Meditation: From the Local to the Universal

(From a talk at Sri Rajarajeswari Peetam, Rochester, NY, on Thursday, July 18, 1996.)

Guruji:  Every one of us exists in two modes—one that I call a “localized” mode and the other a “diffused” mode. In our localized mode of existence, we identify ourselves with our body, mind or intellect. This is our limited state of existence. Our non-localized, diffused, spread-out form of existence consists of our consciousness pervading all life forms—plants, animals, birds, the sun, the skies, the stars—everywhere. In this mode, you are a witness to all of these things and yet you are none of them. 

The relationship between these two modes is like that between a circle and its center. You cannot have a circle without its starting point, the center. The center is within the circle; it’s not attached to the circle. Just like when you bisect a sphere through the center, the center is unchanging, but the circle is always changing. The center must remain fixed. If the center is moving, the circle cannot be formed. There must be a center. 

In the same way, you must be centered on yourself. We need both these states of our existence to discover our roots, our innermost desires, the purpose of our lives— and to be able to express that purpose through the way we live each day.

You need the non-local, diffused mode where you are not your body, not your mind, not your intellect, but rather where you are the whole: you have spread yourself; your consciousness is part of the entire universe. You should get into that state maybe three times a day. If time does not permit, at least two times a day. It is in the silence of the mind that God is known. This has been called Saṃdhyāvandana:  three times a day you have to take your shakti up into a transcendental state and just be there for a while. In this delocalized mode of your functioning, what is important is not the content of the information, but the container of the information. It’s not how much you know that matters, but how much you can forget. It is not subject to logical reasoning, not even to emotions; it’s beyond both of those. And you have to reach that state.

Therefore, I’d like to say a few words about how to access this state—what is called samadhi. You should make a commitment in your life to spend 15 to 20 minutes in the morning and another 15 to 20 minutes in the evening doing this. You may well ask, “Why do you want me to do this? I already have so many pressures in life. What do I gain by doing this? What’s in it for me?” So first of all, you need proof that you need to do anything at all. Let me give you that proof.

Let’s suppose you’re in a classroom, an elementary school classroom, and the history teacher comes and writes a few lines on the blackboard. He’s telling a story from the Rāmāyaṇa. He says, “Once there was a king called Dasharatha,” and he writes Dasharatha up there. “And he had four sons named Rama, Bharatha, Lakshmana and Shatrughna,” he continues, and writes their names on the board as well. After a little more storytelling, the class is over and the history teacher leaves with his notes remaining on the blackboard. Next the mathematics teacher comes in, and he writes the equation (a+b)^2 = a^2+b^2 = 2*a*b on the board. He explains the meaning of all this and then, after class, he goes away, too. And now you, the student, when you go back home, have the following information jumbled in your mind: Dasharatha = (a+b)^2, Rama = a^2, Lakshmana = b^2, Bharatha = 2*a*b — and Shatrughna is nothing!

The moral of the story? It’s not just the chalk piece that puts information in your mind that’s important, but also the duster that removes it! If you do not periodically clean your mind, then the data entering it can get mixed up and a lot of confusion can result. If we do not allow our minds to be cleared at least twice a day, we cannot have clear perception. So which is more important, the chalk piece or theduster? Without the chalk piece you are stupid, without the duster you are confused. You need both.You need the chalk piece - the world, which writes its information on your mind - but you have to be able to clear it, too. This process, of clearing the conscious part of the mind and being able to remain thoughtless for some time, is meditation. We need both.

So that’s one aspect. The other aspect is that—once you are really able to achieve silence of the mind, to stop all of the dialogues, all of the monologues in your mind —  that’s when you enter a state called yoga: yōgaḥ-citta-vṛtti-nirōdhaḥ.

When all manifestations and fluctuations of the mind are subdued, your body identification disappears. When you are in the witness state and only the subject remains; when the object has merged into the subject. The object is no longer there, because the subject has become the object. You are seeing the world and you have become the world—you stop seeing yourself. That is the state called manōlaya — a

state in which you have eliminated your mind. You’ve got to try to reach that state, three times a day preferably. If you can manage a wink at the office—great, nothing like it. If you can’t, at least do it twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. It is necessary in these days of high-tension living and high-pressure jobs — you simply need this relaxation process.

So what are the steps leading to this relaxation of the mind? I think there are basically four:

1. Be a Little Hungry

If you eat heavily and then sit down for meditation, what happens? You sleep like Kumbhakarṇa — who slumbers for six months continuously! On the other hand, if you’re totally hungry, with a burning sensation in your stomach, you can’t sit and meditate well in that state either. So a slight hunger should be there, but not too much.

2. Be a Little Tired

If your mind is totally fresh — for instance, if you have just woken up from sleep — that is also not a state conducive for meditation. The mind wants to think. It has finished its sleep; it wants to become active. And that doesn’t create the slope necessary for the mind to settle down into a thoughtless state. So the second important step is that — just as you should have a little hunger — you should have a little tiredness, too.

