You are eccentric!

Your being is always centered. Your mind is always at the periphery.

Your mind constantly seeks outward led by the senses. Your being stays centered at the core and is directed inwards. You are constantly tugged between the center and the perimeter. When you are at the periphery you are mad, truly mad. You are overcome with fear and greed. You are consumed by lust, desire of power and wealth.

When you at the center, you are Siva. You are in cosmic Consciousness.

Over time, you develop the capability to stay some where in between. You have no choice. You have to choose madness otherwise, because your mind will not let stay at the center. You become eccentric, moving only briefly back and forth between the bliss of your core and the illusions of your periphery.

At the periphery your senses control you; they make merry. Once in a while, if you are intelligent, you realize that you are getting nowhere. You go wherever your senses lead you and try to enjoy the sense objects presented to you. Over time the enjoyment decreases; you need more and more of the same object, while the enjoyment gets less and less. You are about to get addicted. Some bit of intelligence in you warns to get out.

You move away from the periphery and try to move towards the center where you have experienced brief moments of great peace and happiness. Your awareness does not last long. Your mind gets restless and you go back to your old ways. You now move back towards the periphery.

Please understand that at the peripheral level you are in the grip of the need to survive and possess. You are governed by your ego, or ‘I’, based survival needs and ‘mine’ the need to possess. Your fear of losing your identity and your greed to possess more and more are the two strong forces that keep you tethered to the periphery.

Your ego reduces when you realize your connectivity with others, and when you understand that you can collaborate with others far more effectively than if you compete. Your need to possess more and more decreases when you develop the awareness in enjoying what you have with you, instead of rushing to acquire more.

As you move from being eccentric to the center, you move away from the past and future to the present moment. You move away from suffering into bliss.

Nithyananda
www.nithyananda.org

Words, Words and Words

Imagine for a moment that the first half of this column is empty. Imagine that the tape you are listening to you is silent and has no content for just two minutes. What happens?

Your mind races. Thoughts flood you. What has happened, you wonder, what has gone wrong? Why are there no words?

Nothing has gone wrong, nothing at all. Your mind cannot tolerate silence; that is all. Thoughts and words are a call of your Consciousness telling you that your center is unfilled.

There are two kinds of people. One kind is the people who follow words and seek meaning behind the words. Another kind is those people who ignore the meaning and seek the source of thoughts. The first kind is the Commissar and the second kind is the Yogi.

Seeking words and thoughts cannot fulfill you. When you seek words you move into the outer world. You move into the space of sense objects, which results in pain or pleasure. However many times you may experience the physical or sensual pleasure led by your thoughts, you still keep seeking the same pleasure. What one calls karma, is really the effect of these unfulfilled desires.

The meaning of thoughts and words is not to provoke movement towards these external experiences that can never be fulfilled but to move towards the center, the core of your being. Only there you will find the comfort in silence.

Words soothe your superficial mind the same way as scratching an itch seems to provide some comfort. In actual fact it makes the problem worse. It is the same with words. More words you use more confused you are. Be careful of all these scholars and philosophers who use highly complex language and words to propound their theories. They themselves do not understand what they are saying, so they are forced to confuse others by using complexity as a tool.

Whenever you ask questions, more questions arise. This is seen as the measure of intelligence in our system of education. When one really understands, one realizes two things. Firstly, one realizes that questions and answers do no lead to any understanding at all. Secondly, one realizes that understanding happens when thoughts cease.

Truth resides in silence. Truth resides in contemplation. As you move inwards towards the source of words and thoughts, mind become still in simplicity.
This stillness, this silence leads to fulfillment.

Nithyananda
www.nithyananda.org

Don’t you want to be born again?

To many followers of Western religions reincarnation is a difficult concept to accept.

One is so used to being told that this life is all that we have that the offer of another life, in truth, many more lives, can at the same time be very exciting and very dangerous. It is an adventure.

The Western religions and their followers believe we all live only once. What happens after death is a mystery. Because of this, the focus of the present life, sensory pleasures and material benefits is intense. It is do or die, before you die.

Western culture therefore has rightly focused on living life to its maximum in this one and only life time. It has developed much better than its Eastern counterpart, in everything related to the external world of sensory enjoyment, including science.

With Eastern religions it is a lot more relaxed. You have many lives to live. If you have not achieved in this life you still have a chance in the next and the one after. It is also an adventure. Like some one said, life is really like a candy box! You really do not know what you are going to get in your next life!

Any amount of empirical evidence, which now shows that reincarnation is a reality, is difficult to accept because of our conditioning. It is also as a result of the belief that life is all about body. The Western mind has only a vague concept of the spirit and soul, of which the Bible says a lot. The belief is that what is intangible and what cannot be held in one’s arms does not exist. This is the same conditioning that led to the belief for many centuries that the Sun revolved around the Earth.

Why is it more threatening to accept that the spirit returns to another body rather than believe that it burns in hell or frolics in an unseen heaven? The simple reason is that it is easier for religions and society to control us through greed and fear through the concepts of hell and heaven; that’s why.

Once you realize that you will return to another body on earth instead of being consigned to a heaven or hell forever, reduces the pressure on you to conform. You have the time to look within you and find the truth for yourself. You decide how you must live, not others.

Nithyananda
www.nithyananda.org

Why we cannot tolerate criticism!

A lady came to me complaining that she is hurt by even small criticisms coming from others. She said she was very sensitive.

I asked her to stop using that word. I said, ‘You are not sensitive. A really sensitive person will be porous; she will allow the words to pass through her. Only arrogant people get hurt. If you are hurt, please understand that you are arrogant. You are strong like a stone, which is why words come and hit you.’

A sensitive person would have allowed the words pass through her; she will never suffer. Even if someone is deliberately rude, a sensitive person understands where such a person is coming from and is not defensive.

