, the gap was not there earlier. Each one was suffocating the other. Now the gap is there. The gap is not a gap of distance but a gap of awareness.

Sannyas is also living without the burden of the inner woman or inner man. What is meant by inner woman or inner man? It is nothing but the lust hidden in your mind, the fantasies that you have created in your mind.

Shiva says beautifully in the Tantra', 'A man who has abandoned the woman in him, in his inner mind, is a sannyasi, even if he is still in the family.' On the contrary, if thoughts of a woman persist in a sannyasi s mind, he cannot be called a sannyasi. This is the scale to measure if a man is a sannyasi.

In Buddha's teaching, The Four Noble Truths, the second truth deals with the cause of suffering. He beautifully says that suffering is because of the demands we make on life every moment. It is like asking a banana tree to bear mangoes! We will understand this habit only when we bring in awareness.

Not only that, when you watch, you start seeing exactly how transactions are happening in relationships. You see how expectations are driving the whole thing. You see the ulterior motives in everything.

There is a little-known truth about a sannyasi, that a sannyasi takes responsibility for the whole of Existence. He doesn't know the difference between his family and the rest of the world. All are the same. He wishes for the liberation of anyone who comes his way. On the other hand, a samsari takes responsibility for one family or maybe for a few organizations. This taking of responsibility is always towards a definite cause. It is either to accumulate the credit of serving, to fulfill some obligation, or to co-exist easily with the people around him.

The nature of a sannyasi s responsibility is completely different. For him, the whole world is his family. There is no obligation driving him. Responsibility happens completely out of the quality of his inner space. Also, a samsari can rest after fulfilling every duty at that stage in life. A sannyasi continuously works, because people are constantly in need of truths in their life.

A sannyasi is established in rich relationships. People think sannyasis run away from relationships. A young girl asked me while I was addressing a college gathering, 'Was it failure in love that caused you to become a sannyasi? "

I told her, 'It was success in love that caused me to become a sannyasi!' Actually, sannyas is what softens you into real love; love towards not just one person but towards the whole of Existence.

Ordinary love comes with a reason, or with lust. Real love knows no reason. It is just a causeless overflowing energy towards everything in Existence.

In reality, sannyas is living like a king. Sannyas is the beginning of a kingly life because when you have cleaned yourself of all your suffering, then you have gained everything you can ever gain! You gain far more than mere wealth can give you.

A sannyasi recognizes the unending abundance of Existence. His vision is oceanic. He is not stuck in narrow perceptions. He perceives the whole of Existence as one. He feels part of the whole. That is why he is rich. A rich man who feels he owns a few acres is not really the rich one. The man who feels the abundance of Existence is really the rich one.

Understand that the very word 'rich' has been misinterpreted. How can a person who is enjoying just a few bungalows be rich? He cannot be! The rich person is the one who is enjoying everything around

him continuously. His richness is the richness of the whole Existence. He enjoys everything with no attachment to anything.

The word 'penance' means nothing but integrating yourself, making yourself a single entity. You may ask, 'Are we not like that now?' If you look closely, you will see that we exist as different entities, never as one. There is everything else in our life except integration.

If you look deeply inside, you will understand that there are hundreds of voices continuously talking inside you. The moment the mind says, 'Let us do this, the very next moment the thought will arise, 'No. Let us not do it!' After thinking of the side effects and after effects, the mind starts oscillating. Integrating the fragmented parts of the mind is the very essence of life. Integrating the feelings and the mind, integrating your face and your mind, ensuring that your face shows the same thing as what your mind thinks, is the essence of life.

If you study the lives of great masters and try to search for one basic essence in all of their lives, you will find that it is not knowledge or devotion. It is integrity! What they believed in, they lived. That's all! Their integrity was solid. They were ready to lose even their very lives, but not their integrity.

Chaitanya Mahaprabhu', the great enlightened master from Bharat, used to move around on the streets just singing devotional songs. He never bothered about what others said about him. What he felt, he expressed. To be like this requires a deep sense of sacrifice. It takes courage to sacrifice anything to live with integrity!

That is why anything that these great masters did in their lives always culminated in eternal auspiciousness! Everything they did was an effort to integrate themselves with deep sincerity and devotion. The intense effort to integrate oneself completely is what is called penance. Penance always ends in auspiciousness. There will be innumerable things happening in your life all the time. Enduring all those things and intensifying your integrity with them is called penance. On the other hand, if you allow life's happenings to shake you, then you land in disgrace. What way you wish to go is up to you.

Adi Shankara was a great enlightened master from Bharat. As a young boy, he was caught in a dilemma when he wanted to pursue the path of sannyas. He wanted to leave home with the permission of his mother but she was unwilling to let go of him.

One day, he went to bathe in the river. Suddenly, his mother heard him crying out loud for help. She ran out and saw that a crocodile had caught his leg. He was struggling to be free.

Suddenly, by a flash of thought, he cried to her "Mother, if you give me permission to become a sannyasi, I will be freed from this crocodile now to continue with my life." The mother was surprised and asked how. He explained, "According to the Vedas, if I enter a new ashrama' or stage of life, it is equal to being born again. So, if you give me permission to enter into sannyas, then maybe god will give me a fresh lease on life!"

The mother was totally helpless. She quickly made up her mind. It was better to have her son as a sannyasi than see him dead. She agreed. Immediately the crocodile released the grip! Adi Shankara

ran to his mother with great joy. He had lived the truth he sought at that moment... and it worked. See, there are three things:

Thinking the Truth Speaking the Truth Living the Truth

The first two are easy to follow. But the third, living the Truth all the time, is difficult. It is very rare. Sannyas is the courage to live what we think is the Truth. We give importance to speaking the Truth. But living the Truth is most important. If you start living your Truth, your respect for yourself will increase. That is the beauty of it.

When you integrate and live the Truth, you drop hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is pretending to be what you are not. Hypocrisy is hiding in many places so people can't see who you really are. The fragments in you dominate over each other and make you hypocritical. When you fight with your own fragments and win, you are a dheera, a courageous one! It is easy to fight with others and win. When you fight with others and win, you are a veera, a warrior. But fighting with yourself requires more courage. You don't fight unless you are tired of yourself. Only when you are tired, you accept that you need to start the fight.

Once you integrate, for the first time, you know who you really are. All the masks drop. You are ready to expose yourself in relationships. You become more authentic. You suddenly realize that you were missing things because of you! Sannyas is all about becoming more authentic. When I say authentic, I mean that you will radiate your individuality instead of your personality. With fragments, you are a personality. With integrity, you are individuality. Individuality is seeing your authenticity through your own eyes. Personality is a built-up image in the eyes of society. The master's work is to create a space in you where you don't have to guard your personality, where you can be free, where just understanding can cause transformation.

Buddha used to tell his disciples, 'Count your life only after you have taken sannyas. " Someone asked me if taking the vow of brahmacharya or sannyas will lead to enlightenment. Whether taking the vow leads to enlightenment or not is secondary. But if you observe the vows strictly for one month, successfully, the respect you have for yourself will tremendously increase. That is enough! It is called asatya sadhana or doing the seemingly impossible task successfully. It is making you do whatever your mind says you cannot do! Techniques like fire-walking are in this category. Ordinarily, the mind will say that you cannot walk on a fire bed. Once you do it, the respect you have for yourself will increase! Then you will come into integrity.

Integrity needs to be understood in two ways.

The first part is integrating the fighting parts of the mind into one. See, the very life gets wasted in the oscillation of the mind. If you can follow any one path, you will attain it. For example, let us suppose there are two paths to reach Bangalore. One path is 30 kilometers while the other is 30,000 kilometers. You are oscillating between these two paths not knowing which to choose. If you choose any one path and proceed, you will reach Bangalore.

But if you keep oscillating, if you go on one path for half hour, and then change your mind and go on the other path for the next half hour, what will happen? You will never reach Bangalore! At least if you decide and take the 30,000-kilometer path, you will reach Bangalore, even if it takes you one year! But if you keep oscillating between these two paths, even if it takes thirty years, you will not reach Bangalore.

Even if the chosen path is wrong, the one who moves with integrity automatically comes to the correct path. He achieves what needs to be achieved. There are only two types of people on planet

earth — those who live with integrity and those who live without integrity, that's all! The scale to measure a person is not the path on which he went but whether he lived with integrity or not.

Integrity is the strength to live your belief, come what may.

Second, not getting diluted by external influences is also integrity. It is the ability to not alter our integrity or dilute ourselves due to inner confusions or outer influences. The person who lives with integrity, even if he dies on the train platform, will die with the satisfaction that he lived completely. The person who lives without integrity, even if he dies in the best hospital, will die with dissatisfaction. The scale to measure the quality of a person's life is to see how much he lived in tune with what he felt was life. For example, if he is an atheist, if he lived as a strong atheist and died as a strong atheist, there is nothing wrong. He will attain! That very strength, when it goes deeper and deeper in him and searches, will show him the truth!

Integrating the mind is the essence of life. Decide you will always say and do only what you feel is right. Then, you will come to tremendous clarity and conviction in the inner and outer worlds.

Swami Vivekananda recounts in his life that his master, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa™, died leaving him the responsibility of the mission. At the same time, Swami

Vivekananda's father died leaving behind a family of utter poverty. Swami Vivekananda was the only hope for his family. He stood between saving his family and saving the world. No one recognized the mission he spoke of. He says beautifully, 'Who will sympathize with the imaginations of a boy?' He was, after all, a young boy!

He describes those few days as 'unimaginable hell'. He was with a small group of boys, with no money, with only one thing: the integrity to live the life they believed in, the life taught by their master. Ten years later, he says, 'Ten years ago, I could not get one hundred people to celebrate master's birth anniversary. Today there are fifty thousand!' Sannyas is taking a strong decision not to allow the unconscious to hinder the consciousness and to establish consciousness firmly on the master and his words.

Swami Vivekananda was questioned as to how he could desert his family at that time. He beautifully replied, I believed that Ramakrishna Paramahamsa's teachings could rationalize Bharat and many foreign races. With that belief came the realization that it is better that a few persons suffer than for such ideas to die out of the world. What if a mother or two brothers die? It is a sacrifice. Let it be done. No great thing can be done without sacrifice. The heart must be plucked and the bleeding heart placed upon the altar.

Then, great things are done!'

Such was his integrity.

Not only that, those who said that Swami Vivekananda deserted his family do not know the correct facts. He continued to fulfill his duty by giving them the bare minimum requirements. He also went to the court of law to attend to some legal issues they faced.

During the civil wars in Japan, an invading army entered a town and took control of the whole town. Before the army arrived in one particular village, everyone fled except a Zen master.

Curious about this master the general went to the temple to see what kind of a man the master was. The master did not even acknowledge the general. The general became very angry when he was not treated in the usual respectful way to which he was accustomed.

He took out his sword and shouted, "You fool! Don't you realize you are standing before a man who could run you through without blinking an eye?"

The master remained calm and asked, "And do you realize that you are standing before a man who can be run through without blinking an eye?"

With the strength of integrity comes utter freedom and bliss. With freedom and bliss there is no fear in the inner or outer world!

The very goal of life is enlightenment. You may have other goals, but knowingly or unknowingly, they are just different names that we give to the goal of enlightenment. In the same way, whatever else you may seek, what you actually seek is sannyas itself. But you don't know it. That is the problem!

You may think your goals are to have more money and more relationships. The truth is that even the one who searches for money actually searches only for enlightenment! See, there are only two things. One is money, and the other is name and fame. Name and fame mean nothing but to have more relationships. Whatever experience you feel you are going to get through money or relationships, you will only get through enlightenment!

That is why the soul never rests until enlightenment happens. No amount of money satisfies the soul. No relationship satisfies the soul. When money and relationships don't give satisfaction, it is called the 'depression of success'. This is what happens after reaching the peak of our career. People come to me and say, 'I have achieved all that I wanted to achieve, but what for I wanted to achieve, I have not achieved. I feel incomplete.' Understand that this is the call of your being that seeks no other goal except enlightenment. The response to it is sannyas.

Not properly understanding the goal of life is the root cause of all problems. Sannyas is recognizing the goal properly and integrating to achieve it. Whatever goal you may be running behind in your life, be it money or relationship or whatever, your end goal is only bliss. There is no other separate goal in life!

There are only two types of people. One group knows the word bliss or 'enlightenment', and the path to it. They live their life according to that. The other group does not know the word or the path, so it comes around in circles. That's all! The former is sannyasi, the latter is samsari.

You have achieved the human body which gives you the highest possible to take the jump in consciousness. The glass is already reflecting the sunlight. Now all that the glass needs to do is to see the source of the reflection. That's all! Merging with the Source is what I call enlightenment. It is merging of the individual consciousness with the cosmic consciousness.

If this happens, then the goal of life, the purpose for which the glass was created, is achieved. Then, even if the glass breaks, there is no problem. But without achieving that, if the glass is broken, it is the greatest loss ever.

If the human body perishes before enlightenment, there cannot be a greater loss than that. Sannyas is the means to this achievement. Sannyas is not the end of life. It is the beginning of life. Sannyas is moving towards enlightenment, the only and permanent purpose of life.

If the purpose of life itself is enlightenment, where are we stuck right now? In what areas of our lives are we moving in the wrong direction? Understand that the problem is in recognizing the correct goal. If the goal is right, you have achieved it. If your goal is right, it means you are already living it.

Conditioning is the reason that you miss the goal. When you are born, you came as a free bird, a Paramahamsa or the supreme swan, to flit and fly blissfully around and enjoy the whole of existence. But after coming, not only did you fly around, but unknowingly you also landed on planet earth. That was the problem. There are many people waiting to catch birds that land! Society waits to fit you into the frame of country, religion, caste, community and creed.

You were a sweet soul when you landed on planet earth. You were not a Hindu, or an engineer or a worker. But understand that society wants engineers and workers. It is not bothered about your consciousness. Actually, neither your parents nor society are aware that there is something called consciousness. They themselves don't have that intelligence. They teach you what they were taught. That's all. Their conditioning is not a deliberate attempt to restrict or condition you.

Conditioning is the unwanted dowry that has been handed over for generations and lives, from person to person. First, there is parental conditioning. Then there is societal conditioning. Based on these two, you create certain ethics for yourself. This is the self-imposed conditioning, your own dharma", your own path of righteousness.

Because we create so many layers of conditioning, we are unable to see the truth directly. We are not able to perceive the goal directly. We are not able to live the goal directly. We are caught in the conditioning and forget who we truly are. The conditioning creates certain limitations in us, and we start thinking that the limitations are the real us. Even the clothes that we wear condition us to believe we are the clothes!

Many of the conditionings are created in society in order to peacefully co-exist. For example, for easy communication, many languages are taught. There is nothing wrong in learning a language, but taking it up as a conditioning and making the language your very life, and creating sorrow for yourself and others is wrong. That mental attitude is wrong. So many people have sacrificed their lives for the sake of language. If the conditioning were not there, so many deaths would not have happened! The very history of mankind would have been written differently. Conditioning is the reason for terrorism among human beings. Today, conditioning-based-divisions go right down to the level of belonging to specific political parties!

By taking sannyas, you are taking the first conscious step to drop the past and enter a new world. The past is familiar, so you like to carry it. The mind always likes familiar patterns. Also, society teaches you to carry the past so that it can put guilt and fear in you that are based upon the past incidents. The past is unwanted baggage. Sannyas is disconnecting from the past. When you disconnect from the past and move to a new future, initially, there is utter insecurity. Sannyas is utter insecurity. In utter insecurity, there is nothing else to hold on to, so you will find god!

Why do you think I give you a spiritual name? I give you a spiritual name to help you more easily disconnect from the past. The new name that I give you will constantly remind you of the psychological revolution that has happened in you, the new understanding that has happened in you. The name also indicates your individual spiritual path, according to your own innate nature, which will lead to the ultimate flowering of your consciousness.

A sannyasi works for the present moment. He works to give his whole life to Existence and doesn't care about the results. The results take care of themselves. That is his way. He knows only the moment, nothing else. Therefore, he learns directly from Existence every moment. That is why he has no doctrine, no religion. He moves in synchronicity with the whole of Existence and learns through it.

There is a Sufi saying, 'The Sufi is the child of the moment.' In Sufi texts, every moment is called a breath. And the Sufis are called 'the folks of the breaths, because they live in full awareness of every breath, of every instant. According to them, every moment, a new Self arrives. That is the spirit of Sannyas, it is being fresh every moment. A person of the moment learns from the moment. For him, Existence is his teacher.

When the great Sufi mystic Hasan, was dying, somebody asked, "Hasan, who was your master?" He said, "I had many masters. If I relate their names it will take months or even years, and it is too late now. I am going to die any time. I will tell you about three masters. The first one was a thief. Once I got lost in a desert, and when I reached a nearby village, it was late and everything was closed. At last I found a man who was trying to make a hole in the wall ofa house.

I asked him where I could stay and spend the night. He said, "At this time of night it will be difficult.

If you don't mind staying with a thief, you are welcome to stay with me."

I stayed with this man for one month. Each night he would tell me, "Now I am going for my work. You take rest and pray for me." When he came back, I would ask him, "Did you get anything?" He would say, "Not tonight. But tomorrow, god willing, I will try again." He was always happy and hopeful never in a state of hopelessness!

When I was meditating for many years, and nothing was happening, many times the moment came when I was so desperate, so hopeless, that I thought I should stop all this nonsense. And sudden 1y I would remember the thief who would say every night, "God willing, tomorrow it is going to happen"

My second master was a dog. One day, I was going to the river to quench my thirst. A dog came and he was also thirsty. He looked into the river and saw another dog there, which was his own image. He became afraid. He would bark and run away, but his thirst was so much that he would come back. Finally, despite his fear, he jumped into the water and his own image disappeared. I realized that the message had come from god to me." one has to jump in spite of the fear. The third master was a small child. I went to a town where a child was carrying a lit candle. He was going to the mosque to put the candle there.

I asked the boy, "Have you lit the candle by yourself. "He said, "Yes. "Then I asked him, "There was a moment when the candle was unlit, and then there was a moment when the candle was lit. Can you show me the source from which the light came?"

The boy laughed, blew out the candle, and said, "Now you have seen the light going. Where has it gone? You tell me!"

My ego was shattered and my whole knowledge was also shattered.

It is true that I had no master. That does not mean that I was not a disciple. I accepted the whole of Existence as my master. I trusted the clouds, the trees. I learned from every possible source.

Sannyas is the joyful awareness that the 'moment' is guiding you closer to your enlightenment. All you have to do is be vulnerable, that's all.

Tomorrow also comes in the form of today. So why not focus on just today? When you are in the moment, there is no space for pain or suffering. Only when you live in the past or future, you create the space for suffering. When you live in the moment, you automatically create a space where everything is beautiful. Life itself becomes a romance with Existence! You resonate with the whole thing. You are in love with everything and everyone for no reason at all. That is sannyas. Then you don't amass. You don't fear. You don't worry. Things happen around you like a beautiful dream.

A sannyasi is an eternal wanderer in spirit. Even if he is in one place, his spirit wanders without any pattern, touching so many things far away. He doesn't care to accumulate anything. He gives away whatever comes his way. He receives much more than he needs. He lives like a king.

Sannyas is the understanding of the transient nature of everything. All desires, possessions, and emotions are moving and changing. Everything is changing and moving. Nothing is permanent. If you analyze your own desires, before a desire is fulfilled, it looks like a mountain, a huge goal. After being fulfilled, the same desire looks like a molehill. Before being fulfilled, it will seem like your very life. After fulfilling one desire, you simply move to the next desire! Understand that the process itself shows that desires are neither solid nor permanent. They are just changing fantasies of the mind.

Sannyas helps you see the temporary nature of desires. Slowly, desires stop getting created then all the energy that was locked up in desires is freely available to you. Automatically, your potential will take a jump. You are ready to do anything. Although you live in it, nothing in the material world really pulls you. Even if you see something beautiful, you don't wish to possess it. You just enjoy it and move on. That's all. That is sannyas.

Sannyas works like a of wood that is used to burn the dead body and finally gets thrown in the same pyre. It burns out all the fantasies in you and finally give itself to the same fire. It is a tool.

Adi Shankara beautifully says in his famous song, Bhaja Govindam, Even when days and nights, winters and springs have gone, and life almost comes to an end, the grip of desire is still there! Desire has such a pull at the unconscious level that liberating oneself from it is the greatest liberation.

Once there lived a stone cutter. He was not satisfied with his position in life. One day he was passing through a wealthy merchant's house. Through the gate which was open, he noticed many possessions and important visitors in the merchant's house. He thought that the merchant must be very powerful. He became jealous and wished that he could be like the merchant.

To his great surprise, the stone cutter suddenly became the merchant, enjoying more luxuries and power that he had ever imagined.

One day, he was standing on the road when he saw a high official pass by. He was carried in a beautiful chair accompanied by attendants and escorted by soldiers beating gongs. Everyone, no matter how wealthy, has to bow down before the procession.

He thought, 'How powerful that official is! I wish I could be a high official!' Immediately, he became the high official and he carried everywhere in his beautiful chair. One day it was extremely hot, and he felt very uncomfortable in the sticky chair. He looked up at the sun. It was so bright and beautiful in the sky. He thought, "How powerful the sun is! I wish that I could be the sun!"

He became the sun! And he enjoyed his powerful position over everything. One day, a huge black cloud moved between him and the earth, so that his light could no longer shine on everything below. He was surprised. He thought, "How powerful that huge black storm cloud is! How I wish I could be a Cloud!

He became the storm cloud, flooding the fields and villages.

Soon he found that he was being pushed away by some great force, and realized that it was the wind. He thought, "How powerful the wind is! I wish to become the wind!"

He became the wind and powerfully blew over the roofs of houses and through forests. One day, he came across something that would not move, no matter how forcefully he blew against it. It was a huge and towering rock. He thought, "How p that rock is! I wish to become the rock! " Then he became the rock, more powerful than anything else on earth. But as he stood there, he heard the sound o[ a hammer pounding a chisel into the hard surface, and felt himself being changed. He thought, "What could be more powerful than a rock?'" He looked down and saw a stone cutter far below him!

This story clearly illustrates how the mind always thinks that which has not yet been achieved is greater than that which has been achieved. The grass on the other side is always greener. But when we go to the other side, what happens? We feel the grass on the opposite side is greener! We jump from one thing to the other, from one desire to the next, from one point of view to the next, but we are seldom happy.

A Sannyasi is one who clearly sees that everything is changing all the time, and everything is beautiful just the way it is. He also knows that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. That is why he sets out first to clean his eyes. Eyes are the windows of the soul, so his work is at the core level. If you see the world through a red colored lens, everything appears red. If you see with a green colored lens, everything is green. If you see with clear eyes, everything looks clear and beautiful. Existence has always been beautiful, but we missed seeing it. Sannyas is the decision to see with clear eyes.

If life itself is changing all the time, then why are we trying to frame it? Buddha says in his Dhammapada', 'Life is like a flash of lightning in the sky.' Life is transient. Then what are we trying to do? We are trying to do an impossible job. Our job is to see, enjoy, and move on. If everything is a passing manifestation of Existence, then where is the scope for ego or fear or greed? Sannyas, as such, doesn't change anything. Everything remains the same. But it changes the way you see things. Sannyas happens in you. Sannyas has nothing to do with the outer world. Sannyas is awakening the charioteer. Man's body is like a chariot and his consciousness is the charioteer. The charioteer is fast asleep, and the chariot is moving according to the horses. The five horses are the five senses, each with its own different idea. Not one of them is the truth. They are just

transient ideas!

Even in the most difficult times, a sannyasi remains with the awareness that life is a fleeting dream! He carries a completely different definition for success and failure. He doesn't carry success or failure itself. A samsari on the other hand carries success and failure with him wherever he goes. There starts the problem.

Sannyas is saying 'yes' to Existence. Saying 'yes' is surrender. Saying 'yes' is love and compassion.

The human mind is trained to always say 'no'. Saying 'no' boosts the ego. 'Yes' makes the ego vulnerable, so the mind continues to say 'no.' Sannyas is saying 'yes' to Existence. Existence created you. It is waiting to express its divine play through you. By saying 'yes, you allow the divine play to

happen through you. When the divine play happens, things happen exactly according to the flow of Existence. Then, everything becomes auspiciousness!

In the effort to say 'yes, you start softening. Sannyas is about becoming soft.

As long as you say 'no, you remain hard. When you make an effort to say 'yes, you start softening. When you make a conscious decision to say 'yes, it starts. That is where the master plays a role. Sannyas is saying 'yes' to the master without asking for an explanation. When you start trusting the master completely, sannyas starts happening in you. Somewhere you get the click that the master knows better than you. Then you start letting go of your hold over your mind and start holding the hands of the master. The master's hands are always stretched out, but you were not ready to hold them. Once the 'yes' starts happening, you hold his hands.

Then a space is created where love starts happening. Love happens only when you start saying 'yes.' By saying 'yes, not only do you start loving, you allow the other person to love you as well. Then your inner space that was like a rock earlier, starts becoming like cotton! It becomes soaked with love. The love is not just towards one person or for any reason. It is an overflowing energy. It is towards the whole of Existence for no reason. You start communing with the trees, with everything around you. You feel that life is a song, the song of Existence of which you are a part. You are in a deeply resonant mood with everything and everyone around you, including yourself. Your actions simply become an outpouring of the joy and ecstasy that is enveloping you all the time.

A Zen master arrived at the meeting place of the Cambridge Buddhist Society. He found everyone dusting and cleaning the whole place in anticipation of his visit.

They were surprised to see him because he was not supposed to arrive until the following day. He simply tied back the sleeves of his robe and joined the preparations. They could not believe that he wanted to help. He asked, 'Why can't I also prepare for the grand day of my arrival!'

When you are resonating with Existence, you enjoy everything, including yourself. You don't see yourself as separate from anything else. You see no separate reason for anything. There are people who commune with nature but fail miserably when it comes to people. Then, even their communion with nature is not real communion. Feeling only for nature is not a scale by which to measure love.

People tell me that they are already communing with Existence. Trees and animals don't create trouble for you. That is why you claim to commune with them! They keep quiet. You can simply express anything to them. You can thrust your feeling on them, pull it out, and feel good, that's all. It is just an ego trip. The essence is in the ability to commune with the whole of Existence, even when faced with trouble! If you can create that space of love under those conditions, then you are communing.

A poet once wrote a love song and sent it to his friends. A few days later he received a letter from a lady to whom he had sent the poem.

She wrote to him saying, "I am so touched by your poem. Please come home, meet my parents, and ask them if you can marry me." The poet was surprised. He wrote back to her "That was a poem of love from my heart that I wanted to sing to a few souls. It was nothing more than that! " She replied, "You are a hypocrite. Because of you, I will never again entertain a poet in my life."

The problem is, everything happens with the reason of the intellect. Love has been reduced to mere lust for the other person's body. That is the problem. Real love is an expression of the overflowing energy that starts happening in you when you start saying 'yes' to Existence.

The famous poet Kabir says that when love possesses you, don't even think twice. Just dive into it. If you start thinking, it is like arranging your pillows when deep sleep of rest has come to your eyes. He says, 'Even though the head itself must be given, why should you weep over it!'

The master waits many lives for you. But you have to say 'yes'. Remember, the master is a gentleman. He gives you the freedom to remain in bondage. He waits. Once you say 'yes, he takes you in his arms. The master is the only one who can show you the power of love. An enlightened being's love and compassion is boundless. Sannyas is living like an enlightened being. It is living enlightenment.

A sannyasi is one who is established in love and compassion in the inner world, while being established in concentration and precision in the outer world. A real sannyasi has the precision of a sword. When he closes his eyes, the outer world is no more. When he opens his eyes, his work is perfection, perfection not only in work, but in relationships also! He is a father, a mother, a brother and a friend, all at the same time.

He moves, guided by inner intelligence. That is why he is in the present moment all the time. He responds to the moment. That is the ultimate sense of responsibility responding to the moment spontaneously. True love and compassion are spontaneous responses to the moment. That is why they surface irrespective of people or situations.

One man went to a Zen monastery and told the master "Master I wish to practice Zen for the rest of my life but I have never stuck with anything for very long. I always look for shortcuts to everything Is there a shortcut to enlightenment? " The master told him, "You are accepted into this monastery for two days. In these two days, you will be taught the shortcut to enlightenment. Is there anything that you like to do in particular?"

The man said, "Since I don't stick to anything for a long time, I am unable to tell what I like to do most. But I like to play chess" The master called for a young disciple who was supposed to be a good chess player. He asked the two of them to sit down and placed a chess board bet- ween them.

He then took out his sword and placed it in front of the two of them and said, "Both of you have to play. The moment one of you loses, the loser will have his head cut off."

They were shocked at the master's words! They started the game and played. They concentrated on the game like they had never done before. Initially, the young monk made good moves, and it looked like he was going to win. Then suddenly he made a mistake. The man took the opportunity and took over the game. Soon, he was clearly on the way to winning.

Suddenly, he looked at the young monk and thought with what dedication and devotion the monk lived his life with the master at that young age. Then he thought about his own life and how he had wasted it. Suddenly he decided, if at all anyone should die, it should be himself. He deliberately made a wrong move. The young monk saw that and took over the game again.

The master was watching the whole thing. At that point, he took the board away, and the coins fell in the air. He said, "Nobody wins. Nobody loses. The game is over. There are only two things needed for enlightenment, they are concentration and compassion. Today, you learned both. Stay with me and study the way you have played chess today. Enlightenment will be yours!"

Sannyas is bringing together concentration and compassion. With concentration, you never forget the goal of life, which is enlightenment. With compassion, you are ready to sacrifice your very life so that the other may reach the goal! When both are there, both you and the other will reach! That is the greatness of sannyas. That is the space of sannyas.

The greatest quality of a sannyasi is his immense trust in Existence. Society trains you to always protect yourself from everything. That is the problem. You are made to believe Existence is the enemy from which you have to protect yourself. You apply the same rule and protect yourself from the master also. The master happens in your life with just one intention - to destroy your ego and allow the attitude of sannyas to flower in you.

Sannyas is nothing but finding out exactly where you are going wrong. That exact place is known as nothing but the ego. If you understand this, you will simply open up to the master and allow him to strike the ego. You will simply drop all your defenses and open up. Being closed to the master's presence is like closing your nose with your fingers when there is a fragrant breeze blowing. When you open up to him with trust, you will see miracles happen all around you.

Trust has amazing power. It works beyond logic. Anything that works beyond logic is the direct truth. It never fails. When you trust the master, when you surrender to the master, you are giving him the responsibility of you. He never fails! It does not mean you can surrender to him and then do foolish things. No! The first thing to realize is that when real surrender happens, it will never prompt you to do foolish things. Only surrender in the name of surrender will attempt to do foolish things. Real surrender is a consciousness, not a concept for trial.

Sannyas is a consciousness that flowers in groups of people in the presence of the master. Over the years, sannyas has always happened in groups. All the great masters have ordained groups of sannyasins. When a group of people start dissolving in love, when a group of people start melting, sannyas starts happening. Suddenly, so much beauty radiates. Suddenly, Existence appears to be profoundly mystical and beautiful. The power of coincidence becomes a way of life. Tremendous energy starts flowing. For no reason, life looks tremendously beautiful. Everything seems to be perfect. There is an inexplicable feeling of blossoming all round.

It is not that Existence has become more beautiful. Existence is always the same. You have started responding to it, that's all. Your own human qualities have enriched tremendously. That is sannyas! When you start responding to Existence with enriched qualities, when you start melting into Existence, when you start yearning for it, sannyas starts happening to you.

When sannyas happens, you automatically add more beauty to Existence. You become a creator. People think sannyas is renouncing creativity. No! Sannyas is moving one step closer to god, and god is the ultimate creator. The very energy of Sannyas is creation. This is a little-known fact about sannyas.

A small story:

One day a young man approached Socrates', the Greek philosopher and said, "0 great Socrates', I come to you for knowledge. " Socrates' took the man to the sea and pressed his head down into the water for a few seconds.

When he released him, the man came up gasping for breath. Socrates asked him to repeat what he wanted. The man said, "I want knowledge. "

Socrates put him under the water again, this time for a longer period. Then he released him and asked, "What do you want? " The man replied, "Knowledge ". Socrates repeated this a few times.

After a few times, Socrates asked again, "What do you want?" The man gasped, "Air. I want air! " Socrates said, "Good. When you want knowledge as much as you wanted air you shall have it."

Sannyas is a deep urge that rises from within you. It is a deep yearning. Even if the longing is not completely consistent overtime and space, it is alright. You can take the jump. It may not become consistent. But becoming consistent is not the criterion needed. When it takes root, that alone is enough. You are ready. Once you jump in, everything takes care of itself.

One man was walking towards the Himalayan mountains in the winter months. An old man saw him and asked, "It is so cold in the mountains. Are you sure you can make it? " The man replied, "My heart is already there. So it is easy for the rest of me to reach there. "

The initiation itself will trigger the process. The outer adornments of sannyas will take care of the inner adornment. That is why, with the initiation, a new name and saffron clothing are given. They will do most of the job for you. They will keep the awareness alive every moment.

But if you start analyzing the decision to take the jump, you will miss it. Sannyas is linked to your energy. Just by seeing your energy, I can tell you are ready for sannyas! You cannot analyze energy with logic. Energy is beyond logic. When you take sannyas, the moment is right, that's all. Even if you drop it later, have no regrets. The seed has been sown. Once a sannyasi, always a sannyasi. It will happen again at the right time. That time may be the final time.

Sannyas is a decision taken by intelligent people. When life comes to the boiling point, to a peak of depression, to a point where you feel the outer world is of no use, when there is nothing further that can be done to help your situation, there are three choices you can make.

The first choice you could make is suicide. Suicide appears to be immediate freedom but actually it creates terrible suffering. People think that suicide takes courage. Courage is a beautiful word wrongly used here. Do you need courage to rub chili powder in your own eyes? No! It is simple foolishness. In the same way, it does not require courage to commit suicide. It is simply foolishness. There is nothing courageous about it.

Understand the science behind suicide. Suppose your normal life span this birth is ninety years of age and you commit suicide when you are forty-five. For the remaining forty-five years, you have to wait as a spirit. Only at the end of ninety years can you choose the next body to take birth. These forty-five years will be the worst hell you can ever experience. It will be worse than the struggle that happened when you were in the body. Suicide is not the relief you think it is.

The second choice is to resort to some sort of addiction, like drugs or alcohol, and slowly poison the system until it dies. This is equally as foolish because you are knowingly abusing the body.

The third and most intelligent path is to look into yourself. When the outer world seems to be over in your mind, the time has come to look inwards. Sannyas happens when you decide to look in and introspect. Sannyas is the alchemy of transforming your entire lifestyle, directing your whole energy towards enlightenment. When the first thought to look in comes, when the first thought to embrace spirituality happens, the intelligent one takes the jump into sannyas. Sannyas is the shortcut.

A fifty year old student of enlightenment approached a Zen master and said, "I have been studying spiritual studies since I was a small boy. I have learnt that even the grass and trees will become enlightened. This seems very strange to me."

The master asked, "Of what use is it to discuss how grass and trees become enlightened? The question is how you can become enlightened. Have yo u ever considered that?" The old man answered, "I never thought of it in that way." The master said, "Then go home and think it over."

Sannyas is a focused appointment with yourself. It is a conscious commitment to yourself that you are going to destroy 'all that you are not', and cleanse yourself completely.

Once you make the commitment, your seeing, hearing, talking and feeling will start being different. The same things will cause a new understanding in you. That is what commitment to sannyas does to you. Sannyas is going to be the only solution for the future, because it is the only thing that teaches you to be established in yourself and yet learn to act in the outer world in a playful, joyful, ecstatic way. Sannyas allows you to play any number of roles without identifying with any of them. It keeps you in continuous excitement and ecstasy all the time. It makes you experience the very essence of taking birth on planet earth.