When your body and mind are tired, the mind wants to stop thinking and start relaxing. This sets up a small slope in the mind, and it starts gently rolling downward—just like if you take a bottle of water, put some mud in, shake it well and let it stand, it will start settling down. This settling-down process happens because the mind has a natural tendency to be lazy. Therefore, you try to move into a state of non-thinking by following a natural gradient.

3. Be a Witness

But what invariably happens when you sit for meditation is that some disturbance, some trigger, comes along. Maybe some little sound, and you start analyzing what it might be. That starts a train of thought. And when you have these trains of thought, it’s like when a ball rolling down the slope of a hill comes across an obstacle. It stops there. It doesn’t roll any further. Sometimes the obstacle is such that it pushes the ball back up the slope! So what do you have to do?

Well, have you observed that no thought ever remains with you all the time? Is there any thought that has remained with you forever? No, not a single one. All thoughts are born, they grow and they die in your mind. The obstacles to reaching a thoughtless state are the thoughts themselves. But if you observe that all thoughts are temporary in nature, you know they will never stay for long. They cannot. The mind has a natural tendency to kill them.

All you need do is remain a passive witness to the thought. Don’t get involved with it. And certainly don’t invite the thought in, put it on a pedestal and do puja to it as you would to the Devi! But nor should you ask the thought to go away. Because if you push it away, you’re working with the emotion of the thought. “This is a bad thought, I should not be having it. Why do these thoughts come to me when I am trying to clear my mind? I should have only good thoughts, not bad thoughts.” You see? So suspend your judgment of these thoughts. Your judgment — that this is a good or bad thought, one that I should or should not have — is itself a thought. If I think  it’s a good idea, then I want to hang on to it; if I think it’s a bad idea, I want to push it away from me. Thoughts are not the problem; judgment of thoughts is. If you judge not, then you are in a passive state of mind, a witness state of mind. A witness is not affected. Even though my name is Sastry, I can witness this guy Sastry having this thought — but it’s not me. Take yourself a little bit away from yourself. Detach yourself a little. And then, without judgment, let the thought come. Let it stay for as long as it wants to, and let it go when it wants to go. Then let a new thought come, and let that one go, too.

4. Be Expectation-Free

There is one more important thing — the most important thing. Being able to accept God’s creation, good or bad, whatever it is, as being perfect: that is surrender to God. But how does it relate to meditation? Well, sometimes my meditation goes wonderfully; absolutely no problems—and I’m in seventh heaven, walking on rainbows, with the Mother leading me by her little finger and showing me different worlds. They’re singing for me, dancing for me—an aesthetic state of union with God.

And sometimes nothing happens at all. It’s just routine — boring. Where does the boredom come from? It comes when you have an expectation that something is going to happen, but nothing does—and you lose interest in the meditation. The expectation causes disappointment, and that causes boredom. What’s the solution? You should have no expectations whatsoever about how your meditation is going to proceed. If you have no expectations, then you’ll have no disappointments. If you have expectations, you will certainly have disappointments.

And that’s all that is needed for your mind to settle down into a quiet state. Once you have learned these tricks, it will come naturally to you. That’s the duster you have to apply once in the morning and once in the evening. You can choose your  own time. But try to see if you can stick to the same time every day, so that it becomes a habit.

See if you can create an environment around yourself in which not too much external disturbance is present. Try not to be overfull; try to be comfortable. Assume a simple posture in which you can forget your body; don’t contort yourself into a position that you can’t hold for any length of time without discomfort. (If you are used to yoga asanas, that’s a different story. But otherwise what you do issukhāsana.) Whatever asana, whatever posture is convenient for you is fine so long as your body doesn’t keep hurting and bringing you back to body consciousness.

What you want to do is forget the body, forget the mind—but not go to sleep. That is called saṃdhyāvandana. You can use mantras if you like. And beyond that, there is the silence of the mind, where you don’t have the Goddess to hold onto. The shastras call this the nirālamba mārga. There is no support there, so support-less you must be. Any kind of support that you try to hang onto—whether it’s the guru, the mantra or an expectation—denies you independence. You have got to let go of everything. You have to be yourself, without expectation, and try to remain in that state. All the rituals we do are ultimately designed to help us to reach a state of mind that is in balance.

Having practiced it, I know it is in that state that clarity of perception comes, that universal love springs forth from your heart, that you feel your oneness with the entire universe, that you experience being at the bottom of the Ocean of Awareness. It is there that you see the oneness, not the diversity. You start feeling that, when you give to somebody, you are giving to yourself. You know for certain that when you improve yourself, you are improving the world around you. You understand that if you are helping yourself, you are helping the world. We have an equation, “I = YOU” established in that non-localized mode of existence.

We are so very used to the localized mode of existence that we’ve forgotten we can exist in the other mode. In physics, we have what’s called the quantum phenomenon: there is a particle mode of existence and a wave mode of existence. This applies to you as well. Your mind is a quantum phenomenon. It knows of no distance, no time, no path — it jumps from here to there, from this to that, without traversing any intermediate state of time or space.

