CHAPTER 6: Dhyāna Yogaḥ🔗

YOU ARE YOUR BEST FRIEND AND YOU ARE

YOUR WORST ENEMY. WHETHER YOU WISH TO

DEGRADE YOURSELF OR RAISE YOURSELF BY

YOURSELF IS IN YOUR HANDS. KṚṢṆA GIVES

THE TECHNIQUE TO UNITE WITH HIM IN

YOGA, THE SUPREME CONSCIOUSNESS BY

BECOMING A YOGI.

We will start with a beautiful history from Mahābhārat:

Once the elders of Kuru royal family wanted to test the intelligence of their new generation of princes, the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas as to—who is more intelligent and wise—Kaurava kids, the hundred sons of King Dhritarāṣṭra or Pāṇḍava kids, the five sons of King Pāṇḍu. So, they devised a competition.

They said to all the Kaurava and Pāṇḍava young princes, 'You will be given one gold coin. With that one gold coin, you will have to fill your palace house!' This was the test laid out for them.

The Kauravas took the gold coin and sat together. Naturally, hundred brains will mess-up any plan, any program. See, you can have hundred hands but not hundred brains. Be very clear, all great things are done by hundred hands and hundred legs, but not by hundred brains. Brain should be only one. In life, unfortunately, we have thousands of brains, but not a single hand!

So, these hundred Kaurava brains all sit together, intensely discuss, argue, and even fight among themselves, 'How can we fill the whole house with one gold coin?' they speculated. Each brain came up with its own strategy, just to be pulled down by the other. Then, finally after enough squabble and confusion, they came to the conclusion, 'The elders are all cheats, they are abusing us, trying to exploit us, and making us feel we are failures!'

After this whole drama of blaming others, of feeling deprived and cheated, finally they decided that for one gold coin they could get only hay grass, which is the left over chaff of grains and paddy after crop harvesting.

Here, the Pāṇḍavas sat together into the listening of dharma. Even though each Pāṇḍava is a peerless specialist with unmatched expertise in some field, they all were always aligned under Dharmarāja, dharma! Understand, Yudhiṣṭra, the eldest of the Pāṇḍava brothers is Dharmarāja, the king and embodiment of dharma!

Listen! All the five Pāṇḍavas are sons of Nature born as immaculate conceptions of Divine powers. Yudhiṣṭra is dharma incarnate, who along with the four Pāṇḍava brothers, embodies all the four tattvas of integrity, authenticity, responsibility and enriching, empowered with the powers of words, thinking, feeling and living.

Bhīma, the son of Vāyu (wind god), represents the physical valor, the strength of integrity and authenticity. Arjuna, the son of Indra (the king of gods), is Nara incarnate, the highest evolved human energy of Nārāyaṇa, Lord Kṛṣṇa. Arjuna is physiological power, the power of feeling awakened by responsibility! Both Bhīma and Arjuna are totally different expressions of unique divine powers. The ability to thrash is different, the ability to aim is different! Arjuna, the embodiment of physiological power, has the abili-ty to aim and shoot, which needs mastery over the body, mind and senses. Nakula embodies the sense of intelligence and the space of possibility that is awakened by authenticity, the power of thinking. Nakula is one of the most intelligent strategy planners, who plans all the war strategies. Sahadeva is the aligner of time, he is a great astrologer expressing integrity, the power of words. All of them are always aligned under Dharmarāja Yudhiṣṭra. Because they are aligned to dharma, Pāṇḍavas are like one brain having ten hands, all together united to express enriching, the power of living.

Listen! I am defining Dharma. The power of your words, the power of your thinking, the power of your feeling, and the power of your living, this is Dharma. Dharma is aligning yourself to the flow of the Cosmos.

So, they all sit together aligning to Dharmarāja and discuss, 'What will fill the whole house with one gold coin? When our elders say then it is possible.’

Please understand, you can look at this test of intelligence from two possibilities. One group looks out and wails, ‘I think these elders are all fools. They don’t know what they are asking us to do. They are just trying to prove we are all small fellows.’ This is the thought trend of Kauravas. Then come the sons of immortality, Pāṇḍavas, who look in and wonder, ‘When elders say, then there must be way. They are trying to teach us, educate us, and enrich us through this. When elders say, it is possible.’ So finally, Pāṇḍavas also decide to fill the house with one gold coin! How they did it, let us see!

At the time of supervision, all the Kuru elders—Grandsire Bhīśma, Droṇa, Vidura, and Dhritarāṣtra assembled; they first went to Duryodhana’s palace house. On reaching, they saw the whole house full of hay and all these Kauravas were standing outside! They could not even get into the house!

Bhīśma asks them, ‘What happened? Why are all of you standing outside?’ Kauravas reply, ‘What can be done? You only told us that we have to fill the whole house with one gold coin; what else can we get with just one gold coin? So we filled it with hay grass. Here you see! We won the competition!’And all these Kauravas are now standing outside! Neither these hundred brains nor the Kuru elders are able to get into the house.

Dhṛitarāṣṭra, the father of Kauravas becomes very happy! He hurriedly concludes, ‘See my sons and their intelligence! They filled the whole palace house. They should be declared victorious!’ Droṇa, the teacher of Kurus and Pāṇḍava princes, once a poor Brāhmaṇa, was supported by King Dhritarāṣṭra. So, whatever Dhṛitaraṣṭra says becomes the conclusion for Droṇa; and so, he simply agrees to the blind king’s conclusion. But, Bhīṣma stops Droṇa, saying, ‘Wait! Let us go to the other house also to see, and then decide who won the game.’

On entering the Pāṇḍava palace home, they see the whole house is filled with light and perfumed with fragrant incense. Understand, for that one gold coin, they bought earthen lamps and lighted them up along with pleasing, special perfumed incense. The moment the elders entered, the Pāṇḍavas washed their feet, gave them seat and fruits. Enriching them thus, Pāṇḍavas tell them humbly, ‘Please see, the whole house is filled! Filled with light and perfume, pleasant smell!’

Of course, the blind King Dhṛitarāṣṭra is not ready to accept this! So, he goes to every corner, puts his sharp nose and smells to investigate if every corner is filled with pleasant perfume. He finds that all corners have the pleasant fragrance. Finally, the Kuru elders come to the right conclusion and declare that Pāṇḍavas won the game. Pāṇḍavas stand victorious!

Please understand, listen!

Completion is creating a space which is full where you can Live! As the space of Pāṇḍavas is full with light and filled with pleasant fragrance, so is the inner space of completion full with power and filled with the fragrance of bliss—ānanda gandha, where you can live.

Both palace houses are full. You also always keep yourself full; but the question is do you keep the house full like Kauravas or Pāṇḍavas? Find out that! Is your inner space like Kauravas or Pāṇḍavas? That’s all! Have you brought the hay and filled it all around your house, or have you brought the pleasant smell and the light within?

Please understand, completion keeps you full and gives you the fulfilled space to live! Incompletion keeps you full but never fulfilled; you will never be able to live there. Because of their deep incompletions, Kaurava brains fight violently. Finally when they get tired of fighting with their incompletions, they get utterly confused, and jump to the wrong conclusion of filling their house with hay! The Pāṇḍavas who are full with the space of completion and filled with the power of living, beautifully enrich the elders and enrich themselves, enjoying the light and fragrance!

Please understand, the modern day CEOs, leaders are filled with stress. What is stress actually? It is nothing but filling yourself with hay! You are filled not fulfilled. You are occupied but not useful. Before making one decision, when you think about it two hundred times, you are tired just like the Kaurava brains! Usually, when there are so many incompletions fighting in your brain, either your projects die down, or they take a totally opposite turn!

Reduce the incompletions you infuse on yourself; reduce the abusal you do to yourself. Reduce the mental setup of Duryodhanas' on you. Duryodhanas' are nothing but bunch of incompletions, no power! Actually, they took the decision of buying the hay and filling the house because they were not able to handle the whole confusion and fight among themselves. So, they just jumped to the wrong conclusion, ‘let’s do something!’ Listen! Any decision made out of incompletion in the mood of ‘let’s do something’ is suicide! So understand, ‘let’s do something’ out of incompletion, restlessness generated by incompletion, is the pesticide! If you do it just for yourself, it is suicide; if you do it for the family, it is homicide; if you do it for many people, it is genocide.

What Pāṇḍavas did is out of the pure space of completion. I tell you, when you create the space of completion, every moment you create a new way of thinking, new way of feeling, new way of knowledge, new way of being, and a new way of making yourself available to society and to humanity.

Look in, create the space of completion before coming to any conclusion! This is the message of this chapter.

The sixth chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā, Dhyāna Yogaḥ starts with Kṛṣṇa’s words. In this chapter Arjuna is not asking any questions to Kṛṣṇa. Kṛṣṇa continues His answers from the previous chapter.

6.1 Bhagavān says: One who performs his actions without being attached to their fruit (outcome) of his work is a Sannyāsi, and he is truly an ascetic; a Yogī also.; not the one who renounces to light the fire and performs no action.

6.2 O Pāṇḍava, what is called renunciation, or sannyāsa, you must know to be the same as yoga, or uniting oneself with the Supreme., for never can anyone become a yogī, until he renounces the desire for self-gratification [saṅkalpa].

6.3 A one desirous of achieving the state of yoga or no-mind state, action is said to be the means and for the one who is already elevated in yoga, cessation from all actions is said to be the means.

6.4 Any one is said to have attained the state of yoga when, having renounced all material desires, he neither acts for sense gratification nor engages in result-focused activities.

Kṛṣṇa continues with what He said earlier in a little more detailed way. He says, the person who is not attached to the fruits of his action is an ascetic and a karma yogi, one who continuously does authentic work without being attached to the results.

Please understand, karma—the state of action, or sannyāsa—the state of renunciation, is not related to your doing. It is directly related to your being. Being a sannyāsi, a renunciate monk, is not a status, it is a state of mind. Whether you are doing karma yoga or you remain a Sannyāsi is in no way going to affect you. If one is a karma yogī, one goes about doing the work that is allotted to him without attachment and without expectations. This is done even in the middle of one’s life as a householder, a businessperson or an employee. The status is not of any consequence.

In the same manner, it is immaterial whether one dons saffron robes to be a renunciate or an ascetic. One can wear all the outer trappings of a monk and still be fully attached to the saṃsāra māyā, the illusion of life. In the verses of Bhaja Govindam, Ādī Śaṅkarācārya, the Enlightened Master of ancient India, says this beautifully about the ascetic who cheats the world and himself. He says, the ascetic has his hair knotted, or he shaves his head bald, or he pulls out his hair one by one in penance, he wears saffron robes, but he does not see, even though he has eyes. He does all this only to fill his belly!

One’s attitude, one’s inner space, one’s being alone matters. Here Kṛṣṇa gives the gist of the previous chapter.

People repeatedly ask me, ‘Swamiji, should we renounce everything to achieve Enlightenment? How can we lead our day-to-day life and yet hope to achieve spiritual progress?’

I tell them, ‘No! Just renounce what you don’t have. That is enough. You don’t have to renounce what you have.’ I tell them to live with completion with whatever they have, and to just renounce what they don’t have. We fantasize about all that we do not have, that is the problem. There are thousands of things that we don’t have, but we live with all those things mentally. The problem is not what we have, we have got used to those things anyway. That is our reality. It is what we don’t have that creates problems. Just renounce what you don’t have. That is enough to solve all the problems. Then you will start living intensely with what you have.

One of the major problems we bring upon ourselves is that we chase desires and possessions. And once we have achieved what we want, we don’t enjoy it. It is as if the enjoyment is only in the chase and not in the possession itself. The present has no meaning to many of us. Because of this, we miss reality, we miss true enjoyment. It is the illusion of the speculative future that draws our interest and causes misery to us.

There is a beautiful word in Saṁskṛit: brahmacarya. Just like many other Saṁskṛit words, this word has no equivalent word in English. The word has often been wrongly translated as celibacy. Brahma means Existence, reality, divinity. Carya means 'living like'. Brahmacarya refers to a person who lives like the gods, who lives with Existence, who lives with reality. Brahmacarya does not mean one who is unmar-ried. Brahmacarya refers to one who lives with reality, one who lives unattached. One of the four stages of life as defined by the scriptures is brahmacarya. This period of brahmacarya at Gurukul, under the Master's guidance in one's early years, provides the background to shed fantasies and live life in reality.

In today's world most of us live with fantasy. We don't live with the reality of our existence. From our childhood, we are exposed to so many different forms of media that flood us with fantasies. On physical maturity, everyone searches for an ideal person who can match their fantasy with great vigour and determination! Even if you find someone who matches your so-called ideal, when you start living with the person, life will slowly reveal that the ideal image so carefully built over many years is different from the person with whom you are living. There is always a screen of fantasy between your spouse and you, just like between life and you. You are continuously developing on life but you are not ready to look into life as it is.

A person who is mature enough to live with reality in the space of completion has achieved the state of brahmacarya. He is living with the real person or situation. He is complete in the present moment for what it is; he does not dream of how it should be. So just drop your fantasies. Live with reality. That is what I call brahmacarya. Brahmacarya is nothing but high energy, that's all.

I am defining brahmacarya. It is nothing but being authentic with high energy happening in you. Only when you have low energy, you need other person's presence in your life. Brahmacarya is nothing but being authentic with your high energy.

Here, Kṛṣṇa says, ‘Just renouncing the sacred fire and not performing one’s duty does not mean one is an ascetic or sannyāsi.’ In those days, fire was the basis for everything, whether it was cooking or spiritual practice. For everything one needed fire. I can replace the word ‘fire’ with ‘cell phone’ for today’s world! In this age, we can say, ‘Don’t think that by sacrificing the cell phone and laptop you become a sannyāsi or a great karma yogi.’ Just like how the cell phone and laptop have become a ba-sic necessity today, in those days agnī (fire) was a basic need in life. Just like how we are able to relate with people through the cell phone, our ancient ṛṣis (mystics) knew the techniques of relating with the higher energy through fire.

Understand, the Vedic Masters knew how to use fire to commu-nicate with the higher energy, just like how we use the cell phone to communicate. All of science is based on using light particles, whether it is electricity, atomic energy, or other forms of energy, but with different formulae. Whether it is our fan or a microscope or a laptop or atomic bomb, everything can be reduced to that one single thing, the technique of handling light or electro-magnetic particles. Scientists worked on light energy and created all these objects. Our eastern sages worked with sound energy and created all these products. We really had the pushpak vimāna (flying chariot) and we did really have the brahmāstra (nuclear weapon). Everything is true.

