Choose Bliss, Wealth follows!🔗

Beloved Master,

You have said often that it is possible to follow both the material path and the spiritual path and that there is no conflict between the two. I am confused. How can I focus on mammon and god at the same time? Jesus clearly said that this not possible.

A British lady and a gentleman were on a train traveling from London to Manchester. In the same compartment, there was a fellow passenger, an American.

The lady had brought her small dog with her. This dog kept making a nuisance of itself. It barked at the American and tried to bite him. Instead of correcting the dog, the lady was comforting the dog, ‘Don’t let that man worry you dear. He is not one of us!’

After a while of this trauma, the dog lifted its legs and soiled the American’s trousers. Even for that, the lady comforted only the dog and did not utter a word of apology to the American. Next, the dog further soiled the American’s trousers. This was more than what the American could bear. He lifted up the dog, opened the window and threw the dog out of the running train. The lady was too startled even to scream.

The Englishman who was in the compartment spoke for the first time, addressing the American. ‘Sir, you Americans always do everything the wrong way; you drive on the wrong side of the road, you eat with the fork and knife using the wrong hands. Look at what you have done now. You have thrown the wrong bitch out of the window!’

All our choices in life create problems for us.

We suffer each time we make a choice. Each time we choose, we regret the choice. We feel we could have done better. Even if we benefit from the choice, we feel we would have benefited more had we made a different choice.

The grass is always greener on the other side. We are forever in confusion based on comparison.

If I ask you to choose between misery and happiness, you will say that I am crazy. Who will choose misery, you will wonder.

But your choice will always lead to misery, simply because you will never be fully satisfied. This is human nature.

There is no comparison in Existence. There are no conflicts and contradictions. Only humans perceive contradictions in Nature. The contradiction exists in us. We are unable to relate with Existence.

We are unhappy when we do not have a choice to make, we are even less happy when we do make a choice!

People ask me, ‘Master, can we come and stay in the ashram?’ Whatever I say, they will come up with an argument against it. If I say, ‘Stay by all means’, they will tell me why and how they cannot come to the ashram. The reasons will be they have their business, their family will suffer, their friends will miss them, ashram is too far and so on. There are a hundred reasons ready to be told. If I say, ‘Please don’t, you are not yet ready. When you are ready, I shall tell you, they feel hurt.’

I don't win either way. They make me a part of their dilemma. We always live in a dilemma. We live in a dilemma of choices that we do not wish to make.

It is true that life offers choices. There are many forks in the path of life, and we have the option to choose. That's the entire concept of free will and exercising our choice.

Though we are free, we rarely have the strong will.

We always think that no choice in life is without a cost. We feel, each decision to choose something necessarily costs us to lose something else. It is never so. It is just our understanding of 'choice' which causes us to think this way.

What happens is, in many cases, we choose wrongly and with the wrong perception of choice. Without the power of foresight, choice is a gamble. Also, combined with this, human nature is such that it remembers losses more clearly than the gains. As a result of the combined effect of these two points, we are mostly left with a feeling of discontent.

Why do we choose? Why don't we accept events as they happen? Why can't we accept the so-called contradictions as they exist in life?

Choices appear to give us freedom. In reality, however, they constrain us. They are not benefits. They are bondages.

We are like children in a candy store when it comes to exercising our choices in life. We get excited. We also get confused. The more options we have, the more complex our decision-making process becomes. If you have only two shirts or two dresses to choose from, the choice of selection is so easy. However, choosing a shirt or a dress in a specialty store becomes a nightmare.

The wisdom of the Tao is based on Yin and Yang – female and male, good and evil, light and dark, black and white. Interplay of these opposites is constant and certain. There can never be good without bad, no light is without shadow. We have no choice but to pick one without the other. That is the way life's cards are dealt to us.

It is our ability to work with the seemingly opposite qualities in life that leads to fulfillment and happiness, not the power to choose between one and another. There really is no choice.

Some people seek to give up material life in search of the spiritual Truth. They think that being with partners, children and possessions is what stops them from being spiritual and blissful. This is like some people giving up their jobs because they do not like their bosses. They move to another job and discover that they don't like their new boss as well! The problem is not with the boss but with that person.

If you have an inherent problem of getting along with people, wherever you go, the problem will follow you. The solution is not to change your jobs, but to change your attitude.

So it is with the spiritual aspirant who feels that he must give up worldly possessions to reach his spiritual goal. It is his attachment to material objects that causes him dissatisfaction. Even if he supposedly renounces the material world and becomes an ascetic, the attachment will follow him. It is the attachment that has to be dealt with, not the objects of attachment.

He will continue to have the same fantasies, except that now he may be wearing white, yellow or saffron robes instead of other colors. His real liberation lies in overcoming his attachment and desires. This can be done even while functioning as a husband and a father.

