FROM UNDERSTANDING TO EXPERIENCING🔗

Miracle and accident are both beyond your logic.

If the effect is favorable to you, you call it a miracle.

If it is not, you call it an accident!

If you know how to use your inner space, you will be constantly making miracles.

Purifying your inner space is the way to make miracles!

If you don't know how to use your inner space,

you will constantly be creating accidents,

because you will be attracting incidents of the same frequency

into your life.

When the psychological revolution happens, it triggers a powerful understanding inside you. The very understanding empowers you. You feel, just this one understanding is enough! Just by understanding about the states of consciousness, I will remain centered on the 'I' consciousness.

Then, when you begin your practice – the next hurdle comes up! Even though your understanding is clear, even though your practice is sincere, sometimes you may find that these Truths are not becoming the reality of your life.

Why does this happen?

The simple reason is, your inner space also needs to be prepared to receive and practice the Truths. Just as a seed needs a fertile soil to take root and grow, these great Truths need a clean, prepared inner space in which they can take root and flourish. This is the first thing that has to be taken care of.

The most powerful natural resource available to you is your inner space! But just because we don't know how to use it, we constantly misuse and abuse it.

Someone asked me, ‘Can you tell me, in a single sentence, how to get results in my meditation practice?’ Actually, this is a tough thing! If I can speak at length, if I can give you whatever guidance I want, it is easy. But if you want it in one sentence, it means it has to be the essence.

So if you want your answer in just a single sentence, I will tell you, ‘Take good care of your inner space.’ That’s all.

Sankara says beautifully, ‘Aahaara shuddhavo smrti shuddhihi.’ If your intake is purified, your memory and your inner space will be purified.

Understand, when Sankara says ‘intake’, he does not mean just the food which you take in through your mouth. No! He is talking about all that you absorb through all the five senses - your eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin. Whatever you take in through these five senses is called aahaara or food.

Understand: without realizing it, we are constantly abusing our inner space.

Our inner space is constantly abused by a wrong diet! Visually, we swallow so much violence everyday through movies and the media. I don’t mean that you should not read the newspaper. But if you look honestly, you will see that we have a subtle enjoyment in taking in violent information and visualization. We think, how can just reading about violence affect my life? After all, these are just incidents happening somewhere far away from me, in someone else’s life! We just don’t have the sensitivity to understand that all the negativity we are throwing in is corrupting our own inner space.

Please understand: this is a very important thing you should know when you enter into meditation.

Whenever you encourage or allow such corruption of your inner space, knowingly or unknowingly, you create what is called samskara or engraved memories (engrams). Samskaras are the memories that go and sit in your inner space and pull you to repeatedly go through the same experiences, to perform the same kind of actions, to run through the same kind of thought patterns, even if you don't want to.

With the right meditation techniques, you can completely cleanse your inner space of unnecessary samskaras. Of course, all the samskaras accumulated by you are unnecessary! You can be alive and well without any samskara. The Truth is, your very body has already been created of the particular samskaras that you need to run your life. So your mind does not need to carry any samskaras to run your life! You have already come well-equipped to fulfil the desires for which you took this birth.

Please understand: it is you who design your body! At the time of taking birth, you have the clarity to decide about your future life and the kind of life experiences you wish to have. You decide your life, your enjoyments, whatever you want to do, based upon what you think is the ‘juice’ of life. Based on your preferences, you design your body. The energy or the ideas with which you design your body is called prarabdha. It is the innate intelligence you carry as your bio-memory. Your prarabdha, your bio-memory alone, is intelligent, powerful and efficient enough to run your life and enrich you, materially and spiritually. So, any accumulated samskara or engram which is operating in your conscious or unconscious layers is nothing but a hindrance to the fulfillment of your life. There is no such thing as good or bad samskaras. No samskara is good!

An inner space filled with samskaras is hell. An inner space free of samskaras is heaven. So do not try to classify samskaras as good or bad. A samskara by itself, by its very nature, is negative.

Anything that happens in your life out of a deep understanding, out of your pure inner space, always adds value to you. Anything done because of the pressure of samskaras only creates more and more bondage for you.

Right from a young age, we start collecting all kinds of samskaras from the outer world, consciously and unconsciously. After a while, these samskaras start reproducing and empowering themselves

The enlightened Master Mahavira says beautifully that when each human being takes birth, whatever he needs for his entire life is sent along with him. Every grain of rice he will eat during that life is already sent along with him! What Mahavira means is, you have come with the samskaras necessary to fulfill all your desires for which you took this birth. But the problem is, after taking this life, we start picking up new samskaras from others!

For instance, suppose you want to buy a new refrigerator. But when you go to the store to buy it, you meet your friend, who has come there to buy a TV. When you see that your friend is buying a TV, you suddenly decide that you also need a new TV! After you purchase the TV, naturally you find that you don't have the money to buy the refrigerator that you came there for.

Why are you laughing? This is exactly what you do in your life! When you pick up and try to fulfil the samskaras of others, naturally you won't have the energy to fulfil your own desires. When you accumulate too many samskaras, you have to take more and more births to fulfil them. During those lives, naturally you pick up still more samskaras from around you. It is a vicious circle. You are caught in the samsara sagara – the ocean of repeated birth and death.

Samskaras get strengthened in different ways. Some samskaras are strengthened only when you repeat the action. Some samskaras are strengthened just by receiving information about them, when you receive input from the world about them. Then there are some samskaras that need neither action nor information, just remembrance is enough, and they are strengthened!

Samskaras can be strengthened even without your awareness. Usually, you don't even know that you are being driven by your samskaras. When you habitually respond to a particular situation in the same way, after a while you will start reacting in the same way to every new situation, without even trying to understand it. You form a judgment about the person or the situation, and then collect the evidence to support that judgment. Understand, you have made the judgment already. All you need is a few bits of data to support that conviction, that's all!

It is as if your mind is a projector. You have a number of slides which you have gathered throughout your life, some even from your past births. These slides are the projections with which you live your life. Each time the slide is repeated, it gets more powerful. The first few times you see it, it may take several minutes for the slide to impact you. As the samskara gets engraved deeper into your mind, all that is needed is a quick glimpse. Before you know it, your mood changes and you make your decision based on that samskara.

Molecular biology experiments have revealed a startling Truth: each time you experience a powerful emotion like anger, new cellular transmitters and receptors for anger get activated in our body-mind system. Understand, this happens not only in your brain, but everywhere in the body. The first few times the emotion happens in the system, it may be just a brief drizzle. Once more and more cellular structures get built for this emotion, the drizzle turns into a shower, then into a storm and finally into a tsunami!

With each act of anger or violence, the conditioning gets deeper and stronger at the cellular level. It is like cancer. Just like malignant cells can grow, multiply and kill, these cellular receptors also multiply, allowing the emotion to simply flood your system. Suddenly you find that you are no longer in control! If you are not aware, your samskaras can just take over your entire personality.

What happens to all the samskaras we accumulate throughout our lives? These engrams get deeply embedded in the various energy layers of our system.

Understand, you don’t have only one body, as you think! At the energy level, you are composed of seven energy layers or energy bodies or shareera. Just like the five koshas we discussed earlier, these energy layers are also arranged in a concentric way, from the grossest to the subtlest energy layer. The outermost layer is the physical body, and the innermost layer is the nirvanic layer or the space of enlightenment.

Each of your energy layers becomes the storehouse of a particular kind of samskara. Samskaras are like viruses in your system! They can simply multiply and corrupt your inner space. If you are carrying too many samskaras, your inner space cannot hold the experience of Truth. That is why, all initial-level meditation techniques focus on throwing these samskaras out of your various energy layers.