Inner and Outer Violence🔗

Q: Is it possible to be detached without being indifferent? How do we keep our hearts open along the spiritual path?

Please be very clear: only a person with an open heart can be detached.

is one and the same. If you cannot share yourself intensely, you cannot detach yourself. The person who struggles is half of everything, being able to neither attach nor detach. The one who can attach fully can also detach himself.

Many of you are so much in need of attention yourselves that it is difficult to express love and affection to others all the time. Your heart energy center, the anahata chakra, is blocked by a desperate need for attention. You suck energy from others, since attention is energy. The main reason for this is your upbringing. Since childhood you are conditioned to please others and over time you cannot exist without approval of others.

Many of you may have experienced this. When someone is bitter and grieving and you give him or her a shoulder to cry on, you are left feel drained of energy. You are not doing anything physical. You are not even experiencing anything emotional directly. You are only listening to some one cry. Yet, it affects you, it drains you. This is real. People suck energy from you. If you are not centered in your heart center and your heart center is not open, you will feel drained. This may then affect you physically.

By unblocking and energizing your anahata chakra, the heart center, you become a permanent source of energy and become capable of showering attention, affection on others without expecting anything in return and without feeling drained. We teach a simple meditation technique to activate and energize the anahata chakra in our first level chakra energization courses, the Life Bliss Program level

1. Not only is this capable of giving love without expectation, but it is also a powerful self healing meditation.

When you do not expect anything in return, you have no attachment and you become detached. Detachment does not refer to a state of non-caring, it is in fact just the opposite. The right word is nonattachment, not detachment. When you are not attached, you do not differentiate between strangers and family and friends. You shower attention and affection equally. There is no boundary to your circle of care; it is infinite.

Attachment binds you to the past and present. Nonattachment centers you in the present. When you genuinely care, and care unconditionally, you are no longer bothered about what a person did in the past and how he or she behaved with you. You are also no longer concerned about how they may act with you in the future. All that matters is that you care now.

That is why true love is always in the present. That is why it is blind; it is blind to the past and future. Real love only has eyes to see in the present moment. So long as the love has a fixed object, it remains blind.

When you let go the object and let the love flow wherever, to whomever and however, love blossoms into compassion; it is love expressed in a state of total awareness.

Q: Some Masters talk of the Self as poorna and some as sunya. These have contradictory meanings. How can both be correct?

Buddha refers to the ultimate stage as sunya, nothingness. Sankara refers to the same stage as poorna, the fullness stage. Both Masters refer to the same state. Sankara refers to Self-realization and liberation from all bondages of life and death. Buddha also refers to liberation from all bondages though he says there is no Self and all that there is, is nothingness.

Nothingness and fullness are opposite sides of the same state. They are not different from each other. They are just being viewed differently. When we refer to sunya, we negate; when we refer to poorna we include, that’s all.

The Vedic chant ‘poornamadah poornamidam’ says that from fullness arises fullness; when fullness comes out of fullness, fullness still remains. One can replace the word fullness in this chant with nothingness and the meaning will not change. Just as there is nothing beyond nothing, there is nothing beyond fullness.

Whatever you may add or subtract or multiply or divide from infinity, it will remain infinity. In mathematics if you add to zero you may get something, but if you add anything to nothingness, it will absorb the nothingness into it like a black hole and there will be nothing to show.

Sankara, who talked about poorna, fullness, was the ultimate denier of everything. 'Neti, neti, not this, not this,' was his motto. At eight years of age, he responded to his guru Govindapada, on the banks of the river Tungabadra with six verses that form Atmashataka. Every verse in this response is denial. ‘I am not this, I am not that,’ Sankara says. I am not the five elements. I am not the emotions. I am not the enjoyment. He says, ‘I am Shiva. Nothingness leads to fullness.’

Q: Krishna urges Arjuna to fight. Many Westerners say that Krishna preached and practiced violence. Is this correct?

People whose mental tendencies are violent pretend to be shocked at what they perceive as physical violence. They do not understand that there is no difference between the physical and mental violence; one cannot be without the other.