There is no need to choose between a material life of pleasure and spiritual satisfaction through renunciation. They are both perfectly possible to achieve together, as they can and do coexist. But of course, if married life does not pull you in any way, if it does not hold any fantasy for you, then you need not pursue it.

A story from the Indian epic Mahabharata:

A young monk got up from under a tree after his morning prayers. A passing crane's droppings fouled him.

In anger, the monk looked up and the crane was burnt to ashes. Satisfied with his power, the monk walked to the nearest house and sought food. The lady of the house was serving her husband and made him wait. When she finally came out to give him food, he stared at her in irritation.

The lady saw him staring and asked, 'Do you think I am a crane that you can burn? My duty is to serve my husband first. I can feed you now.'

Startled, the monk asked her how she knew about the crane. She said she had no time to explain but that if he was really interested, he could go to a person in the nearby town, who would explain this to the monk.

After a long search for the person's house, the curious monk reached the town's butcher shop. Upon inquiry, he found out that the butcher was the person the lady was referring to. The butcher asked him if Kuppammal had sent him there.

The monk was startled again and asked the butcher how both he and the lady knew these things. In response, the butcher took the monk to his home, where he lived with his old parents, who he attended to with great love and respect. As the monk watched the butcher, he realized the sincerity with which he went about his daily chores.

The butcher explained to the chastened monk that he and the housewife both focused on their day to day duties, which they performed to the best of their abilities. They never sat for meditation, they did no rituals. Their work was their meditation. This they performed with no expectations. The mere performance of their own rightful work, their dharma, had made both of them enlightened.

To be enlightened, one does not have to choose between material and spiritual life. Leading a material life righteously and naturally leads to enlightenment.

All one has to do is to live in the present with no regrets about the past or speculations about the future.

Understand that there is no contradiction in Existence. Whatever is happening is always auspicious and according to the law of Nature. The contradiction is in our mind. If this is understood, you will realize that there is nothing called making a choice; automatically, the step you need to take is taken and you move on without getting caught with choices.

As I mentioned earlier, in science, before the concept of quantum was accepted, there was a conflict between matter and energy. Though Einstein had postulated the relationship between matter and energy clearly, that all matter possesses energy, one group said ‘both energy and matter exist, but in different space and time’. Another group of scientists disagreed and said ‘there is only time gap, no space gap; yet another had a different view: there is only space gap, no time gap’.

Once the quantum theory was accepted, which postulated the simultaneous existence of elemental particles as waves and packets of quanta, this conflict was resolved. It was agreed that matter and energy do exist together in time and space. There is now a concept of singularity of the simultaneous existence of matter and energy; that at the same time, it can be matter and energy, sometimes one and other times another, depending on perception. There are other theories such as string theory, which further confirm this non-duality of Existence.

The concept of singularity or non-duality is where the mind cannot penetrate.

In the spiritual zone, these controversies disappear; they dissolve in experience. Only when you play with words intellectually, you create conflicts and enter into a zone of confusion. When you enter into experience, you just know, that’s all. Then, all conflict simply disappears.

As long as you feel you need to live two different lives, material and spiritual, you are only playing with words.

In material life, you are in search of satisfaction of desires. It is not just your basic needs, but also your wants that do not seem to end. While there is a way that your needs can be fulfilled, your wants keep rising even as they keep getting fulfilled and therefore never reach to a point of satisfaction.

Wants create regrets related to the past and greed creates dissatisfaction related to the future.

Spiritual life on the other hand is all about the present.

How can we link these two disparate lives and worlds, we wonder.

Let us think of normal material life as a horizontal line; let us think of leading a spiritual life, being in this present moment, as a vertical line. When we think of choosing between material and spiritual life, we are trying to choose between the horizontal and the vertical. Only when you understand that you can travel both horizontally and vertically, and even explode in all directions, will you understand that there are no contradictions. Till then, you will have the conflict.

This explosion in all directions is what I call Quantum Spirituality. By giving up the choice between one and another, between the material and the spiritual lives, with the understanding that you can travel both these paths and many other paths simultaneously, you enter into Quantum Spirituality.

Many people think that though material life represents all that they have in life, in terms of physical, emotional, economic and intellectual acquisitions, these also bring them unhappiness. As I said earlier, one reaches a stage in life when one has acquired everything one wanted. The question then is, ‘Why did I acquire all this?’ This is the ‘depression of success’ I referred to.

On the other hand, spiritual life is the greener grass that beckons, one that seems to have all that is missing from the current material life. Because you wish to possess what others possess, you seek blindly and land up not knowing why you sought all those things. They are not your own desires, so once they are achieved, you are left wondering why you achieved them!