Suffering is always from arrogance, never from sensitivity. A person who is sensitive will never suffer. A sensitive person will suffer on account of another person in distress, not for oneself.

You suffer from words when you stop them, when you resist them, when you create your own meaning out of them. When we do not create our own meanings out of words, we do not suffer. We play with words. We always choose nice words to support our ego. We do not say, ‘I am hurt because I am arrogant.’ We always use polished words such as, ‘I am hurt because I am sensitive.’ Please don’t cheat yourself with words. Let your words be unfiltered by your ego.

Let me tell you a small story:

Once, a contractor wanted to donate a sports car to an official. The official refused, saying, ‘I am an honest person and I cannot think of accepting this gift.’ The contractor asked him, ‘In that case how would it be if I sell you this car for ten rupees?’ The official replied immediately, ‘In that case, I will have two cars!’

When an untruth is wrapped in gift packing, you forget you have a problem. You accept it without a murmur. However, when truth is presented bare, you do protest. Presented bare, truth hurts; ego cannot tolerate truth easily.

We are so concerned about politically and socially correct statements, it seems no longer acceptable for anyone to speak the truth. But it seems to perfectly acceptable to lie in a politically correct manner.

Ramakrishna says beautifully, ‘Let your words and mind be straightened.’ Whatever is, let it be offered straight without filtering. Learn to accept truth bare. At least you will know you have a problem that you can solve.


Nithyananda
www.nithyananda.org

Who created the Universe?

From the earliest days of humanity there has been intense curiosity about how it all came about; how man and woman were created and how the Universe was created.

Each religion, each culture developed its own answers, its mythology. Christianity and Islam adopted the Judaic version of creation, as laid out in the Book of Genesis. God made the Universe in six days and rested on the seventh. He created man and from the man’s rib made the woman. Hindu mythology had a different version. So did other cultures and religions.

Was God then independent of the Universe? Where was He before the Universe came into being? Where would He go after the Universe is destroyed?

Buddha said: Universe was never created. Universe will never die. Universe has been in existence always, and will be in existence always.

Sanatana Dharma, the philosophy of Hinduism, supports Buddha. The Brahman always was, is and will be. Brahman is Existence. Existence is the universe. There never was time it did not exist, and there never will be a time it would not exist.

Different parts of the Universe will die and new ones will be created. The Big Bangs and Black Holes will occur at different spaces and different times in the Universe randomly and in chaotic manner. But Universe will exist forever and ever. While modern science talks about Big Bang theory, no scientist has an answer to what was there before to cause the Big Bang, if it is considered to the seminal act of creation.

Science has as of today no answer even to how living matter was created. A-biogenesis, the emergence of living matter from non-living material is still a mystery, though there may be hundreds of unproven theories. How the first particle of the chain of life, the amino acid or its constituents, came into existence is still a question mark.

Hindu scriptures say that living matter came out of the energy of the elements of the Universe. Taittreya Upanishad explains how from the energy of cosmos arose all other energies such as space, air, fire, water and earth, finally resulting in plants and humans. Science has a long way to go before it has an alternative explanation.

After reading the Upanishad, Einstein remarked: Spirituality starts where Science ends. Unlike most other scientists, Einstein understood that there was never a time that Universe and Life did not exist.

Nithyananda
www.nithyananda.org

You are destined to have freewill!

People spend more time arguing about whether they are driven by destiny or acting out of freewill than doing what they should do. They forget that they waste their time of their own accord, their own sweet free will!

There is no such thing as future. Future does not exist till you create it in your present moment, here and now. We all waste our time regretting or savoring what happened in the past and speculating about what would like in the future. Neither is of any productive value. There is nothing we can do about the past, it is gone; it is history. There is nothing that you can do thinking about the future; you have to act now to make your future. Your future is in your hands, and your hands only. Trying to fashion your future based on past experiences is like driving car looking at the rear view mirror. All you will meet is disaster!

We are comfortable being told that we are destined to do certain things. We are relieved when we learn that our sins and problems are because of our past karma, because then we can disown responsibility.

Be very clear, there is no such thing as karma, the way you understand it. Your unfulfilled desires shape your actions and this is karma. As of now your future is driven by your fantasies, your unfulfilled desires, and what you do not have. When the product arrives, you ask, who ordered this, not I!

Start being comfortable with what you have. Enjoy what you have acquired instead of hankering after what you do not have. Spirituality is not about renouncing in the sense of what you understand. There is nothing that you have now that you need to renounce. Nothing at all. Just renounce what you do not have, your fantasies. You will see your life change in front of your eyes.

When you focus on enjoying what you have now, you will have to focus on the present instead of wasting time speculating and regretting. Your entire mindset will be on action. Because this action is not tinged with regret and speculation, you will automatically fall into what Krishna refers to in the Gita as the action without expectation.

When you learn to stay in the present, your freewill destines you to be a true Yogi, one who is truly uniting material and spiritual life. You will be in eternal bliss, nithyananda.

Nithyananda
www.nithyananda.org

Truth is stronger than fact!

West has always focused on facts, while the East has focused on truth. As a consequence the West moved forward in science while the East moved forward in spirituality.

When the great sages of the East looked inwards and realized the truth of their existence, they expressed these in the form of scriptures, the sruti and sastra. In order that the common man could understand these spiritual truths, some of these masters wrote the purana, the epics.

These epics created role models who exemplified these truths that they had experienced in a form that anyone could understand. The purana had characters like Rama and Krishna who the ordinary person could identify with and follow. These characters were based on truth not on fact. When Valmiki talks about the monkeys that occupied Kishkinda, the numbers he uses are so large that Kishkinda could not have physically held so many monkeys. What he is referring to is the impact of those monkeys upon Rama and his mission. When Krishna as a child killed monsters and when Hanuman lifted a mountain, the incidents were meant to convey the truth and impact of the incident upon human consciousness.