A true mother is one who lets go of her child when the time is right. A mother who is too possessive of her child should probably hesitate to give birth in the first place! Even living birth is a form of letting go because she 1S allowing the child to leave her body! Only a mother who is ready to allow the next level of explosion to happen, a mother who is ready to let go, can only be a real mother.

If you are possessive, if you feel sad just thinking about separating from the child, then you should not even give birth to the child! You should continuously feed him through the umbilical cord. The umbilical cord connection should be continuously kept alive! Just as the child grows physically only after you deliver him into the outside world after nine months, likewise, he can grow psychologically only if you allow him to break from you. Physical disconnection is birth.

In that way I am very fortunate. When I went and told my mother that I wanted to leave home for sannyas, it was late at night, around eleven o clock. I went to the temple, spent some time as usual, and came home at my regular time. I opened the door with my key and walked in. I wore wooden sandals, normally worn by wandering ascetics. They made a loud noise on that granite floor! My mother's usual custom was to wake up, prepare the food of my choice, and serve me the moment I entered. If I had finished my dinner at the temple, I would tell her and both of us would go to sleep.

That particular night, she got up and was about to prepare food. I called her and told her, 'I have decided that I am leaving home for sannyas. You can give me food tonight, even though I have already eaten. I will eat now because tomorrow I will be leaving.'

It was a very casual announcement from my side. Of course, she was shocked, but she did not say anything. One thing is that all of my family knew from the beginning that talking and trying to convince me to do otherwise would never work. They knew that before saying anything, I would be very clear about it inside. Only after knowing what to do would I say it out loud. When I say something, it means it is going to be done - that's all!

Tears started pouring from her eyes. I looked at her and asked, 'What do you mean by crying? Do you mean that I should not go?'

She shook her head and said, 'No, I am not saying you should not go. I am crying because I am not able to control myself. I am not able to accept it. I can't say that you cannot go.'

She knew all along that one day this would happen. One day or the other I would leave. It was predicted in my horoscope. The beauty of it was, she never said 'No!' Not only did she not tell me I couldn't go, she broke the news to my father as well. My father thought she had shouted at me and created some problem and that was the reason I had decided to go. He asked her, 'Did you shout at him? Did you create any problem?'

My mother said, 'No, I did not shout or say anything. He came of his own accord and told me this.' Then my father calmed down.

It was a straight and simple declaration. My father came to me, sat down and asked, "Swami, your mother is saying a few things as your words. Are these things true?' Funnily, they used to call me "Swami even in those days!

I told him, 'Yes. I have decided to leave home to pursue sannyas and become enlightened.' It was a shock to him. But he saw that I was very clear, balanced, cool and relaxed. He made only one statement. He said, 'If you fall sick, please inform us. We want to take care of you.' That's all. He simply said, 'If you ever fall sick anywhere during your travels, please inform us. We want to take care of you. That is the only thing we want, nothing else. Otherwise, do what you want.'

My parents never stood in my way. Understand: any relationship, including the parental relationship, is a healthy relationship, only when the person is ready to allow the next phase to happen. I have seen thousands of youngsters who are so inspired, who are bold enough, who are courageous enough to take up this path of seeking. However, they don't even give themselves a chance to explore because of their parents.

Parents simply fall into the regular way of life, living to satisfy other people's ego, and bringing up children. Very rarely, a few souls get the inspiration and courage to explore. Try to understand that I am not asking you to train your kids or force your kids to become sannyasis. No! I am saying that if at all they feel that click towards sannyas, do not stand in their way. You will be blessed if you do not stand in their way.

Have the intelligence to see the path the child has chosen. He has chosen the ultimate path. Even if he cries and struggles and becomes a failure, there is nothing wrong — if that is your fear. I might have been a failure in my previous ten births. That is why this time I am successful! Understand, when the struggle is for sannyas, even if enlightenment does not happen, it is not a failure. It is a great success because you lived with integrity and that too in the conscious field. In the conscious field, Existence watches over you completely. You are taken care of at every step. So, understand that any exploration, any research, any adventure in the conscious field should be encouraged, allowed, and supported.

I feel eternally grateful to my parents for not standing in the way.

We now reach the ultimate, or what I call the peak experience. Realization of who we are and our role in this universe is the ultimate knowledge and experience that we can have. From the darkness of ignorance, we move into the light of truth. We become enlightened.

When you see somebody swimming, you understand three things. The first thing is that swimming is possible, that a man can float on water. Secondly, you have a tremendous urge: 'If he can do it, why not me? Why can't I? I can too.' The third thing is, 'Let me jump in!' You get inspiration and courage!

In the same way, when you see an enlightened being walking on planet earth, when you live around him, you also understand three things. The first thing is that enlightenment is possible. You can live like a god on this planet earth. The next thing is, 'If he can attain enlightenment, why not me?' because he radiates such simplicity and ordinariness, which is close to your own human nature. You naturally get confidence that it is possible for you too. The third thing is courage, 'Let me jump in!'All these three will happen only if you live around an enlightened master and continuously watch his body language. Nothing else can trigger this in you.

Living with the limitless continuum is enlightenment. The limitless continuum will happen when you relax from the identities you hold of yourself in the outer and inner worlds.

The basic thing needed for enlightenment is a 'psychological revolution', a new clarity about the self (Jeeva), world (jagat), and god (Ishwara).

How you think, why you think, how you are driven, what is your inspiration, what motivates you in life - this understanding is the clarity about the self or Jeeva.

How to achieve your desires in the world, how you avoid fears and other things forced upon you by the world - this understanding is the clarity about the world or Jagat.

Clarity about Ishwara or god means understanding the source of both the individual self and the world. Achieving the source, knowing all these three, is enlightenment.

When you have a clear understanding about you think how you think, this very understanding gives you the clear experience of the self. When you understand how to connect with the world, achieving what you want, and avoiding what is not needed, you gain a clear experience of the world. The third is experiencing god, Ishwara, the source of the self and the world.

Gaining a true understanding of the self, world and god is enlightenment.

People ask me, 'After enlightenment, can enlightened beings enjoy?' I tell you, only after enlightenment can you enjoy! Before that, you can only think or imagine you are enjoying. After enlightenment, you don't even need sense objects to enjoy. You will simply be enjoying all the time. There will be such an intense excitement for no reason.

If I have to define enlightenment in two words, I will say it is 'intense excitement' for no reason, intense passion directed towards no object. There is no object, but there is intense passion. There is no reason, but there is intense excitement. That is what I call enlightenment. Enlightenment does not mean escaping somewhere. Tasting life here and now is what I call enlightenment.

What I call enlightenment is experiencing the same intensity of life that you feel inside yourself, outside your skin also. You are not alive just inside your body, but you are also alive inside every other individual, tree, and rock. Your hold over your physical body is transformed into a hold over the cosmic body! You are alive in every cell in the cosmos. Every cell is a complete, fulfilled part of the cosmos.

Understand, I am alive as much outside as I am inside my skin. So, I am alive in all the millions of heads, eyes, and feet and all the millions of beings in the cosmos.

To achieve this, start seeing everything as if you are seeing for the first time, without bringing in your engrams, your past engraved memories. Then you will start experiencing the same life and intensity that you experience inside your skin, outside also. Try this for ten days. Once you get a glimpse, you will never miss it! You will see you are in ecstasy for no reason. You are in excitement for no reason. You will never take things for granted again.

You will always be in joy.

As of now you connect all the past experiences of your life and create a shaft. All your future experiences depend on how you have created this shaft. They depend on which words from the past you have picked, and how you have formed the shaft. Your future emotions, reactions, thoughts, and words depend entirely on this shaft. But after enlightenment, life is very different from this. Thoughts arise, and if they want to work, the body pursues the thoughts. Once the work is done, the thoughts disappear. Then the next time something needs to be done, thoughts arise again, and the process continues. The whole thing happens beautifully by itself. There is no shaft at all.

Currently, we all carry constant irritation from the moment we get out of the bed until the minute we go back to bed. Constantly we carry some irritation or other. We are waiting to jump on people. We only need some excuse. After enlightenment, the constant fear or guilt or desire, something that constantly irritates is not there. When you unclutch from the shaft for even one moment, you get a glimpse of enlightenment.

The shift from the shaft happens in a fraction of a second. If you are deeply aware, you can catch that precious moment when the unclutching happens. All our tapas, spiritual training, is only preparing us to catch that shift. The shift happens many times. You just need to be really aware and you can catch it. When you permanently unclutch from the shaft, you are enlightened.

I can say that a few changes happened permanently in me when I became enlightened. The first thing was that all inner chatter disappeared. By inner chatter, I mean the constant chatter of words that goes on inside us normally. In the gap between my words as I talk now, even in those few seconds, there is no chatter inside. It is simply pure space, silence. The second thing is that the idea that my boundary ends here at this body, and there starts the rest of the world disappeared. Border consciousness dissolved.

I don't feel I am just this six-foot form. I see and feel myself in everything. If you watch me, I will be the first one to enjoy all my photographs after a photo shoot or on the book covers! I will just play with them for four or five days.

The third thing is that even though the body is a male body, the inner identity of male or female disappeared. The psychological idea that 'I am male' or 'I am female' doesn't exist in me anymore.

And the fourth thing is that there is a constant excitement within, everything excites. Even small things give big excitement. Even a simple thing creates intense excitement and joy. I can say that these four changes are permanent things that happened in me after enlightenment.

Be very clear, enlightenment is not the end. It is the ultimate experience, but not the final experience.

'final' and 'ultimate'. They are very different. For example, after the first day of discourse in a series, one person came to me and said, 'You have said everything. Why do we need one more class?' The next day, another person said, "Swamiji, on the first day, I thought you could not take us any deeper; it is over. And today, suddenly I felt that you have taken us deeper than yesterday, and you cannot take us any deeper than this. Every day I feel that you cannot take us much deeper than this, but we do keep going deeper.' Every day the person felt that the experience was the ultimate. Ultimate means living every moment totally, completely. Ultimate is not final. It can be updated.

There is a big difference between these two words, ultimate and final. If it is ultimate, it is happening every moment. It is not final.

When a being becomes enlightened, not only does he experience his potentiality, but he also starts creating more enlightened beings. He starts creating the possibility of more enlightened beings.

When you are enlightened, there will not be any movement of letter or word or thought between your navel and throat. Words will come only from the throat. I can say this is one of the precise descriptions of enlightenment. There will not be any word, thought, syllable, or sound movement between the navel and the throat.

Words will be there only when you are talking. When you are not talking, there will not be any words inside. Only the energy movement will be there. There will be no thought, no verbalization, no continuous inner chattering.

Understand, when you don't have inner chatter, it is not dead silence. It is intense energy! From that energy, whatever needs to be done will come out as a complete visualization. If you have inner chattering, it will come line by line like, 'In the morning, I have to wake up. Then, I have to go to

office. There I will work on the new project. In the evening I will come back. Then I may go out for dinner...' In a linear manner, one by one, thoughts and words come out.

When you don't have inner chatter, when you are just with yourself, the whole visualization comes out as one package, one piece of information. That is what we call intuition. When you go through the logical process, it is called inner chatter, it is intellect. But when you don't have that inner chatter, things start expressing in you intuitively. Straightaway, you know.

The person who has removed hypocrisy from his inner space will experience enlightenment. Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, the enlightened master from Bharat, says beautifully, 'Integrating your inner chatter and your spoken words is enlightenment.' He says, just integrate your inner chatter and the words that you utter. Let both of them be integrated and you are enlightened

After someone achieves enlightenment, they have a very sharp superconscious awareness. With that superconscious awareness, it is easy to do research, experiments and analysis. Even after enlightenment, I have been doing so many experiments, so many practices along with scientists and researchers of the outer world and inner world, and by myself.

Understand, when an enlightened being does spiritual practices it is not just for him. It is to create the right formulas for the disciples, so that he can reproduce the same experience in them.

Someone asked me, 'Is enlightenment the natural human state or is it a transcendence of the human state?'

Surely, enlightenment is the transcendence of the human state. Whatever you think of as the human state is not complete. You are only a seed, a potential, a possibility. You are not a tree. You are not actuality. Your actuality is enlightenment.

You are called a human being in your potential state. In your actual state, realized state, you are called an enlightened being. Be very clear, you are not a human being with a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being with a human experience!

When you meditate, you can get various yogic powers or siddhis. But enlightenment happens when you go beyond these powers also. Enlightenment is having the capacity to handle the powers, as well as the intelligence to drop them when necessary.

The other day I read an interesting article about a book "Occult Chemistry based on research done by the theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater on the molecular structure of various elements. It said that even long before physics discovered that an atom has a nucleus, the theosophists had determined the atomic structure of many elements, and that too down to the 'quark', the most fundamental particle known today in quantum physics!

How did they find this out with no modern scientific equipment, before even quantum physics was born? The report says it was through the siddhi, or mystical power, known as anima that has been described in the Yoga sutras by the sage Patanjali, and enlightened master from Bharat and father of the science of Yoga'. Patanjali described anima as 'the ability to acquire knowledge of the small, the hidden, or the distant, by directing the light of superphysical faculty'.

With yogic training, they could experience visual images of minute objects too small to be seen by the normal eye. They found five new elements through these yogic powers. They even went beyond the quark as well as its detailed structure, into the sub- quark, which science is yet to find. These very same findings have also been made by at least three other people from different places in the world at different times, through such occult capacities.

They concluded that all matter is like bubbles in space, just like pearls on an invisible string. The report says that the researchers not only 'saw' the subatomic particles, but they could also see inside the atom down to the sub-quark, for which science needs a very powerful particle accelerator that costs billions of dollars!

There are many yogis who have these kinds of siddhis or powers that come about as a result of meditation. They are good as long as you don't get caught in them. Otherwise, you will lose sight of the ultimate goal of enlightenment

Enlightenment is having such a strong and clear sense of peace inside you that even your thoughts cannot disturb you.

Do not think enlightened masters don't have thoughts. It is just that their inner space is so big that the mind is a negligible part. For you, if you have a ten-acre mind, all ten acres are like a zoo. With an enlightened being there are a million acres, but still only a ten-acre zoo. In a million acres, if there is some movement in ten acres, can you consider it as something disturbing? No! It is negligible. It is practically not there. That is why an average person feels 'I am the body' but an enlightened being feels, 'I am the body also.' It is not that the idea I am body' disappears. It just expands to 'I am also the body.'

'Always being intense' is the main mark of an enlightened master. When you see that, you understand it as 'bliss' or 'happiness'. To tell you honestly, I myself do not feel that I am a separate blissful being. All I know is that something extraordinary is constantly happening in me, very intensely. Only an outsider feels it is 'bliss'. Actually it is not even 'bliss'. It is the quality that cannot be described, that cannot be conceived by the mind.

As of now, you see three separate things: the experiencer, the experience, and the experienced. For example, you are reading this book now. You are the experiencer that is the reader, the experience is of reading, and the thing being experienced is the book. When you get enlightened, all these three experiencer, experience, and the experienced, become one. You are only the experiencer having the experience of you, who is also the experienced!

Living enlightenment

As of now, you are not mature enough to hold the chaos, the cosmos, inside the frame of your body. You need to put the chaos in order because you are not able to handle the cosmos as is. The six feet frame of your body is not mature enough to hold the chaos as is, to experience and enjoy the cosmos as is.

The body, mind and brain being awakened, tuned to experience the cosmos as is, is what is living enlightenment.

For this, the body, mind and brain need to be prepared. The body can be prepared with techniques like Nithya Yoga.

The mind is like the software. It consists of the conscious mind and unconscious mind. The conscious mind can be cleared by teachings, removing the wrong ideas and taking in the clear, correct ideas. The unconscious mind can be cleared by meditation techniques.

But ultimately, for the software change to be permanent, the hardware also has to change. Your very brain grooves have to change to hold the experience of and radiate living enlightenment. This can happen through initiation, through the touch of the master. Initiation is directly transmitting the energy after which different dimensions of you will start getting awakened

Living enlightenment has nothing to do with married life or celibacy. It is just living a conflict-free life where your actions and knowledge are in tune with the desire.

Not being in the extremes of anything, not being caught in the extremes of emotions is what is called the Middle Path. Being in the middle path, the madhyapantha, suddenly you see a reduction in the number of thoughts that arise before any action starts. That is the period called 'living enlightenment'. When thoughts completely drop and you are able to do all your activity without thoughts, you are enlightened.

When you are centered in sattva, positive energy, you have a clear understanding of the jeeva, the self. You have the clear understanding of how to relate with the jagat, the world. Because of the clarity of the self and the world, naturally you will fall into the source, Ishwara, god.

The very understanding will give you clarity. That clarity will automatically awaken the nonmechanical parts of your brain. When that awakening happens, a chaos will start happening in your routine. Your routine will start getting re-arranged by itself. Just cooperate with it. That is what I call 'living enlightenment. Cooperating with the awakening that happens in you is what I call being a disciple or living enlightenment.

'Living enlightenment' is the right word. When you are living these great truths you are enlightened, that's all.

You are supposed to live the truths. Living

the great truths in your life is enlightenment. Enlightenment does not mean you will leave your body and die. No! You will live in a center that is beyond the five senses, but with the five senses. Only

your center will be shifted. The cognitive shift will happen within you. This is what I call Jeevan mukti, living enlightenment.

Your ego is not powerful enough to take away your enlightenment! Understand, your ego is not so powerful that it can take away your enlightenment.

You need to stop thinking that you have an ego. Even your ego is not as big as you think. You are not as big as you always think! So even your ego cannot take away your enlightenment.

Whether you believe it or not, experience it or not, you are eternal Consciousness. Your logic is also not as strong as you think. I always tell people, your ignorance is not so strong as to take enlightenment away from you. Even in your ignorance or ego you are not that big a person, and that is the truth!

People ask me, If a master wants, whether a disciple is qualified or not, can he give him enlightenment?'

An enlightened master can enlighten anybody just by one touch — not even touch, just a thought is enough. Nothing else is necessary. He can liberate anybody.

The greatest happening on planet earth is an un-enlightened being sitting with an enlightened being and becoming enlightened.

The master can simply download the software of an enlightened physiology into anyone. When you are completely open, the software of an enlightened physiology can be downloaded into your system. Your body learns that it can be better than what it is now. Your bio-memory learns the lesson of the possibility for a better existence.

A small story from the life of the enlightened master Buddha:

Buddha was once asked, "Why don't you give enlightenment to everybody? "He said, "Please ask in the village who wants enlightenment. Bring them to me and I shall give."

The man went through the whole village that day asking who wanted enlightenment.

Buddha asked him, What happened? Nobody wants enlightenment, is it?"

The man replied a little cheerfully "No, no, two people want enlightenment." Buddha replied, "Ok, get them right now. I will give them enlightenment."

He came back to Buddha in the evening with a low face.

Buddha asked him, What happened? Nobody wants enlightenment, is it?

The man replied a little cheerfully 'No, no, two people want enlightenment.' Buddha replied, 'Ok, get them right now. I will give them enlightenment.'

The man replied in a low voice, "No, they don't want to come here. If you send it to where they are, they will take it! "

Nobody really wants enlightenment in the real sense! They just want it as a utility or to keep in their showcase! Understand, god gives you the freedom to be in bondage also. Enlightenment can never be forced on you. If it is forced, even freedom will become bondage.

There are two things: qualification and wanting. There is no qualification needed for enlightenment, but the deep feeling, the deep wanting that 'I want it', should be there.

Please be very clear, I also had ALL the problems that you are having like not being able to trust Existence or not being able to trust myself. All I can say is, there is no qualification for enlightenment. For somebody to become enlightened, they do not need any qualification.

Enlightenment can be had by giving yourself to Existence. Giving yourself is not an equal thing for what you receive. Even if you give your life, it is nothing more in effort or value than buying a lottery ticket.

After it happens, you will understand that the whole thing is nothing but the pure grace and blessing of Existence. The result or the transformation will be so big, so great that you can't think of a reason why you were chosen for it, why it was showered on you! No qualification is necessary, but the deep need, the seeking is necessary. Fulfillment is always a gift. To receive a gift, there is no such thing as being worthy. Ramakrishna used to say, 'Suppose you are living in poverty, dying with no food and no clothes. But somehow you know that there is a lot of wealth kept locked in the next room. Even if you take it nobody will know. Will you be able to sleep restfully now? Either you will try to open the door or you will break down the door. Unless you have that wealth under your control, you will not be able to sleep.'

In the same way, you should know you are in spiritual poverty right now. You should know that inside you there is a room in which there is immense wealth that is kept under lock and key. That knowledge, that attitude, that intensity, that mood is a basic necessity. With that, the seeking can simply transform your whole life.

Your dedication is powerful enough to lead you to enlightenment.

Actually, enlightenment is practically like cooking. Something has to be added, something has to be removed. You have to add the intense seeking. Whatever is unnecessary, like restlessness, etc, will come out automatically, and enlightenment will happen!

During the vedic times in Bharat, the whole life, the whole society was based on enlightenment where seventy percent of the people were enlightened and the remaining thirty percent were seeking, working towards enlightenment.

Arts, sciences, education, lifestyle and every sphere of life, every action was directed towards the ultimate experience of enlightenment. Classical dances like Bharatanatyam, traditional vocal and instrumental music, traditional architecture of temples and sculptures, classical paintings and art forms, the science of languages like Sanskrit, the sciences of astrology and vaastu, the unique gurukul system of education, traditional ceremonies right from birth through marriage to death every single activity in every dimension of life was an expression of the enlightenment of the great seers, as well as a means to get enlightened

There can be nothing more than the enlightenment experience on planet earth. No philosophy, no system, no theory, no ideology, stands, survives, or thrives for more than one generation if it does not have an enlightened base or the base or inspiration from an enlightened being.

In ancient Bharat, there were at least 3000 kings ruling at different times. Not a single king or kingdom that was not guided by an enlightened master was able to flourish. Even today if you go to South Hindu villages, you will see huge temples built of stone, installed by enlightened masters. But the palaces that were constructed by the same kings for themselves no longer exist.

Understand, the same king and the same architect who built the temples to hold the enlightened energy, also built the palaces for the king to stay. One might think the king would have used better material for his own palace! But today, if you see, the temples are still standing while the palaces have disappeared with time.

In my own village Tiruvannamalai in South Bharat, the village in which I was born and brought up, we have a temple that has twenty acres of built up area. The palace built by the same king is not there. It is just ruins. But the temple built by him is still alive because the enlightened master's energy is there.

The biggest service you can do in your life, the best use you can make of your life is to keep this science of enlightenment alive on planet earth. Planet earth is alive today in spite of all the atomic weapons we have piled up, all the depletion of forests, minerals, and natural resources. It is so because of the presence of enlightened masters. As long as there are enlightened masters on planet earth, planet earth can never be destroyed!

In the following four chapters as well as those on meditation techniques that follow in a later section, I give you the pathways to experience the truths we talked about. By now, you have the intellectual understanding about what needs to be done and why.

We now come to the part of how. All the understanding will remain only theoretical if it is not converted into experience.

What is your ultimate aim in life?

To earn more... ? To stay forever young, healthy, beautiful...? To have better, longer- lasting relationships...? To improve your personality. . .?

Each of us is actually searching for bliss, but we search in many different ways. But ninety-nine percent of us are not even aware that bliss is our true goal! We search everywhere in the outside world for something which is there within us, just waiting to be discovered.

A small story:

One evening, a man was searching hard for something in the courtyard in his house. His wife asked him what it was. He replied that he had dropped a gold coin. His wife also joined in the search. Soon, others gathered and practically the whole neighborhood was searching for the lost coin.

Suddenly one neighbor asked the man, "Where exactly did you drop the coin? How come we still haven't found it?". The man replied, "Oh, I lost the coin inside the house." Everybody searching became angry and asked him, "Then why are we searching here?" The man replied, "The problem is I have no lights inside my house. So, I started searching by the light of this streetlamp here!"

This is exactly what we do in our own lives. We are all experts in searching for answers in the wrong laces. We search for bliss everywhere, be 1t in money, power, relationships or ideologies. But we don't move in the one obvious direction which is inwards.

In life everyone has experienced some moments of great happiness. But it has always been for a reason. The state of that happiness does not seem to remain forever. It is there temporarily, and when it changes or goes away, once again you feel pain. Only the happiness you experience for no reason at

all, which does not die for any reason, is real and permanent happiness. This is what is called bliss. Such happiness doesn't depend on anything outside of you.

The word ananda itself means, 'that which cannot be reduced, which cannot be lost'. Ananda does not translate into 'happiness'. You will be surprised to know, it simply means 'that which cannot be reduced or lost'. And bliss is that thing which does not reduce for any reason.

Any technique, any method which raises your consciousness is meditation.

Meditation can even be a simple breathing technique. It can be a simple repetition of a word or simply sitting. In the Zen tradition, just sitting is meditation. You may think this is the easiest thing to do but in fact, just sitting is the most difficult meditation. Anything can become meditation if it raises your consciousness.

Meditation is just being blissful in the moment. When you are at complete peace in the present moment, you are already in a state of meditation.

Recall any moment in your life when you have experienced extreme beauty. Maybe it was the sun rising suddenly from behind a mountain, or the first time you heard a lovely piece of music. Suddenly you became totally still, wordless. In the presence of that beauty you couldn't think any more. You were just silent, relaxed, in thoughtless awareness. You were completely dissolved in that beauty. That moment was meditation!

After a few moments your inner chatter started again. Your mind said, 'What a beautiful sunrise!' The moment the words appeared; you were out of meditation! You can either think or meditate. You can never do both. Meditation is just being. It is experiencing the present moment without resistance.

The first thing is, be sincere. Keep an open mind. Have the openness to experiment. Be enthusiastic.

There is a beautiful term in the Zen tradition to describe the attitude — the beginner's mind. It means looking at every single thing in life as new, so everything in life excites you.

The second thing is, be optimistic. Bliss is a perfectly realizable goal for you, even if you are completely unfamiliar with meditation.

Once a man approached the great enlightened master Ramana Maharishi and asked him, "Bhagavan, am I qualified for spiritual life?" Bhagavan answered him with a question, "Are you alive?" The man was startled. He said, "Yes, of course!" Bhagavan replied, "That is enough. You already have the necessary qualification for spirituality!"

The very aim of human life is enlightenment. The possibility of becoming enlightened lies in the Kundalini shakti, an extraordinary potential energy which is hidden inside every human body. If it can be awakened, it will take you to a different plane of consciousness, a different plane of Existence. The possibility to become a different conscious being is present only in human beings. Animals don't have this potentiality to become enlightened, to become different conscious beings.

The third thing is, be playful! Meditation is a big adventure. To become serious about meditation is to miss the whole point. Celebrate meditation. Simply enjoy it! The fourth thing is, have patience. Don't start worrying about results the moment you start meditating.

The possibility to become a different conscious being is present only in human beings.

A small story:

Three monkeys once found a ripe, juicy mango. Like all monkeys, they fought over the mango for a while. Then somehow, they had a moment of clarity, a moment of intelligence. Instead of eating the mango right away, they decided to sow the mango. They knew that once the mango seeds sprouted and grew into a tree, there would be more than enough mangoes for all three of them.

Each of them decided to take up one part of the task of caring for the mango plant. The first monkey said, "I will water the plant every day!"

The second monkey said, "I will keep the soil healthy and rich, add fertilizers and ensure that the plant grows well."

The third monkey said, "I will guard the plant carefully and protect it from harsh weather and other animals."

One month passed, then two, then three. There was no sign of any plant growing out of the soil. The three monkeys called for an urgent meeting to discuss the issue.

The first monkey declared, "As promised, I have been watering the seed every single day." The second monkey cried, "As promised, I have been adding fertilizer and making the soil rich."

The third monkey said, "As promised, I have been guarding the seed very carefully. Not only that, I have been taking the seed out every single day to check whether it has sprouted or not!"

If you are greedy for instant results, you actually prevent the process from settling down in your system. You yourself block the whole process.

The fifth thing is, enjoy solitude. Give yourself a chance to experience your inner environment. When meditation becomes a part of you, bliss will flower naturally.

There are three states that we constantly experience in our lives – the waking state, dream state and deep sleep state. But there is a fourth state that we have not experienced. It is called turiya. In this state the 'I' consciousness exists but without thoughts. It is called thoughtless awareness. Very few

people experience this in their lives. Some people experience this for a few seconds and then go back to their regular waking state.

If you get a sudden shock or if you are sitting with nature in a completely relaxed state and in deep silence, it is possible that for a few moments you experience this thoughtless awareness. The identity is alive, the 'I' consciousness is alive, but there are no thoughts. This is the fourth state of turiya.

All our physical and mental illnesses take root in the dream state. The dream state starts penetrating and overlapping the deep sleep and waking states.

If our waking state is penetrated by the dream state, it is called daydreaming. We fantasize or imagine endless things that we wish to do. If our deep sleep is penetrated by dreaming, it is called disturbed sleep.

Continuously during the day or night, our dream state disturbs us. When our deep sleep state is disturbed by dreams, it results in problems like chronic fatigue and insomnia. When our waking state is disturbed by dreams, we will be daydreaming with much less awareness of the world around us.

The more the dream state penetrates the waking state, the more the frequency of our consciousness decreases. We may be living in the human body, but we will not be living a truly human life. When the frequency of consciousness comes down, we will not be fully aware about the decisions we make. We will not be aware of the kind of words we are thinking. We will not be aware of what is going on inside of us. It will be as if we are living in a house, but we do not know everything that is happening inside that house.

You ask, 'Why should I meditate?' Meditation is needed to infuse deep awareness into both your waking state and the deep sleep state. Instead of the dream state penetrating the waking and deep sleep states, with meditation the turiya or blissful state will start penetrating the waking and deep sleep states!

The purpose of meditation is to experience this fourth state at least once. Once we experience this fourth state, we can bring the influence of it more and more into our waking and deep sleep states. If our waking and deep sleep states are completely influenced by the fourth state, turiya, that is what we call jeevan mukti or living enlightenment.

Meditation has the power to transform you physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

See, physical health means digesting whatever you eat and having that food become part of your body. Mental health means digesting all the ideas and problems that you encounter and forming a clear solution. In other words, it is living without conflict. Spiritual health means receiving all the great teachings and energy, digesting them and living a liberated life. Having all three is total health.

Meditation is also a complement to medication. Through meditation, you can regulate your blood pressure and blood sugar and you can increase your body's resistance to disease. Through meditation, it is possible to heal even chronic problems like skin allergies, asthma and arthritis. No disease can escape the power of meditation.

On the mental level, meditation enhances clarity of thought. Meditation is also a proven way to improve concentration and memory power. Above all, meditation leads you from intellect to intelligence to intuition.

With meditation, you go beyond the mind, into the being. In the being no rules exist. You become free to explore your full potential. That's why with meditation you will suddenly find yourself at ease with your surroundings, easily able to cope with new situations. You rediscover your spontaneity.

You may have a medically fit body. That does not mean you are completely healthy. Of course, I can say from my experience of having seen millions of people, ninety-nine per cent of those who do not have the 'self-healing clarity' in your system are never able to maintain even physical health.

When I say 'self-healing clarity', I mean the clarity and understanding to bring yourself out of depression whenever it tries to grip your consciousness.

The knowledge of the Truth is what I call 'knowledge-weapons' or shaastra-shastra. Shaastra means Truth, knowledge. Shastra means weapons. Knowledge-weapons are the weapons of Truth that can destroy the depression of your being. The more knowledge-weapons you have, the more depression will be afraid of you! If you have a huge army, naturally the enemy country will be afraid of attacking you. Just by seeing your pile of weapons, the other country will think twice before attacking you. In the same way, the more you accumulate the self-healing thoughts, the knowledge-weapons, inside your being, the more depression will fear to come near you.

With meditation, you can live your life in a much better way with greater clarity and greater intensity. You will be more aware, more creative. Yet internally, you will experience a deep and undisturbed silence.

You will no longer be doing, you will only be watching the doer. This is the whole secret of meditation — to become the watcher, to become the witness of your own actions and emotions.

Once you become aware that the real you is not the one who acts, that the real you is not the one who feels angry or hurt or depressed, then you experience a tremendous sense of freedom. This will happen through meditation. And this is real freedom.

All our life we are searching for freedom. Whether we realize it or not, every single one of us is searching for freedom. We think our freedom is dependent on others. This will happen through meditation. And this is real freedom.

All our life we are searching for freedom. Whether we realize it or not, every single one of us is searching for freedom. We think our freedom is dependent on others. Now you know that the other person is in no way connected to your freedom.

With meditation, for the first time, you will understand what it means to love for no reason. For the first time you will not be giving something in order to receive. You will give love simply because you have so much to give! You will shower love upon the world in the same way that a rain cloud showers upon the earth or a flower spontaneously spreads its fragrance all around. You will love because you are so full and overflowing!

Just try this: whatever you do, act with awareness. If you are eating, eat with awareness. No extra time is needed to do this. In fact, it will take less time to eat because when you eat with awareness, you will eat just the amount your body needs rather than stuffing food down your throat thoughtlessly.

Awareness has tremendous knowledge. Awareness can do better miracles than all your planning. Awareness doesn't contradict, it complements the plans. It will add to the potentiality.

With meditation, for the first time, you will understand what it means to love for no reason.

When you are aware, you are absent. When awareness is present, your ego can't exist. When your ego exists, awareness can't be present. 'Your absence' will make you live enlightenment.

When you are aware, you will work optimally and use your energy efficiently. So at the end of the day you are just as fresh as in the morning. You see, it is not the work that exhausts you; it is your mind, your attitude. The whole game of meditation is to get out of the work-oriented mind and look at every moment of life as a beautiful Divine play.

The next question is when to meditate. This is always a controversial question! All the youngsters think, 'I can do this in my old age after I have lived my life fully and I don't have anything else to do.' All the elderly people think, 'I should have done this in my young age when I was fresh and energetic.'

So the question is not just how long to meditate everyday, but also when to make the decision to enter into meditation. Please understand, meditation is the basic need for every person. It is not an option. It is a very basic need.

Meditation results in holistic health. It gives good health on the physical, mental and emotional levels. Specific health benefits reported by some who meditate are:

• 1. The stabilization of high or low blood pressure, blood sugar, body heat and heartbeat.
• 2. The balancing of mind/body rhythms.
• 3. Reduction of muscle tension, stronger bones, immunity from disease.
• 4. Cleansing quicker elimination of toxins and body waste.
• 5. Overcoming insomnia and improved quality of sleep.
• 6. Enhanced energy, increased work capacity.
• 7. Longer life span improved body metabolism and body cells with a longer life span.

8. Secretion of healthy body chemicals - increased secretion of natural anti- depressants, enhanced secretion of endorphins, the body's 'happy chemical's'.

9. Relationships - Meditation inherently puts you in tune with yourself and others. The direct result of this is deeper, more meaningful interpersonal relationships with family, friends and with everyone you encounter in your daily life.

10. Intelligence - To work efficiently, one needs intelligence. Meditation ignites your innate intelligence making you more aware and sharp. The natural result of this is improved, efficient and effortless performance in whatever you do.

11. Creativity - Each of us holds within us an undiscovered treasure of talent and potential. Meditation reveals and helps you realize your inner talents and latent creativity. 12. Authenticity - Meditation allows you to touch base with the real you, and makes you realize your uniqueness. Selfconfidence then becomes a natural by-product.

12. Balance - Most of us live life as a roller-coaster ride, held in the sway of emotions like worry, jealousy, discontentment, fear, anger, guilt, etc. over which we have no control. Meditation enables you to be centered in yourself, have a solid inner balance and thus, be the master of your own self.

13. Relaxation, peace, bliss - A natural byproduct of meditation is something we spend almost a lifetime trying to attain inner relaxation and peace. With meditation, you automatically drop out of the vicious cycle of fear, greed and stress, and enter the virtuous cycle of bliss.

14. Holistic spiritual growth - To measure intellect, we have IQ or Intelligence Quotient, which is measured by many standardized tests. Of late, another measure is gaining importance, especially in the corporate world, namely EQ or Emotional Quotient. However, the most important factor of our lives which is inner satisfaction and fulfillment, is what matters at the end of the day. Meditation enhances this very important factor of life, SQ or Spiritual Quotient, besides also increasing IQ and EQ.

