Your Familiar Form🔗

11.45 After seeing this Form which I have never seen before I am filled with gladness but at the same time I am disturbed by fear.

I yearn to see You in that Form.

Arjuna now makes his final plea in these verses.

'Show me Your Form that I am familiar with,' he says, 'the One that I am comfortable with. I am grateful and overwhelmed by the visions that You have shown me, but what I am comfortable with is Your four-handed Form holding the discus and mace, as the Protector of the Universe. I am not comfortable, I am indeed fearful of the terrifying Form of You as the Destroyer, however real it may be.'

All of us are in the same situation as Arjuna. We all have fixed ideas of what divinity is, what motherhood is, what love is and what friendship is. Divinity is benign, comforting, protecting, nurturing, forgiving and all that is sweet and nice. So are motherhood, love and friendship.

Existence does not work that way. Existence does not differentiate between good and bad, between beautiful and ugly. It is we who make judgments and create emotions within us to promote those judgments.

In the Vishnu Sahasranama, which is recited by Bhishma as he lies awaiting his liberation, he describes Vishnu as 'shantakaram bhujaga shayanam padmanabham suresham'. 'Peaceful, emanating bliss...' is how Vishnu, whose incarnation Krishna is, is described. Just the very words bring to us so much peace and calmness, yes?

If instead, Bhishma had used words to describe the fearsome attributes of Vishnu such as:

'frightful destroyer, with burning mouths...' and so on, how many would recite the Sahasranama? It is a different matter that most people who go through the motions of reading and reciting the thousand names of Vishnu do not understand a word of what they are saying! So they are safe, whatever Bhishma may have said.

But if you do understand what the words mean, and if you are not in equilibrium, you will be disturbed. These words, understood to be negative by your logical mind, will create severe emotional turbulence within you.

A yogi is one who has passed beyond these turbulences. He understands that the Divine is without attributes, neither peaceful and comforting, nor fearful and terrifying. These manifestations are also illusions. Beyond and behind these apparent manifestations, Divinity just is. It is beyond the three gunas, it is beyond mind-body and spirit.

Arjuna at this point in time is yet to reach this stage. He still seeks the safety and comfort of the four-handed Divine Protector that he is used to, rather than the terrifying mahakala.

When we realize that both are masks of the Divine, that neither is His true Self and that both are His true Self, then and only then are we rid of illusions, and are liberated.

Q: Master, I am a mother of young children. Can you advise me on how to bring them up the right way?

Our whole effort is always to project our desires on our children. Our own dreams are unfulfilled, because dreams are never going to be fulfilled, so we project

them on our children, we hope that what has not happened to us will happen to them. The same has been the case with your parents and the same will be the case with your children when they become parents.

Helping the child to go beyond dreaming, beyond fantasies, should be the basic function of the mother, the father, both the parents. Normally we do just the contrary: we help the child to become more ambitious, more egoistic. We condition them to live in greed and fear and train them to fantasize.

For centuries, from one generation to the next generation, parents have continued giving hopes, ambitions and desires that basically can't be fulfilled. To be really helpful to the child we have to understand this. Have no more projections; don't load the child with your dreams. Help him to see the futility of all dreams. Then each child can become a Buddha - each child is meant to become a Buddha. It is because of wrong conditioning, wrong society and wrong education that we hinder their growth into Buddhahood.

In Japan they have a certain art. It should not be called art, it is cruel, but they call it the art of bonsai. They grow trees in small pots. Big trees, which if grown in the soil would reach to the clouds, are grown in small pots that have no bottoms, and they go on cutting their roots. These miniature trees in Japan, four-hundred-year-old trees, are just six inches high.

If you cut the roots, how can they grow? They think that this is an art and many people all over the world appreciate it. People go to see those trees and they think

something great has been done! They are centuries old and the gardeners have been keeping them generation after generation. The older the tree, if it is not allowed to grow, the more artful it is understood to be. It is ugly to see those trees.

They used to do something similar to human beings in Imperial China. They broke the feet of noble ladies and bound them so that they could not grow. The feet remained the size of a child's feet, and could not support the weight of an adult. These ladies were literally disabled; all this in the name of beauty and fashion.

They do the same thing today in the fashion world. They starve themselves and they vomit what they eat, so that they can be painfully thin. Young women think they are ugly if they are more than skin and skeleton.

This is the way society has conditioned people, especially children. But that is the situation of every child in the world; those bonsai trees are very representative. What do we do to children? We cut their roots, unknowingly, of course. We want to help but we are so unconscious that our help is a hindrance, not help at all.

So this is going to be your work. This will help you to wake up and this will help the child to grow in the right direction.

The time has now come to go beyond mind. Mind is our bondage. Mind means the past, and to go beyond the mind means to live in the present. Slip out of the past; don't allow it to interfere anymore, because to love through the past is to live a dead life. The past is dead.

Living through the past is living in a grave. That's why there is so much misery in the world and so much deadness, insensitivity, unconsciousness: people are not really alive. They are not flowering; there seems to be no growth happening.

They are simply born, and vegetate and one day they die. Their whole life consists of very meaningless activities, trivia. They don't attain any significance. They can't say in the end that life has been a great benediction. They go frustrated, disappointed, disillusioned, but nobody is responsible for it except themselves. If we live through the mind this is going to happen.

Start living the life of meditation, and meditation means the life of no-mind. Don't allow thoughts to interfere. Be in direct contact with Existence: with trees, with rocks, rivers, people. Become a child again; then the circle is complete.

One is born as a child; one should die as a child. Jesus says: 'Unless you are like small children you will not enter into My kingdom of God.' He is absolutely right. The really ripe and mature person is one who, in his old age, again becomes as innocent as a child. The circle is complete: life has come to its ultimate peak and we are ready to go back home.

If the circle is incomplete we will have to be born again, because the circle has to be completed; that is the task that has been given to us. Unless we fulfil it, God cannot call us back. This is our work in life: to become a child again, innocent, full of wonder and awe. The mind is good as a mechanism; use it but don't be used by it. Don’t become its servant and don’t be possessed by it. Remain the master.

Become a child to guide your child. Recover your lost innocence. Drop your own conditioning so that you can bring up your children as unconditioned beings.

Scientists tell us that until the age of adolescence children still operate with the brains in the alpha pattern. All adult brains work at beta brain wave frequency (about 13 to 20 Hertz). Alpha is between 8 and 12 Hertz. When they are younger the frequency of brain waves is even less, in delta and theta, which are the state of dreaming and deep sleep. In these low-frequency states the individual is highly influencible. Anything any person says, especially an older person with authority, is never questioned.

This is the scientific basis for conditioning of children; this is how conditioning by parents, teachers and elders occurs. This is how our samskara are built up. Over generations this samskara burden is no longer that of an individual parent, the father or mother. It becomes a tribal or cultural or religious samskara. They become injunctions and commandments. They become the tools for controlling people.

That is what happens when we bring up our children. We control them on behalf of our society and religion, because this is how we have been brought up. We do not know any better. However unhappy we are with the circumstances of our own life, knowing fully well that the way we have been brought up has caused us miseries, we still inflict the same rules upon our children. It is simply

because we know no better. We are like deer caught in the headlights of a car. We seem frozen in our responses.

If you seriously wish to bring up your children instead of bringing them down as most parents do, drop your own conditioning. Drop all your parental, societal and religious conditioning. All you have to lose is your fear and greed. You will then stop perpetuating the chain of destruction. You will stop spreading the destruction of spirit and allow enlightenment to blossom.