Incidents as recorded in the purana are metaphysical, not physical. They are not factual history but truthful experiences. Our sages recorded not day-to-day history, but only those incidents that impacted upon the collective consciousness.

When a scientist conducts an experiment to prove his theory, he does so in three dimensions. These are the easily understood dimensions of length, breadth and depth. A master goes beyond these in his inner experiments to discover truth. He travels in space and time as well. He experiences, expresses and records what is permanent in different space and time dimensions. It may be difficult for you to grasp and accept this, but this is the truth. That is why our scriptures have withstood the test of time and cultures.

Expressions of the experiences of our great masters were recorded as sruti. The rules and regulations that they recommended based on these experiences for societal organization were the smruti. Sruti was the truth and permanent. Smruti were facts that needed to change over time and space.

Spirituality is based on sruti. Religion is based on smruti. Both need to be used for every day life, as theory and practice. However, one needs to understand the difference between truth and facts. Truth transcends facts; spirituality transcends religions.

Nithyananda
www.nithyananda.org

The world is not your enemy, it is You!

Usually, as an individual ego, we always see the World around as our enemy.

We are all like small waves in a big ocean. However, suddenly, the wave starts thinking that the ocean is its enemy. When it is created, when it exists or when it drops, the wave is always connected to the ocean. But, the wave starts thinking that it is in some way different from the ocean. Not only that, the wave starts fighting with the ocean.

For the wave to realize that it is fully connected with the ocean, it has to be consumed by the ocean. The ego has to dissolve. The individual identity of the wave has to disappear. This is the first and last step to enlightenment.

We all live in the illusion of our own self-created identities. Each adopts another wave as its father, mother, wife or child and relates with these. However, ultimately, each one of these related waves disappears just like the wave itself.

Yet, the impermanence of its own existence as a wave as well as that of other waves around it, to whom it feels related, does not sink in easily. You have to rise beyond the individuality of your existence as a wave to be able to see that you are part of the larger whole of the ocean of this world.

If you look at the human body itself, you can see this oneness so beautifully exemplified. The human body consists of trillions of cells living in total harmony. If you look at the individual cell itself though, it has intelligence by itself.

However, when it is a part of the larger whole, the body, it is not the intelligence of the individual cell only at work but it is the collective intelligence of the body mind system that governs.

An enlightened master, Suzuki lived in Japan. When his master passed away, he started weeping profusely. One person asked him, ‘You are an enlightened person; you shouldn’t be crying on your master’s death.’

Suzuki replied, ‘My master was the most extraordinary man on planet earth.’ The person asked him, ‘What was so extraordinary about him?’

Suzuki replied, ‘I have never seen such an extraordinary person who thought he was the most ordinary man.’

In ordinary life, every average person thinks he is extraordinary. When you feel that you have undergone the maximum suffering, your ego feels good. Only when your enemy is big, you feel big. When your enemy is small, you feel small.


Nithyananda
www.nithyananda.org

Stop seeking, you will find your God!

All around us, we come across people who are running towards God. Or who they think God is!

They spend so much time and effort in seeking God in all kinds of places. Often, after they believe they have found Him in one place of worship, they will again begin their search in some other new place. They become professional seekers.

Even those who deny God, the atheists, are seekers. They too are seeking their own version of God!

In reality, seekers do not ever truly find God. This is because in the inner world, the logic is very different. The process of seeking is not the same as in the material world, where things exist in separate physical forms. In the spiritual realm, God is not at the end of a journey, He is not the achievement – He is just in the Awareness.

God is already in each one of us, only we have lost the sensitivity to know His presence! When God is all around us, and inside us – it means that we cannot run towards Him, for in which direction shall we choose to run? He is everywhere! This is the Awareness we need to have to reach God.

This is in fact true of all goals. Goals are not reached by frantically running towards them. That makes us tense and creates barriers in the quest. The path should be the quest, not the destination. If we move towards the destination without expectations, if we work towards goals with no attachments to failure or success, we will find that that we become far more productive. We would then work with no stress at all, completely focussed on the journey, the process, and the present.

To work in the present in our daily life we need to trust life itself; we need to trust existence or God. This abiding trust in existence is actually the path to God. But we spoil this path by judging all events against goals set by our minds.

When we sincerely make efforts, immersing ourselves in trust, whatever happens will be good for us. This is what I mean by saying that you actually achieve your goals when you stop running towards them.

Zen masters say: When you see Buddha on the road, kill Him!

If you see Him, or think you see Him, he is not real. When you stop seeking, you will find Him. Seeking makes you tense. It makes you miss your real purpose.


Nithyananda
www.nithyananda.org

Possess Nothing, enjoy Everything

Do you respect a beggar? Do you disrespect a rich man?

In today’s world, people are evaluated only on the basis of their possessions and status. A person’s worth in society is decided on the basis of how much he or she owns. Apart from his physical wealth, his power and influence become important. Success in life is related to ownership of assets and extent of influence.

In reality, nothing can be more damaging to a person’s real success in the world than possessions and status. The desire to possess rises from comparison and jealousy. If your neighbor buys a new refrigerator your house gets warmer. From early childhood we are conditioned to desire what others have.

When we are not able to possess something, we are unhappy and consider it a failure. We become happy when we do acquire what we want. This happiness, however, lasts for a brief period. It lasts till we find one more thing to covet. Happiness seems to be in the acquisition, in the chase rather than through enjoyment of what we have.

Ramana Maharishi says: Till you get something you want, it looks as big as a mountain. Once you get it, the same thing becomes the size of a mustard seed!

Greed drives us. Greed and envy are the root cause of all our sorrow. Gautama Buddha said that all suffering is caused by human desire. Buddha was not referring to genuine need based desires when he said this; he was referring to the unending stream of wants that we develop based on comparison.

Joy is the natural state of a human being. Joy happens when there is no comparison. Joy happens when there is no attachment to an acquisition. It gives rise to sorrow when the desire for possessions imprisons us within the boundaries of time and space. When we recall a happy time, we keep trying to possess that time again. A desire rooted in the past becomes the driver of our present state of mind.