Your entire life is wasted this way. You run all the time while staying in the same place. The more you acquire, the more you feel the need to acquire, and lesser you are happy with what is.

Whatever you choose, if there is no basic understanding, if there is no awareness, there is no use. Awareness is the door that opens to bliss.

When you are aware, you are in the present. To be in the present, you need to move beyond the mind. Your mind disengages from you, when you rest in the present. Thoughts are nothing but the mind’s constant movement between past and future.

It is not the appearing of thoughts that prevents us from being in the present. It is our conditioning that connects one thought to another to form a sequence, a shaft of thoughts. For example, the pain we had 10 years ago, the pain we had 5 years ago and the pain we have today are all totally different unconnected experiences. They have no connection whatsoever. Yet, we connect them to form a pain shaft. And when we experience pain now, that shaft starts happening and magnifies the pain that we feel now. What pains us is not the pain itself but the pain shaft that is not real. There may be pain, no doubt, but the pain that you feel is not wholly from the present pain. It is from the unconscious shaft of pain from previous incidents.

To be in the present, one needs to reach the state of ‘unclutching’, a state where one does not connect thoughts to form these unreal shafts. When this happens, the contradiction about spirituality and materialism disappears.

When you are in this state of mind, of the present, of the here and now, you are in an ‘unclutched’ zone. I call this the ‘Zero TPS state’ – zero thoughts per second state. This is the state of ultimate liberation, enlightenment, salvation or nithyanandam – the eternal bliss.

In this ‘unclutched’, no mind state, you will have complete awareness and total consciousness, and you will not have any inner chatter. You will not connect one thought with another to form either painful or pleasurable shafts. You will witness each thought as it arises objectively, non-judgmentally, set it aside and move on. You become non-attached to everything around you.

The mind conditions you to make you believe that you can only travel in one way – horizontally or vertically, spiritually or materially. That is why you do not grow in many of the spiritual practices called sadhana, which forces you to choose between these two seemingly separate conditions, material and spiritual.

Instead of two axes, you now have multiple axes, infinite axes that offer infinite possibilities in the past, present and future, as well as across all points in space. Being in the here and now helps transcend barriers of time and space so that one can be everywhere at all times.

This phenomenon of singularity is what Hindu scriptures call Brahman and Buddhists call ‘akashic record’. This is the state of universal consciousness – where one is simultaneously in a state of past, present and future. This is the state where time and space disappear into one continuum.

This is also the state of enlightenment, as the ego or mind breaks down when this state is achieved. It is an explosion within one’s mind that is multi-dimensional in time and space frame, in the total absence of thoughts.

To reach this state, all one has to do is to stay in the present and suspend thoughts of past and future. As for the present, just focus on what you are doing at that time.

Buddhism refers to this as the mindful state. Techniques such as vipassana meditation seek to introduce us to this state of mindfulness.

Most of us, when we eat, do everything else but focus on the food. We talk, watch television or read books, paying little attention to the food that we eat. The food energy in turn pays little attention to us. It turns into garbage and sits on our waist and hips instead of being the energy it could have been.

And then what happens? Instead of being energized after a meal, you want to take a nap!

Stay in the present whatever you may do, when you take the next step, when you brush your teeth, when you smile at some one, just focus on what you are doing at that point in time. If other thoughts intrude, witness them as an observer without getting involved. Do not link one thought to another. Each thought is independent.

When you function in this way, there is no past; therefore no baggage of the past can be accumulated; you can be free from karma if you are in this state! Also, in this state, you will have an intuition about the future; therefore even as you focus only on the present, you are aware of the future and what you decide to do in the present is with complete precognition of what the future entails.

You are what the scriptures call a trikala jnani – one who knows the past, present and future, one for whom the universe holds no secrets. You are indeed a master of the universe.

This is the best meditation you can ever do. All other meditation techniques you can do once in a while to further cleanse yourself in many ways. People tell me after our LBP that they wish to do all the seven meditations taught in the program everyday. I tell them to do one to start with and slowly move to the next. They insist that they want to do all, I agree. After a few months I find that they have not even started with one! When I ask them, they say that they have a problem in finding time.

You have no problem giving appointments to other people for your time. However, when it comes to giving yourself an appointment with your own Self, you have a big problem with time.

Whenever you are in prayer or meditation, you are in a hurry to finish. Even when you are praying or chanting, you are constantly peering at your watch.

People come to me with guilt. I give them some ideas. They insist on learning meditation. Just to console them, I give them some meditation technique. After a month if I ask them, they would just have an added guilt feeling of not doing meditation!

We only wish to try to transform; we really do not wish to transform. You see, it is easy to keep saying that you are trying, because then there is no commitment from your side to show a transformation; trial has no commitment; you just keep proclaiming your wish to transform, that's all.

