Tuning to Intuition

Animals eats, sleeps, hunts ad mates 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. However, 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 energized. 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.

Truth is Timeless

I was traveling with a Professor on comparative religions. I asked him for percentages of different religious groups in the United States. He asked do you want published figures or real figures of those who practice these religious sincerely. These two figures are very different, he said. When I studied statistics at least 25% of all Americans have practiced one form of Yoga or another. At least 10% practice regularly.

Edison discovered light. Once discovered it belonged to the whole world. Patanjali, an Indian sage who lived thousands of years ago, discovered the truth of inner light and made it available to the whole world. There was no copyright fortunately. Patanjali is great because he did not create an organization. Once an organization is created truth is cremated. A real rose is beautiful and God given. A plastic rose is not. The difference between truth and organized religion is the same as between a real rose and plastic roses.

Another great Master J Krishnamurthy said after creating his organization that the organization has only the right to publish his teaching and writings, but not to comment upon them. If Krishna and Jesus meet they will hug each other; but Krishna’s cows and Jesus’ goats will bicker and fight with each other. Masters are truth, followers are corrupt. Organizations and followers create complications so as to exploit people, to control people.

Patanjali says when my teachings are no longer true, this book will die; let it live as long as it is the ultimate truth. I want only truth to survive. If I create an organization, my followers will try for the survival of the organization not the truth. If Krishna and Buddha descend today their temples will not welcome them; it will disturb their vested interests.

This openness is what makes me call him a saintist, a saint and a scientist, a mystic and scientist combined in one. He created this book to understand how to reach the ultimate truth and then is ready to stand by and let his book be replaced if some one else comes up with a greater truth. We still can not add a single word to enhance his sayings. Only a person who is so confident can be so open. It is like a money back guarantee, which is possible only if you have absolute confidence in yourself and what you believe in and say.

The Expressway to Suffering

It’s weird and yet it has become normal. Whatever moves faster is better. Communication is at the speed of light. The world is a global village. Electronic mails have to be responded to within the hour. We all are always in a tearing hurry. Doing what?

We are all driven by greed and fear. Greed tells us that there is no time to lose. Fear tells us that we are going to lose. So we hurry not knowing what we are going to lose, not knowing what its value is.

We run because we are afraid to stop; afraid to stop and reflect on what we are doing and why. We are afraid to be with ourselves. To be silent can be terrifying as it makes one vulnerable to oneself.

A young man came to see me.

He said: Swamiji, I have everything sorted out. I am building a house with a 25 year loan. By that time my daughter (a two year old holding his hand) will be ready for marriage. My son (an infant that his wife is carrying) will be in a good job. The house would be very valuable and we can get a lot of money by selling it. We will invest most of it and settle down with you at the Ashram.

He had finished off twenty five years of his life in just ten minutes. He still feels that his calling is spiritual. Is mortgaging the present for the future spiritual?’

This constant running is a reflection of our inner restlessness. We certainly feel we have missed out on life. Has the running been worth it? This is the fastest route to suffering, the expressway.

There is good reason to plan for tomorrow, it’s important. However, let’s not forget to live today!

We take ourselves too seriously. What we do in our life time hardly matters in the bigger picture. It is lost in the vast expanse of the universe. Things go on silently in the universe; so peacefully without any contradictions; millions of solar systems function with such beauty! Things happen in nature in spite of us not because of us.

When we realize this we relax into ourselves. We feel centered in our being. There is a deep sense of trust and peace that envelops our being.

When this happens, we will not find the need to hurry through our lives.

Living Life in Reality

In his yoga sutra Patanjali, the great sage, the greatest writer of them all, talks about eight ways to reach enlightenment.

The second element in the first way, yama, of Patanjali is brahmacharya. Normally this word is translated as celibacy. This is wrong; totally wrong. Celibacy is suppression, perversion.

Brahma means existence, reality; chariya is to walk in it, to live with it; brahmacharya is living with reality.

People ask: to become enlightened, do I need to leave my wife and children? I tell them: renounce only what you do not have; do not renounce what you already have.

Live comfortably, intensely, happily with what you have. If you have a wife, live fully with her; not with the fantasy of some other woman. Renunciation is brahmacharya; it is dropping your fantasies. Brahmacharya is accepting reality as it is. When you drop your fantasies and accept your beloved for what she is, your life becomes heaven.

The idea of beauty is just an idea. As long as distance is maintained things look beautiful. Close ups are always ugly and flat. Even if you marry the Miss Universe the idea of beauty will not last more than 15 days. The moment you start living together reality comes in; glamour wanes and fades. That’s why you call the first few days honey moon, not honey sun.

When you drop your fantasies you can live with reality for ever. That’s why in Sanskrit there is no word for divorce. If you feed your fantasies you can change your partner any number of times and still be unhappy. Only in fairy tales do people live happily for ever. All legendary lovers, Romeo and Juliet, Laila and Majnu, were never married; had they married their stories would have had different endings.

People forcing themselves into celibacy are sitting on a volcano. They can not look into your eyes for fear you will see their suffering. If you meditate and practice celibacy, Hindu mythology says that the gods above send celestial beautiful women to disturb you. Nobody sends women to disturb you; if that’s true everyone will start meditating. These meditators start hallucinating because of their suppressions, suppressed fantasies. Brahmacharya can not be practiced as morality, but as an understanding. When you accept your partner as he is or as she is, your fantasies drop, and you start accepting yourself as you are. Your partner then becomes your beloved.

Life is not suffering, It is Bliss

A housewife has sent all her children to school and is cleaning her house. She hears the door bell and opens the door. Two preachers are at the door and ask her whether they can have a few minutes with her to teach her how to live her life eternally.

She says no, thank you, I don’t think I can stand any more of this life, forget about living it eternally, and slams the door shut.