In the classical model of physics, if I want to go from Rochester to New York City, we can put up sentries along the way—say, at Syracuse, Troy, Albany and then New York. And you can say, “Okay, he has just crossed into Syracuse; he has crossed into Troy; now he’s crossing into Albany” — all before I reach New York. But in the quantum mode of travel, this doesn’t happen. Instead, you disappear here and you reappear there. And that’s it. That’s how the mind functions, too. And if the mind is a quantum phenomenon, then the classical model of the continuous path does not have to apply.

The mind being a quantum phenomenon, it can disappear from being an individual and become a wave. It can dematerialize here and materialize there. Sometimes you’re a particle, sometimes you’re a wave. We’ve been taught to be particles all throughout our lives. What we must learn now is how to be waves.

Guruji's ambivalence towards money and its temptations.

(from "Goddess and Guru"):

Sister-in-law Sundari Amma related another exchange with Guruji that reveals even more about his ambivalence toward money and its temptations.

Guruji, his brother, Amma and myself were travelling by Jeep on a pilgrimage to Arasavilli. Guruji had his eyes closed, meditating.
As we approached Srikakulam, he suddenly opened his eyes, saying that a yakshini241 had just appeared to him and revealed a spot nearby where there was a buried treasure! Being young at the time, I immediately said, “Well, we need money to build the temple!
Most people can only donate, at best, ₹100 or ₹50. So let’s go retrieve this treasure and use it!” But Guruji laughed and said, “That’s not how it works. To commit money won in a lottery is not true commitment. I will have to work hard—and many thousands of others will have to expend their labor too. This temple will be built by mitigating the karmic debts accumulated over many lifetimes of those
who traverse the path along with me. And in return we will build a temple within the heart of every person who comes here. For that, we do not need money!”

"The One and the Three…" Guruji on Siva and Sri Rudram

Guruji: eka ca me tisrasca me .... ŚRĪ RUDRAM

Śiva is the God of death. So, why worship Śiva? Why say "mrityave svāhā", this offer is to death?

There are three powers and three pleasures that go with them. These are, the power to think, the power to express the thought, and the power to do. Thinking is consummated in talking, talking is consummated in doing. And doing is consummated in what? In a loss of the original desire which animated all these three powers: of thinking (iccha), talking (jnana), and doing (kriya). Śiva is the God of losing desire. This sequence: think, talk, and do is what brings the future into the present and present into the past. The movement of time is the power of Śiva, called KALI.

There is pleasure in thinking. That is why we think in the first instance. There is an undeniable pleasure in talking, else we won't be such great talkers. But a greater pleasure awaits us in doing. The greatest of all pleasures, the acme of pleasure, however, lies not in doing, not in talking, not even in thinking but in just doing nothing at all; that is right, in just being lazy. But that is death, and it is difficult to do absolutely nothing.

But to some people like me, and I suspect to some of you too, it comes naturally sort of. Just being lazy - not thinking anything, not talking either to someone else or to one's own self, not even thinking or being emotional (emotion is also one way of thinking) - that is perfect bliss.

I can't imagine for the life of me why people find it difficult to be lazy. Why? Conditioning, probably. The value you have attached to the obsession of work has prevented you from just being yourself, even once in a way. This is an action society. Be up and do something, be a man! Otherwise, you may be just a-well, let me say it at the risk of being irreverent - mere woman! Damn these male chauvinist pigs!

The whole world revolves around these three. Think about the future, plan for it. Then put it, the (parallel) picture in serial words. Then get down to the business of putting the blueprint into action. And finally, AAAAHH! the bliss of accomplishment. We can relax, take it easy, dhire dhire, aahista, aahista, we can bask in the sunshine of our own glory, illumining ourselves. This is fine.

The trouble is, more often, we think about wrong things. Such as: causing hurt to ourselves, or to others. Then we put these ideas into words, express it, and finally, we act out the hurt, the pain. The moment this is done, the release from the animating desire has happened, we could be lazy and blissful in our accomplishment. Yet the bliss escapes us. For, we have not learned the fine art of not generating a fresh desire from the experience. We wish to repeat it. So, we are caught once more in the web of thinking, speaking, and acting.

DESIRE for anything, be it pleasure or pain, is a wave, a movement in awareness, a disturbance in the still laziness. This is a habit. We form the habit of forming a desire. Once a desire is born, it has to run its course, trying to find an expression in thought, word, and deed. Somehow, it has got to be satisfied, through reality or simulation.

Every time a desire is satisfied, there is an experience of pleasure, an orgasm. The intensity of pleasure depends upon the amount of tension released. More tension released more pleasure. Pleasure increases by holding the tension, not allowing it to be released without sufficient build-up.

We weep because we release pain in weeping. It is good to weep, to shed tears, to feel the pain, and LET IT PASS. Do not suppress it. Do not become a stoic, denying yourself the pleasure of expressing your pain. This is precisely the point, the sharp pain of pleasure, and the pleasure of pain. Don't you weep and laugh at the same time? Don't you ever wish to die in your most intense moment of pleasure? When you see such moments in a movie, you celebrate it as great acting

Cessation of desire is an orgasmic release from desire and its modifications in thought, word, and deed. Death is a great cessation of pleasure and pain, the ultimate unending orgasm, the final release. That is ŚIVA, the lord of death, the greatest of all yogis. Unperturbed awareness, intensely alive through death, basking in its own glory of self-illumination. We are born with an erection through an orgasm into this world, we will die with an erection into the orgasmic release.