15. Life - As of now, our mental setup is rigid and reflects our personality. Because of this selfimage we carry in our minds, we face a lot of troubles in life and are not able to enjoy life completely. Meditation simply reprograms the software of the mind so that we can live life completely.

16. Ultimate potential - You are like an airplane with the potential to fly, but you think you are an ox-cart because you have not actualized your potential. Meditation simply makes you realize and experience who you really are and the enormous capabilities you have been born with.

17. Ultimate potential - You are like an airplane with the potential to fly, but you think you are an ox-cart because you have not actualized your potential. Meditation simply makes you realize and experience who you really are and the enormous capabilities you have been born with.

There are three kinds of meditation.

The first is bringing the truth or awareness into your life.

This meditation is supposed to be done all twenty-four hours a day. Breath-related techniques like vipassana or techniques where you bring your awareness to the present moment all the time belong to this category of meditation. It is not a part of your routine. It should become the very quality of your routine. You may be doing anything like writing, reading, cooking, discussing, but this thread of meditation should be happening simultaneously like an undercurrent.

With the second kind of meditation techniques, you need to spend a particular time, like one hour in the morning or one hour in the evening, or any other convenient time.

The Mahamantra' meditation technique, where you hum for a few minutes and then remain a witness for a few minutes, can be given as an example for this category of meditation. Nithya Dhyaan is another example of this type of meditation, since it is practiced for a specified time each day.

Then there is the third kind of meditation techniques, where just the very remembrance of the technique is enough.

Examples of this are the statements of the great timeless truths. When you are in a highly mature state, you don't need any separate technique. You don't need to practice the whole day or at any particular time. Just the very remembrance of these truths will put you in the elevated state. This is the third type of meditation. Examples of this are the beautiful Zen koans They are profound truths written in a concise way. Just the very remembrance of them will transport you to the zone of truth!

There is a very beautiful story in the Upanishad" where a disciple comes to the master and asks for a technique or a method for enlightenment. The master just says, "Tat tvam asi, Tat tvam asi, Tat tvam asi - 'Thou art that, Thou art that, Thou art that', and the story says, the disciple became enlightened!

It seems like a very strange story. The master just repeats a few words and the disciple is suddenly enlightened. How is it possible? It seems unbelievable! Actually it is not so. If we have done the first two types of techniques, the technique that needs to be done the whole day and the technique that needs to be done at a particular time, then the very maturity that happens out of that practice will cause you to experience the Truth the moment you hear it from the master!

You may wonder, 'How is it that every day when I come back to the waking state, I see the same world but every night when I go back to the dream state, I don't see the same world? So, can this be used as a scale? With this can we say that this waking-state world is real?'

Let us analyze one night's dream. For example, let us say that you go to sleep on the night of the fourteenth, and on the morning of the fifteenth, you wake up. You sleep for around ten hours. I am sure many of you have had experiences of having lived around ten to twenty years of your life in one night's dream, in just ten hours' time.

Perhaps the dream starts in your college days and moves slowly, step by step, up to your marriage, your having a son, your son's marriage, etc. In this way, you live even twenty years of your life in just one night's dream, am I right? If you have experienced this at least once, you can follow very closely what I am going to present now.

You see, while sleeping, we go through the dream state and the deep sleep state. Maybe for half an hour, you fall into the deep sleep state. Then you go to the dream state and have some dreams. Again you fall back into the deep sleep state for perhaps twenty minutes, and then once again, you come back to the dream state. In this way you keep moving from the dream state to the deep sleep state and back.

Understand: in one night, you dream that you have lived twenty years of your life. In the first episode of your dream, you are in college. In the second episode, when you come back to the dream state after a gap of deep sleep, you are getting married. In the third dream episode, you have a son. Maybe in the fourth episode, you see your son getting married.

An important thing you need to understand: when you fall into the deep sleep state and then come back to the dream state, and then repeat this process, in these different episodes, you do see the same world even in your dream state. Am I right? Sometimes you do see the same world even in the dream state.

Understand, it is a very subtle point, a very subtle understanding. If you can catch this, it will lead to very great clarity, which can really revolutionize the way in which you think about your life, the way in which you try to solve the problems of your life.

Imagine a man is dreaming. In the dream he sees a tiger chasing him and he starts shouting, 'Oh, a tiger is chasing me! Save me, save me!' His wife is sleeping next to him. She wakes up and sees the husband shouting! The wife is confused, 'What am I supposed to do?' She just needs to tell him, 'Hey, wake up!' Instead of that, if she tries to supply some weapon to kill the tiger in the dream, what will happen? He may kill himself or he may kill her! Any other solution she may try to find will only lead to more problems, more difficulties. All the husband needs to do is wake up.

If you understand these basic things, suddenly you will see that your very decision- making is revolutionized. The cognitive shift happens in you. The way in which you think and the way in which you make decisions, the way in which you find solutions for your problems, will be entirely different. You will start working towards the right solutions.

When you are dreaming, in a span of ten hours, you can easily live twenty years. You fall into deep sleep and come back to the dream state many times. Whenever you come back to the dream state from deep sleep, even though there was a break from the last dream, you see the same world. So, you have to understand clearly that just seeing the same world after the break in the dream state cannot be the quality to define it as reality. Only when you wake up from this 'waking dream' in which you are living now, suddenly you will realize you have dreamt maybe ninety years of your life in a few hours! This life in the waking state may be another long dream!

When you are in a dream, you think the dream is reality. Where you are, that is reality for that moment. There is no other scale. In the dream you can never imagine, 'It is a dream.' In the reality, you can never think, 'It is one more dream.' When you come out of the dream, the dream looks like a dream. But when you are in the dream itself, it will not look like a dream.

In the dream,even if you remember about your real life, you think it is a dream. In the reality, even if you remember about the dream, you think it is a dream. So it just depends on the frequency in which you are. There is no other scale to explain which is reality or dream.

Realizing and understanding there is a possibility that this very waking state could be one more long dream will turn much of your attention and awareness to the center, to the consciousness, to the ultimate reality. When you go beyond the frequency of this waking state, it will also look like one more dream.

This is the first step in spirituality. This is the first step in psychological revolution.

Again and again, your suffering gives you a clear statement that you are not living in reality.

Many times I am asked another question along the same lines, 'Not only am I seeing this world, even the people who are living around me are seeing the same world. How can you say it is a dream?'

Understand, in a dream if you are seeing a particular city, and if in that dream you are going to that city with your whole family, then not only you, but the family with you inside your dream, will also see the same city, because they are also projections of your mind! So, just because the people around you see the same scene as you do, it does not mean that the scene is reality. Those people around you might be a projection of the same scene!

The ultimate truth is that the stuff out of which your dream world is made is the same as the stuff out of which this waking world is also made.

If your attention is centered on the stuff, naturally the inner healing cannot happen. If your attention is equally distributed on the consciousness and the stuff, that is what I call healthy life or balanced life. You will have physical health, mental health and a vibrant life.

If your attention is totally centered on the consciousness, not on the stuff with which these worlds are made, that is what I call 'living enlightenment' or jeevan mukti.

Whether you want jeevan Mukti or not, whether you want enlightenment or not, is secondary. But if you can turn a little bit of your attention towards the 'I' consciousness, towards the Truth, towards the center, suddenly you will see that a tremendous inner healing happens.

For example, if you are facing some big difficulty or depression, if you realize very clearly and consciously that this whole thing is a dream, you will experience such a relaxed feeling or the inner healing happening in you. That inner healing is what I call meditation. That restful awareness that happens in you is what I call satori, the first glimpse of samadhi.

A basic cognitive shift or a basic psychological revolution, with the simple understanding that what you are seeing may not be reality as you think, can bring tremendous inner healing inside you, can bring a great restful awareness inside you.

Science is just now getting glimpses of the tremendous power of meditation to completely change the entire body-mind structure itself. The benefits of meditation are countless and across all planes, be it physical, mental, emotional or spiritual. Meditation can simply change the very quality of life.

Until recently, it was believed that in the brain, the connections among the brain nerve cells were fixed in childhood and did not change, so the brain growth stopped early in life. Now scientists are finding that the brain actually grows and forms new connections all throughout life, they call this neuroplasticity.

They found that the awareness was more and the brain activity was faster and much better organized and coordinated in the meditating monks than in the students who were new to meditation. Not only that, the brain region associated with happiness, positive thoughts and emotions, was also much more active in the monks than in the students.

One more important thing, the researchers found that the brain activity of the meditator monks was more intense and organized (than that of the students), even before the monks started meditating. So the benefits of meditation are actually permanent. Meditation can simply change the very circuitry and the inner workings of the brain.

Many top universities in the USA like Yale, Harvard and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), have also studied* the effects of meditation.

Studies using MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) showed that meditation actually increased the very thickness of the brain in areas related to awareness and attention, as well as cognitive processing and emotional wellbeing.

The researchers found that the blood vessels become wider, the support structures also increase in number and they have more branches and connections.

There was another research done at the University of Kentucky where they studied the effects of sleepiness on a person's awareness. A group of people was made to look at a screen and they were supposed to press a button as soon as an image came on the screen.

Normally a person who has had less sleep takes much longer to respond to the image than a person who has had normal sleep. Sometimes they even completely miss seeing the image coming up.

The researchers tested the participants before and after forty minutes of sleep, meditation, reading or some light activity.

They found that with meditation, the response was the fastest for every single participant, even though the participants were not experienced in meditation. In fact, their response was even better after keeping awake the whole night!

There have been many studies to learn the effect of meditation on the speed and correctness of perception and response

A couple of studies were done at Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, England. In one study, the participants were given lines of letters with different numbers of dashes marked above the letters. They had to cross out the letters with multiple dashes, as quickly as possible.

In another study, the participants were shown the words like 'RED', 'BLUE' or 'GREEN' printed in different colored inks. They had to quickly name the color of the ink the word was written in. Normally, this is difficult because your brain tends to read the word rather than look and identify the color of the ink that the word is written in!

They found that the meditators were much faster and made about half the number of errors as the nonmeditators.

Meditation directly and significantly improves awareness, attention, memory, concentration, response time, visualization, emotional wellbeing, and general health.

Science has just started exploring the vast dimensions of the effects and benefits of meditation. But for thousands of years, right from the vedic times, man has been enjoying the benefits of meditation which is the ultimate way to the Ultimate! It is a foolproof, time- proven technique to realize oneself.

Part II Bhagavad Gita Decoded

vasudeva sutaṁ devaṁ kamsa cānūra mardanam I devakī paramānandaṁ kṛṣṇam vande jagad gurum II

'I salute unto you Bhagavān Kṛṣṇa, Guru (master) of the world,

son of Vasudeva, supreme bliss of Devakī, destroyer of Kamsa and Cāṇūra'

Srīmad Bhagavad Gītā is the ultimate sacred scripture of yoga, Yogaśastra and the pristine glory of the Vedic culture, the eternal living tradition called sanātana-dharma. It belongs to the whole Universe for it is delivered to the Universe by the source and embodiment of the Universe. We salute and bow down to Bhagavān Śrī Kṛṣṇa, who spoke the Bhagavad Gītā out of His infinite love and compassion for all beings.

Whenever unrighteousness, adharma becomes predominant and dharma, righteous living declines and the Yoga of Enlightenment is lost, Parabrahma Kṛṣṇa, the Supreme Consciousness appears again and again to revive this sacred yoga, to protect and to enrich the devoted beings; and destroys adharma to re-establish the pure and everlasting dharma—the Science of Enlightenment. dharma saṁsthāpanārthāya sambhavāmi yuge yuge—this is Śrī Kṛṣṇa's promise and the essence and spirit of the Gītā.

Gītā is also called Brahmavidyā—the Knowledge of Brahman, the supreme absolute truth; it is Jīvan Mukti Vijñāna—the Science of Living Enlightenment. As with all scriptures, it is the knowledge and experience that is transmitted verbally as Śri Krṣṇārjuna Saṁvād, an intimate dialogue between Master of the world, Jagadguru Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa and His dear devotee and disciple, Arjuna. It is called śruti in Saṃskṛit, meaning something that is heard.

Gītā, as Bhagavad Gītā is generally called, translates literally from Saṃskṛit as 'Sacred Song of God'. Unlike the Vedas and Upaniṣads, which are stand alone expressions of Truth, the Gītā is written into the greatest Hindu epic, the Mahābhārat, called a purāṇa, an ancient historical happening. It is part of the recorded history of the greatest tradition, the paramount civilization in all its Divine grandeur and its human complexity, so to speak.

As a scripture, Gītā is Gītāśastra, the essence and the most important part of the ancient knowledge base of the Vedic tradition, which is the expression of the experiences of great sages. Vedas and Upaniṣads, the foundation of śruti literature, arose from the insight, vision and the consciousness of completion of these great sages when they were raised into a no-mind state of Advaita (non-duality). These are as old as humanity, as eternal as truth, and the first and truest expressions in the journey of man's search for truth.

Unlike the Vedas, which were revealed to the great Sages or the Upaniṣads, which were the teachings of these great Enlightened Sages, Gītā is part of the great Bhārata's (Bharat's) history narrated by Śrī Veda Vyāsa or Śrī Kṛṣṇa Dvāipāyana Vyāsa, one of the great Enlightened Sages and the compiler of all scriptures and hymns. Gītā is scribed by Śrī Ganeṣa, the elephant God who embodies pure wisdom and joyful spontaneity. It is narrated as the direct expression of the Divine Himself. It is because of Bhagavān Śrī Kṛṣṇa's direct presence that the Mahābhārat and jeweled in it, the Bhagavad Gītā is the indisputable authority of the greatest revelation of Truth. The Gītā is the sacred text incarnation of the Absolute Divine.

Living Enlightenment. As with all scriptures, it is the knowledge and experience that is transmitted verbally as Śri Krṣṇārjuna Saṁvād, an intimate dialogue between Master of the world, Jagadguru Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa and His dear devotee and disciple, Arjuna. It is called śruti in Saṃskṛit, meaning something that is heard.

Gītā, as Bhagavad Gītā is generally called, translates literally from Saṃskṛit as 'Sacred Song of God'. Unlike the Vedas and Upaniṣads, which are stand alone expressions of Truth, the Gītā is written into the greatest Hindu epic, the Mahābhārat, called a purāṇa, an ancient historical happening. It is part of the recorded history of the greatest tradition, the paramount civilization in all its Divine grandeur and its human complexity, so to speak.

As a scripture, Gītā is Gītāśastra, the essence and the most important part of the ancient knowledge base of the Vedic tradition, which is the expression of the experiences of great sages. Vedas and Upaniṣads, the foundation of śruti literature, arose from the insight, vision and the consciousness of completion of these great

sages when they were raised into a no-mind state of Advaita (non-duality). These are as old as humanity, as eternal as truth, and the first and truest expressions in the journey of man's search for truth.

• Unlike the Vedas, which were revealed to the great Sages or the Upaniṣads, which were the teachings of these great Enlightened Sages, Gītā is part of the great Bhārata's (Bharat's) history narrated by Śrī Veda Vyāsa or Śrī Kṛṣṇa Dvāipāyana Vyāsa, one of the great Enlightened Sages and the compiler of all scriptures and hymns. Gītā is scribed by Śrī Ganeṣa, the elephant God who embodies pure wisdom and joyful spontaneity. It is narrated as the direct expression of the Divine Himself. It is because of Bhagavān Śrī Kṛṣṇa's direct presence that the Mahābhārat and jeweled in it, the Bhagavad Gītā is the indisputable authority of the greatest revelation of Truth. The Gītā is the sacred text incarnation of the Absolute Divine.ītā arose from the super consciousness of Śri Kṛṣṇa, the Supreme God, the complete Incarnation Purṇāvatār, and is therefore considered Gītāśastra—the essential scripture, knowing which, one is liberated from all incompletions, yaj jñātvā mokṣyase asubhāt (9.1) and Gītopaniṣad the essence of all Upaniṣads, the purest and highest knowledge to be ever known and cognized because it gives the direct experience of the Self pavitram idam uttamam pratyakṣāvagaṁ dharmyaṁ (9.2).

Through the entire opening chapter of the Gītā, it is Arjuna who continuously speaks, while Kṛṣṇa listens, listens and listens!

Only an intelligent man will allow the other person to speak. We all continuously speak to each other, but a 'real' conversation does not happen. We simply carry out simultaneous monologues with each other. We are polite enough to pretend that we are listening, so that we will, in turn, be heard. You need intelligence to allow the other person to speak. You need intelligence to listen!

When you listen to others, you listen to yourself. And when you don't listen to others, you also don't listen to yourself. Are you getting it? Only when you listen to you, you will be able to listen to others. When you listen to others, you will also listen to YOU! Because any listening that happens, happens from the space of completion. Please understand, you can only listen when you are complete. If there is any incompletion in you, you will not be able to listen.

What is incompletion? For example, you are sitting here right now, hearing me speak, but you are not listening to me, you are thinking—'I have not done this, I have not done that, this has not happened, that has not happened, I am restless'–that is incompletion. If you have such incompletions inside, be very clear, you will not be listening to me. You may be sitting here out of compulsion or some other reason, but you will not be listening to me. And when you don't listen, more and more incompletions happen. It is a vicious circle.

If you listen, especially to the words that come out of the space of completion of an enlightened being, you will suddenly see that the energy of those very words goes and changes your inner space.

See, when you come to me and tell me about your problems, I give you my authentic listening. That is why you suddenly feel light; you suddenly feel that all your problems are not big anymore. It is the power of listening. Listening awakens your intuition. Listening awakens your innermost intelligence. Listening is GOD!

By His very listening, Kṛṣṇa is able to heal the restlessness in Arjuna, the incompletions in Arjuna. Kṛṣṇa is showing us the power of His completion, the power of His listening. He just listens while Arjuna empties himself. He allows Arjuna to speak into His pure listening. Now, the real Gītā can start!

Please understand, when Kṛṣṇa listens to Arjuna, He is interested in Arjuna's real problem, not what Arjuna is complaining about. And He is not interested in just expressing what He knows. He allows Arjuna to speak into His listening, so that He can go to the root of the problem and address the issue. He knows that once He allows Arjuna to express his problems, Arjuna himself can find a solution to them. And as Arjuna continues to speak, he exposes the root of his problem—his root thought pattern.

Let me define root thought pattern.

The first strong cognition you receive in your life, which influences you to continue to function based on the same cognition, is a root thought pattern! It is the pattern you develop when powerlessness takes you over for the first time in your life. Your pure cognition is imbalanced and your mind is born!

• Listen! The way you behave, feel and respond, all come from this root thought pattern. It is the limiting cognition that happens in you and fills you at a very young age, overpowering you. Sometimes it is fear, sometimes it is greed, sometimes it is jealousy and sometimes it is the decision to prove yourself. Sometimes, it is just plain confusion and worry! Throughout the initial chapters of the Gītā, Arjuna is operating out of his root thought pattern—his parental and societal conditioning— struggling with all the dos and don'ts that he learnt from society. The moment he sees that the enemy he has to fight are his own extended family, he is overcome by powerlessness and refuses to fight, lamenting, 'svajanam, svajanam!'—my people, my people! The bonds of family were rooted in his very identity, and to Arjuna, to cut these bonds was to destroy himself! This was Arjuna's

It is here that the Gītā begins, as Kṛṣṇa finally begins to speak.

In the succeeding chapters of the Gītā, Kṛṣṇa compassionately guides Arjuna, releasing him from his root thought pattern, guiding him to completion, and leading him to the ultimate knowledge—the knowledge of the Self, ātmajñāna. Arjuna is re-established in jīvanmukti, Living Enlightenment; the space of living Advaita*.*

The essence of Kṛṣṇa's teachings in the Gītā can be understood through four simple but powerful Universal principles, the four tattvas—Integrity, Authenticity, Responsibility and Enriching. These four principles awaken the four innate great powers within us.

Let me define these principles.

Integrity (sampūrti) is you fulfilling the word and thought you give to yourself and to others, and experiencing a state of 'pūrnatva'—completion with yourself and with life.

Authenticity (śraddha) is you being established in the peak of your capability, and responding to life from who you perceive yourself to be for yourself, who you project yourself to be for others, and, what others expect you to be for them.

Responsibility (upāyanam) is living and responding to life from the truth that you are the source of, and therefore, you are responsible for all happenings in and around you.

Enriching (āpyāyanam) is you taking responsibility with integrity and authenticity, that you are committed to continuously enriching, which is expanding yourself and life, in and around you.

Any problem or conflict you have in your life can be handled very practically, efficiently and skillfully with these four principles. I can say with my entire experience that these four principles are the essence of all spiritual scriptures! They are the essence of life.

These four spiritual principles awaken four great inner powers in you. Each tattva is the key to unlock a corresponding power in you. Now, I will reveal these four inner powers that manifest when Kṛṣṇa's message is internalized and lived.

Listen! You actually have the power to simply manifest the reality of your choice!

Whether you know it or not, whether you believe it not, in each one of you is an enormous potential energy that expresses as four great powers.

To be able to unlock these great powers inside you, you must first understand a little more about yourself. They are related to the four major dimensions of your life—your words, your thinking, your emotions, and your living. When you awaken your peak possibility in each of these dimensions, it becomes a great power and support in your life.

These four inner powers are…

The power of words or vāk śakti. The power of words will be available to you when you practice Integrity.

The power of thoughts or mano śakti. The power of thinking will be open to you when you practice Authenticity.

The power of feeling or prema śakti. The power of feeling will be possible when you practice Responsibility.

The power of living or ātma śakti. The power of living will be established in you the moment

you Enrich others. Now, I will summarize Kṛṣṇa's teachings through these tattvas and their powers.

We all know honesty. Honesty is more like ethics, morality. But with the tattva of integrity, you are taking a step deeper than honesty. With honesty, you only have to honor the words that you give to others. With integrity, you also have to honor the words that you give to yourself. Honesty is not integrity. Integrity is honesty also.

It is very unfortunate that society teaches you to honor the words that you give to others, but forgets to teach you to honor the words that you give to yourself. The words you give to yourself are as important as or more important than—the words you give to others. Because the flow of your life—the amount of contentment that you feel in your life, the degree of fulfillment that you feel in your life and the experience of fulfillment that you feel in your life—everything depends on the words that you have given to you!

Please understand, the words you give to yourself form the bone structure of your life. If you commit with yourself that you will become a doctor and you don't honor that word, and you don't even bother to complete that word inside your heart, then that word hangs inside you as a broken commitment given by you! Integrity is you not carrying the hangover of the commitments you have made, either to yourself or to others.

When you break the commitments you give to you, you lose self-confidence. The more commitments you give and break, the more your self-confidence is lost. You lose confidence in you! When you break the commitments you give to others, it takes away their confidence in you. When you break the words you have given to yourself, you lose confidence in yourself. When you don't honor the words you give, and don't even bother to complete with them, the broken commitments that hang in your heart take away your self-confidence in life!

This is what happens to Arjuna on the battlefield.

Arjuna is a kṣatriya by birth, a warrior, a Pāṇḍava prince. When the Pāṇḍavas decide to wage war against their Kaurava cousins, Arjuna is perfectly aware that this includes a large part of his extended family! Yet he makes the decision to fight as per his dharma, as per his path as a kṣatriya. But when he enters the battlefield, he only sees 'friends', 'teachers', 'uncles' and 'relatives' leading the army, not the evil men who snatched away his kingdom and publicly insulted his brother and wife! Caught in the clutches of his parental conditioning, Arjuna instantly becomes powerless and decides to leave the battlefield.

By trying to escape from the battle, Arjuna falls completely out of integrity with his dharma as a warrior; he has slipped from his dharma. As a kṣatriya, he should have fulfilled the words he gave to himself, to his family, and to his Master; and he should have had the courage to face his decision of waging war against the Kauravas. Otherwise, he should not have taken the decision for war! But by becoming powerless and preparing to leave the battlefield, Arjuna is out of integrity with his dharma. This is what happens when you function out of your root pattern. You fall out of integrity with the words you give to yourself and others, and the root pattern takes over your response to life!

Understand, taking responsibility for your words is practicing dharma, the right living. In Mahābhārat, dharma is defined as 'This is the essence of dharma. Do not do unto others that which would cause pain when done to you.'

The only way to come out of lack of integrity is through completion.

Through His dialogues with Arjuna on sāṅkhya yoga and karma yoga, the nature of life and the purpose of action, Kṛṣṇa helps Arjuna find the right understanding to complete with the limiting cognition created by his root thought pattern. Kṛṣṇa teaches Arjuna two key concepts— Nityam (the nature of the Eternal) and na tvam śocitumarhasi (the pointlessness of grieving). By revealing to Arjuna the truth about his true eternal self, Kṛṣṇa helps him with the right understanding to go beyond all the arguments of his logic and complete with his root pattern.

Arjuna then awakens his power of words that brings him the spontaneous intelligence and the clarity to use the right words to verbalize his real self-doubts. His initial powerless words of grief such as, 'katham bhiṣmamahaṁ saṅkhye dronaṁ ca madhūsudana (2.4)—O Madhūsudana, how can I oppose Bhīṣma and Drona in the battle who are worthy of my worship?', now turn into words of enquiry such as, 'sthitaprajñasya kā bhāṣā samādhistaye keśava (2.54)—What are the descriptions of the steady one who is merged in the awareness of truth and wisdom? How does he speak, how does he sit and how does he walk?'

Now, Arjuna is ready for the next lesson—Authenticity, the power of thinking.

When you unlock the power of thinking, you will be able to spontaneously focus your thoughts to achieve your highest potential.

Kṛṣṇa now initiates Arjuna into the path of authenticity in action and the path of knowledge in renunciation in Karma Yoga and Jñāna-karma-sannyāsa Yoga. 'Yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam—Yoga is authenticity in action,' declares Kṛṣṇa.

karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana I

mā karmaphala hetur bhur mā te saṅgo'stv akarmaṇi II 2.47

yoga-sthaḥ kuru karmāṇi saṅgaṁ tvaktvā dhanañjaya I

siddhy-asiddhyoḥ samo bhūtvā samatvaṁ yoga ucyate II 2.48

The entire teaching of Bhagavad Gītā can be summarized in these two verses. Nothing more can be said or ever needs to be said about why and how one should perform.

Kṛṣṇa says, 'You have the right only to work, but never to the results of that work. Let not the outcome be your motive; but do not move into inaction. Do what you have to do with a complete inner space centered on yoga. Be balanced in success and failure. Evenness of mind is yoga.'

He emphasizes again and again to be complete in yoga and drop all attachments—'Act without attachment. Do not worry about the success and failure in results of your actions. Surrender yourself to the wisdom of completion.'

I am going to share an important concept here.

Listen! You don't have just a single identity, as you imagine. You have four identities!

Please understand, what you consider as you has four dimensions.

1. Mamakāra—what you believe as you or inner image.

2.Ahaṁkāra —what you project to others as you or outer image.

3.Anyakāra—what others believe as you or others' image.

4. Svānyakāra —what you believe life to be for you or life image.

All these identities put together is YOU.

Authenticity is nothing but keeping your four identities in tune and being at the peak of all four dimensions of you.

Usually, what you think as you—your mamakāra, inner image is always less than what you are, and what you project as yourself to others—your ahaṁkāra, outer image is always more than what you are. For example,

you may experience yourself as a very fearful person, but you will always project yourself as strong and powerful. Rarely, some people have a high mamakāra, but they project a low ahaṁkāra to others. And many times, the others' image or anyakāra that others have about you will be completely different from both your mamakāra and your ahaṁkāra!

When one identity is fighting with another identity, how can your thinking be focused? All your energy is going to be used in reconciling your fighting identities. When all your identities or 'images' are in tune, all your thinking will be aligned in one direction. Your thinking becomes clear and sharp, like a laser beam. You will awaken the power of thinking.

Authenticity is not just you living at what you think as your peak, or what you project as your peak, but also at what others think as your peak and what you experience life to be for you. Only when you stretch yourself to others' image and expectations about you, you express extraordinary capacities and miracle powers.

Every time you raise yourself and stretch yourself to fulfill others' anyakāra, you achieve completion. You achieve fulfillment. You achieve union. Liberation from your individual identity happens to you only when you raise yourself to others' anyakāra. When you stretch yourself to others' anyakāra, liberation from ahaṁkāra and mamakāra happens!

You may think, 'I am responsible for what I feel as me, and what I project as me to others. But why should I take responsibility for others' expectations about me?'

As long as you think that you are stretching just because of others' expectation, you will carry continuous irritation, agitation and heaviness. Understand this important truth—It is YOU who is sitting in the inner consciousness of those who have expectations about you, and making them expect things from you!

Listen: when you are not ready to listen to your own heart and expand, the Divine helps you by creating the same expectation in others, so that you can expand! It is some part of you which is suppressed by you, which wants to realize itself, that goes and sits in another's heart and becomes their expectation about you, so that the suppressed part is realized!

At the root of mamakāra is your jīva—your soul, in which all of us are one. If you suppress it in one body, it simply comes out in another body. When you are suppressing your expectations (mamakāra) about you in your own body, it simply comes out as anyakāra in another's body. Nobody else is forcing you. It is your own expectation about you, giving you one more chance! Now, it is no more somebody else's anyakāra. You are simply expanding to fulfill your own mamakāra and ahaṁkāra.

Others' expectation about you is nothing but a reminder, another chance that Bhagavān (Divine) gives you to realize yourself. When you realize that this is also your own expectation about you, you will have fulfillment!

The Bhagavad Gītā is the manifestation of Arjuna's suppressed longing to realize his own divine self. With authenticity, Arjuna discovers his power of thinking. He is now able to dive deeper into his suppressed thoughts and allows them to surface in Kṛṣṇa's Divine presence!

In the early chapters, Kṛṣṇa shares His anyakāra for Arjuna. He urges Arjuna to realize his eternal blissful self. He gives him an intellectual understanding of this truth. Through the chapters of Jñana-karmasannyāsa Yogaḥ and Sannyāsa Yogaḥ, Kṛṣṇa guides Arjuna on the ways to achieve this.

Kṛṣṇa gives the ultimate winning strategy of life to Arjuna—to stand up with the courage of authenticity in all his actions—yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam. He urges Arjuna to devote himself to yoga to expand himself to his peak energy. Kṛṣṇa then deepens Arjuna's understanding by revealing to him the deeper truths of death, renunciation and sannyāsa.

Once this understanding has settled in Arjuna, Kṛṣṇa leads him to the next tattva, Responsibility, the power of feeling.

Kṛṣṇa's teachings in the next chapter, Dhyāna Yoga, can be summarized in these words—'Look in' and

'Take responsibility to raise yourself '.

Listen! Responsibility is the key that awakens the power of feeling. The power of feeling is unlocked when you recognize yourself as a leader and take responsibility for everything in and around you!

Here, Kṛṣṇa teaches Arjuna the techniques to go beyond the mind and senses and become liberated. He guides Arjuna to rise to the level of Īśvaratva, leadership consciousness and become like Himself.

That is why Kṛṣṇa says,

uddhared ātmanātmānaṁ nātmānaṁ avasāyadet I

ātmaiva hy ātmano bandhur ātmaiva ripur ātmanaḥ II 6.5

'You are your own friend; you are your own enemy. Evolve yourself through the Self and do not degrade yourself.'

By this Kṛṣṇa means—if you know the technique of how to raise yourself by yourself, you are the friend of your Self. If you let yourself down, you are the enemy of your Self!

Listen: Responsibility means thinking, feeling, acting and cognizing life from the truth that YOU are the source of everything; therefore, you are responsible for all happenings inside you and around you.

I know the big question you will all have now! You must be thinking, 'How can I be responsible for everything happening around me? I can be held responsible for what is happening inside me. How can I be held responsible for what is happening outside me? For example, if an accident happens in my life, how can I be responsible?'

Everybody asks this question. Let me answer you.

• A person who does not feel responsible even for his own actions is an animal. He lives at a very low level of consciousness!
• A person who feels responsible for his own actions is a human being. He lives at the middle level of consciousness.
• A person who takes responsibility even for others' actions is Divine. He lives in leadership consciousness, Īśvaratva.

Please understand, only when you feel that you are responsible for everything happening in and around you, you will start looking into the truth and start seeing the possibility for a solution. Only when you take responsibility will you even find the solution!

Listen. When you take responsibility, the higher energies express through you. Even if you take one step towards responsibility, the Cosmos takes a thousand steps towards you, taking responsibility for you. When you are in the space of responsibility, both your inner space and your outer space support you. The whole Universe supports you, because the Universe experiences its fulfillment through the cognition of those who feel responsible.

Take responsibility in every situation. When you don't feel responsible, you are a drop in the ocean. When you feel responsible, you are the ocean in a drop! When you take responsibility, Īśvaratva, leadership consciousness starts happening in you.

The power of feeling is nothing but your ability to realize yourself as the source of all the happenings in your life. This understanding gives you tremendous control over your own life and gives you the power to be a positive influence in the life of others.

With responsibility, life happens to you. But life always demands your expansion, because expansion is the natural flow of life. The more you engage with life, the greater the expansion that will be demanded of you. When you take responsibility for whatever is seen and experienced by you, that which is unseen and unexperienced by you takes responsibility for you! If you take responsibility for the known part of God and the world, the unknown part of God and the world takes responsibility for you. When God takes responsibility for you, you are God. You are an Incarnation!

Kṛṣṇa guides Arjuna to realize Kṛṣṇa consciousness through the tattva of responsibility. Kṛṣṇa's teaching of responsibility culminates in Viśvarūpa Darśan, where He blesses Arjuna with a glimpse of His Cosmic dimension, His infinite expansion—a foretaste of Arjuna's own Enlightenment.

Listen.

Your expansion frightens you. Whenever bigness is demanded of you, whenever you feel you are being 'forced' to expand, you shrink even further into your comfort zone. Your tiredness, your weakness, your powerlessness all these are nothing but the resistance you have to seeing your own bigness!

That is what becomes of Arjuna after Viśvarūpa Darśan, the fear of expansion overtakes him. But being devoted to Kṛṣṇa, the embodiment of Cosmos, Arjuna responsibly expands and awakens his Enlightenment with the next tattva of enriching, the power of living. Kṛṣṇa assures him after the darśan that only by taking the responsibility to enrich others—by doing His work, by being undividedly devoted onto Him, can Arjuna expand himself into his highest possibility—madkarma-kṛn mad-paramo mad-bhaktaḥ (11.55)!

We now come to the fourth tattva—enriching. Enriching means infusing all these three tattvas continuously, in your life and others' lives! You may ask, 'I can understand why I should enrich myself. But why should I enrich others?'

Listen. Life happens to you with others! The purpose for which you are born is for enriching yourself and others. When you operate from this understanding, you are most alive, you are at your peak and living enlightenment.

Please understand, every relationship you experience is just one dimension of you. It is your son who makes you a father, it is your wife who makes you a husband, it is your followers who make you a leader. Each significant relationship in your life is one dimension of you. And unless you fulfill all your dimensions, how can you be fulfilled?

Again and again, the ego forgets, the ahaṁkāra forgets, that all its joy comes only when it stretches itself to others' anyakāra (expectations), not when it fights with others' ahaṁkāra! You very conveniently forget this important fact and take life happening to you with others for granted. You think, 'My brother has to behave like a brother! My father has to behave like a father! My teacher has to behave like a teacher,' without taking the responsibility or understanding that you should also fulfill your role! Why should the teacher enrich the student, if the student does not take the responsibility of enriching the teacher?

Kṛṣṇa beautifully enriches Arjuna—'If you don't do yajña (enriching sacrifice) and give back to the Divine for what you receive, you are a thief!—yo bhuṅkte stena eva saḥ (3.12).' It means that anything you receive from the Cosmos without enriching in return, is stolen!