We all feel life is a curse and is a result of our past karma. Again and again people ask why our life is like this; please teach us a way not to have another birth. You feel life is suffering, punishment, an effect of past karma. There are only two groups in this world, wise and otherwise. The wise ones feel that life is ananda, bliss, that their being is bliss, their consciousness is ananda. Thousands of enlightened masters have said this time and again. When you ask them how, each one offers his own method. One says you be a vegetarian, another says you fast, another says you practice this meditation or that, another says you marry, another do not marry and so on. If two rishis say the same thing, it is said, one is a fake. Each expresses in his own way the path to enlightenment and bliss. But they all concur that consciousness is bliss. If all agree it means that this fact is essential.

In daily life we find that it is misery, it’s a punishment. There is a gap between our experience and that of masters, between the wise and otherwise. Somewhere we have lost the essence of life. We have misunderstood the basic principle of how to live.

Said Einstein, the last word of science is the first word of spirituality. Like there is no gap between matter and energy outside, inside us there is no gap similarly between your body and mind. Ordinary people identify with their body and mind. Spiritual seekers lose this clarity. They know that they suffer through identification with body and mind, and this increases their suffering. There is one more suffering, how to disconnect and how to reach liberation.

Not only are you not body and mind, but there is no need to disconnect from body and mind. There is nothing you need to do. Bliss is continuously happening with in you without gap of time and space. As long as you associate your bliss with a particular time or a particular space you will lose the bliss. The gap between sufferings becomes bliss for you. Being in the present allows for this bliss to happen continuously within you.

Live the truth to live out your desires

Patanjali, in his Yoga Sutras, talks about an eight fold path to achieve Yoga, union of the Self and the Divine. Satya is one path. He says live your life truthfully

Satya is just not truth of the words we utter. That’s only one dimension. Thinking the truth and living the truth are the other two dimensions. Vedanta says that you create what you want; you are the creator of the whole world. It is you, who creates suffering and bliss. We may ask: if we are the creator of the world, why would we create suffering? The reason is that either consciously or unconsciously we are not being true to our Being; we are not living, acting, or speaking the truth.

Continuously we create self contradicting desires. At a deep level, whether we accept it or not, believe it or not, understand it or not, we are God. Therefore we create trouble when we contradict our selves and give power to self contradicting thoughts. When you think of wanting to get rid of a disease, when you say to yourselves that you must not have this pain, you are already meditating upon that disease. Instead if you say, let me be healthy, and if you bring the concept of health to our mind and being, the ache and pain will disappear. Self contradicting thoughts such as trying to get rid of pain by thinking of pain are called samskaras and these get power and become real.


Being truthful is something more than being factual. First you need to straighten your inner chatter. When an enlightened Master speaks it comes true, because they live in truth. They do not have self contradicting samskaras. These samskaras suck your energy and make you powerless. The word you repeat within yourself should be true. You give power to disease by just saying disease.

Try and spend half an hour a day to straighten your thinking, the same way as you spend in straightening your body and dress. Spend time in straightening out your samskaras.

Satya is what gives peace and bliss to all. You can not speak arrogantly; arrogance creates anger, disturbance, and violence. If you say people are disturbed when you speak the truth, the truth that you express is your ego and arrogance, not the truth. You can always express truth politely, acceptably without hurting some one; only then it is truth. Pure truth can never be violent, can never hurt some one. It makes your dreams come true.

Stop chasing your thoughts!

SOCIETY, in the form of political or religious institutions, controls you through fear and greed.

These institutions believe that unless you are prodded by fear and greed, you cannot be effective, productive and valuable. But productive effective and valuable to whom? It is certainly not for any advantage to your own Self, but perhaps to the benefit of these institutions.

Fear and greed make you seek the external world for fulfilment. You seek to act on your thoughts and words. These as you would have experienced throughout your life can never be fulfilled. The same fear, the same greed reappears, however many times you may have experienced them before.

You are in rajas, the mode of aggression when you act on your thoughts. People question, how can I live without acting on my thoughts, who will pay my bills?

Please understand. If nature provided within you a system that converts bread into blood, can it not take care of providing you with bread as well? Nature does not trust you with anything that is critical to your living. That is why all your essential activities such as breathing, growing, digesting, etc, happen without your involvement.

I say to you, stop acting on your thoughts. Stop looking for their meaning. Instead seek the source of thoughts. For instance, if you feel hungry, ignore that thought. When your body feels that desperate hunger, it will by itself seek and procure the food to fulfil its needs.

When you do this, when you stop acting on the meaning of words, you will fall into tamas, into inaction. That is what you are afraid of.

There is nothing to fear. You will stay in that inaction till all your hatred against your restlessness and greed get worked out. Once that happens, you will come out of that inaction, that tamasic state, purified. Please understand that you do not move from tamas into rajas and then into satva as you may think. You do not, as you think, move in sequence from inaction to aggression and then to peace. You start with
rajas, which is the state of your day-to-day activity, when you are in the mode of doership, seeking to fulfil the meaning of your thoughts and words.

When you stop seeking meaning you will fall into inaction, tamas, for a brief period, till you start seeking the source of your thoughts and move into satva. You will feel the effect of inner healing, and you will understand that the universe does take care of you.

Intuition: the key to effective decisions

Three nuns were returning to their monastery in the evening through a lonely path. They heard footsteps behind them and a man’s voice shouting at them to stop. The nuns were sure that the person following them had bad intent. The nuns whispered to each other, and one nun veered off to the left, and another turned off to the right, leaving only one in the path. Later at night, the three met up at the monastery gate.

The two who had arrived first anxiously asked the third who had just reached running and panting. In response to their anxious query whether she was alright, she replied: 'when the man was close to me, I said to him to take his pants down, while I lifted my skirt up.'

'Oh, my God, then' screamed the other two.

'It’s simple,' she continued, 'a woman can run a lot faster with her skirt up than a man can with his pants down, so I escaped!'

To make effective decisions, all we have to do is to outthink our opponent. Our decision needs to be better than his, that’s all. There is no need for it to be perfect.