All religious fervor has to do with the initiation, an enactment of dying to this world and taking a new birth of undiluted pleasure, it is obtained by a commitment to your own and other's happiness: not by a commitment to your own and other's pain.

The Journey of the soul: p7 - what is Kundalini

Guruji: You realize that anything traveling faster than the velocity of light has to go backwards in time? So there is a possibility. I'm becoming too intellectual, I don't like it. If you write down the equations of motion then you change the X, Y, Z and T, the signs of them, into “-X”, “-Y”, “-Z” and “-T”, then the equations are invariant. So in the micro world, the time can equally go in the forward direction or in the backward direction. Entropy, which indicates that the degree of disorder tends to increase, is what puts the arrow on time. But there's a new theorem of Śastri that the entropy is conserved in any reaction. And this theorem says that for every disorder that is increasing there is an order simultaneously being created in a different space. Not in this space, but in the phase space. You see what I mean? There is a model for the new world that's being created and intelligence being created every time the disorder is increasing.

So to put it in the simplest way I can think of putting it is like this - supposing we have a particle traveling with a velocity V, it can be described by its Fourier transform as a series of waves traveling with the velocity Omega (Ω) and you know very well that V times Ω is C2, where C is the velocity of light. So Ω is C2 upon V or C upon V into C. Now if V, the velocity of a particle, physical particle, is less than the velocity of light, then C upon V is the number larger than 1 and you are multiplying C by a number larger than 1, so Ω is always larger than C. C2 = V * Ω; 
Ω = C2/V or Ω = (C/V)*C If V < C, then C/V > 1
 

As such, Ω > C What this means is that if you have a wave packet, describing the motion of a physical particle, it is having a dual, which is consisting of another group of waves centered around an Ω, which is always traveling faster than the velocity of light. So that is the world, which is turning backwards in time and this world is turning forwards in time. These two worlds are meeting in the present and this point of meeting is moving this way. And that is what is causing the Universe to function. You happen to be in this world of these things, but you could equally be well in that phase space. In that space order is being created and in this space the order is being reduced, and this conservation of entropy or the degree of disorder in the Universe is preserved.

You cannot interact with that, it interacts with you through your mind. The spiritual aspect, the mental functioning you can exceed the velocity of light. There’s nothing that stops you, because it has no mass. Or it would have an imaginary mass. With zero mass you can go with the velocity of light but it doesn't go faster than light, it has to have an imaginary mass in order to go faster than light. These are called tachyons, the tachyon Universe. In that Universe because it is going backwards in time, since the order is decreasing in the forward direction of time, the order must be increasing in the opposite direction of time. Is it not true? So the possibility of going backwards in time exists really in the imaginary field of your thoughts. And this is how you can probably explain materialization and dematerialization. 

You can explain levitation on the basis of coherence of the thought patterns, which is the arousal of the Kuṇḍalinī. Then like the superfluid helium whose wave function keeps on expanding and you cannot contain superfluid helium, it just climbs up the walls of the container and comes down. In the same way when you have established coherence in your thinking pattern, then your Kuṇḍalinī is active, your whole thought process has become totally coherent, which means that you can predict the next step from whatever the present state is. So that is what I mean by coherence. In this state a levitation, these kinds of things can manifest in that state. So the main thing is to establish a coherent behavior with no deviations in your thought patterns. And the function of yoga, the function of mantra japa, the function of all these sadhanas, the function of ritual is establishment of harmony of thought. A cooperative, a supportive action for the joyous harmony in the world that is what is Kuṇḍalinī. Have I answered your question, how the possibility of free will can exist simultaneously with the possibility of predetermined Universe?

If the possibility of you going coherently backwards in time and then coming back to this, that is how the alternate evolution can come about. It is determined by an intelligence, so you can create a new world through your determination, through your intelligence, through your cooperative functioning. And a starting point is inside of you.

It's 10:30, we'll take a break. Thank you.

oṃ bhadraṃ karṇebhiḥ śṛṇuyāma devāḥ |

bhadraṃ paśyemākṣabhiryajatrāḥ |

sthirairaṅgaistuṣṭuvāṃsastanūbhiḥ |

vyaśema devahitaṃ yadāyuḥ |  [Ṛg veda, mandal 1, sukt 89, mantra 8]

svasti na indro vṛddhaśravāḥ |svasti naḥ pūṣā viśvavedāḥ |

svasti nastārkṣyo ariṣṭanemiḥ |

svasti no bṛhaspatirdadhātu ||

oṃ śāntiḥ śāntiḥ śāntiḥ || [Ṛg veda, mandal 1, sukt 89, mantra 6]

hariḥ oṁ śrī gurubhyo namaḥhariḥ oṁ

Thank you for being with us. What I speak is a function of what you are and I thank you all for being with me and eliciting these ideas from me. It has been an honor to be with you. Thank you.