Please understand, enriching means taking responsibility for everyone. I tell you, when you take responsibility for others, extraordinary powers start flowing through you! When you start enriching others, the whole Cosmos starts expressing through you. Whenever you enrich others, the energy that flows through you is cosmic energy. If you want to taste and experience cosmic energy, just start enriching others! The excitement you feel, the freshness you feel and the readiness, the joy and the inspiration that happens in you is all Cosmic energy, pure Cosmic energy.

Just see Bhagavān Śrī Kṛṣṇa! He is the ultimate embodiment of enriching. His very presence is enriching. Throughout the Gītā, He takes responsibility for Arjuna's inauthenticity, for Arjuna's confusion, without giving up on him. The entire Gītā itself is the manifestation of His enriching expression. Bhagavad Gītā is Lord Kṛṣṇa's gift to the world, enriching generations with its timeless truths. Lord Kṛṣṇa blesses Arjuna and humanity with the ultimate tools to look inward and explode in Divine Consciousness.

What Kṛṣṇa says is true for everyone. Whether you accept it or not, any idea that you have about yourself, other than the understanding that you are God, is low self-esteem! What you are lacking is just the awareness of the truth. Once you realize the truth that you are God, there is no difference between you and Kṛṣṇa. You are enlightened.

Kṛṣṇa is so compassionate that He expresses the whole Bhagavad Gītā just to prove this. That is what Kṛṣṇa came to prove. He has no need to prove that He is God. His mission is to prove that you are God! His mission is to enlighten Arjuna and through Arjuna, the rest of humanity. Kṛṣṇa's expression is the ultimate

Part 6: The Sacred Text of Hinduism - Jeevan Mukti Bhashya_English_part_6.md

enriching, because he takes responsibility even for your enlightenment! That is why He concludes the Bhagavad Gītā with the importance of completing with one's root patterns and joyfully surrendering to Life.

Kṛṣṇa showers Himself on Arjuna, waking him up to the experience of the Whole. He simply says, 'Drop everything and surrender onto Me. Drop everything you know as dharma, whatever you think you know as life, just drop it! I will liberate you from all sinful reactions. Do not worry.'

sarvadharmān parityajya mām ekaṁ śaraṇaṁ vraja I

ahaṁ tvām sarvapāpebhyo mokṣayiṣyāmi mā sucaḥ II 18.65

The Enlightened Master is nothing but concentrated Life! When you drop your conflicts, your root patterns and surrender to His wisdom, He liberates you. This is the ultimate enriching!

Please understand, these four tattvas are the very nectar pot of spirituality. They exist in our very DNA. They are the natural flow of life and they can solve any problem.

When you live these tattvas, you will find that

• With Integrity, the innate intelligence to expand is straightened and the space of positivity is awakened in you.
• With Authenticity, life continuously oozes in you. You experience the space of possibility.
• With Responsibility, you awaken to your true nature. Īśvaratva— leadership consciousness blossoms in you.
• With Enriching, you establish your Existence into everything and ultimately experience yourself as Brahmanyam Bahuputratām— the favorite inheritor of the Cosmos!

These four Universal principles will continuously inspire, encourage and make you experience your ultimate possibility. When you live these tattvas, you will constantly expand and fulfill the very purpose for which the Bhagavad Gītā was delivered!

There are millions of scriptures and books on planet Earth. From time immemorial, human beings have created scriptures and still continue to create spiritual books. But Bhagavad Gītā is incomparable. Unlike any other, this book has penetrated human consciousness so deeply. No other book has contributed to the preparation of so many Enlightened Beings on planet Earth. Bhagavad Gītā is the unabridged dictionary and encyclopedia of spirituality.

Spiritual literature can be classified into three categories. First we have śāstras: Sāstras give us clarity about the goal of human life. They give intellectual understanding about the ultimate truth of man and God.

Śāstras are the scriptures which guide us to have the right cognitions of life. They logically and intellectually answer all major questions so that we can be logically convinced to follow the ultimate path. There are many examples. The śṛutis and smṛtis of sanātana-hindu-dharma, the sacred scriptures such as the Vedas and Upaniṣads, the guidelines such as the Manusmṛti and Itihās, and the great epics, historical happenings such as Rāmāyaṇa, Mahābhārat, are śāstras.

The second category of literature is stotra. It is the expression of someone who has realized the ultimate Truth; who has had the glimpse of divine love. When such a person expresses his joy, the expression is stotras, devotional compositions.

Śāstras give us intellectual understanding, stotras give emotional feeling connection, Sūtras give the being level experience. Śāstras are like signboards, intellectual scriptures that explain the basics of life. They alone cannot lead us to enlightenment; although they can take us to an Enlightened Master. Stotras enrich us to surrender to the Divine. The glory of the Divine is expounded on by the stotras. Sūtras give us techniques to achieve devotion or Enlightenment.

Stotras are spoken from the level of emotion, feeling. Sūtras mean the technique that helps us achieve the goal of the śāstras and the stotras.

People who are intellectually oriented, need śāstras—intellectual scriptures. They do not do anything unless they are intellectually convinced. We cannot say that because of this attitude, they should not seek spirituality, the path of living the highest potential and expanding with peak possibility. Listen, we should look at man with more compassion. We can't put faith as the main criterion to enter into spirituality, then we are refusing spirituality to almost 90% of humanity. We should create a system through which we can reach and enrich every individual with the science of completion and creation.

Our Vedic seers created śāstras—the absolute science of living in completion while creating our peak possibility. They logically taught us the path and the goal—why we are asked to do what we do, why we need spirituality in our day-to-day living. All these major questions are proven logically in śastras and the conclusions are given. Understand, śāstras completely take away our doubts. Doubt is a devil. Once a doubt enters our mind in the form of self-doubt, self-hatred and self-denial, we can't sleep, we can't rest until we clear and complete with it. Śāstras help us get rid of these doubts intellectually, scientifically!

Unless we have complete intellectual clarity, complete cognition, our belief will be a pseudo belief; anyone can shake our faith as it will be rooted in self-doubt. Our cognition is not complete cognition till the śāstras of integrity, authenticity, responsibility and enriching become the basis of our cognition. Till then our cognitions are nothing but confusions, self-doubts. Our faith does not have a strong base, it is like a building without a foundation. It will collapse. The same will happen to us if we don't have the base of śāstras.

Next are the stotras. Stotra means expressing our experience, our deep love or devotion to our Master or God. Many people ask, 'Swamiji, why does Hinduism have idol worship?' Listen. Hinduism does not have idol worship. We don't worship the idol; we worship through the idol. When we stand in front of the idol, do we say, 'Oh stone! Give me a boon. Oh stone! Please save me?' No! We say, 'Oh God, please save me.' We don't worship the idol; we worship through the idol. So we are not doing idol worship. In Vaiśnavism, the devotional stream of Hinduism, there is a beautiful word Arcāvatār. This means the idol worshipped in the temple is the Incarnation of God, it is not just a stone.

When we stand in front of the idol and pour our heart out through verses, this enriching expression is what is stotras. All the songs written by great devotees like the Alvars, Nayanmars, Mīrā and Caitanya, are stotras. People ask me, 'Swamiji, sometimes I don't feel like chanting these stotras. Should I do it mechanically even if I don't like doing it?' I say, 'Do it with integrity and authenticity. You may feel it is a mechanical exercise for one or two days. But, it will become your being once you start enjoying the meaning and experiencing what you express. It will become your feeling that enriches you deeply.' The reason I allow these stotras to be chanted is this—I can see thousands of people, when they have feeling connection with the Divine, they flower and become enlightened. So, when you express your heart, it becomes stotra.

Understand, in Vedic tradition, even God is a stepping-stone for Enlightenment. All the forms and names of the Gods, everything is used for attaining Enlightenment, for nirvikalpa samādhi, for living advaita. When the devotion, the feeling connection is awakened in you, you automatically go towards enlightenment.

• Next are the sūtras**.** Sūtras give us the technique to reach enlightenment. Sāstras are from the intellectual level. Stotras are from the emotional level. Sūtras are from the being level.
• There are three kinds of human beings: head oriented, heart oriented and being oriented. To fulfill everyone, our enlightened sages have created three kinds of literature—śāstras, stotras and sūtras. Bhagavad Gītā is the only book that is a combination of śāstras, stotras and sūtras, with something more!

• 1.1 Dhṛtarāṣṭra said: O Sañjaya, assembled on this righteous holy land of pilgrimage at Kurukṣetra, what did my sons and those of Pānḍu, eager and ready to fight, do?
• 1.2 Sañjaya said: O King, seeing the Pāṇḍava army in full military formation, Duryodhana went to his teacher, and spoke the following words.
• 1.3 My teacher, behold the great army of the sons of Pāṇḍu, Expertly arranged by your intelligent disciple, the son of Drupada,
• 1.4 , 1.5, 1.6 Many are the heroes and mighty archers equal to Bhīma and Arjuna in war; Yuyudhāna, Virāta, and the great warrior Drupada, Dṛṣṭaketu, Cekitāna, and the heroic king of Kāśī; Also Purujit, Kuntibhoja, and the great man Śaibya; the valiant Yudāmanyu, the formidable Uttamauja, the son of Subhadrā, and the sons of Draupadī, all great warriors.
• 1.7 Best of the Brāhmaṇas, let me tell you, who are the powerful warriors on our side—the generals of my army, for your information, I mention them.

It is significant that a blind man gave the opening statement of this great scripture. Not only had he lost the power of sight, but also the power of insight, the wisdom to distinguish between right and wrong.

Dhṛtarāṣṭra's brother Pāṇḍu handed over to him his throne, as well as the care of his five children. From the point of view of any righteous person, these five Pāṇḍava princes were Dhṛtarāṣṭra's responsibility as well. However, the separation born out of the self-doubt in Dhṛtarāṣṭra's mind was clear when he said, 'My sons and the sons of Pāṇḍu.'

'What are they doing?' he asked Sañjaya plaintively, 'These sons of mine, the hundred Kaurava princes, and those five sons of Pāṇḍu, the Pāṇḍava princes?' He claimed no ownership or responsibility of the Pāṇḍava princes or concern for their welfare. His concern was for his own sons.

Dhṛtarāṣṭra is the embodiment of self-doubt which is always blind! His attachment to his sons, especially the crown prince Duryodhana, had blinded his powers of reasoning. Whatever his son did received his endorsement. From early adolescence, Duryodhana had been plotting to kill his Pāṇḍava cousins. Although Dhṛtarāṣṭra pretended ignorance of his son's evil deeds, he was aware of what his son was up to. Even when Duryodhana and his brother Duśśāssana went to the extreme of disgracing Draupadī, the wife of Pāṇḍavas, trying to disrobe her in public court, Dhṛtarāṣṭra seemed powerless to act. When Duryodhana finally refused to give the Pāṇḍavas even a needlepoint of land, still Dhṛtarāśṭra kept quiet, ensuring that blood would be shed.

Dhṛtarāṣṭra was fully aware that he was non-integrated and inauthentic, following the evil path of adharma and that it would result in the destruction of his clan. Yet he seemed powerless to act otherwise. Dhṛtarāṣṭra's tale is common to humankind. Often, we follow wrong paths even though we know it is wrong, we go out of integrity and authenticity almost as if under a hypnotic spell of doubting ourselves. Gītā, therefore, begins from this premise of blinding self-doubting pattern, the primal pattern that invokes all other patterns in us!

Mahābhārat is not merely the fight between good and evil. Far from that, it is about our root patterns, our inner conflict in being unable to do the right thing, not being courageous enough to stand for what is right, and not taking responsibility to be complete. It is about the lack of awareness, clarity and courage to follow the path of righteousness, dharma of integrity, authenticity, responsibility, and enriching. It is a fight between good and evil within us, not merely outside of us. It is actually a fight between the completions and incompletions within us, between possibilities and patterns within us.

Kṛṣṇa, the Superconscious, constantly looms over our being, eternally reminding us of our space of highest positivity, possibility, divinity and enlightenment with His tremendous patience and infinite compassion. Yet we ignore this divine call within us, caught in self-doubting illusion that what we choose instead will make us happy.

Listen. I tell you, all wars between countries are nothing but triggering the collective root patterns of that society. Whether it is war at home, or war in the communities, or war between the countries, the root pattern is responsible.

Incompletion at the level of a single individual piles up and becomes the incompletion at the level of society. Incompletion in the level of society piles up and becomes the incompletion in the level of large communities. Incompletion in the level of large communities piles up and becomes the incompletion in the level of the whole country. Incompletion in the level of countries leads to and causes wars.

War is the result of incompletions. Whether it is war between you and you, or war between a country and country, it is the result of incompletions, which is there in a single human being. Kurukṣetra war is the ultimate war of the collective root patterns of humanity itself.

Dhṛtarāṣṭra refers to Kurukṣetra, the site of this world war, as a holy land or place of righteousness, dharmakṣetra.

People ask, 'How can a battlefield be called a holy land?' If you study the history of humanity, you find that it has always been a battlefield. Whether these wars were morally guided or misguided is a matter of opinion. What is right for one need not be right for another.

Listen! Mahābhārat beautifully says, 'Let the fight be in kurukṣetra!' In Saṃskṛit, kurukṣetra means space of creation. Kuru means doing. Let the fight be in the space of creation. The whole place of fight should not be with the lowest realm, but with the highest realm! So, you will always be in the middle. In the fight itself, you will always be in the middle, and in the end you will be at the peak.

Life is a fight till you are enlightened. But, let your fight be in kurukṣetra, the field of creation, not in the field of losing. Don't be constantly fighting with, 'Will I get heart-attack and die?' 'Will my health

collapse?' 'Will others leave me?' 'Will I become bankrupt?' No! The ground on which the battle happens decides your existence and expansion. Let your visualization be—'Will I become CEO or not?' 'Will I become a yogi or not?' 'Will I become jñani or not?' 'Will I become rich or not, leader or not?' 'Will I become enlightened or not?'

I tell you, if your fight is in the direction of kuru, you will win the game very easily with least or no stress. It does not take more than forty-eight hours to convince yourself to shift the battleground. You just need to complete some of the self-doubts that you got from your elders, family and societal conditioning. Complete with them! So, all you need to do is just shift your core visualization, your core cognition, your core energy.

Change the battlefield and enter the energy-field of dharma, led and controlled by Śrī Kṛṣṇa, immediately you will experience so much of completion. Kṛṣṇa is the epitome of dharma (righteousness), and Kṛṣṇa was on the side of the Pāṇḍavas, then how could they lose? The tragic fate of Dhṛtarāṣṭra was that he knew that the destruction of his clan was inevitable, and yet his self-doubts had turned into self-denial, making him powerless and deny the obvious path of dharma.

• Listen. The moment you change the battlefield from adharma to dharma, you may even become enlightened; because it is your default parking spot that decides whether you are enlightened or not. Otherwise you ARE enlightened! You just need to remember and reclaim it. The best way to remember and reclaim it is to complete with your self-doubting patterns and shift the battlefield itself. See, now your battlefield is—'any one day I am going to become bankrupt. Let me delay it as much as possible!' Instead, let it be—'any one day I am going to become the richest being. Let me do it as early as possible!'

1.7Your goodself, Bhīṣma, Karṇa, Kṛpa, who are ever victorious in battle, an even so Aśvatthāma, Vikarṇa and the son of Somadatta.

• 1.8 Many other heroes there are who are prepared to lay down their lives for my sake; all are well-equipped with different weapons, and well experienced in warfare science.
• 1.9 The strength of army of ours, protected by Bhīṣma, is invincible whereas the strength of their army carefully protected by Bhīma is limited.
• 1.10 Stationed in your respective divisions on all strategic fronts, all of you must give full protection to Grandfather Bhīṣma.
• 1.11 Bhīṣma, the mighty patriarch of the Kuru dynasty, their glorious grandsire, then blew upon his conch loudly, roaring like a lion and Duryodhana was joyful.

Duryodhana was a coward by nature. Cowardice is the smell of inauthenticity. Courage is the fragrance of authenticity. He was inauthentic as his mamakāra, what he perceived as himself, was much lower than his ahaṁkāra, what he projected as himself to others.

Understand, when one is in denial, suffering is naturally going to be there. His root pattern of self-denial, of deep fear and insecurity had always made him feel threatened by the fact that his Pāṇḍava cousins especially Arjuna and Bhīma were far more superior, physically stronger and skilled than him.

Duryodhana felt secure only when surrounded by cronies. His strength and valor arose from the feeling of being supported by his clan and the army around him. On the positive side, Duryodhana was an extremely generous friend who gave his all for the sake of someone he trusted. This quality had attracted strong men like Karṇa to him who swore undying loyalty. Even though Karṇa knew that Arjuna was his own brother, all he could say to his mother Kuntī was that she would finally be left with five sons, implying that one of her sons, either Arjuna or Karṇa, would perish in the war. Such was the loyalty that Duryodhana evoked in his friends.

Duryodhana now rightly went on to claim that there were a number of people, who were great warriors, who would willingly lay down their lives for him. He then began to boost his own morale by saying that the power of the Kaurava army led by Bhīṣma was immense, whereas the Pāṇḍava army with Bhīma as one of the commanders was limited in power. Duryodhana's reference to Bhīma alongside Bhīṣma was due to the fear pattern that he had, of the oath that Bhīma had taken—to break Duryodhana's thigh and drink his blood to avenge the insult to Draupadī. Duryodhana knew that the only factor that could prevent it would be the protection of Bhīṣma.

Duryodhana then addressed the Kaurava army, exhorting them to support their Commander-in-Chief, Bhīṣma. In response, Bhīṣma blew his conch like a lion, making Duryodhana joyful. Bhīṣma was the first Kaurava Commander-in-Chief and Duryodhana wanted to make sure that the entire Kaurava army was committed to his leadership. Bhīṣma, the greatest warrior either side had known, was leading the Kaurava army. Duryodhana wanted to take no chances that his past hatred towards Bhīṣma would affect his assembled supporters. Though he knew that Bhīṣma and even Droṇa would have gone with the Pāṇḍava princes and Kṛṣṇa, had it not been their strong bonds of duty, he could not afford to antagonize them.

Bhīṣma is the embodiment of dharma, righteousness. He is the Pitāmaḥ, the great-father of Mahābhārat, the grand sire and patriarch of the Pāṇḍavas and Kaurava clan. Bhīṣma was born to Gaṅgā as Devavṛata. He was the only surviving son of eight sons whom Gaṅgā had given birth to. So, Gaṅgā, the sacred most river energy

is the great grandmother of Mahābhārat. When Bhīṣma's father king Śāntanu wanted to marry Satyavatī, a daughter of a fisherman, Devavṛata swore to remain as a brahmacāri, never to marry, so that his stepmother Satyavatī's children could have access to his father's throne. Satyavatī was the grandmother of both Pāṇḍu and Dhṛtarāṣṭra. Bhīṣma was highly respected for his valor and sagacity. It is one of the greatest ironies of Mahābhārat that wise men like Bhīṣma and Droṇa chose to be on Duryodhana's side, knowing fully well that whatever path Duryodhana was following was not only morally incorrect, but also against dharma, the cosmic law.

In the highest spiritual sense there is no right or wrong morally. Everything is neutral. Bhīṣma and Droṇa were not ordinary people, they were highly matured souls, adept in living the scriptural truths. Moreover, they were fully aware that Kṛṣṇa is a divine Incarnation, and the very fact that Kṛṣṇa sided with the Pāṇḍavas was a clear indication to them as to how the war would unfold. As great warriors themselves, they had no fears about their own deaths; and more importantly they had no guilt, no incompletions about what they had embarked upon.

Great men like Bhīṣma, Droṇa, and Kṛpācārya, trusted their inner space. Duryodhana was their prince and they were committed to him. Not attached to the result of the war, they were certain that Duryodhana would perish and they would too, along with him. In fact, at one point in the war when Kṛṣṇa was greatly angered at the rout that Bhīṣma was causing in the Pāṇḍava army, Kṛṣṇa got down from Arjuna's chariot that He was driving and advanced menacingly towards Bhīṣma. Bhīṣma instantly laid down his arms, joined his palms in prayer to the advancing Kṛṣṇa who was wielding a chariot wheel as His sudarśana cakra, the divine discus weapon on His finger, and greeted Him. 'Lord, it will be the greatest blessing for me to die at Your hands.'

To these great warriors, dying on the battlefield was the duty of a kṣatriya, a warrior. They weren't concerned with the righteousness of Duryodhana's motives. Their integrity transcended the moral rights and wrongs established by society and religion.

What is morality? In a given society, in a given era, morality is generally the accepted standards of what is desirable and undesirable, what is considered right or wrong conduct and good or bad behavior of a person, a group or an entity. Morality is about good and bad, right and wrong. It changes from time to time, era to era. When time changes, all this changes!

Please understand, integrity is not morality or ethics of the society.

Integrity is not ethics. Ethics is different, integrity is different. Morality and ethics vary from time to time. Integrity is absolute. These warriors disapproved of Duryodhana's insult of the Pāṇḍava princes and Draupadī in the court but did not protest. They disapproved of Duryodhana's instigation of this war and yet took his side, knowing fully well that what lay ahead was destruction.

This was not foolishness or resignation from the powerless space. This was surrender to the inevitable, surrender to the Divine. At the level of their consciousness, these great Masters allowed Nature to take its own course. To relax and allow whatever happens to happen is the sure sign of an evolved spirit. Ordinary humans have the freedom to think, choose and act. As a result, they think they are in control of their destinies. In a sense they are; they make their decisions and act upon them. But it is their unconscious root patterns that drive them to all these decisions.

A cycle is created as the root thought patterns lead to certain incomplete actions and those incomplete actions in turn mold their mental set-up and lead to more and more incompletions. Yet, a human has the choice to break out of this cycle of incompletions and live in freedom. This freedom is the space of completion. And the science of completing with this incomplete cycle of root patterns is the science of completion, pūrṇatva. This is the dharma taught in the Gītā scripture.

Listen! There are two ways to live life.

One is to accept the world and life as it is, as we perceive it without any resistance being complete, to see the reality as IT IS—what in Saṃskṛit is termed Sṛṣṭi Dṛṣṭi. The other way is to try to make circumstances evolve according to our viewpoint, to create the reality as we want to see, called Dṛṣṭi Sṛṣṭi. The first attitude, one of acceptance out of completion brings happiness; the second, one of resistance, brings suffering. No one

can change the world according to his viewpoint. It is an exercise doomed to encounter failure. At best, we can transform ourselves, that's all. And when we do transform ourselves, we are also empowered with the great inner powers to create the reality as we want, for ourselves and others!

No revolution has ever succeeded in bringing about any significant, positive change. Revolutionaries who claim that they are against dictatorship become dictators themselves. That has always been history. Ironically, an Enlightened Master has no such freedom. He is a faithful channel of the universal energy, Parāśakti, the Divine Existence. Every move, every thought is at the behest of the Divine. An Enlightened Being is beyond choice; He is in complete surrender to the Divine.

Bhīṣma was of pure divine origin, the son of Gaṅgā. Gaṅgā is the embodiment of pure inner space. Bhīṣma had the gift of icchā-mṛtyū, self-willed death. His dharma, his integrity and authenticity were the standard for his era. Yet Bhīṣma kept quiet when Draupadī was attempted to be disrobed and insulted. Because he had the wrong association with self-denial, Duryodhana and being in integrity to his huge vow to always protect the kingdom's royal seat, he did not act when Duryodhana denied the Pāṇḍavas even a patch of land the size of a needle tip.

He chose to fight for Duryodhana. However, when Duryodhana requested him to lead the Kaurava army, Bhīṣma told him that the Pāṇḍava princes were as dear to him as Duryodhana was, and while he would wage war against their army, he could not take their lives. This was the condition under which Bhīṣma agreed to fight against the Pāṇḍava army on Duryodhana's behalf.

Yet, in this instance, Bhīṣma's compassion for Duryodhana overcame his distaste for his actions and behavior. Bhīṣma understood the desperate fear running through Duryodhana's mind, and he felt the need to reassure him. In response to these exaggerated claims of Duryodhana, Bhīṣma blew his conch as a sign of resounding affirmation of whatever had been said by Duryodhana. Sañjaya said that Bhīṣma's conch sounded like the roar of a lion, coming from the oldest and the bravest of all the warriors assembled on the battlefield. It was also an affirmation of Bhīṣma's own support to the Kaurava prince and the signal for the war to begin. Bhīṣma's conch was a celebratory signal, seeking victory.

1.12 Conches, bugles, trumpets, drums, and horns all suddenly sounded; Their combined sound renting the skies.

1.13 Then, seated on a magnificent chariot drawn by white horses, both Mādhava (Kṛṣṇa) and Arjuna sounded their divine conches.

1.14 Hṛṣikeśa (Kṛṣṇa) blew on His conch, the Pāñcajanya; Dhanañjaya (Arjuna) sounded the Devadatta and Vṛkodara (Bhīma) sounded his mighty conch called Pauṇḍra.

1.15 1.16 1.17 King Yudhisṭra, the son of Kuntī, blew his conch, the Anantavijaya; Nakula and Sahadeva blew the Sughośa and Maṇipuṣpaka. That great archer, the king of Kāśī, the great fighter Śikhaṇḍi, Dṛṣṭadyumna, Virāṭa and the invincible Sātyaki, Drupada, the sons of Draupadī, and the others, such as the mightyarmed son of Subhadrā, all sounded their conches.

Conches, called śankha in Saṃskṛit, are the shells of mollusks that live in the sea. From time immemorial, Hindu scriptures have referred to the use of conches during ritualistic, devotional and celebratory occasions. In general, a conch is blown to signify obeisance to the Divine, or in celebration of an auspicious, victorious occasion.

Each of the great warriors in the Mahābhārat war had his own conch with its unique sound signature. Most of the great warriors also had their own chariot flags and their weapons, especially their bows, had great spiritual significance. It is said that Arjuna's presence in any part of the battlefield would be known by the sound of his conch and the twang of his bow!

When Bhīṣma blew his conch in support of Duryodhana, the response was tumultuous on both sides. Every warrior on the battlefield took out his conch and blew his signature note. Of all the sounds that emanated at that moment, a few were heard above the rest. Kṛṣṇa sounded His Pañcajanya, the conch of Viṣṇu, which drowned out all other sounds. It was the victorious announcement for all that the Divine was already present with the Pāṇḍava army.

Vyāsa, through Sañjaya, attributes divinity only to Kṛṣṇa's conch, not to anyone else's. He refers to Kṛṣṇa as Mādhava, and later as Hṛiṣīkeśa. Mādhava signifies that Kṛṣṇa is an Incarnation of Viṣṇu, the husband of Lakṣmī, goddess of wealth and fortune. In this context, it signifies that whoever Kṛṣṇa sides with would be invincible. Kṛṣṇa is then referred to as Hṛiṣīkeśa, controller of the senses, the superconscious, who has created the māyā, the illusion that is this great war of Mahābhārat. Vyāsa implies that all that happens is a creation of Kṛṣṇa. For what purpose? He alone knows. The Divine truly has no purpose. The Divine IS, that's all.

Kṛṣṇa was Arjuna's charioteer. Arjuna's chariot and his bow, Gāṇḍīva were a blessing from Agnī, the fire god. The chariot was capable of traversing all three worlds. The chariot flew the flag of Hanumān, the monkey god, the close confidante, disciple of Lord Śrī Rāma, the earlier Incarnation of Viṣṇu or Kṛṣṇa. Hanumān had blessed Bhīma that he would be with the Pāṇḍava princes at all times, and he himself would ride upon Arjuna's chariot flag. Wherever Hanumān is, Śrī Rāma is present. So Arjuna is accompanied not only by Śrī Kṛṣṇa, but also by His earlier Incarnation Śrī Rāma! Arjuna and the Pāṇḍava princes were twice blessed! Arjuna is referred to as Dhañanjaya, winner of wealth, in reference to his ability to generate the wealth needed by his brother Yudhishṭra.

Not to be outdone, Bhīma, also called Vṛikodara blew on his conch Pauṇḍra, a fearsome sound that invoked dread amongst the Kaurava army. Bhīma was feared by his enemies for his strength and anger. The other three Pāṇḍava princes, Yudhiṣṭra, Nakula and Sahadeva and then by the great warriors, Drupada, Virāṭa, Sātyaki, Śikhaṇḍī, Dṛṣṭadyumna, Abhimanyu and others followed, all blowing their conches in celebration of their impending victory.

Each of these warriors had a great history. Yudhiṣṭra, the eldest of the Pāṇḍava princes, was born to his mother Kuntī through the grace of Yama, the god of justice and death, and was universally known as Dharmarāja, the king of truth, as he was established in dharma, an embodiment of integrity with the power of words, never known to tell a lie. Nakula and Sahadeva embodied enriching, the power of living who were born to Mādri, the second wife of Pāṇḍu, through the grace of the Aśvini Kumāras, celestial beings.

Drupada, the king of Pāñchāla, was the father of Dṛṣṭadyumna and Draupadī, wife of the Pāṇḍavas. Virāṭa was the king in whose kingdom the five Pāṇḍava princes and Draupadī spent a year in hiding. His daughter married Abhimanyu, Arjuna's son by Subhadrā, Kṛṣṇa's sister. Śikhaṇḍi was born as Bhīṣma's nemesis, when Ambā, a princess whom Bhīṣma captured as a bride for his stepbrother Vicitravīrya, immolated herself to be reborn to avenge her shame.

It is as if Sañjaya, the narrator of the war, repeatedly tries to impress upon the blind king Dhṛtarāśṭra the caliber of the Pāṇḍava warriors. Sañjaya specifically refers to these warriors as 'aparājita', invincible, ever victorious in whatever task they undertook, implying that they would be victorious in this war.

It is significant that Bhiṣma's conch, sounded by him as the Commander-in-Chief of Kaurava army, to signify the war opening, was responded to by Kṛṣṇa, and not by Dṛṣṭadyumna, the Pāṇḍava Commander-in-Chief, or any of the other Pāṇḍava princes. Kṛṣṇa's was a response of victory, not a reaction to the challenge issued by Bhiṣma.

Understand, if you feel that you are not responsible, you react. If you feel that you are responsible, you respond. When all your actions are responses and not reactions, you are a karma yogi; no karma binds you—you are living in completion and expressing completion. The cosmic vibration of Kṛṣṇa's Pañcajanya conch was a declaration of His responsibility for everything in and around Him, an acceptance of the fact that whatever was thrown at the Pāṇḍava army was being accepted by Him, Divinity Incarnate.

Kṛṣṇa, as the Superconscious guide of the Pāṇḍavas, the five embodiments of dharma, absolves them of any incompletions, any guilt or wrongdoing by taking upon Himself the responsibility for everything happening and is to happen.

The biggest question we have in our mind is, 'How can I be responsible for everything happening around me? I can be held responsible for what is happening inside me. How can I be held responsible for what is happening outside me? For example, if an accident happens in my life, how can I be responsible?' Everybody asks this question! Let me answer you.

Listen: there is an important difference between being the cause for something, and being responsible for it! Sometimes you may not be the reason for a certain happening, but if it is affecting your life, you ARE responsible for that happening. For example, you may not be the cause of political corruption in your country, but as a citizen of the country, you ARE responsible for it! You may not be the reason for it, but that doesn't mean that you are not responsible in truth.

You need to know that unless you take responsibility, you are neither going to improve the situation, nor you are going to expand your inner space.

• • A person who does not feel responsible even for his own actions is an animal. He lives in a very low-level consciousness! Duryodhana along with the Kaurava army represents this low-level consciousness.

• • A person who feels responsible for his own actions is a human being. He lives in a middle-level consciousness! There were many warriors who felt responsible for their actions, their duties and even supported Duryodhana, they represent this middle-level consciousness.

• • A person who takes responsibility even for others' actions is Divine.

He lives in leadership consciousness, Īśvaratva. Śrī Kṛṣṇa is the Īśvara, the leader of the Universe, responsible for the whole Cosmos, with the ability to do anything with the Cosmos.

We always feel that responsibility is a burden. NO! It is a power! Responsibility makes you powerful. Responsibility directly leads you to leadership consciousness, Īśvaratva. As long as you feel responsible only for your family, you remain as the head of just your family. When you feel responsible for the community, you become a leader of the community. As your feeling of responsibility expands in you, your leadership quality also expands as a power.

Listen. Cosmos functions on 'responsibilism.' The law of Cosmos, the natural law of Existence, dharma

is responsibilism. The law of nature is responsibilism. Kṛṣṇa leads the whole war with this one truth, satya of 'responsibilism.'

The whole Mahābhārat war is Kṛṣṇa's expression of the power of His responsibilism, Īśvaratva. Even though Kṛṣṇa or His actions are not responsible for the war, even though He is not the reason for the war, He takes the responsibility even for others' inauthenticity and others' irresponsibility and reestablishes dharma, the cosmic law of responsibilism. This is the job of an Incarnation.

The rest of the Pāṇḍava army, including Arjuna, follow Kṛṣṇa's lead by blowing their divine conches.

1.19 This tumultuous sounding of the conches reverberated in the sky and the earth, and shattered the hearts of the sons of Dhṛtarāsṭra.

1.20 Then, seated in his chariot, which bore the flag of Hanumān, Arjuna lifted his bow, fixed his arrows and looking at the sons of Dhṛtarāṣṭra spoke to Kṛṣṇa.

O Acyuta (Infallible One), please position my chariot between the two armies and let me see the warmongers gathered here with whom I must wage this battle.

When Bhīṣma sounded his conch, it invited back the resounding response of the conches of the Pāṇḍava warriors.

There is no mention by Sañjaya that Bhīṣma's conch or the accompanying sounds of drums and trumpets from the Kaurava army caused any concern amongst the Pāṇḍava army.

What he says now is different. With the roar of the conches of the Pāṇḍava warriors, led by Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna, Sañjaya says that the hearts of the sons of Dhṛitarāṣṭra were shattered.

The words used here are significant. He says that the blowing of the conches created vibrations in the sky and upon the earth. The conches of the Pāṇḍava princes and other great warriors were not mere musical instruments; they were filled with great spiritual power and divine presence. They were in fact mantra or sacred sounds, which created powerful vibrations affecting the environment. That is the uproar Sañjaya was talking about.

In the Hindu Purāṇas, epics, one finds references to weapons called astra. An astra is not a physical weapon. It is a thought, a word that was given enormous power by its creator to destroy, even to the extent of a nuclear device. Later in the Mahābhārat war, power nuclear weapons like Brahmāstra, deadliest of all the astras, capable of delivering destruction were attempted to be used. Just by the power of thought and words,the nuclear energy was invoked in the warrior's mounted arrow. Kṛṣṇa received the Brahmāstra on Him before it could do any damage.

The conches that the Pāṇḍava warriors used were not meant to destroy physically, but they were clearly successful in destroying the fantasies of the Kaurava princes. The purpose of sounding conches was to set the stage for the battle and to define its boundaries. The Pāṇḍava princes and warriors had the comfort of knowing that they were doing what was right, both in their own hearts and in the eyes of God, since they had the association and support of Kṛṣṇa Himself. The Kaurava princes were afraid. All that motivated them was greed and envy. They did not have divine purpose as their motivation.

Sañjaya, with his powerful ājña, third eye vision, was able to see far beyond the superficial responses on the battlefield. He was able to unravel the unconscious, deep rooted patterns, emotions and responses of the warriors. Whatever may have been the perceived reaction of the Kaurava army to the response from the Pāṇḍava warriors, Sañjaya concludes that the Kaurava princes were demoralized, imbalanced. The armies went face-to-face in military formation. The conches had sounded in anticipation. The warriors on both sides were waiting for their commanders to signal the first move in offense.

Arjuna was at the forefront of the Pāṇḍava army. He had blown his conch, Devadatta, at the same time as Kṛṣṇa sounded His Pañcajanya. Arjuna had taken up his divine bow Gāṇḍīva, and had fixed the arrow to the bow. However, instead of releasing the arrow, Arjuna looked at the Kaurava army amassed in front of him, with all the Kaurava princes, his cousins, facing him. He then addressed Kṛṣṇa, his friend, mentor, divine guide and charioteer.

