Believe And Practice🔗

17.7 Food that we consume is of three kinds, according to the three types of material nature. These are sacrifice, austerity and charity. Hear the difference between these three.

Krishna now speaks about food. Three different types of people enjoy three different types of food. Before we discuss these verses, let me explain the three different types of śraddha based on what we are.

Please understand that one group of people is completely negative. They only doubt and doubt and doubt. They have decided not to believe in anything. They have decided not to raise themselves in their lives. They remain dumb. We can't do anything with them. This is the first group.

The second group consists of people who believe, but do not practice.

The third group of people believes and practices sincerely.

There are three groups. One group doubts. Even the word doubting is too good to describe it. They are prejudiced. This group is in tamas. The next group is the believers. They are in rajas. The third group is sincere. This group is in satva. Krishna beautifully explains the differences between the prejudiced group, the believers and the sincere group. He then talks about their ways of life, character and how we can achieve the sincerity of satva and imbibe the truths explained in the Gita.

He gives beautiful step-by-step explanation and teachings on how to raise us from the prejudiced level to the believing level, and from the believing level to the sincerity level. All those here are already at the believing level.

If you are prejudiced, you will not sit here everyday. You would merely stand there, listen to two or three words and go away. Many people come just to check out what is going on. They stand here for two or three minutes and look at their watch. And even in those few minutes, their feet will shuffle ten times this way and that, and they will say, 'Alright, enough. I think he is just a young swami. What can he say that I do not already know?' They just walk out.

If you are not at least at the level of belief, you will not sit here. Coming regularly and sitting through these lectures shows that you are at least at the level of belief.

Now all you need to do is jump into the level of sincerity. The moment we jump into the level of sincerity, we experience the truth. We become Krishna. We experience Krishna consciousness.

Now we will enter into the technology of experiencing the sincerity, the technology of Krishna consciousness.

You see, there is an important choice that you must make. Either you should be completely sincere and trust what I say as the truth, or be very clear that whatever I am saying is just lies. If you can't practice what I am saying, whatever I am saying is a lie. If you are unable to practice, what is the use of this truth? Whether I am saying the truth or not, you will decide. Only you can decide that. No one else can decide for you. I cannot decide for you. If you can execute what I tell you, if you are able to imbibe it, I am speaking the truth. If you are unable to do it, what is the use of the whole thing? Nothing, there's no use. For eighteen days, it's a waste of three hours of your time and three hours of mine, that's all. If you don't imbibe, if it does not transform your life, then it is only a wastage of time. And whatever has happened here is not the truth.

Please be very clear that the result of my words on your consciousness decides whether what I spoke is the truth or a lie. One more thing you must understand is that you don't need to do it completely or perfectly. Having the courage to experiment is enough. After my talking all these days, if you say, 'Why not test for two or three days?', if you have that much courage, that is enough.

If that doesn't happen, then my sitting and shouting and talking is just like an Indian political meeting speaker! If you are in South India, whether you want it or not, you must listen to some political speaker every year, maybe every month. They air the politician's talk on the loudspeaker throughout the city. No one can escape hearing him.

Let me share a real incident that happened some time ago. One day I was traveling from Pudukottai in Tamilnadu to our Bangalore ashram. We suddenly started hearing a voice over a loudspeaker. The person speaking used slang words, not a single decent word, except two or three, 'hmmm, hmmm.' There were no other decent words. We couldn't escape from his slang words for ten kilometers, which means half an hour. The roads were also horrible. For half an hour, he was shouting. Unfortunately, we had to drive past the stage where he was speaking. I was surprised that only four ladies were sitting in front of the stage. There were more people on the stage than in the audience!

I asked one brahmac¢ri (unmarried boy training on the path of sany¢s) traveling with me, 'What is going on? Why is he using all these slang words?'

The brahmac¢ri said, 'What is this, Swamiji? He is speaking decently. Why are you blaming him?'

