Words From The Master: Love and liberate, don’t possess

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 1:	Flow in Love – Living enlightenment is expressing overflowing love towards all.
Part 16:	Love and liberate, don’t possess
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The next time you are with someone, when you are with your friend with whom you are completely open, remember to practice this technique.

Just sit next to him or her. Don’t bother about what you are going to do or what you are going to say. Just sit, that’s all! That is the technique. Actually, speaking is nothing but avoiding the other person. Because you cannot look into the other person’s eyes, you go on speaking. That is the truth. The other person listens so that he can start speaking whenever you take a break! If a person is listening to you, it means that he is either thinking of something else or he is preparing for his turn. He sits there so that he can start once you finish.

Now if you try this technique, it can take you to a different space altogether. When you are with the master or your friend or your beloved, whoever you feel deeply connected with, whoever you are very open with, you can try this technique. It will straightaway lead you to enlightenment. Be very clear, I am not teaching this technique for you to have better relationships or for you to develop your personality. No! I am giving it to you to straightaway experience the pure love that can lead you to enlightenment.

Words From The Master

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 1:	Flow in Love – Living enlightenment is expressing overflowing love towards all.
Part 7:	Be a lover every moment
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If you become lost in every moment, you become love. Then, when you work you work with the utmost focus because you are in deep love with it. This way, your very life becomes a deep meditative love.

Then you start feeling, relating and respecting everything as a living being, just as you are. You even start feeling the other person’s thoughts. You start responding and relating to the other person without him or her opening up to you. You feel the cosmos as a translucent, ever living presence. You have tremendous intelligence. You know exactly how to connect to things. Such is the power of love.

Words From The Master: Love and liberate, don’t possess

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 1:	Flow in Love – Living enlightenment is expressing overflowing love towards all.
Part 16:	Love and liberate, don’t possess
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The big problem is that you never sit in a relaxed way. Either you are driven by greed, meaning you are in a hurry to say or do something, or you don’t know what you are doing and so you are caught with fear. You just try to finish your job and escape! Either you are in greed or you are in fear. But for now, just relax. Be neither in fear nor in greed.

Just sit in the present. Just feel the other person’s presence. Accept the other person as he or she is, as that being is, and feel what happens inside you. Try this for a few days. Suddenly you will see that you will experience a different space that you have never before experienced in your life.

This is a technique from the Shiva Sutras*, a collection of techniques for enlightenment delivered by Shiva*. This technique will take you through a quantum jump from the form to the formless, from possessive love to causeless love.

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Shiva Sutras – A collection of teachings of enlightened master Shiva in epigram form as techniques. Includes Vignana Bhairava Tantra, Guru Gita, Tiru Mandiram etc.

Shiva – enlightened Master from India who delivered the universal Truths in the form of scriptures like Shiva Sutras.

Words From The Master

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 1:	Flow in Love – Living enlightenment is expressing overflowing love towards all.
Part 4:	Love brings great courage
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A beautiful incident happened in the life of Ramanuja. If you study the life of Ramanuja, you will see how he used every step of his life to move towards enlightenment.

When his teacher initiated Ramanuja, he gave him a special chant. The teacher told him not to pass on the chant to anybody and that if he did so, he would go to hell. Ramanuja asked him what would happen to the others with whom he might share it. The teacher said that they would be led to salvation.

What would we have done? Naturally we would have kept quiet, thinking, ‘Why unnecessarily go to hell?’

Ramanuja immediately stood on a platform in a temple and called out to the whole village. He loudly pronounced the chant given by his teacher and told the people, ‘Let you all go to heaven! I am not bothered about me going to hell. Let you all reach heaven!’

When you are deeply in love, you feel as if your whole being is open and you are ready to go to any extreme for the sake of anybody. You are ready to go to any boundary, as there is nothing to protect within your being. Your being is totally open. You don’t feel insecure when you are wild with love. That is why people who are in love always do risky things. They take the risk because they feel they have nothing to lose. There is no insecurity about anything. They feel so expansive. Love gives tremendous courage and energy. It opens you up. It makes you finally available to yourself. As of now, you are not available to yourself. Love can make you available to yourself.

When the teacher saw what Ramanuja did, he admitted that he learned a lesson from his disciple and declared that Ramanuja had reached greater heights than him. He told Ramanuja, ‘You are in a different space now.’