For the first time in this scripture, Arjuna speaks. Arjuna is not the mere hero of Mahābhārat in this Gītā scripture. He is the embodiment of all humanity. He is Nara, the human aspect of Nārāyaṇa, Lord Viṣṇu, who in turn is Kṛṣṇa. Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna, as Nārāyaṇa and Nara, as the Divine and human, is the theme that runs throughout Bhagavad Gītā and also much of the epic Mahābhārat.

'Achyuta, O Infallible One,' said Arjuna to his friend and mentor, 'Please take me to a vantage point between the two armies so that I can see for myself who I am fighting with. Let me see who is assembled here on this battlefield,' he says. 'Kṛṣṇa, please show me who I must vanquish.'

Arjuna already knew to the last man, each one who was on that Kurukṣetra battlefield. He had no

confusion about whom he was fighting. All these decisions, negotiations, changing of loyalties, dropouts, all these happened in the days before the war. The lines had been drawn very clearly, even if unwillingly in some cases.

It made no sense at all for Arjuna to ask Kṛṣṇa at this last minute to show him clearly who he was fighting against. It was as if he was hoping that at the last minute something would occur to change the course of events. If that were to happen, he knew that it could only take place through the grace of his charioteer, friend and guide, Mādhava.

It is as if Arjuna was making a desperate plea to Kṛṣṇa, 'Please show me something that I do not know. Show me something that You alone know, Oh *Achyuta (*Infallible Divine). Take me there, where You will, and show me.'

1.23 Let me see these well wishers in this war of the evil-minded Duryodhana, who have come together here to fight.

1.24 Sañjaya said:

O descendant of Bhārata, being thus addressed by Guḍākeśa (Arjuna), Hṛṣikeśa Kṛṣṇa then drew up the fine chariot in the midst of both armies.

Arjuna starts out on a challenging note. He says he would like to see all those who had assembled to fight him, in support of the evil minded Duryodhana. Accordingly, Kṛṣṇa drew up the chariot between the two armies so that Arjuna could have a good look at all those who had gathered.

Arjuna is being called Guḍakeśa in this verse—Guḍakeśana Bhārata, the one who has transcended sleep or the need to sleep. Sleep, here, also refers to the unconscious mind, the incomplete inner space. Please listen. Sleep is nothing but the rest we need to give to our tired inner chatter. Sleep is related to the incompletions of the mind. All our incompletions, that drive our actions, reside in our unconscious space as root thought patterns. Only thing we need to go beyond sleep is a complete inner space. Integrity brings deep sleep to us, makes us conquer tiredness and ultimately conquer sleep.

Let me define Integrity, the first spiritual principle. Integrity is the key which unlocks the power of words, or vākśakti.

Integrity has two dimensions—honoring the words you give to yourself and honoring the words you give to others. Integrity means not just fulfilling, but honoring the word you give to you and others as your very life, is Integrity. Listen. Honoring the word you give to you—that is the key point.

Who is the first person to hear the words you utter? YOU! When you honor the words you give to yourself, your confidence in yourself grows and your self-doubt melts away. YOU become powerful! When you honor the words you give to others, others' confidence in you grows. Your relationship with that person becomes powerful!

The words you utter are YOU! You become the words you speak to yourself and others. If you go on saying, 'I am sick, I am sick', you simply will become sick. In the same way, if you constantly tell yourself, 'I am healthy', your energy will wake up. You will be very healthy! Cosmic energy awakens in your system and makes your declarations a reality. It is important to choose the right words, because you can create your reality with the power of your words!

A small story about the power of words, vāk śakti.

Once, a small town was visited by a saint. As the saint passed by a small hut, a woman came to him and begged him to pray for her dying child. Since the saint was new to the town, a crowd gathered around him, curious to see if he could do anything. The woman brought the sick child out to him and he said a prayer over her.

Do you really think your prayer will help the child, when even medicine has failed? After all, they are just some words!', yelled a man from the crowd.

The saint turned and started shouting at the man, 'You idiot, you don't know what I am doing! Just shut up!' The man was furious! His face grew red and hot. 'How dare you insult me,!' he shouted at the saint.

The saint smiled at him calmly and said, 'If one word has the power to make you so angry, may not another word have the power to heal this child?'

That is the power of words!

Listen: every thought we complete is the word we give to us. We have to honor it. The first step of integrity is completing all the negative words we created within us about us and life, and completing all of them. With integrity, our inner chatter disappears, it never becomes tired.

By bringing integrity to his thinking and words, Arjuna had conquered his tiredness, his boredom, his powerlessness and conflicts. When we have integrity and authenticity, when we give our life to fulfill our words, Cosmos intervenes to fulfill our words and makes them into reality. Arjuna is being referred to here as one who has conquered sleep, as a result of tirelessly doing pūrṇatva, completion with all the negative words he carried. Because of Arjuna's integrity, the power of words or vākśakti became available to him. To fulfill the words of Arjuna, Śrī Kṛṣṇa, the Cosmos Himself becomes his charioteer, leading him to his total surrender to Divine.

Kṛṣṇa has been called Hṛṣīkeśa, one who controls the senses from His powerful space of completion.

• A person who does not have even one moment of powerlessness or incompletion in his life is an Enlightened Being. A person who never had any patterns, any incompletions in his life, right from his birth, is an Incarnation. Physically, mentally, and spiritually, Śrī Kṛṣṇa is the space of eternal completion. His senses are complete as He knows what He experienced through them is not the source of happiness. The relationship between Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna is the highest form of interaction between the Divine and the human.

This surrender happens in three stages. At the first level it is an intellectual surrender, the intellectual acceptance of what the Master represents and what he means to you. A true seeker reaches this stage when he encounters the real Master, Sadguru destined for him. The seeker sees in the Master, qualities he has been searching for. His questions start dying down and answers come even before questions happen.

Intellectual surrender to the Master replaces inadequate questions with adequate doubts. Doubts are not violent like questions as they do not arise from the root patterns or ego. They arise from a genuine, authentic need to know, to create adequate, complete cognition. Despite his high level of surrender, one does see Arjuna initially in this state of questioning, perhaps as a lesson to us.

At the next level, one reaches the state of emotional surrender. From śāstras one moves to stotras, from the head to the heart. It is like coming home when the heart surrenders. One feels a deep connection with the Guru and constantly remembers Him. It is impossible to forget Him. His memory brings tears to one's eyes, tears of gratitude that are impossible to hide.

Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa says so beautifully, 'When thinking of the Divine or your Guru, Master, if you have tears streaming down your cheeks, be very sure that this is your last birth.' Emotional surrender leads one close to liberation.

At the final level, is surrender of the senses. One truly realizes Hṛṣīkeśa, Master of senses, and gives up one's distorted, incomplete sense of reality and embraces the Truth of the absolu reality of Advaita, non-duality that the Master and every Incarnation have expressed. Ultimately, we must move beyond both doubt and faith to completion that creates a deep trust in the Master, recognizing that everything the Master expresses is for our liberation. As Arjuna progresses through the Gītā, layers of his incompletions peel off, and he travels into deeper stages of surrender.

Please understand, when we are driven by root patterns, we don't even know what we do, why we do why we are making money, why we have married, why we are living. Nothing! The Kaurava warriors blindly driven by Duryodhana, did not know—why they are fighting, why they want power and exactly what is going to happen? With such an unconscious, incomplete space, Duryodhana and his allies did not suffer from any doubts. When our root patterns are driving our life, we may believe that we are winning, but we will never be driven to victory. If your enemy is driving you, will he be driving you towards victory? Mired totally in selfdenial patterns, these Kaurava warriors followed Duryodhana blindly, unaware that the person they followed was blind himself.

Arjuna, on the other hand, is in turmoil. He is driven by Hṛṣīkeśa, the Master of senses, who can control and complete any root pattern. Arjuna's charioteer is Kṛṣṇa Himself, whose very life is a living science of completion. As Kṛṣṇa brings the chariot to a stop between the two armies, in a metaphoric sense, He brings Arjuna's inner space to a steady state to drive him to completion.

With Duryodhana's self-denial root pattern of saying 'no' to life, cloning itself into the manifold Kaurava army of conflicting patterns, even if Duryodhana won any war out of that pattern, he would never achieve satisfaction or completion. Because the reason he is fighting for power is to feel secure from his fear. He will feel secured only when he breaks that pattern, not by winning the war! It is the wrong strategy, for the wrong reason!

Arjuna, unlike Duryodhana, has become aware of his root patterns, he is exposed to his inauthenticities, and is working to free himself from their bondage. However, he is not in the zone of light yet. The conflict between Arjuna and Duryodhana is the conflict that all humans face within themselves—a conflict between their possibility and patterns, their deep unconscious desires, the incompletions driven by their root patterns, and the possibility of completion, consciousness. Completion is consciousness! Which part wins depends on one's ability to complete and surrender to the superconscious Divine or the Master, Śrī Kṛṣṇa.

As long as one is in darkness, one does not miss light. But, Arjuna is in the state of a person who has had sight and has now lost it, who was in the light of completion, but fell into the darkness of incompletion. Yet, only in its own light, can a moon even see its dark patches. And so is Arjuna now seeing his incompletions face-to-face and is blessed to have the source of light, Jagadguru Kṛṣṇa to enlighten him. He is an intelligent man, but suddenly wondered whether what he was doing might be wrong and evil. So he is disturbed.

Duryodhana, on the other hand, has a mind that is always in darkness, He has never experienced true intelligence or completion. Therefore, words like 'immoral' or 'non-integrity' or 'inauthenticity,' 'dharma' or 'adharma' would make no sense to him.

1.25 to 1.30

In the presence of Bhīṣma, Droṇa and other rulers of the world, Hṛṣīkeśa said, Pārtha, behold all the Kurus who are assembled here. There, Arjuna could see within the armies of both parties,

His elders, grandfathers, teachers, maternal uncles, cousins, sons, grandsons

And friends, as well as his fathers-in-law and well wishers. When Arjuna, the son of Kuntī, saw all these friends and relatives present there,

He was overwhelmed with deep pity and said: Kṛṣṇa, seeing my friends and relatives present before me, eager to wage war,

I feel my limbs trembling, my mouth drying, and my hair standing on end.

My bow, Gāṇḍīva, slips from my hands, and my skin burns. I am unable to stand here any longer.

I am forgetting myself, and my mind reels. I foresee only evil omens, O killer of the Keśī demon.

Kṛṣṇa parked the chariot between the two armies and said to Arjuna, 'Here are the people you wished to see.' Arjuna wanted to see those who were about to fight him and die, and Kṛṣṇa, with no mercy at all, showed him that these were Arjuna's near and dear ones.

Kṛṣṇa Himself was related to Arjuna. Kuntī, Arjuna's mother, also known as Prithā, was Kṛṣṇa's aunt, sister of Kṛṣṇa's father Vāsudeva; so He addresses Arjuna here as Pārtha, the son of Prithā, emphasizing their relationship. Kṛṣṇa is also referred to in Gītā as Pārthasārathi, the charioteer of Pārtha, Arjuna.

Assembled in front of Arjuna were compatriots of his father Pāṇḍu, grandfathers and great grandfathers such as Bhīṣma, his own teachers such as Droṇa and Kṛpa, uncles such as Śakuni, brothers and cousins as all the Kaurava princes were, friends and well wishers. At one time or another, each of them had been an object of affection and respect to Arjuna. Now, they were part of this enemy army.

The expression of Arjuna's dilemma starts here.

The theme of Gītā is the story of Arjuna's dilemma, his incompletion and its completion by Kṛṣṇa.

As a warrior, as a kṣatriya, Arjuna was used to killing in battle. He was no stranger to death and violence. As long as those who faced him were his enemies Arjuna had no difficulty in carrying out the execution. However, those in front of him now were his svajanam—his relatives, people who actually were like his father, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, sons and grandsons, tied to him with bonds of blood. Many others were his friends with whom he had previously enjoyed bonds of loyalty.

Arjuna's dilemma was not one of nonviolence, ahiṁsā. As a kṣatriya, this word had no place in his dictionary. His dilemma was one of violence, violence born out of his ego, his identity. He could kill people he did not identify with, but he could not bear to kill those whom he could relate with himself in one way or another. The bonds of family were far stronger than Arjuna had imagined. These bonds were rooted in his ego, and to cut these bonds was to destroy himself. This was Arjuna's dilemma.

What follows now is a bunch of fantasies, inauthenticities that Arjuna's mind weaves in an attempt to justify his dilemma. It is what the human mind conjures up time and again as its projection of the unconscious root thought patterns, trying to justify as authentic action.

Sañjaya says that Arjuna was overwhelmed with pity. Some translate this as compassion. Compassion, true compassion, which is the hallmark of an

Enlightened Being, is non-discriminatory; it does not differentiate.

Please listen. When responsibility expresses through your heart, it is compassion. To the truly compassionate person, the whole world, of both living and nonliving beings, is an extension of his own self. Anything that hurts any object around such a person would hurt him, and he too would feel the pain.

However, Arjuna's emotion was discriminatory, inauthentic. He felt pity only because they were his kinsmen, only because he identified with them, not because of his authenticity and responsibility to enrich them, not because he felt that all of them were his own extensions, and so by not fighting them he would in turn not fight himself.

This was not compassion born out of ahiṁsā, nonviolence, but pity born out of hiṁsā, violence. Arjuna's emotions arose from his root pattern, his ego.True compassion arises from a state of integrity and authenticity, the absence of ego where one's inner and outer identities are aligned, and one expresses peak of one's positivity and possibility. It arises from a state of responsibility, out of no-mind and no-thought, where the feelings of 'I' and 'mine' have disappeared and one realizes that one is the Source of everything and so one is responsible for everything. True compassion is a state of completion and bliss, one of true surrender to the Universe.

Please understand, the four spiritual principles of integrity, authenticity, responsibility and enriching are the four Vedas, caturveda to experience surrender to the Cosmos and to have the power to simply manifest the reality of your choice!

Listen! Whether you know it or not, whether you believe it not, you have four giant powers sitting inside you. Though you use these powers everyday in your life, you don't use them consciously, with a clear intention. Please understand, all these powers are great energies, just like electricity or wind power. If you handle them properly, they can shower you with everything you want. But if you don't handle them properly, they will continue to impact your life in negative ways.

These powers are related to the four major dimensions of your life—your words, your thinking, your emotions, and your living. When you awaken your peak possibility in each of these dimensions, it becomes a great power and support in your life.

First spiritual principle is Integrity. When you practice integrity, the power of words or vāk śakti will be available to you.

Second tattva is Authenticity. When you practice authenticity, the power of thinking or mano śakti will be open to you.

Third tattva is Responsibility. The power of feeling or prema śakti will be possible when you practice responsibility.

And the fourth tattva is Enriching. You will have access to the power of living or ātma śakti the moment you decide to enrich others.

The foundation for these tattvas is pūṛṇatva—completion of all the patterns we carry.

When we live these spiritual principles and express these four great powers, the individual self merges with the universal Self, and true compassion happens out of the space of completion with the Cosmic Consciousness; from the experience that one is part of that Brahman.

Listen. Arjuna's pity arose out of fear of losing his identity, his fear of expansion, his root pattern or ego. Arjuna was mortally afraid. He claimed that his throat was parched, his hair was standing on edge and his divine bow was slipping from his sweaty hands. If one did not know Arjuna better, one would have considered him a coward.

Arjuna was no coward. He had no fear for his own physical safety. He was not concerned that he might be injured or that he might die. As a warrior of warriors, these feelings were beneath him. But, Arjuna was afraid of breaking social and ethical laws. His values and beliefs, his bio-memories, his root thought patterns, told him that what he was doing was wrong and unacceptable. So powerful was this feeling that he was reeling, quivering, dazed and unable to think or function.

Can something like this really happen? Can a hero lose his composure and exhibit the physical symptoms of a frightened coward? A true hero to whom death is play, who is trained from childhood by the greatest of Masters not only in the control of his body, his sleep, but of his mind as well? Arjuna's situation shows how the mind can play games with the best of us, how the root patterns can take over the mind in so powerful a manner as to make us powerless, without our awareness.

Arjuna was frightened that he would be held responsible for the death of his kinsmen, people who were father, grandfather and other such important figures to him. He was afraid that even if others did not blame him, he would suffer the guilt and regret for his actions for the rest of his life. So great was this fear root pattern of potential guilt, that it drove Arjuna into behaving inauthentically like a coward. All he could foresee was disaster and evil all around him. At another, far deeper level, Arjuna was terrified of his own destruction. The moment one starts identifying with svajanam, kinsmen, family, friends and relatives, it is a material identification, born out of possession arising from one's ego, the feeling of 'I' and 'mine.'

Possession is born of attachment, and leads to attachment as well. There can be no feeling of possessing something unless one is attached to it. People speak of attachment, liking and love. All these are valid only as long as a sense of possession exists. The moment the object of love turns around and displays independence and unwillingness to be possessed, the liking and the love disappears.

Possession arises out of our survival need, from our mūlādhāra cakra, an energy center located at the base of the spine. It is a primal feeling that yokes us to mother Earth. Out of the need for possession, feelings of lust, greed and anger arise. Often what one cannot possess, one wants to destroy.

'What I cannot have, let no one have,' we often feel, out of our incompletion. Possession leads to violence. It is also the deep-rooted desire for possessions, the feeling of 'mine,' that gives rise to your identity 'I.' The need to possess does not stem from your identity. It is the other way around. 'Mine' leads to 'I,' not 'I' to 'mine.' This is why you cannot eliminate your identity till you renounce your attachment to all your desires and possessions. You need to get rid of the 'mine' first. Only then the 'I' disappears.

Understand, incompletions will make you feel the whole world should be yours. Incompletions will continue to make you feel you can own, possess the whole world. Incompletions continuously make you exploit others.

Arjuna is in this mood and frame of mind. It strikes him at the moment of waging war, that what he is about to destroy are his own possessions, his own identity. If he were to destroy them he will be destroying a part of his own self, his own mind-body system. It is true that when someone dear to us dies, a part of our mind-body system dies with them. Arjuna knew that the destruction of so many of his near and dear ones, his kinsmen, would take a massive toll on him, akin to committing suicide.

Arjuna's dilemma was an existential one. What is the point of eliminating others, if it results in one's own elimination? It is a dilemma born out of partial understanding, an incomplete cognition, a peek into the truth of collective consciousness. If Arjuna were to be as unaware as Duryodhana, this doubt would have never entered his mind. Were he enlightened as Kṛṣṇa was, the answer would have been obvious. Arjuna was in between, hence his dilemma.

Why should I destroy myself? What for? These are the questions that naturally follow this line of reasoning. Arjuna was far wiser than many modern philosophers in posing this as a doubt, without venturing into any answers himself.

Listen. Utter confusion, dilemma is the first thing any person has to face in his life for Enlightenment. If we have not yet faced the dilemma, the possibility for transformation has not yet opened. When we are in dilemma, be very clear, the seeking has started in us.

Arjuna has become a seeker of Truth. He was no longer satisfied with what he had imbibed all these years—śāstras, stotras and sūtras. He wished to go beyond. He questioned them, as he had doubts. He was in a dilemma.

Arjuna-viśāda-yogaḥ is the name given to this first chapter of Gītā. Viśāda can mean many things in Saṃskṛit—grief, sorrow, despondency, despair, depression, powerlessness, dilemma and such. Here what we see is the dilemma that Arjuna was in, not knowing whether what he had been taught all his life, and what he had believed to be true, was really true after all.

1.31 I foresee only evil omens, O Kṛṣṇa, I do not see any good coming out of killing one's own kinsmen [svajanam] in this battle.

I do not covet my dear Kṛṣṇa, victory or kingdom or pleasures.

1.32 What use is kingdom, pleasures or even life, Kṛṣṇa?

1.33 Those for whose sake we seek kingdoms, enjoyment and happiness Now are arrayed in this battlefield ready to lose their lives and wealth.

1.34 , 1.35 Even if I am about to be slain by my teachers, fathers, sons, grandfathers, maternal uncles, fathers-in-law, grandsons, brothers-in-law and all relatives, I would not like to slay them even to gain control of all three worlds. Why then, Madhusūdana, would I wish to kill them for control of this earth?

Arjuna now started developing his theme in detail. He started expressing his doubts with clarity. One may ask, 'How can such doubts be clear?' Doubts need to be clear if they are to be resolved. Thoughts need to be integrated if they need to be complete.

Listen. A clearly expressed word is fulfillment. The word which constantly keeps you in completion and expands you is Integrity. Everything starts with the word. Unclear doubts lead only to more confusion.Thoughts and words lacking integrity lead to incompletions. Unintelligent beings that lack integrity have unclear doubts.

Arjuna's doubts were precise. Arjuna started listening to himself. Listening to you is the first step to spirituality. Constantly listening to your inner space is the beginning of integrity.

Listening brings integrity into our words. We never ever really listen, either to ourselves or to others. When you really start listening to yourself, you will naturally become more aware of the words you give to yourself and others. You will also have the ability to listen to others' words with integrity.

Listening is directly connected to your ability to handle reality as it IS, without creating your own unconscious ideas and conclusions. When you don't have listening, you always come to a conclusion even before the information is cognized in you. That is why the very first step of Hindu spiritual practice is Śravana**, Integrated Listening.**

Because Arjuna was listening to himself, he started thinking with integrity. When we bring integrity in our thinking, the first thing is that we will know what is happening inside us. Arjuna has clarity about the doubts arising inside him, and is now exposed to his own inauthenticies. How could he seek happiness through destruction of his kinsmen, he asked. How could any good come out of this action? How could he desire power, possessions and pleasures through such action? And if he did gain those things as a result of killing his family, of what use would such a life be to him?

Though Arjuna was in a dilemma, it was a dilemma born out of intelligence, not out of ignorance. Arjuna had been taught all his life to seek power, possessions and pleasures, and he had done it. Up to this point, he had not come across a single situation where the cost of acquiring these had seemed to be greater than the accruing profit, the resulting enjoyment. Perhaps he had never bothered to evaluate the cost and benefits.

For the first time in his life, he has faced a situation that forces him to evaluate his options. 'Do I forge ahead and destroy what is dear to me so that I get more power and possibly more pleasure?' he asks. What a fundamental question, one that each one of us should ask ourselves. How often do we lack integrity and go behind activities that promise us more material benefits, even though we know that these may in some way damage our life or the lives of those we care about?

It takes a lot of courage of authenticity to bring integrated listening to our thinking, to stop and question our lives, our actions and society's plan for us. Understand, the attitude of asking 'WHY' needs awareness, but we forget to ask the 'why'. We don't take our thoughts, words and deeds to the logical conclusion. It takes authenticity, the power of thinking, the inner strength to say to the world, 'Stop, I want to get off; I want to know why am I doing, what I am doing? I want to seek true inner bliss!'

It takes tremendous courage of authenticity to recognize the transitory nature of life and its limited offer of happiness, to say—'I want something more.' It takes enormous courage to complete with the materialism of the world to seek one's true purpose in life.

I tell you, if just the 'why' is kept alive, 'why am I feeling powerless?', 'why am I feeling tired', 'why am I feeling sick?', 'why am I depressed?'; just if the 'why' is strong enough to take you to the logical conclusion, our problems will be solved. If we just keep this one question alive, 'Why am I doing what I am doing?' and are able to take this one question to the logical conclusion in our life, I tell you, we will be enlightened. You will radiate enriching!

Arjuna is now thinking with integrity and questioning himself, his training and his purpose when faced with the task of fighting against his kinsmen. The scene from his chariot has taken him off balance! In his heart he knows that what he is about to do is correct. All of his training as a kṣatriya confirms this as well. But when faced with the reality of actually killing those who have been near and dear to him, he loses his will. He is feeling completely powerless. Why?

Arjuna is a courageous man. Only a courageous person will have the confidence to open himself up so transparently and expose his innermost fear patterns, his lack of integrity and inauthenticities and seek help. Arjuna was not depressed, he was confused. He could certainly differentiate between right and wrong. His sudden confusion grew out of his awareness of his parental and societal patterns that what he had been taught throughout his life, might be wrong! Fortunately for Arjuna, his charioteer is none other than Kṛṣṇa Himself, Lord of all beings and knower of all! Only He can see what is at the heart of Arjuna's grief. Only He could provide answers to Arjuna's doubts and completion to his dilemma.

Arjuna argues that the reason one would fight to gain power and wealth was for the sake of one's near and dear ones. However, his near and dear ones were the people with whom Arjuna should fight! Even if they killed him, he would not consider killing them at any cost, 'If I would not kill them for all the riches of the three worlds, why would I destroy them for the sake of earth, this one world, alone? Arjuna questioned Kṛṣṇa. When asking, Arjuna calls Kṛṣṇa as Madhusūdana, which means the slayer of the demon Madhu. Arjuna implies that Kṛṣṇa may be a destroyer, but Arjuna himself would not like to be one like Him.

Arjuna's dilemma had now become deeper and more complicated. He had now got into justifications as to why he should not kill; he began to justify his lack of integrity and authenticity. To any observer, his dilemma had validity. This is a common cunning, safe game we all play with ourselves. When the stakes are high in any competitive environment, when we don't want to expand to our peak capability, we play this inauthentic game. We fantasize about rewards far greater than what could possibly materialize. The more unrealistic and unlikely the reward, the easier it is to refuse it.

Arjuna is playing this same safe, inauthentic game. Understand, when we are authentic, we will commit words which express our maximum peak capacity, as per our understanding, and as per others' understanding of our peak capacity. When we unlock the power of thinking, we will be able to spontaneously focus our thoughts to achieve our highest potential.

Arjuna said he would not kill even if he were to be killed. This is just a spontaneous lie. I tell you, spontaneous lying means you feel powerless. You are inauthentic to yourself. It is Arjuna's own loss of identity that is bothering him, the loss of identity that would result from the destruction of his lineage. Arjuna then says that he would not consider killing his kinsmen and teachers, even if he were offered all the three worlds of Universe in return. Why then, he queries, would the reward of just this planet Earth be attractive to him?

Who was offering Arjuna the three worlds anyway? The notion was a figment of his overexcited imagination born out of his powerlessness. If Kṛṣṇa had turned around and offered Arjuna the control of the Universe, Arjuna's dilemma would have actually become far worse! However, posing it as a symbolic question as Arjuna did, made him look noble.

Arjuna is consoling himself with the idea that the rewards of winning this battle are too small and that even if he were to be offered control of the Universe, he would not be tempted. It is a safe position he is taking, since the chances of his being offered the control of the Universe are infinitely small. What matters is that it calms his bruised, powerless mind and keeps the focus off the real source of his fear.

Time and again, people play this safe game with themselves and others. It starts when we cannot face the truth with integrity and authenticity and therefore cannot tell the truth. We just give up on ourselves and go outof-integrity with our words and become inauthentic with our thinking. For the majority of us, our identity lies in the roles we play, the responsibilities we have, the worrying we do and the acceptance that we receive from others. Without these possessions and relationships to form the foundation of our personalities, without the foundation of 'mine,' we feel lost and have no 'I.' Like us, Arjuna found it better to invent a host of other inauthentic reasons to avoid facing the truth.

We create illusions in our mind about the situations we face, about how critical they are to our existence. Then we create fantasies in our minds about what is going to happen to us, be it an imagined good or difficulty. We do everything except being in integrity and authenticity with our space of positivity and possibility, and facing the present moment with completion.

As we will see later, facing the present moment with the space of completion, pūrṇatva; living the four spiritual principles of life— integrity, authenticity, responsibility and enriching, and awakening the four great inner powers is precisely what Kṛṣṇa forces Arjuna to do.

When Arjuna is able to surrender to Kṛṣṇa's teachings and brings completion to his root patterns, then his self-doubts and illusions dissolve. Arjuna then realizes the truth, satya of these sacred tattvas and reaches his highest possibility—living enlightenment, jīvan mukti. He understands what he needs to do and becomes a spiritual warrior, a pure instrument of Kṛṣṇa and goes about powerfully radiating responsibility, enriching himself and the world with Divine purpose.

1.36 What pleasure will we get by destroying the sons of Dhṛtarāṣṭra, Janārdana? Only sin will overcome us if we slay these wrongdoers.

1.37 It is not proper for us to kill the sons of Dhṛtarāṣṭra and our friends. How could we be happy by killing our own kinsmen, Mādhava?

1.38, 1.39 O Janārdana, although these men are consumed by greed and they see no fault in killing one's family or quarreling with friends, Why should we, who understand the evil of the destruction of a dynasty, not turn away from these acts?

Here is Arjuna's dilemma spoken plainly. He had two options and is looking to be convinced of one or the other. The first was that going to battle was wrong, especially against his kinsmen. Therefore he should cease and resist, walk away from the war before it starts. All his arguments up to this point were in this line of thinking. At the same time, Arjuna was open to the possibility that what he had set out to do was indeed correct, in which case he would go back into battle mode, as a true kṣatriya would do.

To begin with, had Arjuna been totally convinced that war against his kinsmen was wrong, he would not have come to the battlefield. It was his lack of integrity that raised within him the question of retreat from his duty. To Arjuna's credit, he listened to himself, to what his mind had to say and turned to the Master for guidance. He allowed Kṛṣṇa to speak into his listening. Understand, the whole spiritual life starts with authentic listening.

Arjuna's mind now brings up one more argument. Arju na agreed that Duryodhana and his allies were the aggressors and wrongdoers. Whatever they had done to him, his brothers and his wife was not pardonable, and they needed to be punished by the laws of the land. By all rights Arjuna was quite justified in killing those wrongdoers. 'But,' Arjuna asked, 'Would one wrong be corrected by another wrong? How can I be happy killing my kinsmen, however justified I might be in doing that? Their misdeeds cannot be remedied by my misdeed and that would only make me miserable.'

There are two incompletions central to Arjuna's dilemma.

The first incompletion is that of relationship. The problem that Arjuna faced is one that we all face when asked to do unpleasant things to people we know. It is always easier to criticize and punish people one does not know. To be faceless is to be fearless. With people one knows, there is a danger of breaking the relationship through perceived negative behavior, even when it may be fully justified. To face this incompletion in one's relationships, one must first develop detachment that allows action without worrying about the consequences. This detachment only comes from completion with every relationship with oneself and with others in one's life. One follows the path of completion and leaves the result to the process. As long as the path is right, whatever destination the path takes one to, will also be right.

Listen. Vedic civilization is established on completion. You realize your potentiality, you establish yourself in the space of completion, you are God! Understand, only if we start living completion, we will understand the quality of life. I tell you, when there is incompletion, your life is stolen away from you.

Let me define Completion.

To overcome this isolation, this incompletion we need to realize that no man is an island. We are all connected at the spiritual level.

When we complete with everything, animate and inanimate, we will experience the space of non-duality, advaita, where there is no one, no two but infinite, everything is infinitely powerful. See, relationships are nothing but our own extensions. Relationships are not outside; they are just our own extensions. The 'you' extended outside you is our relationships. Completing with all our extensions,we will learn to complete the

incomplete 'you,' if present in other.

When we arrive on planet Earth, we are complete, integrated beings. We are open to all possibilities. Over time, we build walls believing that these walls will keep us safe and that the connections that we have established inside the walls are ours to keep. We create a delusory cognition that we possess everything within the wall. Slowly, the open space we started with becomes a maze and we are lost inside! The islands need to be bridged. We need to complete with everyone, with everything instead of isolating them and competing. Competition does not ensure survival; completion does. Understand, with competition you may have survival success, but you will never expand. Success in crisis moments is only survival success, not life success. Success in life happens only with completion.

The other incompletion that Arjuna faces is the problem of directness of action. In a war of this type, Arjuna faced transparent consequences of his action. If he shot an arrow and killed a kinsman, death was a direct result of his action. Arjuna did not have the luxury of remote destruction. He had to look the victim in the eye before releasing his arrow. He was aware of whom he was killing and why. He felt the destruction within himself when he killed someone else.

Please listen! Life is continuously happening in front of us. Arjuna is frightened in front of the eyes of life; from his disowned self, his relationships which are his forgotten extensions. This anxiety, fear, shivering is nothing but the expression of the incompletions Arjuna was carrying.

Arjuna was affected by the combination of these two delusory incompletions: that of being connected by kinship to his enemies and the fact that he had to kill them directly and personally. It affected him because he was not a Duryodhana, who was in self-denial about the consequences of his actions. It affected Arjuna because he was not a Kṛṣṇa who would have taken responsibility for his and everyone's good or bad actions, being in the powerful space of completion at all times. Arjuna was neither Kṛṣṇa nor Duryodhana. His mind was doubting that he might be doing wrong, but his mind had not yet ascended to be able to complete with his kinship bonds. This was Arjuna's dilemma. This was Arjuna's incompletion.

Earlier Arjuna said that even if his kinsmen had made big mistakes, he should not repeat the same mistakes; even if offered the entire Universe. He said that his kinsmen blinded by greed for power, were in darkness that saw nothing wrong in destroying one another and their own kinsmen. He asked Kṛṣṇa, 'Shouldn't we be distancing ourselves from these people and their attitudes, we who are not ignorant, not in darkness and not blinded?'

Now, he condemned the same kinsmen, his svajanam that he had referred to so passionately a few moments earlier; the same people who he claimed to hold in great respect and affection and therefore did not wish to kill. He shifted gears now and moved from the position of not killing them because they were his flesh and blood to a greater moral position of not wishing to kill them because it was morally reprehensible.

Arjuna said that destruction of the lineage, the dynasty, is evil, and that he recoiled from such a deed even though his opponents had no such compunction, blinded as they were by greed. Arjuna's dilemma now jumps to a larger arena. It was now a matter of tradition and respect for the lineage that could be traced back to the moon and divine beings, and an old, established tradition that would be a sin to dismantle and destroy. It's no longer about individuals; it is about the destruction of a race that had existed for thousands of years. How could he be expected to carry out such a horrible act, he pleaded.

In Arjuna's mind this was a big self-doubt. Killing a few individuals, even if kinsmen, was a mistake. Killing a whole generation was a far bigger sin, and now he was expected to destroy a whole race, the foundations of a proud and legendary dynasty. How could the future generations forgive him? This was how the argument of Arjuna's dilemma shifted. His incompletions led to greater delusory incompletions, from individual to racial destruction. When Arjuna talks about the threat to his dynasty, it arises out of a fear of his own mortality.

He has asked, 'Even if I am to die, as I must, should I not ensure the continuance of my dynasty that bears my signature, my identity, my DNA?'

Arjuna is pleading with Kṛṣṇa, 'Please tell me, am I right? Please tell me, should I withdraw from this battle?' Arjuna is now violently asking for a single instruction to escape the fear of losing his identity on which his mamakāra, inner image is built. Understand, Arjuna's identity is based on his kṣatriya up-bringing, the mentality of a warrior. Asking for one single instruction comes from his mentality of fighting, of violence that always excludes. In a fight who is the winner? Only one. In survival instinct, who is the winner? Only one.

As we will see, Kṛṣṇa never gives him a single instruction but gives him inspiration. He gives him the whole inspiration based science of Gītā śāstra, so he can find his own answers and he raises himself by himself!

1.40 With the destruction of dynasty, the eternal family tradition is destroyed too, and the rest of the family becomes involved in immoral practices.

1.41 When immoral practices become common in the family, O Kṛṣṇa, the women of the family become corrupted, And from the degradation of womanhood, O descendant of Vṛṣṇi, arise social problems.

1.42 As these social problems increase, the family and those who destroy the family tradition are cast in hell, As there is no offering of food and water to their ancestors.

1.43 Due to the evil deeds of the destroyers of family tradition, All kinds of rituals and practices of caste and family are devastated.

1.44 O Janārdana, I have heard that those who destroy family traditions dwell always in hell. 1.45 Alas, we are preparing to commit greatly sinful acts by killing our kinsmen, driven by the desire to enjoy royal happiness. 1.46 I would consider it better for the Kauravas to kill me unarmed and unresisting, rather than for me to fight them. 1.47 Sañjaya said: Having said this on the battlefield, Arjuna cast aside his bow and arrows and sat down on the chariot, his mind overwhelmed with grief.