The mistake we make is to think through our intellect. If we ask any successful business leader or CEO these days about what has made them so successful, again and again they say that their success came from something beyond their intellect; something beyond logic and facts, something that gave them the intelligence and guts to take effective decisions. It is simply the intuitive power within them that has helped them make these effective decisions.

We can tune into intuition as part of our regular life. The question therefore is not whether we can all be intuitive, but merely how we can we make ourselves intuitive.

When we step into the Present we step out of time bound awareness. We step beyond tension. Our body stops producing adrenalin. Time bound awareness is mass, which is solid. Non time bound awareness is pure energy, liquid, dynamic, bubbling and creative. We step out of our boundaries. We become free. We become intuitive.

When our thoughts stop, our present vision extends into the past and future. We become free of time and space constraints. When we meditate deeply, we become intuitive, and can reach cosmic intelligence or enlightenment.

Drop your Past and Move On

Your thoughts bridge your past to the future.

Your mind is constantly in motion, without a purpose. Its purported purpose is to provide a rational link between your past and your future. However, there is no such rational link. Neither past nor the future exists.

Your past is dead, it is gone, it is finished. As the poet Omar Khayyam said in Rubaiyat, ‘the moving finger writes and having writ moves on; nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it.’ No regret, no penance will recreate your past differently. Reliving the past is an exercise in futility and foolishness.

The future does not exist yet. To create the future is speculative. You do not even know whether you will breathe your next breath. What arrogance, therefore, to think of creating your future.

Worse still is to flash back into the past so as to create the future. If you think you will learn from your past mistakes to create a faultless future you need to think again. You do not have the intelligence to learn from the past and make new mistakes; you will keep making the same mistakes again and again.

What exists in reality is your present. The present is all that there is. Once you suspend thoughts you are grounded in the present, the state of truth and the state of awareness. When you are in the present truly, in deep awareness, you become aware of your past and present as well. You become a tri kala jnani, an enlightened master who is in all three time zones past, present and future, all at once.

A great Zen master was asked: what is the difference you found when you became enlightened? He said simply: I eat when I eat and I sleep when I sleep.

When you become aware and mindful, you live in the present all the time. You focus on what you do at that moment. Your mind is where your body is.

Normally when you are at work, your mind wanders and takes a vacation; and when you are on vacation at a beach, your mind worries about your work that you should have done, but did not. Once you learn to be in the present dilemmas disappear; your mind becomes clear.

Drop your thoughts, Now, and you will be at peace.

Drop What Hurts

A Zen master was sentenced to death by his king. He was sitting unconcerned. His disciples asked him: are you not bothered you are going to die tomorrow. He said: how can I worry about a day later, even the next moment is a new miracle for me.

When you live in the present all your fantasies drop, all your fears drop.

If some one complains that he cannot change, I say change is your nature, I am surprised that you are holding on to the same character. Let go and you will change. When they don’t listen and insist, I give them advice to confuse them.

You say give me a technique. It’s so difficult without a technique, a tool. The word difficulty is the greatest difficulty. When you know fire burns drop the fire. Where is the difficulty? Be a little more intelligent. Drop what hurts. When you understand that the mental setup causes you trouble, drop it. You will then transform your being.

You ask, how will I survive if I drop? The seed always wonders what will happen to me if I break. Unless it breaks the plant can not grow. Trust and open, trust and break, you will grow. If you make mistakes it’s worth making mistakes. Perfectionism is madness. The more you are far from perfect the more God has grace for you.

Search for perfection is search for madness. Graveyard is the perfectly secure place. But it’s not the place to live; it is only for the dead. A ship is secure in the harbor, but it has to move out to function.

As you move from ego to spontaneity you will undergo pain, transition, that’s your penance. That’s the price you pay for a better life. Everything will be a miracle. When you take life for granted, what results is boredom and depression. You seek to acquire not to enjoy. You can increase the height of your bed not the depth of your sleep.

Meditation is the key to spontaneity. Do not keep track of what you have done in the past. It’s better to let go and grow without worrying about what happened in the past and also what will happen in the future.

Enlightenment is not a step by step growth process, it is a quantum phenomenon. Living moment to moment, in the present, without worrying about past and present is meditation. It’s a quality to be added to your life, not a quantity to be added to your life.

Don’t Grow Old: Age Gracefully

At an old age home, the inmates were asked, "Why do you think God has allowed you to reach the age of ninety?" Ramu responded, "To test the tolerance of our relatives."

Ageing is not pleasant for any one; not for the person ageing; not for the people around; especially if the family, that is otherwise occupied, has to take care of the aged.

Our body starts degenerating from the time we are born. Cells die every second even in an infant’s body, even as new cells grow. Medical science says that the entire body has a new set of cells every year or so. Not even one cell is as it was. Some parts of the body start rejuvenating; like our teeth for instance; it is rare that a third set of teeth grow if you start losing your second set. Muscles grow weaker and memories get shorter. Immunity levels decrease making people more prone to diseases. Ageing is in built into the human DNA.

There is no antidote to ageing. There is no kaya kalpa that reverses the ageing process and makes you young again. However, with intelligence we can retard the process of ageing.

We age disgracefully because we abuse our body. We eat unhealthy food, we smoke, we drink, and we dump all kinds of toxins into our body which kill living organisms and yet expect that we can stay young.

We can not prevent ourselves getting old but we can delay the degeneration process and we can age gracefully if we learn how to respect our body.

Paying attention to body needs with great awareness is the first and most important step in graceful ageing. Listen to your body in the present moment. When it tells you that the cigarette smoke burns your throat, stop smoking; when it tells you that alcohol makes the body lose coordination, stop drinking; when it says it is tired go to sleep; only when it says it is really hungry eat.

At the first indication of pain we swallow pills. If an alien were to see our commercials on TV he would think that our food is just pills. Instead of popping a pill next time you invite pain upon yourself, lie in a dark room and focus on the pain. Focus all your attention at this spot and soon you will find it shrinking. Pain turns into pleasure.

You can heal the body just by paying attention to it.

Be Unbonded! Drop Your Samskaras!