I asked, 'Is this decency?'

He said, 'Swamiji, you have not been present at these kinds of meetings. That is why you call this slang. It is actually decent.'

I asked, 'Then why are there only four ladies in the audience?'

He said, 'Because of the loudspeakers, people can listen to the speech from their homes for a radius of ten kilometers. They don't need to attend the meeting.'

In that political meeting, the speaker told the crowd, 'O dear people who are here, like an ocean you have gathered...' Only four ladies were listening to him and he called them an ocean. And these four ladies were chewing betel nut and betel leaves and spitting on the ground continuously.

These old ladies must have had some arguments with their daughters-in-law at home. Where else could they go after that? There was some entertainment here, so they must have come here.

They must have thought, 'Let us go and sit there. Maybe at the end of the talk, they will give some clothes or gifts. If we don't get anything, we can remove a few flags and take them home. We can use them to clean the house!' This was why these ladies probably decided to come.

A small story:

At a political meeting a politician caught hold of the mike and started speaking. He went on and on and on. Slowly some people left. Then a few more left. By and by, everyone left except one old man with a shawl. The politician finally felt tired. He stopped and thanked everybody for attending the meeting.

He saw the old man sitting in front of him and said, ‘I am so happy that at least you stayed and heard me through.’

The old man said, ‘No, I own the mike system. I am waiting to pack up the mike and take it home.’

The politician said, ‘Please forgive me, I did not bring a watch. That is why I didn’t know how long I was speaking. At least you could have set a clock in front of me, so I would know when to stop.’

The old man said, ‘You forgot your watch, but we put up a calendar for you. You could have at least looked at that!’

These politicians become courageous when they speak, especially when they don’t have an audience sitting in front of them. They say whatever they want to say. When the audience sits at home, there is no danger of anyone throwing stones at them. So the politicians say whatever they want to say. If there is a crowd in front of them, they don’t speak much. They are careful in case people throw stones or create problems. Otherwise, they go on and on and on. It never ends.

Please understand, our meeting will become one more such meeting if we don’t have the courage to experiment with the truth that we learned here. If we don’t practice, if don’t allow Krishna’s words to work on us, if we don’t work with these words, this meeting will be another political meeting, maybe a polite political meeting. Please don’t make this a political meeting. Let these words penetrate you. May you experiment with the truth. If you don’t experiment, at least it will be mentally clear to you that this is not the truth.

You might think, ‘This swami was simply saying what he has read somewhere.’ But if you believe this is the truth, you will be here. If you think this is not the truth, you will not be here. You will not come everyday and sit for three hours, even if you do not have any other work to do. You have a television at home. You could have sat in front of the television. There are many other places to go to, yet you chose to be here. You chose to listen. This shows that you think there is truth behind these words. So when you think there is some truth, never wait to experiment with it.

Have courage and experiment. Take one single idea. You don’t need to experiment with the whole Gita. Take one single concept and imbibe that to the core. Let your whole being vibrate with that single thought.

Swami Vivekananda says, ‘When you commit to a single idea, your blood should boil with that single idea. Even your hair should stand in that direction. Your bones, your thoughts, your body and your mind should all stand for it. Your whole being should be directed towards that concept. Only then success is certain.’

Please understand, take one concept and work with it. If you fail, there is nothing wrong. But have courage to work with it. If you succeed, you will know it is the truth, and you will be liberated. You will have bliss. If it fails, you will know that it is not the truth and you will be clear. You can continue your search elsewhere. So be very clear about it. The basic truth Krishna is telling you is about sincerity.

There are three groups of people. The tamasic group is prejudiced, meaning negative. The rajasic group believes intellectually. The satva group has sincerity. They not only believe, but they have courage to play with the words and ideas as well. Please do not miss the courage. Let these words penetrate you.