But in the course of time we lost the technology, that’s all. As the technology for handling sound waves was lost, the existence of these things is being questioned today. People now believe that all these things are just mythology, just epic stories. No! I tell you, Purāṇās are histories not stories; they are ‘His-stories’. Just because we have lost the key and are not able to open the lock, don’t think that there is no treasure.

The entire collection of scriptures, the Vedas is nothing but learn-ing the techniques of tuning oneself to work with sound particles. Just as scientists work with light particles, the sages have worked with sound particles. They were able to relate with higher energies and were able to communicate just with the vibrations through fire. Whether it was Sañjaya, the minister of the Kaurava king Dhritarāṣṭra, who saw the Mahābhārat war through telepathy with his third eye, or the puśpak vimāna, the flying chariot, or brahmāstra, the ultimate fire weapon, these were all true. When the cultural invasion of India happened, these techniques were lost.

I have seen a Sannyāsi create fire by just uttering a few words. Even now, if we go to the Kumbha Melā (the holy river Gaṅgā festival, planet’s largest spiritual gathering in India), we can see hundreds of people like this. I have seen many Sannyāsis—some bury their heads inside the Earth for more than twenty-four hours; many can play with sound energy. I have seen a sannyāsi floating in the air and another sitting on a board full of sharp nails, with people watching them in awe.

So here, Kṛṣṇa says that just by renouncing fire, a person cannot become a Sannyāsi. Similarly, here I can say that just by renouncing our cell phone in life, we cannot become a sannyāsi. The space needs to be transformed. To truly renounce, the mind has to renounce thoughts. Usually, wherever our body is, our mind is not. When we are at home, our thoughts are at the office. When we are at the office, we worry about what is happening elsewhere. When we are on vacation, we worry about work. To bring the mind to where the body is to renounce the inner chatter by completing with thoughts patterns. This is the starting point of renunciation.

Thoughts cannot be suppressed. The more we suppress them the more they erupt. We need to let go. We need to constantly bring ourselves back to where our body is, to the present space of completion, to the here and now, away from the dead past and the unborn future.

Renunciation of the past and the future, by bringing our mind to focus on the present space of completion, is true renunciation. This renunciation does not happen by giving up objects of material welfare such as the fire and the cell phone. It also does not happen by giving up what we think is superficial to spiritual progress, such as rituals. Giving these up without bringing in the true completion of consciousness is not renunciation.

In the first verse Kṛṣṇa gives the essence of the previous chapter. Now He continues. Kṛṣṇa has already said that renunciation for the sake of renunciation, renunciation of material things without renouncing desires, is of no value.

Please listen. You have to renounce fantasies. These fantasies are the creation of the ego, mind, identity, root patterns—whatever name you wish to call it. This self creates up all these unreal fantasy visions, to keep you occupied and under control.

We may think that we are in control of our mind. But actually, our mind controls us. This is what Kṛṣṇa means by saṅkalpa, self-interest, because the mind wishes to satisfy the senses that it operates and controls. By visualizing, by hearing, by smelling, by tasting, by touching, through the sense organs, our mind wants us to experience pleasures that will keep us under its hold. Only when we renounce the mind's control by going beyond the senses can we become a true renunciate. ‘Control your senses and still your mind so that you can reach Me,’ Kṛṣṇa says in earlier chapters.

When Kṛṣṇa talks about ‘self’, it is the small ‘self’, the external identity that we confuse with our Self, the real inner core, the Truth. Only when we do renounce this so-called identity, which is not the true Self, then we will perceive our self as the supreme Self that is our true identity. An ordinary person sees his own self as being the body, mind, memories, senses and the identities that he creates for him-self. These are the channels through which we can project ourselves onto the outer world. Normally we create two identities. One identity called ahaṁkāra, the identity that we project to the outer world. This identity is usually based on our achievements in society, our profession, our possessions, etc. The second identity is called mamākara, the iden-tity we project to our inner self. This identity is usually based on our ideas about our attitudes, our beliefs, and our self-esteem. Through a combination of these two identities we create an image about ourselves that we hold on to with deep conviction and belief. Our true Self is beyond all these inner and outer images.

Please listen. If we don't want to be controlled by the mind, any activity that we perform to satisfy this false identity or ego should be renounced. As long as we allow our senses to feed us, we will be nurtured and controlled by sensory pleasures that satisfy our ego. Our mind will then keep us in its control.

Listen. I am defining Yoga.

Renunciation of these fantasies that we feel we need for self-satisfaction is Yoga. Yoga is the state when our desires, expressed through sensual pleasures, dissolve. We unite with our true Self in this state. In this state, there is no gap between the Divine and us.

Whether we believe it or not, accept it or not, want it or not, we are God. We are divine. All we can do is accept it, experience it, live and powerfully express it or we can just continue to struggle and fight with it. This is the truth.

A small story:

A man was informed that his wife had just fallen into the river. He ran to the river to save her. To everyone's surprise, he jumped into the river and started swimming in the opposite direction, against the current.

People who watched the scene shouted to him and called him a fool. They asked him, 'Why are you swimming against the current? Your wife has been carried with the current, downstream.'

The man said, 'You don't know my wife. Even in the river, she would go only against the current!'

We can be like a rock in the water, forever resisting the flow of the water. The river pounds the rock, eventually reducing it to sand that settles at the bottom. Or we can be like the reed that bends and flows in whichever direction the water flows. By giving in to the water flow, the reed rests in the water.

In Saṁskṛit there are two terms, ‘dṛṣṭi sṛṣṭi’ and ‘sṛṣṭi dṛṣṭi’. Dṛṣṭi sṛṣṭi means to look at the world as it is and take life as it comes. Sṛṣṭi dṛṣṭi is just the opposite, when we want to create the world as we would like it to be, as we want to see it. We want the world running according to our fantasies, instead of coming to terms with the reality of the world. This is a sure recipe for disaster, much like the woman swimming against the current and meeting with disaster.

We have a choice. We can either move against the current, believing that we control our destiny, and struggle all the time. Or we can flow with the current, surrender to the Divine of which we are an integral part, and be in bliss. Whether we go against the current or go with it, we are in the water. Whether we realize it or not, we are Divine. When our desires for external sensual pleasures are controlled, we experience the divinity within.

This is the state of yoga that Kṛṣṇa talks about—yogārūḍhasya tasyaiva śamaḥ kāraṇam ucyate (6.3), the state of true renunciation where there is no suppression. Instead, there is transformation into completion. The path is no longer towards self or sensory satisfaction. In fact, there is no ‘towards’ or ‘goal.’ The goal is the path itself. When we lead our life with no expectations, the mind cannot speculate or control us.

Kṛṣṇa says next, ‘A person who initially wants to start practicing a yoga system laid down by the sages should carry out all activities in line with that system. Activities for all other reasons will then cease.’

This is such a beautiful instruction for anyone doing yoga. Today, the true meaning of yoga is completely lost. Yoga is not about physical exer-cise or sweating in high temperatures. Its purpose is not bodily fitness.

Yoga integrates body, mind and spirit. It is a journey into the inner Self, towards the Self.

Patañjali, the great sage and the father of Yoga, who authored Yoga Sūtras, laid down an eight-limbed system called Aṣṭāṅga Yoga. Today this is being misinterpreted as ‘eight steps of yoga’. Patañjali laid down eight limbs or parts that needed to be practiced simultaneously, not separately or sequentially. There is no meaning in practicing yoga through only two of the eight parts: āsana, physical postures, and prāṇāyāma, breath control. But these are the only two parts taught by most yoga teachers today. What is the point? Nothing of real value will come out of it.

In Patañjali’s Aṣṭāṅga Yoga, bliss is the goal, the path, and the end result. Have you seen even one yoga practitioner enjoying what he or she is doing? They are grimacing all the time, forcing their body, controlling their breath, torturing themselves. What for? Patañjali never asked them to torture themselves or their students. Yoga as it is practiced now only breeds ego. They have added many components to yoga: Deluxe yoga, Super deluxe kuṇḍalini yoga! Yoga should be done as bhoga, not as roga. Yoga should be done as an enjoyment, excitement, bhoga and not as a roga, disease. The excitement you radiate in your body, the whole bio-memory should be alive. Whole intelligence should be alive, up!

Patañjali’s system of yoga is a way of life. Starting with inner and out-er regulation, yama and niyama, his system cleanses our body, mind and spirit. Just yama, which is one of the eight limbs, has five parts, one of which is satya or truth. If we practice this with integrity and authenticity, it will lead us into enlightenment. Another part is brahmacarya, which is living enlightenment or walking in completion with reality. Actually, we need to be in the eighth state of samādhi to truly be able to practice even one of the yama principles with awareness.

Discovering your root pattern and completing it is the first step towards yoga. Please understand, yoga is not just moving your body or blowing your nose. No! Yoga starts when you discover your root thought pattern and complete with it. The yoga system is a parallel sys-tem, not a sequential system. When each of its parts is acted upon with awareness, every single thing that we do will be in completion with Na-ture. We will automatically surrender to Nature and attain the true yogic state of samādhi.

Ahiṁsā, non-violence, is another part of the first limb, yama. Religion teaches non-violence as a moral injunction. But I tell you, no morality can be practiced. Even if we are successful, then we will be schizophrenic. If we can understand and practice, it will never be a discipline. It will be just falling in tune with Existence. Ahiṁsa should be practiced out of deep understanding and then we will start radiating it in our very walk and talk. Even animals will be attracted to us. Our very being will be a blessing to planet Earth.

One of the other rules in yama is satya, truthfulness. Truthfulness can happen in us only after we have experienced samādhi, the eighth limb. Until we attain enlightenment, whatever we think of as the truth is only a perception of our five senses, not reality. The rules of yama and niyama (discipline) will only be established firmly after we have experienced samādhi.

More than what actions you do, the space from which the actions are done and the context and reason from which the actions are done, that matter. Whether we believe it or not, accept it or not, we are divine. To realize our divine nature, ancient mystics have created this wonderful eight-fold formula of the yoga system. Yoga in modern days is practiced just for health reasons.

Listen! You can do yoga with a smaller reason and smaller context like just to have flexibility or to get out of back pain. Or you can do the same yoga with the right context of becoming in tune with Cosmos, Brahmāṇḍa. In what context you do yoga, that result you reap. When you practice the right reason, right results come. When you practice the same yoga with the smaller reasons, only the smaller results come. At the most, you will have good health. Good health is just a by-product of practicing yoga, not the end.

The actual reason, the right reason that our wonderful Sages created this formula, was to create the divine experience within anyone who used the formula. Yoga is a straight technique to achieve the Divine experience. This formula cannot be modified or altered or practiced in parts and pieces. This formula has to be practiced with this right reason as prescribed for one to realize the divine nature of one's Self, asserts Kṛṣṇa. Yoga is a formula in which there are techniques that can be practiced to reach the Divine.

Learning yoga means bringing integrity to your body. Once we become intensely tuned to the eight-fold formula, it will become such an integral part of our being that it will become difficult to forget it even for a minute. When we practice yoga to meet with the Divine we will not treat yoga as an activity to be performed at a particular time of the day. We will live and breathe yoga. These eight limbs of yoga will influence any activity that we perform. For example, if you are speaking to someone you will constantly be aware of the need to speak the truth. You will constantly bring integrity into the words you utter to others and to yourself.

‘Yogasya prathamaṁ dvāram vāṅga nirodhaḥ. The first step in yoga is reduction in the words inside and outside of you.’ Why will the words you create be reduced when you step into yoga? Because you bring integrity and awareness into your system! Now you become responsible for the words you utter to you and to others. What will happen? Naturally, reduction in words will happen.

When you bring integrity, the words inside and outside you automatically drop, drastically. When we bring authenticity, the words will increase, and our capacity to fulfill it will also increase.

‘Yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam—yoga is authenticity in action!’ When authenticity is in action, it is yoga. If you are performing an activity, your awareness will be completely on that activity. You will bring authen-ticity in every level—the way you do business, the way you maintain relationships, the way you take responsibility, the way you think, cognize, and respond to the world, the way you behave with you, with your body; with everything bring authenticity.

I was taught Aṣṭāṅga Yoga by a great yogic Master, Yogirāj Yogānanda Puri (lovingly called Raghupati Yogi). He started training me when I was barely three and he was then already nearing one hundred years of age. I truly believe that he was a descendent of Patañjali; he was so much in tune with the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali. I hated a lot of what he made me do then. He made me climb pillars in the Arunachala temple in Tiruvannamalai with one hand behind my back! But it was this training that allowed my body to withstand the rigors of my spiritual wandering through the country and the Himalayan mountains, in search of Enlightenment.

Now, I teach Aṣṭāṅga Yoga, as it was taught to me, with the additional experiential insight of Patañjali's vision that I have gained since then. I call it Nithya Yoga. The path and purpose of Nithya Yoga is bliss. It is bliss arising out of the merging of body, mind and spirit, when the glimpse of what we truly are is experienced by us.

The word ‘yoga’ in Saṃskṛit means to unite or to become one with. Actually, yoga refers to the process of uniting. What is important in yoga is the journey, the path, and the process. For whatever purpose, with whatever intention we move our body or bend our body, that idea, that intention, is completely inserted or recorded into our body and mind, our bio-memory. This may appear startling to us but it is the truth from my experience.

Whatever thought pattern and intention, the saṁskāra, you hold when you move your body, that saṁskāra will get inserted into you and will start expressing itself in your body. For example, if you move your body with the intention and the strong belief that you will have health, in whichever way you move your body, health will simply happen. With any physical movement, including just sitting, if you strongly believe that you will have health, health will simply happen in you.

This leads us to an important conclusion: the method in which we do postures in yoga is not important. It is the thought, the idea with which we move our body in the posture that matters. Understand that the body itself is made out of bio-memories and muscle-memories. Whether we believe it or not, we are an expression of our own self-hypnosis. Here is a simple technique to experience this truth: For just ten minutes in the morning, visualize your whole body as a bliss bag filled with bliss. Then move the body in whatever way you want. The body will start working, experiencing and expressing the bliss.