In some parts of India, if some one sneezes as another person is about to leave on an important mission, it is considered a bad omen, and the mission is aborted. People may call this superstition.

Some people must do everything by a set routine. Before leaving home they will check half a dozen times whether the lights are off, whether doors are locked and so on. Psychologists call this obsessive compulsive neurosis.

You wear a blue shirt once to an important event and you are successful. From then on you always wear blue for any critical event. You call it your lucky charm.

You tend to follow what worked for you in the past; what someone tells you worked for them in the past; what, therefore, you believe will work for you in future.

Your mind stores these past impressions and memories, as well as the emotive reactions associated with these experiences continuously, whether you remain conscious of these experiences or not.

Mind never sleeps, not for one moment. Data stored by the mind based on past experiences with an emotive overload are called samskara in Sanskrit.

Your samskara define you. They lead your life. Samskara drive you to take illogical, unconscious and irrational decisions. Samskara keep you in bondage. They are the root cause of all suffering. When Buddha said that desires are the root cause of suffering, he was referring to the effect of these samskara, these unfulfilled desires that drive you irrationally, blindly, without awareness.

The problem is that samskara drive your actions unconsciously and without your awareness, letting you believe that whatever you are doing is rational.

Your ultimate liberation lies in infusing silence, injecting light, bringing thoughtless awareness to your unconscious zone. When the unconscious samskara arises, when you remember something that disturbs you, you create an energy clot, an energy block within yourself; you contract; there is less space in your Being. When you meditate on your inner space or inner silence you expand. That is possible only when you do not have samskara, no energy clots within you, which disturb you.

These samskaras can only be eradicated through meditation, through awareness; by being witness to and not being a participant in thoughts.

You have nothing to lose but your samskara, when you meditate! Drop your samskaras and be liberated!

Be Unclutched, Be 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 ten 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 thought. Unless you renounce the thought of sitting you can not 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 the source of thoughts, the truth of who you are, where you come from.

When you drop the connection between thoughts, you will then realize the futility of that connection except in causing you suffering. When you realize 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.

Awake from your Waking State!

Buddha says: you dream when you are awake.

You don’t have to fall asleep to dream. You will day dream even when you are awake. In the night you see stars. In the day they are still there but you cannot see, because of the sun. If you get into a deep well without water, you can see stars even in the day. When you are not active you dream. Because of continuous activity you do not notice your dreams, but you dream on.

People ask me: please tell me how I can worship and love a 18 handed Kali? I say first start loving your 2 handed wife. First understand your life and then you can go into religion. All your love for God is just a fantasy. That’s truth. You dream even you are awake. That’s why Masters say that we are all asleep.

The great Russian Master Gurdjeef had a disciple who asked him how to be enlightened. Gurdjeef taught him a technique and said you must do this for three months continuously without leaving this house. The disciple meditates for three months. At the end of three months his master Gurdjeef takes him for a walk into the town. The disciple says I feel everybody here is asleep even though they are doing something. What has happened? Master says nothing has happened to these people, something has happened to you, you are now awakened.

You need to meditate to be awake. When you meditate you have no thoughts, your mind has stopped, but you are aware.

Meditation should be done playfully, not seriously with a long face. We grown up people find it difficult to laugh. Kids find it difficult to be serious; they can laugh all the time. You tell them to stop, make them like you, you idiots. You want to be comfortable in your ignorance, in your rigidity, in your false beliefs

Have you ever seen an ugly kid? You never can. Have you seen a single grown up man who is beautiful or graceful? Seriousness makes you ugly. Seriousness is not sincerity. Be sincere but relax.

When I say relax, people ask what to do. Doing is natural, but relaxing is unnatural. Don’t ask for another technique to relax. Whatever you understand by relaxation you do. Relax from the idea that you should relax.

Empty your mind for wisdom

A pompous professor came to a Zen Master to learn. Instead of listening, he started blowing his own trumpet. The Master asked for tea and when it was brought, started pouring a cup for his guest. He kept pouring tea into the cup without stopping. The cup overflowed and tea spilt on the table.

Irritated the professor shouted: stop, can’t you see the cup is full?

The master said: so is your mind. Unless you empty it what can you learn?

Acquiring knowledge is a transmission process. For this transmission to take place effectively and effortlessly, one’s mind has to be empty and still. Only then the teaching, learning and above all the transmission can happen.

Knowledge comes in three varieties. Basic knowledge that we all learn from childhood, the type that learn our three ‘r’s with, is intellectual knowledge. To read, write, and calculate we use our head, our mind, to acquire the needed knowledge. At this level of knowledge transfer what happens is communication.

Another type of knowledge needs the heart to be involved; one’s head is no use here. Can you become a poet using your head; can you become a singer or a painter using your head. You need passion to be a master.

The son of a potter watched his father and picked up the art. He became famous as a master craftsman. People came to him and asked to be taught the way he learnt it. He said, “I don’t know how to teach you. If you want just watch me and do.”

What was merely an intellectual communication becomes collaboration between master and the taught, when the heart is involved.

Spiritual knowledge is knowledge of the highest kind; it is not knowledge really but wisdom. This knowledge can neither be taught nor learnt. Spiritual wisdom, the Truth of the Universe, has to be experienced, by transmission from an enlightened Master who is willing to transmit it from his Being to your Being. At this level, it is a communion of beings, far beyond collaboration and communication.

Spiritual wisdom happens; it’s not taught or learnt. It happens in the silencing of your mind. It happens when your chatter, both inner and outer are stopped.

Meditation is the key to silencing the mind. No spiritual knowledge is possible without the aid of meditation. Ego fills the mind otherwise. To go beyond ego, to go beyond mind, to go beyond chatter, meditation is the answer.

Eat when you Eat

A Zen disciple asked his master: How did you change when you became enlightened?

The master replied: I now eat when I eat; I sleep when I sleep.

How many of us eat when we eat? We watch TV, read books and newspapers; if nothing else we gossip. We disrespect the food and it sits on our waist.

