Trust Existence, Not Your Logic🔗

Q: Swamiji, you spoke about needs and wants, and that needs carry their own energy for fulfillment. Does this mean that we can do nothing and things will happen?

When you have unconditional faith in the power of the universe, yes it will happen. Whatever you need you shall receive, without doubt. This is my experience.

When I left home at seventeen, I took a vow never to touch money again. All I had were the clothes on my body, the two-piece saffron cloth I was wearing, a water pot and a staff. With just these, I traveled the length and breadth of India for over six years and a distance of thousands of kilometers.

Not only did I not die, I became enlightened!

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

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

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

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

In fact outside India, even religious institutions do not allow such freedom. I have not seen any wandering monks out on their own space like these sanyāsis - wandering monks of India.

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

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

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

Patanjali's concept of Ashtanga Yoga that includes the part of pratyāhāra or sense control is what Krishna refers to here.

Pratyāhāra literally means stopping the feeding of the senses. It does not mean removing the objects that the senses are attracted to, or getting frightened of the field of the senses or even shutting off the senses so that these objects cannot be sensed. No, that will never work.

If one's senses can be controlled by getting sense objects out of the way, all you need to do is go to the Himalayas and you will be enlightened! Moving out of the range of sense objects is a helpful condition but not the only and essential condition. There are thousands of sanyāsis out there in the mountains, forests and monasteries in seclusion, out of contact with women, who still have not dropped their fantasies of lust.

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

When the novice finished, the older monk said, ‘I am ninety and I still have lustful thoughts, plenty of them. Let us go to my master who is a hundred and twenty. He may perhaps have an answer!’

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

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

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

There is an energy behind your five sense organs, the jñānendriya that helps them perceive the world. What this energy reports to your body-mind system is interpreted by your unconscious mind based on your conditioning. You act based on that interpretation. Your actions further reinforce that conditioning, and the cycle continues.

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

Pratyāhāra or starving the senses refers to starving or stopping the energy behind the sense organs, or stopping it from operating.

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

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