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Ramanuja – Founder of the Vishishtadvaita or modified duality principle. Along with Adi Shankara and Madhva, considered to be one of the three great teachers of Hindu philosophy.

Words From The Master

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 1:	Flow in Love – Living enlightenment is expressing overflowing love towards all.
Part 1:	What is Love?
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To tell you honestly, it is very difficult to define love exactly. Mere words cannot express it precisely. I am trying to use a few words here and there so that some word will click within you.

Love is an intense experience in one’s inner space. Many of us think love is a choice. We think experience and expression of love is a choice. We think that if we want to, we can handle love; otherwise we can let it go. No! It is not a choice as we think. It is a basic necessity of life.

When I say life, I don’t mean just breathing and staying alive. I mean being alive at the innermost being level, as a live Consciousness. If you can express love, if you can experience love, that is the only way of being alive as a Consciousness. If you don't experience and express love, you may inhale and exhale, but you can’t say you are a live being. There are so many animals, plants and other things that breathe day in and day out. You will continue to exist like them, that’s all.

A small story:

A disciple asked a Zen* master, ‘Does an enlightened master speak?’

The master said, 'No, an enlightened person never speaks. Only a person who doesn’t know enlightenment speaks.’

Then the disciple asked, 'So does an enlightened master keep quiet?'

The master said, ‘No, an enlightened master never keeps quiet. If he keeps quiet, then he is not enlightened.’

The disciple was puzzled. He asked, ‘You say he neither speaks nor keeps quiet. What does he do?’

The master replied, ‘He sings! His being sings. He neither speaks, nor keeps quiet. His very being sings.’

Love is the ultimate experience of a human being. When the experience happens, we will not be able to possess the experience, only the experience will possess us! That is what the master means. When the experience possesses us, whatever we do will be like a beautiful song. Any word that comes out will be poetry. Our being will be so light. We will simply float. Our walking will be a dance. Our body language will radiate grace. All our expressions will be of great service to humanity.

Words From The Master: The unity of Love

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 1:	Flow in Love – Living enlightenment is expressing overflowing love towards all.
Part 15:	The unity of Love
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Children feel that they are adults only when they say ‘no’ to their parents. It is a basic instinct. When they say ‘no’ they feel that they are established as an individual. That is why, all over the world, youngsters always rebel. Whether it is in the West or in the East, in all the countries all over the world, in all the cultures, the youth say ‘no’. When they say ‘no’, they feel they are strong.

But our love is dependent only on ‘yes’. As long as we receive ‘yes’, our love also is ‘yes’. When we get a ‘no’, we also start saying ‘no’. This is called horizontal love. It starts and ends horizontally. It starts again and ends again. It always ends with some reason or other. There is another love called vertical love. It never ends because it never starts. It is always there in the form of energy. It is consciousness. Vertical love is when we suddenly realize that we are living inside everybody just as we live inside our own body!

Words From The Master

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 1:	Flow in Love – Living enlightenment is expressing overflowing love towards all.
Part 6:	Ego disconnects – Love connects
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The mind is part of the ego. It knows how to close, but it does not know how to open. To love means to open up, to surrender. It means opening up to Existence, to the flowers, to the bees and to the stars. How do we open to this beautiful music that fills the whole of Existence? How do we open up to this celebration that goes on and on – flowers dancing in the wind, trees enjoying the wind and the stars, always in a state of bliss? Except for man, everything else seems to be in harmony.

Man falls out of harmony because he has what is called ‘consciousness’ which is not present in other living creatures.

Consciousness can do two things. It can create ego or it can create egolessness. If it creates ego, we live in hell. If it creates egolessness, we live in paradise. The whole world is in paradise without knowing it. When man enters paradise, he enters knowing it fully. That is the grandeur and beauty of man. That is the danger as well, because it is easier to fall into the trap of the ego and not enter into paradise than to enter paradise knowingly.

The problem is that we have forgotten who we are and for what we were created. We are emperors of love, but we dream that we are beggars. We have the whole kingdom of Existence within our being and yet we continue to beg for mundane things. We keep collecting mundane things not knowing that we have infinite, inexhaustible treasures within our being. We are oceans, yet we are thirsty because we have become disconnected from our own selves. But no matter how disconnected we are, no matter how much we have forgotten and how long we have forgotten, it can be remembered in a single moment and we can become connected immediately.