To be in the present is an impossible task for us; our mind flits from past to future, back and forth. Being in the ‘here and now’ helps transcend barriers of time and space so that one can be every where at all times. This is also the state of enlightenment, as the ego or mind breaks down at this point.

People leading a material life wish to be ascetics, sanyasins. They feel that they can realize happiness, peace of mind and calmness only by donning saffron robes.

In the Mahabharata, Vyasa tells us this beautiful story. A crow dirties a Sanyasin who is on his morning bhiksha (begging for alms). The Sanyasin looks up in anger and the crow burns to death. He then walks up with his bowl and stands in front of a nearby house. The lady of the house is serving her husband, and when she is finished comes out to attend the Sanyasin. The sanyasin looks at her in anger, and she asks: do you think I am a crow? Startled the Sanyasin asks her how she knows. He tells: I have no time to explain, please go to this man in the nearby town. The Sanyasin searches out this person in the town and finds out that he is the local butcher. When he goes to meet him, the butcher greets him cordially and enquires about the housewife. The Sanyasin is again surprised, and asks this butcher how two such ordinary people have this great power of divination. The butcher says simply: all we do is to do our duty well; that’s all we know.

Doing one’s duty, one’s dharma, well is the key to spiritual progress. That duty, that responsibility, can be your material life as well. It does not need to be the life of an ascetic that you force fit upon yourself. You need to be aware in what ever you do; you need to be 100% involved in whatever you do, for you to do your dharma well.

Stay in the present with whatever you do; when you take the next step; when you brush your teeth; when you smile at some one; just focus on what you are doing at that point in time. That’s true enlightenment.

Do not postpone living

One man after having lost his wealth prayed to God and got a boon that from dawn to dusk on the following day, whatever land he covers by running, can be owned by him.

The man started running at dawn and kept running even after he covered more than what he lost. He refused to heed his body’s pleas for rest and food. His mind was filled with thoughts of the land owned by his neighbors and relatives. By evening he felt dizzy and weak. In the distance, he saw a burial ground and a river flowing beyond it. He was very happy at the thought of owning a river and a place where he and his progeny could be buried and decided that he would stop after he reached the river. Just as the sun was about to set, he reached the river.

He bent down to sip some water. The moment his lips touched the water, he dropped dead of exhaustion. They buried him in the burial ground he had crossed!

This is how we all live our lives. We run the race without even stopping to think why we are running.
We travel in the horizontal dimension of thinking ‘what next’ all the time. This is what causes us to run.
As long as we are moving in this horizontal line, we will run till we drop dead in our grave. Traveling from more to more is only traveling towards our grave. It is just slow death! It can never be life.
It is possible to satisfy our needs, but it becomes impossible to satisfy our wants because, they are changing and unclear all the time. Every time one want is fulfilled, a hundred more come up.
Always, as long as we are chasing something, it seems that it is worth the whole world; but after we get it, somehow it is not important any longer! If we become aware of ourselves and understand what exactly we want, and try to do that alone, we will never find ourselves in this kind of a self-contradictory and fragmented situation.
Never think, let me work now, I can enjoy later!
I tell you, it will never happen. Every tomorrow comes in the form of today only. Doing should lead to being every moment, only then we are on the right track.
It is now or never. We all run throughout our lives thinking that we can enjoy later, but we land up running into the graveyard.
So don’t postpone living. Celebrate! It is now or never.

Be Blissful!

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.When you dance with your Being, you are so total and near to God.

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.

Vaishnavism, the Hindu philosophy of duality preached by Saint Ramanuja, made a big contribution to recognize dance as a way to reach God. Followers of Ramanuja do namasankirtan i.e. singing and dancing for hours together, the name of God. In Sufism, the mystic sect of Islam, the basic technique 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!

Cycle of Desires

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 cannot 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 has to 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.

Understanding Cosmic Laws

Any event that we do not fully comprehend, any thing that we can explain scientifically and rationally gets filed away in our mind either as something totally inconsequential, or if it is of a magnitude that can not be ignored gets classified under catastrophes or miracles.

It is a catastrophe if it involves material loss to us and a miracle if it provides us material gain. It’s that simple. A tsunami is a catastrophe; a yogi who heals a person given up as a lost case by doctors has performed a miracle.

In both cases, the degree of unexpectedness of the incidents and our inability to see any causal linkage between these incidents and what we understand to be scientific laws causes us unease, discomfort and confusion. Anything that is not supported by what we term 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 these ‘scientific’ laws that have been so far discovered by humans, we start understanding the cause and effect linkages behind many of these inexplicable happenings. We then start understanding and 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 in one galaxy another star system is born in a big bang somewhere else in the universe, perhaps in another galaxy. Every action any where produces a reaction some where in the universe.

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 speculations, with no time to ground ourselves in the present. Thoughts are the linkages between the future and the past; a future that is speculative and a past that we feel guilty about. Thoughts are always unsettling; they cause suffering. Through thoughts we can never hope to understand how nature, how the universe functions.

We need to go beyond thought; we need to transcend the future and the past. We can do that by letting ourselves to settle in the present, in the here and now. When we stay in the present moment, fully focus upon the present moment, we are in meditation. In meditation thoughts gradually disappear. When thoughts disappear there is an expansion of our ability to transcend time and space. When we transcend time and space, we are able to traverse past, present and future simultaneously, both in time and space. We then start to understand the cosmic law.

Once we are in the present miracles become common place. We then start to understand that whatever science is unable to explain are no longer miracles but a natural flow of the universe.

Act out of Consciousness not Conscience

From our childhood we have been told to act out of our conscience. These were just social rules that were laid down by society for some justice and peace to prevail in society. But it is very important to understand the difference between conscience and consciousness.

A man, who has real consciousness, can’t hurt others or kill others, because he feels others as an extension of himself. A person with conscience may not kill with knife, but he will kill with words because his being will be violent. With conscience, we may be socially non-violent, but with consciousness, our being will be non-violent.