When we reach the state of yoga, we are in a meditative state of bliss. In this state, all desires for sense gratification and activities cease. Our existence becomes an outpouring of bliss. There will be so much bliss bubbling up from inside that there will be no need to look for an outer object, person or location to influence this bliss. The desire to run after goals will automatically drop. This bliss is beyond the body and the mind. This state of bliss can radiate and flow out to touch outer objects, but the outer objects cannot influence this inner bliss!

6.5 You are your own friend; you are your own enemy. Evolve yourself through the Self and do not degrade yourself.

6.6 For him who has conquered the Self, the Self is the best of friends. For one who has failed to do so, his Self will remain the greatest enemy.

6.7 For one who has conquered the Self, who has attained tranquility, the Supreme is already reached. Such a person remains in this state, in happiness or distress, heat or cold, honor or dishonor.

6.8 A person whose mind is contented, because of spiritual knowledge, who has subdued his senses and to whom stone and gold are the same, and who is satisfied with what he has, He is said to be estab- lished in self-realization and is called an enlightened being.

6.9 A person is considered truly advanced when he regards honest well-wishers, affectionate benefactors, the neutral, the mediators, the envious, both friends and enemies, the pious and the sinners with equality of mind.

You are your own friend; you are your own enemy. Evolve yourself through the Self and do not degrade yourself.

In my discourses, if I have quoted any Gītā verse more than twice, it is this one. I can say this single verse provides the essence of the whole Gītā.

In the last session, we saw how to move from 'doing' and 'having' to 'being'. Usually we are stuck in 'having'. We are constantly focused on our possessions, our status. It is always 'I' and 'mine'. Loss of possessions affects our ego and identity deeply.

A slightly more intelligent person moves from 'having' to 'doing', from passivity to activity. Then, from doing we are supposed to move to 'being', from activity to active-passivity. This shift to 'satva', active passivity, helps us evolve spiritually as we move deeper into completion. In the last chapter we learned the technique from Kṛṣṇa for moving from fear and greed into Divine consciousness and bliss.

In this verse, Kṛṣṇa says:

'One must raise himself with the help of his own being and not degrade himself. The being is the friend of the conditioned soul and his enemy as well.' You are your own friend and you are your own enemy. If you know the technique of how to lift yourself by yourself, you will become a friend of your Self. If you let yourself down, you will become an enemy of yourself.

A small story:

There was a big spiritual organization. A monk was sent to a remote tribal area to perform service. Suddenly the headquarters received a lot of complaint letters about that monk.

After reading the complaint letters, the president said, 'We have posted the right person. Don't worry.'

The secretary was puzzled and asked him why he thought this despite all the complaints received.

The president replied, 'If we are getting complaints, it means that he has already started working. At least something is happening.'

When we start anything new, we will always have three phases. The first is resistance. The second is avoidance. We just avoid, neither caring nor resisting. The third is acceptance. This is the way anything starts. Similarly, when we start doing anything inside our system, we start growing in the same way.

First, resistance: we will repeatedly fall. We will forget. Our system will resist. We will try to create complications and complaints and all possible arguments. Sometimes, if we can't follow the teachings of Kṛṣṇa, we start blaming Kṛṣṇa. I have seen many people, when they are unable to follow the teachings of Kṛṣṇa, they will go ahead and start blaming Kṛṣṇa saying, 'What Kṛṣṇa are you talking about? He was always flirting. What type of a person was He?' We can easily escape Kṛṣṇa by criticizing Kṛṣṇa.

When we can't practice these teachings, we start justifying ourselves. Since we are unable to follow, we start criticizing Kṛṣṇa. This is the best way to escape and avoid the teachings of Kṛṣṇa. When our being resists, if we allow the resistance to grow, we are our worst enemy. This is what Kṛṣṇa means by saying, 'May you lift yourself by yourself. May you raise yourself by yourself' If we don't, we will be our worst enemy. It is up to us to enrich ourselves as best friend or to hurt ourselves as our worst enemy.

Please listen: Nobody can hurt you unless you allow him or her to. Nobody can help you unless you allow him or her to.

May you lift yourself by yourself. May you lift yourself to your Self. Again and again, these Masters stress the same point. If you have fall-en, if you have failed while practicing these words, the teachings or the meditation techniques, if you have forgotten, don't worry. Again and again, lift yourself. Don't give up on you. Don't feel depressed and don't have guilt. Don't get dejected thinking you will not be able to do it. Don't doubt your self. Again and again, lift yourself.

Here Kṛṣṇa says, 'May you lift yourself by yourself. Nobody can do anything unless you lift yourself—uddhared ātmanātmānaṁ nātmānam avasāyadet.'

Don't give up on you and people! Internalize this important truth— do not give up on yourself and people! Even if people fail a hundred times, continue to work with them. When you are frustrated at other people's failure, understand that it is nothing but your frustration towards your own failure. If we turn our back on people, we are not living dharma, because when we give up on others, we have also given up on ourselves! So never give up on you and people!

Listen. Nobody really wants Enlightenment! And even if we do, we want it as one more item in our showcase. We are not ready to risk any-thing for Enlightenment.

Whenever people come to our houses, we can say, ‘This is from Delhi, this is from New York, this statue is from Japan.’ Just like that, we can say, ‘Oh... this enlightenment... do you know that Mas-ter, Nithyānanda? He gave it to me. He was giving a Bhagavad Gītā discourse that I attended and he just gave it to us. How does it look?’ Just as one more showpiece, we are ready to accept it, but we are not ready to commit or risk anything for it. We are not ready to take up the responsibility for it.

Here, Kṛṣṇa says, ‘May you liberate yourself by yourself. Unless you liberate yourself, nobody else can liberate you; uddhared ātmanātmānaṁ nātmānaṁ avasāyadet. If you help yourself, you will be the greatest friend for yourself. If you don’t, you will be your worst enemy—ātmaiva hy ātmano bandhur ātmaiva ripur ātmanaḥ’

This is an important verse. This has to be understood well. Let us see the next two verses to get the complete context and then we will enter into the meaning of the verses.

A small story:

There was a great enlightened Master. He was always in ecstasy, always in joy.

One of his disciples asked him, ‘Master, how are you so blissful? I have never seen you suffering. You are always joyful. How is this possible?’

Master replied, ‘Every morning when I get up from bed I ask myself, what do you want today? Do you want to be blissful or do you want suffering today? Naturally what will the mind choose? It will choose to be blissful. Then, immediately, I tell the mind: alright, be blissful. That’s all!’

We may think, ‘How can it be so simple?’ Be very clear, we know our twenty-four hour routine. Just try this tomorrow morning. Just de-cide whether you want to face your normal routine with bliss or with suffering, with joy or with the usual long face. Decide for yourself. You have the choice. And whether you go with a long face or with a smiling face, the routine is going to be the same.

I always tell people, ‘Pain is inevitable; suffering is a choice.’ We have one thing that we can choose—and that is our inner space. Do we want our inner space to be incomplete like the Kauravas filled with hay or do we want our inner space to be fulfilled with completion like the Pāṇḍavas, radiating the light and fragrance of bliss? We have complete freedom to create our inner space. That is purely our own decision with no one to blame. Pain is independent of suffering. Pain is an external thing, suffering is an internal choice.

Hell or heaven is our conscious choice. People always have another question, ‘What do I do if my mind says, I want to suffer?’ Then suffer, that’s all. What is there in it? When our mind wants to enjoy suffering, then even suffering becomes an enjoyment for us.

So when you get up every morning, ask your mind, ‘What do you want today?’ If your mind chooses bliss, just tell your mind, ‘Be bliss-ful. That’s all!’ This single conscious decision can change the quality of your life. But don’t make a commitment to do this for three days or one week. You will forget. Decide every day for just that 24 hours. People will immediately think, ‘Let me decide for my whole life today itself.’ No! You will forget. You will be back with the same face again tomorrow. No, don’t decide for your whole life. Decide only for one day. Only then will you be able to maintain it.

A small story about this natural face:

The head of a monastery, was teaching the young novic-es to preach. He was giving them tips on how to speak in public.

He said, 'When we speak, our whole body should express what we are saying. Our face should express the idea that we are talking about. When we speak about heaven our eyes should sparkle and our whole body should show the bliss, we should express the joys of heaven clearly. Our face should shine.'

He continued, 'When we speak about hell, we can just re-main as we are. People will understand!' At least in our life, let us not maintain the long face as our natural face.

When we conquer the mind, happiness and distress are both one and the same and we are not touched by it. Now, Kṛṣṇa has an important point here. He says, ‘For one who has conquered his Self, has already attained the supreme bliss, jitātmanaḥ praśāntasya paramātmā samāhitaḥ, for him happiness and distress, heat and cold, honor and dishonor are all the same, śītoṣṇa-sukha-duḥkheṣu tathā mānāpamānayoḥ (6.7).

Throughout this chapter Kṛṣṇa emphasizes this one idea—senses. Kṛṣṇa speaks about the senses. How can happiness and distress, heat and cold, honor and dishonor be the same for a man? How is it possible?

The first thing is that when our senses do the work, we decide ‘yes’ or ‘no’ only based on our past experiences, the experiences with which we have grown or the words with which we have conditioned our mind and memory. Our intelligence decides based on our root thought patterns which are the incompletions of our mind and memory. Please be very clear: something that is tasty for us may be like poison to our neighbour. Why even go as far as our neighbour... Take your spouses for instance. You might like something, but she or he might hate it.

Whenever our mind is caught in dualities, again and again we fall back to our dilemma, to our nature, to our suffering, to our instinct level.

Here Kṛṣṇa says the person who has achieved bliss is not affected by heat or cold and joy or sorrow—śītoṣṇa-sukha-duḥkheṣu. How do we reach that state? First, understand that when I say conquering the senses, I don’t mean controlling the senses or destroying the senses. If we try to control or destroy the senses, we will only struggle and suffer more and more. If we try to control our body, that is not going to work either.

Kṛṣṇa says beautifully, ‘For one who has conquered the self, jitātmanaḥ.’ When He says self, He means the whole cognition where the decision-making happens. Mind-Intelligence-Ego is the spot where the decision-making is happening. When we just try to conquer the senses, we will fail again and again. If we fail two or three times we will lose the confidence to try again. If we fail in a fight with our senses, we will automatically start thinking that it is impossible, and we will lose confidence. We need intelligence to progress in this path.

We need to learn the science of creating the space of completion to conquer the senses. If we try to work from the wrong side out of incompletion, from the side of the senses, we will never be able to succeed. If we try to create more pressure on the cooker we will not be able to open the cooker lid. First, we need to put out the fire, the energy supply. Putting out the fire is doing completion with our root patterns. The ego or root patterns or the intelligence, the place from where we make decisions, is continuously supplying energy to our senses. So all we need to do is to work at the level of the mind and not at the level of the senses to become jitātmanaḥ. If we try to work at the level of the senses, we will create only more and more perverted desires, leading to more and more incompletions.

For example, normally, if we fast for one day, that night in our dreams we will be feasting! Our body has got its own balance, its own intelligence. If we avoid something, it has to supply and rejuvenate itself. If we are hungry, we can’t sleep. In order to sleep, our bio-memory itself should be made to believe that we are not hungry. For this, we need to do completion with our patterns of food not suppression of the desire of food. So, the unconscious energy creates a dream as if we are feasting. Whenever we deprive ourselves, our unconscious energy will satisfy itself in the dream state. This is because in the dream state, there is noone to control us; all our incompletions simply come out in the dream. We just project our world and enjoy it.

See, I initiate thousands of people into a powerful spiritual process called Nirāhara Saṁyama, liberating them from their food patterns. Listen. It is awakening, rekindling the power of your bio-memory to produce energy and food directly from air, water and space. It is not fasting. An important rule in this process is the moment one feels hungry or tired, one has to start eating. One cannot use his or her willpower. Understand, if you fast, in the dream you will be dreaming as if you are feasting, eating! But, not a single one of my Nirāhara Saṁyama participants has a dream of eating food and feast-ing! Why? Because they are initiated into the most practical method of completing with all the root patterns. They don't suppress their hunger, they just go beyond it, they go beyond their senses!

Understand, if we suppress something, it will automatically express itself in our dreams. Dreams are nothing but expressions of our suppressed desires and fears. Not only that, it expresses itself in a perverted way. If we do completion with our root patterns and out of completion when we enjoy with the senses, we will never become tired. But when we suppress our senses, our being suffers in our dreams.

Now there is a new concept called 'fear stroke'. These are imaginary fears, such as imagining ghosts lurking in dark corners, or the sudden ringing of the telephone, etc. We also get these fear strokes in dreams. Please listen. If we are suffering with incompletions at the dream level, there is something seriously wrong at the mind-intelligence level. We are trying to control the senses instead of conquering the mind. Instead of removing the fire, we are trying to create more pressure in the cooker. All we need to do is to work on the mind, do completion to remove the fire, to stop the supply of fuel to the senses.

Completion! Again and again complete! Understand, if you have dreams, whatever type of dreams they may be, whether they are good or bad, you are not worthy of sannyās yoga or karma yoga. Sannyāsi is a person who should be in that level of completion where no dreams happen in him. The day you start sleeping without dreams, you have become a real sannyāsi, a real karma yogi.

Dreams are nothing but the incompletions expressing in your inner space when you are unconscious. Understand, I am defining what is dreaming and thinking.

Incompletions expressing when you are unconscious are dreams. Incompletions expressing when you are conscious is thinking. Incompletions expressing when you are unconscious is dreaming.

Arjuna is called Gudākeśa by Kṛṣṇa, the one who has not just conquered dreams but who has conquered sleep itself. While addressing Arjuna as Gudākeśa, one who is in the light, having conquered sleep, Kṛṣṇa readies Arjuna for liberation.

Here Kṛṣṇa says, ‘For one who has conquered the mind, jitātmanaḥ.’ He means that this applies to one whose mind has learned the right cognition of completion. If our intelligence and memory are filled with past incomplete memories, we cannot make correct decisions. Don’t think the mind makes decisions in a logical manner. For example: when you see me, if you have had any problems with any other person who was wearing this same color robe in the past, suddenly that memory will be awakened. Then, the intelligence is not even ready to sit and listen. Immediately, our ego gives the order to leave. This is what we call prejudice.

A man whose senses are complete, meaning one who is not driven by his senses, has the ability to make decisions with clarity from the pure space of completion. Such a being is jitātmanaḥ—the conqueror of the mind and the self.