This is what is called holiday religion. We go to a discourse or a temple when we feel like relaxing. We practice part-time spirituality. As far as we are concerned, it is only skin deep. This fills us with hypocrisy and guilt. Understand that even meditation becomes a ritual if it is restricted to one part of your life at one time in a given space. The moment you associate meditation with a particular time and space in your house, it becomes a mere ritual, there is nothing spiritual about it. At least, that kind of meditation can never bring about the real transformation in you. In true spirituality, your life itself becomes meditation.

Meditation is not a quantity that is to be added to your life; it is a quality that needs to be built into your life.

Concept of Singularity in Quantum Physics is beyond matter and energy. Similarly Quantum Spirituality is beyond material and spiritual lives. You need to be in both the horizontal and the vertical lines simultaneously. What I wish to give you is an understanding, not a mere technique or an empty idea. If you go beyond mind, when you go beyond thoughts, you explode in all directions – vertically, horizontally and in all directions.

There is nothing you can ever do or attain that will get you closer to enlightenment than the technique of being in the present. You just need to be to be enlightened.

This may be hard to grasp for your mind. Your mind is accustomed to thinking that everything worthwhile is in the future or in speculating the past.

Don’t blame your upbringing or your past for you being like this now. Anything that you ever did or that was done to you in the past cannot prevent you from saying yes to what is now. Take your attention deeply into the Now. Now never happened before; it will not happen again.

You do it now or not at all.

There is no starting point to worldly life; there is no end point to spiritual life. Enlightenment is not an end, it is a new beginning. An ultimate experience is not the last experience. It is just the greatest experience till that point in time, that’s all.

Someone asked me, ‘How can I retain the bliss of your meditation program?’

The moment you wish to retain something, be sure, it will escape from you. If you choose to have bliss, bliss will escape. Like how water flowing in a river stays in your open palms but escapes when you try to close your palms to catch it, when you are in bliss just enjoy the bliss without trying to hold it.

You can never possess nithyananda, eternal bliss. It has to possess you.

Perfectionists like to choose. Life is not perfect, only death is. One who does not make mistakes, or believes he or she makes no mistakes, does not respect others. Do not try to be perfect; do not choose.

People ask what they have to renounce to be spiritual.

I say, ‘please do not renounce anything. Do not renounce what you have; renounce what you do not have; renounce the fantasies that you do not have’.

When you are with your wife, do not allow your fantasies to come in between her and you. When you have a home, do not allow a fantasy home to come in between. Enjoy what you have.

Living in the present moment is the missing link that helps you traverse the horizontal and vertical lines at the same time and space. Every moment is a possibility in which you can explode in all directions. In Quantum Spirituality, there is no attachment or detachment. If you are not in awareness, you detach and attach. If you are in awareness, you are just blissfully immersed in the moment with neither attachment nor detachment.

Be aware of what you are and where you are. When we are in one place and one time, we always think about another time and another place. Our body is never where our mind is. When we are in the office physically, our mind is having a vacation; when we are at home physically, our mind worries about work in the office. We invite maya, illusion, into our lives. We invite suffering into our lives. When we learn to live in the present, our mind stays where our body is. Yet, we find that there are no boundaries; time and space are no longer constraints.

As in the story of the American and the dog, in life we constantly make wrong choices and throw the wrong things out of the window. We do not have the intelligence and awareness to flow with the right choices most of the time. Decisions we make are made by our unconscious mind. That is the problem.

This unconscious mind absorbs almost 90% of all our sensory inputs and takes 90% of the decisions. The unconscious mind can operate at lightning speed. Biologists say that while the conscious mind can only operate at about 60 bytes per second, the unconscious can process 60 million bytes of data every second.

One part of our brain is called the reptilian brain. Biologists say that this is the carry over from our evolution. It is a carry over from the time we were aquatic and amphibian creatures. Nature stores our prehistoric memories in this part of the brain so that we can survive. This reptilian brain is all about our life and death decisions.

Nature programs us in such a way that all life and death decisions are made by the unconscious. Whether to run away from a life-threatening situation or whether one should stay and fight is a decision that is always made unconsciously. The conscious mind, the conscious brain is too slow to react to such emergencies.

Unfortunately, this programming extends to non-emergency situations by default. The unconscious mind is full of past experiences and memories, value systems and beliefs that interfere with our thinking process and our decision-making process. It is these embedded or engraved memories that decide for us, almost always unconsciously.

All the talk about 'I think, therefore I am' is just talk, not reality. Most of the time, you do not even know what you think. Most of your mind is a black box to you; as I have said before, in fact it is the Pandora's box.