According to me, morality should be based on consciousness, not on conscience. When this happens there will be no need for rules. Because our love for ourselves and society (which is only an extension of ourselves) will be so great that we will never think of disturbing or harming anybody.

A serial killer has no consciousness, which is why he does what he does. The fact that he does not abide by societal rules, what religion and moral studies would term as conscience, is only a secondary issue arising out the first. If he had consciousness of his existence, he would be aware that he is the same as every other being and would not harm another being.

Conscience is a poor substitute for consciousness. In the meditation program called NSP (Nithya Spurana Program), I help people to experience at least one glimpse of consciousness, so they can start living with consciousness instead of conscience. Anything based on conscience is skin deep, it’s not eternal, but anything based on consciousness is eternal. We should work for conscious experience. Just because we don’t have conscious experience, we should not compromise with conscience. Our morality, understanding, lifestyle everything should be based on consciousness. When it’s based on conscience, it’s based on fear and greed.

If the idea that we should not speed on the highway is based on fear, when we don’t see a cop’s car we will speed up. It becomes tempting to break laws, and we feel courageous. Whenever anything is followed because of fear and greed, we will be waiting for the chance to break the rule. Kids saying no to parents have a similar basis, and it makes them feel they’ve proved themselves. If morality is based on conscience, we will always do something to violate it, directly or indirectly.

May existence bless us all to act out of consciousness.

Be blissful!

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 these people 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 ever lasting happiness and peace.

Not so. There is no need to choose between a material life and spiritual satisfaction. They are both 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.

Chaos is Order & Order is Chaos

The Universe, what we call the Brahmanda, the macrocosm is apparent Chaos. On the other hand the Individual body, what we call Pindanda, the microcosm, is all in apparent order.

Energy in the universe is chaotic. Energy in each atom is chaotic. In that chaos there is order. Chaos is energetic always; orderliness is dull. When you break an order you are thrilled; you radiate joy; you exude energy. Dancing without rules is joyful; regulated dancing may be pleasing to those who watch, but not joyful to those who perform.

Saying no, makes one solid and assertive; saying yes, makes us liquid, yielding, blissful. Rules are no, they are solid. When some one smokes, most often it’s for the joy of breaking the rules, rather than any benefit derived from smoking.

Chaos with order is the Cosmic Intelligence. The stars and planets move in order seemingly, with no regulatory authority. Science is yet to find the source of this order. Universe is just not power; it is power plus Intelligence which is Energy. This Intelligence responds to our prayers. Says Buddha: Universe creates Universe.

Mystics say we come from God; Scientists say we come from monkeys. If evolution was that straight forward all monkeys should by now have become humans, and humans should have become something more. Evolution has stopped with humans because we are the only ones with Consciousness. Our next step is to Universal consciousness.

Believing that Universe is just matter is what causes power struggles, terrorism and violence of all kind. When we realize Universe is Intelligent Energy, seeds of peace are sown. World is divided into those who are spiritual who believe in its Intelligence and those who live for power and control over others.

Cosmic energy continues to prove that it responds to us. In a book ‘Message from water’ Masaru Emoto describes the amazing results of his experiments with ordinary water. He bottled water in different containers and labeled them; love, hate, greed, compassion, terror, Bible, Koran etc. To each bottle of water he spoke everyday for 10 minutes in line with its label; to water labeled love he spoke on love with love; to the one labeled terror he spoke on terror with terror; he read the Koran to the bottle labeled like wise. At the end of a month he froze the water in these bottles separately and studied the frozen crystals of each under a microscope. To his amazement he found that the crystals of water labeled love shone brilliantly like diamonds; those labeled terror seemed misshapen, ghostly and somehow fear inducing; most amazingly the crystals from the water labeled Koran had the imprint of the Holy Kaaba on them! Water responds to our thoughts and words. So does the rest of the Universe energy. Water constitutes more than 80% of our body system; you can imagine the power of words, our own and those of others upon our body system.

British soldiers in their early days in India found that when they carried water from England in their ships to India, the water spoilt even while on ship. However when they carried water back from India the water not only stayed fresh through the voyage, but was still potable till they consumed all of it back in England. When scientists studied this surprising phenomenon, they found that this water which was from the Ganga in Calcutta had properties of killing harmful bacteria and rejuvenating itself.

It’s no wonder that the millions who have prayed to Ganga over thousands of years have left their thought imprints that have made this water so energy giving.

The river Nile has been studied by the Egyptians over thousands of years by measuring its flow, level, turbulence etc. They have found that these parameters of one of the greatest rivers of this World reflect often times catastrophic incidents in distant parts of the world, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis etc.

Universe responds to the state of your Being. State of Being and therefore State of Mind bring you status. Status without State of Mind only brings you grief. If you wish to see atheists go and see temple priests. They take God so much for granted that they treat God as a stone.

God is a dust bin for most of us. What ever we do well we take credit for it. Anything that goes wrong we blame God for it. God is great if he answers our prayers. Please remember God is even greater when he does not make your prayers come true; because he only knows how dangerous your prayers are to you.

When we keep getting whatever we want we end up with depression of success. Your status overcomes your state. Status without State of Mind, power without wisdom, Shakti without Buddhi is a killer.

Said a Zen Master when a disciple asked him: What have you attained?

When I started a mountain was a mountain and a river a river; when I traveled, mountain was not a mountain and a river not a river; when I reached mountain was again a mountain and a river again a river.
Before achieving you are ordinary. Half way you feel extraordinary though you are still ordinary. When you have reached you feel ordinary even though you may be extraordinary.

We as part of this Universe are part of its potential and part of its chaos and Order. When we try and be in control of us and others, when we try to be perfect, we violate this cosmic order. Perfectionism is a disease; it leads to madness. Orderly people tend to order inflate their ego and suffer.

We try to maintain order because we believe we have boundaries. Let go your boundaries, your need for order will disappear; joy will appear. When you realize the Cosmic Consciousness within yourself, you will discover the order that is inherent in you, without doing yourself harm. You will accept yourself as you are and others as they are.