We can never achieve bliss by controlling the senses. We can only achieve bliss by controlling the mind by completing with our root thought patterns, which give birth to the mind. By changing the servants, we can't change the leader. But by changing the leader we can change the servants. The mind is the leader or the master who is making decisions and leading the senses. So all we need to do is work on completing with the mind, not the senses.

Kṛṣṇa says, 'One who has conquered the mind achieves the Paramātman (divine Self), jitātmanaḥ praśāntasya paramātmā samāhitaḥ (6.7).' We don't need to achieve bliss. It is always there within us. If it has to be achieved, there is every possibility it can be lost. If it can be lost, what is the guarantee it will be there forever? Anything, if it has to be specially achieved, is not worth achieving. But if it is our very nature, then it becomes easy. Kṛṣṇa says that all we need to do is conquer our mind. We don't need to achieve anything.

The fountain of bliss is continuously happening in us. Our very life energy is bliss. Unless we have the bliss energy in us, we cannot inhale and exhale. But we are stopping the bliss fountain again and again. All we need to do is stop the stopping process. That's all. We don't even need to create anything or achieve anything. Kṛṣṇa says that we just have to conquer the mind because the Self has been already achieved and we are with it. All we need is completion with our Self.

Here is a small story to explain how happiness and sorrow are in no way related to the outer world but to the inner world.

An old man went to a nearby city for some work. When he was coming back to his village, from a distance he suddenly noticed that his house was on fire. He start-ed shouting, screaming and rolling on the ground and weeping.

His son came to him and said, 'Dad, don't worry. Don't you remember, we sold that house just yesterday?'

Immediately, the old man sat up and wiped his tears. The sorrow just disappeared. In ten minutes, his other son came to him and said, 'Dad, yes, we have sold it, but we are yet to get the money.'

Again the man started rolling on the ground and weeping, 'Oh, I don't know what I will do now. I don't know how to save myself.'

Some ten minutes later, his wife came on the scene and said, 'Don't worry, just this morning I saw that the money was deposited in our bank account.'

Again the man got up and wiped his tears and became perfectly normal!

If you notice, it is the same situation and the same person. But when he thinks the house is his, he is suffering, and when he thinks it is not his, he is liberated. So what gives us suffering? It is just this single thing: thinking that something is 'mine'. The habit of thinking, 'mine', 'mine'.

In the same way, there are people who can't enjoy something unless it is theirs.

One day I was going for a walk on the beach.

One of our devotees started saying, 'Swamiji, I think we should have a cottage here. It would be very nice. We can come out and enjoy the breeze.'

I asked him, 'Are we not enjoying ourselves now? Why do you need a cottage here to enjoy? Just enjoy yourself now!'

But the mind never enjoys unless we are sure it is ours. Unless we possess something, we don't enjoy it. By the time we own the cottage we start worrying, 'I think I should have this kind of furniture, that type of arrangement.' Or we have already started thinking about another cottage in some other place.

Ramaṇa Maharṣi was a great devotee of Arunachala, the sacred hillock in Tiruvannamalai, Śiva's own form, my birthplace. Someone who visited Him for the first time said, 'Master, what a beautiful place this is! The Arunachala hill is so beautiful!’

Ramaṇa Maharṣi said, ‘Just be here for three days, all these ideas will disappear!’ In three days, we take things for granted.

Something will be beautiful only for three days. The person who enjoys only by possessing will never enjoy. The person who enjoys will not bother about possessing. It is just our mind. Sometimes, the mind will not allow us to enjoy something unless we know for sure that it is ours. And at other times when we know it is ours it creates suffering. Suffering or joy is created only by that one link, the mind. There is no other difference between an enlightened person and us other than this mind, which continuously thinks, ‘What is in it for me? In what way am I connected?’

We always complain about the senses. No, we are corrupting them. Don’t put the responsibility on the senses. Just look into your life. It might be late at night, even two a.m., but we will still watch our baseball or cricket game on television. Our eyes are begging for some rest, but we continue to watch the game. We abuse our eyes, our senses because we want to enjoy ourselves. Please listen, it is this pattern: ‘What is there for me?’ This ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’ is where we start abusing the senses. All we need to do is control the mind, not the senses.

Understand, our thoughts create our senses. Don’t think we are living with what we have. We create what we want to have. Our thoughts are so powerful that they can just change the whole body. For example, just think of one thought that creates disturbance inside you. Or think of a person who took money from you and has not returned it. Immediately, we experience the change happening in our system. Our blood boils, our blood pressure rises, our heart rate and pulse rate rise. A single thought can change the whole body chemistry.

Our body is created only by our thoughts. In India there is a great science called sāmudrikā lakṣaṇa. Just by seeing the body-language—the face, the body, the way of standing, sitting and walking, the trained sage can tell everything about the person's mind. This is because he knows the secret that the mind creates the body. The body is the outer expression of the mind. The mind is the inner experience of the body. If our mind changes, our body can be changed and our whole system can be changed.

A man whose mind is clearly reprogrammed according to spiritu-al ideas can completely change his senses. As of now, our mind is pro-grammed for misery. It is looking outward. If we can reprogram our mind to look inward, towards bliss, our entire sense experience can be changed. All we need to do is to reprogram our mind to look-in and be complete. This is the gist of this whole chapter.

Kṛṣṇa says one more important thing about heat and cold. Let me tell you very clearly: I lived in the Himalayas and I used to sleep on the snow with this same cotton dress. It may be very difficult to believe but it is the truth. All we need to do is stop resisting. Just try this experiment: the moment you feel the cool breeze, don't create the idea, 'It is cold, I may catch a cold, I may have wheezing or sinus problem.' Just don't create such words.

The words you give to yourself can be nectar or poison. The words you constantly repeat to yourself, have to be enriching you, exciting you and enlightening you. The words you give to you are āhara (food), what you consume to create life in you. The words you give to yourself are more important than the words you give to others. Because the flow of your life-the level of contentment that you feel in your life and the experience of fulfillment that you feel in your life, everything depends on the words that you have given to you. Whenever we repeat some-thing, we create that quality in us.

Here is a simple experiment you can do: Close your eyes and repeat ten times: 'Śānti, Śānti, Śānti,' you will have peace inside (Śānti means peace in Saṃskrit). Just by repeating the word 'Śānti', the quality of peace will start happening in you. In the same way, if you repeat the names of diseases, you will start creating those diseases in you.

Whatever we think, we express. We need to do only one thing: Work to bring completion to the mind. Do completion with your thought patterns. Just liberate the mind with completion. Then our whole system will be purified. Our senses will be reconstructed. Kṛṣṇa gives us a beautiful technique to work on the mind.

He says one more important truth, ‘Honor and dishonor will be the same—māna-apamānayoḥ.’ This is very difficult to believe. Cold and heat or hot and sweet can be the same. We can even accept that. But honor and dishonor, how can the two be the same? A single word thrown at us is enough to anger us and hurt our honor.

Please listen!

A thought pattern is a pre-defined way of responding to any situation based on a powerful past experience like failure, rejection, being punished, being subjected to abuse or witnessing the death of a loved one. During such moments of crisis, you create an idea about yourself and life—like ‘I am weak’ or ‘I am a failure’ or ‘Nobody loves me’ or ‘Life is dangerous, so I have to be very careful.’ Almost all root thought patterns are negative, even the ones which may lead to success in your life, because they are born out of your feeling of powerlessness. You have many thought patterns, but a root thought pattern is one of the few defining thought patterns that are continuously running your life without your knowledge!

Someone asked me, ‘Swamiji, why do we bother so much about oth-ers’ opinions?’ We bother about others’ opinions because we don’t have an opinion about ourselves. We know about ourselves only through others’ words and their opinions. Our identity is built based on others’ opinions. We understand and identify ourselves through others. If every-body says, ‘You are beautiful,’ we get that certificate. If everybody says, ‘You are intelligent,’ we get that certificate. We collect all these certificates and we build our personality with them.

Even the conflicts among your identities are nothing but the result of your root thought patterns. If you have a certain idea about yourself inside, but you project a different personality outside, that is inauthenticity. If you look deep, all your problems arise from conflicts among your dentities. When any of your dimensions is out of alignment with the others, it causes disease, suffering and incompletion in your life.

In the Inner Awakening Program, the first session is about the un-derstanding of root thought patterns. It is about why we get depressed, why we are in conflict, why we repeatedly fall into a powerless state. It is because our energy source is others' certificates. We don't have any self-respect and self-completion. We constantly live in self-doubt, self-hatred and self-denial. If others' opinions about us are good, we think we are great. If others' opinions about us are not good, we immediately lose self-completion and fall into self-denial. If our idea about ourselves is 'nobody loves me', then we project the outer personality of 'I am very loving person' or 'I am very friendly person.' This is inauthenticity.

But our root pattern is—we don't even love ourselves. That is why there is so much of self-hatred. We don't have any self-respect, only self-hatred, self-denial. That is the reason for the wars within and around us.

Living is a power. If we want to live, we must learn how to stand on our own two feet, learn how to be complete with ourselves, how to raise ourself by ourself without giving up on us and others. This is the science of completion that is taught and transmitted experientially in the Inner Awakening program.

As of now, our source of energy is others' opinions or others' image about us. If somebody tells us, 'You are really great,' we may project an outer image of acting humble and try our best to say, 'No, no, I am not,' but what happens inside us? Our life image, the expectation from others' and life says, 'Please tell me a little more!' And our inner image may feel, 'I am a failure' or 'I am not good enough.' Outside we feel shy but inside our mind we feel powerless, and that powerlessness makes us want them to go on praising us to fill our incompletion within.

Please understand, all these identities you carry are actually thought patterns that you carry about you. Even others' image about you is an idea that you have created in them. So you are the creator of all your identities. Understand?

Now, when one identity is fighting with another identity, how can your thinking be focused? All your energy is going to be used in reconciling your fighting identities. When all your identities or 'images' are in tune, all your thinking will be aligned in one direction. Your thinking becomes clear and sharp, like a laser beam. You will awaken the power of thinking. With authenticity, there is no more space for unconscious thinking and living, because you will always be aware of the causes and effects that are playing in your life.

Kṛṣṇa says, 'A person whose mind is content because of spiritual knowledge, who has subdued his senses and to whom stone and gold are the same, and who is satisfied with what he has, is said to be established in Self-realization and is called an enlightened being'

First we should understand why Kṛṣṇa is speaking of all these qualities of a Master. These qualities are techniques. If we practice them we will reach the same enlightened state.

There are three things we need to understand here: First, experience comes out as expression. Second, the quality of experience and the quality of expression, are very closely associated with one another. And third, a very important thing, is that if you concentrate on the expression, you will reach the experience. Here, again and again, Kṛṣṇa speaks about how an enlightened person lives and the qualities that an enlightened person expresses, so that we can meditate on it. When we begin internalizing these ideas in our lives, we can reach the consciousness of an enlightened being. When we contemplate upon these ideas, we start expressing them naturally and they sink into our being.

Kṛṣṇa says repeatedly, ‘Vijitendriyaḥ’—one who has subdued and won his senses. This whole chapter is just about the senses, indriya. Kṛṣṇa gives us a beautiful technique to heal the problem. He gives us a method to complete with the root thought pattern and go beyond. All we have to do is understand the root thought patterns; understand where we are caught and where our incompletions lie.

Beyond the ego or root patterns we have the ātman, the Self. Just the presence of the ātman or the light of the ātman radiates and makes our ego work. The whole trouble is when we doubt, judge for ourselves and start thinking, ‘What is there for me? How am I going to gain or to lose from this?’ Here is where the root problem starts. If the ego and the intelligence are removed from the system, the self starts radiating its energy directly through the senses.

That is why enlightened people have sharp senses. Their senses are not contaminated. Whether it is their vision or their listening, it will be sharp and deep because it is not corrupted by the root patterns. Only a person whose being is clear and complete will have pure senses. A man who continuously uses his senses abuses them. He will not have energy or tejas in his senses.

The first thing that happens to a man who has used and abused his senses is the loss of his sense of smell. Then you need to be im-mediately admitted into the ICU of spirituality. You need Inner Awakening immediately. When our mind is under our control and complete we develop equanimity. We look at everyone the same way. This really happens when we reach enlightenment. When we become enlightened there is nothing to be achieved. Our being will start respecting, loving and enriching everyone automatically.

Here the word ‘equal’ is used, but the exact translation of the word ‘sama’ should be ‘unique’. When we understand that everyone is unique, we respect him or her. Sometimes when we say we treat everyone equally, we start disrespecting everybody equally! We are not all the same. We are all unique. God is an artist not an engineer. That is why He painted each one of us so differently, so uniquely. If He was an engineer, He would have just ordered ten thousand pieces of Mr. India or one million pieces of Miss Universe so all of us would look the same. When we understand that each one of us is unique, we will start enriching every being. Understand, even our enemy is necessary for our life. Just like our friends, our enemies also may be playing a role in our life. When we understand that each and every being is unique, we will see everybody with the same mind or in the same way.

One more thing that Kṛṣṇa says here is about ‘the pious and the sinners, sādhṣv api ca pāpeṣu’. Be very clear, there is no such thing as sin, except calling human beings ‘sinners’. Kṛṣṇa rightly states that the enlightened being sees only Divine Consciousness in everyone and so can never label anyone as being pious or a sinner.

Understand: God accepts each one of us as we are. The society created the idea of sin and merit. Immediately, the next question will be, ‘Then can we do whatever we want?’ A man who understands this spiritual science will never disturb others. Our sin and merit should not be based on fear or greed. If it is just based on heaven or hell, I don’t think we can claim to be matured beings.

Let discipline happen to you as an understanding out of the space of completion, a natural flowering. Let our morality not be based on fear and greed. That is why in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, there is a beautiful word ‘yama’, which means discipline. It also means death. If we understand that our life is going to end in death, if our consciousness internalizes this truth, we start thinking and meditating upon death. We will automatically be disciplined and will completely restructure our whole thinking and our life. If we start thinking about yama (death), then yama (discipline) will happen in our life. In Saṃskṛit, for both discipline and death, we use the same word. Let our discipline happen only out of the complete cognition of death and not out of incomplete cognitions of fear or greed.

In these verses Kṛṣṇa gives directions for the practitioner of Yoga, the Yogī. There are instructions about both the state of the mind and the state of the body.

These verses are often quoted and misused with a literal understand-ing and without grasping the inner meaning and significance. We can sit with closed or half closed eyes, with spine erect, in a sound-proofed dark room, and still be far away from enlightenment. Understand, these are general and practical guidelines given to help us with how we should sit and meditate. These are not essential qualifications for Enlightenment.