The journey of the soul: p6 - overcoming negativity; possibility of free will in predetermined law of karma

Guruji: When I was sleeping alone in an attached hunt and there were movements and I knew that the snake was there and there's no power, dark night. I could not run away, I could not go anywhere, because if I move I may step on the thing. So I was frozen, frozen in that state. It was there through the night. But after some time we got used to each other, we started loving each other and the fear went away. Then I became Śiva. So having been with it, having nourished your negativity for some time, when your attention, total awareness, that you are able to give it, moves away, you give it up. I then turned that around. I turned that into a positive affirmation. How you do that is the following. Imagine that one of the results that I would like to have in that situation is to be the cobra, so that I would be in a position to strike. Or if I was faced with the tiger, I would like to have been the tiger. Or in a war situation between Arabs and Americans, I would like to be an American, rather than the Arab. So I would like to be in the winning situation. I can visualize that, right? I can visualize that or imagine that the cobra has gone away. And I can visualize that the lights have come on and it is not there. This situation I can visualize. What I have to do is to convert that negativity into positivity. You don't have to imagine this state through which you transform from that to this. All you have to do is to make a visualization about the final result that you want to achieve, and assume that you have already achieved it. And having done that, you imagine that you put it in a pink bubble, which represents your heart.

Heart is a pink bubble, and we chose a heart because it's love. Enclose that in that. Put it in your hands and blow it away. It goes to the Cosmos. So give this model of what you want to manifest or what you want to finally arrive at, as a model for the higher intelligence, saying that either this or something better than this should come into being for the benefit of everyone concerned. And it may take some time for this to materialize, but surely it will. What prevents such a visualization from materializing or manifesting? Your own doubt about it. Again, I apply the same procedure to the doubt. Be with the doubt, love it, transform it into a positive statement, but I'm not going to have any doubts regarding this. That will also materialize. You are your own worst enemy, because whenever you have something positive, you're simultaneously thinking something negative. And this is what I said - every one of our dreams becomes true, provided we don't have a contrary dream, which prevents this dream from coming true, because that dream also comes true. That works against this. 

So if you are having negative thoughts, the best way is to deal with them, be with them, transform them, convert them into a positive assertions and leave to the Divine Mother to manifest in its own time. You can work like this with anything. It all depends upon how you are able to visualize howto deal with that: if you have fear, anxiety, insecurity, job, you want money, you want comforts, you want happiness. Pyār cāhiye ke paisā cāhiye, whether you want love or money. And I think I want both. And why not? Pyār cāhiye aur paisā cāhiye Whether paisā that I really have is really apyār of the people. The love that people have for me is material wealth. And you know how this has happened and how this has worked out, so I don't have to expand on that.

Question: Will you explain the concept of karma, the rebirth and how it relates to the evolution of the soul?

Guruji: It's a deep question, I can't dispense of it very lightly. Because the understanding of the concept of the karma itself is involved there. As far as my understanding goes, karma really implies causality; that if you do this  then this result will follow. This is the cause and this is the effect. The assumption being that everything that is there now, some prior cause must have been there. So without the cause, this effect will not be there. So the succession between cause and effect is the causality, the law of causality, how a reaction will proceed. In other words, a well-orderliness in time is the causality or theory of karma.

I have sequence of events A, B, C, D. A occurring earlier than B, B occurring earlier than C and C occurring earlier than D. And always when I find B, I see A occurring earlier than B, so I say “Aha!” A is the cause of B, and B is a cause of C, and C is the cause of D. This is as far as our normal understanding of that interior karma is concerned. In that sense, the theory of karma seems to be unavoidable. So if you say that everything is already pre-structured, predetermined, how is there any possibility of any free will, how is there any possibility of one's own effort to contribute to an evolution of a spiritual nature or a material nature? This is your question, how does it relate to the spiritual evolution? Evolution means the grow thin time of certain series of possibilities. We will approach the question through an example. We know that time is moving relentlessly from the past to the present and the present to the future. So everything is simply following the karma theory and how we can overcome this situation? 

Let’s suppose that I have a piece of cardboard and I cut a vertical slot in that. Behind that cardboard there's a dog and the dog is walking forwards and then changing direction and walking backwards. And I keep observing the dog through the slot. And what is it that I observe as a scientist? When the dog is walking, it always walks forward. So I see its nose as a first thing that's coming in through a little slot, then I see its eyes, then its ears, then its front legs, and then the trunk, and then its back legs, and then the tail. And every time I see, the same sequence of events is happening. So I say “Aha!”, the nose is the cause of the eyes, eyes are the cause of the ears, the ears are the cause of the front legs, the front legs are the cause of the trunk, the trunk is the cause the back legs, and the back legs are the cause of the tail. But now comes Swami Silly-Goose-Ananda and he gives a bottle of whiskey to the dog. And what does the drunken dog do? He starts walking backwards now. 