When you experience the order in cosmic chaos you experience bliss; when you realize the chaos within you as order you exude compassion; that compassion surely leads you to enlightenment.

Chakras and Gods

Every man lives in one of the seven chakras, the energy centres.

If you are in the lowest level, that is the muladhara chakra, you are caught in lust and desire. You worship a God who can grant all your boons. That is why God is understood as a giver of boons throughout the world and is very popular. People are caught up in fantasy, expectations and desires and whoever fulfils these becomes their God. The moment they miss giving a single boon, their Gods will get dethroned!

Next is the person who is caught in the Swadishthana chakra (fear). You worship the God who gives confidence, who you believe will take care of you; you go behind the idols that have many weapons and many hands. You experience God as a protector.

The third level person stays in the Manipuraka chakra (worry). You continuously worry and remain confused. You worship the God who gives clarity and peace. You will want idols that radiate peace.

Next is the person who lives in the Anahata chakra (attention need). Here, you are attracted towards the God which showers love on you. You worship the God who gives emotional fulfilment.

Next, if you are raised to the level of the Vishuddhi chakra (the urge to be unique), the God of creativity or Energy appeals to you. You experience God as the creator.

If you are centred in the Ajna chakra (Ego), you are locked in ego. Somebody in the egoless state attracts you: Rishis, Seers, Sages, Prophets and Masters attract you. The egoless man becomes your idol.

That is why I say: Man creates God in his own mould! You simply relate to God or the Masters from these six levels; a relationship doesn’t happen - you simply reduce them to mere mortals. You have a concept in your mind and you are demanding from them that concept - it is simply a monologue.

In the Ajna chakra, the dialogue starts. Only in the Sahasrara chakra (gratitude), the communion happens! If you understand that you are actually relating to your Gods and Masters from these chakras and that you need to go beyond this and catch the transcendental expression of the Divine, all your problems will dissolve!

When you are in the Muladhara chakra, the Master drills into you like a crowbar. At a little higher level, he is like a knife penetrating you. At the level of the Sahasrara chakra, he is like a fragrance! If you are alert and aware, the Master can transform you. You just need to be passive for the alchemy to happen. If you are alert and aware, you can catch the smell and experience it!

Break free from your Ego

Losing ego is the only way to reach enlightenment. How to lose ego?

Existence is continuously changing. If you trust that Existence changes and you also change, you can never get settled with your ego. Your ego is nothing but a rigid mechanism, a definite pattern. Only a person who is ego less can trust that the universe is changing and he is also changing. The man who sells his time will never understand that the universe is changing because he is caught in a routine. Not being caught in a routine is a basic discipline for enlightenment!

If you are in a routine, you become so unaware that you stop believing, you stop realizing that Existence is changing. I have seen some government servants working for 30 years in the same office. They would not even have moved their table from one place to another and eventually forget that their table can be moved! Even in your house, don't live with the same kind of furniture arrangement for years together. Shuffle it so that your mind does not get stuck with a single attitude. Once in a few months, change the order; create a little bit of chaos! Otherwise you will become dead.

I have seen people - they will have ten rooms and because of their habit, they will follow a certain track in their own house and as a result would not have stepped foot on eight rooms for months together.

Be very clear - the most definite thing on planet earth is your tomb, your graveyard! The more you live with definition and security, the more you are dying. That is why, when you live with a definite track in your house, your house will have the vibration of a graveyard. Once in a while, dance in the main hall of your house - the space will be purified. If you live with the same things, you will create a track of memory. You will then have very little access to your own Being. Your mind and your house are one and the same. Your Being and your house are one and the same. If you don't live in your whole house, be very clear, you are not living with your whole memory. Drop your rigid ego, break free from your mental patterns, understand change and discover the reservoir that you have within yourself. Explode in all directions and realize your unlimited potential!

Are We Qualified?

Many people want to know if they are qualified for a spiritual awakening.

We are constantly in doubt about our own potential. We are part of the divine. Problem is that we do not remember that we are. When someone does tell that we are, we think that such people are crazy.

A man once asked Ramana Maharishi whether he was qualified enough to pursue the spiritual path and the Sage countered: are you alive? The person said: Of course, yes. Maharishi said with finality: Then you are qualified enough.

Religious orders and their priests create this doubt in us, so that we may become dependent on them for our qualification. We may need to ask them as to what qualifications they themselves possess to ask us the question. A Master never would. Organized religions often counter spirituality. Spirituality is about discovering who we are? It is the search for the ultimate Truth about us and our relationship with our Creator. Religions once organized are more concerned about power and whatever leads to power, whether control, fear or money. It’s the confusion between religion and spirituality that also leads to this question in us. We are constantly told that we are sinners and as such incompetent to enter the doorway of our Creator. This is nonsense.

If one keeps questioning one’s capability, even after decades of rigorous sadhanas one would feel unqualified. The concept of qualification, as with guilt, is brought in to exploit and bind you mentally. As with guilt it needs to be dropped for us to move on successfully.

A beautiful Zen story goes thus; a man asks a Master: Master, am I qualified for spiritual progress? I feel there are many obstructions. Replied the Master: The word obstruction is the only obstruction, nothing else.

Patanjali’s yoga sutras define various steps to enlightenment. The first step aayama comprises five steps, all quite strenuous: celibacy, truth, non violence, not stealing, not possessing. Only after you practice all these steps and master them are you qualified to move up to the next step in yogic accomplishment.

A man came and asked me: Swamiji, I am not qualified in these steps; I have never practiced aayama and niyama; how can I learn Yoga?

I said to him: If you are already qualified in these steps you do not need Yoga!

Maturity and meditation help each other and help us all. Maturity comes with knowledge and experience and gives us energy; and the energy reinforces maturity. Meditation helps us focus that energy in the right direction to make spiritual progress.

In the present day world Patanjali’s techniques take a lot of time. To realize Truth through yoga of any form would probably take many births, and you will forget what you started in this birth, when you start your next!