Kṛṣṇa repeats the importance of controlling our senses again and again. Why?

Senses are our doors to the external world. As long as they are open and uncontrolled, we are immersed only in the external world. It is impossible to understand our true reality when we are studying the external world. We may become a great scientist or a wealthy businessman by observing the outer world, but never an enlightened person. For this path, looking inwards is the only way.

Controlling the senses requires controlling the mind. Controlling the mind requires control of thoughts. Controlling the thoughts requires integrity. When we continuously live integrity, we will become aware of the thoughts and processes happening in our inner space.

And constantly listening to our own inner space is the beginning of integrity. If our inner space says that there is nothing more to listen, if only silence is there, then that is the end of integrity. We have achieved integrity. When we start listening to our inner space, we start integrity and when we listen to only silence from our inner space, we have achieved integrity. As long as we are hearing something from our inner space, it is lack of integrity.

Go on listening. Even while you are sitting, driving, talking or walking, listen to you. Also listen to you, when you are talking! It is listening to you that is going to bring integrity to you! Listen! Listen! Untiringly listen! Intensely bring integrity to your life. If we sit for a few minutes and intensely listen and analyze our thoughts, we will find that there is no connection between one thought and another. There is no logic in our thinking process. By their very nature our thoughts are illogical, unconnected and irrational. Thoughts keep swinging from past to future and back to the past.

We need to do two things to control our thoughts. First, we need to stay in the present moment by refusing to move to the past and future and second, we need to disconnect thoughts. I call this Unclutching. We need to be aware that thoughts are not inherently connected. We con-nect them into a shaft of joy or sorrow. These shafts do not exist at all. So I say to you, unclutch and become liberated. I am not saying to stay without thoughts. That is not possible; just witness thoughts. Understand that thoughts are unconnected. Detach yourself from the emotional baggage of the thoughts. If we detach ourselves from the regrets of the past and the speculations about the future we will automatically rise into the present.

People again and again ask me, ‘The moment I sit for meditation or Unclutching, I have more thoughts! I have more confusion, I have more problems. Next time, I don’t want to sit for meditation or Unclutching. Swamiji, what should I do?’

How will you not have thoughts or confusion? Unclutching is not like switching off the electricity to your house. It is like cleaning, sweeping and wiping your house. It is not like electricity that you will just switch off and be unclutched. No! It is like cleaning, sweeping and wiping. First, listen to your inner space! That is the first step to meditation, to life. Listen!!

We cannot live without desires. If anyone tells us that we can reach Enlightenment through elimination of desires, it is incorrect. First of all, we are already enlightened. Our inner Self knows it is connected to the Divine. We are just not aware of it, that’s all. If we are already there, how can we achieve it? Second, desires are energy. We cannot inhale and exhale without the desire to live. Simply dying will not give us the experience!

That is what Kṛṣṇa talks about here—dropping the attachment and possessiveness to desires, not the desire itself. It is the feeling of ‘mine,’ the desire to possess, that creates the feeling of ‘I,’ not the other way around. Our identity is made up of all the things that we want, that we desire, that we are attached to. These constitute our mental make-up. The seeds of desire and embedded memories are the stuff our package of ‘I’ is made of. Once the feeling of possession, the feeling of ‘mine’ disappears, it is possible to shed our identity as well. When we are free of the feeling of 'mine' and 'I', when we are not attached or attracted to external objects, when we are not led by our senses, we have steadied the mind and senses. To facilitate this, Kṛṣṇa stipulates the conditions.

We should go to a secluded place. Why? Whatever said and done, in the house, the phone may ring, somebody may knock or some sales-person may call. A secluded place is really just a means to move us away from these disturbances. Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa continuously recommends in his books that every person should retire from the regular activities at least for two or three days a month, or at least once in six months, and re-align himself towards the higher ideals. I also recommend this for all my followers and disciples, at least once in six months, take three or four days off. Come and spend your time in the Bidadi ashram campus, realigning yourself to integrity. Here, you will see and hear the miracles happening just by integrity and authenticity. Only when you see all these miracles with your eyes, you will understand the power of integrity, the power of authenticity. Whatever is happening is the power of dharma.

Buddha means a person who has aligned with dharma. Sangha means a group of people who are aligning with dharma. But dharma is the center. It is the power of dharma. Once in a while, you have to retreat from the regular activities and align yourself to integrity, authenticity, responsibility and enriching.

The kuṣa (a grass ideal to sit on and meditate), deerskin and all those things are like insulation, so that the earth will not absorb the energy we create. But now we don't have to bother about that, since we usually sit in a chair, raised a little from the ground. The seat should neither be too high nor too low and it should be comfortable. That's all. The most im-portant thing to be aware of in any meditation is to be relaxed. We cannot meditate in discomfort. Sthira (stable) and sukha (pleasurable) are the basic essentials of any meditation posture.

Here Kṛṣṇa updates the technique that He gave earlier. Here He gives three more instructions:

1. Head, spine and neck should be in a straight line. 2. We should fix our eyes on the tip of the nose. If we look at the tip of the nose, naturally, our awareness will settle on the third eye. Our concentration will settle on the ājña cakra (the brow energy center).

3. We should meditate on ‘Me’ as the supreme goal.

These are simple, commonsense instructions. Keeping the head, neck and spine, all in one line, helps in two ways. Firstly, it prevents us from dropping off to sleep. If we doze, our neck will drop, and we will no longer be steady. Secondly, as long as the head, neck and spine remain steady and vertical, the flow of pranic energy, the life-giving energy, through the energy pathways will be unblocked and smooth.

Whether we close our eyes fully or half close them, it is important that we disconnect from the external world. When the eyes are focused on the tip of the nose, they are not looking at external objects and ninety percent of sensory inputs are cut off. In addition, the focus is on the third eye between the brows, which, when energized, dissolves the ego block.

Finally, Kṛṣṇa says, ‘Focus on Me—manaḥ saṁyamya mac-chitto. Make Me the Supreme goal—yukta āsīta mat-paraḥ (6.14).’ He means our true Self. If we like, we can meditate on the form of Kṛṣṇa, with a flute and peacock feather. But I always prescribe going beyond the form. Go into your being. Of course, when we enter into our third eye, automatically we will go beyond the form. We will start meditating on the formless energy that is beyond the form.

Kṛṣṇa talks here about control of the mind and being established in the Self. He talks about the path and the goal of yoga. The first line of Yoga Sūtras starts with ‘yogaḥ citta vṛtti nirodaḥ.’ It means: Yoga is cessation of the mind. The very first line gives the path and the goal of yoga. The word yoga means uniting with the Divine. To reach the Ultimate, the goal and the path is the practice of Yoga.

We have two lives in us. One is the life we want to live–the dream. The other is the life in reality–the life we are living. The meeting of these two lives is what I call Yoga.

You can unite the two either by reducing the depth of fantasies or by increasing the expression of your energy so that reality can come closer to the dream. If you reduce the depth of the fantasy, your expectation, the dream plane and the reality plane will come closer together. On the other hand, if you increase the energy expressed through reality, the reality plane will come closer to the dream plane. The meeting and merging of these two planes is what I call Yoga.

The goal is uniting with the Ultimate or experiencing the ultimate spiritual energy, or the Divine and realizing our inherent nature. The path is dropping the mind, which means going beyond thoughts. We are spiri-tual beings having a human experience; we are not human beings having a spiritual experience. This is the truth. Bliss is our very nature. All that we need to do is go back to the source and realize our true nature.

The mind pulls us towards the temporary happiness that we experienced by pursuing sense pleasures. For example, we may like a particular sweet. We are attracted to its taste. When we sit down to eat it, for a few minutes our mind seems to stop thinking about it. There is a sense of peace when we are eating the sweet. Actually, we are at peace because the number of thoughts has come down for those few minutes. But we think the peace we experience is due to the sweet itself.

Understand that there is nothing wrong with liking the taste of the sweet. But if we think that the sweet is the cause of our fulfillment, then the problem starts, because the next time the same sweet may not give us the same experience of fulfillment. The experience of fulfillment has nothing to do with the object of experience.

In the same way, if we hold on to an object that we think gives us bliss, we will create an attachment to that object. But the experience of bliss is different from the object. Bliss is beyond attachment to any object, mate-rial or spiritual. Bliss is beyond the pairs of opposites. When we are hap-py due to some pleasurable event or person, the momentary joy comes because the number of our thoughts comes down when we meet the person. When the number of our thoughts comes down, bliss happens in us. But the bliss itself comes only from our own being, not from the person who we met. In fact, it continuously happens within us, irrespec-tive of anything that goes on outside. Then why do we not feel the bliss continuously? It is because we are under the control of the mind, which needs the pairs of opposites to survive. We can go beyond the mind.

When we are completely in reality, in the present, we are complete with Existence and we are in bliss. This is eternal bliss. ‘Nitya’ or ‘eternal’ means the past, present and future all put together, because it is beyond time. Being in the present is what eternity is. The present blissful moment gives birth to the next moment, which will be blissful. But if we try to look for bliss in the future, thinking that we can do various things to create a blissful future, it will never happen. When we are not in reality now, we are creating the blissful future from our fantasies. So come to terms with reality here and now and be blissful; automatically the future will also be blissful.

Bliss is like the water in a river. We can keep our hands open in it and enjoy it. But if we try to hold the water with closed hands, it will simply flow away from us leaving our hands empty. If we want to be in eter-nal bliss, we need to be blissful this very moment. We should not bother about whether we had bliss in the past or whether we will have it in the future. Just be blissful now.

When Kṛṣṇa talks about the mind and the senses being controlled, He is not talking about suppressing the mind and the senses. That is impossible to do. People who claim to renounce the world and its mate-rial aspects still cling to desires. Their efforts result in misery. Instead of directing our senses towards external objects and the pleasure derived from these objects, it is possible to turn our focus inwards and experience inner joy. Once the senses and the mind discover this inner joy, they will give up their attachment to external pleasures. Suppression never works; what works is completion.

To be balanced in whatever we do and to act without attachment is the path of a Yogī. Whether it is eating or sleeping or working, we should be sensitive to our body’s intelligence. Understand, when we are complete, we will be sensitive in all our actions. Only when we are not complete or conscious will we be caught in confusion.

Yoga manuals will not tell us what Kṛṣṇa tells Arjuna here. Guidelines on sleeping too much or too little or eating too much or too little is in no way a prescribed method for yoga. Controlling or regulating the senses does not mean we should suppress the senses. Eating too much will only make us lethargic—tāmasic. Eating too little will make us crave more food. If we sleep too much, it will lead to laziness and lethargy, tamas. If we sleep too little, we will end up feeling tired because the body-mind is not rejuvenated enough.

How do we know what is too much or too little? Here, Kṛṣṇa actually refers to our body intelligence. We do not trust our inherent body intelligence. We run our body according to the mind or according to our desires and senses. Otherwise, why would we stay up in the night watching television when our body is begging for some sleep? Why would we overeat? Has anyone seen any animal ever overeat? They eat according to their body intelligence. When the body signals that it needs food, they eat. When the body signals that it needs sleep, they sleep. We have forgotten how to relate with our own body intelligence.

After eating, we should feel energetic. But do we feel energetic after lunch? Why do we feel lazy and sleepy after lunch? It is because we do not eat the right type and amount of food. Most often, we don’t need to eat the amount we do, for our body to run. Just try this for a few days: When you eat, eat just enough until you are about full but not completely full. Try this for a few days and you will see a difference.

Similarly, we do not need to sleep for as long as eight hours as most of us do. Even science has established that there are periods in our sleep— the dream and deep sleep states that determine our holistic health. Actually, it is in the deep sleep state that we access the causal body, the kāraṇa śarīra, where we touch the source of our energy. Touching this layer is what gives us energy and rejuvenates us. This state can be achieved through meditation as well. In the course of an eight-hour sleep cycle, we are in the deep sleep state only for a couple of hours. That is why even a few minutes of meditation can actually refresh us as much as a few hours of sleep, because we access the same energy of the causal body through meditation. We should trust our body intelligence and just try to live by becoming sensitive to the body, rather than be driven by the mind, the senses.

Kṛṣṇa talks about āhāra in these verses. Āhāra in Saṁskṛit means food. It is the food that is taken in through our five senses, not just the mouth. Pratyāhāra, one of the eight parts of yoga, is the control of sensory inputs. It means going beyond these āhāra, beyond the sense objects, so that the higher level of consciousness can be awakened. When we move away from the senses and experience bliss, we will automatically realize that what we experience through external sense objects is not bliss. What we experience through the senses can be called pleasure or joy. That is why, the opposite of joy that is pain, is bound to follow this temporary pleasure. Bliss is beyond the pairs of opposites like pleasure and pain; it is not related to external incidents or people. It is an internal happening.

The main aim of all our yoga and meditation techniques is to reach the level of our being. When we reach the being, we are in 'nitya ānanda' or ‘eternal bliss’. We are in union with the Divine. Bliss is actually what we are running after but we think it can be achieved through money, comforts, relations and what not. We do not realize that all these objects only give us temporary states of pleasure and happiness. Our inherent nature is bliss and that is the reason why we are constantly searching for this state of bliss. When we realize that bliss is happening inside us all the time, the desires will drop automatically. You cannot drop desires or suppress them because they will surface again with greater intensity.

When we are aware of our actions, we can never be addicted to anything. Be very clear, all addictions, whether smoking or drinking, drugs or anything else, cannot exist if we are conscious and aware when we are engaged in the action. We try to suppress the desire instead of doing completion with it, and that is where the problem starts. An addiction has power over us because of a feeling of guilt or regret, or unfulfillment.

When we drop the guilt pattern by doing completion, many of our repetitive negative behavior patterns drop automatically. Moreover, we cannot consciously send something harmful into our system. We cannot consciously inhale harmful smoke into our system. To those who come to me for help with addictions, I say, 'Smoke as much as you want. Drink as much as you want. But do it with awareness. Do it with enjoyment out of completion.' In a few days, they come back and say they cannot smoke or drink anymore. That is because the innate body intelligence refuses to cooperate with the disastrous activity.

Completion is the key to bring the mind under control, because then we become the master of our mind, instead of the mind being our master. Normally, our mind oscillates between the past and the future just like the flame of a lamp that's wavering in the wind. When the same lamp is placed in a windless place, it stops flickering. By nature, the mind is in dilemma. We cannot suppress it or control it just by allowing it to wander either. All we can do to still the mind is to stop bothering about it, just witness it and complete with it. So just relax.