Q: You tell us to search for bliss. You and Krishna say that sincerity, courage and faith will take us on the path to bliss. But the path to bliss does not seem easy. There are many pitfalls. We do not even recognize bliss when we experience it. How can we cope?

Bliss is not easy. Nothing worthwhile is easy. You must struggle. That is where śraddha comes in. Buddha, Christ and Mahavira also struggled.

The word ‘Christ’ means to be crowned by God. But Christ had to go through a rare crowning ceremony: crucifixion was the first step. That has always been so and will always be: unless one dies, unless the ego dies, God cannot crown you.

You can be crowned only when ‘you are not.’

Meditate on that paradox. When you are, you are as far as possible from God; when you are not, you are God. You reach the crown cakra, the sahasrāra, the energy center at the top of your head. When you are absolutely empty, God fills you from everywhere, from every direction and dimension. You are flooded. That is the crowning.

Unless God crowns a man, man lives in vain. He does not live. He only exists. And to merely exist is to live in hell. On the other hand, 'to live' is to exist in a higher state of existence. It is a conscious state of existence. A rock exists. The ordinary man believes that he lives; however, he exists like the rock. Only a Buddha or a Christ actually lives.

How should we live? How can we come to this ultimate glory? We can come to it only through disappearance.

Be ready to dissolve. Surrendering to the master is dissolution. Once you are not, everything fits perfectly. A deep harmony arises. When you are not, there are no discordant notes. It is all music and poetry, all celebration.

We always listen to the outside; hence we keep missing the inner voice. And God speaks from our innermost core. In the master we hear the echo of our innermost being. The master functions as a mirror: he reflects our original face. He says what God wants to say to us because we are not ready to listen to our inner Self. By listening to the master we slowly become aware of the synchronicity between the master and our inner voice. We become aware that the master speaks on behalf of our inner Self. That is why surrendering to the master is not surrendering to anybody; it is surrendering to our own center.

We live on the periphery. We live in the mind, and the mind is so noisy that it does not allow us to hear the still, small voice within. A master is needed as a device because we only hear the outside. The master says from the outside what God has been trying to tell us from the inside.

As we listen to the master outside, we start listening to the inner master as well. You slowly become conscious and wonder what is happening. The master says things that you somehow feel to be your own, more your own than your mind and your body. That's why the East calls the master, a God. The East knows why the master is called God. The master represents God. He reflects God because he reflects your reality, your true being.

Being with the master is getting ready to turn in, so that you can close your eyes and look in, so that you can hear what your intuition keeps telling you. And the intuition is always right. The intellect may be right or wrong. It is always either-or and doubt persists. It is never without doubt. But intuition is without doubt. It simply knows. The intuitive person never repents because he never does anything wrong. He simply follows God's voice within him.

It is possible to be blissful without being wise; however, that is not true blissfulness. That is what people call happiness. It comes and goes. It is momentary. And it leaves us in deep frustration and despair. The cost is too much and not worth it.

It is also possible to be wise without being blissful. That type of wisdom is pseudo and false. It is known as knowledge. It is borrowed and so it is a burden. Anything that has not arisen out of our experience is bondage. It can nourish our ego but it cannot reveal our Self. The true seeker must find bliss and wisdom together.

Meditate. On the one hand, you become blissful and on the other hand, you become wise. Both grow simultaneously in a kind of deep synchronicity. In the ultimate state, bliss becomes wisdom, and wisdom becomes bliss.

To be blissful is to be prayerful. All other prayers are formal. You can say beautiful words, but they are only on the lips. Words belong to the mind. The heart knows no words. It is wordless. It is silent. It is full of love, yet wordless. It is cheerful. It can sing, but in silence. It can dance, but in an invisible way.

The head is gross. Hence everything of the head is visible. It is matter. It is machine. The heart is the center of the invisible. It is not matter. It is consciousness. The heart knows how to be blissful, how to be longing. Being blissful opens the doors to divinity.

People typically go to God in despair. That is the wrong moment because when we are in despair we are closed. God is available, but His availability is of no use unless we are available to Him.