People come to me and say that things are not working for them. They give their own reasons as well. They would say that what happens is destiny; that it was meant to happen. Please understand as far as you are concerned that there is no destiny at work. What works for you is pure and simple free will. What you think, what you say and what you do have an effect. That effect arises out of free will.

The problem, however, is that while you are truly free you have no will to speak of. Your will, your thoughts about what you wish to happen keep changing all the time. Very often they are self-contradictory.

Take a very simple example. If you wish to rid yourself of a headache, you keep thinking that you should not have a headache. How will this work? As long as you think of a headache, the ache will continue. If you wish to be rid of headache, visualize good health, comfort and so on, not headache.

As long as our expression and desires are contradictory, visualization cannot work. They need to be in convergence. We teach simple visualization techniques in our various programs. You have been introduced to one already. People marvel at how effective they are. They are amazingly powerful. All that you need to ensure is that there is no self-contradiction.

This contradiction is what happens when you try to combine materialistic benefits with spirituality, based on understanding through your past conditioning.

Most people see spirituality and materialism as mutually exclusive and contradictory. When you try to meet two contradictory qualities, you will always land in trouble; you will be in dilemma. Either you feel you need to sacrifice or compromise and neither of these appeals to you.

What matters is whether you are happy, by being spiritual or material. The state of mind within you is what matters, not the external milestones of your spiritual or material accomplishments. Your inner happiness is not dependent and should not be dependent on what the external states are.

The contradictions that you perceive will automatically resolve themselves once you are able to integrate them into inner happiness.

If your inner nature is one of happiness, you will be happy in whatever state you are. You do not need company, you do not need relationships, you do not need status and you do not need possessions to make you happy. Wherever you go, in whatever situation you are in, you carry your happiness with you. Your happiness is not dependent on external factors, you are liberated.

People who think they are spiritual, get dependent too. Instead of name, fame, wealth and relationships, they get hooked on to aspirations of salvation, sacrifice, renunciation and enlightenment. Sometimes, they seek all – enlightenment as well as wealth, name and fame.

No problem at all, but then when you have inner contradictions based on your past conditioning that all these do not go together, you create problems for yourself. Things become difficult to cope with.

You asked, ‘How can I focus on god and mammon at the same time?’

The only reason you cannot is that you have been taught you cannot, that is all.

People who wish to control you through fear and greed have dinned it into you that you cannot be wealthy and spiritual at the same time. Jesus is reported to have said, ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to go to heaven.’

What Jesus said has to be viewed in context of having to drop your baggage, your samskara – deeply engraved past memories – before you can be liberated. Wealth is energy, and not a burden, when it is appropriately used.

Once you believe that you can be wealthy and happy, rich and spiritual, and there is no inner self-contradiction, you will become wealthy and happy. Your belief will generate your thought, your thoughts will generate your actions and your actions will generate wealth and happiness. This is a spiritual truth.

Nature sees no contradictions. To man, Nature is full of apparent contradictions: good and bad, pleasure and pain, loss and gain, name and shame, all these are man-made contradictions.

Your ability to live with, and enjoy opposites, makes you comfortable with choices. If you are the kind of person who lives amidst great material comfort and can afford to demand the best of everything and yet can do with two simple meals a day, by choice, then, you can carry that comfort with you anywhere!

But, however, you may be someone who has decided to renounce material comforts for the sake of renouncing. So, instead of Mumbai or Delhi, you decide you will go to the mountains, the Himalayas perhaps. Perhaps, you have heard me say that there is something in the Himalayan environment, the very air, which inculcates spiritual evolution. So, you go there hoping, expecting that something will happen. You sit cross-legged with your eyes closed for hours. You do pranayama and asana.

Only time will pass. Nothing else will happen. So, you get bored with the mountains and return to Mumbai or Delhi. Again, you are unhappy.

This cycle continues because of your expectation with which you make the choices. Sitting with just your eyes closed makes you only dull, not enlightened. Even with eyes closed, you can have a television running within the closed eyes. All that you refuse to see outside will be playing inside. Instead of reality, you will live in fantasy, that’s all. Consciously, you may refrain from seeing something. But unconsciously, there will be so many things surfacing which you will not be able to control.

When we operate in the unconscious zone, we operate out of our instinct. The reptilian and some other parts of our brain control our emotions and autonomous nervous systems without even a conscious effort from our side. If they do so, we will not survive. Our system will shut down when we sleep.

The problem that arises is one of our wanting to be in control. The truth is we cannot, as long as we work through our mind. At the very best, we can try and activate our conscious brain as much as we can and hope for the best to take what we believe would be rational decisions. Since the conscious part of the brain is a mere 10% of the total brain, this possibility is limited.

In order to move beyond this dilemma, we need to understand how our mind works. How do we get out of this dilemma? How do we regain our freedom?