Then what happens? First the tail appears, and the legs; and the whole logic that we have built about this Universe of the dog or God, whatever, it has become topsy-turvy. Your causality somehow instead of A being the cause of B, B has become the cause of A. See, this whole thing gone upset. So first observation that we make from this example is, that when the time-flow is reversed or a possibility of reversal time flow is there, there is a possibility of converting cause and effect into each other. So having established this fact, now let us take one step further and ask how can I create an alternate possibility for me from this point onwards? I will give you a procedure to try. It may be a little difficult but you can try all the same. What you have to do is, you have to go back to a time when your father was not yet born to your grandfather. Then take a gun and shoot your grandfather before your father was born to him and then come back to the present moment. And then ask the question, do you or do you not exist? You definitely and surely exist, because you went back in time, you shot your grandfather and came back to your present. You’re not dead. Now, we go back in time and I shot my grandfather and my father was not born. 

If I shot my grandfather, my father would could not have been born to my grandfather. And if he was not born, how could I be born to my father? So I cannot exist. You see, the situation here? So your ability to go back and in time and come forward has created the alternative possibility of your non-existence, going as a parallel event from your present state of existing. So your world lines start from this point onwards as two separate lines and go on together and one line says - you mare existing and other one says - you are not existing. You have created an alternative possibility. In other words if causality is an expression of succession in time, then a non-causality or a possibility of a freedom of choice for an individual to have an alternate growth pattern is an expression of the fact that time-space is a continuum in which motions back and forth are possible. Once you're able to do that, then how can you cross the barriers of time? That is your next question you must ask. You haven't asked, so I’m not going to answer.

The Journey of the soul: p5 - forms of the ritual; who are true Masters in spirituality; removing fears and neganivity

Guruji: I had talked very little about the ritual in all this. It is important to realize that your body is the temple of God and the God, who is residing in the temple, is inside your body. This recognition of the divinity of yourself, as well as the divinity of the temple is important. This is just a way of saying that just as you keep the temple clean, you keep your body clean. What is the meaning of saying, the body is clean? My body consists of not only the physical body, when you consider flesh and blood, but also of my thoughts. Everything that I see, is my body. I am seeing that, I am not that. So that is coming out of me, all that is my body. How do you artificially distinguish yourself from this? There is no distinction really, this distinction is artificially assumed.The question arises - is the ritual essential or not? When you sit for a meditation, you are doing a saguṇa [upasana] or assuming a form of God or Goddess. 

And because you can love that, you want to have it in a form, so you can relate to it. It is in the mind or externally? Is there any distinction between thought and action? That is as much a ritual as when you perform it outside. Even when you are performing it outside, that ritual is not complete until the major mental visualizations are properly done. So there is always a unity between the ritual performed either internally or externally. Now what corresponds to the internal? Let us say nirguṇa dhyana, when translated into the external terms - bahya pūjā. Supposing I am walking along a road, which is what I am doing these days, I’m walking three miles a day, and at each step I keep on saying one bījākṣara after the next, let’s say Rāma. So right foot forward - Ra, left foot forward - Ma. Rāma, Rāma, Rāma, Rāma. It keeps on going. This is my centering device. Now as I keep walking, initially for some time, I am interested in looking at the houses, at the flowers that are arranged in front of the gardens. And as I'm walking on the road, I am cognizing the cars that are coming. And when the car comes, I just move to the left and I keep walking and then when the car is not there I can walk on the road again. We Indians like to walk on the road. And this behavior persists for some time. 

And then, after some time you stop seeing the different parts, it’s just the whole scene you are taking in. You are not saying that this is a tree, this is a road, this is a car, this is me - all those ideas have disappeared and you are just walking and the whole thing is slowly coming over you, flowing over you. You have entered the Tao of walking meditation. Your cognition has stopped, your thinking mind has stopped, you have gotten to nirguṇa dhyana, in that there are no divisions. The picture is there, but you are not cognizing it. Similarly, inside the mind there also can be a picture, but if you are not cognizing it, you merge into that. You become one with that, you can become a part of it. Then the car is a part of you, you are a part of you, the trees are a part of you, the road is a part of you, everything is one single whole and there is no time in that. Time does not flow in that. The motion has halted, it has become a still picture. You are not giving any name to anything. So the ritual can be internal, the ritual can be external, the ritual can be with form, internally or with from, externally. Or without form, internally or without form, externally. All these possibilities are there. I do not see any essential distinction between these things.

It is easy to identify the beauty with God, but you become the master when you are able to identify everything with God. Even when it is ugly. It is easy to identify the good with God, but you are a master when you are able to identify also bad with God, because that's also a part of you. You must love it and transform it. You cannot reject a part of it, you cannot throw it away. It won't go away. If there is a darkness in the shadow, you cannot trample upon it and try to wish that the shadow would not be there. What you are trying to do is to shine a light on it. That light is your love. You must love it and transform it. Start having a better dream. That is the way. So the ritual is a means of learning a harmonious and a joyful mutually supportive kinds of actions. We have the technology that makes a war - that is also a ritual. But we can have a technology that makes peace. We can use the technology for eliminating the wants of the people. 