All our patterns, desires, and fears arise because, at the root, we feel that life has some goal, some purpose. Understand that life has no purpose. It has only meaning. The path itself is the goal; enjoy the path. We think life is as we are living now. Understand that the way we are living life in our world of fantasies is actually like living in our dream world. When we realize the purposelessness of life, we can drop our desires and fears, we can plunge into reality, into the present.

The moment we decide to stay in the present space of completion, the mind stops flickering. When the mind does not flicker and stands still in the present, then we reach the state of 'no-mind'. In this state of 'no-mind,' we don't creates, sustain, or destroy any thought. We relax from all these three things into the space of no-mind.

Our mind is like a lake. When we throw a stone in a lake, many ripples will be created. If we want to stop these ripples, we cannot put our hand in the lake to try to smoothen out the ripples. This is what we end up doing when we try to still our minds. Instead if we just watch the lake, and ensure no more stones are thrown in, the ripples will disappear and the lake will become still. If we just relax and watch our mind with complete awareness, then no new thoughts will be created.

In Bhārat (India), we say that God has three roles—creator, sustainer and destroyer. Brahma is called the Creator or god of creation. Viṣṇu is known as the Sustainer or the God of maintenance. Śiva is called the Destroyer or the God of rejuvenation. Listen, when our thoughts stop performing these three roles of creation, sustenance and rejuvenation, when we transcend all these three, we become Parabrahma, supreme Self. When there are no new thoughts being created, sustained or destroyed, then the mind is absolutely still.

There is a beautiful story described in Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, the history of the various Incarnations of Lord Viṣṇu:

Devatā, the demigods were oppressed by the demons and appealed to Lord Viṣṇu for help. According to His directions, the demigods were to churn the ocean of milk using the Mahā Meru mountain as the staff and Vāsuki, the serpent, as the rope.

During the churning, many products emerged out of the ocean of milk including an elephant, a horse, a divine chariot and many other divine things. Then, hālahāla, a deadly poison emerged, that threatened to take the lives of everyone. Lord Śiva came to their rescue by consuming the poison Himself. He drank the poison but did not completely take it in. He just held it in His throat. That is why He is referred to as Nīlakaṇṭha, the one with a blue throat who has swallowed the poison and holds it in His throat.

Listen. When the churning of the milky ocean started, everyone was waiting only for the nectar. That is why, when the poison emerged, it was a suffering for them. But Mahādeva was waiting for the poison also, that is why it could not bring suffering to Him. Śiva is never surprised by the poison brought to Him. That is why He is Mahādeva, Śiva!

This is actually a metaphysical representation. Nīlakaṇṭha is embodiment of responsibility. Nīlakaṇṭha is the symbol that Mahādeva is complete with both desires and fears. Life is like the churn-ing of the ocean of milk where we are churned, pulled towards the desires and pushed away from the fears. There are various products that emerge out of the churning, out of the decisions and choices we make in life. Some of these products appear pleasing while others appear dangerous like poison.

When we exist with responsibility without taking in the poison or throwing it out, meaning without running towards the desires or running away from the fears, we become Śiva and live life blissfully as Nityānanda, irrespective of what comes our way.

Kṛṣṇa talks about two important things: practice with determination and practice without deviating from the prescribed way. Both are key elements to experience yoga. After a few days of practice it is easy to fall into inertia, tamas, and give up on ourselves. Our mind has been programmed with our old routine for years and will will draw us back to the old ways. This is where determination is needed. Determination driven by the curiosity and the quest to see and experience the truth is what will give us the energy to practice yoga.

The other important element is practice without deviating from the prescribed way. We are re-introducing, re-presenting yoga in the form of Nithya Yoga—the yoga of eternity. I can say re-presenting because it is a new expression. The method has evolved but the system, the truth itself is the same as the original system offered by the great master, Patañjali. His system is so complete that we can't add even a single word to the techniques. It is the experience of Truth and Truth cannot be developed. Only lies can be developed. All we can do is help evolve the teaching of Truth to suit the current minds.

Kṛṣṇa emphasizes here that yoga should be practiced in the prescribed way. All eight parts of yoga need to be practiced, simultaneously. Even one part of Patañjali's Aṣṭāṅga Yoga will take many lifetimes to achieve, given the modern man's mindset.

Please understand, Patañjali's Aṣṭāṅga Yoga, eight organs of yoga or aṅga has unfortunately been wrongly translated by the English yogis as 'eight steps of yoga'. Because of this, it has become just a small few techniques or methods to make your body flexible and a little healthy. That is a disgrace done to yoga. When you get a diamond and you use that diamond just as a vegetable cutter, it is a disgrace to the diamond. In the same way, when you use such a great power, the powerful science of yoga just as technique to bring a little health, it is so unfortunate!

Satya, truth, is a part of yama, the first of the eight steps of Aṣṭāṅga Yoga. If we consistently practice truthfulness alone, we will reach samādhi, the state of liberation. Our thoughts, words and actions become pure and truthful only when we are enlightened; only when we bring integrity in our words, authenticity in our thinking and actions, responsibility in our feeling, and enriching in our living.

Please listen! Yama is Integrity. Niyama is Authenticity. Āsana, Prānāyama, Prayāhara, Dhārana are Responsibility. Dhāyana and Samādhi are Enriching.

This is what Kṛṣṇa means when He says, 'Self is satisfied by the Self in the Self, yatra caiva ātmanātmanaṁ paśyann ātmani tuṣyati (6.20).' All of this has to happen together, not part by part. When one aspect is complete, all others also become complete. This is the state of pūrṇa, complete completion. Nothing can be taken away from it. Noth-ing can be added to it that would make any difference to its state of completeness. No joy can make it more blissful, no sorrow can make it less blissful. One becomes centered in bliss. When centered in bliss, it is forever!

Kṛṣṇa talks about moving into reality, transcending the senses and the mind. The way yoga is taught and practiced in many places, one is moved away from reality into a fantasy world, to fulfill one’s imagined needs. The senses and the mind wander aimlessly. We cannot suppress desires, because anything suppressed will surface with more intensity. We might have experienced in our own lives that a desire may be satisfied momentarily, but soon afterwards, it arises again. Instead we need to un-derstand what is happening and how it is happening. The way out of the mind is also through the mind and not by avoiding it. Completion process is the key through which all our emotions can be handled. They basically originate from the root patterns of greed and fear. As we witness and do completion with our root patterns, the fear and greed lose their grasp on the mind.

Take fear for example. What do we do when we feel afraid of some-thing, whether it is fear of insects or fear of heights? The moment we are faced with the object of fear, we try to escape. Have we tried facing the fear? The next time you are afraid, try this. Instead of running away, just try looking at the fear consciously, go through it fully and declare completion with it. Do not identify with it by trying to suppress it or run away from it. I tell you, when you look at fear with completion, you will see that the fear does not exist as you thought it existed. It simply does not exist because fear is born out of ignorance, when something is unknown to you.

When we bring the light of knowledge upon fear, ignorance is removed and we get the courage to see the object as it is. Because now there is nothing hidden, our mind cannot fantasize about the unknown.

So understand, our fears are nothing but negative fantasies and we can complete with them. The same also applies to greed. Why do we always feel that we need more? We start running after the next desire before one desire is even fulfilled. We are so tuned to running after things.

‘What next? What next?’ becomes our chant. Have we ever stopped to think what we are running for? After fulfilling a desire, have we stopped to think whether we have achieved what we wanted? Have we stopped to enjoy what we just fulfilled? If we sit and contemplate sincerely over one desire after fulfilling it, by now, we would have gotten out of the vicious cycle of desires.

Can we ever drink water from a mirage? Running after the fantasies created by the mind is just like running after a mirage or running after the horizon. We can never achieve bliss by running behind these fantasies because these fantasies have no existence in reality.

Here Kṛṣṇa says that we need conviction and intelligence to be established in the Self. Why does He talk about conviction? Understand that intelligence cannot happen without a strong conviction, a strong intellectual base

Our Vedic seers, Ṛṣis have created śāstras, the foundations of knowledge that give the intellectual understanding, conviction and commitment to this process. Logically, we will be clear about the questions that naturally arise. 'What is the path? What is the goal? Why do we need spirituality?' All these questions are answered logically in the śāstras. The conclusions are given to us. Śāstras are the scriptures that take away all our doubts completely.

Saṁśaya rākśasa nāshana astram—it means saṁśaya is a rākśasa—'doubt is a devil'. Once a doubt enters our mind, until we clear it, we can't rest. The śāstras help us get rid of these doubts intellectually. Unless we have complete intellectual clarity, even if we believe, our belief will be a pseudo belief.

There are different ways to learn and develop clarity and conviction. We can learn from our experiences as well as from others' experiences. For example, when we touch the flame of a candle, we learn that it burns. When we touch a burning gas stove, we learn again that fire burns. One by one, we can experience and learn that all fires burn. Or, when we touch the first form of fire, immediately we can learn that all fires will burn! Coming to a conclusion and a clear understanding that all fires burn, after just one experience, is intelligence!

We need a strong conviction for spirituality to flower in our lives. Only then can we stay on the path without faltering. If we do anything with knowledge about the science of the whole action, then the activi-ty becomes a meditation. When the science is lost and only the activity remains, it becomes a ritual. When the juice of wisdom is not in the activity, it becomes a ritual, and we become religious nuts. When we add the juice of wisdom, we become spiritual fruits! We need to add 'spirit' to the 'ritual'. Then it becomes 'spirituality'!

We can start with simple things. We can try to infuse comple-tion into simple actions in our everyday life like eating, having a bath, driving. Gradually, when the completion extends to more actions of our life, we can see that such awareness of completion results in bliss. Completion is bliss. We need to bring the light of awareness and completion into everything we do. It is a conviction arising out of our innate intelligence and understanding that we must return to our true nature, that is Divinity.

Now, Kṛṣṇa is emphasizing an important spiritual quality— perseverance. In the previous verse, He spoke about convic-tion. Now, he talks about persevering with that conviction. What happens most of the time to most of us is that when we realize we need to transform, we try a few times and then we give up on ourselves thinking we cannot do it. We expect the mental setup that we have created and solidified, to be broken and restructured in a few attempts, almost instantly. How is this possible? We need to be more patient and persevere in our efforts for the real change to happen.

So what if we fail sometimes? Why don't we look at the positive side and see that we succeeded a few times? Why do we want to count the failures and feel depressed? We can also look at the successes and feel inspired. Once the conviction is there, nothing can stop us except our own mind. The mind is like a faithful servant. It reproduces whatever it has been fed. All along, we have been feeding the mind negative memories of failure and we have been storing all the past memories related to failure. What will the mind reproduce? It will recollect and present the same instances of only failure. When we want to measure the strength of a chain, we measure the strength of the weakest link in that chain. But we cannot apply the same logic to measure ourselves.

When we measure our lives based on our weakest moments, our failures and our incompletions, we take a wrong reading of ourselves. We cannot do with our lives what we do with the chain. Why can't we give credit to ourselves for the strong, successful moments of our lives? We have been conditioned by society to consider ourselves weak beings, that we are not powerful. We have been taught to feel guilty. Does that help us in any way? No! It only creates low energy and powerlessness.

Listen. Strength is Life. We should just decide that we will not be trapped in this cycle of guilt and desire. We need to measure ourselves by our strongest moments, our greatest moments of powerfulness, when we have displayed extraordinary awareness, courage, compassion, love and such other divine qualities. A human being is the sum of his greatest moments of completion. He is not a mechanical device that fails based on its faults. He is a spiritual being who thrives on his strengths.

Understand that you attract ‘like’ incidents in your life. ‘Like attracts like.’ The energy of one frequency attracts the similar frequency. When we are angry, the low energy attracts similar low energy. Pain attracts pain. Joy attracts joy. Bliss attracts fortune. If we are joyful, we will create a beautiful community of joyful people around us. It is for us to decide what we want to attract.

We must persevere in our efforts to change our space and we will see the results in front of our very eyes. Failures are merely tests to verify our mettle. Irrespective of how many times we may fail, with complete faith, with integrity and authenticity, we can trust in that inner strength that we all possess. Then we shall succeed. This is what is meant when Kṛṣṇa says the true yogi reaches the state of ultimate happiness, the state of eternal bliss and divine consciousness by his identification with the Absolute.

In the next verse, Kṛṣṇa talks about passion and sins.

Passion is nothing but a deep attachment to something for the plea- sure that it gives. Usually we associate passion, sin and such terms with deeds that we classify as right or wrong. But here, Kṛṣṇa does not talk about sin in the way society teaches us. It is not morality that He is talking about. I tell you, there is no sin except the sin of connecting thoughts and thinking that we are logical beings.

So, the key is to be in the space of completion every moment. The solution is not to condemn ourselves as sinners and expect some exter-nal force to bring completion to us. It is we who choose everything in our lives and how we want to live. But since we do not participate in this process consciously, we call it ‘fate’. We are the ones who do the actions, but we don’t want to accept that fact when we get the results. Somehow we choose to do whatever we want to do and then blame everyone else for the consequences! When we infuse completion into our actions, automatically the very completion will ensure that we have the integrity to do the right things. Listen! When you are integrated, so many resources which are present in you as a potential, suddenly becomes a reality in you! When we are integrated, we don't need to depend on society and morality to teach us the right things to do.

I tell you, live according to your intelligence and awareness. If you depend on others, even after becoming an adult, it means you are not mature. Anything done out of conscience does not have the conviction of experience to back it. That is why it is never done whole-heartedly, because your energy, your intelligence is not behind the action. Have you seen a child doing anything, like looking at a flower? A child will look at a flower not just with its eyes, but also with its entire body. A child does anything and everything completely. We should try to look at life in a similar way. Many of us have not experienced the joy of enriching someone whole-heartedly. On the other hand, if we are smokers, do we need somebody to convince us to smoke? No! Smoking has become our experience.

When we are in bliss or the highest happiness, we can never commit any sin because we are aware and conscious and we cannot be caught in passion or lethargy. When we are in a 'no-mind' state, we are in bliss and we are not caught in the passion or sin that are products of the mind. When the mind drops, the Divine hand that is orchestrating every single event will guide every one of our actions.