Stop wanting to acquire more and more. Enjoy what you have. I keep saying this: Enjoy what you have; there is no need to renounce what you already possess. Renounce only what you do not have. You do not have to move into a forest as a monk or sanyasi to find happiness. You can find it in the middle of your worldly comforts

All you have to do is to renounce your fantasies. That is the gateway to Bliss!


Nithyananda
www.nithyananda.org

Ignorance cannot lead to liberation!

Again and again we confuse spirituality with religion. As I have said before, at the very basic level, spirituality is flowering of internal awareness. Religion is a very poor external tool that pretends to achieve this.

Religions, as they evolve, can converge towards spirituality. But this happens at the individual level, through individual effort, and not through any institutional support. The institutional support may help, if you see many others moving in the same path with the right qualities, but it can never substitute individual effort that we call sadhana or tapas, practice and penance.

At the lowest level, religions can be based on ignorance. Unfortunately, many religions are. They force you into believing what they say without questioning. They say this is what God said. They do not give you the freedom to approach God.

Ignorance based religions subjugate you. Their only purpose is to control you. The problem with unquestioning faith is that there is no awareness behind it and it can be destroyed in a second. Secondly, there is no God who is interested in laying down dos and don’ts for you. That is the job of control-freak humans, not an all seeing compassionate God. Neither He has time to lay down regulations for you nor the inclination to watch over your movements to check whether you are doing right or wrong.

Unquestioning beliefs, based on regulations, can only lead to bondage. Such bondage leads to intolerance of others and beliefs of others. It leads to the fanatic belief that I am alone right. That is what leads to terrorism and all other negative acts against humanity.

Shedding of this ignorance and moving to a greater level of awareness about ourselves and all that exists around us helps to move to higher planes of existence. This can only be done at the plane of aloneness, the plane when you are all in one. When the ‘I’ merges into a compassionate embrace with the ‘all’ in this universe, you move up and you are liberated. Yes, it can and will happen.

Institutions cannot do this for you. They create boundaries, whereas liberation is breaking down boundaries. Institutions fragment so that they can control, but spirituality is about integration. Question your beliefs? If those beliefs do not work in this time and space, you have nothing to lose by losing them.

That will be your first step in moving towards Nithyananda, eternal bliss.


Nithyananda
www.nithyananda.org

You are not equal, you are Unique!

A monastery is not an ashram.

In a monastery there is hierarchy; there is order; there are rules, regulations, and how much work each person has to do.

In an ashram, there are no man made rules and regulations. No one measures how much one does and how much another does. There is chaos, outwardly. There is no equality on terms of responsibility or duties in an ashram; but there is uniqueness. Each person in an ashram does what he or she is best suited for.

In an ashram, an inmate does not work out of fear, greed, motivation or necessity. An ashramite, a resident of an ashram, works out of gratitude. Once people start measuring what they are doing and what others are doing in comparison, you create a political organization, not a spiritual organization.
People mostly work out of fear and greed; all organizations control people out of fear and greed. A few graduate out of fear and greed and then get caught in the need for attention, or jealousy and comparison to prove that they are some way superior to others. Even those who shed all these negativities retain their ego, need for an identity. When all these are shed, one moves up in surrender, working out of sheer gratitude.
A cook in a monastery cooked in the monastery for thirty years. He never bothered to be around the master, rarely attended the master’s discourses. When it was time for the master to leave the planet earth, he called every one to announce who would be the next heir to his seat in that monastery. All of them were expecting one of the disciples very close to the master would succeed him as the master. The master, however, appointed the cook as his successor. He said to his disciples, you have been listening to my discourses all these years, but this cook just lived my teachings. Just with these words, the master made the cook enlightened and capable of being his true successor.
People are not equal. Each one comes with one’s karma and with different attitude. As long as the Master is around, He will take care of every thing. When Master is not there, the whole thing will become dharma, set procedures. When the Master is there every thing will become moksha, liberation. That is the difference between dharma and moksha. Work for moksha. That is the difference between an ashram and a monastery.
Nithyananda
www.nithyananda.org

Words From The Master - 19 May 2008

Cycle of desires and aspirations

A MIRACLE happened in the life of a stone cutter. A fairy appeared before him and told him, “From today, you will become whoever and whatever you would like to be.” The stone cutter had always wanted to be rich, very rich and he wished he could become the king, and instantly he became the king. He slept happily that night, “there is no one more powerful than me from now.” The next morning, the stone-cutter who had then become king, wanted to go round his city in his chariot and called his minister. The minister said: Oh king! It has been raining heavily from yesterday and you can’t ride in the chariot.

The king thought: Is the rain more powerful than me? Then I should become the rain. Forthwith, he became the rain. He was extremely happy as the rain and flooded the city. Suddenly, there came a strong gust of wind which scattered away the clouds and stopped the rain. Very angry at this, the rain thought: is the wind more powerful than me! All right, then I must change as the wind. The rain instantly changed into wind.

The wind became very happy and blew hard and fast. It uprooted very big trees and destroyed many houses too. But, try as it might it could not do any thing with the mountains.

“What? Are the mountains and the rocks in it more powerful than me? I then wish to become a mountain.” The moment he thought so, he turned into a mountain. At dawn, a stone cutter came to the mountain and began to cut on the rock face. The mountain could do nothing. Every cut and blow hurt terribly. Even as the mountain thought, “Is this stone cutter so powerful that I cannot stop him even though he hurts me? I may then as well be a stonecutter” the mountain changed into a stone-cutter. The stone cutter returned to his starting point. One cycle was completed. How he will be hereafter depends upon his desires. This is what continuously happens due to desires.

