You Are Everything and🔗

Everywhere

11.35 Sanjaya said:

11.36 Arjuna said:

Rakshasa fly in fear in all directions and all hosts of sages bow to You.

11.37 And why should they not bow to Thee, O Great Soul, greater than all else, the Creator of even Brahma the Creator. O Lord of Lords, O Infinite Being, O Abode of the Universe,

You are the imperishable, that which is beyond both the seen and the unseen.

11.38 You are the primal God, the ancient Being, the Supreme Refuge of the Universe. You are the Knower and the One to be known.

You are the Supreme Abode, O Being of Infinite Forms, by You alone is the Universe pervaded.

11.39 You are Vayu, Yama, Agni, Varuna, the Moon, Prajapati and the Great-Grandfather of all.

Salutations unto You a thousand times and again salutations unto You!

11.40 Salutations to You, before and behind! Salutations to You on every side!

O All! Infinite in power and Infinite in prowess, You are everything and everywhere.

Arjuna now reaches the third stage of his perception of Krishna's Cosmic Form.

In the first stage, Arjuna's expectations of the glorious universal form of Krishna were fulfilled. He saw Krishna the way He expected with His crown, discus and mace, with Brahma rising on a lotus flower from His navel.

Even as he was getting used to the enormity of the vision that he beheld, Arjuna found this form replaced by a terrible, all-devouring form of Krishna that filled Arjuna with fear. Arjuna cries out: ‘Who are you? Why are you here?’

Krishna explains who He is; that He is the all-devouring Time.

Still overcome with fear, but recovering from the primal fear that had overcome him a few moments ago, Arjuna now surrenders himself to Krishna.

Arjuna is so overwhelmed by the fearsome sight of Krishna as mahakala, devouring everything around Him, and is so relieved to still be alive and coherent, that all Arjuna can do is to sing Krishna’s praises. He no longer has any doubt in his mind about the Universal Consciousness of Krishna, who till a while ago was his friend and charioteer. Whatever names and descriptions he is aware of to address this Supreme Being, he uses now.

At this stage, Arjuna understands who Krishna is. He understands what Krishna’s purpose is. Arjuna’s devotion is at its peak. He salutes Krishna as the source of all beings, the creator of Brahma, who in turn created Prajapati from whom all beings originated. He salutes Krishna as the elements of nature. Since Krishna extends everywhere and there is no place where He is not present, Arjuna salutes Him in all directions. Arjuna now truly appreciates the unfathomable magnitude of Krishna.

Q: There are those who say we are all sinners; we are born sinners. We must redeem ourselves to reach God and there is only one God. What do you say to this?

You are no sinner! You never were, you never are and you never will be!

Everybody is potentially a Krishna, a Christ or a Buddha. Feel blessed that God has given you the seed of the Ultimate. All that is needed is to find the right soil and to be ready to die in the soil, to rupture and grow.

If at all you need to redeem yourself it is through renunciation. It is not through regretting anything that you have done. It is to transform from what you were to what you are.

You entered this world in the image of God. You were born pure, free and natural. Your external conditioning imposed changes upon you. You can go back to what you were born as, at any time.

That is what Jesus meant by the word ‘repent.’ In ancient Aramaic, which Jesus spoke, the word ‘repent’ meant ‘to go back to your roots,’ to your original nature, your divine nature. That is not the redemption that priests of any religion will talk about. They will talk about money, about contributions to the collection box and going to confession.

To go back, you need to renounce. As I said before, you need not renounce anything that you already have. Just renounce your expectations, your attachments and your fantasies. Renounce what you do not have, that is enough.

Renunciation is the right soil, and to be with a Master means to be ready to die in Him. The moment the seed dies, a tree is born. The tree cannot be born without the death of the seed. It is only through death that the new arrives. One who knows this secret of life goes on dying every day, every moment, because then death is the process of renewal, of rebirth, of renewing oneself.