By now, Arjuna had become desperate. His arguments seemed weak, even to him. They include the tragic impact this war would have on future generations and the entire Kuru race. Arjuna starts quoting the scriptures of social laws to explain to Kṛṣṇa the evil his destructive actions would bring to the noble lineage, which would lead to the decline in commitment to the rites and rituals that make society civilized and moral. He then elaborated upon these immoral and unrighteous acts.

He said that women in the family would become unchaste and result in children of mixed castes, which would be undesirable. Those who destroy family traditions would ruin all sacred practices and such people had no place to go but hell. To understand what Arjuna said, it is important to understand the origin of the caste tradition in Hindu religion.

At the age of five, a child was given to the care of a spiritual Master by the parents in the ancient Hindu education system called gurukul. The Master became mother, father and teacher to the child. In the gurukul itself, the science of completion was taught to the child. The child grows up as a complete being. The child's natural aptitudes formed the basis for the caste classification, varṇāśrama. Brāhmaṇas (priests/teachers), kṣatriyas (kings/warriors), vaiśyas (tradesmen) and śūdras (service) are these four classes.

The Vedic gurukul system was not concerned with whether the child's parents were brāhmaṇa or vaiśya. Irrespective of parentage, children were taught the Gāyatri mantra at age seven, which allowed their natural intelligence to blossom. If the Guru found that the child had the natural aptitude to learn the scriptures, he would be trained as a brāhmaṇa. Others were trained to enrich through materially relevant arts and sciences to re-enter the world with a mature and complete personality.

Over time, this caste system was corrupted through human greed. Those who believed that they were doing more responsible work, and therefore were more respected, such as the brāhmaṇas and kṣatriyas, decided to pass on their caste qualification to their children as if it was their birthright. Such a practice had no scriptural sanction.

Arjuna's doubts about caste pollution had no scriptural base or merit. What he referred to became the societal norm because of human greed, the collective root patterns of society. There were many instances of caste mixture even in the great Kuru lineage that Arjuna claimed would be destroyed. Satyavati, his great grandmother, was a fisherman's daughter. Arjuna himself had wives who were not of kṣatriya lineage by birth. He talked as if mired in total confusion when he linked practice of rites and rituals with morality and chastity. His logic was distorted.

Rites and rituals, as prescribed in the scriptures, are an expression of one's inner completion. Completion is not created by blind practice of rites and rituals. Arjuna voiced the sentiments of organized religion and priesthood, which derive their power and monetary base from such rites and rituals. This is how, in each culture and religion, the power of the priestly class was established, as if they were the sole mediators to God.

Arjuna talked about ancestral worship and implied that the offspring of mixed caste have no right to make offerings to their ancestors, leaving them lost in the realms beyond death. It is the confusion that has prevailed over the ages that Arjuna captured and presented. He raises doubts on behalf of mankind and seeks clarification. There are no ancestral spirits waiting to be pacified by us. If the spirit is enlightened it merges with the infinite energy. If not, it gets reborn within three kṣanas, three moments.

Hell and heaven are in our minds. They are psychological spaces, not geographical places. We are in hell when we are depressed, guilty, and in suffering and incompletion. We are in heaven when we are in completion and feel and express love, joy and gratitude.

Arjuna is not a fool; he understands all this perfectly. Yet, he voices his doubts as if ignorant, as if confused. He acts out of compassion for humanity when he articulates these self-doubts so that the Divine, Kṛṣṇa can answer and destroy the root of the self doubt. A thoughtful man of integrity like Arjuna cannot talk about the lack of chastity of women without blaming the men who are equally responsible. He reflects here the superior attitude of men over the ages, those who have treated women with undue superiority. The doubts he voices are those of the society he lives in, and those doubts have not changed in thousands of years.

Now, Arjuna was ready to give up on himself. He had collapsed both psychologically and physiologically. His cognition was totally imbalanced and he was now completely powerless. He was all set to run away from the battlefield and escape from the reality of his responsibility. He had convinced himself through his own illusory arguments that what he had embarked upon was evil, nothing but evil, and therefore he wanted no part of it. He said, 'I am ready to lay down arms and be defenseless. Let Duryodhana and his men kill me.'

For a kṣatriya to say this means one of two things: His act is one of total surrender, or powerlessness of extreme confusion. A kṣatriya warrior, a supreme warrior such as Arjuna knows no fear. It is neither fear of death nor fear of injury that compels him to say what he did.

Arjuna was not in a space of total surrender yet. Nor was he in the space of ahiṁsā, nonviolence. He was not in tune with the Cosmic Consciousness the space of non-duality, advaita, the experiential expression of infinity to say that—'Killing others is killing myself, as I feel they are one with me.' His arguments about not killing his kinsmen being like killing himself were born out of his incompletions,and not out of self-realization or completion.

Arjuna's desperation was becoming extreme. He was an intelligent, thoughtful man, who was torn between his responsibilities as a kṣatriya prince, and the scriptural codes of morality. His distress, his delusion, his powerlessness was now complete. He sat down, unable to bear the weight of his emotions. He put down his bow and arrows, which signified that he was out of the battle. He was as far away from reality as he could possibly get.

Arjuna, the greatest of warriors and men of his time, Bharataṛṣabha, was in the depths of despair due to the conflict between his inner and outer identities, his upbringing and value systems, his root patterns. Arjuna, at this point, was no example of a true kṣatriya. Arjuna, now being human, was a true example of mankind. He was torn between darkness and light, between patterns and possibility. He was experiencing deep conflict between the unconscious patterns that were driving him and the possibility, the reality of what he ought to do. The clarity that would come about with the grace of the greatest Master, would be his Enlightenment, his complete Completion.

The darkness that surrounded Arjuna at this stage was māyā, the illusion that prevents us from perceiving the Truth of Reality that pervades all our experiences. Yā mā iti māyā—that which is not real but appears as absolute is māyā. Māyā is not unreal in the sense that it does not exist. Māyā truly exists as reality. It veils, it covers reality, the ultimate Truth—the truth of our inner divinity, our infinite powerfulness; and therefore it is unreal, an illusion.

Had Arjuna been enlightened as Kṛṣṇa, he would not have been tormented by the play of his māyā. Had Arjuna been a Duryodhana, or even a Bhīma, whose individual consciousness was not awakened, he would have accepted the māyā without question. But, Arjuna is Nara, he is intelligent, partially awakened, he is a seeker. He is in the presence of the greatest of all Masters. He is struggling to rid himself of his māyā and seek clarity.

It is Arjuna's root pattern that created the māyā of powerlessness in him. His own unaligned identities and his own identification with who he was, along with his conviction that he should preserve his lineage— all these delusory incompletions created the illusion in him that he was something other than who he was. These gaps between his identities created the self-doubt in him that he should do something other than what he was there to do. Ādī Śaṅkara says beautifully: If you imbibe even a little of Bhagavad Gītā, if you drink even a drop of Gaṅgā water, if you think even once about that great Master Śrī Kṛṣṇa, you will never have to face death.

Thus ends the first chapter named Arjunaviṣāda Yogaḥ, 'The Yoga of Arjuna's Dilemma,' of Bhagavad Gītā Upaniṣad, Brahmavidyā Yogaśāstra, the scripture of yoga dealing with the science of the Absolute in the form of Śrī Kṛṣṇārjuna-saṁvād, dialogue between Śrī Kṛṣṇa, Arjuna.

It is here that we enter into the real Gītā. It is from here that Bhagavān or God, Nārāyaṇa starts speaking and singing the Gītopaniṣad into the listening of Nara Arjuna, and through Arjuna into the listening of the whole of humanity.

Until now Kṛṣṇa was speaking as a man, as Vāsudeva Kṛṣṇa, in His human form, but it is only from here that Kṛṣṇa sings as Parabrahma Kṛṣṇa, in His divine state as Bhagavān, the universal Kṛṣṇa.

Understand, only an intelligent man will allow the other person to speak. Only a man of completion will provide integrated listening to himself and others. We all speak continuously to each other, but a conversation does not really happen. When the other person speaks we do not listen; we are busy preparing our own reply. We never speak into the listening of others, we just speak into the non-listening of others! We need intelligence; we need integrity to allow the other person to speak into our listening. In the first chapter, Kṛṣṇa does not say a word to interrupt Arjuna. He allows Arjuna to speak fully into His listening for one whole chapter of Arjunaviśāda Yogaḥ. He keeps quiet, even on seeing the depth of Arjuna's confusion and depression. He consciously analyzes the root of Arjuna's thoughts, his root thoughts patterns to determine the platform of powerlessness upon which Arjuna is standing.

Please listen, the moment you start talking to somebody, when you don't have listening, you start coming to your own conclusion even before the information is cognized in you, either by rejecting that person or taking that person as a big threat. Both will lead you to suffering.

That is why the very first step of Hindu spiritual practice is Śṛavana, Integrated Listening.** It is possible to become a successful businessman just by studying the first few chapters of Gītā. You can reach the peak possibility of your profession and of your life just by learning the art of integrated listening from Śrī Kṛṣṇa. Once you provide your integrated listening to yourself and others, you will automatically be able to speak into the listening of others and thus communicate to enrich yourself and commune to enrich others as well.

When you experience the words you utter to you and to others as the extension of your life, they directly affect you. When the words uttered by you are not listened to, the completion is disturbed. I tell you, if the person to whom you are talking to is not in the space of listening, the ideas you want to express will never be delivered. It may lead to an argument, but it may never lead to intelligence transfer.

Listen! Information transfer is argument. Intelligence transfer is Listening. In arguments, information can be transferred, but never intelligence. Only in integrated listening can intelligence be transferred.

In Vedānta, the first principle is Śṛavana—Integrated Listening; the second principle is Manana— Intranalyzing, meaning analyzing the truth for the sake of internalizing it not for rejecting it; and the third principle is Nididhyāsana—Living and radiating the truth!

Any transmission of knowledge, energy or experience happens between a Master and disciple only when the disciple gives his or her listening! Even Vedic Ṛṣis start with this chant: śrunvantu viśve amṛtasya putrāḥ— Oh! Sons of Immortality, please listen to me!

Here, Kṛṣṇa is giving His integrated listening to Arjuna! He is interested in the real problem and not in expressing what He knows. He wants Arjuna to learn the ability to give integrated listening to himself, to have the clarity of mind. He is interested in enriching him to find a solution to his own problem. He allows Arjuna to speak so that He can listen and transmit the ultimate knowledge and experience of completion to him.

You can open up to THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM at three levels. You can converse and convey through words and THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM will listen. At the next level you can communicate from the heart in silence; you can visualize instead of verbalizing in speech. Finally, you can commune in silence through Upaniṣad and THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM will grasp this even more powerfully.

Here Kṛṣṇa allows Arjuna to verbalize, He allows him to speak into His pure listening, so that to begin with, Arjuna himself will develop the ability to have integrated listening and understand his problem. Once Arjuna cognizes and expresses his confusion, he can relapse into silence and commune with the Master of completion in the space of Upaniṣad.

2.1 Sañjaya said: As Arjuna's eyes overflowed with tears of pity and despair, Madhusudana (Kṛṣṇa) spoke to him thus.

2.2 Bhagavān Kṛṣṇa says: Where from have these impurities descended on you at this critical time, Arjuna!

You behave unlike a nobleman and this will keep you away from realization.

2.3 Do not yield to fear, Pārtha! It does not befit you. Drop this powerlessness of heart and stand up,

O Parantapa, destroyer of enemy.

Arjuna was distraught with pity and despair. His pity was for his opposition that consisted of his svajanam, kinsmen, elders, teachers, relatives and friends. He despaired at the thought of what would happen if he did have to kill them. He had collapsed in his chariot and his bow and arrow had slipped from his hands.

Kṛṣṇa allowed Arjuna to exhaust himself, physically, emotionally and spiritually. He listened to him carefully, completely. Kṛṣṇa wanted to give Arjuna time to open his mind, heart and being to Him, Arjuna's friend, guide and master, so that His answers would penetrate Arjuna's very being.

Then He spoke for the first time, as if opening His being directly. Bhagavān Kṛṣṇa says, 'My dear Arjuna, how have you acquired these impurities? They do not at all befit a man who knows the value of life. They lead not to higher planes but to infamy, akīrti karam arjuna.'

śrī bhagavān uvāca kutas tvā kaśmalam idaṁ viṣame samupasthitam I anārya juṣṭam asvargyam akīrti karam arjuna II 2.2

This verse is connected to the next one.

'O Pārtha! Do not yield to this degrading impotence. It does not befit you. Give up such petty powerlessness of heart and arise, O Parantapa, destroyer of enemy.'

klaibyaṁ mā sma gamaḥ pārtha naitat tvayy upapadyate I kṣudraṁ hṛdaya daurbalyaṁ tyaktvottiṣṭha parantapa II 2.3

Kṛṣṇa gives the direction to the whole Gītā with this one truth to awaken Arjuna from his delusory incompletions. Kṛṣṇa is the true Master and does not beat around the bush. Understand that Kṛṣṇa is not a philosopher; He addresses the dilemma of Arjuna straightaway.

Kṛṣṇa asks Arjuna directly, 'How did such impurities, such incompletions come upon you? They are not for a man like you. They will not lead you to higher planes but only defame you.' In the next verse He asks Arjuna to give up this powerlessness and asks him to arise, addressing him as 'Parantapa, destroyer of the enemy.'

Kṛṣṇa knows Arjuna's root thought pattern. Please understand that Arjuna is not depressed because of a spiritual search. It is just that he does not want a solution; he wants only support.

Understand, asking for solutions and asking for support are two different things. What Arjuna needs is support, not a solution. This is why Kṛṣṇa does not speak of spirituality in these two verses. Arjuna's root thought pattern originates from fear and worry. His maṇipūraka cakra (navel center) and svādiṣṭhāna cakra (being center), energy centers that get locked due to worry and fear, are now completely locked! Because of his fear pattern, he has deep seated incompletions, stress and worry.

Kṛṣṇa addresses Arjuna's deep fear and powerlessness straightaway without any philosophy, and asks him to give up his foolish weakness and get up and fight—tyaktvottiṣṭha parantapa. He does not offer any consolation, just a straightforward scolding, and a slap to awaken him!

If Arjuna had been in a mood of stotra, meaning devotional surrender that he reaches only later on, these two verses would have served as sūtra or techniques for him. Had he been without fear and expressed full faith and devotion in Kṛṣṇa, these two verses would have been enough to wake him up and stand powerfully.

At this point, Arjuna is in the state to be intellectually convinced and Kṛṣṇa employs śāstra as the right approach. Since he was not in the mood of stotra, not yet ready with devotion and faith, Kṛṣṇa had to create the śāstra or method, to bring him to the stotra state. The whole issue was due to his root pattern of fear plus worry and powerlessness because of this fear.

All our depression, worry patterns are nothing but the root``` pattern of a deep fear of life, a deep selfdoubt, fear of expansion and fear of losing something. You need to stand up and complete with your root thought patterns to be rid of them. Please understand, even your ignorance is nothing but your fear of expansion. Many times, you continue to pretend to be in ignorance, because of your fear of failure.

There are many levels of fear: fear of losing our wealth and status, fear of losing a limb or our health, fear of losing our near and dear ones and fear of the unknown or death. That is why Kṛṣṇa says that Arjuna is not behaving as an ārya, a word that can be interpreted as a nobleman; an integrated human, not a particular race or caste. Vedic literature says that an ārya is one who is evolved, cultured, integrated and authentic, a prince amongst men.

Arjuna is confronted with all the four fears: fear that he may lose whatever he possesses, that he may be maimed in the war, that he may lose his near and dear ones, and fourth, that he may lose his very life. These fears have in turn led to his powerlessness of heart. Understand, all your fears, all your anxieties, all your patterns are directed only in one line—fear of your possibilities!

Your bigness frightens you. You always believe that you are suffocated by your smallness. NO! You are suffocated by your bigness! Whenever bigness is demanded of you, whenever you feel you are being 'forced' to expand, you shrink even further into your comfort zone. Arjuna's tiredness, his weakness, his powerlessness all these are nothing but the resistance he has to seeing his own bigness!

That is why, when someone tells you that you are weak, poor and a sinner, it is so easy to accept it. But if someone tells you that you are Divine, you are powerful, you are complete, your whole identity starts trembling with fear! Arjuna trembles and collapses totally fearing his bigness, shrinking into his weakheartedness!

But life always demands your expansion, because expansion is the natural law of life. Here, Kṛṣṇa, the source of life, demands Arjuna to stand up and expand into his powerfulness, and give up his degrading powerlessness unbefitting an ārya prince, who is also famous as parantapa, conqueror of enemies.

But Arjuna is carrying such a deep fear of life, especially fear of life in the form of other people—because people are the most living expression of Life! The whole Kaurava army and his dear ones are the people who now represent his deepest fears of life.

Listen! The more you engage with life, the greater the expansion that will be demanded of you. Whenever you are feeling weak, tired, and powerless, the first thing you should do is this: immediately take on ten responsibilities and commit to fulfill them within an impossibly short time! Shake your inner space so powerfully with that commitment that there will be no way for weakness and tiredness to grow inside you.

Kṛṣṇa directly addresses this weakness, powerlessness in Arjuna and the fear of life in the form of his kinsmen with the śāstra, the explanation of wisdom that is directed to the head, the intellect. He shakes Arjuna's inner space demanding of him to take up the responsibility to stand up and commit to powerfully uproot all his impossibilities, and fight— tyaktvottiṣṭha parantapa!

That is why again and again they are doubted. Arjuna is Nara, human being who resists his expansion, and Śrī Kṛṣṇa is Nārāyaṇa, Divine Incarnate who reminds him of his highest possibility of expansion—that he is God, that Nara is the reflection of Nārāyaṇa, who is mirroring the infinite inner space of God!

It is the authority with which Kṛṣṇa is seen transmitting the Gītā that makes it a scripture. 'I am the Divine,' says Kṛṣṇa. 'If you believe in Me, you too shall realize your inner divinity.' It is this profound and yet simple message that has resounded so deeply in the hearts, minds and beings of generations of Hindus, in turn establishing the scriptural sanctity of the Gītā.

Here all the verses of the Gītā are reduced to just two verses by Kṛṣṇa.

He straightaway addresses and completes the root pattern where Arjuna is stuck, that is in his need for name and fame or rajas. A man who is centered on satva, goodness, who has neither greed nor lethargy but a neutral attitude, will work out of compassion. A man who is centered on rajas will work only for name and fame. A man who is centered on tamas, lethargy, will work only for sensual pleasures.

Duryodhana works only through tamas, which explains his cruel and gross behavior. Dharmarāja Yudhiṣṭira works on satva, out of compassion. Here Arjuna is centered on rajas, therefore he is working only for name and fame. This is why Kṛṣṇa asks him not to work in this way as it would ultimately bring Arjuna a bad name, akīrti karam arjuna. This is how He straightaway puts His hand on the tumor, the tumor that is the subtle root pattern working within Arjuna.

All Western philosophies begin with logical analysis and end with the conclusion. All Eastern processes begin with the conclusion and then give the analysis. Eastern masters are compassionate. They first give us the option of grasping the solution, if we have the intelligence. They expect us to transform with just the trust in them. If we don't have this qualification of grasping and trusting, they have no other option but to go into detailed explanation, they start the regular process.

Here Kṛṣṇa tries the first method of sudden enlightenment, the immediate liberation, the ultimate possibility but Arjuna is not mature enough to receive it or comprehend it. So Kṛṣṇa now starts the process of explaining it to him stepby-step.

2.4 Arjuna says:

O Madhusūdana (killer of demon, Madhu), how can I oppose in battle, Bhīśma and Droṇa, who are worthy of my worship?

2.5 I would rather beg for my food in this world than kill the most noble of teachers.

If I kill them, all my enjoyment of wealth and desires will be stained with blood.

2.6 I cannot say which is better; their defeating us or us defeating them. We do not wish to live after slaying the sons of Dhṛtaṛāṣṭra who stand before us.

2.7 My heart is overwhelmed with pity and my mind is confused about what my duty is. I beg of You, please tell me what is best for me. I am your disciple. Instruct me, as I seek refuge in You.

2.8 Even if I were to attain unrivalled dominion and prosperity on Earth or even lordship over the Gods, How would that remove this sorrow that burns my senses?

Despite what Kṛṣṇa had said with total clarity, that Arjuna should get up and fight, Arjuna now recounts all his previous arguments. It is as if he had not listened to Kṛṣṇa at all.

He once again implores Kṛṣṇa, 'You, as the Lord of the Universe, have the right to destroy what you please. As the Lord, You destroyed the demons Madhu and Keśin and many other enemies. How can I, a mere mortal, be bold enough to wage war against my grandfather and my teacher, with the intent to kill them? They are ones I should worship, not destroy. I shall be condemned if I fight them.'

Arjuna is now pleading Kṛṣṇa, 'Oh Lord, leave me now! I will beg and eat becoming a Sannyāsi.' He continues, 'It is better for me to seek alms as an ascetic or even a beggar than kill these elders—śreyo bhoktuṁ bhaikṣyam apīha loke (2.5). Once my hands are stained with their blood, how can I enjoy worldly pleasures? I am confused as to which would be better, for them to slay me or for me to slay them, yadvā jayema yadivā no jayeyuḥ (2.6). How can we live after slaying our kinsmen and elders?— yān eva hatvā na jijīviṣāmas.'

Understand, Bhagavān is not against Arjuna's Sannyāsa. He does not want Arjuna to take Sannyās out of powerlessness.

Arjuna says, 'Oh Lord, leave me. I will beg and eat—bhoktuṁ bhaikṣyam.' No! I tell you, Arjuna would not have become a sannyāsī. He would have gone and asked for food in a royal way, 'Hey, give me food.' If somebody doesn't give, he would have picked up his gāṇḍiva bow and arrow to shoot the person for his food.

To become a Sannyāsi, Śrī Kṛṣṇa says, 'Go to Sannyāsa out of completion.' Bhagavān is only saying one thing, 'Out of completion, take any decision. Out of completion, take any decision!'

Listen. Bhagavān denies Arjuna even his decision to take Sannyāsa because Arjuna takes that decision out of powerless pattern. He accepts Arjuna's decision to fight, because he took the decision out of powerfulness, completion! Whether it is Sannyās or fight, powerlessness never leads your life to any next steps.

Arjuna says further, 'Now I am confused about my duty and have lost all composure because of misery and weakness—kārpaṇya doṣhopahata svabhāvaḥ (2.7). I can see no solution to my dilemma. Even if I slay these people and gain control over the earth, or even control over the heavens,

what good will it do me? In this condition, I ask you to tell me, for certain, what is best for me, *yat śreyaḥ syān niścitaṁ brūhi tanme*. Now I am your disciple and the soul is surrendered unto you. Please instruct me—*śiṣyas te'haṁ sādhi māṁ tvāṁ prapannam* (2.7).'

I must now tell you an important truth.

Here Arjuna says, 'My soul is surrendered unto you—*māṁ tvāṁ prapannam*.' This is a lie. Had his soul been truly surrendered to Kṛṣṇa, he would simply have followed what Kṛṣṇa said and would not have waited for an intellectual explanation.

Arjuna says his soul is surrendered to Kṛṣṇa but when Kṛṣṇa asks him to do His bidding, he is not ready to do so and is confused! Surrender out of confusion is not surrender, as you do not even know if you are doing the right thing.

• Here Arjuna surrenders only verbally as he says that he is confused, that his mind is bewildered, sammūḍha cetāh. You must either do what you think is right or do as the Master instructs. Here Arjuna wants the Master to say what he wants to hear, not what the Master wants to say. So, although Arjuna says he has surrendered, he has not done so.
• Kṛṣṇa, fully aware of Arjuna's dilemma, moves forward in his mission to destroy Arjuna's identity, the root pattern. The Guru, Master is a surgeon who removes the cancer of ego, the root thought pattern. This is what Kṛṣṇa does throughout the Gītā dialogue. To give Arjuna credit, he stays through this surgery. Many weaker men would have run away from the operation theatre, this battlefield, with no desire to let go of their identities. Arjuna's greatness lies in his integrity, his powerful determination, his decision to listen to his Master and be guided by Him.

So, Arjuna implores his Master, 'Kṛṣṇa, please tell me what to do. I am your disciple. You are my refuge.'

Arjuna's integrity lies also in not making any decision when he is feeling powerless. When you are in the space of powerlessness, the only one decision you have to make is to come out of powerlessness. No other decision should be made. When you are in powerlessness, any decision made leads to more and more powerlessness, more and more suffering.

In his deepest powerless moments, the only decision Arjuna takes is to come out of his powerlessness. He declares to Kṛṣṇa that he is His disciple and exposes his inauthenticies to Kṛṣṇa. It is this readiness to surrender to the Master that brings completion to Arjuna and enriches him to take the responsibility to win the war, which in reality is the war within himself. This is the war that each one of us is fighting each day with our powerlessness, if we are truly aware. This is the war that we need to fight to drop our root pattern, our mind, and the identity that binds us to all the bondages upon this earth.

Listen! Whatever you think is yours and whatever you think is you, is different from the truth. It is the Master who can lead you through the path of self-completion, as Kṛṣṇa is now leading Arjuna. To be led, you need the attitude of surrender, the decision to surrender your powerlessness.

2.9 Sañjaya said:

Guḍākeśa (Arjuna) then said to Hṛṣīkeśa (Kṛsṇa), 'Govinda, I shall not fight,' and fell silent.

2.10 Then, Hṛṣīkeśa, Kṛṣṇa smilingly spoke the following words to the griefstricken Arjuna, as they were placed

in the midst of both armies.

You grieve for those who should not be grieved for and yet, you speak words of wisdom.

The wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead.

• 2.12 Never was there a time when I did not exist; nor did you, nor all these rulers, And nor shall any of us ever cease to be hereafter.

• 2.13 Just as the spirit in this body passes through childhood, youth and old age, so does it pass into another body; the man centered within himself does not fear this, or deluded by this .

Even though it is written here in the past tense, I feel Kṛṣṇa should always be addressed in the present tense. He is still relevant, present to each of us today. We cannot say, 'Kṛṣṇa was' but 'Kṛṣṇa is', not 'Kṛṣṇa said' but 'Kṛṣṇa says.'

Once again, having lamented about what he is being forced to do, and not wishing to do what he is expected to do, Arjuna, like a petulant child sits down saying, 'Govinda, I am not going to fight, na yotsya iti govindam (2.9).' It is as if Arjuna is waiting to be persuaded. He is seeking an explanation.

Kṛṣṇa says to him gently and smilingly, 'While speaking learned words, you are mourning for what is not worthy of grief—aśocyān anvāśocas tvaṁ prajñā-vādāṁś ca bhāṣase. Those who are wise lament neither for the living nor for the dead—gatāsūn agatāsūṁś ca nānuśocanti paṇḍitāḥ (2.11).'

Again, Kṛṣṇa addresses Arjuna's incompletion directly, 'O Arjuna! You speak as if you are intelligent, enlightened, prajñā-vādāṁś.' You speak the words without having experienced them. Therefore, your words do not carry conviction. Your emotion, your being, shows that you are not enlightened, that you have not understood. A truly enlightened person will never worry for the living or the dead.' If you worry for somebody living or dead, you cannot be an intelligent person. What is death and life after all? There are thousands, rather millions, who have lived and gone.

See the brilliance of Śrī Kṛṣṇa! He is so soaked in the space of completion. The moment Kṛṣṇa opens His mouth, the first truth that comes out from Him is Sāṅkhya Yogaḥ. I can be sure that Kṛṣṇa is filled with Kapila.

Kṛṣṇa is the greatest follower of Sāṅkhya Yogaḥ. Please understand, when you are in a crisis, the first few words you utter are the words with which you solve your own problem. When somebody asks you for advice, what comes up first? The words that you use to enrich yourself, will only come out to enrich others.

Sañjaya says Kṛṣṇa was smiling as He uttered these words. Kṛṣṇa must have been laughing at Arjuna. 'You fool; you pretend to be wise and quote the scriptures.Who do you think you are quoting the scriptures to? What can you understand of what I Myself have said?'

Kṛṣṇa continues: 'Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you and all these kings, and never in the future shall any of us cease to be.'

na tv evāhaṁ jātu nāsaṁ na tvaṁ neme janādhipāḥ I na caiva na bhaviṣyāmaḥ sarve vayam ataḥ paraṁ II 2.12

With this verse begins the essence of the whole Gītā. This is ātmajñāna, Self-Realization, the knowledge of completion. If you can understand this one verse, you can become enlightened straightaway and enter into eternal bliss.

If you think our souls will also die with our bodies, you are wrong. We were there before our birth and will remain after death. It is not true that any of us will not be in the future.

Listen. You existed in the past, exist in the present and will exist in the future. Your face and body may change but you continue to exist. Then why do we think we will die and why do we fear death? If what Kṛṣṇa says is true, why are we worried about this life and about death? You need to first understand the concept of the past, present and future to enable you to understand what Kṛṣṇa says.

Let me explain this concept of time first.Time is like a shaft continuously moving from the future on the right into the past on the left (see diagram). The future is on your right and the past is on your left. The future is continuously moving into the past; every moment and every second it is turning into the past. The present is the point where the future and the past meet.

Your mind as such is nothing but movements between the past and the future.

You cannot have any thoughts if you stop thinking about the past and the future. Your thoughts consist of nothing but the constant movements between the past and the future. The more your thoughts shift from past to future or future to past, the higher the frequency of thoughts. The less you shift from past to future or future to past, the lesser the number of thoughts. Try to think of something in the present, you will find that you cannot. You can think of it only by taking it into the past or future. You are either worrying about the future or remembering the past.

The higher the frequency of thoughts, the more you are caught in the physical and material world. For example, if you have 100 Thoughts Per Second (TPS,) it means you have jumped 100 times back and forth between the past and future in one second! If you have 80 TPS, it means you have jumped 80 times between these two dimensions. The higher the frequency, the more you will be away from the present and more problems you have. If the number of thoughts reduces, you fall into the present moment.

The past, present and future, all the three put together are eternal, Nitya or Ātman**.** Only when you come to the present moment do you experience Ātman—your true Self, but as of now you are constantly shuttling between the past and future. When the number of thoughts reduces, you will not even be aware of the passage of time. For example, when you are with someone you love, even two or three hours will seem like a short while. But, when you are with someone whose company is boring, even a short time seems very long.

Time is more psychological than chronological. That is why, in our scriptures or Vedas, we have the word kṣaṇa to describe the unit of time. Kṣaṇa does not denote one second, but is defined as the gap or time interval between two thoughts. The larger the kṣaṇa or the gap between two thoughts, the more in the present we are. Each person's kṣaṇa will be different depending on how busy his mind is! When our TPS is lower, we will naturally be in completion, in ecstasy, in bliss.

Kṛṣṇa says beautifully, 'You were there in the past, you are in the present and you will be in the future;

you do not die. You existed before birth and will remain after death. Whatever dies, can never live. Whatever lives can never die.' When Kṛṣṇa says, 'You are the eternal soul,' He means that as a being, you are beyond time.

Here, your deep consciousness says that something is living in you. This quality you wrongly attribute to your body and mind. You are not the body or the mind. As long as you are caught in the past and the future incompletions, you think that you are the body-mind. The moment you come down to the present moment, you are in the eternal space of completion, you experience that you are beyond the body, beyond the mind.

Completion is the only methodology where you can complete with your past and future incompletions. You need to know that when you do completion now, don't think that only your future will be in completion and complete. No! Even your past gets altered. Even your past becomes complete! The moment you create the space of completion, what Kṛṣṇa declares, 'you are the eternal soul, beyond your body and mind,' becomes reality in your life.

Kṛṣṇa is established in the space of Sāṅkhya knowledge. Kapila Muni, the founder of Sāṅkhya, does not elaborately talk about God, but he talks about the methodology to reach God. Sāṅkhya does not speak about God, because completion itself is given the place of God. Please understand, Sāṅkhya does not have the system of God because the methodology to reach God is made as God. It is a lifestyle. The methodology of completion is God. Completion is God!

2.1 O Kaunteya (son of Kuntī), contact with sense objects causes heat and cold, pleasure and pain, and these have a beginning and an end. O Bhārata, these are not permanent; endure them bravely.

2.2 O Purṣurṣabha, chief among men, these surely do not afflict the brave person who is centered and complete,

Pleasure and pain are the same to him and he is certainly ready for immortality, amṛtatvā.

2.3 The non-existent (asat) has no being; that which exists (sat) never ceases to exist; This truth about both is perceived and concluded by the Seers of Truth.

• 2.4 Know It to be indestructible, by which all this body is pervaded. Nothing can destroy It, the Imperishable. 2.5 These bodies of material energy are perishable. The energy itself is eternal, incomprehensible and indestructible. Therefore, fight, O Bhārata.

Kṛṣṇa says here that the sensory experiences, mātrā-sparśhaḥ are all temporary. Feelings of hot and cold, śītoṣṇa, sweet and sour, wet and dry, experiences of pain and pleasure, sukha-duḥkha, as well as other experiences of like and dislike are all temporary, anityāḥ. These experiences do not affect the centered person who is qualified to be enlightened, so amṛtatvāya kalpate.

Nitya and anithya do not translate into real and unreal. In the same way māyā , loosely translated as illusion, is not unreal. Māyā and anitya are real and perceived by our senses but they refer to things that are not true, that are not lasting. They are factually real but truthfully unreal! That which is true will always be true; it cannot cease to exist. Truth here refers to the state of permanence, of being eternal.

I tell you, if there is fire burning and you sit at a distance and just go on gazing at the fire, you will feel the heat in your body! If you just turn your eyes away while maintaining the same distance—you will not see the burning and no more experience the burning in your body! How? The seeing has reduced the distance between you and the fire! That is perception and reality!

This is what Śrī Kṛṣṇa means when He says, 'O son of Kuntī, contact with sense objects causes heat and cold, pleasure and pain, and these have a beginning and an end.'

Please listen! Now, I am defining perception.

The way your patterns react and respond to the facts is perception. Perception is nothing but processed facts. There are three levels of perception:

• No pattern, no perception—that is the worst.
• Pattern with perception—that is okay.

Perception but with no pattern—that is the best.

These are the non-responders who are soaked in dullness. They neither have patterns nor have consciousness. The vast army of Kauravas signifies this dull unconscious space of 'no pattern, no perception.' They lived in stupid materialism with their life philosophy as stupid atheism. That is why Duryodhana is never attacked by any pattern or dilemma that overpowers Arjuna.

Then, there are responders who have 'patterns with perceptions.' The moment Arjuna sees the vast Kaurava army, his whole body and being shiver with the fear pattern. His patterns do not let him see the army as army and just fight as per his natural perception of himself as a warrior. No! He sees relatives, friends and teachers and wants to escape the war; he wants to shrink from life!

Ultimately, we have the Lord of all perceptions, the one with complete consciousness, Bhagavān Kṛṣṇa Himself! His very existence is the pure space of perception. He is the destroyer of all patterns, who enriches Arjuna in destroying and completing with the army of root patterns by transforming Arjuna's own perception!

As long as we are in this present moment, we have a pure perception without any patterns, only then we are truly complete and integrated. The present moment never ceases to exist. In fact, that is all that does exist. The present moment alone is sat, truth, everything else is asat, untruth.

The process where we perceive or receive information through five senses, internalize it with our root thought patterns, and respond based on our patterns is Cognition. Now it is proven that it is our root thought pattern that leads to our cognition and thereafter determines our genetics.

In these verses, Kṛṣṇa says first that the spirit pervades the body— avināśi tu tad viddhi yena sarvam idaṁ tatam. His definition of body is the body-mind system. Secondly, He states that the body and mind are destroyed at death—antavanta ime dehā nityasyoktāḥ śārīriṇaḥ. Thirdly, He declares that the spirit does not die at death—vināśam avyayasyāsya na kascit kartum arhati. Fourthly, He explains that the spirit is beyond our mental comprehension—anāśino prameyasya.

