Brahma's Day And🔗

Night

Now He says, ‘After attaining Me the great souls who are steeped in yoga never return to this temporary world which is full of miseries, because they have attained the highest perfection.’

The understanding of this science, the very intellectual understanding, gives the inspiration to experience truth and naturally leads us to the ultimate Truth.

Here Kṛṣṇa says, ‘If you achieve this state, you never come back.’ He inspires us to enter that state. The only job of an enlightened master is to make everyone realize the truth that he himself has experienced. There is no ulterior motive.

People again and again look at an enlightened master with suspicion. They suspect foul play. Understand: A person who remains at the inner source of bliss never cares for anything external. He does not need external sources of happiness.

That is the reason he does not see the world as a collection of miseries. You see, an enlightened master may not get food for days, yet he is always blissful. Even in such situations, the only things that he experiences are gratitude and compassion. He is neither attached to sorrow nor to happiness. He is detached from both to the same degree.

He is always in a state of gratitude to the universe. Worldly things do not affect him. Happiness and sorrow are not in his dictionary.

A small story:

The Sufi master, Javed paid gratitude to God five times a day. Once he and his followers were wandering through several villages where Sufism was not accepted as a religion.

In the first village, people accused them of begging, and threw meager alms at them. In the next village, the people refused to give them any alms.

On the third day, the village they visited was so hostile that the villagers drove them out with sticks and stones.

That night as usual, the master knelt down and offered gratitude to God. His disciples watched. It was too much for them. They could not understand why their master was thanking God when they were hungry, thirsty and miserable.

They cried out, 'Master! For three days we have gone without food! Today we were driven out of that village like dogs! Is this what you offer gratitude for?'

Their master looked at them and said, 'You talk about three days of hunger! Have you thanked God for the food you have received for the past thirty years? My gratitude is not based on receiving or not receiving anything. It is an expression of deep joy and love in my being; it is a choiceless and prayerful expression.’

An enlightened master looks at misery and happiness with total gratitude and surrender to the universe. He surrenders everything that he has and gets, to Existence. He says, ‘Let Existence take care.’ There is a great relief inside when that state of surrender happens. We suddenly light up in joy.

We consider something as misery because we think we are responsible for that something. That is why, when something does not happen according to our expectations, we see it as misery. But an enlightened being simply flows. Whatever comes, he accepts it and surrenders it to Existence.

In the next verse, Kṛṣṇa talks about the misery-filled world and we see how good deeds cannot get us out of the cycle of birth and death. Kṛṣṇa says here:

‘From the highest planet of Brahmaloka in the material world down to the lowest, all are places of misery wherein repeated birth and death takes place. But one who attains Me, one who attains My being, one who attains My consciousness, never takes birth again.’

Even if we reach the cosmic layer of Brahmaloka, the land of the Divine, we must come back and take birth again. It means that even if we are full of good intentions and good deeds, even if we are attached to good things, we must come back into a body.

Even if we are caught in doing good deeds, we return. Our good deeds, puṇya, cannot give us enlightenment. I tell people, ‘Even if you give money for my ashram, I cannot give you a speed pass to enlightenment!’ Be very clear, unless you achieve at least one moment of thoughtless awareness, nobody can save you from the cycle of birth and death.

Some people believe that when they give money to institutions, they receive a receipt and a pass to heaven. They are buried with the receipt so that they can show the receipt to the gatekeeper of heaven who will let them in!

Honestly at least I don’t have such a system with this institution. Let me be very clear! I never tell people, ‘Do charity and good acts and I can get you into heaven.’ Do things out of love and gratitude with no attachment, and you will be in heaven as a result of your mental setup.

I tell people, ‘Even if you give money to my ashram, I cannot give you any speed pass; nothing can be done. This is the honest truth.’ People ask, ‘Then why do you build ashrams and temples?’ I build them because they are laboratories where the spiritual sciences can be practiced, where people study and imbibe great truths to practice them in their lives. They are inner-science laboratories.

Do charity and good acts with the consciousness that you are engaged in research in the inner sciences in these laboratories, just as the ṛṣis of the great vedic tradition did. Don’t do it for some special ticket to heaven.

Don’t expect that if we do these things for Lord Viṣṇu, He will send a special flight with a garuḍa (eagle) emblem when we leave the body, and the celestial beauties, will take us there. Nothing of that sort happens! If we expect these things to happen, we will only sit and wait. No such thing will happen! Whether we acquire sin or merit, we suffer when we leave the body. Both are karma.

Then what is to be done? When we live in the body, at least once, by meditating or by surrender, experience one glimpse of thoughtless awareness.

Work intensely for it. If we achieve one glimpse, it’s over. That one glimpse acts like a torch and guides us through these seven layers when we leave the body. We will just slide through all seven layers. If we achieve that one glimpse of consciousness, we achieve what has to be achieved; everything else is a waste. All merits and sins - nothing comes with us. We will be judged only by this one glimpse of samādhi, the ultimate truth.

Again and again Vivekānanda says, ‘If you achieve even a single glimpse, you leave your body in that experience.’ The intense experience of Self-realization will come up at the time when we leave the body. At the time of death, our whole life is played back to us in a fast-forward mode in a few seconds. And only the important scenes appear in multicolor; all others scenes appear in black and white. If we have had the samādhi experience when we were alive, that alone will appear in multicolor; all other things will fade away in the background.