Feel blessed that God is within you. One need not be a Christian or a Hindu or anything to be God. Why settle for being a Christian when you can be a Christ? Why settle for being a Buddhist when to be a Buddha is within your grasp?

My suggestion to all my followers is this: never settle for any small thing. Only the Ultimate can make us contented and fulfilled. Be blissful because we are already saved, from the very beginning we are saved. All this talk about our being sinners is manipulative. It is to keep us in bondage. It is to keep us under the control of the priests and religious leaders. By nature, in nature, we are free, we are God, and so, we cannot be sinners.

There is really no way to go astray because all ways lead to God; they can't lead anywhere else. Even those who go astray are simply taking a longer route, that's all. Where else can they go? There is nowhere else to go to, God is everywhere. So you can go south or north or east or west, or you need not go anywhere. Sit wherever you are: God is there too!

Those who say they don't believe in God, they also belong to God. And as far as God is concerned they are all saved. This whole universe is already in the Ultimate state: we have just forgotten. We have forgotten that we need not do anything. We have forgotten that we are already there, where we would like to be. We have forgotten that we are already That which we want to be, That which we dream about and desire, and we have never been otherwise.

In Zen they have a saying: From the very beginning all are saved, all are Buddha. But deep sleep has fallen over us. The function of the Master is not to save us but just to remind us. We should be capable of listening to Him, that's all.

There is a difference between hearing and listening. Anybody whose ears are functioning can hear, but unless our hearts are also there we can't listen. Listen with deep obedience, listen with deep trust, and listen without any thoughts. Because if we have thoughts they will interfere, they will distort. They will change the meanings of the words and they will impose their own ideas. They will only allow us to hear what our mind wants us to hear.

Meditation is the art of listening to Existence. The wind is passing through the trees; listen to it and listen obediently, as if God has called you. God has really called you because the wind belongs to Him and the trees belong to Him and the sound of the wind passing through the trees also belongs to Him. Listen to the water, the running water, and the sound of it; listen to the clouds and listen to the silence of the night. And in the same way listen to the noise of the marketplace, the sound of the train passing by. They are all the same.

Listen to everything with such deep silence that you become capable of not distorting the messages that are arriving every moment. God goes on pouring His messages from everywhere.

The leaf falling from the tree is His message.

Lao Tzu became enlightened seeing a dry leaf falling from the tree. He must have been a man of tremendous silence. Just seeing the pale, old, dead leaf falling from the tree he realized that all is momentary, that life is going to end in death, that there is nothing to cling to, nothing worth clinging to, that this life which ends in death is not the Truth. The leaf became the messenger of God.

In that very moment the worthless was renounced. Not that he made a deliberate decision to renounce; that is not needed. The very understanding that life is momentary, that life is futile, that life is meaningless is enough; one starts searching for another kind of life, on another plane. One has been moving outwards, now one starts moving inwards. We have been searching for joy and bliss and have been finding frustration and misery because that's what the outside can give to us. The moment we turn in, the moment we start exploring our interior, a great joy arises.

Meditation is the art of listening to Existence with deep obedience, with such totality that between us and the song of the bird, there is no barrier. Then the song of the bird becomes the message of the Buddha. Then in every silence there is a scripture. Then every moment of life is a contact with the Divine. Then on every leaf is God's signature, and in every stone a beautiful song is asleep, is hidden.

When we become silent, what is hidden starts becoming manifest. We start hearing things which are not heard ordinarily and we start seeing things which are not seen ordinarily, as if new eyes have grown in us, new ears have grown in us.

The definition of meditation is also the definition of the disciple: the art of listening to the Master.

Let us crucify our head and crown our heart. If we surrender to Existence we are victorious;

we then become 'the crowned one,' which is what the word 'Christ' means. Christ was crucified. His crucifixion was really His crowning ceremony. For those who understand, for those who have eyes to see, His crucifixion was a crowning ceremony because at the last moment on the cross, He surrendered totally.