What does it mean to be freed from all past sinful reactions? Our past reactions are nothing but our root patterns, the past memories along with the associated emotions, deeply inscribed in our unconscious space. Whenever we hold on to any past incidents or emotions as root patterns, our actions are bound to be impacted by them. But, if our action is not based on the past but arises from a spontaneous decision based on the present situation, then we are 'responding' to the event or incident or person. When we are in bliss, our actions will be only a response not a reaction, which is based on these past memories that Kṛṣṇa calls past sin-ful reactions.

Have the courage to complete with your root patterns, to make decisions without referring to these past incidents, because every single incident and moment is a brand new one. How can we compare what is happening now with what happened before? The situation is different, the person is different and so are we. Every moment, each one of us is dying and being born again; we are changing. Our intelligence is being constantly updated. Then how can we analyze the present situation through the lens of the past? We must complete with all regrets and guilt that we might have about the past, and immerse ourselves in the present moment. We don't need the past to live beautifully in present space of completion. In fact, we can't live blissfully in the present if we continue to use the past as a reference point for how to manage our lives.

Kṛṣṇa says that the realized person, yoga-yuktātmā, sees the Supreme in everyone and everything. He sees everything situated in the Supreme and all beings situated in the Supreme. The yogi is in touch with the high-er Self and is in bliss.

When we experience the Truth, we see everything in ourselves and ourselves in everything. In fact, in my first spiritual experience at the age of twelve, this is what I clearly saw.

When I was twelve, I was playing with this technique of just watching where thoughts came from, the source of my thoughts. At that age, I didn't even realize it was meditation. One day, at the foothills of Arunachala, in my hometown of Tiruvannamalai in South India, I was sitting on a rock, just playing with this technique that I had been practicing for two years.

Suddenly, something happened; something opened within me. I felt as if I was being pulled inside. Suddenly, I could see 360 degrees in all directions. My eyes were closed but I could see everything in front of me and behind me.

Not just that, I felt that whatever I was seeing, was all me. I could see myself in everything—in the trees, in the rocks, in the ground, in the hills, everything!

An Enlightened person sees no difference between Himself and the rest of the Universe. He is one with the Universe. His boundary does not end where his physical body ends. In fact, now with Kirlian photography, we can even check the auric body. For ordinary people, the aura just surrounds the physical body but when you are one with the universe, the aura extends infinitely. The Viśvarūpa Darśan, vision of the cosmic form, that Kṛṣṇa gives Arjuna is the glimpse of the same Truth, where Arjuna sees that Kṛṣṇa is one with the Universe.

In the ultimate sense, the moment we understand that we are deeply, totally and intensely connected to the whole Universe, not only do we start experiencing bliss, we really start living in the space of completion. Many dimensions of our being start opening. Right now we are stressed out and disturbed continuously because we think of ourselves as individual egos. If we disappear into this collective consciousness, we will experience so many dimensions and so many possibilities that we simply cannot imagine right now!

When we see an Enlightened Master, we understand how all-encompassing he is. He never excludes anything or anyone. He is just pure love, that's all. And pure love sees no imperfections. When we see every human being as a part of God, then that is real worship. It is easy to worship god in the temple. Real worship is seeing everything as God. Existence is pure love.

Deep inside, society is actually against Existence or god. It is against pure love. The best way not to follow anything is to start worshipping it. Society escapes in the name of worship. Society will never approve of us if we were to let go and love every plant and animal with endless love. It will tell us that we are mad. But I tell you, we must keep on loving with all our hearts, and expand to see Existence in everything.

The root of God is love. The root of God lies in seeing Him in everything. People are afraid to go to the roots and so they delude themselves in superficial layers. Have the courage to go deep inside and love. We will start feeling the common thread of Existence in all that we see. We will understand that all that we see are illusory happenings held together by the real thread that is Existence. Automatically we will start loving everything in the same way without any trouble because we will see only Existence in everyone and everything. Each and every atom in this Earth is unique, is divine, and is an expression of Existence.

6.30 For one who sees Me everywhere and who sees everything in Me, for him I am never lost nor is he lost to Me.

6.31 He who is in oneness with Me in all respects, worships Me situated in all beings and remains present in Me.

6.32 One who, by comparision to his own Self, sees the true oneness of all beings, in both their happiness or misery, is Supreme Yogi in My opinion, Arjuna.

6.33 Arjuna says: O Madhusūdana, this system of Yoga as described by You, appears unendurable to me, for the mind being restless and unsteady.

6.34 O Kṛṣṇa, the wavering mind is agitated, strong and firm. I think it is difficult to control the mind like it is difficult to control the wind.

6.35 Bhagavān says: O mighty-armed Kaunteya, it is undoubtedly difficult to control the wavering mind but by practice and detachment, it can be controlled.

Here, Kṛṣṇa gives a promise. He says that for anyone who sees Him in everything and who sees everything in Him, He is al-ways available. Neither Kṛṣṇa is lost to him nor he is ever lost to Kṛṣṇa.

What He means is not that we should see the form of Kṛṣṇa in everyone, with the flute and two peacock feathers. Of course, that form is beautiful but do not get caught in the form. The form is there one day and not there the next; it is ephemeral. It is like this: if my finger is pointing in the direction of the moon, look in the direction of the moon and enjoy its beauty. Instead, if you watch my finger, you will miss the moon!

What Kṛṣṇa means by ‘Me’ is the Kṛṣṇa energy, the Divine conscious-ness. See the Divine in everybody and everything and automatically, you will relax. You will no longer fight because you will see everything around you as a part of the Divine, including yourself. What is there to fight with and what should you fight for? You will simply relax.

Existence is waiting with open arms to engulf us, to dissolve us into Itself, but only if we are ready to let go. If we just have the courage to let go with an open heart, we will meet and merge with it. When we are ready to feel the embrace of Existence, we rise into a higher plane, a plane of higher consciousness. We enter into a space we never even knew existed. With Existence we always fall in to rise.

People ask me, ‘How can we tell that you are the right Master for us?’

I tell them simply, ‘Forget about any analysis or intellectual reasoning. If I am truly your Master, you can never forget me. I will be there even in your dreams!’ The relationship between the Master and disciple is one of pure love. When we are truly in love, we see the object of love in everything around us. We are consumed by that feeling. The Master fills every pore of our being. We never need to ask, ‘Are you my Master?’ We just know! He has filled our being, touched us at our core, because to him, there is no separation. Here, Kṛṣṇa is describing the state of the enlightened person. An enlightened person can empathize with everyone because he experiences himself as everyone.

An incident from the life of Swami Vivekananda:

One night, Vivekananda woke up at two a.m. and woke up his disciples. His disciples became anxious. Vivekananda said that he was feeling a lot of pain and that in some part of the world there was a natural calamity hap-pening that was causing him the pain. The next morning, the newspapers carried the news of a terrible earthquake in Fiji Islands that consumed many lives. Vivekananda was sensitive to a calamity that happened in some corner of the world thousands of miles away!

What happened in Vivekananda is what we call empathy. It is not sympathy. Sympathy is a very superficial word. We are all capable of sympathy. When someone tells us that they are suffering, we make some noises and just confirm their suffering for them. That is sympathy. When we sympathize, we affirm to them that their worries are big, so we actually give them a subtle ego boost.

What an Enlightened person or a Master feels is never sympathy. It is empathy. Empathy is when we feel another's suffering in our own being. It is when a person does not have to tell us he is suffering, but we simply know because the Existential energy in us feels it. Masters are one with us because they are one with Existence and we are a part of Existence. It is only that we see them as separate. In reality that is not the case.

When we realize the sense of non-duality and infinity with the entire Universe, we experience a tremendous overflowing of love and compassion for every being without discrimination, because we realize that everyone is a part of the same Whole. That is why we can see that Masters are such an ocean of infinite love and know only how to give. They are Existence itself. They shower love without asking questions because they feel a constant devotion towards the entire Universe or life force or Parabrahma Kṛṣṇa. They cannot see anyone as a separate entity because there is no separateness.

It is only our senses, mind and logic that perceives information and categorizes it and analyzes it to create the separateness. As long as we use our logic, our collected information, words and our little dictionar-ies to analyze the information received through our senses, we will be excluding and judging. Existence or the Universe is a living energy with infinite potential, which is simply beyond our logic. Only when we drop our logic, mind and ego can we merge with Existence and become whole, and start seeing that everyone and everything is an extension of the same life force with just different expressions.

Just as the fingers on the hand and the toes on the feet belong to the same body, we will be able to see that everyone is a part of the same Universal Energy. This is when true compassion, empathy and sincere service towards enriching everyone can happen. Until then we will only be using our logic, mind, ego and conditioning, to enslave others.

When we realize the infinity of everyone, we will express our unconditional love and compassion towards everyone without discrimination, because we know that all discrimination is baseless and false. Our very walk and talk will start radiating so much bliss that our very presence will start healing others. We will become a blessing for planet Earth and the people who experience our presence.

There are a few disciples who have internalized me so much, that they express me in everything that they do. People who come to the āśram are amazed to see these people who walk and talk like me. Some people think that these disciples are doing it to show off. No, they are so much in tune with me that they reflect my body language, my presence is in them.

Kṛṣṇa goes further to explain the state of an enlightened person or a person who is one with the Divine Consciousness. He says that the enlightened person will feel equally the happiness and pain of another person as he feels his own. Such a person feels one with the whole world. For him, everything is a part of him, so there is nothing else other than his own self. His boundary does not end with the boundary of his own physical body. What does Kṛṣṇa mean when He says that the enlightened person feels happiness and distress equally in himself and in others?

First, He said that the Enlightened person is beyond the opposites, the dualities, beyond the opposing emotions of happiness and distress.

It is like this, say there are two trees in a forest. Now, if one tree falls on the other, we can say that the tree on which the other tree has fallen feels the impact or the pain of a falling tree. Now, say the tree actually feels the entire forest as a part of its own self. Can we say that it will feel 'another' tree falling on it? When everything is a part of its own self, where is the idea of 'other'? When the idea of 'other' disappears, then where is the pain? The idea of pain is relative. The enlightened person is just immersed in enjoying Existence. No separate identities or judgments about right or wrong, happiness or misery exist.

A Yogī in the state of super-consciousness will just watch everything in Existence without judging or labeling it. He will be in a state of complete celebration of life. Existence is love and nothing else. Yet, the compassion of the yogi, the Master, is such that he feels the experiences that others undergo and he empathizes with them. The Master's state of equanimity is not disturbed and yet he feels the pain and joy of others.

This expression of collective consciousness is what Kṛṣṇa has described elsewhere as Vasudaiva Kuṭumbakaṁ. It means that the world is our family and we should feel the rest of the world as we would for our immediate family. When we exist in this state of consciousness, we are true Yogīs.

Arjuna introduces the word 'difficult or su-duṣkaram' here. Be very clear, the moment we categorize something as easy or difficult, we have made it that way. Understand that the ego can be fulfilled only through difficult things. Simple things cannot satisfy the ego.

After listening to Kṛṣṇa about controlling the mind, Arjuna ex-presses his doubts about being able to still the mind. Arjuna is actual-ly asking about problems that will be faced by future generations also. His question is not just an individual's question. The questions are the fundamental quest of the individual and the answers are the eternal Truth. We now have become more complex than our forefathers because of this cerebral layer that has formed with all the fantasies bombarding us from all directions. Arjuna cannot understand how to practice yoga, given the unsteady and wavering nature of the mind. Five thousand years ago, even though there was no infiltration by television and media on the scale that we have now, Arjuna expressed his doubt about how to handle the mind.

Here, Arjuna addresses to Kṛṣṇa his concerns about the mind being so strong that it sometimes overcomes the intelligence. The first and foremost thing is to accept that we have a problem, we have a root pattern. The next thing is to understand how the root pattern is created. That is what Arjuna does here. It is only then that we can overcome the root pattern. If we ignore or run away from the pattern we can never re-solve and complete with the pattern. So, the first thing to accept is that our mind does oscillate, then to understand how it oscillates. For this we need to watch the mind and do completion with the thought patterns. This is meditation. The very act of watching, being aware of the mind, and completing with it will take us beyond the mind.

Here, Kṛṣṇa has to answer from the same plane that Arjuna asks the question. Arjuna says that the mind is wavering and difficult to control like the wind, vāyor iva sa su-duṣkaram (6.34). Just as one thorn is used to remove another thorn, Kṛṣṇa has to give Arjuna a technique. He has to support the idea that it is difficult to control the mind. So, Kṛṣṇa has to give some technique at this point—practice and detachment. Now, if He tells Arjuna that this problem is not a problem at all but a creation of his mind, Arjuna will not understand. Kṛṣṇa has to give a technique for the mind to play with.

Masters give meditation techniques so that we try all these and ultimately realize we are bliss, and that meditation is our natural state, and that there is nothing to be achieved. But, if I tell you that right away, you will not believe me. The mind cannot believe something so simple. It will create all kinds of contradictions and self-doubts as to why it cannot be so simple. Kṛṣṇa also has to give a solution for the doubting mind. He emphasizes perseverance and penance. Don't think penance means leaving home, going to the Himalayas and sitting in meditation while fasting. Penance is persevering with authenticity until we experience the Truth.

Kṛṣṇa also reveals the root of the problem of controlling the mind and gives the technique to complete with it, which is detachment. Here we need to understand the word 'detachment'.

Whether we say ego or mind, it is just the collection of thoughts. Thoughts can exist only in relationship to our identity and the past or the future. In the present, we cannot have thoughts because the very moment we think, the present has slipped into the past. The mind moves only because it is attached to the identities that we carry. Either we fear losing the carefully constructed inner image or we are greedy to develop a better outer image of ourselves in our own eyes and in the eyes of society.

The mind becomes so attached to these identities that it is constantly reviewing the past incidents or it is constantly planning the future to either protect or develop these identities. This constant pre-occupation of the mind with the past and future is the root cause of the oscillation of the mind. If we look deeply, staying in the present moment of completion means total insecurity. It requires us to be ready to embrace the present without planning for the future or reviewing the past. This seems like a great danger for our ego.

Listen. I tell you, any identity that we create about ourselves that is less than the idea of our being God, is a false identity. If we consider ourselves to be anything less than God, we suffer from an inferiority complex. If we have the courage to detach ourselves from the certificates of society, if we have the courage to drop these false identities, then we can embrace the Divine.