Love is the connector.

Words From The Master

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 1:	Flow in Love – Living enlightenment is expressing overflowing love towards all.
Part 9:	Love Existence and feel It loving you
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Existence is not a thing. It is a living energy being. Every single tree, every single stalk of a plant responds to your love and hate, your every thought.

Cleve Backster*, a polygraph expert, has conducted several experiments to examine the response of plants to human emotions and thoughts. He discovered that plants would respond to human thought in a way similar to how a human being would respond. A simple thought by a person about burning the leaves of the plant would register erratic movement in the polygraph recording of the plant! Backster* called this response ‘Primary Perception’ – the ability of plant, animal and human cells to perceive and respond to any thought.

On one occasion, Backster* recorded graphs that registered a flat line that suggested the plants were in a state of shock. He asked the owner of the plant if she had done anything to hurt the plants. The lady told him, ‘I roasted a few of its leaves to get their dry weight!’

When you start loving Existence, it begins responding to you in beautiful ways. You start rising above all of the differences around you – differences between people, situations, emotions, between anything and anything. Everything merges into unity. And that is the truth. Everything is part of one Whole. And love is the only thing that can make you realize this truth.
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Cleve Backster – A polygraph expert who studied behavior of plants subjected to threats and affection using the lie detector equipment.

Words From The Master

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 1:	Flow in Love – Living enlightenment is expressing overflowing love towards all.
Part 5:	Be open – not philosophizing
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A small story:

Ten philosophers were imprisoned in a country. They were kept together in one cell. They decided that somehow they should escape from the prison. They sat and made a big plan. They got the mold of the prison door key and made a duplicate key.

Finally, they chose the date of escape. The whole plan was clearly laid out. They decided that on the particular night, two of them will open the prison door with the duplicate key and signal to the others. The others would escape and these two would follow after locking the door behind them.

The day of escape dawned and two of them went to open the door. The rest of them waited for the signal. They waited and waited but never got any signal. Three hours passed. Suddenly the two who had gone to open the door came back and said, ‘We have to drop our plan to escape. It can’t happen today. We will have to do it some other day. We will have to reschedule our escape.’

The others asked, ‘Why, what happened?’

They replied, ‘What to do? The foolish guards forgot to lock the prison door!’

Those who philosophize cannot think of anything new! It has to be the same old mental setup. If there is some change or some new situation, they cannot think creatively to deal with it, because they are not open. They are like a closed circuit.

We have also become like philosophers when dealing with our lives. We are stuck in patterns of the past. We are never in the moment. If anything new happens, we are at a loss.

The person who experiences the ‘ever living presence’ experiences life in its freshness. He is also the one who is open and available. He constantly experiences the oneness with everything around him. Understand, being open means respecting every thing as equal to you. It means considering each other as equal and being open to change. ‘Available’ means that you are clear that the source of everything in this universe is Existence and that you are available to it every moment. That is the meaning of being available. It is recognizing the profundity of Existence of which all things are part. If you are open and available, you are no more a philosopher. You are ready to open up to life with love.

Words From The Master: Worry – a legacy passed down

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 2:	There is nothing to worry – Living enlightenment is enjoying life without worry.
Part 4:	Worry – a legacy passed down
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There are two things to understand: chronological planning and psychological worry. Chronological planning is needed to set up a schedule for tasks or projects to be completed. For example, you decide, ‘I will wake up at six a.m., do my meditation, then take a shower at seven a.m., and leave for the office by eight a.m. I’ll finish work by five p.m. and return home by six p.m.’

This type of planning is perfectly alright. But before you come to each task on your list, you start creating anxiety about it. You think of the pros and cons of each, etc. This is called psychological worry! This is not needed. Chronological planning is fine, but psychological worry is not needed. It is like trying to cross a bridge before it comes.

So much energy is spent worrying, and it is all of no use. In the story I just narrated, it does not mean that the son does not care. He cares without worry, that’s all. Why contemplate over the bridge even before it comes?

Words From The Master: Love in relationships

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 1:	Flow in Love – Living enlightenment is expressing overflowing love towards all.
Part 17:	Love in relationships
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When a person passes away, you grieve only because you regret not having loved him completely. You can love him completely only when your love itself is complete. It doesn’t have anything to do with the other person. It doesn’t matter what kind of person he is. That is the beauty of real love. It loves for the sake of love, not for the sake of the other person.

