Trust Existence, Not Your Logic🔗

When I left home at seventeen, I swore never to touch money again. All

I had were the clothes on my body, the two-piece saffron cloth I was wearing, a water pot and a stick. With just these, I traveled the length and breadth of India for over six years and a distance of thousands of kilometers.

Not only did I not die, I became enlightened!

I was not the only one who achieved this. There are millions like me in India who choose to give up and surrender themselves to the energy of Existence. In the Western world they would be called homeless and would be hounded. They may be taken to prison. In India, wandering monks are respected and given free food and shelter. No one says, 'Why are these able bodied fellows doing no work and begging for food?'

Honestly, I never begged for food. When I was really hungry, someone brought food from nowhere. I stayed under trees and out in the open, even in the Himalaya Mountains at 17,000 feet altitude, at Tapovan and such places. I had absolute trust in Nature. 'Whatever had to happen will happen' - such was my faith.

When you do not have that faith, of course it is a different story. I send some of my disciples, the brahmacharis, on such trips, the parivrajaka – wandering, with no money. They too travel all over India and return with wonderful experiences. This is the only way you can understand how the world lives.

There is freedom in whatever you do. You are answerable only to yourself. Western societies are afraid of this. That is why they control such behavior. If too many people do that then society cannot control them. Society loses power and it can collapse.

In fact outside India, even religious institutions do not allow such freedom. I have not seen any wandering monks out on their own like our sannyasis on parivrajaka, the wandering monks, in India.

It is bondage if one lives even as a monk in a place that is regulated. You can never be free within a disciplined environment.

That is why our ashrams are not regulated. Each person does what he or she can. No one is forced to do anything. It is a different matter that they perform far above their normal levels, but that is out of freedom and love, not out of greed and fear.

Q: When Krishna advises Arjuna to withdraw his senses as a tortoise does, is He advocating the practice of pratyahara?

Patanjali's concept of Ashtanga Yoga that includes the part of pratyahara or sense control is derived from what Krishna says.

Pratyahara literally means stopping the feeding of the senses. It does not mean removing objects that senses are attracted to or getting frightened of the field of the senses or even shutting off the senses so that these objects cannot be sensed.

No, that will never work. If one's senses can be controlled by removing sense objects out of the way, all you need to do is go into the Himalaya and be enlightened. Moving out of the range of sense objects is a helpful condition but not the only and essential condition. There are thousands of sannyasis out there in the mountains, forests and monasteries in seclusion, out of contact with women who still have not dropped their fantasies of lust.

A young novice monk went up to his Master and asked him how he could get rid of lustful thoughts that kept bothering him and disturbing his meditation.

The older monk asked him to describe his thoughts and fantasies in detail and listened with great interest. There were many 'wow' and 'tell me more' comments in between.

When the novice finished, the older monk said, 'You have given me a lot more material to think about. I am ninety and I still have lustful thoughts, plenty of them. Let us go to my Master who is a hundred and twenty. He may perhaps have an answer!'

Shutting your eyes and ears is no solution either. You see people trying to meditate by shushing every one around them and trying to concentrate. Meditation is not about becoming deaf and dumb. You can close your eyes and plug your ears to shut off all external noise signals. But then your inner movies will start playing; your inner television will starts to play instead.

You may have heard about and met people who have had their limbs amputated but feel pain in the empty space where their limbs had been. They call this 'phantom pain'. You do not need the physical entity to feel pain; the nerve endings imagine that lost part and convey pain.

Blind people dream. They have dreams as vivid as any sighted person. With your eyes closed, you dream during the day as well as in the night. Shutting off a sense organ physically has no effect on the perception of that sense organ. It plays back from stored memories.

There is an energy called chakshu behind your five sense organs, the gyanendriya. It is not the physical and material objects that you perceive which threaten your senses but this energy that interprets them. What the chakshu reports to your body-mind system is interpreted by your unconscious mind based on your conditioning. You act based on that interpretation. Your actions further reinforce that conditioning, and the cycle continues.

The only way to stop this cycle is to disengage the chakshu. It does not help if you run away from the scene of action; the action will follow you through the fantasies of your mind. It does not help if you close down your sense organs physically. Images stored within will still continue to play.

Pratyahara or starving the senses refers to starving or stopping the energy behind the sense organs, or stopping the chakshu from operating.

What Krishna implies is more. It is not merely stopping the chakshu; you will then be the walking dead; He does not want you to be a zombie. He wants your chakshu to operate, but you be non- judgmental. He wants it to be free of all conditioning. He wants you to be freed from your samskaras.

When you can see and hear and touch and taste and smell everything around you without feeling aroused or repulsed, with no feeling of pain or pleasure, with no interest in the outcome, then you are free of samskaras. Your chakshu may function but your mind does not. You perceive but you do not interpret. You move with nature as your awareness dictates. You do what you need to do with awareness with no interest in the outcome.