Detachment is the direct technique that Kṛṣṇa is suggesting here. Detachment at the root level will lead to detachment from everything else. Detachment from the ego or the identities will lead to detachment from desires. This is detachment from the past and future. This is being ‘Unclutched’.

WITHOUT YOGA

Kṛṣṇa continues to declare in this verse that it is possible to achieve Self-realization by stilling the mind if one intensely practices the appropriate techniques. Here, Kṛṣṇa explains that it is possible to achieve control over the mind. and to also stay in that state where we are in control of the mind.

Actually, having an experience of Sātori or the first glimpse of bliss is not a big thing. It is easy to get a taste of enlightenment. But to stay in that same state, the same consciousness, needs preparation of the body and mind. To express that high energy through the body and to radiate that experience of bliss requires that our body and mind be prepared. Preparing the body and mind for enlightenment is what yoga is all about. This is what sage Patañjali created yoga for. The problem is that only the verbal language of Patañjali remains, but the body language is absent. That is why so much confusion and mutated forms of yoga are around today. How much can words convey?

Only a person in the same space, in the same consciousness as Patañjali can convey what He wanted to convey. This is what Nithya Yoga is all about. Nithya Yoga is my offering to the world. It is the science, the formula, that will give others the same experience of Enlightenment which happened in me. It is yoga taught by an Enlightened being who can convey the body language and experience of Patañjali, because he is in the same consciousness as Patañjali. The whole purpose of Nithya Yoga is to prepare the body to experience, to stay in and radiate eternal bliss. Its purpose is to ‘Unclutch’ and enlighten. I can say it is a direct means to Enlightenment.

Here, Arjuna again asks the questions we all will have in our minds. What happens if we start with faith but somewhere, we fail in controlling the mind? Be very clear, this situation will happen. When we start off, we will face failure in our attempts to control and complete with the mind. If we don’t experience this, we should check ourselves because we may be fooling ourselves with whatever we are doing!

Arjuna wants Kṛṣṇa to give an assurance that Enlightenment is possible for all kinds of people; that even if a person starts practicing intensely but fails due to the wavering mind, it is still possible to attain the Divine Consciousness, Brahman. Actually, at the very root of Arjuna’s question is the mind that is generating the fear and making him believe that it is hard to find the no-mind state.

The mind does not want to lose its existence. The mind always looks for a reason to convince us that we cannot carry on our lives without it. In our day-to-day life we face the situation that Arjuna faces here. Even with activities that we have carried out successfully many times in the past, we feel nervous when we start again. Will we succeed? What will happen if we fail? Even before we begin, we start imagining the worst.

Actually, it is okay to imagine the worst. I tell people that to overcome fear and face fear, it is good to imagine the worst-case scenario. Visualize it fully, relive such an experience consciously, taking it to its logical conclusion, and the fear will disappear. However, if all we can do is to think and brood over the worst things and continue with our fear unconsciously, we will be in the same situation as Arjuna—totally confused!

The future is not ours to see. The goal as we imagine it does not exist. There is no purpose to life. The meaning of life is to live. That is all. If only Arjuna was comfortable with just practicing the techniques that Kṛṣṇa has already outlined for him, trusting Kṛṣṇa and enjoying the path shown to him, he would not be asking such questions. Arjuna still does not believe Kṛṣṇa. He has heard and intellectually understood the meaning of what has been said, that is all. He has not fully listened and internalized the Master and His words. Arjuna has yet to learn.

Kṛṣṇa assures Arjuna by saying that there is no destruction either in this life or the next life for one who is on the right path, the path of yoga. He provides the assurance that Arjuna is looking for, since he knows how frail Arjuna's state of mind is. Kṛṣṇa is giving a wonderful assurance for all of us that even a small amount of practice of this yoga will save us from the cycle of birth and death. Any yoga practiced will give us tremendous benefit. The very intent to practice yoga itself means that we have gained knowledge about the problem of the mind.

Listen, any movement of the body with a strong intention will cause that intention to get deeply inscribed into our bodies and muscles. If the intention is wanting to become one with our true identity and wanting to drop our false identity, it will get deeply inscribed or recorded in our body and will remain there and automatically the body will start moving towards that one goal. If we move our body with the thought of bliss, the bliss emotion gets ingrained in our system. If it is anger that moves our body, the anger emotion gets ingrained. This is such an important and beautiful truth. Don't miss it!

Understand, the basic quality of life is reproduction and expansion. Therefore, it is possible for us to replicate happiness, joy and bliss as well. It is up to us to choose what type of emotion we want to allow in our bodies, what emotion we want to be ingrained in our system. All that we need to do is to intend to be joyful and joyful cells will keep reproducing. This process cannot stop. We will be full of joy.

We can try this when we meet people we do not like. Just smile at them. Not the plastic smile that only covers the lips, but a smile from our heart with warmth, so that the smile spreads to our eyes. See what happens. All our negativity will disappear. In addition, any negativity that we create in others also will disappear and they will respond with the same smile. Spread that love around and you will find that the negative emotions of people who approach us with anger, fear or jealousy will be consumed by the energy of love that we unleash.

Kṛṣṇa talks about how we choose everything in our lives, including our birth, when and where we are born and whom we choose as our parents. This truth may seem difficult for most of us to believe. Our birth is not just an accident. It is an incident and we are the ones who choose all the details about this incident. We must understand that it is only we who program and design everything and everybody in our life, including our parents and environment. Our choice of the next body is based on the way we have lived our life in this body.

For example, if we live to eat rather than eat to live, at the time of death, we will still have the desire to continue eating. So, we will design our next body to fulfill this desire. We might choose the body of a pig. Or, if we have lived our life only for sleeping and doing no creative work, we might choose the body of a buffalo. So, based on the attitude we have lived with, we choose the next body. This is the basic idea on which our janma-maraṇa cakra (cycle of life and death) revolves.

We go into a birth-death cycle. We go and come back again, taking a new body. This phenomenon happens again and again.

Whatever we choose at the moment of death will become reality in the next birth. You will be that. Some people think that they can manage if they remind themselves to think of the Divine, at the last second of their lives. But that will never happen unless we make that a habit throughout our life. If we keep chanting 'Coca-Cola' our whole life, we cannot and will not think of Rāma or Kṛṣṇa during our last moments! How we live our life will decide the quality of our death as well.

Here, Kṛṣṇa gives the assurance to Arjuna and to the whole of humanity that a person who has performed virtuous activities takes birth in a family of wise people or in a prosperous family. His pious activities will earn him a place among the higher worlds. After dwelling there for a while he will take birth in the family of righteous people to once again enable his spiritual seeking.

We can choose our body and the time that we wish to be born. When we live our life running behind our greed and desires, running after 'what next? what next....?', naturally, at the time of our death also, we will not be ready to leave the body. The body will be tired of running behind desires continuously, but the mind will not be ready to leave. So we will leave the body in the pain and suffering of this push and pull of desires and fear. If we can just relax into the present and take life moment by moment, we will leave the body in a relaxed way, peacefully.

Once we leave the body, in three kṣaṇa, three moments, we get into a new body and we are reborn. Kṣaṇa in Saṃskṛit does not mean 'sec-onds'. It means the gap between two thoughts. If we have been constantly running behind desires, the gap between two thoughts will be really small for us. When we learn to relax into the present, the gap between two thoughts increases and the three kṣaṇas can be a long time. In three kṣaṇas, we take on the new body to fulfill whatever desires were unfulfilled when we left the previous body. Here, Kṛṣṇa says that on taking birth, we gain the intelligence of the previous body and continue the journey where we left off.

One thing we should understand here is that when we say death, it is not just the death that happens at the end of our life. It is what happens every day and night. Every night, we go from the physical body to the dream body and causal body. In the morning, we enter the physical body again. We die and take birth again.

People tell me, ‘No, no, Swamiji. Everyday when we enter into the dream we are not entering into the same dream, but everyday when we wake up to the reality we are entering into the same reality. So with this scale we can say this is reality and that is dream.’

Please listen, in one night’s dream we live even twenty years of life, am I right? In one night’s dream, don’t we live even twenty years of life? In that twenty-year span, we are in the same dream. But is that reality? No! So be very clear, this whole life which you think as reality, may very well be part of one dream! This whole span that we are thinking of as real can be part of one dream.

Every day we leave the body. We go to the causal body when we fall asleep. Every day we die. When we wake up, we come back. Every day we come back to life. As of now, every morning, how do we come back to life? How do we take this body again in the morning? Just look deeply. What happens at the time when we get up from bed?

First thing, usually, the moment we gain awareness, either a thought based on greed or fear will hit us. There will be thoughts based on greed such as, ‘I need to get this today,’ or thoughts based on fear such as, ‘I have to finish this work today in office. Will I be able to?’ Some thought based on fear or greed will hit us. Immediately, we will jump out of our bed. The moment we assume our body, that moment is a moment of taking birth. Please be very clear, that is the moment we take the body.

Early morning, the thought with which we enter into the body, which makes us assume the body, is going to play a major role in our consciousness. The first thought is going to play a major role in our consciousness throughout the day. Just as the thought with which we leave the body on dying decides the kind of body we will assume in our next birth, in exactly the same way, every day the thought with which we get up in the morning and assume this body decides the quality of that day, that life. If we understand this once and alter our thoughts at the time of waking up, we will alter the whole consciousness.

When we get up from bed, let the first thought be related to love and compassion. Wake up only to express life in bliss. Wake up just out of joy. When we get up from bed, let us assume the body with gratitude to the Divine. With this, the whole quality of our consciousness will change. We will become a Divine Incarnation!

Kṛṣṇa is actually giving a technique on how to become Kṛṣṇa, how to enter into Kṛṣṇa Consciousness, to become an Incarnation. The man who assumes the body out of love and compassion is an Incarnation.

If we assume the body out of greed or fear, we are human. Early morning, let the first thought be gratitude. Let it be out of love and compassion. Our whole life will become pure eternal bliss, Nithyānanda.

Kṛṣṇa is describing the process of the human experience. Why do we assume the body? We think that we can experience bliss through the body and mind; that is why we assume the body. When we realize that bliss cannot be experienced through the body or mind, we know that going beyond the body is the only way to experience it. Then we will not assume the body. Assuming the human body is simply our choice.

People ask me, 'Why do we choose to have the human experience?' That we should find out for ourselves. Why did we assume this body? I asked the question and I got the answer. I know why I chose the human experience. Ask the question yourself and pursue it as a quest and you will get the answer. You will be enlightened.

We claim that we want to experience the ultimate and that we want to be enlightened. But I tell you, if we really want to be enlightened, there is nothing that can stop us. There is no hindrance to our being enlightened except our own self. As of now, actually, Enlightenment is last on our laundry list of items that we want to do in life! When the urge becomes urgent, when the question becomes a burning quest, then we get the answer. There is no other way.

In these verses, Kṛṣṇa promises a few things. He says that whatever we have learned in one life does not get wasted. We do not start from ground zero in the next birth. We start from where we left off. Our vāsanas, our mindset in one birth, continues into another. He also promises that if we keep practicing, if we keep trying, we will be cleansed of all sins and reach the highest state. Such a person, Kṛṣṇa promises, will reach Him.

At the end of the day, what Kṛṣṇa implies is this: We need to do our bit. We need to practice yoga, the path that leads to self-aware-ness, to self-completion, the path that leads to Kṛṣṇa, with dedication, perseverance, with integrity and authenticity. There is no other way. There is no short cut. Once you do your bit, the Master promises deliverance. He promises that you will be one with Him. We will enter into a technique given by Śrī Kṛṣṇa to go beyond the mind, to awaken our senses, to look in.

Now it is time to look in. Now it is time to tune ourselves to that highest teaching given by Śrī Kṛṣṇa in this Dhyāna Yoga. Now we will enter into the meditation. If we are ready to sit for the next ten minutes, we will start the meditation.

Please sit straight and close your eyes. Keep your head, neck and spine, all three in a straight line. Inhale and exhale as slowly as possible and as deeply as possible.

Slowly, in a relaxed way, bring your awareness to your ājña cakra. Concentrate between the two eyebrows. Bring your awareness between the two eyebrows.

Remember and pray to that Energy that came as Kṛṣṇa, that is guiding us and helping us in our life. Pray to that Energy that gave us the Bhagavad Gītā.

Meditate on the pure light energy. If your mind wanders here and there, don't worry. When you remember, bring it back again and relax in your ājña cakra, between your eyebrows. Don't concentrate. In a very relaxed way, be aware of the ājña cakra, the space in between the two eyebrows.

(a few minutes pass)

Slowly, very slowly bring your mind to your heart and meditate on your heart center. If you want, you can touch your heart center with the hand and feel it. Try to bring your awareness to the heart center. Try to remember the heart center. Forget all other parts of your body; forget your mind. Just become the heart center. Just be in the heart center. Inhale and exhale as slowly as possible.

May you experience your pure inner space. May you experience the eternal bliss, Nityānanda.

(a few minutes pass)

Om śānti, śānti, śāntihi...

Relax. Slowly, very slowly, open your eyes.

We may wonder how a simple technique like this one can lead us into our Self.

Please understand that we always live in the head. Start living from the heart. We will then start acting from intelligence. We will start act-ing, not from our head but from our heart. When we start acting from the heart, we don't calculate. The very calculation disappears, the 'I, I, I' disappears. And naturally our senses become sensitive. We don't abuse our senses. We don't destroy our senses. Too much of the energy that is supplied to the heart is taken away by the mind. The fuel supply to the mind will be reduced and the fuel supply to the heart will be increased.

So try to continuously remember this heart region, anāhata cakra. Naturally, we will have awareness in the ājña also. In the last session, Kṛṣṇa gave the technique to be in the ājña. Today, He says start with the ājña and come down to anāhata. This is because in the heart, there is a possibility of much more happening. The possibility of reaching is easier and greater in the heart. Kṛṣṇa says, ‘Let you be in the heart.’

Look in! You will realize ‘You are That.’ Just look in, you will experience the eternal bliss, Nitya-ānanda. Let us pray to that Ultimate Energy, Parabrahma Kṛṣṇa to give us all the Eternal Bliss, Nityānanda.

Thus ends the sixth chapter named Dhyāna Yogaḥ, ‘The Yoga of Path of Meditation,’ of the Bhagavad Gītā Upaniṣad, Brahmavidyā Yogaśāstra, the scripture of yoga dealing with the science of the Absolute in the form of Śrī Kṛṣṇārjuna saṃvād, dialogue between Śrī Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna.

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