The stone cutter would not have continued upon such a cycle if at any stage he had remained contented and happy with whatever nature has bestowed on him, and without any pride whatsoever. It was only because, at every stage of his desires, he did not feel fulfilled that he had to go frantically searching: what next? What next?

What we call Karma, is the collection of unfulfilled desires and unsatisfied aspirations that we accumulate during our lives.

Words From The Master - 18 May 2008

Enter the zone of quantum bliss

BLISS is continuously happening within us without gap of time and space. As long as we associate our bliss with a particular time or a space, we will miss the bliss. We then think that the gap between sufferings is bliss. In life, we seem to experience happiness only in gaps between sufferings.

If you associate pleasure with a particular space, say a fantasy home, or with an object such as a car or with a particular person, you feel happy when you are with these things. You crave to be around that space, object or person. Possession starts, and possession always takes revenge by trying to own the object or person. When you try to possess, you reduce people to matter. Possession always gives rise to hatred and jealousy because of your dependency on the person or object.

Associating bliss with time also leads to suffering. When you try to bring back the time that you felt happiness to experience it again, you somehow find that the happiness is no longer the same. The joy is lacking. After a few attempts you feel depressed and sick. You don’t feel the energy of happiness.

When you understand that happiness does not depend on time and space, you enter the zone of quantum bliss. When you associate happiness with time and space, you stay within boundaries of suffering.

For example, you have a great desire to eat a sweet. When you eat the sweet, you feel joy. You associate that feeling of joy with the sweet and you wish to eat more of the sweet. If you keep eating more and more of it, at one point in time, you feel revulsion not joy; you cannot eat any more. If your joy was really associated with the sweet, then the joy should only multiply, is it not? But it doesn’t happen that way. What is it then that gave you that joy?

What actually happens is, when you feel that you are enjoying an object, the moment that object is near you, the number of thoughts in your mind reduces, and a feeling of peace and joy expresses itself. But you associate this feeling with the object, the sweet! The joy is actually because of the reduced frequency of your thoughts. When the frequency of thoughts reduces, you experience bliss, which is independent of any outer world object. When you experience this for longer periods of time, you have taken the jump into quantum bliss.

Be blissful!

Words From The Master - 15 May 2008

Verily, guilt is the gateway to hell!

WE ALL have our own ideas about where we shall go after death. We all have our belief systems that define what we should do to go to what we believe are heaven and hell.

People worry constantly about heaven and hell and ask me again and again whether they will go to hell because of what they did. It is religions that tend to control through fear of hell in a world that we are yet to reach. All you need to fear is the hell in this life as a consequence of your actions and not hell in another life or after this life.

We are never punished for our sins; we are punished by them.

People believe that sins are punished after a time, since the wheels of God grind surely but slowly. They are therefore not overly concerned about immediate repercussions.

You never know: God may forget, He may have other more important things to do, and if He does remember I can always bribe Him to let me off. Sad to say, many sins attract immediate punishment; though the punishment may not seem either tangible or connected.

Guilt is often the punishment we inflict upon ourselves for our sins. Even for petty sins, we carry our guilt a long time. When we drop the guilt we drop the sin as well. A person committing what may be socially termed unacceptable with no feeling of guilt is not a sinner, nor suffers punishment.

There is no greater sin than refusing to let go of one’s past. There is no greater sin than hanging onto one’s feeling of guilt and constantly punishing oneself for it.

Once we learn the lesson from our past mistake and determine not to repeat it, we should drop the guilt. Worrying constantly about past mistakes that you have truly regretted only creates problems.

Confessing to a sin as a ritual without any real sense of regret and feeling cleansed quite often makes one ready to repeat it with greater fervor. Doing this only enhances the coffers of religious institutions, does not in any way enhance your spiritual status.

To redress a sin one must cleanse one’s own self internally, truly regret the sin and be aware not to repeat it.

Meditation brings that awareness to you and into you. Meditation liberates you from guilt and sin.

Words From The Master - 14 May 2008

Choices are constraints

NO CHOICE in life is without a cost. Each decision to choose something necessarily costs us the option of keeping something else. In most cases having the cake and eating it is just an illusion.

In many cases we choose the wrong option. Without the power of foresight choice is a gamble, and as with most gambles odds are theoretically even. Since human nature is to mourn losses far more than celebrate gains, end result of a sequence of choices is mostly dissatisfaction. Why must we choose? Why can’t we accept contradictions in life? Choices appear to give us freedom; in reality they constrain us instead of liberating 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, since there really is no choice.

Many seek to give up material life in search of a spiritual Truth. For them it is an obvious choice between what they think is a debilitating life of women, children and possessions that precludes any possibility of their ever finding lasting happiness and peace.

Not so. There is no need to choose between a material life and spiritual satisfaction. Both are perfectly possible to achieve together, as they can and do coexist.

A story in the Mahabharata goes thus: A young sage gets up from his morning prayers when a passing crow’s droppings foul him. In anger the Sage looks up and burns the crow. Satisfied with his power he walks to the nearest house and seeks food. The lady of the house is serving her husband and makes him wait. When she comes out to give him food, he stares at her in irritation. “Do you think I am a crow that you can burn,” she asks. Startled the Sage asks her how she knew. She tells him to go to a person in the nearby town who will explain. After a search the curious Sage ends up at the town’s butcher. The butcher asks the Sage whether the housewife sent him. The Sage is startled again and asks the butcher how both he and the lady knew things that only the Sage knew. The butcher explains to a chastened Sage that the mere performance of their own dharma had made both of them enlightened.

To be enlightened one does not have to choose between material and spiritual life. All one has to do is to live in the present with no regrets about the past and speculations about the future. Life is all about living with contradictions sensibly and in balance.

Words From The Master - 13 May 2008

Beyond instinct and intellect

ANIMALS eat, sleep, hunt and mate with no thoughts. Instinct is their nature. Instinct keeps them happy. Human beings work at a different plane altogether.