So let us start having dreams of those things and those dreams have to start from the people. We have to withdraw the power from the media, which is trying to present those violent images to us. How do we do that? We stop seeing those things and they will lose their energy. And then, they have to go away. If a public does not respond to the violence aspect of it and obviously the advertising industry cannot survive, they'll have to change their advertising strategy to meet the needs of the people. If the people are peaceful, then they will demand the peaceful things. The transformation has to come from within and once having found the light within, we must try to express that light. Do not be conditioned by what other people are saying, just go with whatever your heart says and your heart always says the right thing. The heart always says - love everybody. That is because that is unity, that is the way the heart functions.

Question: How to remove the negativity?

Guruji: There is a beautiful book by a lady, Shakti Gawain, called “Creative Visualization”, I would advise you to read. But I’ll also tell you about the answer to the question. We have anxieties, we have fears, we have insecurities, we lose our job. This is a very common; or we lose the lover that we had. There’s a feeling of insecurity. As I was saying, that insecurity is a part of you, it is one of your children. You have to accept that insecurity. You are to love that insecurity; it is like a child that is craving for your attention. You must give it that attention and that attention is the love that you are giving. You cannot keep telling your child, that you are good for nothing, you are useless and I kick you whenever I see you. That child is going to become a rebel and is going to break away from you and act out in antisocial ways. The way to convert that child is to give it your love and attention and not by rejecting it. So negativity is like your child, you have to accept it and nurture it. 

What do you mean by nurturing your negativity for some time? Supposing you lost your job or you are about to lose your job, then be with that thought. Imagine the worst possible kinds of things that can happen when you do not have a job. Go deep into that, into the negativity. Give it your total attention. And as you are doing that, you will go deeper, and deeper,and deeper. If you get depressed, get depressed. Do not run away from it, keep with it. After some time your mind starts to move away a little from that idea. It cannot bear the tension of the negativity. And it is at that point your training in meditation should help you to let go of this. When your mind starts moving away from this. To give you an example. Supposing you are in a room, it is absolutely dark and the power has failed. You cannot put the light on and you know that there is a cobra inside that room. You are afraid. That fear is, what is going to happen. You cannot just shove that fear, saying that I do not want to have this fear. It will not go, it will be with you. What happens then? You get into an altered state of consciousness, an altered state of awareness, mode number two of your functioning, where your mind has totally become alive and concentrated. Every little sound, every little movement, you are able to perceive, even though you are not able to see anything.

You have become the room and you have become the snake also, because you are able to feel its movements. You are not seeing it, but you are visualizing. Through your heart you are seeing without seeing. You are seeing with your heart; you have become the snake and you are visualizing how you are reacting to this. And this is not a situation which the mind is liking very much. It cannot stay in that state for a long time, the adrenaline that is being pumped into your system induces the fear. But you can only retain this altered state of consciousness depending upon your conditioning and evolution, up to a certain level. Then the inhibitory levels come up in your mind and you lose your awareness, then you become merged totally. At the time you can let go of the fear and the fear will go away. I had experienced this at Devipuram.

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Vira Chandra: very powerful techniques to work with a fear and negativity ware described by Viktor Frankl and are called "Paradoxical Intention" and "Dereflection". 

In short, Paradoxical Intention is a technique that invites you to wish for the thing that you fear most. This was originally suggested for use in the case of anxiety or phobias, in which humor and ridicule can be used when fear is paralyzing.  For example, if you have a fear of looking foolish, you might be encouraged to try to look foolish on purpose. Paradoxically, your fear would be removed when you set an intention to behave as foolishly as possible. Hasya (Laugh) Rasa has been described by Abhinavagupta Pada as the highest, so when you are looking at the most frightening things with a humor, you are invoking a God Vision on the Reality.

Dereflection refers to diverting the person's attention away from their symptoms. Dereflection has been originally developed by Frankl for people suffering from sexual disorders, in which the patient's desire for sexual pleasure becomes an obstruction to achieving it. Because the more the person wishes egoistic pleasure, the more it runs from him/her. The therapist discourages intercourse and thus breaks the cycle of desire, striving, and disappointment.

These techniques are so powerful because deal with 2 purely divine phenomenons:  the ability to self-transcendence and the ability to abstract from oneself's lower nature [which is inherent in the sense of humor] - which are mobilized by these techniques.

The journey of the soul: p4 - what is Sri Vidya; different matras; Siva and Sakti

 Question: What is Śrī Vidyā?

Guruji: The Śrī Vidyā is a deep tradition, it is one of the esoteric traditions. It is a ritual, which integrates different kinds of disciplines in it. For example, there are aspects of the ritual where you have a visualization that you are placing your body on a funeral pyre and cover it with sticks and set it alight. So there is a light, which burns up your body, and once you burn up your body, everything that belongs to the body goes away. This is an imagination. In the imagination you try to disassociate yourself totally with your body and then, having done that, your body is reduced to ashes, which you are seeing in your mind's eye. Then you imagine that the clouds are gathering, there is rain and thunder and lightning flashes and rain is there. And this rain gives a new life to these ashes and these ashes then take the form of the divine personality and it is that personality which carries on from that point onwards. You have reset yourself to the state of being the Devi, whom you are going to worship. So it is not Joe worshiping Devī, but it is Devī worshiping Devī from that point onwards.

