Delusion Of Senses🔗

18.36,37 And now hear from Me, O Arjuna, about three kinds of pleasure. The pleasure that one enjoys from spiritual practice results in cessation of all sorrows. The pleasure that appears as poison in the beginning, but is like nectar in the end, comes by the grace of Self-knowledge and is in the mode of goodness.

18.38 Sensual pleasures that appear as nectar in the beginning, but become poison in the end, are in the mode of passion.

18.39 Pleasure that is delusion from beginning to end and born out of sleep, laziness and illusion is said to be of the nature of ignorance.

18.40 No one, either here or among the celestials in the higher planetary systems, is free from these three states of material nature.

Earlier Krishna spoke about the influence of guṇas (attributes) on the intellect, that in turn defines the way we act. Now He talks about how we respond as a result of our behavior.

Krishna says that spiritual practice, that is the state of satva, is difficult in the beginning, and it is like poison; however, it becomes life-giving nectar in the end. Sensual pleasures born out of rajas, on the other hand, seem like nectar in the beginning but become poisonous. In the tamasic state, Krishna says, one is deluded as if in sleep, laziness and illusion. Every human is in one state or another. Not merely humans, even the celestials who are supposedly more evolved are in the same mode. No one can escape the effect of the guṇas, the attributes of Nature.

How beautifully the master summarizes how we become deluded by our senses! It is not easy to begin spiritual practice. In the vedic tradition, in the gurukul schools, from a young age children were brought up in an environment of spirituality. They learned to control their mind and senses at an early age and to focus upon Self-realization. They understood by the example of their masters that there was something more pleasurable than sensory pleasures. This gave them courage.

In today's age, this education system is considered impractical. Invading Moghuls and the colonizing British destroyed the vedic culture, especially the gurukul tradition. This was not accidental or incidental. It was a deliberate strategy. Aurangazeb ordered his men to convert Hindus to Islam or kill them. He advised that it was better to convert. He knew conversion added another person to his religion, whereas killing only eliminated a Hindu. British rulers identified the educational system of gurukul as the key to India's tremendous intelligence, and targeted its destruction so that they could rule.

What we have today is a mass of literate Indians who are uneducated. They are totally unaware of the great tradition of our vedic culture. They think rituals are meaningless. Hindu philosophers and scholars, equally ignorant of our culture, encourage this trend. We have lost the knowledge of the connection between these rituals and spirituality. Rituals, when carried out meaningfully, are the basis of spirituality.

We are behind our sensory pleasures now. When we are in the rajasic mode, only sensory pleasures of the body matter. In the tamasic mode, we don't even know we are in deep ignorance. The sensory organs are powerful. They are our windows to the external world. They are trained to run away from pain and chase pleasure. Bodily pleasure gives mental pleasure and therefore emotional satisfaction. Once we experience the mental pleasure, we constantly rewind and replay that pleasure. Our past drives our future. Attachments and expectations drive our actions.

If you lead your life with awareness, you won't get caught in the illusions of attachment and expectations.

A small story:

A three year old boy asked his aunt who was pregnant, 'Why is your stomach so big?'

She replied, 'I am having a baby.'

The boy was surprised and asked, 'Is it a good baby?'

She replied, 'Oh, yes, it is a real good baby.'

The boy was shocked and asked, 'Then why did you eat him?'

Often in life, we too jump to the wrong conclusions when we are led by our senses! We try to keep on experiencing pain and pleasure alternately. Either way it is only an illusion.

Krishna describes the tamasic person with great insight. He does not use the word poison in describing the state of such a person. A tamasic person is like a drug addict, He says. At least a rajasic person enjoys the experience now, and suffers later. A tamasic person has no enjoyment. He suffers without knowing that he is suffering. His delusion is so deep. That is why he passes his suffering on to others with no compunction. That is how ignorant people who rise to become leaders act.

Q: Swamiji, education teaches us that we must think through problems to reach a solution. Yet, you say to stop thinking. What then is the point of education?

Truth can’t be reached by thinking. Thinking can help us arrive at a theory, a hypothesis; it cannot know the truth itself. Truth can be known when thinking ceases, when we become absolutely silent and move into a state of utter awareness which is a state of utter thoughtlessness, too. That’s why few people arrive at the ultimate Truth.

Many have strived, many have struggled and many have desired. All the same, they were working through the mind. The mind can spin and weave beautiful fictions. It cannot give you that which is.