He said: 'Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.' That was His last prayer. That is surrender. To have one's own will is egoistic; to allow God's will to happen to us is surrender. To be with God and in God is to be victorious; there can be no other victory greater than this.

A Master has to live through this paradox: the paradox of surrendering and realizing victory. We have all been barren and nothing has grown within us. We are all locked inside; so many blockages, so many stones and so

many hindrances to growth. But we go on accumulating them, thinking them to be precious, thinking them to be diamonds. But they are not diamonds. They become a great weight on our soul; the heart is crushed underneath.

In the past, societies all over the world have praised the quality of being hard like a rock. That has been thought to be very manly. That has been praised and honored because the society needed soldiers. It needed people willing to kill and be killed by other people. It needed hard people living in the head and not in the heart. It needed people who couldn't feel, we couldn't be sensitive. Only such people can be forced to be slaves because they will function like machines. Efficient they will be, but human they will not be. Machines do not distinguish between right and wrong.

Where is the scale to measure what is right and what is wrong? There is no scale. That is why in Sanatana Dharma (the correct name for Hinduism, which means 'eternal spiritual path'), we have two scriptures. Sanatana Dharma is the only courageous dharma (spiritual path) to have two kinds of scriptures. All other religions on the planet Earth have only one kind of scripture, one book, which they call the Ultimate Book of Books! That is all. There are many religions that say that their Holy Book can't be updated. Even software can be updated! If the book can't be updated, I don't know what to say. There are many religions that say their book can never be updated.

But Sanatana Dharma is the only courageous spiritual path, whose founders say that their book can be updated. They divided their scriptures into two parts: shruti (the veda or knowledge passed on by word of mouth or hearing) and smriti (set in memory and writing, the code or rule books). Shrutis are the expressions of the experience of enlightened Masters and are about how to reach enlightenment. Smritis refer to the social laws, day-to-day rules and regulations. Vedic tradition was the first courageous culture that declared that their rule-books, the smritis, can be changed. From time to time enlightened Masters can create new smritis because we know that no code of morality can be adequate forever.

No law can be a law forever because morality and law are based on the situation! If the deer population becomes too high, you are allowed to hunt. In the same way, once upon a time in India, the bovine population was too high. That is why they started offering cows in sacrifices. Once the bovine population became too low, they started to worship the cows.

These rules are created to maintain equilibrium in the society, to maintain harmony in the society. When we all live together, we need a few basic understandings to live happily. For example, you agree not to kill me so that I agree not to kill you. That is all. We can both live happily without fear. Like this, a few basic understandings are assumed or have come into being. Slowly, by and by, they become rules. They become morality.

The problem is, as long as we understand the root or reason for morality, we neither behave immorally nor get disturbed by this morality. When we don't understand

the reason for the rule, it becomes just spoon-feeding, a sort of forced rule. Then not only do we try to escape from that rule, but also whenever we break the rule, it creates a deep guilt in us. When it is a forced rule, we often try to go beyond it; for instance we often speed when we don't see a cop! Actually, there is some adventure in doing what we are not supposed to do.

A small story:

One guy became addicted to smoking. He came to me asking for help, 'Master, please help me to quit smoking. I don't know how I became addicted. Please help me.'

I asked him, 'How did you start?'

He replied, 'Master, I never wanted to smoke. In fact, I hated the smell! One day my friend and I were talking on a street corner. My friend was smoking. My father saw us from a distance and thought that I was also smoking. When I went home he started shouting at me. He started screaming at me. I tried my best to explain to him that I was not smoking. But he was not ready to listen to me. Then I thought, anyhow, he has already shouted at me and is not willing to believe me, why not smoke? I already had the punishment. That is why I started smoking.'

Most of the time, if we are asked not to do something, we are tempted to do it. We feel a sort of joy, a satisfaction, in doing it. That is the basic tendency in every human being.

When we say no to our parents, when we rebel, we prove we are adults. We think that as long as we say yes, we are only children. We feel we are not mature. When we say ‘no’, we think we have become mature! It is a basic tendency.