In so-called civilized societies the rule of law controls and inhibits people from exercising the violence of their minds. You do not even find people smiling. If at all they do smile, the smile does not move beyond their lips. The smile is a dead smile. Suppression of the mental violence within does not make a person non violent; it does not make a person peaceful. It just makes the person a time bomb.

People call this privacy. Suppression of feelings is not privacy. It is a disaster waiting to happen. Not letting others into you is not privacy. It is an invitation to depression. You cannot become free by encasing yourself in seclusion.

It is like a monk running away from home thinking that he has renounced everything and that he will be free of all desires. Desires spring from the mind. If the inner maturity does not happen then even if the monk sits far away from everything in a forest, fantasies will crowd his mind.

You cannot run away from your family and become a monk. You can be with family and renounce. You have to be awake and aware to renounce and be a true monk. You do not need to run away to the forests or the mountains to be awake. You can be awake wherever you are.

The Master awakens you most often with a hard slap. Ramana Maharishi says that the Master is a simha swapna, lion nightmare! The Master is a nightmare that wakes you up from unreality into reality.

Krishna is removing the fantasies of Arjuna's mind. He is clearing the cobwebs of pretension that Arjuna and mankind have about what is good and what is evil. Truth is beyond good and evil. Dharma, the universal law of righteousness, is far different from society's law of morality and immorality.

We all are brought up with role models and behavior templates of what is right and what is wrong. This is based on societal conditioning. These guidelines and regulations are to ensure that society operates as smoothly as possible. When we do not have the awareness and intelligence to see beyond these rules and regulations and to understand the reason for their existence, we are constantly tempted and yet afraid to break them. We are like the toddler testing the parent's rules.

The Ten Commandments was the truth that Moses experienced. They were expressions of his experience. For his followers they were mere commandments that had to be enforced through fear and greed. What was a deep spiritual experience of awareness for one enlightened person, degenerated into guidelines for sin and merit, and gateways to hell and heaven.

Many Eastern scholars also have not understood Krishna. They either gloss over what He says as something metaphorical to escape addressing the apparent violence of His statements or they criticize Him for advocating violence.

Krishna is not advocating violence. He is advocating awareness. He says that what we perceive as life and death is a dream. He says that what we perceive as good and evil and as right and wrong are relative, cultural, impermanent and unreal. These dualities are born out of our conditioning and our ignorance. In reality there is no duality. There is no right or wrong, there is no good or evil.

It is this conditioning that makes people constantly ask why God is so cruel. This is why people question situations in the world like the death of a young child or the natural disasters that kill thousands. There are no logical answers except that this is the way of Nature. Nature's way is impermanence. Nature's way is unpredictable.

Krishna takes a sledgehammer to break our conditioning. He says to Arjuna, 'Fight!' knowing fully well that much of humanity will be shocked. People are shocked because this is what they have in their minds but are afraid to reveal. Constant suppression of violence in the mind breeds depression and leads to violence towards oneself. Some destroy themselves while some are in the process of destroying themselves and others.

It is good to accept the violence within. It is good to reflect upon and examine the violence within in order to understand wherefrom this violence springs. Once the understanding happens the violence will disappear.

A person who has the awareness to realize the impermanence of body-mind and the permanence of the spirit within has already developed within himself the intelligence to know whether the fight and the killing are needed or not. That is why it is said that even if Buddha kills, it is no sin. It is an act born out of awareness that had to happen.

People who preach about non-violence need to understand that ahimsa, the Vedic concept of non-violence, goes well beyond physical non-violence. It is a comprehensive expression of an integrated person. It is non-violence of thoughts, words and from that, non-violence in action. Such non-violence can only happen through complete awareness. It can only happen when there is awareness that every being, animate and inanimate, is part of the same, interconnected cosmic energy. It can only happen when there is the awareness of boundarylessness.

In such a situation, with such awareness, when destruction happens it is an integral part of creation; without such destruction there can be no further creation.

What Krishna says here cannot be understood just through simple logic, by reading or listening. It can only be understood through experience. Krishna is not saying that you logically determine what is right and what is wrong and then decide to fight against what is wrong. He does not give that choice to Arjuna because he does not trust Arjuna's logic. He does not trust any logic. He says that whatever you think of as good and bad, right and wrong, moral and evil, whatever you think of as opposing dualities are only figments of your own imagination. .