Our thoughts are the constant movement of our mind from past to future and future to past. This is the constant inner chatter that manifests itself as worries, desires, anxieties and so on. There is nothing we can do with the past, it is history. Often, we cannot even learn from it. Yet, we constantly dwell in the past, in regrets and guilt. We spend hours rehearsing how we could have done better by having said what we forgot to say.

Of what use is it? The moving finger never returns having written.

The future is even more uncertain. We don’t know a thing about what can or will happen and we have no control either. We do not even know whether we will breathe the next breath. How then can we determine the future? Trying to determine the future by trying to learn from the past is as foolish as trying to drive a car by looking at the rearview mirror. We just cannot do it.

The only way we can accomplish anything is by doing whatever we can in this present moment. What is the present moment now is the future. By doing things correctly now in the present moment, we can certainly influence our future.

The interesting thing is that once we focus on the present moment, once we focus on what we are doing at this moment in time, our thoughts reduce and stop. When we are totally in the present, in what I call the time shaft zone, thoughts cease. One falls into a no mind zone. In this zone, one sees the past, present and future, all as one; one sees the future clearly.

This zone is the zone of intuition. Many of you would have experienced the feeling of having been in a place before. You may have identified the caller just as the phone rings, without knowing who it is. You would have at that moment unknowingly fallen into the time shaft zone. You become intuitive. You foresee the future.

You can develop this faculty knowingly. You can learn how to do it. The process to achieve this is ‘meditation’. Meditation is turning inward, becoming aware, touching your consciousness; touching it at the point where thoughts cease and you reach the no mind zone. Then, you are in a state of intuition.

Getting into the state of intuition need not be a spiritual exercise. You will benefit enormously through this skill in the material plane. You will be able to decide rapidly and rightly and above all, intuitively. As your intuition grows, you evolve spiritually.

Spirituality is the integration of all your physical, mental, emotional, material and relational well-being, taking into account the well-being of others also. That’s all. As long as you wish well for others while you wish well for yourself you are in a spiritual plane. There is therefore no need to separate spirituality from materialism. There is no conflict.

The conflict arises when greed overwhelms you to the extent that you are ready to harm others. The conflict arises when mammon blinds you to the suffering of others and you rush to acquire. The rich man that Jesus refers to who He says has less chance of entering heaven than a camel passing through the eye of a needle, is one who gains through the suffering of his fellowmen.

I say, ‘Do not renounce what you have; just renounce whatever you do not have!’

Do not worry about the evils of materialism or whether a rich man can enter the gates of heaven or not. First of all, heaven and hell are states of your mind, not locations that you will be dispatched to when you die. You live in hell in this life when you live in sorrow, and you live in heaven when you know how to live in bliss.

If you have the attitude of a miser who acquires ceaselessly but does not know how to enjoy, you will be in hell even when you are living.

As long as you are satisfied with what you have and do not keep wanting more out of fear and greed, you are alright. You need not renounce anything that you have today. Be happy with life that you have, your spouse, your children, your house, your car, your career and whatever else that you have. Enjoy what you have acquired, fully.

The problem that all of us have is that we chase acquisitions; but once we acquire, we lose interest in what we have acquired and we are off to acquire something else. This attitude truly lands us in hell, even as we live.

Ramana Maharishi says that till the moment we acquire something, what we wish to acquire looks like a mountain; but once we acquire it, it shrinks to the size of a mustard seed!

We are forever running; we are never comfortable being still. Look at everything that you have achieved in life. Just look back and consider whether any of it made you truly happy. If it had, you would have stayed where you were and enjoyed what you acquired. You would not have reason to keep running to acquire more and more.

People, especially those on corporate or business life, believe that they should set goals only to exceed them. You set a goal, achieve it and set a higher goal, and so it goes on, never ending. You call it ambition. But along with this ambition, comes fear. Fear is what drives the greed. Fear of the fact that you may lose all that you have acquired drives you to acquire more and more. That is the problem with your ambition. It is driven by fear.

When you know that your own life is impermanent and that when you die there is nothing that you can take with you, where from do you get the idea that what you acquire is permanent?

We keep acquiring, and then move on, as though what we have acquired is of no further use. This is what leads to the contradiction of forever being dissatisfied with what we have while constantly fantasizing about what we do not have.

That is why I keep saying: do not renounce what you have. Enjoy what you have. Enjoy your wealth, enjoy your health and enjoy tour relationships. You don't have to have a whole load of these things to enjoy. You may not even have some of these things, but that is not the point. The point is, whatever you have, just enjoy it with deep fulfillment.

Being fulfilled with what you have is the corner stone of all your happiness; your possessions, your relationships and what you do day to day should fulfill you. When that happens, you are in the present moment of being happy with what you have here and now.

