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.