Cleansing Techniques🔗

15.5 Those who are free from pride, delusion, and attachment, those who dwell in the Self, who are done with lust, who are free from the dualities of joy and sorrow, who are not confused, and who know how to surrender to the supreme person, attain the eternal consciousness.

15. 6 That supreme space of eternal consciousness, My consciousness, is not illuminated by the Sun or the Moon, or by fire.

Those who enter that space never return to this material world.

Krishna explains the same truth again at a deeper level. He had expressed the same idea in earlier chapters. But Arjuna was unable to understand. At that time, Arjuna was in the questioning mood. In the questioning mood, we miss the whole subject and are busy preparing questions. Now that mood has gone and there are only doubts, no questions.

With doubt, the disciple is open. He is open with his being waiting for the master to flow into him. Arjuna is ready to imbibe Krishna. He is waiting for the master’s words. His inner chatter has ceased so there are no more questions. He now has the inner space and awareness to receive Krishna. That is why he is now able to understand.

Zen Buddhism calls it a koan, a riddle of sorts. Just one word is given. One famous Zen koan goes like this: ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ Another says: ‘What was your face before your mother and father were born?’

Disciples meditate upon these koans and return to the master with answers. The master gives them a whack on their back and sends them on their way. Ultimately they experience the sound of one hand clapping. There is no expressed answer to a koan, only an experience.

Here Krishna says, 'Those who are free from pride, delusion, and attachment, those who dwell in the Self, who are done with lust, who are free from the dualities of joy and sorrow, who are not confused, and who know how to surrender to the supreme person, attain the eternal consciousness.'

What wonderful usage of words!

He does not say who have 'renounced' lust. No, because renunciation won't do. Vairāgya means beyond attachment and detachment. Rāga means attachment. Arāga means detachment. Virāga or vairāgya means beyond attachment and detachment. It is nonattachment.

Till the age of seven, we are attached to toys. By age eight or nine we are forced to be detached from these. By twenty, most people are beyond attachment or detachment to children's toys. With detachment, we might have renounced it externally. But the inner urge for it prevails.

That is why Krishna uses fitting words: Those who are 'done' with lust. In this state, we know what we can afford. We know it is there. We can use it or throw it away based on the need. Life is also like a toy. If this is fully understood, you will live like a king, not an ordinary materialistic king, but an enlightened king, a rājarṣi.

This is a Zen koan. This is not for understanding. This is to be meditated upon. On meditating upon this technique, these characteristics will start flowering in you and give you a clear-cut idea about the causal body.

Earlier, Krishna explained ways to erase saṁskāras. Now He speaks on the construction of a proper layer. It is about re-programming your causal layer.

Krishna gives techniques for construction of the causal body.

Krishna's words are like Zen koans. Actually Krishna uses the same words again. Not only words and expressions, He uses the same letters again. Earlier He used these words as advice. Now He uses same words as programming techniques. This chapter is about programming our causal layer; programming our saṁskāras. This program creates positive saṁskāras in our causal layer. As long as Arjuna was in the questioning mood, these same words were spelt out as advice. When he enters into the mood of doubts, he receives the same words as techniques. When the disciple is in a questioning mood, the master's words will be taken as advice. Only when the disciple stops questioning and starts listening, these same words will be techniques.

With advice, you need keys to open the door. Techniques are the keys themselves. They are ready to open the door.

Arjuna receives the gist of earlier chapters. He receives the juice in this chapter. In North Indian monasteries, this chapter is chanted before every meal. This 15ᵗʰ chapter must be chanted before meals, since this chapter is a programming tool of the inner space. The mere words of this chapter can do wonders in re-programming your causal layer.

It takes less than five minutes to chant it. Anybody can do it. Don’t worry about the meaning. If you understand the meaning, it is good. Yet, it is highly useful even if chanted without understanding. Repeating these words can program your causal layer. Especially, when you chant them in a mood of surrender, with due respect to the master, it directly touches the causal layer.

Arjuna is completely in a receiving mood. He is fully tuned to the master. If the disciple is completely tuned to the master, Existence helps him through the master. Arjuna needs no explanations, no logic. He is ready to imbibe the master.