And naturally, we stay in that state and leave the body. One more thing - if there is a scratch on a videotape, the tape gets stuck in that place when it runs in fast-forward mode, is it not? So when the fast-forward happens, the remainder of the tape is erased. Similarly, thoughtless awareness is the stuck point in our life because in that space we never had a thought. We will be stuck there and whatever fast-forward happens beyond that, all the karma associated with it will be erased, washed away!

It is like a virus entering our software; the more we try to operate the software, the more the virus destroys the software. Similarly, thoughtless awareness is the divine virus for our samsāra sagara – ocean of worldly life, for the software that is our mind.

Don’t think that the mind is intelligence. The mind is just programmed software. For example, let us say we experience anxiety every morning because of office-related worries. The funny thing is, eventually we start experiencing the same depression even on the weekend when there is no office to attend! Then we tell our mind, ‘No, this is the weekend. I don’t need to think about those things.’ But every weekend, our mind goes back to the same mood because our mind is pre-programmed software.

One glimpse of consciousness in our lifetime is enough. Then there will be no need to take the next birth. We assume the body and mind only if we believe there is something to be enjoyed or achieved through the body and mind. When we are in this body, if we work on our engraved memories, saṁskāras, and come out of them, we will liberate ourselves from their influence, and hence from the cycle of re-birth.

Actually, you do not normally become aware of these saṁskāras. In our Second level program, Life Bliss Program Level 2, we take you through techniques to uncover them first. You write down and analyze all that has happened in your life and all that you have stored in the various energy layers. You analyze: What is the root of your desires? What are your own desires? Which desires are borrowed?

For instance, guilt is initially imposed on us by society. Later we master the art of creating guilt and continue to create it for ourselves! Next, pain and suffering. Society creates a scale deciding what pain is and what suffering is. We then actually turn our whole life into suffering by measuring it with that scale. In the workshop, we work deeply on these things - on every emotion related to engraved memories or saṁskāras.

If we are stuck with guilt, we can never enjoy our desires. When we don't enjoy our desires, we create more guilt. Then again we cannot enjoy our desires. This becomes a vicious circle.

As of now, understand this one thing: Experience His consciousness, the witnessing consciousness in which Kṛṣṇa stays and plays the whole game of life. That is why Kṛṣṇa's life is called līla – cosmic play; Kṛṣṇa līla. It is not history. It is a cosmic play.

For ordinary human beings, after they die, their life will be written as history. For incarnations, their life itself is a script that has already been written; they just come down and enact it! They play the whole game. That is why their life is called līla. If we achieve the witnessing consciousness, our whole life becomes līla. We know the script and we are ready.

Kṛṣṇa conveys one thing: All we need to do is work to achieve a glimpse of thoughtless awareness. He says further:

‘By human calculation, the thousand ages taken together form the duration of Brahma’s one day, and such also is the duration of his night.’

One year for us is one day for the devatas, demigods. Only when we achieve the consciousness of nirvāṇa – thoughtless awareness, will we not take re-birth. Here He says a beautiful thing about kṣaṇa.

At the time of death, our soul has three kṣaṇas to take another body. If we have lived a restless life, -our kṣaṇas will be in microseconds. If we have lived a peaceful, blissful life and achieved at least one glimpse of thoughtless awareness, our kṣaṇa can be even two or three hundred years. It can extend to two or three hundred years, because it is the gap between one thought and the next thought. So kṣaṇa is relative and depends on our state of mind.

Time is actually psychological. If we sit with a friend with whom we are comfortable and joyful after three or four hours, we suddenly notice the time and say, ‘Oh! I don’t know how the time has passed by so quickly!’ At the same time, if we sit with somebody with whom we don’t feel comfortable, we will keep looking at the watch and think, ‘Why is the watch not moving? The time is simply dragging on.’

The number of thoughts that happen in our mind decides the time consciousness. If thoughts are less, even after ten hours, we will not feel that ten hours have passed. If the number of thoughts is more, two or three minutes will seem like years.

A small story:

A lady goes to the doctor for a check-up. After a thorough examination, the doctor says, ‘I’m sorry. I have bad news. You may live only six months more at the most.’

She says, ‘What is this? What should I do now?’

The doctor says, ‘I have one suggestion. Marry an accountant.’

She asks, ‘Will that cure me?’

He says, ‘No, no. But then the six months will seem very long.’

One year of human life equals one day of the devatas, demigods, because their thoughts per second (TPS) is very less. That is why the deity Naṭarāja in the temple at Chidambaram in South India, has only six prayer offerings throughout the year. Normally, the worship is carried out six times a day in other temples. But this temple is supposed to be where the devatas worship the Divine, so the worship is carried out according to their time!

The six offerings of worship required for the deity are conducted in our one year because our one year is one day for the deities or devatas. Devatas refers to those whose TPS has come down, who have had a glimpse of samādhi. If our TPS is low, we too are in heaven. If our TPS is high, we are in hell. Heaven always looks brief; hell always looks eternal, because of the number of thoughts.

When we are in the body, if we have had a single glimpse of thoughtless awareness - the experience of meditation, then automatically this consciousness comes up at the time of leaving the body, and we will have two benefits. We can choose to become enlightened and not take another birth, or we can choose the right place to express and work out our karma, to live as we want. We have both choices if we experience thoughtless awareness while living.