There is no duality, there is no difference. The difference is in your awareness. When you shift your awareness beyond this duality you are in a state of Oneness, Wholeness. In that state of Oneness there can be no violence.

Q: Based on beliefs of Christianity and Islam, rebirth or reincarnation is denied by the majority of the world's population today. Why do these religions deny this phenomenon if this is true?

The socially correct answer to this would be not to get into this controversy and carry on with one's own belief systems.

Judaism, the religion that spawned both Christianity and Islam, believed in the concept of the spirit living on, moving from one body into another. The concept was called gilgulim. While modern Jews may discount this concept, orthodox Jews still believe in reincarnation.

Christian groups such as Gnostics and Islamic groups such as Sufis have repeatedly confirmed their belief in reincarnation. The Bible as it is read today was recompiled in the fourth century A.D. and in this process many scriptures that did not appeal to the Romans were discarded. This is a historical fact. Similarly, in the Koran there are verses that refer to a life before and after birth.

It is true that in these religions reincarnation is not as central a concept as it is in the Vedic tradition. There can be no doubt about this.

Disregarding what religions may say for and against reincarnation, one should look at this concept empirically and scientifically. Instead of dismissing evidence of people with past life memories as hallucination, it is necessary to keep an open mind and investigate. Science today

confirms that matter and energy are inter-convertible and while matter can be destroyed, energy cannot be destroyed. There is no doubt in anyone's mind that the human system operates on energy. So what happens to this energy at death? It has to go someplace.

Even if one assumes that energy does not move from body to body, one has to concede that it goes into a central pool of energy. This is what we call the Brahman in Vedic tradition. Since the newborn has to derive energy from somewhere, that energy has to come from a central pool, the same Brahman. Whichever way one argues, the energy of the spirit lives on and moves from one body to another, even if not directly, but indirectly through a storehouse of energy.

From this agreement to actual reincarnation is a leap of faith. Actually it is a leap of experience. Every great Master who has realized his Self has declared that he was one with Existence, one with the Brahman. From this the concept of the individual Self, the atman, developed, which is the same energy but contained in that individual.

Krishna says that the individual energy, the atman, has the choice to move either into another atman, like a person changing clothes, or to be liberated into the Brahman. When the desires of the atman have been completely fulfilled, it moves on to the Brahman. When it has unfulfilled desires it enters into another body.

Q: Master, the concept of reincarnation gets even more complicated when we are told that we can be reborn as animals or even insects. That is pretty tough to swallow isn't it?

Yes, it does get more complicated.

We can so easily accept the concept of evolution that human beings evolved from single cell beings. However, even for those of us who can accept reincarnation it is very difficult to accept that human beings can also devolve into what we consider 'lower' forms. It is a threat to our identity. How can I turn into a fly or a fish or whatever?

What the spirit chooses in the future body depends upon the mental setup or tendencies of that person during the previous incarnation. It all depends on what kind of a life one led and with what unfulfilled desires one left the body. I say jokingly to my disciples sometimes that if they are over-fond of sleeping they may be reborn as a buffalo and if they are gluttons they may take birth as pigs! There is an element of truth in this.

Do not imagine that human beings are so unique. They are to the extent that they are the only species that can think and have consciousness that can elevate them to beyond this body-mind. Animals need to pass through the human body to be liberated. However, we have the same energy as animal, just in different form. The highest energy center of an animal is the root energy center or muladhara. When the spirit of an animal evolves into a human, the higher chakras are developed. If a person lives throughout his life only in the muladhara chakra, in lust and greed, there is every possibility that the person can be reborn as an animal. The spirit will move towards the lower energy centers at the time of death.

What is more difficult to grasp is how an animal moves up to become a human. Even though they lack the consciousness of a human to be liberated, animals can reach the highest levels of their own existence and can move up in the next birth. That is how evolution works.

People ask: A few centuries ago there was only a fraction of the current world population. Even if you add animal population there would not have been six billon spirits. So, how did the population grow to six billion and continues to grow? If new lives are based on rebirth where did all these new bodies come from?

Relax. All living beings are energy. Moreover this universe extends far beyond planet Earth. The entire space is energy. So there is enough energy to populate many planets, not only to overpopulate this Earth.