Hence, Krishna utters the following words to program the causal layer. He gives techniques to create positive saṁskāras.

He says:

‘Those who are free from pride, delusion, and attachment, those who dwell in the Self, who are done with lust, who are free from the dualities of joy and sorrow, who are not confused, and who know how to surrender to the supreme person, attain eternal consciousness.’

Lust is difficult for a man to shed. Even the greatest of sages have succumbed to lust. Lust is of the body and as long as body consciousness remains, lust will stay. Only a person who has gone beyond body consciousness can drop lust.

A small story:

A small boy went to a kids’ movie with his parents. It was about a lion cub and other animals in a jungle. The boy was thoroughly enjoying it. Suddenly there was a scene where the lion cub was trapped by a hunter and became terrified.

The boy was not able to bear this scene. He just jumped from his seat and ran down the hall towards the movie screen. He started throwing up his hands and legs as if in a fight with the hunter in the movie who was about to cage the lion cub. Soon the other animals in the jungle joined together and drove away the hunter and rescued the cub.

The boy came back to his seat and proudly told his mother, ‘See how I went first and all the animals followed me and we saved the cub!’

Just as the boy thought that the movie was real, we believe that the input perceived by our senses is also real. We are caught in the māyā or illusion created by our senses. The most powerful illusion is the lust within us.

Adi Shankaracharya says in the verses of Bhaja Govindam:

Bhaja Govindam is considered the essence of Vedānta, the end of knowledge. Here Shankara says: ‘Do not be overcome by furious desires of delusion by looking at the breasts and the navel of women. Realize again and again that these are only flesh and will deteriorate.’

Suppressing lust externally and not indulging in sex does not and will not make one enlightened. It only turns one insane. Celibacy of the body, without eliminating the fantasies of the mind, creates greater suffering than indulging in lust and sex. Enlightenment helps one transcend lust and sex by transcending the senses and attaining a no-mind state.

The Sanskrit word brahmacari is often misunderstood and wrongly translated. This word comes from two words, Brahma and carya. Brahma is the Ultimate and true reality; carya means to walk or follow the path. One who follows the path of reality is a brahmacari.

Time and again, this word has been taken to mean being a celibate because the first stage of one’s life in the vedic period was brahmacarya. This was the period when a young boy or girl around the age of seven was placed in the care of a spiritual master, a guru. The master decided how the child should be educated based upon the child’s aptitude.

At seven, they were taught Gayatri mantra to stabilize their mind and focus it on the inner Self. Children stayed with the master through adolescence. Given the nature of their training and upbringing, they remained celibate. Thus the term brahmacarya acquired the meaning of celibacy.

Based on their aptitude, these children followed different studies. Those who exhibited strong spiritual inclinations were taught śruti, the Veda, the Upaniṣad, the Brahma Sutra, etc. Those who were not so spiritually inclined, were trained to be householders and were taught the Kama Sutra.

Kama Sutra is not and was not a sex manual. Vatsyayana, the author, was an enlightened master who wrote it when he was sixteen. Vatsyayana was enlightened at a young age and went to his mother and told her that he was enlightened. To his mother, he was still a child.

She asked, ‘What do you mean you are enlightened?’

Vatsyayana said, ‘Now I know everything.’

His mother countered, ‘You are just a child. If you know so much, tell me about love and sex.’

Vatsayana’s teaching to his mother about love and sex when he had no direct material experience of either is the Kama Sutra, the Bible for householders.

An enlightened master transcends sex. He is genderless. He becomes an ardhanārīśvara, a man-woman, a person who expresses both traditionally male and female qualities or attributes. One key attribute of enlightenment is genderlessness.

Krishna is direct. He does not believe in giving brain candy to keep you happy. He is brutally direct. He says, ‘He who has conquered lust.’ Lust is a primal emotion provided by nature for continuation of the species. Going beyond lust, conquering lust, is the first major step in realizing super-consciousness.

Humans are forever confused between love and lust. They think only animals are lustful. Actually, only animals are capable of pure lust when they mate. Humans, with their rationalization, can neither be lustful nor loving. So, they are forever in the twilight zone, dissatisfied and unfulfilled.