Once you have developed the mindset for being happy with what you have and what you have finished acquiring, you will stop reaching out for more acquisitions.

But this should happen in you as a natural happening, not as a compulsion. Without conviction, if you adopt this attitude, you will continue to suffer with suppressed fantasies. If you give yourself time, it will happen. And you won't even know when it happened.

A monk who sits with closed eyes and still visualizes women in lust is in far worse a state than the playboy who lusts openly. The monk has renounced whatever material possessions he had but is yet to renounce his fantasies!

You may have seen old pictures of heavenly damsels dancing in front of meditating sages. At one time, especially in South India, every single calendar used to have these kinds of pictures. The sage will have one hand raised as if to drive the woman away and another hand across his eyes as if he is peeping through his fingers at the woman! The woman would be highly sensual, and it was believed that Lord Indra sent these women to test the meditating sages. One can see this especially of sage Vishwamitra.

If this were to be true, if Indra would be sending celestial maidens, apsara, to disturb meditators, then all men will start meditating right away! Actually, no such thing really happens. The celestial maidens are nothing but the depiction of the fantasy within the sage. The fantasy thoughts that arise while practicing austerities such as meditation are depicted by these celestial maidens. It shows that while the sage thinks that he has conquered lust and sex, his fantasies are still to leave him completely.

When you renounce all that you do not have, you no longer live in fear and greed. You can no longer be fuelled by fear and greed because you have renounced all the fantasies!

You live a fulfilled life. You live a liberated life. You become a true renunciate without having to renounce anything that you have. You are at ease. You reach the cross roads of both the material and spiritual planes. From this point, you can explode in any direction. You have infinite choices.

In fact, you reach a point of choicelessness.

When you decide to be choiceless, when you renounce all that you do not have and you live in the present moment, the universe showers upon you all that you need. You do not have to ask, it will be given. The mere decision to be content with what you have and the awareness in not grasping through fear and greed ensures that you live in bliss.

This state is what Krishna constantly refers to as the state of being non-attached. He says again and again, ‘Do whatever you have to do with no expectation of what is likely to happen, with no expectation of and with no attachment to the result of your actions. Surrender the results of your actions to Me, to Existence. You will be liberated; you will be in bliss.’

The greatest master of them all, Krishna, the Jagat Guru – master of the world – says this, time and again. The renunciation we talk about here is not of actions, but of desires, expectations and results.

When I say renounce what you do not have, many of you ask me, ‘How can I pay my bills, especially in a country like the United States where there is no one to support me?’

Understand that I am not saying that you should sleep all day doing nothing. You need to do what you need to do in the material plane. But, you can do this without getting obsessed about the end result, without worrying and planning again and again about the outcome of every passing minute. You can do things without asking for more and more. That is what I am trying to say.

The problem is, you have needs as well as wants. Needs are basic to you. you need them to live your life. On the other hand, wants are not your needs nor are they your own desires. They are borrowed from a thousand other people, sometimes many whom who have not even met, about whom you have learnt from the media, from magazines, television, movies and so on. Their possessions become your obsessions. Their beauty becomes your inferiority complex. Their possessions spur your greed and make you unhappy.

The minute your neighbor centrally air conditions his house, the temperature in your house goes up, you start sweating from jealousy.

The renunciation I have talked about is what Krishna talks about. It is nothing but giving up jealousy, greed, fear and lust and to continue to do what you need to do to carry on with life blissfully, with no concern about whether your efforts will succeed or fail; in fact without even knowing what success and failure are, with just the knowing of doing and being.

It is only when you become goal centric, you have the problems of success and failure. When you do not have any specific goals, any thing specific to achieve, how does one define success or failure? Whatever happens is ok. You live life as it is, as it happens. It is a state of being comfortable with whatever happens. In that state, whatever that is good for you happens.

This is the state of renunciation, where the past and the future are renounced in favor of the present. In this state, when you live in awareness of the present without having to choose the past or future, when you live in the knowledge that whatever you do will result in material, emotional, physical and spiritual well-being bliss automatically happens in you.

You need not ask for anything; when you are in the present moment of awareness, Existence showers upon you!

Meditation:

This is a 30-minute meditation, with three parts of 10 minutes each. Use the instruction tape if you have one, or else use an alarm clock, or have someone monitor the timings.

This meditation brings out all the suppressed emotions in you. Many masters have employed this technique before.

Breathing is the bridge to the universe. It is the system with which you are living your mind. If your thinking is calm, your breath will be relaxed. If your thinking is aggressive, your breathing will also be aggressive. You first need to control your breathing in order to control your mind.