Dhyana or meditation is the answer to enlightenment in this age. It’s foolproof and without side effects. The only side effect is bliss and realization of your own Self. To start dhyana, all you need to be is a human being, nothing more. A Being with Consciousness is the only requirement to embark upon a spiritual path. The very desire that you wish to start on this path is a true indication that you are qualified.

It is said in Tao: A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

Once you are on the path, the path helps you on. It’s the first step that breaks the inertia and get you moving. That is enough for you to move towards the end goal.

Take that step now!

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 energized. 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.

Awareness is the way out of pain

A Man used to complain bitterly about the lunch he brought to work everyday. He would open his lunch box and look at its contents and complain. His friends one day finally asked him why he didn’t ask his wife to cook something he liked to eat, rather than suffering this way.

He replied: What wife? I am not married. I cook my own lunch.

We all live our lives much the same. Through lack of awareness, we invite pain upon ourselves as the cause of the problem. Responsibility for the pain is always someone else’s, never our own.

Pain is caused by absence of attention. It can be relieved by our attention. Pain is a negative energy; it does not exist by itself; it is the absence of a positive energy.

How to get over pain?

Next time you have some pain, just try this small exercise: Lie in a dark room with eyes closed and focus upon the area of pain to the exclusion of everything else. As you experience the area of pain, drop the notion of ‘Pain’ from you mind. Focus all your attention on this spot; soon you will find it shrinking. Concentrate further and you will find that the pain disappears and in its place you experience pleasure; pain and pleasure are the same sensation with different tags. Your awareness of pain causes it to disappear and bring in positive energy of pleasure.

When you feel hurt and angry through other people’s actions, you need to watch these emotions without judgment of who is right or wrong. Suppressing these emotions can cause harm to you. Enter the feeling of hurt or anger; just watch it; don’t feel sorry for yourself; do not direct the anger against another person. This awareness itself will simply transform the negative emotion to a positive one.

You have no control over when, how and why things happen. All you can do is to choose whether to suffer from it or learn from it. If you use the opportunity of that pain experience to look inside you, you will discover that you are the cause, and that only you can be the solution.

Awareness is the way out of pain and suffering. Suffering is important in life for growth. But when you understand suffering, you will realize how unnecessary it is and you grow!

Be Blissful!

Joy of discovering individuality

OUR mind dies when we are alone. Mind needs relationships to survive. Mind, ego and personality are norms of a society. They thrive only in relationship with society. Our true nature is aloneness. However, our mind starves when we are alone and makes us feel uncomfortable as it is not conditioned to it. Our personality has a social basis of comparison with others. However, when we think of ourselves in terms of our personality, we are isolating ourselves from others. We are setting ourselves up for loneliness. Again, we feel uncomfortable as a result of this comparison. Personality is a status given to us by society. What others think about us, what we have earned, what comforts we have accumulated are all part of our personality. Personality is like an external covering.

Personality thrives on attention. Personality makes no distinction between good or bad kinds of attention. For a personality to thrive, any kind of attention is sufficient. In all our social roles, whether positive or negative, we are constantly seeking attention. We act to seek attention. We beg for attention.

However, sooner or later, we seek our true nature or it seeks us. There will be no one to praise us or blame us. Our ego and our personality are shaken with this lack of attention. We then start realising that we are not merely the personality or the status we project to the outside world. We then realise that we are more than a spouse, much more than our professional label, and even more than a citizen of a nation. These are parts of us and we are more than the sum of all these.

Individuality is our natural state. On most occasions, we nurture our personality ignoring our individuality. Individuality is internal. The cry of individuality can be heard above the clamour of our personality if we dare to be alone. Our life is filled with parties, shopping, or watching TV. Why? It is because we are afraid of being alone. We don’t know how to be with ourselves. Old people who have married grandchildren read matrimonial columns in newspapers for vicarious pleasure! Entertainment is to run away from individuality.

For how long can we run? We always believe we will be joyful at some point or other. By the time we are about forty years old, we may get everything we want. But, we still don’t understand why we wanted all this. We are still unhappy. We have reached the depression of success. Take time to be with yourself. Get comfortable with aloneness. This is the state of meditation. It leads to bliss, Nithyananda.

The easiest way to eternal bliss

IF I asked you, ’what did you eat for breakfast,’ some of you might be able to mention a few things that you ate. But if I asked you how each dish really tasted, you would have no answer.

The truth is that you are always in a hurry. Your tongue never tastes when you eat. Your eyes never see when you look. Your ears never listen when you hear. Your body never feels when you touch.

Consider the simplest of things you do. Shaking hands with people or visitors. How many times you shake your hands in a dead way? For you it has become a mechanical action. Your hand is practically a dead man’s hand. Your handshake is a dead man’s handshake. Remember, that all you do is to stretch your hands but never your being. Never has your inner being penetrated through it.

How does one do anything from one’s being? The answer is simple. Be in truth. When you live in truth, if you are truthful, there is no need to prepare a script, hold a mental rehearsal, or decide how to say something to another person. Consider the many ways in which you lie everyday. When there is no truth in you, it will reflect in your actions. That is the simple reason why love affairs often end in failure. How long can you continue to act out? How long can you keep on preparing? How many times? How many days? How many times can you remember what you said the previous time? Not more than once, certainly.

You see the truth comes out eventually. A woman says you have cheated her. And you say she has cheated you. Both feel cheated by the other. In reality, nobody is cheating. It is just that your true nature or reality has emerged. Love affair is like a dye and powder. When you go in the rain, colour changes as the dye runs. Black comes here, and white goes there. How long can you maintain the pretence? Naturally the truth has to come out. The truth is out when you relax. When that happens you are in big trouble.

People ask me how I can speak for hours without any script, without any notes and certainly no Power Point presentations. I can because I speak from my being. I have no mind that filters what arises within.

When you fall in tune with the truth there is no need to remember anything. What you said before is irrelevant. There will be no problem of discordance. Then there will be no fear of having to create the script. You can continue to live as you are.

Live in truth. That is the easiest way to eternal bliss.