Mind is the stuff dreams are made of. Dreams are different from thoughts. Dreams are pictorial thoughts. Dreaming is a primitive way of thinking. That’s the way children think. Children’s books must include many pictures and colorful illustrations because children are less interested in text and more interested in pictures.

Slowly, as they grow up, pictures become less and less. By the time they reach their post-graduation in the university, pictures disappear. They move from pictures to words.

Thinking is a more sophisticated and evolved way of dreaming. It is more eccentric, more mathematical and more philosophical. Even so, deep down, it is the same process. Whether you think in pictures or words makes no difference.

Ancient languages like Chinese are written using pictograms. They don't have an alphabet. They are the most ancient languages. They must have been the first languages. They still carry the imprint of the ancient primitive mind.

For example, they say if you want to write 'war' in Chinese, you must make a pictogram: a roof with two women sitting underneath — that means one man and two wives!

Thinking has its own limitations. The greatest limitation is that it can go round and round but it never reaches the center of things. Truth is that which is. We cannot fabricate it. We can't think about it. It is already there. We just need to look at it. If we are trying to think about the truth, we have missed it, because we need an unoccupied consciousness.

The whole process of meditation is becoming an unoccupied consciousness. There are no dreams and no thoughts, just a silent awareness. There is nothing to hinder and disturb, nothing to interpret and interfere. Then we see that which is. That is satya, the ultimate Truth.

Truth is for the courageous. The greatest act of courage is dropping our mind, because we consider it our most precious possession. We don't know anything higher than that. Education teaches us to have more and more refined minds. Education is the process of refining our mental processes. We devote almost one-third of our life to formal education. But that is the most precious time of our life because we will never be that young again. We will never be that innocent again. We will never be that intelligent again. We will never have that much energy and strength again.

The most precious time of life is devoted single-mindedly to a single purpose: refinement of the mind. Then one day, when somebody says 'drop it,' it seems impossible. We have acquired it through great effort, years of training, examinations and all the nightmares that we go through. And then the master says, 'Drop it.'

He says, 'It is all rubbish!'

The purpose of the master is to help us get rid of our own mind. Great courage is needed to drop those twenty-five years and the training and all our degrees, the PhDs and DSCs. Certainly great courage is needed to close that whole chapter. It is the process of becoming innocent again. Losing that grip on intellectual knowledge and losing all that we have learned means we will be in a state of non-knowing again. That is what is required for knowing the truth.

The state of non-knowing is the basic requirement for knowing the truth because only the innocent ones can know it. The knowledgeable ones miss it. The knowledgeable ones keep asking, 'Why?' Those who really seek ask, 'How?'

This is the way of the disciple: not to ask, 'Why?' But this certainly requires courage.

Bliss is possible only through great intelligence. Misery needs no intelligence. Any one is capable of being miserable. That's why there are so many miserable people in the world!

People ask me, 'Why don't we see many blissful people?' The simple reason is that only a few people allow their intelligence to function. The rest prefer to live in ignorance.

Intelligence has always been a problem. If we are intelligent, we are constantly in trouble because unintelligent people surround us. There will be no communication with them. And they are in the majority — we will be alone. They can overpower us. They can force their ideas upon us and make us obey them. They don't allow individuality. The crowd wants us to be part of the crowd. It wants us to surrender our intelligence to it.

Whatever the crowd believes in, it wants us to follow that, whether it is Communism, Christianity, Hinduism or Islam. It wants us to be a believer. Belief is one of the many poisons that kill intelligence. The crowd wants us to become a yes-man to all kinds of nonsense, superstitions and ideas that are meaningless.

For centuries Christianity fought for the belief that the sun revolved around the earth. It killed thousands of people for believing otherwise. Now we look back and wonder how millions of people could have believed such things for hundreds of years.

It was because of fear of the crowd and fear of what violence the crowd was capable of. The crowd wants us to conform. That is the root cause of peoples' intelligence being destroyed. When intelligence is destroyed, we cannot know bliss.

As the child grows up, it is robbed of its natural intelligence. It is educated and conditioned. All kinds of things are forced upon the child. By the time he is a grown man, he has lost his intelligence on the way somewhere. His life becomes miserable.

An ignorant person cannot understand what he is doing, why he is doing it or where he is going. So first he needs to release his imprisoned intelligence. After that, bliss is simple. It is a byproduct. Once we know our intelligence, we immediately feel a showering of bliss.

Yes, there is no point to education if it kills intelligence and bliss. Education that is designed for conformity is useless. It is dangerous. It spoils the spirit.