Presently, in our repressed state, most of us are half-alive and half-dead. In the first part of this meditation, deep breathing is carried out in order to create a churning in your repressed system. Your mental system is made fully alive by the increased intake of oxygen, it becomes more vital. Your cells will get more energy and will create more bioelectricity or bioenergy. This energy will melt all the repressed emotions like melting ice.

You may practice this technique on an empty stomach, preferably in the morning. Twenty-one days of this meditation will transform your Being and bring a glow to your face and body. This is like taking a psychological bath. You will be able to experience the silence in you. When you kill sorrow, ananda or bliss flowers in you and sends forth a beautiful fragrance from you.

For the first 10 minutes, in a standing position and with your eyes closed, breathe deeply and chaotically.

What is chaotic breathing?

In chaotic breathing, there is no definite rhythm. Just breathe as deeply as you can. Forget everything else, just breathe, breathe deeply. Become the breathing!

During chaotic breathing, when the body intelligence is allowed to take over, the body will take in however much oxygen is needed. There is no need to control your breath – this is not pranayama.

If you have a heart problem, or you have had recent surgery, or you are pregnant, or you have any health issues, consult a doctor first; then, do this without straining yourself, and as much as you can without discomfort. Otherwise, if you are fit, put your whole energy into it!

The vibrations generated in these 10 minutes will melt all your solidified negative energies. The unconscious will be thrown open. All conditioned memories or samskara will be dissolved.

There is no particular way to keep your body. You have to be standing, that's all. Let your body behave as it wants to.

Stand with your eyes closed. Breathe deeply and rhythmically from the depths of your body, with your mouth closed and through your nose. Move your hands, flex your knees and bend to a semi-squatting position and then rise up. Move as if you are a bird in flight, up and down, knees moving up and down, arms moving up and down, all rhythmic in line with your breathing.

Do the movements gently and synchronize your inhalation with upward movement and exhalation with downward movement. If you have a heart problem, do only as much as you can. Similarly, pregnant women and others with physical ailments – do only as much as you can. Do this for 10 minutes.

During the next 10 minutes, still standing, with eyes closed, tense and relax every part of your body, one after another in sequence.

For the next 10 minutes, keep your eyes closed and tense each part of your body, part by part, limb by limb, then let it relax; tense and relax one limb and then move to the next. Start with your feet, move to the legs, then to the thighs, next to the hips, then to the stomach and lower back, next to the chest and upper back, then to your arms from finger tips to shoulder, next to the neck and shoulders, next to your face and finally to the top of the head. Relax each part of your entire body before you move to the next part. When you move to the next part, keep the earlier part relaxed. For instance, while tensing your thighs, keep your legs and feet relaxed. This is like an isometric exercise with each part of your body.

During this part of the meditation, all the energy pathways in your body, all the 72,000 of them, get energized.

At the end of these 10 minutes, you will become vacant inside; you will become cool, calm and composed.

In the next 10 minutes, sit down, either cross-legged on the floor, or in a chair, with your eyes closed and your back, neck and head in a straight posture. Produce a ‘hoo’ sound.

For the next 10 minutes, sit down keeping your eyes closed and chant the 'hoo' sound, just the word 'hoo'. There is no need to chant it deeply and loudly. Just chant it in a relaxed manner. As you chant, simply witness whatever happens inside or outside your Being.

The first two parts of this technique are actually a preparation for this third part that is the actual meditation. When you come to the third part, you will see that the mind becomes silent effortlessly, by itself. Silence cannot be forced upon you; it can only happen by itself.

Breathe normally, and with each exhalation, produce a 'hoo' sound with your mouth. Focus completely on this sound and become one with this sound.

After a few seconds, you will see that thoughts are again rising in you. Then just sit down, in a pleasant mood, and slowly start witnessing those thoughts. Breathe normally.

For a minute thereafter, just be in silence.

Remain in this relaxed state with a smiling face and blissful mood. During this time, there may be many experiences, just watch them as you would watch the television. Watch your mind thought by thought.

Don't concentrate on anything. Meditation is not concentration. Meditation is awareness.

So just be aware of your thoughts, witness what happens inside your body and outside your body.

Slowly, very slowly, open your eyes. Carry this energy and silence with you.

If you want to test the efficiency of this technique, go and have your picture taken today.

After 21 days of practicing this technique, have another picture taken and compare the two. I assure you, your face will look completely different! Your eyes would have become more pleasing. You will look blossomed. You will feel grounded in reality.

To summarize,

1. Practice the meditation for grounding yourself in reality.

2. Intend that you will be in tune with reality, with no fantasies.

3. Visualize this state of intent as real. Visualize being in the here and now. Visualize that you are wealthy, healthy and happy with joyful relationships.

4. Let go.

5. Offer your gratitude to the universe for what you are NOW and for what you are continuing to receive.

May you be grounded in reality and be in nithyananda, eternal bliss!