When a man and woman are capable of indulging in sex one hundred percent driven by pure lust, they will find that this lust will turn into love. For that, each needs to be immersed in the other. The act will then be an experience that expresses love.

In ancient times, lust and sex left the householder around the age of forty because they had enjoyed these fully. When a desire is fully experienced it leaves your system. Do you know the mantras chanted at marriage? These days only the priests who conduct marriages get married, because only they understand the meaning! No one else does.

In Saptapadi, the seven steps that the couple takes together after tying the wedding knot in Hindu marriage ceremonies, sacred mantras are chanted in front of the fire-witness wherein the wife says to the husband, ‘Become my eleventh son’ and the husband says to the wife, ‘Become my eleventh daughter.’ It means that in the eleventh year of marriage, their intimacy would be so great that they become each other’s child! There is a deep intimacy; there is a wonderful relationship. These words were not poems. They were the guidelines for living.

Now marital relationship has become a business for security or material benefits. You may live in the same home, but not in a homely way. You have to remove the imagination and dreams from your lust, both about your partner’s body and your own body.

Many of us are ashamed of our body. We hate it. All body pains and chronic skin diseases arise out of low self-esteem and disrespect to our body. We would like to be someone else. We would like to shape our body and dress like someone else. We stop staying within the boundary of our own skin, and fantasize about being someone else.

Whenever we hear our name we think of our face, not our whole body, because we are not comfortable with our body. When we do not accept ourselves fully and copy someone else artificially, we can be beautiful at best, but never graceful. Grace comes from within.

For the next few days, after bathing, watch your body with love. Feel comfortable. Our body oozes bliss all the time. Yet we feel only the pain. If we are relaxed with our body, our mind will not wander. Usually, when we are at home, our mind is in the office and when we are working, we wish we were at a party. Where our body is, our mind will not be.

Also, we love someone as long as that person does what we say, as long he obeys us. A mother says, ‘I loved my daughter deeply till she married someone not of my choice.’ Is this love? It is slavery to our ego. As long as the daughter was an extension of the mother’s ideology and personality, she felt love.

Add friendliness to love. As of now, our love and lust are deep-rooted violence, to own the other person, to conquer the other person while he or she resists. It’s a war. Instead, add friendliness to relationships. Welcome the partner as he or she is; do not just accept him or her. Welcome and accept the mind, body and being as it is.

Are we friendly even to our own body? No, we are not. If we watch carefully, we disrespect and abuse our body. We stay up late and watch television even if our body cries out for sleep. We gorge ourselves on food even if our stomach is full. We smoke even if our lungs cry out. We drink ourselves to unconsciousness. We treat our body like a garbage dump. We are like the pig that shoves its nose into filth thinking it can escape the smell of the filth. We torture our body for what we feel is enjoyment.

We are bothered about terrorism around the globe. Yet we ignore violence at home and violence against our own body. Sadism and masochism do not bother us, terrorism does. But we torture ourselves with guilt and others with our perfectionism. This is also violence, a subtle form of terrorism.

A man once told me, ‘My wife is a lawyer.’ I asked, ‘Does she go to court?’ He replied, ‘No, she argues at home.’

Drop your imagination and dreams. Add friendliness towards yourself and others, towards their body, mind and being. Carry words that heal others. Carry your body in a way that heals others. Carry friendliness with you always. This is a spiritual process. Carry the grace and goodwill of Lakshmi instead of observing fasts and pūjā.

The first time you approach others with friendliness, they may not receive you openly because of your past behavior. Persist and persevere. Don’t stop even if others do not reciprocate. Carry on till others believe and reciprocate.

Drop all imagination about your body, mind and being and those of others. Add friendliness towards yourself and others and persevere. Lust will turn to love. Your being will be in eternal bliss.

Krishna says, ‘That supreme space of eternal consciousness, My consciousness, is not illuminated by the sun or the moon, or by fire. Those who enter that space never return to this material world.’

These words are not advice. They are for contemplation. Advice is the only thing everybody gives and nobody takes! Krishna gives these words to program our causal layer. These are words to contemplate, to meditate upon. They are the hymns to be meditated upon.