People remember God when they are in misery. That is not the right time to remember Him. The prayers at that time are more or less complaints against the misery as well as demands and desires for things to be better. Those are not real prayers.

A real prayer has one flavor, that of gratitude. A real prayer has one fragrance, that of contentment. It knows no demand or desire. And because God has given so much and been so gracious, the heart silently bows down to the Ultimate. That is real prayer, the very essence of prayer!

Be blissful and let that be your prayer. God is not far away. He never has been. He is just around the corner. The moment the heart is ready, He immediately appears. He will not knock on the doors because that is interfering with your freedom. He will not trespass, for He respects human dignity. Unless you invite Him, He will wait.

Prayer is a way of inviting Him. And the best way to invite Him is when you are in a dance, when your whole being is singing, when you are in joy, when every fiber pulsates with celebration. Then He is ready to come in immediately. There is not a single moment's gap: it happens instantly.

Fulfill the only condition: be blissful.

Bliss arises from love. Love is the only real poetry. When the heart is full of love, your whole life is transformed from prose to poetry, from noise to music and from discord to harmony.

A heart without love is a desert. The man with a heart that is without love remains ugly. His approach towards life is prosaic. He has no aesthetic sensibility, no sense to appreciate the beauty of Existence and no awareness to be grateful for all that God has done, for all that the universe is. Only the poet knows how to praise, how to be grateful, how to dance and sing and how to celebrate life and its tremendous blissfulness.

It is such a sheer joy to be. Just to be is enough. It is more than is needed, yet we need to be sensitive to feel it. We need to grow feelers. Learn to grow feelers so that life is no longer a thought but a feeling. Once we have moved from thinking to feeling, there is only one more step, and that is from feeling to being; and that is very simple.

The first step is arduous: we must do a lot to move from thinking to feeling. The second step comes almost automatically; there's nothing we need to do for it. From feeling to being, the distance is none at all. It can happen any moment. The poet can become the mystic at any moment. The real problem is how to get out of our thinking and get more and more into feeling.

Love more. Feel more. Enjoy more so that you can feed your heart. Watch the sunrise, sunset, clouds, rainbows, birds, flowers, animals, rocks, and people - look into their eyes. It is such a multidimensional Existence. Look into every dimension as a poet: to praise and to feel. Be ecstatic!

Much is going to happen. So get ready! And don't be afraid when it happens. The only barrier is fear. When things start happening, we become fearful because we are moving into the unknown, and the mind wants to cling to the known because the mind is clever with the known. With the unknown, the mind has nothing to say. With the unknown, the mind is at a loss as to what to do. It loses its expertise. It is shocked into silence when it encounters the unknown.

The mind is a great expert as far as the familiar and the known are concerned because mind is memory. It can give all kinds of information about the known. It is like a computer. First we feed the information to the computer. Then the computer is ready to give the information back. It can only feed back what we have fed to it, nothing more. There may be new combinations of the old inputs but nothing is original.

Mind knows no originality. On the other hand, the mind can pretend with the known. It can feel great. It is an expert at that.

A child asked his mother, ‘Who is an expert?’ The mother said, ‘The expert does the same thing that women do, but when women do it, men call it nagging.’

Mind is a great expert, a great nagger. It keeps goading and nagging, ‘Do this. Do that.’ It opens many alternatives and constantly persuades you, seduces you and corrupts you, ‘Go this way. Purchase this. Enjoy that.’ It keeps you occupied with the known.

The work that a disciple enters into is with the unknown, the uncharted, and the unmapped territory; so fear will be there. That is the only barrier. In spite of it, we should go on. Let fear be there. It will hang around for a while. When we do not listen to it, it will leave us. It is a great day when fear of the unknown leaves us. From then on growth becomes simple, easy and spontaneous.

This committed journey leads to bliss, eternal bliss, nityānanda.