The human mind works at three levels: instinct, intellect and intuition. When you work through instinct, your mind decides subconsciously or unconsciously, as in the case of an animal. However, this is the nature of a human being and it makes you unhappy. This instinctive response from the unconscious is very much faster than the conscious mind response, and can be very useful when we are in dangerous situations. Most other times, these responses are negative and based on embedded memories that drive us into irrational decisions. We respond as animals. Most such responses result in actions that leave us drained.

From the days of Descartes, we believe in working through our intellects. But when we work through the intellect, we work at a conscious level but not energetically, not enthusiastically; we work mechanically; like a programmed robot, a computer.

When you work at the third level, at the level of intuition, however, you suddenly know what is right though you may not know how; more importantly you feel energised. You are presented with many choices, and suddenly one pops up. Intuition gives you the power to decide and the energy to implement.

Be very clear, if you feel guilty about a decision that you have just made you have operated out of instinct; if you are confused about that decision, you have operated at intellect level. Intuition alone will help you to be clear and also provide you the energy to go ahead. The benchmark of intuition is happiness, satisfaction inside as well as outside.

How to awaken this intuition? All you need to do is to give your conscious mind a rest. You may ask, how. There is a state of mind in which we are self-aware but exist without thoughts. Western science or psychology has no term for this. This is what Hindu sages called the turiya or samadhi state, which is one of deep meditation. You live here intuitively.

Whenever you find time, give appointment to yourself; some part of your being wants to express itself more. Give yourself 30 minutes everyday to meditate. It takes only two or three days of meditation to tune you into this higher energy of intuition and creativity.

Words From The Master - 12 May 2008

Accept guilt and move on

ANANDA is bliss. Nanda is something that can die out, disappear and related to suffering. Ananda is that which can never disappear from your being, it is bliss. It is not joy. Joy brings suffering in its wake. Ananda is beyond joy. It is eternal bliss, nitya ananda.

Pleasure is what you feel through your senses based on an outer object; music, a fragrance, a beautiful sight, physical touch. When you meet nature, a mountain, a sea, a forest, you feel joy. When you feel ecstasy without sensory inputs or nature, not even inputs of forms of God, only from your inner core of energy, your atman, without any external input, it is bliss. It can be with no reason. It comes from with in. That is Ananda.

Yoga: it’s important to understand what yoga is not. Yoga is not physical exercises or breath control; these are but a part of Yoga. Yoga is union; the union with the divine; union with the cosmic power. It is chitta vritti nirodaha: it’s the cessation of the mind, to take it beyond the mind, to be one with existence. The blissful technique to unite your own self with the divine is ananda yoga, using bliss itself to unite.

Life has no goal, it has only purpose. Living has a purpose. If life is a goal it’s a rat race; even when you win this race you are still a rat. The very living is bliss when you go without a goal, only with a purpose of enjoying the path.

You cannot look at God as a goal. You cannot run towards God. In inner world, logic is very different. Goals are not reached by running towards them. Vivekananda says: Arise, awake, and do not stop till the goal is reached. I say: arise, awake, stop; goal is reached.

Seeking makes you tense, will make you miss your purpose. In a relaxation course you are so tense that you lose the purpose.

I say accept all guilt, all mistakes, and all failures; even if you cannot accept, accept that you cannot accept. You will then relax; guilt will drop from your mind.

If your mind is tense it can never stop. Only when you relax it can cease. You have to drop goal orientation. If you accept what you are, what is, mind will lose its roots. When mind is, bliss is not. It is either mind or bliss.

Words From The Master - 08 May 2008

Be unclutched become free

YOUR entire belief in rationality and logic is based on the premise that your thinking is sequential and it follows a pattern. This is a lie.

Buddhists say mind is a monkey. That’s very true. Your thoughts are not sequential. Your thoughts are independent of each other. They are not connected. They are illogical and irrational. They are like the bubbles in a fish tank which appear connected; but there is no connection between one bubble and another. They are all independent.

Just try this. For a few minutes, truthfully, write down all your thoughts as they occur to you. When you read what you have written again, it will appear to you that what you have written is a madman’s diary. Nothing will be connected, nothing will seem logical. You would have jumped from past to present, from future to past, all with no logical connection whatsoever.

It is only when you link thoughts to one another, when you try and provide a logical and rational sequence to thoughts with the help of your mind, you invite suffering. The pleasurable experiences or painful experiences that you had 10 years ago, five years ago, two years ago and yesterday and today are all independent of each other. They are unconnected. Yet you try and fit them in a pattern and then expect that pattern to repeat. This expectation leads to disappointment and all suffering.

Each thought that you have comes after another only when you have renounced the first one. Unless you renounce the thought of sitting you cannot stand up. Unless you renounce the thought of standing you can not walk. This tendency to link thoughts and form a pattern is what creates your value systems and beliefs, your samskaras, the root cause of all your problems.

It is the pattern that the mind weaves and not the ground reality that you experience that drives your life. Connected thoughts are the foundation of all illusions and suffering. Once you drop the connection between thoughts you can go to the source of thoughts, the truth of who you are, where you come from.

When you drop the connection between thoughts, you will then realise the futility of that connection except in causing you suffering. When you realise that thoughts arise in you at random and not in any sequence and are always unconnected, you then drop into the present. You become unclutched, you become free. You then regain your Self.

Words From The Master - 07 May 2008

Log out of your inner chatter!

MIND is in constant inner chatter. It starts as soon as you wake up. If you record all of your inner chatter you need a recorder for all your waking hours, say 15 hours. All this chatter creates problems unconsciously. You are comparing yourself unfavourably with others. Of these 15 hours of tape, all spoken by you, why don’t you convert the chatter to give you positiveness and freedom? No man is so poor that he cannot create words that create bliss. We are not poor in capacity, only in consciousness.

This 15 hours of tape are of our karmic system. Ten hours say I cannot, only five say I can.