In the Nithyananda Spurana Program, LBP Level 2, participants are guided through a meditation upon darkness while working on the causal layer. This darkness is not mere absence of light. It is energy.

The causal layer of energy is the passage through which the spirit passes on its last leg before it leaves the material world. When the spirit is stuck in this causal layer, one is in coma. One can be stuck in this layer for a long time.

When the physical body cannot bear the pain of the process of death, it escapes into coma. As long as the person is in coma, the spirit is in the causal layer of energy. This means that the spirit can return to its physical body from this causal layer at any time. That's why we come across people who have returned to life after years of being in coma.

All near-death experiences, NDEs, are of people who return from the causal layer of energy. For various reasons, the spirit returns to the body it had left, before it reaches the no-return zone. Unlike a coma, this is a quicker journey and return.

Those who go past the causal layer, this layer of energetic darkness, where neither the sun nor the moon shines, nor fire warms, progress onwards to the cosmic layer and then to the nirvanic layer, which signifies true liberation.

One can meditate upon this technique, upon this truth expounded by Krishna, through the darkness meditation that teachers teach in some of our meditation programs. This meditation, which focuses on darkness, liberates one from the fear of death and the fear of loss of identity that causes the fear of death.

Death is not an option. Death of the body is certain. Separation of the spirit from the body-mind is painful. Vivekananda says it is like a thousand scorpions stinging at once.

At death the spirit leaves the body shell and merges into infinite energy. It then reappears in another shell, another body. As discussed earlier, it is like drawing circles on a whiteboard. The background is universal energy and the perimeters of the circles drawn are the bodies that envelop the individual spirit. These circles separate individual spirit or self from universal energy or Self.

When we erase these circles, the whiteness within the circles merges into the whiteness of the background. Individual self merges with universal Self. When the spirit is such that it has gone beyond attachment and lust and is constantly focused on the Self, then there is no return for that spirit into another body-mind complex. Else it returns.

Krishna points out that the death of the body is a certainty, however, the death of the spirit is impossible. The spirit lives on. When the spirit is evolved it doesn't revert to a mental setup that it transcended in the previous birth, that's all.

Q: Can Near-Death-Experiences lead to enlightenment?

Near-Death-Experiences, NDEs, can be highly spiritual experiences, but they are not enlightenment experiences. You do not have to die or nearly die to become enlightened! On the other hand, when you become enlightened, you die in a different sense since you lose your past identity.

Many people have such powerful NDEs, which are so different and shocking to their logical minds, that they go through a cognitive shift. This leads to a transformation in the way they think and act.

Most NDEs follow a pattern. These people who have experienced them say that they float away from the body. They see themselves dying. If in an operating theatre, they see and hear what the doctors and nurses do and say. They see what they normally cannot from their position on the bed. Typically, they go through a dark space at the end of which they see light. The light is comforting. They experience no fear, just peace.

Especially if they are medically trained, some see the gradual cessation of their body-mind functions. They may seek help if they are able to, but not out of any fear. They are happy to move towards whatever there is at the end of the dark tunnel.

Depending on cultural and religious beliefs, they may see figures that seem to beckon them. Finally, they are told to go back. Or they are sent back. They feel themselves back in the body and they wake up.

People lose their fear of death when they have NDE. Whatever they experienced gives them the faith that there is something more to life than mere material benefits. Many start believing in rebirth and reincarnation. The awareness develops that one is not bound by this body and mind and that we are all interconnected beyond body and mind. People develop more tolerance and pay more attention to relationships. They develop a greater belief in a superior being, a God.

In our Life Bliss Programs, we take participants through meditations that replicate the death experience. Without having to go through an uncontrolled NDE, one can shed the fear of death through these meditations under safe and controlled conditions. Participants also go through identity dissolution experiences. They learn that there is more to life than possessions and acquisitions. They discover who they are and what they need to do in this life.

Enlightenment is your natural state. You become enlightened when you understand who you truly are. In that sense, a NDE can direct a person towards the realization of one's Self and therefore, enlightenment.