When death happens, bodily functions stop and the senses, which are a function of the mind, stop working. The entire body-mind system is then left by itself and it degenerates. This part is clear to all of us who have seen death. What is unclear or unknown to us is that there is something within us that does not perish at death. Kṛṣṇa clarifies here that this is the Self, Ātman, the energy that never dies.

Kṛṣṇa urges Arjuna to fight saying, 'Therefore, fight, O Bhārata, tāsmad yudhyasva bharāta', with the full understanding that what he thinks of as real is unreal, that what he thinks of as permanent, Nitya is impermanent, Anitya and what he thinks he is about to destroy can, in truth, never be destroyed.

Kṛṣṇa tells him to open his eyes and see with pure pattern less perception; that what he is about to do will only destroy that which is going to perish anyway. Even if he wants to, Arjuna cannot destroy the imperishable, avināśi spirit that lives on.

Arjuna's concern about the death of his kinsmen and elders arises out of his root pattern of fear and insecurity about his own death. He does not realize his true imperishable nature and therefore he is afraid of dying. By extension of this fear, he is afraid of others' deaths as well, especially at his own hands. Kṛṣṇa tells him that there is no such thing as death and that death is unreal, anāśinaḥ.

Sāṅkhya is reality. What exists as reality is perceived by you without the interference, perversions created by your powerless patterns. Sāṅkhya is the philosophy of reality—ultimate existentialism. Completion will lead you to experience that Sāṅkhya, the reality, existential reality—Tattva Satya, Satya Tattva!

2.14 Neither understands, he who takes the Self to be slayer nor he who thinks he is slain.

He who knows the Truth understands that the Self does not slay, nor is It slain.

2.15 The Self is neither born nor does It ever die. After having been, It never ceases not to be.

It is Unborn, Eternal, Changeless and Ancient. It is not killed when the body is killed.

2.16 O Pārtha, how can man slay or cause others to be slain, When he knows It to be indestructible, eternal, unborn, and unchangeable? 2.17 Just as man casts off his worn-out clothes and puts on new ones, The Self casts off worn-out bodies and enters newer ones. 2.18 Weapons do not cleave the Self, fire does not burn It, water does not moisten It. And wind does not dry It. 2.19 The Self can neither be broken, nor burnt, nor dissolved, nor dried up.

It is Eternal, All-pervading, Stable, Immovable and Ancient.

The Self is said to be unmanifest, unthinkable and unchangeable and able. Knowing this to be such, you should not grieve.

Understand, the moment Bhagavān is opening His mouth, you are given an amazing introduction about you!

Kṛṣṇa is one of the greatest followers of Kapila, the celebrated Incarnation of Mahādev and Viṣṇu in Śrimad Bhāgavatam. Kapila is the first thinking man on the planet who experienced completion, the founding father of this great Sāṇkhya philosophy, the founder of Mahānirvaṇi Pīṭha. That is why even when Bhagavān addresses His own glory later, when He introduces Himself, He says, 'siddhānāṁ kapilo muniḥ (10.26) - Among the great perfect beings, the complete beings, I am Kapila.' 'I am Kapila among the siddhas, the great incarnations!'

Siddha means a complete being. This means that in Śrī Kṛṣṇa's time, Kapila was the star of the spiritual world. That is why He remembers Kapila. That is why I say that Bhagavān Śrī Kṛṣṇa is also the Mahāmandaleśvar (spiritual head) of Mahānirvaṇi Pīṭha. Śrī Kṛṣṇa also studied Sāṅkhya; He is a follower of Sāṅkhya philosophy.

Kṛṣṇa directly addresses some of Arjuna's earlier doubts in these verses. Arjuna has claimed that destroying his people, svajanam will bring him untold grief, not only in this world but in future births as well. Kṛṣṇa explains to Arjuna that all his fears are misplaced. There is no death in reality. What is seen as death is the destruction of the impermanent body. No one therefore can kill another person or be killed by another person. Both are illusions.

Here Kṛṣṇa is talking to someone who has witnessed death. So, He has to explain to him that death does not exist. It is the individual's attachment to the body that creates the illusion that the individual also perishes with the body. Attachment to the body is the most intense of all attachments. We also get attached to material possessions as well as our relationships. The potential loss of these leads to fears similar to that of losing one's body. One who understands that all these attachments are temporary and are the cause of all our suffering, understands the truth. Understanding this truth removes all fears.

In some cultures, people are bred on the pattern that one's life ends at death. This pattern leads to desperate inadequate cognition, as if there is no further time to seek happiness. Once a person understands that death, like birth, is merely a passage, and sees the continuity of being, the fear of losing one's identity disappears along with fears of sin and hell.

This is why religions that accept the continuance of life after death, as Hinduism and Buddhism do; breed a culture of tolerance amongst their followers. There is no rush to live and extract the maximum juice out of one's life in a single birth. They propound that we all come from a common energy source and we go back to this source, and the cycle continues. Those who understand this spiritual truth teach completion, inclusion and compassion, and they have no desire to convert others to their beliefs.

Here Kṛṣṇa reveals to him a more subtle level of truth that he hasn't yet grasped. Arjuna shies away from killing, not because of his conviction of ahimsā, non-violence, but because of his root thought pattern that he identifies with the people he has to destroy. His hesitation is from his delusory incompletions, ignorance, attachment and fantasy, not from the wisdom of non-violent compassion.

You may ask, 'If nothing is destroyed and nothing can be destroyed, is there no sin in killing at all? So Kṛṣṇa is indifferent to mass violence? No, He is not. For one thing, Kṛṣṇa speaks as an enlightened Master from an existentialist perspective and declares that, even when the body perishes, the spirit lives on, and therefore, there is no death.

Violence and killing are not merely physical acts. They are psychological compulsions acted out of incompletion in the physical realm. The ruler of a country who orders warfare against others is the violent one, even if he hides behind his throne. Violence of the mind carries on as the vāsana or desires; the essence of the spirit, that incarnates from birth to birth. That is the horror that does not end with death. The spirit is violated, degraded, and degenerated by this attitude of violence.

A violent man is always a coward, an inauthentic person who does not have the courage to face the truth. He does not have the sensitivity to treat others as he expects to be treated. He goes out-of-integrity, losing his power of words, isolating himself in a cocoon of lies, using the excuse of defending himself, and commits violence against others.

When we become aware and conscious that the person next to us is actually an expression of the energy of God, how can we possibly respond with violence? It has nothing to do with whether someone is family, part of our culture, religion or nation; or part of our history, habits or beliefs. The other person may oppose all that we believe in. Yet he is as much a part of this Universe as we are.

If this message of Kṛṣṇa is truly understood, there can be no violence in this world, no self-hatred and no killing at all. You will not even kill an insect. You will not kill even in self-defense because once you are in completion, your space of completion is transmitted to the other being and that being will not even attack you.

One of the important secrets I want to share with you.

Any root pattern you carry can be destroyed if you just have love for people. Decide to go on enriching everyone who is happening in your life. When you enrich others, be very clear, you are constantly getting enriched. Decide life is for others. Life is for enriching. Enriching is life!

Listen! The purpose for which you are born is enriching yourself and others. When you operate out of this understanding, you are most alive, at your peak and living enlightenment!

Just decide that life is for others! All the best things will be showered on you. You will get back to the space you were in when you were born— the purest space of life, the imperishable space! This is the jumpstart technique for enlightenment. Decide from this moment, 'Life is for Others! Life is for Enriching!' All your insecurity, fear, anger, greed, all your root patterns will become rootless patterns. Kṛṣṇa is giving this jumpstart technique of enlightenment to Arjuna so that he enriches himself and others and fights to destroy the very root of his root pattern of fear and violence .

Kṛṣṇa continues with Sāṅkhya, the knowledge of completion:

Just as man casts off his worn-out clothes and puts on new ones, the Self casts off worn-out bodies and enters newer ones, anyāni saṁyāti navāni dehī (2.22).Weapons do not cleave the Self, fire does not burn It, water does not moisten It, and wind does not dry It. The Self can neither be broken, nor burnt, nor dissolved, nor dried up. It is eternal, all pervading, stable, immovable and ancient.

nainaṁ chindanti saśtrāṇi nainaṁ dahāti pāvakaḥ I na cainaṁ kledayanty āpo na śoṣayati mārutaḥ II 2.23

These verses are amongst the most quoted verses of Bhagavad Gītā. Here, in very few words, Kṛṣṇa expounds upon the entire truth of life and death, mind, body and spirit. He clarifies why we should accept death gladly, as a matter of fact and course, instead of grieving over it. He says this so simply that even an innocent child can understand this truth.

Kṛṣṇa says, 'O Arjuna, the Soul is not destroyed at all. No astra, no brahmāstra, no nuclear weapon can destroy the energy within the body. Fire cannot burn It, water cannot wet It, and air cannot dry It. It is not made of the elements and cannot be destroyed by the elements. It is the energy behind the elements that creates the elements. How can It then die?'

'It cannot be disintegrated in any manner, by breaking, dissolving, burning or drying, acchedyo 'yam adāhyo 'yam akledyo 'soṣya eva ca. It is eternal. It transcends all the elemental powers. It pervades the Universe, nityaḥ sarva gataḥ sthānuṛ (2.24). It has been there always, sanātanaḥ. Therefore, It never can be destroyed.'

2.20 O Mahābāho (mighty-armed), even if you should think of the Soul as being constantly born and constantly dying, Even then, you should not lament.

2.21 Indeed, death is certain for the born and birth is certain for the dead.

Therefore, you should not grieve over the inevitable.

2.22 O Bhārata, all beings are unmanifest in their beginning, seemingly manifest in their middle, and unmanifest again in their end.

So, what need then for grieving?

2.23 One sees It as a wonder, another speaks of It as a wonder, another hears of It as a wonder.

Yet, having heard, none understands It at all!

2.24 O Bhārata, This that dwells in the body of everyone can never be slain; Therefore, do not grieve for any living being.

Death is inevitable for the born, jātasya hi dhruvo mṛtyur; and birth is certain for the dead, dhruvaṁ janma mṛtasya ca. Whether the spirit lives on after the body perishes and locates itself in another body may be a debatable point to some. Kṛṣṇa says that this is not a reason to lament death, na tvaṁ śocitum arhasi (2.27). In either case, death can be a passage that one can look forward to. Bringing the dead back to life is not a wonder or miracle. The real wonder and mystery though, is the transformation of individuals instilling in them the truth of completion to live integrity, authenticity, responsibility and enriching, and causing these four powers of words, thinking, feeling and living as reality. This indeed is the miracle that only a true Master can perform.

I tell you, mystery school is nothing but THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM's inner space with his vast responsibility—whoever comes inside, in whatever form is processed, transformed and released!

The illustrious King Yayāti lived for hundreds of years.

Bhāgavatam, the great Hindu epic, says that when Yama, the god of death, came to Yayāti at his appointed time of death, Yayāti begged to be allowed to live on. Due to his deep incompletions with life, he said he had not lived life enough and he needed more time. Yama relented and said that if one of his sons would give Yayāti the rest of his life, then he could live that long. Using the life span of his son, Yayāti lived many more years but with more and more incompletions.

• Finally the realization dawned on him that no matter how long he lived, his incomplete desires would never cease and that his completion would never happen through material enjoyment. Yayāti completed with his root pattern and gave himself up to Yama once he realized this truth. It is not death that frightens us. It is leaving our incomplete desires and unlived life that frightens us. The problem is that we do not know how to live a fulfilled life in the space of completion. All our desires are partially fulfilled or incomplete because, before they are fulfilled, we move on to other desires. The hangover of that past incomplete desire continues to chase us as a pattern in the present. The simple fact is that we do not know how to be complete, joyful.

Please listen. Every thought, every desire you have is a commitment you have given to yourself. Every thought you complete is a word you have given to you. You have to honor it. You cannot entertain any thought of fear or greed, doubt or denial because you are literally sitting under a kalpataṛu, a wish-fulfilling tree, all the time!

Kṛṣṇa reveals that to be truly complete, joyful, to be eternally blissful, is to cognize the truth that you are

indestructible, that your spirit lives on, and that life and death are but a mere passage. When you cognize this truth and start living it with integrity and authenticity, you will be living death. If not, you will be dead living.

Kṛṣṇa declares to Arjuna, 'O Bhārata, whatever is permanent and real was unmanifest before it became manifest in the middle—avyaktādīnī bhūtani vyakta-madhyāni bharāta and again it will become unmanifest avyakta-nidhanāny eva. Therefore, what is the need to lament, tatra kā paridevanā (2.28).'

Everything is in a state of becoming something else. At every moment we die and are reborn; millions of cells in our body-mind system die every day and are reborn. Yet, through all this change there is continuity. There is a continuity that we cannot see, touch or feel. What we see as manifested, as this body and mind, hides from us the process of constant change that happens within us, as well as the continuous thread that holds the whole process together.

2.25 You should look at your own responsibility [svadharma} as a kṣatriya. There is nothing higher for a kṣatriya than a righteous war. You ought not to hesitate.

2.26 O Pārtha, happy indeed are the kṣatriya who are called to fight in such a battle without seeking;

This opens for them the door to heaven.

2.27 If you will not fight this righteous war, then you will incur the sin of having abandoned your own responsibility [svadharma], and you will lose your reputation.

• 2.28 People, too, will remember your everlasting dishonor, and to one who has been honored, dishonor is worse than death.
• 2.29 The great generals will think that you have withdrawn from the battle because you are a coward.

You will be looked down upon by those who had thought much of you and your heroism in the past.

• 2.30 Many unspeakable words would be spoken by your enemies reviling your power. Can there be anything more painful than this?
• 2.31 Slain, you will achieve heaven; victorious, you will enjoy the earth. Therefore, O Kaunteya (son of Kuntī), stand up determined to fight.

Pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat—treat them all the same. Do battle for the sake of battle. You shall incur no sin.

Kṛṣṇa addresses Arjuna's fears about killing his svajanam, his relatives, elders and teaches him that what he considers to be the end of life for these people is just one step in their journey.

Kṛṣṇa then descends to the practical level at which Arjuna exists and begins addressing his svadharma, Arjuna's own dharma, the natural path of his responsibility. Kṛṣṇa explains to Arjuna why, from a societal point of view, he should not run away from the battlefield, but instead, stay on and fight as behaves a warrior. Kṛṣṇa here addresses Arjuna as kṣatriya, the warrior.

When Kṛṣṇa refers to Arjuna as a kṣatriya, he is referring to the entire personality of Arjuna, the great warrior, which has been decided only partly by birth and mostly by training based on his aptitude. Arjuna is the quintessential warrior who knows no fear, and yet is now disturbed by issues of whether he is doing right or wrong by fighting against his kinsmen.

Kṛṣṇa says, 'Fight! You are a kṣatriya. By fighting as your own responsibility demands, svadharmam api cāvekṣya (2.31), you earn merits and go to heaven. If you run away from this war, you commit a sin for being out-of-integrity with your responsibility, hitvā pāpam avāpsyasi (2.33). You will also be termed a coward and people who know you will laugh at you, akīrtiṁ cāpi bhūtani kathayiṣyanti te 'vyayām (2.3). You will be dishonored, and for a kṣatriya, dishonor is far worse than death, sambhāvitasya cākīrtir maraṇād atiricyate (2.34).

'Do not worry about victory or defeat. If you are defeated and slain you will ascend to heaven. If you are victorious, you will enjoy material benefits in this world itself. Therefore, O Kaunteya, fight as it is your responsibility as a kṣatriya.'

hato vā prāpsyasi svargaṁ jitvā vā bhokṣyase mahīm I tasmād uttiṣṭha kaunteya yuddhāya kṛta-niścayaḥ II 2.37

Kṛṣṇa says to treat pain and pleasure, gain and loss, victory and defeat all the same. He says to fight without worrying about the outcome. To fight is your responsibility. You shall incur no sin.

Kṛṣṇa's exhortation is beyond human rationale. It is not what you do that matters; it is who you are being that matters. It is your space that matters.

Kṛṣṇa is not worried about what you do, He is concerned only about who you are being. If your actions are from completion, if they are innocent of motives, whatever you do is right. If what you do is motivated by patterns of fear and greed, pain and pleasure, victory and defeat, you can do nothing right. Whatever you do for gain is sinful.

Understand, if the gap between who you are and who you want to be is without responsibility, it is greed. If it is with responsibility, it is possibility! When there is no responsibility-bridge, it is greed. When you are building the responsibility-bridge to achieve what you want to be, then it becomes a possibility; it is no more greed!

Responsibility directly leads you to leadership consciousness. As long as you feel responsible only for your family, you remain as the head of your family. When you feel responsible for the community, you become a leader of the community. As your feeling of responsibility expands, your leadership quality also expands.

Responsible declaration unlocks the power of feeling, prema śakti in you. But the moment you hear that you are responsible for everything happening around you, you think, 'If I feel responsible for all the garbage on the streets, I will be stuck cleaning it up the whole day! I will not be able to do anything else!'

I am not saying that if you feel responsible for the streets, you will need to clean them yourself. I am also not saying that you will NOT clean them yourself. Anything may happen, but don't be afraid to dive into the feeling of responsibility just because of your imaginary complications. Don't stop yourself from feeling it at all.

Understand the science of feeling. You can feel anything as joy or anything as pain—it is your freedom! Even the greatest achievement can bring pain to you, and even the worst experience can be a joyful learning. You have the ability to decide how you want to feel!

All your suffering pain, anger, guilt, fear, jealousy, frustration is nothing but powerlessness expressing in different ways! When you feel responsible for everything that happens in your life, you will feel that everything is joyful—because nothing can make you powerless. So, empower yourself with responsibility and unlock the power of feeling.

When you take responsibility to fulfill what others expect from you, the whole Cosmos expresses through you! You will have extraordinary powers, because it is directly seva, enriching others. Whenever you enrich others with a feeling of responsibility, without having any other motive, the Cosmos celebrates your Existence. It just celebrates your Existence!

Kṛṣṇa, as the transcendental Parabrahman, is not concerned about the practical and societal consequences of Arjuna walking out of the battlefield. He is only concerned about what that would do to Arjuna's inner self. He wants Arjuna to reclaim his inner space, which is occupied by his self-doubt.

2.32 Thus far, what has been taught to you concerns the wisdom of Sāṅkhya. Now, listen to the wisdom of yoga [buddiyoga].

Having known this, O Pārtha, you shall cast off the bonds of action.

2.33 There is no wasted effort or dangerous effect in this path of yoga. Even a little knowledge of this, even a little practice of this dharma, protects and releases one from very great fear.

2.34 O Joy of Kuru, on this path (of yoga), the intelligence is resolute with a singlepointed determination. The thoughts of the irresolute are many, branched and endless.

• 2.35 Men of little knowledge, who are very much attached to eulogizing the flowery words of the Vedas, O Pārtha, argue that, 'there is nothing else'; these advocates of Vedas (vādīna) look upon and recommend various fruitful actions for elevation to heavenly planets, resulting in high birth, power, and so forth. Thus being desirous of sense gratification and opulent life, they say that there is nothing more than this to living.
• 2.36 Those whose minds are attached to sense pleasures and lordship, who are diverted by such teachings, for them, the determination for steady meditation and samādhi, fixed intelligence does not happen.
• 2.37 O Arjuna! Be you above the three guṇas (attributes) that the Vedas deal in: free yourself from the pairs-of-opposites and be always in satva (goodness), free from all thoughts of acquisition (yoga) or preservation (kṣema), and be established in the Self.

The Brāhmaṇa (sage), who has known the Self, has little use for the vedic scriptures, as these are like a pool of water in a place that is already in flood, overflowing with a great water reservoir.

All the great scriptures, Vedas, Upaniṣads and Gītā, exist at different levels of understanding, seven levels, to be precise, depending on the energy level that one dwells in. At the highest level one understands that all that there is, is INFINITE, each one infinitely powerful. There is no experiencer, experienced or experience as separate entities at the highest energy level; ALL is INFINITE.

Kṛṣṇa refers to that truth here in these verses, the truth of the highest energy. 'Do not be carried away by the apparent ritualistic approach of the Vedas as propounded by half learned scholars,' the Master says, 'go beyond; go beyond duality, nirdvando. All these seem to bring joy but are transient; that joy is the brief intermission between periods of sorrow. Go beyond the three attributes, nistrai-guṇyo bhavārjuna and seek the firm truth of the Infinite, the Union, that is Yoga,' He says to Arjuna.

2.44 You have a right only to work,

but never to the fruits (outcome) of action. Never let the fruit of action be your motive; and never let your attachment be to inaction.

2.45 O Dhanañjaya!

Do your actions dropping all attachment to the outcome, being centered and complete in Yoga.

Be balanced in success and failure. Such evenness of mind is Yoga.

The entire teaching of Bhagavad Gītā can be summarized in the above two verses. The sheer brilliance of the wisdom of the Universal Master is reflected in these verses. Whenever I get a chance I refer to these verses to explain how one should lead one's life.

Kṛṣṇa says many, many things in these few words. He says, 'You have the right and responsibility to work. You have no responsibility or right to the results of that work. Do not focus on the result and make it either a pattern of greed to chase or fear to stay away from. Do what you have to do with a centered mind, a complete inner space without worrying about whether you will succeed or fail.'

karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana I mā karmaphala hetur bhur mā te saṅgo'stv akarmaṇi II 2.47

Nothing more can be said or ever needs to be said about why and how one should perform.

Many people wrongly communicate and misunderstand these verses. There are people who stay away from work that they fear may end in adverse negative results. As long as the results can be positive either to themselves or others, they will carry out and complete what they are assigned sincerely. But when they think that something bad may happen, that they may fail, they will stop doing whatever they are doing.

One of the biggest problems human beings have is this—you love to be successful, but you deeply believe that you are a failure. This is one of the biggest paradoxes. This shows the lack of integrity in your thinking. Understand, some of your actions may be a failure, some of your decisions or dimensions may be a failure, but YOU are never failure, because you are still breathing!

Do what you have to do as your right and responsibility, without worrying about the results. Do not act with hopes of a certain reward. Do not stop doing what you need to do because you are afraid of what may lie ahead.

Constantly bring integrity to your thinking, authenticity to your feeling, responsibility to your actions, enriching to your lifestyle!

With integrity, you will literally clean your inner space of the constant unwanted beliefs that you carry, like the strong belief that you will be a failure. This continuous belief holds you from taking responsibility for your actions, makes you worry about the results, and leads you towards failure! When you start thinking with integrity, you will diagnose those self-fulfilling negative prophecies that you constantly give to yourself.

If you have a strong idea or self-doubt what you are doing is going to be a failure, the moment you think that it is a failure, it is a commitment and word you are giving to you. Do you understand? So if you give that word, you naturally have to fulfill it. Do you want to fulfill that word? No. Then tell yourself that I am not going to fulfill it. It means that whenever you have a thought, 'I am a failure,' you should know—this is a commitment I am making to me, and I have to honor it. You may say that it comes on its own. Then complete it! Consciously disown and complete with it.

When you clean your inner space with the power of integrity, you will realize that all the contradictions, conflicts and confusions you carry are responsible for your whole life, for all reactions you attract from others and society. You are responsible for all your actions, the reactions you attract from others and the happenings of life. Integrity will automatically teach you responsibility. You will understand that for everything happening

Part 7: The Sacred Text of Hinduism - Jeevan Mukti Bhashya

in and around you, you are responsible.

Integrity is the first lesson of spiritual life. Integrity is not just a simple vow, a simple word. Integrity is all about ironing out your thinking, aligning your thinking. If you bring integrity to your inner space, you will realize that even accidents are attracted by you. You are attracting everything in your life, whether it is wealth or poverty, right or wrong. You are responsible for your life.

When you are in completion, with integrity, without internal conflict or contradictions, whatever you project on the cosmos is a project for the cosmos! Simply cosmos does it. When you are integrated, the outer world obeys you just like that. That is the power of integrity! Please listen: nothing is political or accidental on the planet Earth. Everything runs on the natural law of life, dharma of these four principles.

Yoga is your realization of your own Self, your realization that you are divine. It is the state of completion, the state of truth, the state of the present, when all that you do will be in righteous consciousness, dharma. When you perform with this completion, and with no expectations, you will do what is right and just.

2.44 O Dhanañjaya, beyond the action with selfish motive is Yoga (of action) in wisdom [buddhiyoga].

Wretched are those whose motive is the fruit (outcome); Surrender yourself fully to the wisdom of completion.

2.45 Endowed with the wisdom of evenness of mind, move away from both good and evil deeds in this life; Therefore, devote yourself to Yoga. Authenticity in action is Yoga.

2.46 The wise, having abandoned the outcome of their actions and possessed of knowledge of completion, are freed from the cycle of birth and death. They go to the state that is beyond all sorrow.

2.47 When your wisdom takes you beyond the delusion, You shall be indifferent to all what has been heard and what is yet to be heard. 2.48 When you are not confused by what you have heard and your wisdom stands steady and unmoving in the Self, You shall attain Yoga, Self-realization.

He says, 'Act without attachment. Do not worry about success or failure in results. Center yourself in wisdom of completion

that takes you beyond action and the desire for fruits of action. Once you are centered in wisdom of completion you will act wisely. Once you give up attachment to results, you will be freed from the cycle of birth and death and you will be beyond sorrow.'

In the next verse, Kṛṣṇa begins initiating Arjuna into yoga with the second tattva of authenticity or śraddha. Kṛṣṇa is the greatest strategist of life.

Here, He begins revealing the truth of authenticity, the strategy of life, the strategy that will make Arjuna succeed and expand!

Kṛṣṇa declares, 'yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam.' Please understand, I first want you to understand these words: 'yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam—yoga is authenticity in action.' Not just 'perfection in action' but I am translating it as 'authenticity in action.'

buddhi yukto jahātīha ubhe sukṛta-duṣkṛte I tasmād yogāya yujyasva yogaḥ karmasu kauśalaṁ II 2.50

Let me define Authenticity.

Listen, the moment I say 'expanding you more and more, continuously,' do you feel, 'Oh, God! Then it is unending process? I will never be able to rest at all!' If you cherish this idea in you, then you are deathoriented; you are entertaining death in your heart. The idea you entertain in your life invites different happenings of life. So, don't blame, if you get any killer diseases in your life, because you invited them. Understand, first thing you need to do is break that pattern.

Every time inauthenticity is allowed in you, it leaves a powerful fear in you. Arjuna's inauthenticity in not raising himself to his responsibility and to others' expectation of him as a warrior, led him to be death-oriented and collapse with fear.

Whenever you need more time to do more work, stop the time, complete the work, and allow time to move. You can do! Listen. Something has to grow in your body—either life or death. Life has no pause button. Either life has to grow in your body or death has to grow in your body. The inauthenticity, which you entertain, is death for you.

Pick up authenticity as your strategy plan in every moment of your life. Whether it is to do with health, creativity, solving relationship problems, creating wealth or achieving inner fulfillment, have authenticity as your strategy plan.

Kṛṣṇa then adds, 'When you are centered in wisdom of completion you will no longer be deluded by what you hear. When you are no longer deluded by what you have heard, you are liberated.' Kṛṣṇa's immediate reference here is to the scriptures, the Vedas. He chides Arjuna and says, 'Don't be confused by what you hear, even if it is supposed to be divine knowledge, the Vedas. Remember: If you are really centered in wisdom, you can never be deluded; you will be in completion.'

Vedic scriptures are not dead knowledge that is a burden upon us to abide by. The Vedic scriptures, the śrūti, divine in origin, and the smṛti, rules and regulations laid down later by Manu and other sages, make no such claims. They are the living guidelines that lead us into wisdom and liberation. In fact, Hindu scriptures have both the humility and the power to challenge us to transform ourselves according to the needs of the day, but stipulate that we first experience what is said.

'So,' Kṛṣṇa says, 'let the Vedas say what they want, but put what you hear, see, and read to the test of wisdom to go beyond delusion.' Kṛṣṇa is the Vedas, the source of all knowledge. He himself declares this in Gītā and yet He asks Arjuna to experiment and be guided by his inner wisdom, not by what he merely hears.

What courage, what authority! Only one who is so sure about the truth can say, 'Do not listen to what I say and how I act, but listen to your inner voice of truth born out of your own experience.'

Kṛṣṇa says, 'Don't be inactive, do what you need to do. Do it with no expectations and no attachment to results. Do it with a centered mind, and in wisdom of your own inner calling, and not because of something you have heard. You will then go beyond all suffering and be liberated.' These steps are so simple that everyone can practice them; in fact everyone should practice them. Stay fully in the space of completion, and based on the truth of integrity and authenticity, act. You can never go wrong. I promise you that.

With integrity you experience the space of positivity. With authenticity you experience the space of possibility. Only a man who lives authenticity is a liberated one, a yogi, the one devoted to authenticity in action. Only when you surrender yourself to practice integrity in thinking and authenticity in action—yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam, you will realize that you are responsible for success and failure, for good or bad, for everything you experience. You drop your attachments and your fear patterns, and experience self-realization— tadā yogam avāpsyasi (2.53).

2.44 O Keśava. What is the description of Sthitaprajña, one who stays fixed in completion and is merged in the restful awareness of truth and wisdom? How does one of steady wisdom speak, how does he sit, how does he walk?

2.45 Śrī Bhagavān says:

O Pārtha, a man who casts off completely all desires of the mind and is satisfied in the Self by the Self,

He is said to be Sthitaprajña, one of steady wisdom in completion.

2.46 He whose mind is not disturbed by adversity, and who, in prosperity does not go after other pleasures,

He who is free from attachment, fear or anger is called a sage of steady wisdom.

2.47 His wisdom is fixed on one who is everywhere without attachment, Meeting with anything good or bad, and who neither rejoices nor hates. 2.48 As the tortoise withdraws its limbs from all sides, when a person withdraws his senses from the senseobjects, His wisdom becomes steady in completion.

Though for the embodied, the sense enjoyments may be restricted, the taste or desire for sense objects remain; but, such tastes or desires also leave him on seeing, experiencing the Supreme.

For the fifth time Arjuna expresses authentic interest in what Kṛṣṇa is saying. Arjuna has realized that whatever he said earlier had arisen from his confusion, his patterns. Arjuna is intelligent enough to know that he does not know.

When Kṛṣṇa tells him to behave in a manner befitting the code of the warriors, this piece of advice certainly makes good sense to Arjuna. However, what Kṛṣṇa says further confuses Arjuna. Kṛṣṇa says to do what you have to do without being concerned about the outcome. This is a strange idea to Arjuna. He has rarely done anything in his life without thinking about the result of his action.

Arjuna, the greatest of marksmen, is conditioned with the pattern to first define his target and then act. Kṛṣṇa has confused him totally now. Kṛṣṇa says, 'Release your arrow; where it lands is my business.' At least, this is how Arjuna understands what Kṛṣṇa says. Arjuna has enough trust in Kṛṣṇa not to ignore this instruction from the Divine.

So he asks, 'Tell me who is it who acts without any interest in the outcome? Who is it who is not concerned about the result, whether it is good or bad, painful or joyful, and how do I identify such a person?'

Kṛṣṇa responds, 'This man is free from desires and emotions. He has neither greed nor fear. He has no patterns. He is always complete in himself. Pleasures through the senses do not interest him. He has withdrawn his senses from the external or outer world and has integrated them inwards into his inner space, directed them towards that Supreme Truth that is beyond all pleasures, attachments, emotions and sense objects.' Kṛṣṇa thus describes the Realized Yogi, the Sthitaprajña to Arjuna so that he too may emulate him and realize himself.

'Nirmohatve niścalatatvaṁ,' says Ādī Śaṅkarācārya, taking a cue from the Master. It means: Absence of desires leads to a clear and still mind and inner space, steeped in the wisdom of completion. When there are no desires, there are no emotions such as joy, depression, sadness, anger, disappointment, jealousy that normally arise from the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of such desires. When the mind is without fear and anger, without expectations of success and failure, the unattached mind seeks that which is unattached. First the objects drop, then the desire for the objects disappears as truth dawns. This may sound complicated, but is as simple as counting '1, 2, 3.'

The macrocosm and microcosm are just mirroring each other's possibility. When we feel the responsibility for existence, we become existence and existence feels responsible for us. When we let go of our patterns, when we listen to the Universe and feel responsible, the Universe feels responsible for us and gives us all that we need to live with abundance.

2.44 O Kaunteya (son of Kuntī), the turbulent senses carry away the mind of a wise man,

Though he is striving to be in control.

2.45 Having restrained them all, he should sit steadfast, intent on Me. Whose senses are under control, his mind is steady in the present.

2.46 When a man thinks of objects, it gives rise to attachment for them. From attachment, desire arises; from desire, anger is born.

2.47 From anger arises delusion, from delusion, loss of memory, from loss of memory, the loss of discrimination, from loss of discrimination, he perishes. 2.48 The self-controlled man, moving among objects with his senses under control,

free from both attraction and repulsion, attains peace.

2.49 All pains are destroyed in that peace, for the intellect of the tranquil-minded soon becomes steady. 2.50 A person not in self-awareness cannot be wise or happy or peaceful. How can there be happiness to one without peace? 2.51 He loses his awareness of the present moment when his mind follows the wandering senses, Just as the wind carries away a boat on the waters.

Kṛṣṇa says that our senses are turbulent, and however much we try to control them, they stay out of control. He says that the only way is to integrate and fix one's mind on Him once the senses are under control and the mind is steady. The mind cannot be stopped. Thoughts cannot be stopped as long as the body exists. You can bring integrity to your thinking by doing completion with your root patterns. Thus integrating your mind on something that transcends sensory pleasures, it will become quiet by itself. Once the mind discovers the bliss of this completion, it will never want to stray again.

Each one of us develops attachment, liking, hatred and dislike for many things through our experiences. These likes and dislikes stay in our unconscious memory as root thought patterns and even without any conscious awareness on our part, drive us into actions through desires or into inaction through fears. When the desires are fulfilled, there is temporary satisfaction; then the desires grow. When the desires do not get fulfilled we are disappointed, we get angry.

We should be angry with our own selves for having had the desires or for not having worked with authenticity, wholeheartedly at the peak of our capability towards fulfilling the desire, but we actually get angry with other people who we think are responsible for our failures. We do not realize that blaming others will make us feel more and more powerless!

Kṛṣṇa reveals two very important truths here in the last two verses. One is that you can never be peaceful unless you are complete, conscious. The other is that you cannot be complete if you are led by your senses. Therefore, as long as your senses lead you into what you think is a pleasurable journey; you cannot really be happy or peaceful. It is just another trick your mind is playing on you. Your happiness is not real happiness. It is just a gap between two periods of sorrow. What you hear, what you think you hear, what you see, what you think you see, and so on, all these sense inputs are unreliable, incomplete cognitions.

Understand, you can make whatever you can visualize as reality. With integrity and authenticity, visualize yourself in the space of non-falling, moving only from completion to completion, fulfillment to fulfillment. Your past is history. Your past record is the dumping ground of all your regrets and guilt. There is no greater sin that you can commit than carrying past records of these regrets and guilt.

2.44 O Mahābāho (mighty-armed one), his knowledge is therefore steady whose senses are completely detached from sense objects.

2.45 The self-controlled man is awake in that which is night to all beings. Where all beings are awake, it is night for the sage who sees.

2.46 Just as all waters enter the ocean, which, though always being filled from all sides, remains unmoved; likewise, he, into whom all desires enter themselves, remains unmoved, undisturbed, can alone attain peace; not the one who desires to fulfill desires.

2.47 The man who moves about abandoning all desires, without longing, without the sense of ego—'I' and 'mine', attains peace.

2.48 O Pārtha, this is the state of Brahman, Brāhmī-sthiti; none is deluded after attaining this.

Even at the end of life, one attains Brahmanirvāṇa, oneness with Brahman, when established in this state.