If you are grieving for the loss of a person, be very clear, you are grieving because you missed loving him in totality. If you had loved him in totality, you would say goodbye to him with complete restfulness, not with grief. You grieve only because you missed something somewhere. Even if it is your own father or husband or wife, it is the same. If you had radiated your causeless love to them when they were alive, then when they left there would not be any regret. But if you had loved them with rationalizations, then when they left, the incompleteness of your love towards them would create a hangover, and that hangover is what you feel as grief.

Words From The Master: Awareness – the benign virus!

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 2:	There is nothing to worry – Living enlightenment is enjoying life without worry.
Part 6:	Awareness – the benign virus!
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With awareness, anything becomes a blessing, including illness. Have you ever been joyful when you were sick? You can be if you become aware. There is no need to worry about sickness. Even sickness is a part of the flow of Existence. You can feel this if you become more aware of the bigger picture and what is happening at the cosmic level. Awareness simply relaxes you into deeper understanding.

Words From The Master

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 1:	Flow in Love – Living enlightenment is expressing overflowing love towards all.
Part 10:	Love is different from respect
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Very often, love is confused with respect. From a young age, children are brought up to always show respect but never to show love. You can hear people teach the children, ‘You should respect your elders.’ You will hardly hear, ‘You should love your elders.’ That is the problem.

Respect sows the first guilt in you that you are something inferior. It makes you feel separate from the other person to whom you show respect. On the other hand, love sows the seeds of joy and unity in you. It makes you feel connected with the other person and with everything in Existence. With respect, there is fear. With love, there is authentic respect as well as the scope for deep understanding to happen. With respect alone, not much understanding is possible. With love, there is a possibility for tremendous understanding and transformation to happen. Love by its very nature is transforming. If softens and melts you.

Words From The Master: Worry – a legacy passed down

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 2:	There is nothing to worry – Living enlightenment is enjoying life without worry.
Part 4:	Worry – a legacy passed down
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The problem is that parents expect their children to worry! If they don’t worry, they brand them as uncaring. It is possible to care without worrying. Care is doing, worry is chattering. There is no use chattering. Chattering is like trying to cross a bridge before it comes.

A young boy was driving his mother to the neighboring village. They were nearing the village when they remembered a particular bridge that used to be very old and unusable.

The mother got very anxious and said, ‘I will never cross that bridge by car.’
The son said, ‘Let’s see how it looks when we come to it.’

The mother said, ‘I’m sure the bridge will break if we attempt to cross it.’
The son replied, ‘Let’s see how strong it is. We won’t cross it without checking it carefully.’

The mother said, ‘If something happens to you or me, your father will never forgive me.’ She kept going on like this, becoming more and more upset.

Soon they reached the spot where the bridge stood. The bridge had been replaced with a new one!

Words From The Master

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 1:	Flow in Love – Living enlightenment is expressing overflowing love towards all.
Part 1:	What is Love?
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All human beings are born as loving beings. A newborn baby radiates causeless love. Does she know anyone around her at birth? No! Her energy is causeless love. As we grow, society instills fear and greed in us and we orient our love based on greed and fear. Then it is no longer causeless love. It is love with a reason. It becomes suffocating. We start feeling other emotions like jealousy, fear and anger. We experience only love with a cause, a reason. But with a little awareness and awakening, it is possible to reclaim our original love.

Words From The Master: Meditation – feel the Love overflowing in you

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 1:	Flow in Love – Living enlightenment is expressing overflowing love towards all.
Part 18:	Meditation – feel the Love overflowing in you
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Sit down comfortably by yourself and close your eyes.

Focus on your heart region. Exclude everything else. Focus only on the heart.

Visualize your heart as an endless reservoir from where blessings can flow.

Feel every heartbeat deeply. Let every beat resound throughout you.

Between the heartbeats, feel the energy of love happening.

In the deepest parts of your body, mind and soul, the love energy is waiting to be acknowledged.

Invite the love energy of the heart to flow and fill these deepest parts of your body, mind and soul.

Slowly open your eyes.

Words From The Master: Awareness – the benign virus!