Reverse it; let at least ten hours of tape create freedom in you, to start with. When all 15 hours give you freedom from chatter, you have reached liberation.

Now your mind is locked into one space, as an engineer, as a doctor, whatever; you cannot touch any other part. All of you are endowed with memory of past life, yet you do not recollect. Why? That’s because you are so caught up in this life’s memories. If you can come out of, relax from, your mind, you can enter all sections of your mind. You can log in and log out. As of now you can only log in partly since you are afraid to log out. Is it possible to log out, walk out of inner chatter? Asks Buddha: when you have the capacity to create, don’t you have the capacity to walk out? Unconsciously you invite suffering. When everything is right you look for trouble. A guy living by a railway track is so used to the noise of trains that he wakes up if he cannot hear the sound. You are so habituated to the incessant inner chatter of worry that if it stops you miss it. If your worries are reduced you lose your importance. This world runs not because of us, but in spite of us.

Let us be a little more intelligent and use words that liberate us instead of making us addicted. Napoleon on his deathbed told his subordinates: place my hands out of the coffin so that people will know that even the great Emperor Napoleon carried nothing with him when he left this world.

When you drop your cravings, they may get fulfilled. When you keep craving even if they get fulfilled you are not content. Choose between filling and fulfilment.

Words From The Master - 06 May 2008

Dance your way to God!

THERE are several meditation techniques to fall in tune with the Divine. Techniques give us the experience of God. They are the essence of religion. One such technique is Dance, in the literal sense of the word and even otherwise!

Quantum physics has proven that the atom is made up of elements that are static and moving at the same time. A picture taken of this phenomenon reveals the resemblance it bears to the dancing deity — Nataraja. Scientists are proving every atom is vibrant. The whole of Cosmos is actually dancing with joy. Enjoying and celebrating every moment! Only man is still holding on to his prestige and ego, which are nothing but the labels stuck on him by society.

Dance is the ultimate technique to break free of the ego, to break free from the identity that man holds close to his heart. Dancing breaks your conditionings. You do not need to use the mind to dance; you dance from your Being. Dance is the outward expression of the inner joy when you fall into the joyous path.

Just like when you clap your hands and the birds fly off from the trees, so also, when you sing and dance in the name of the Divine, your karmas (past unfulfilled actions) fly away from you; you are liberated from them.

Children need not be taught to dance, they already are that way! Their inner intelligence knows how to balance their Energy in the centre of their Being and that is why they are so joyful all the time. But you are unable to handle them in that state and so you suppress them and make them dull. When you dance with your Being, you are so total and near to God.

Vaishnavism, the Hindu philosophy of duality preached by Saint Ramanuja, made a big contribution to recognise dance as a way to reach God. Followers of Ramanuja do namasankirtan i.e. singing and dancing for hours together, in the name of God. In Sufism, the mystic sect of Islam, the basic techniques for expressing bliss are dancing and whirling. Always the highest form of spirituality expresses itself through dance.

Take for example Krishna, Meera, Chaitanya, Ramakrishna, Tulsidas and Tukaram. All of them danced in ecstasy, expressing their love of God. Chaitanya says dancing is the best way of spreading bliss and joy. Ramakrishna says dancing is the ultimate technique to drop your ego. I tell you, don’t hold back, just dance your way to God!

Be Blissful!

Words From The Master - 05 May 2008

Happiness without reason

Two friends met after a long time. They decided to have lunch out. One was an actor, the other a psychiatrist. They were talking about what they had been doing after they had left college.

The actor was a very happy man. He said, “I have never been worried about anything. By God’s grace I am happily settled in life.”

The psychiatrist was listening. He asked, “How long have you been like this?”

Happiness is categorised with other emotions. We try to frame it in space and time.

We cannot understand the emotion when someone says that he is happy! It is difficult for us to believe him.

Great happiness and joy is ours. Enlightened masters are in this state all the time.

Happiness is the core of existence, of nature that surrounds us. But man somehow needs a reason to be happy.

If we are successful in say, business today, we are happy.

Then again if someone says something nice about us, we are happy. If we visit new places, we are happy.

But the moment you need a reason to be happy, it means that you do not know what real happiness is.

We choose to suffer because our ego is solid. When we are happy, our ego is threatened.

When we are happy without a reason, when there is no suffering, the ego is under threat. So we go back to our suffering. The ego revives. We believe there is a reason to live when we suffer.

Of course, each one of us has problems. But if you deal with them happily, in a grateful and prayerful mood, you will find that the problem simply disappearing in front of your eyes. But if you allow the problem to make you dull and depressed, you will remain in this mood.

Real happiness is the result of overflowing gratitude in oneself towards nothing in particular.

You may be grateful towards the Whole, towards Existence. This is real happiness; this is bliss.

This kind of happiness is happiness without choice.

The moment you are allowed to choose, you will choose between happiness and sorrow.

But to have no choice is Bliss. To choose is to suffer.

Real happiness can never be taken away from you because it came without reason.

If there is a reason behind happiness then something can happen, and can be taken away from you.

But because it has no reason it can never be taken away from you.

When you have found this kind of happiness, you have found the way to permanent happiness.

Words From The Master - 04 May 2008

Run with yourself

A man was doing penance in a jungle for God to appear. God took pity and appeared before him. He told the man to ask for anything he wanted. The man, a landlord, was overjoyed. He said he had lost all his wealth and wished to become wealthy again.

God took pity and told him that if he ran from dawn to dusk the next day, the entire area he covered would be his.

The following day the man ran as fast as he could even before dawn. It was noon and he was hungry but he was determined to not to stop running. In the evening, he was thirsty and tired but he didn’t stop for he thought of his rich neighbour who owned many acres of land. A little before sunset, he felt giddy and weak but he managed to take a few more steps. At twilight, he stumbled, and fell down dead.


The same way in life we get tired and dissatisfied. This happens because we keep running ‘behind our wants, instead of our needs’. We have been given enough energy to fulfill our needs. We don’t need any more energy.

