59. Unclutching from Memory brings Grace🔗

In Sanskrit there is a beautiful word called mahima. Mahima means grace.

Mahima happens to you when you have unclutched from memory. When you unclutch from memory, wherever you go, whatever you do, a tremendous feeling of security starts happening inside you and radiating around you.

Please understand, only a person who feels completely secure can unclutch from his memory! Only a person who can unclutch from his memory can feel completely secure.

I am continuously giving discourses all over the world. If you see our website, you will find that I am speaking every day, somewhere or other - and all I have in front of me is this book of sutras, nothing else!

The other day a university professor told me, 'Swamiji, it takes me three hours to prepare a forty-five minute lecture, and even after that I am always stressed when I am presenting the lecture to my students. I keep wondering whether I have remembered all the points or not. How do you speak continuously, without any preparation or reference material or notes?'

All I said to him is this: 'Fortunately, I have learned how to unclutch from memories, so I can simply be spontaneous!'

I have a story for you:

A popular speaker gives a long public discourse at an event.

When he returns home, his wife asks him, 'How was the discourse? How did you feel?' The speaker replies, 'Which discourse are you talking about?' His wife is surprised. 'What do you mean? You gave only one discourse!' The speaker replies, 'No, there are three discourses - the one which I prepared, the one which I delivered, and the one I was thinking I should have delivered.'

Understand, when you are not able to unclutch from memory, you will be constantly suffering with these three problems. Not only in your public discourses, but even when you relate with your friends, you will be preparing your speech!

Even if they are close friends, while you are driving to go and meet them, you start preparing your lecture; what you should say, and if the other person responds in this way, how you should respond to that, and if she talks in that way, what you should say in response! You have prepared some thirty statements with the right response, but when you meet her, she just changes her third statement, and you are at a loss! You expected the conversation to happen in a different direction, but she is taking the whole conversation in a different direction. Now you are at a loss.

Being too dependent on memory makes you sterile, dead. Life is lost. Our regular colleges and universities teach you how to gather more and more memory, but they don't teach you how to unclutch from it when you don't need it, and how to handle it correctly when you really need it. That knowledge is never delivered to you.

Please understand, that is the worst thing done to you. It is like this: you are taught how to eat, but you are not taught how to clean your stomach, or how to be away from food whenever needed. So much of memory is put inside your system; it is like slow poison. Sometimes you can't retrieve the information when you want it, and sometimes you are overcrowded by it when you don't want it! I feel so fortunate I did not go to a proper school; I could retain my natural intelligence!

I can say, learning to handle memory in the correct way is the formula for a successful inner-world and outer-world life.

How often do you use memory to make up for a lack of spontaneity? Become aware.