Breaking free of suffering: my personal experience🔗

When I had the ultimate experience of enlightenment and settled with this body, everything looked useless. No really. All the sadhana I did: pooja, worship, meditation, repetition of God's name, going to temples, everything felt useless.

When I was doing my spiritual practices, I was literally a fanatic about my spiritual practices. Morning when I wake up, the first thing I will do is go and see the Arunachala hill. It was like a fanaticism in me. Understand, the spectrum where enlightenment happens is different from the spectrum where the spiritual practices are happening. There is no connection.

I suddenly felt, 'Oh God, I should not teach any of this to the next generation. The whole thing is useless'.

A small story:

All the frogs living in a forest gather together and decide that they want to migrate to some other country. They realize that the only way to go to another country is to catch a flight. All of them are planning on how to catch a flight. One intelligent frog with a long beard says, 'Hey, have you not seen that every day the morning flight goes over our forest. Tomorrow let us all stop the flight, get into the flight,

When I was in the Ramakrishna mutt I will be up until twelve o’clock at night to finish all my work. I was in charge of four to five areas: publications, kitchen, etc.

Around twelve o’ clock at night, I would come back to the room. After that I will have a bath, and sit and do some puja and meditation. I will sit for two to two and a half hours. By the time I am done it will be three o’ clock in the morning – time to wake up for the next day’s spiritual practices!

For at least two years I lived like this. I practically had no sleep. Of course, it is very difficult for everybody to believe.

When I had the ultimate experience of enlightenment, I felt, ‘Oh God, all these are just useless!’ It is exactly like the story I told you about the frogs trying to build a rope bridge, and stop the flight and get into the aircraft. Actually, my first reaction to my enlightenment, after settling into the body, was shock! ‘Oh God, the whole world is getting misguided.’

The goal you need to experience is avyaktam achintyam avikaaryam. It is unmanifest, unthinkable and unchangeable. Vedas describe very beautifully that whatever you know as the universe, the so-called known universe, is not even one fourth of it. More than seventy-five percent is unmanifest. What does this mean? You cannot perceive it by anything that has manifested. You cannot perceive it with your eyes, with your ears, with your tongue, and with your body. You cannot perceive it.

So anything you do in the manifest world will be useless to experience the ultimate unmanifest. I don’t want to give a license to all of you, but I have to make it very clear.

Also, none of your wrong actions stop your enlightenment. It is not that when the pilot slowly comes down and drops his rope for all the frogs to come up, he says, ‘No. This frog is a drunkard, he