We can see this in teenagers, especially in the USA. The moment they say no they think they are grown up and mature. They feel they become mature by saying no to their parents. That is why there are so many rebellious groups, so many gangs. Because there is a deep taste of satisfaction in saying no! Saying no is almost like an addiction. When we say no, we try to prove we are somebody special; we are somebody different. As long as morality is given to us as spoon-feeding, not with an understanding, we create two things. Firstly, we try our best to escape from it; secondly, we create a deep guilt inside our being once we do escape.

All human beings like to break rules. It is in our nature to rebel. Most of the time people rebel without awareness, just to break rules. It is because these rules have been created without any understanding or experiential inputs from their makers.

If we look into our life, there are so many blocks that have entered the same way. There are so many speed breakers; there are so many obstacles that have entered our life without our understanding. In course of time many practices, which originally had some meaning, become rules, which no longer have any meaning!

In India, in the olden days they would not stitch clothes after sunset, because the stitching was done by hand.

Naturally, in the night, in the dim light of candles or a hurricane lamp, you would not be able to stitch. But even now, in India, we see that after sunset many people won't stitch clothes! Not even in the tailor shops! There are so many tailor shops where electric lights are available. They may stitch with machines, but they won't stitch by hand after sunset.

When we don't have the understanding, practices become dead rules. When we have the understanding, any rule can become a technique to live life happily. When we have the understanding, we will see that all rules are created just to have a happy and blissful life for ourselves and other people around us. Today these very rules create hell for us because the meanings have been lost.

I have seen some people who, before starting their meditation, create such a fuss in the house: 'Keep quiet, don't shout, switch off the telephone, do this, do that'. They will practically turn the whole house upside down just for the sake of ten minutes of meditation. Do you think that they will actually do ten minutes of meditation? The moment they start, they will doze off; after two to three minutes, they will start swatting mosquitoes; after another two minutes, they start scratching themselves. Then they think, 'I can do the rest tomorrow. It is enough for today.'

For this non-meditation they make such a big drama that they practically upset the whole house, without understanding that the very meditation itself is done for the sake of peace and silence. Some people, when they try to silence others, themselves create a lot of noise. Their noise will be much worse than others’. Their words, ‘Hush, keep quiet!’ will be louder than the people who are talking. In schools we can see that the noise made the kids is less than that made by the teachers!

Most of the time, when we don’t understand the root of morality, we start living in a dull and dead way. According to me, any rule, if it is internalized, will create guilt in us. Understand! Any rule! When I say any, I mean ANY. Any rule, if it is internalized, will create a deep guilt in us, because, by our nature, we aspire for freedom.

There is a profound saying, Svabhava swatantraka, which means that our nature itself is freedom. We are eternally free. We never want to be caged! We never want to be a slave of any rule!

We can see that all of society is struggling and working only towards freedom. Our entire struggle is nothing but this struggle for freedom. Even our search for money is the search for freedom. If we have more money, we have bigger choices: bigger house, bigger car, more comforts. We have more choices, therefore, we have more freedom. Our choice or freedom is the real search. Our search for money is nothing but our search for freedom. So by our very nature we are searching for freedom. We never want to be caged by any rules or any morality.

When some morality is given to us as a rule, either we try to go beyond it or if we can’t, we take revenge on whoever imposed the rule on us. We always take

revenge. Maybe, we wait for the right time. And at the right time, we take revenge on them.

People again and again come and tell me, 'Master, my son is not listening to me.' Be very clear, your son may be your first enemy, but you may also be his, because you have given him so many rules, so many regulations. You had given him so many rules and you controlled him when he was young. Naturally, in one part of his mind he will have respect and in the other part he will always feel resentment towards you. That other part will be just waiting to take revenge on you. Because you gave him rules and regulations, it is a basic rule; he will rebel against you because you gave him rules and regulations.