We all think we are awake; are we really? We live in daydreams even if we are awake. The only occasion when we are truly awake is when we are in the space of completion. A person in such a space of completion is whom Kṛṣṇa calls a 'Muni,' a realized being living in the present. Such a person is always awake, having experienced his inner awakening, whether physically awake or asleep.

Kṛṣṇa says that such a person is in sleep when others are awake, yasyāṁ jāgrati bhūtāni sā niśā paśyato muneḥ (2.69). The realized person, although he may appear to be living and actively participating in the activities of the same world that we live in, is in reality, in a state of passive alertness or restful awareness.

This means that his senses are not immersed in worldliness and he is centered and complete in his Self. He is dead and asleep to this world because he has moved beyond his senses. A truly realized person is also awake when others are asleep, yā niśā sarva-bhūtānāṁ tasyāṁ jāgrati saṁyamī (2.69). Even in his sleep he is aware, in what is called the state of supta chittam.

A person who is in the space of completion is still as the waters in the bed of the ocean. Though there are waves in the surface, they do not disturb the bed of the ocean. Even when desires assail him, they are mere waves in the periphery of his consciousness, and do not disturb him at all. He has abandoned all attachment to 'I' and 'mine.' He is without thoughts and desires and when thoughts and desires come to him, they merge into him without disturbing him.

We are all enlightened because we are all a hologramic part of the reality of the Universe, Brahman. All that we lack is the awareness of the truth of our Enlightenment. What prevents you from realizing that you are enlightened is your root pattern, ego. This ego is not necessarily about any arrogance. It is the perception of who you think you are, your inner image; what you project yourself to be for others, your outer-image; and what others expect you to be for them, others' image. It is the collection of thoughts, experiences and emotions that go to make up that 'I' and 'mine.' This identity is that of the body and mind, not of your spirit. Therefore, it perishes with your body and is transient.

People with a strong consciousness of 'I' live out of their blocked mūlādhāra cakra, the root energy center. They are at the very beginning of their spiritual evolution. Their main concerns will be about their own survival, and they are caught in lust, anger and greed. The person with a strong attachment to 'mine,' the possessions belonging to the 'I,' constantly lives in fear of losing these possessions. Such people live out of their blocked svādiṣṭhāna or spleen cakra—the energy center that gets locked due to fear. They live in insecurity of losing possessions, of losing identity, and finally, of death.

Energization of the mūlādhāra and svādiṣṭhāna cakra and moving the energy up through the anāhata or heart cakra to the ājña or thirdeye cakra (energy center between eyebrows) opens us to completion, the reality of looking at others, at Universe as our own self and finally dropping the root pattern—one's identification with 'I' and 'mine.'

The science of completion is the essence of Sāṅkhya Yoga. Completion makes you experience the Sāṅkhya of life. In this second chapter of Gītā on Sāṅkhya Yogaḥ or Transcendental Knowledge of Completion, Śrī Kṛṣṇa who is the space of completion Himself, sets Arjuna on the path of completion. May all of you travel that path too!

Let us pray to the ultimate Existence, Parabrahma Kṛṣṇa, to give us all the experience of eternal bliss, Nityānanda. Thank you!

Thus ends the second chapter named Sāṅkhya Yogaḥ, 'The Yoga of Knowledge of Completion,' of the Bhagavad Gītā Upaniṣad, Brahmavidyā Yogaśāstra**,** the scripture of yoga dealing with the science of the Absolute in the form of Śrī Kṛṣṇārjuna-saṁvād**,** dialogue between Śrī Kṛṣṇa**,** Arjuna**.**

3.1Arjuna says:

O Janārdana, Why do You urge me engage in this terrible war, If You think that knowledge is superior to action, O Keśava?

3.2My intelligence is confused by Your conflicting words. Therefore, please tell me certainly what is most beneficial for me.

3.3Bhagavān says,

O sinless Arjuna, as I said before, in this world there are two paths of firm faith; jñānayoga, the path of Self-knowledge for the intellectual and karmayoga, the path of action of the knowing.

• 3.4 A person does not attain freedom from action by abstaining from work, nor does he attain fulfillment by giving up action.

Your whole life is purposeless, but again and again, you are conditioned to run towards something—whether it is in material life or spiritual life. Some goal is always put in front of you. The so-called goals in material life or spiritual life continuously make you feel you are not good enough.

If we spend that time enjoying and being enriched by the journey, any destination we reach will be the right destination. The destination is not important; the journey is. The goal is not important; the process, the path is.

Root thought pattern is nothing but this first social conditioning, this strong cognition which imbalances you from your purposeless space and gives birth to the mind, the idea that there is some purpose to life. Life has no purpose. Even if you achieve whatever you want, you can't take it with you. You can't carry even a single dollar when you leave. Nothing will come with you.

Life has no purpose, but it has meaning. Purpose means goal orientation. You always think about the goal; you keep running and one day you just drop dead! The more goal-oriented you are, the more you will miss life and the more you will be incomplete.

Purpose is different from meaning. When I say 'meaning', living itself becomes meaningful. Come to this present moment of completion and the path itself is life; the path itself is meaningful.

Two things you need to understand from this: One, He says, let your inner space not be contaminated by the purpose of life. When I say inner space, I mean your mind and how you feel about yourself, about things and life inside you. When you close your eyes, what comes into your mind is your inner space. If your inner space is filled with the purposes of life, be very clear you are running behind something which will never give you completion. He says, 'Let your inner space not be disturbed or filled with purposes or incompletions.'

By nature, your inner space is the space of completion, it is filled with energy; your inner space, what you refer to as ātman, spirit or soul, is filled with blissful energy. The more you empty yourself of goals or incompletions, the more the space for completion and bliss.

Completion will clear out all unnecessary things from your inner space. It will get you all that you need in the outer world. Don't furnish your inner space. Let your inner space be empty. Of course then, it will never be empty. It will be filled with completion, pūrṇatva. It will be filled with bliss! The more complete inner space you create, the more blissful your life will be. That is what Kṛṣṇa means by saying, 'Don't be attached to results.'

If you continuously think about the result, you will never be able to perform your action with completion. You will always be goal-oriented and you will never enjoy and enrich the path of completion. Not enjoying

and enriching the path is the worst hell you can be trapped in.

You can easily miss life's possibility by having a purpose to Life. Unless your thinking itself becomes integrated to your positivity, unless your working itself becomes authentic to the peak of your possibility, unless your life itself becomes the responsibility to enrich yourself and others, unless that itself becomes completion and bliss, you cannot experience what Kṛṣṇa says in this verse: karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana (2.47).

Purpose can be fulfilled, but through purpose, your life can never be fulfilled. When you carry purposes in your life, you are not living; purposes are living through you, that's all.

Abstaining from work or moving away from work cannot give you freedom from action. It puts you in the biggest bondage. To have freedom from action, your inner space needs to be purified. Your inner space should become empty to allow the natural space of completion in you.

3.5Surely, not even for a moment can anyone stand without doing something. He is always in action, despite himself, as this is his very nature.

3.6He who restrains the sense organs, but who still thinks of the objects of the senses, is deluded and is called a hypocrite.

3.7He who begins controlling the senses with the mind and performs selfless work through the organs of action is superior, O Arjuna.

3.8Do your prescribed work, as doing work is better than being idle. Even your own body cannot be maintained without work.

Here, Kṛṣṇa assures you, 'By your very nature, your body and mind will work. If you just keep quiet, it is enough.'

'By nature,' He says, 'sarvaḥ prakṛti-jair-guṇaiḥ—by their very nature your body and mind know the right thing to do.' The problem is that you never trust your body and mind. You always trust your ego and it finally dumps you! Yet you never trust your body and mind. Be very clear, your body and mind will do their work. All you need to do is keep quiet and relax from your ego. Don't think your inner space is needed for outer work. The person who understands what nitya (eternal) is, and what anitya (ephemeral) is relaxes into Existence and is always in eternal consciousness. He always resides in nitya ānanda—eternal bliss!

When you take the jump, you will naturally make some small mistakes. Don't worry about them. Putting up with that mistake is what I call penance, tapas. Penance is nothing but accepting and completing with the small mistakes you make and restoring your integrity and authenticity when the conscious transition happens in your being.

A man who keeps his senses under control but who is not able to keep his inner space under control by completing with his patterns related to senses is called a hypocrite, indriyārthān vimūḍhātmā mithyācāraḥ sa ucyate (3.6), says Kṛṣṇa.

Please be very clear, again and again Kṛṣṇa declares:

karmendriyāṇi saṁyamya ya āste manasā smaran I

indriyārthān vimūḍhātmā mithyācāraḥ sa ucyate II 3.6

If you can't create completion in your inner space, even if you control your body or your senses, you are just a hypocrite. Your life will not be a complete, blissful life. Not only will it not be a spiritual life, it will not even be life! The meaning of living is bliss, but there is no purpose.

The moment you experience, in your inner space, that nothing is going to be with you permanently, a deep healing, a breeze enters your consciousness. Your whole inner space is healed. You have so many wounds of incompletions in your inner space. Wounds created by your incomplete desires, by your failures, and by your near and dear ones. All these wounds will be healed with this one medicine. This one understanding that life is purposeless, that whatever you achieve is just nothing, and that nothing is going to be with you, is enough. Mind is nothing but dilemma. Whatever you choose, whether material life or spiritual life, you will always feel you are missing the other part. You will continuously feel you are missing something. As long as you think you are the mind, as long as you live with the mind, you will have this problem of material life verses spiritual life.

Mind you, it is not inspiration; it is just perspiration that you give up! The moment all respect for the purpose is gone from your life, you will simply fall into your being. One important thing: The moment you fall into your being, you explode! Whatever you can imagine and whatever you can't even imagine will start happening. Only then do you become a truly multi-dimensional being.

every single inch of your body. Every moment will become meaningful.

When you think that life as a whole has a purpose, the individual moment will lose its meaning. If you think one month of your working time is worth 50 thousand dollars, you will judge the value of that one month as being only 50 thousand dollars. Suddenly, if someone says, 'I will give you 50 million dollars, give me

your life,' will you be able to give him your life? No! But, this is the way you are calculating and working! We are ready to sell our mind, our moments, our inner space by calculating the value of our lives. You forget the work itself or living itself.

If you think the whole has a purpose, then the part loses its meaning. When you realize that the whole has no purpose, the part will become meaningful.

Kṛṣṇa says, your senses, by nature are programmed to go out! You are programmed to work, to go out. Going out can happen only in two ways: either to enrich or to swindle! Surely, swindling others is not going to transform you. Only enriching others is going to transform you.

The choice is really about how to work. Here, Kṛṣṇa gives the answer to that. He says that we should perform work with devotion with authenticity in our actions, only to enrich, and without attachment to the results, karmendriyaiḥ karma-yogam asaktaḥ sa viśiṣyate (3.7). Work without unnecessarily being bothered about whether or not it will fetch the results that you expect.

You see, there are two things: chronological planning and psychological planning. Chronological planning is planning on a timescale. You decide you to get up at a particular time, finish the list of tasks you planned at the office by a certain time, and so on. This is a practical way to organize your work in a way that it can give the best results. This is fine.

But what do we do? We don't stop at this. We review the plan in our head over and over again, thinking in different ways, internally preparing for eventualities, expecting results from our plan even before the action. We keep supposing, 'What if this happens? What if that happens?' Psychological planning boosts your ego, your root pattern. It makes you feel great and worthy. It makes you stay serious and feel that you are handling great things.

It is very unfortunate, but we carry a strong pattern that we should be ready to accept failure, because failure is a part of life. Then you are constantly giving a commitment to you that there is going to be failure. You always internally prepare yourself for failure. When you prepare, you usually remind yourself of the worst possibilities and then prepare tools and weapons to handle it. In the name of contingency planning, we just worry and give a commitment to failure. Instead, if we apply our awareness to the problem with integrity in thinking and authenticity in action, the solution will be visible.

Kṛṣṇa says, 'One who does devotional work with authenticity, without attachment, and controlling the senses—yas tv indriyāṇi manasā niyamyārabhate arjuna, is superior to one who merely pretends to be in control of his senses and acts in renunciation, karmendriyaiḥ karmayogam asaktaḥ sa viśiṣyate (3.7).'

There are intellectual type of people, the philosophers, well versed in the scriptures, who look down upon the devotional and emotional practitioners! Intellectuals believe that their dry understanding of the non-duality of the Self is superior to that of those who fall at the feet of the Divine. Kṛṣṇa firmly says, 'No, it is not so!' Kṛṣṇa says that what makes the difference is your space of completion that brings lack of expectations of either failure or success, the sense of purposelessness that defines your state.

Sannyāsa, renunciation, is a state, not a label. The state of renunciation is not a state of doing nothing. You can never sit without doing anything. Even if you sit still in one place, you are sitting, you are breathing, is it not? The internal functions in your body are happening. Maintaining this very body requires that work be done. The breath that you take in carries prāna, the life energy that sustains you. So, you cannot say you are not doing anything.

Be aware that when you are in action, it is the senses acting. Then you will not get attached to the action or its result. Then you are free; you are liberated from the bondage of action. Action binds you only when you consider yourself 'the doer' and have expectations about things being a certain way.

3.9 Work has to be performed selflessly; otherwise, work binds one to this world. O son of Kuntī, perform your work for Me and you will do it authentically, liberated and without attachment.

3.10 Brahma, the lord of creation, before creating humankind as a selfless sacrifice said, 'By this selfless enriching, be more and more prosperous and let it bestow all desired gifts.'

3.11 The celestial beings, pleased by this sacrifice, will also nourish you; with this mutual nourishing of one another, you will achieve supreme prosperity.

• 3.12 Satisfied with the selfless enriching, the celestial beings certainly bestow upon you the desired enjoyments of life. He who enjoys the things given by them without offering anything to the celestial beings is certainly a thief.
• 3.13 Those who eat food after selfless enriching service are free of all sins. Those who prepare food for sense enjoyment do grievous sin.

There are two techniques by which one can liberate oneself from attachment to work.

One is by telling oneself, 'I am not the doer.' By continuously reminding yourself that it is the senses and not you who is doing something, you distance yourself from the action. This is what Kṛṣṇa explains in the previous verses. The other way is by surrendering the fruits of one's work to the Divine to the ultimate life force that is conducting this Universe. This is the technique that Kṛṣṇa talks about here.

When you do work as a sincere, humble offering to the Divine, the very attitude of this surrender will make you do the job authentically to your peak capability and you will be liberated. When you are excessively bothered about the results, you actually think you are the doer of the action!

When you see that Existence is purposeless and you are living in the loving, caring arms of Existence, you will relax and surrender to that very Existence. When you are in this relaxed mood, you can function at your best and enjoy every moment of life without feeling like the doer and therefore not worrying about making small mistakes. Real surrender happens when this understanding becomes your experience.

from rains the food grains become possible, the rains become possible from selfless sacrifice of enriching.

• 3.15 Know that work is born of the Creator and He is born of the Supreme. The all-pervading Supreme is eternally situated in sacrifice of enriching.
• 3.16 O Pārtha, he who does not adopt the prescribed, established cycle lives a life full of sins. Rejoicing in sense gratification, he lives a useless life.
  • Our relationship with the activity of Nature is a very deep one. Our actions are like oblations offered in a fire sacrifice. Our activities are not just movements of the limbs. When we perform a yajña, a fire sacrifice of enriching the Source, the Cosmic Energy we pour various offerings into the fire. We do so to tap the Cosmic Energy and to flow in tune with Existence, with Nature.

The subtlest, most powerful and all-pervasive Cosmic Energy is invoked through the slightly less subtle air element when we chant the mantra and we connect and enrich the still, less subtle fire energy through the fire ritual. Energy is then transferred to water, a grosser energy, and then the water in the pots is poured over plants, idols and humans as well as the earth, which is the grossest form of energy.

Enriching is the way in which you relate with the expressed component of God, the expressed part of God. Integrity and Authenticity are the ways in which you relate with the unexpressed, avyakta part of God. Responsibility and Enriching are the ways in which you relate with vyakta, the expressed part of God.

When we perform a sacrifice, we perform certain invocations to the higher energies. So, we attract corresponding effects for our actions. Our actions are like offerings in a sacrifice. When the actions are in tune with tattvas of integrity, authenticity, responsibility and enriching, which is the flow of Existence, it is like offering ghee (clarified butter) into the fire. When we do not flow in tune with Existence, it is like offering mud into the fire. You know the kind of smoke comes out of the fire when you offer ghee and the kind of smoke that comes out when you offer mud. Just like you can determine the quality of the offering you gave to the fire from the quality of the smoke, the result of your actions can be determined from the quality of your actions. The quality of the end result is based on our input, our offerings, our enriching.

Kṛṣṇa says that rains become possible from the enriching sacrifice

Rain is a grosser form of energy that is activated by the subtler unexpressed energies which are influenced by our authenticity in actions and integrity in words, thoughts and vibrations.

Rain is the cause, the source which is responsible for the growth of food grains. Food is the enrichment needed to sustain our bodies and minds, which give rise to further authentic action and integrated thinking. So, you see this cycle now, of how the subtle energy, avyakta, the unexpressed part of God manifests itself in the grosser world as vyakta, the expressed part of God, and how the actions in the grosser world affect the subtler elements.

Understand, this is what Kṛṣṇa says, 'O Pārtha, he who does not adopt the prescribed, established cycle lives a life full of sins, aghāyur idriyārāmo. Rejoicing in sense gratification, he lives a useless life, moghaṁ pārtha sa jīvati (3.16).'

When you do not enrich every person with the fruit of enriching after constantly being enriched by the sacrifice of the Existence, the Supreme, your life becomes full of sins and you live a useless, incomplete life. That in turn brings the cycle of more and more incompletions!

The Universe is a huge wave of 'Tathāstu!—so be it!' So everything is as you create, as you organize, as you arrange! Put a little intelligence, time and energy into creating the right space in you.

• 3.17 One who takes pleasure in the Self, who is satisfied in the Self and who is content in his own Self, for him certainly, no work exists.
• 3.18 Certainly, he never has any reason for doing his duty or not doing his duty in this world. He does not depend on any living being.
• 3.19 Therefore, one should work always without attachment. Performing work without attachment, certainly, man achieves the Supreme.
• 3.20 King Janaka and others attained perfection by selfless enriching. To guide others, you too must act selflessly.

Existence has provided, is providing and will provide for each and every one of your needs. Your suffering, your struggle, your incompletion is only because you don't trust that you are being provided all that you need; because you carry a deep self-doubt and consider yourself separate from Existence, who you think is your enemy.

Here Kṛṣṇa says a beautiful thing:

• King Janaka was a beautiful example of a true karma yogi, a man of selfless authenticity in action with a continuous commitment to enriching life in and around him. He was a king. He ruled a kingdom and yet was unattached, liberated. Just like Kṛṣṇa who ruled a kingdom and yet was a Sannyāsi in the truest sense of the word, Janaka was a model king who was complete unto himself, untouched by the external world. Only when you are completely detached can you be completely involved. Otherwise, your very sense of ownership and emotional attachment will be a hindrance to plunging headlong into the task. Only when you work without any incompletion, can you perform the task authentically to your peak possibility, without expectation and without being concerned about the results.

• 3.21 Whatever action is performed by a great person, others follow. They follow the example set by him.

• 3.22 O Pārtha, there is nothing that I must do in the three worlds. Neither am I in want of anything nor do I have to gain anything. Yet, I am always in action.

• 3.23 If I did not engage in work with care, O Pārtha, certainly, people would follow My path in all respects.

• 3.24 If I do not work, then these worlds would be ruined.

I would be the cause of creating confusion and destruction.

There is a difference between the state of a leader and the status of a leader. Most of us want to attain the status of a leader but not the state. The state of the leader is something totally different. It is the state of the leader born from the principle of responsibility that enriches people to become responsible. Problems of all kinds, ranging from stress to discontentment and violence, result because the leader has achieved the status and not the state.

It is responsibility that makes you realize all possibilities. It is leadership consciousness that brings not just success, but fulfillment in you.' Kṛṣṇa, who owns responsibility, the space of leadership consciousness, Īśvaratva, is making Arjuna own responsibility. Kṛṣṇa says, 'Whatever action is performed by a great person, others follow. O Pārtha, there is nothing that I must do in the three worlds. Neither am I in want of anything. Yet, I am always in action.'

There are only two types of human beings on planet Earth—those who feel responsible for everything and those who don't feel responsible for anything. People who feel responsible become leaders. People who don't feel responsible continue to be slaves.

Deep understanding and experiential expression of the truth happens only with taking responsibility for all your actions. Only when the space of leadership becomes your own experience does the responsibility become complete. Otherwise, if the understanding is just based on someone else's words and experience, then there is always the possibility that anyone can come and shake your belief and you will either hold the situation or others responsible. The roots of responsibility, in this case, are not deep and strong enough to withstand all kinds of questions. Others' questions are nothing but your own unanswered questions that you chose to suppress within you!

That is what happens to Arjuna as kurusattama, the leader of all Kuru warriors, as bharataṛṣabha, the best of Bhārata. Even though he takes the responsibility to fight and avenge the collective irresponsibility of the Kauravas, he falls from his space of leadership and gives reasons to escape his responsibility. Arjuna, the one of taintless, pure fame, becomes a slave to his incompletions. Only when he allows the Master to enrich him does he surrender to the Master of all masters, Jagadguru Kṛṣṇa as His disciple!

Unless we enrich ourselves and allow ourselves to be enriched by the Master, nothing good can happen to us. Allowing the Master to enrich you is the best way of enriching yourself.

There are three types of people: the disciples (or the followers), the Masters, and the leaders (or guides).

The disciple is one who has not yet experienced and enriched himself with the teachings of the Masters, but who is authentically interested and has responsibly embarked upon the path. He needs some guidance on the path. He does not yet know how to practice what is being taught.

The Master is one who is in the eternal space of Īśvaratva, leadership consciousness and is in the ultimate experience of Enlightenment. Out of compassion, He enriches by showing the path of responsibility to reach His state to all those who would like to be in that state. It is not necessary for the Master to practice what He preaches because he is beyond the common rules of conduct. Masters need not follow what they tell you to do to reach their state. They understand the illusion of the physical plane that their body-mind system operates in. Whatever they may do physically is in a state of complete awareness.

A leader or guide is someone who is a spiritual activist, he is between the Master and the follower. He has not yet reached the ultimate state of the Master but he has had glimpses of that state. He is not as inexperienced as the follower. He is the bridge of responsibility to lead the follower to the Master.

In these verses, Kṛṣṇa beautifully explains what walking the talk means through His own example. He says there is nothing in the three worldsthe nether world, earth or heaven, for Him to achieve. There is no duty that binds Him. Even though He has nothing to gain, lose or even to do, He is constantly engaged in action

and enriching the three worlds. Why?

Because people look up to Him as God, they would obviously follow the path He sets. People's anyakāra, the expectation that world has from Kṛṣṇa is that He is God, He is Bhagavān. They would simply follow what He does. He is now responsible to fulfill even others' image about Him for leading them on the correct path. That is Bhagavān Kṛṣṇa's authenticity and responsibility!

When responsibility expresses through your head, it is leadership. When responsibility expresses through your heart, it is compassion. When responsibility expresses through your being, it is Enlightenment, Sātori.

Please understand, what you feel as you, the idea you believe as you, is mamakāra. For example, I can very authentically say I feel that I am a pure empty space.

There is something in front of the pure empty space which operates to create the Sangha. I believe myself as a pure space, I project myself as an Incarnation who wants to give this pure space to you. My belief as me, my cognizance of me as a pure space is my mamakāra. My decision to project myself as an incarnation who shares this space to be experienced by others is my ahaṁkāra.

What others believe and perceive as me, is anyakāra. When somebody looks at me as Śiva, I need to take the responsibility of Śiva and do for him whatever Śiva will do for him by stretching my ability. He may expect some boons from Śiva. So now it is my responsibility to stretch my super-consciousness to give him those boons. That is authenticity.

It is the energy behind the action, the energy of the being that decides the quality and hence, the effect of the action. It is not the action itself that decides the quality.

I always tell people, 'When I am compassionate, I cheat you. When I scold you, I teach you. Either way, you grow.' When I scold you, you are jolted into the present moment. Suddenly, in a flash, you get the awareness that you have been missing your natural space of completion. The energy behind my words is purely for your transformation. There is only pure compassion.

• 3.26 Let not the wise disturb the minds of the ignorant who are attached to the results of work. They should encourage them to act without attachment.
• 3.27 People, confused by ego, think they are the doers of all kinds of work while it is being done by the energy of nature.
• 3.28 One who knows the Truth, O mighty-armed one, knows the divisions existing in the attributes of nature and work. Knowing well about the attributes and sense gratification, he never becomes attached.
• 3.29 Fooled by the attributes of nature, those people with less wisdom or who are lazy become engaged in actions driven by these attributes. But, the wise should not unsettle them.

We are all governed by our basic nature, attributes, or guṇa. The mental set-up, patterns from previous births, called vāsana determines what we are, what we do in this birth, and also what happens to us in our future births. The desires born out of vāsana carry their own energy for fulfillment. If you are conscious, you will be able to fulfill them. Once fulfilled, these vāsana and karma get dissolved. One who reaches this state of completion with desires also realizes that he is not the doer.

Then when you do not take responsibility for these actions, the very actions and their effects bind you into further incomplete actions or desires. Please listen! Any karma left incomplete, any action done out of incompletion is pravritti—incompletion leading to more incompletion. It is

more and more dangerous, and makes you more and more powerless.

To understand, 'I am not the doer,' this concept of 'I' and 'mine' needs to be understood. Śiva says that the concept of 'I' itself comes from the concept of 'mine.' We think, when the sense of 'I' happens, the sense of 'mine' happens. But if you look deeply, our idea of what we think of as 'ours' is what defines what we think of as ourselves. Just imagine, if your possessions, your status, your wealth, your relations all are taken away from you, what will you think of as you? How will you define yourself? Your idea of 'I' is also relative, is it not?

• 3.30 Dedicating all actions to Me, with consciousness filled with spiritual knowledge of Self, without desire for gain and without sense of ownership, without being lazy or agitated, fight.
• 3.31 Those persons who execute their duties according to My teachings and who follow these teachings faithfully with authenticity without envy, become free from the bondage of fruitive actions.
• 3.32 But those, out of envy, who do not regularly perform their duties according to My teaching, are considered all-ignorant, enseless and ruined.

Kṛṣṇa says: Those persons who execute their duties according to My injunctions and who follow this teaching faithfully with authenticity, without envy, become free from the bondage of actions.

Understand, as long as you follow the goals set by society, you will be carrying a social conscience. The moment you drop social conditioning, the purposes taught to you by society, you will drop conscience and start living with consciousness. Please listen, conscience will become consciousness the moment you bring responsibility to it. Conscience means struggling with do's and don'ts, guilt and desires. Consciousness means the pure flow of life. As long as you do not take the responsibility, you will be struggling with goals, with do's and don'ts. If you live with goals, you will carry a social conscience in your life. If you realize the beauty of purposelessness you will carry spiritual consciousness in your life.

'The man who lives according to his consciousness, believing in and having śraddhā towards these teachings...' Why does Kṛṣṇa ask for śraddha here? This is the first time Kṛṣṇa says 'śraddha. Why? Śraddhā cannot really be translated as faith. It means faith plus the courage of authenticity to execute the highest level of possibility.

When you enter into your being, when you experience the purposelessness of life, the so-called material life and spiritual life both drop you and you enter what I call 'Quantum spirituality' or Eternal Consciousness. You are then in eternal bliss. Only then you will understand you don't need worries to live. You don't need your mind. Until you reach the being, you need to have śraddha.

The next word is a beautiful word: 'anasūyanto,' which means 'without envy.' This is important. We all think, 'My brother has purchased two houses. My sister is getting a big new car. How can I live like this?' The moment you get such thoughts, 'He has that, she has this,' what happens? All your spirituality, all your authenticity, all your purposelessness, everything just disappears. You are again in the same rat race. If your neighbor buys a new air-conditioner, the temperature in your house shoots up.

The man who lives in eternal consciousness, THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM, and allows his body and mind to work according to their nature is centered in eternal consciousness. He is called a karma yogi, one who has espoused authenticity in action without attachment as the ultimate renunciation. But the man who acts out of jealousy, enters his lower dimensions of social conditioning. He is caught in the rat race, and is called a karmi, one who is focused on inauthentic action arising from patterns of greed.

All your joy, the very bliss of living is swallowed by this one illusion called comparison. Just like the Earth is destroyed by the ocean at the time of the final deluge, pralaya, your whole life is destroyed by comparison.

Jealousy and comparison have no absolute existence, they are delusory patterns. There are two levels of reality: comparative reality and existential reality. If you build your life based on existential reality, you will

never suffer. If you build your life based on comparative reality, you will continuously suffer till death. Not only at the time of death, even after death.

Constantly practicing authenticity brings you to the space of possibility. Śraddha or Authenticity continuously connects you with yourself and your highest possibility. Life is for realizing that possibility. Life is for realizing the Self. Life is for realizing itself.

Authenticity is Life! Life is continuous expansion! Add authenticity to your thinking in every step. Constantly go on expanding! Don't settle down with the lower perception. What you know about humans, what you know about the world, what you know about you is all imperfect perception, comparative reality. When you settle down with comparative reality, you make the most horrible mistake of your life. Don't build your inner space on comparative reality. Let your inner space be built on existential reality which is the space of highest possibility. If you build your life on existential reality, you will live your life blissfully in eternal consciousness, as a karma yogi.

By nature, a person with a body and mind has to act in one way or the other. If you follow your nature with authenticity, you can be comfortable and flow in tune with Existence. When you are relaxed, when you are blissful, you express yourself beautifully.

Authenticity is the key. If you bring authenticity to what you perceive as you, to what is happening within you and what you project yourself outside you, you will not be controlled by your unconscious patterns. You will be able to see clearly when lower emotions arise or unconscious reactions arise. The awareness of your inauthenticity will itself bring you to your peak capability. Then, you will naturally drop all your lower level emotions and live what Kṛṣṇa calls as śraddhāvanto anasūyanto, authenticity without envy, the space of possibility.

- 3.33 Even the wise person tries to acts according to the modes of his own nature, for all living beings go through their nature. What can restraint of the senses do?
- 3.34 Attachment and repulsion of the senses for sense objects should be put under control.

One should never come under their control as they certainly are the stumbling blocks on the path of self-realization.

- 3.35 Better it is to do one's own responsibility, even if done faultily, than to do someone else's responsibility perfectly.
Death in the course of performing one's own responsibility is better than doing another's responsibility, as this can be dangerous.

- 3.36 Arjuna says, 'O descendant of Vṛṣṇi, then, by what is man forced to commit sinful acts, even without desiring, as if impelled by force?'
- 3.37 Bhagavān says, 'It is lust and anger born of the attribute of passion, all-devouring and sinful, which is one's greatest enemies in this world.'

We have always been trained by society to consider certain acts as duty; some as good and others as bad. Duty and responsibility are totally different.

What Kṛṣṇa talks about here is not socially defined duty or conscience. He is talking about responsibility, the leadership consciousness, the law of the cosmos. The Cosmos functions on responsibilism.

Each of us is unique in our capabilities and interests. Accordingly, our responsibilities are different. If you try to imitate others, thinking their responsibility appears more attractive, you will be making the mistake of following somebody else's path. Comparison literally rules our lives. When we use our energies with authenticity for our peak growth without comparing ourselves with others, we do our responsibility according to our nature.

These four principles of integrity, authenticity, responsibility and enriching exist in our very DNA.

As of now, man is only a possibility. Only when these four principles become reality do you experience your actuality. Then the base energy of lust can be transformed into the higher energy of love. It is an alchemic process of changing any base metal to a higher metal. Similarly, changing our base emotion, lust, to the highest emotion we are capable of, love, is alchemy.

First, the impurity, an animalistic emotion, should be removed from lust. Your lust is contaminated by all kinds of fantasies, feelings of guilt and desire we have picked up from the society and media.

First, the impurity in lust needs to be removed so that a deep friendship at the being level and not just at the physical or mental level can be added. When you feel deeply connected to a person, there will be no need for physical proximity to that person. You will feel happy and satisfied with just the feeling connection. For the final transformation of lust into love, the relationship needs to go through the process of patience and perseverance. You need to be patient for the other person to accept your transformation. Then he or she will automatically be transformed as well.

Here Kṛṣṇa refers to lust and anger, both born out of passion. Anger is also an emotion born out of lust. When the other person rejects your lust, it turns into anger towards that person. Anger is a tremendous energy we misuse because we do not understand and respect it. Greed, anger and lust are all rājasic qualities that arise from passion and aggression from the blocked mūlādhāra cakra, the root center.

• 3.38 As fire is covered by smoke, as a mirror is covered by dust, or as the embryo is covered by the womb, So also, the living being is covered by lust.

• 3.39 The knowledge of the knower is veiled by this eternal enemy in the form of lust, Which is never satisfied and burns like fire, O Kaunteya.

• 3.40 The senses, the mind and the intelligence are the locations of this lust, which confuses the embodied being and veils the knowledge.

• 3.41 Therefore, O Bharataṛṣabha, chief amongst descendants of Bhārata, in the very beginning, control the senses and curb the symbol of sin, Which is certainly the destroyer of knowledge and consciousness.

• 3.42 It is said that the senses are superior to the body. The mind is superior to the senses.

The intelligence is still higher than the mind and the consciousness is even higher than intelligence.

• 3.43 Knowing the Self to be superior to mind and intelligence, by steadying the mind by intelligence, Conquer the insatiable enemy in the form of lust, O Mahābāho (mighty-armed one). Once a person reaches physical or sexual maturity at adolescence, it is very difficult to control the effects of lust arising out of the mūlādhāra. One needs to be spiritually awakened before sexual maturity so that the energy can flow upwards towards the sahasṛāra or the crown cakra. The mūlādhāra cakra is the seat of all fantasies, primarily sexual fantasies. These fantasies are the ones Kṛṣṇa says are like dust on the mirror, completely clouding our judgment.

We live by templates that we carve out in our mind based on these fantasies, and live towards fulfilling these fantasies.

Completion in the present moment is the key to unlocking the mūlādhāra and dissolving lust. It is only completion that brings you in touch with reality as it is and dissolves your fantasies.

Kṛṣṇa closes his dialogue with Arjuna in this chapter with these words, 'Be aware that you have a higher intelligence. Use that intelligence to control your senses and curb your lust, which is your most dangerous enemy on the path to completion.' Please note that Kṛṣṇa does not say, 'Arjuna, come here, I shall help you dissolve the lust in your body and mind. You can then be at peace.'

Arjuna started the dialogue saying he was confused by Kṛṣṇa's words about action and inaction. Kṛṣṇa then told him to carry out his own responsibility with authenticity and without worrying about the result of his actions. He guides Arjuna to lead a purposeless life, free from obsession with the final goal and to be detached

from the result of action. 'Authentic action is our nature,' He says, 'not inaction. Act, work, but surrender the result of action to Me.'

Now, Kṛṣṇa says clearly, 'Control your senses, be aware, be complete living in the present moment and give up lust.' Lust, here, not only refers to sexual desire but also to all desires related to the outer world. It is our sense of identity, the sense of possession that drives us to acquire and enjoy. The truth, however, is that acquisition only leads to the desire for more acquisition, not to enjoyment and fulfillment.

When we realize that life has no purpose, that the meaning of life is to enrich others and ourselves and to enjoy the path, we learn to give up attachment to end results. We drop expectations. We move into the present moment and live in the space of completion.

This is the whole essence of Karma Yogaḥ. Be complete and drop your attachment to the goal and the fruit of your actions, and live an enriching life with integrity in words, with authenticity in thinking and action, and with responsibility in feeling. Live life blissfully. You will achieve the Supreme. You will achieve the space of Enlightenment.

Kṛṣṇa says, 'You will achieve the Supreme.' You will achieve the eternal consciousness, Nityānanda, eternal bliss.