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 2:	There is nothing to worry – Living enlightenment is enjoying life without worry.
Part 6:	Awareness – the benign virus!
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Awareness is nothing but bringing our focus to exactly what is happening in and around us. It is witnessing. Anything that we watch with awareness will dissolve. That is the power of awareness, whether it is physical pain, mental pain, worry, or something else. When we watch with awareness, we stop the conflict somewhere within us. We start moving with the natural flow of things.

When we watch worry with awareness, we focus light on exactly how worry is created, how it exists. Once this happens, the worry starts to dissolve and clarity starts happening.

Words From The Master: See what is as it IS – and move on

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 2:	There is nothing to worry – Living enlightenment is enjoying life without worry.
Part 3:	See what is as it IS – and move on
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Many people get worried about what they see in their dreams and come to me for interpretations. I tell them that we are unable to even accept what happens in reality, then why bother about what happens in our dreams?

On day, a man dreamt a strange dream and became very curious to know what the dream meant. He went to his master, told him about the dream and asked for an explanation.

The master told him, ‘Come to me with dreams that come to you in your wakeful state. We will work them out. The dreams of your sleep belong neither to my wisdom, nor to your imagination.’

If you are still worried about your dreams, you should know that dreams tell you about the state of your mind during the day. Learn from your dreams and think how to transform the mind during the daytime. For example, if you think too much about lust when your are awake, your dreams will be lustful. If you worry too much about passing with high grades, you will write exams in your dreams! If you worry too much about relationships, you will fight with someone in your dream. So wake up to what your dreams indicate to you. There is nothing more to interpret from your dreams. Wake up and see what is as it IS.

Words From The Master: Worry and dilemma – our inner software

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 2:	There is nothing to worry – Living enlightenment is enjoying life without worry.
Part 5:	Worry and dilemma – our inner software
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One more thing is that when we fall into this software, this worry, again and again, we often end up in dilemma.

What is a dilemma? It is moving back and forth when making a decision. The moving happens because there are so many thoughts inside you trying to put their signatures on your final decision! There is a great conflict between these thoughts because they were recorded at different times and under different circumstances. So they conflict with each other when a decision has to be made. This conflict becomes your dilemma. For each person, the dilemma is different. There are no standards or rules for a dilemma.

Words From The Master: See what is as it IS – and move on

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Excerpt From:	Living Enlightenment
Chapter 1:	You Are Your Emotions
Section 2:	There is nothing to worry – Living enlightenment is enjoying life without worry.
Part 3:	See what is as it IS – and move on
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A small story:

One disciple kept asking the master, ‘Master, where is paradise?’
Finally one day, the master asked him, ‘Do you really want to know?’
The disciple sat up and said, ‘Yes!’

The master said, ‘Alright, my first disciple Hemachandra is in paradise.’ After saying these words the master closed his eyes and went into meditation.

The disciple knew it would be a long time before the master opened his eyes. So, he went and asked some of the disciples if they knew where Hemachandra lived. No one seemed to know.

Finally one disciple said, ‘I know how to guide you there, but I have never been there myself. It is in a deep valley beyond a range of ice covered mountains.’
The disciple wrote down the directions carefully and went back to the master. He told him, ‘Master, I wish to pay a visit to Hemachandra!’
The master was absorbed deeply in some work. Without even looking up he said, ‘Go ahead.’

The disciple started on his journey. He walked for many days, passing through sun, rain, snow, and what not. He became exhausted, on the verge of death. It took him one hundred days to reach the valley. When he finally reached it he looked at the valley and thought, ‘This valley doesn’t look all that great. I have seen many more beautiful valleys. Why did the master call this paradise?’

He looked around and walked further and finally found Hemachandra’s hut. Hemachandra was very pleased to see him. He served him food and asked how the master and other disciples were doing.

All along, the disciple was thinking to himself, ‘Master called this place paradise? I can’t believe it.’

After a week-long stay he left and returned to his master. It took him another one hundred days to return home.

He went straight to the master and stated, ‘You said that the place is paradise. But what I saw was the most ordinary place ever!’

The master said, ‘Oh god! At the time of your enquiry, had you been more explicit about your intention, I would have told you the truth.’

The disciple asked, ‘What is the truth?’
The master replied, ‘Hemachandra is not in paradise. Paradise is in him!’

When you live close to Existence, without any expectation, seeing what is as it is and finding the blessings in it, you will carry heaven in you! Heaven is not geographical, it is psychological. It is not physical, it is mental. If you decide, you can be in heaven right now.