If we stick only to needs, we will not have any problems. But what happens is that we develop many wants from all that we see around us. We borrow all the desires of our friends, neighbours, relatives and make them our own wants.

When we do this, two things happen: Even after we ‘acquire all our borrowed wants, we are dissatisfied because they are not our own wants, they are borrowed and don’t really satisfy us’. Then, when we realise that such things don’t really satisfy us we become tired and frustrated.

For example, we might be able to live without an air conditioner. But the moment we hear that someone has bought one, we begin to get ideas about buying one. We then feel we cannot manage without an air conditioner! We spend time buying and maintaining an air conditioner. This is how, even in small matters, we borrow ideas and then run behind them.

It is our attitude of comparison and jealousy that makes us borrow ‘these needs of others’.

From beauty to success, we look at what others have and try to acquire it ourselves. All these are borrowed desires that become our wants.

Our needs, on the other hand, are just what we need for that moment to run our lives.

People ask me, “But what about career aspirations? Is that also borrowed?” No, that is all right.

As long as you don’t run because some one else is running, it is all right.

Run with yourself.

Try to better yourself every day keeping in mind the previous day’s performance.

That will keep you immersed in your needs instead of your wants.

Words From The Master - 02 May 2008

There are no miracles

At one time or another we all experience the phenomenon of precognition. We feel some one is about to call us, and sure enough, the person calls.

You are watching TV and suddenly you feel that the character you’re watching is about to say something, and sure enough she obliges. You are about to have dinner, the door bell chimes, and you know who is at the door; sure enough, it's the old schoolmate you haven't seen in years.

I find that in my discourses often over 40 per cent of the audience responds positively when I ask if they had experienced a similar phenomenon at some point of their lives. When this happens, most of the time we brush it off saying that it’s a coincidence. When this happens regularly we attach the tag 'gifted' to the person – similar to those who see auras and sense the vibrational energy of people and places.

When the magnitude of the experience is far greater we no longer term it a coincidence. Someone predicts disasters rightly time and again, and forecasts deaths. Others heal people given up as lost cases by doctors. Some produce substances out of thin air. We then call them miracles.

What we see as coincidences or miracles, depending on the degree of unexpectedness of the incident, are those where we do not see the causal linkage between these incidents and what we understand to be scientific laws. Anything that is not supported by what is termed as ‘science’ is either barbaric or a miracle.

There are no miracles in life. It is just that we do not yet understand the laws that govern occurrence of such incidents which seem to defy ‘scientific’ laws. Once we understand that this universe supports laws that go beyond the ‘scientific’ laws that have been so far discovered by humans, we start understanding the cause and effect linkages behind many of these inexplicable happenings and start appreciating the mysteries of our Universe. Astrophysicists talk now about the parallel universe. They have discovered that each time a star system dies as a black hole another star system is born in a Big Bang somewhere else in the universe. Every action produces a reaction.

Chaos theory now says that action and reaction do not need to be proportionate. There is no linearity in nature. A butterfly fluttering its wings in China causes a tornado in Mexico! This is science, not imagination. Matter and energy were totally different entities till Einstein established their linkage. Even after Einstein, it was either matter or energy, never both in the same time and space. It is only recently that the principle of ‘singularity’ that allows matter and energy to exist simultaneously in a common time and space framework has been understood. ‘Singularity’ is the common universal platform the Universal Consciousness that we call Brahman. Making contact with Brahman is not impossible, once you know how. With thoughts crowding our mind, all that we normally do is to flit from one zone to another, from regrets to speculation, with no time to ground ourselves in the present. However, once we allow ourselves to settle in the here and now, in the present, thoughts gradually disappear. When thoughts disappear there is an expansion of our ability to expand in time and space, which allows us to traverse past, present and future simultaneously. Once we are the present miracles become common place, and we do know that they are no longer miracles but a natural flow of the universe.

Words From The Master - 01 May 2008

You are a spiritual being!

We have always been trained to think that we are human beings looking for spiritual experience. Now I tell you: You are a spiritual being looking for human experience. This is the truth. If you develop a firm conviction about this truth, it is enough; you will start experiencing it.

I tell people: I am not here to prove I am god; I am here to prove that you are god! People look at me with shock and fear when I tell them this. But it is the truth. When I say this, I don’t mean that you should develop a spiritual ego; I don’t mean that you should go around claiming that you are god. Just understand that by nature you are an ego-free spiritual being and because of societal conditioning, you feel that you are a human being, and so you start searching for spiritual experiences.

When this point is understood deeply, you will understand that all emotions like fear, jealousy, desire, ego and discontent become baseless! A spiritual being can never come under the clutches of these emotions. But you have been reduced to an ordinary human being; that is the problem. All terrorism and violence that goes around in the world today are because we don’t understand that we are a high-level being. Not only that: People start looking for powers like black magic, materializing things and what not. They think that these are all a measure of being spiritually powerful. The whole concept needs to undergo a 180-degree change.

As long as we feel we are human beings, we will be focused on gaining material wealth; all our actions will be towards that; we will continue to run behind material things. At the end of it, even if we have gained all that we wanted to, there will be a void in us, a yearning in us; something will be missing.

That something is nothing but a deep awareness that we are high-level beings. If this is understood, the focus will shift from material wealth to living a sweet life. Wealth is not the real richness; the capacity to be un-clutched from the wealth is the real richness! When you can be un-clutched from material life, life will become so sweet.

When you understand that you are a spiritual being, you will be able to watch the whole of life as a big drama; you will be able to play your role joyfully without getting caught in any of the emotions; you will then understand that your real nature is neither spiritual nor material; it is beyond both! When you understand this, you fall into the middle path and you become liberated! Moving towards understanding this is the goal of life itself. That is why I say, ‘Bliss is the path and the goal.’

Be Blissful!