Some people try to give us the rules in a very subtle or cunning way. They exploit our greed and fear by showing us heaven and hell and by creating the desire for heaven and the fear of hell. They create so many concepts of hell and heaven in us. They say, 'If you practise these types of things you will be rewarded with heaven; if you practise those types of things you will be punished with hell.' This concept of heaven and hell is a subtle way of exploiting our being. When we are given some rules based on greed and fear, a deep guilt is created in us.

One more thing! This is one of the ultimate laws, which is very difficult to understand but I repeat, one of the ultimate laws. No one can live one's life based on any law. When I say no one, I mean nobody. When I say any law, I mean any law. Life is far above laws. All the laws, rules and regulations are based on some understanding of life. But life is beyond all our understanding and beyond our logic.

People ask me, 'Why was this life created at all?' I tell them, this 'why' can never be answered. Because this 'why' is based on our logic. But life is based on God's logic. Our logic and God's logic can never meet. His logic is so big, so vast and so infinite. We can never meet His logic.

God has created life. Humans have created rules. Naturally, our laws can never match or fit in with God's logic or the life created by God. Life is natural. Laws are societal. Life is physical. Laws are mental. So all our ideas, all our dos and don'ts, all our morality, all our right or wrong is given to us by society. We are called saints or sinners only by society.

As long as society titles us as a saint, we are saints. The moment society titles us as a sinner, we are sinners. If we kill someone in the society, we will be called murderers. We will be punished. If we kill someone on the war front, we will be called heroes. We will be rewarded with a big award! So, the moral structure is societal. When we start internalizing the laws of society in our mind, we create a deep wound in our being. We destroy our intelligence. According to me, all our morality, rules and regulations are only superficial. It is only skin deep. Look a little deeper!

Our nature is always struggling to express, to go beyond all rules, all regulations and all morality. Our consciousness is always trying to break through our conscience. Our consciousness continuously fights with our conscience. Conscience is societal. Consciousness is natural. Conscience is a poor substitute for consciousness.

People ask me, 'What are you doing, Master? You are breaking the basic laws. You are pulling down the whole social structure. You are pulling down all rules and regulations. Then how can we all live morally? How will people live with morality? What are you doing?'

I tell them, be very clear! We need forced morality only for kids. To children we need to say, 'Keep quiet, I will give you candy.' Of course, nowadays kids say, 'I am happy. I don't need your candy. I am happy jumping around. Who cares for your candy?' To a kid you can say, 'I will give candy,' or 'I will punish you.' On kids we can impose morality based on fear or greed.

Now, it is time to grow beyond that! We are not kids anymore! It is time to stand up and be moral based on understanding, and not based on fear and greed. As long as our morality is based on fear and greed, be very sure that it is just skin deep.

We can never be moral based on fear and greed. If fear and greed is the base for morality, we will try all possible ways to escape from it. For instance we will drive ten miles over the speed limit, thinking that if we see the cop, we can slow down. As long as our morality is based on fear and greed, be sure we are children. We are not mature. If we are really grown up, our morality should be based on understanding and not based on fear and greed.

According to me, a mature person is one who lives a happy, blissful and quiet life without fear and greed. When we drop our fear and greed, a new kind of morality arises in our being. This morality is not societal morality. This is not just skin-deep morality. It arises out of our whole being. Our whole being experiences a different kind of wellbeing.

When religion or society brands us as a born sinner, there is something seriously wrong with its philosophy. It negates the very spirit of a human being, which is divine. Yes, the body-mind system can be polluted and corrupted; but the body-mind system is perishable and changeable. The spirit within is pure and incorruptible. When this is understood, the individual will work towards his upliftment and the realization of his own divine, sin-free Self. Without this understanding, all that will happen is a self-fulfilling prophecy which will further mire him in depression and negativity.

We have enough negativity and depression in this world without religion and society adding to it. The purpose of religion should be to uplift and enlighten, not to frighten and control.

So I say to you, we are no sinners; we never were and never will be.

We are eternal bliss, nithyananda!