4. Living intensely🔗

You cannot feel fulfilled by offering sense pleasures to the senses. Living intensely does not mean fulfilling your senses, pouring pleasures into your senses, or living as you wanted. Somebody asked me, 'Since bondage and liberation is relative, why not just eat, drink and be merry?' That is perfectly all right. Be intense. That's all. Eat intensely.

When you are eating, only eat. When you are sleeping, just sleep. When you are drinking, only drink. When you are making merry, just be merry. If you can be merry, you don't need anything else. The whole problem is because you can't really be merry. That is why you need so much of teachings and ideas about liberation.

See, that's why here you think, 'Why not just eat, drink and be merry?' You think it's very easy. No! The problem is you can't be merry, which is why you drink the things that are not directly needed by your body, which can't be accepted by your body.

Understand, master's words should be understood completely, with intensity and clarity, not superficially. Eat, drink and be merry is not such a simple issue as you understand, as you think. If you do that intensely, that's perfectly alright.

A small story about this intensity and understanding: After twenty five years of married life, one day when the wife was going through the closet of her husband in his room, she discovered three soy bean seeds and thirty dollars in cash. She went to him and asked with a lot of curiosity, 'What is this? Why three soy beans and thirty dollars cash? How did it come? What is the meaning?' He said, 'Now I have to confess to you. Whenever I cheated on you, I put one soy bean in that.' The wife was shocked but was a little consoled that he had cheated on her three times only in twenty five years. She then asked, 'Now what about the thirty dollars cash?' The husband replied, 'Well, whenever the soy beans were ten dollars per kg I sold them!'

So, eat, drink and be merry, these three words, if you understand like three soy beans, you will not be able to understand the truth. You have to see the thirty dollars behind it! Only then you will understand the truth, you will understand what liberation is.

When you live intensely, automatically you will be liberated.

If you don’t live any moment intensely, what happens? Your mind looks for repeating the action in that moment. Why? Why does your mind pull you to the same experience again and again? You may crave for a particular candy or you may be addicted to something. Why? Actually if you look deep you can see it is because you never eat the candy or cater to the addiction completely with full involvement. You hold back from throwing yourself into the action fully.

Maybe you feel guilty about it or you have too many confusing thoughts at that time. So you decide to just do the action ignoring your thoughts and feelings that are coming in the way of your pleasure. You see, part of you wants to indulge in the action. Another part of you argues why you should not. You are caught in too many thoughts, many of them self-contradictory.

You lose energy in fighting with yourself. Finally, you are not integrated whether you do the action or not. You are not intense. So the desire is not completely fulfilled and leaves behind its memory in your inner space. Engraved memories of desires that are not completely fulfilled are called samskaras.

These engraved memories have the power to make you return and travel in that same path. Whether it is coffee or champagne or smoking, whatever engram you create will have the power to make you do the same action again and again, till you feel completely fulfilled with that habit or with that enjoyment or pleasure.

If you enjoy your addiction intensely even once, only once, you will be completely liberated. That engram will never ask you anymore to travel in that path. It will liberate you.

You keep your body alive, you keep your mind alive, because still you have hope that the body can give something to you, the mind can give something to you. Still you have the hope you can enjoy something, or something needs to be fulfilled through the body and mind. That is what I call karma.

Karma is nothing but unfulfilled engrams and desires, which are inside your being, which constantly make you again and again to travel in that same path, trying to give the experience of fulfillment in your inner being.

If you do any action with complete involvement, if you follow any desire totally, there will be no craving for repetition and you will be liberated from the desire once and for all. You can now direct your energies to exploring and enjoying new, unexplored experiences of life. You will not be caught in the vicious circle, your life will move towards growth and fulfillment. You can experience for yourself that life is presenting something new and fresh every moment. For all this, there is only one thing needed on your part: live intensely.

There are two ways of living. One is living like a buffalo, just being alive and breathing but with no intensity and passion in life. The other way is like a Buddha, living intensely in the present moment in the current action.

Have you experienced a nightmare? During a nightmare you will experience that even if you want to open your eyes you cannot. You want to move your hands but you cannot.

Then the nightmare becomes so intense.

It may be that a lion is chasing you and has almost caught you or you are falling down a deep chasm or you are in some such life-threatening situation in your dream. When it comes to its maximum intensity, the very intensity wakes you up.

If the nightmare is not that intense, you cannot wake yourself up and come out of it. If it is very intense then that very intensity wakes you up, and suddenly there is no nightmare. It was only a dream, but you thought that it was reality. Understand, even when you were falsely thinking it is happening, you were actually out of it. It was only a film going on in front of you.