Now the act of worship implies a division - that is for your joy, for your play. You are trying to define the map, to give a structure to the Cosmos in ways you can understand. You are generating a probing action into the Universe through different channels of communication and each of the areas is in the Śrī Chakra and represents a particular aspect of the Cosmos. You are trying to understand through a process of division, but you also are unifying everything at the center. So this balancing of the male and the female aspects the receptive and the active aspects, is taking place in this ritual. In that sense, it is a divisive as well as the unitive algorithm or a procedure. In a pūjā context, at the end of the pūjā you withdraw that thing back into yourself and you are all alone. During the pūjā, arcāna kāle rūpa gatha, at the time of worship She assumes the form. Where does the form come from? It comes from within your heart. And you know that it has come from your heart and you are worshiping yourself when you are worshiping the Devī. This experience of the mirror, imaging yourself as Devi is an integral part of the ritual. Every action that you are performing, you must visualize the image of what you are doing, you are also experiencing. If you are giving a bath to Devī, you must experience the bath flowing over your body. If you are capable of going through the visualizations, to that extent the ritual is successful. So it’s the two sides of the mirror, this one laughing and that one laughing, but you know it's only an image. This helps, because you are trying to create a model for yourself and the model for the Cosmos to grow into. This is based on the mutually supportive functions of the different aspects of the intelligence, not divisive. I would prefer to use supportive to co-operative. 

Co-operative is not strong enough. When you are doing something and if the other persons are supporting you in your actions, then there is harmony in that. So supportive validating kind of an environment is what is created by Śrī Chakra. Śrī Chakra means a wheel. And who is the center of the chakra? Śrī. Śrī means auspiciousness. It can be translated as love, it can be translated as harmony, it can be translated as the deepest of joy that one is capable of; all these things. So Śrī Chakra is an auspicious circle of whom other devotees, they are all parts of your own self. So like Śrī Kṛṣṇa playing with the gopī maṇḍala, you are playing with yourself. And this concept of Śrī Kṛṣṇa playing with the 16,000 gopīs is derived from the effect that there is a 16-petal lotus in the neck, Viśuddhi chakra and there is 1,000- petal lotus at the top of your head. If you draw the lines connecting each of these petals to one of those petals there you have got 16,000 lines. Each one of them is a different cittavṛtti, the mind vortex or the thought pattern. So 16,000 different thought patterns, the Kuṇḍalinī Śakti is flowering and playing with itself, that is the concept there. In fact there's nobody else besides you in this world. So where is the question of even a division between thought and action? It's not there.Thought is action when there is no division. If you draw a space like this and if you form a structure in the space and then you can say there’s an arrow of going like this, I can say this arrow is going from outside to inside.

 This arrow represents a sensory motor functioning. I am inside this and the world is outside and I am knowing about this world. This is a sensory arrow. But if I am acting on the world, then it's an outgoing arrow. The division between outgoing and incoming arrow is there so long as a boundary is there, so long as the sensory apparatus is functioning, so long as you have the division between action and thinking. Without the boundary there's an arrow there but you can't say whether the arrow is going in or out. It represents both thought and action. A thought is action when you have merged yourself into the Cosmos. As long as you preserve the diversity or division then the thought is not the same thing as action. So the interval between the thought and action is brought about by the existence of a boundary, which is dividing inside from outside. The difference between Aham and Maha - you write Aham and reverse the letters and you get Maha. Maha is the Cosmos and Aham is the role model that we are playing, thinking that your body, your thoughts, that your individual thoughts represent the totality. That is not so. The Universe is your true nature. You are capable of knowing the Universe, being the Universe. All that you have to do, is to throw away this limited thing and gain the eternal thing.

Question: Are there different mantras for different roles, different purposes?

Guruji: Let's suppose that you want to go into a beautiful place, which is surrounded by several peaks. You can observe that beautiful place from different peaks, from peak A, peak B, peak C. And from each place it has got its own beauty, its own representation. And you are approaching a certain peak, you are having a different experience of the road that's going and the visions that it’s presenting. In the same way, the beauty and harmony of the dynamic nature of the Mother Universe can be appreciated through different channels of communication. And each different mantra is a different channel of communication. You can communicate with the world through the channel of fear, which is at the mūlādhāra chakra. Or you can communicate with it through the channel of continuation of the race, the svādhiṣṭhāna chakra. Or you can appreciate the Universe from the point of view of its awesome power and glory, that is the maṇipūra chakra. Or you can try to appreciate the Universe from the standpoint of view of the universal love, un conditionallove, that is the heart chakra. Or you can ignore all these things, ignore all the attachments, and merge yourself into all the space. Be like the tummy that contains the whole Universe inside of yourself, you are like the Mother, then you are at the viśuddhi chakra, you are containing all space. Then you see the world growing as a baby inside your womb ashiraṇyagarbha. Then you are going to the time chakra; there you know what is in the past, present and future, both bhūta, bhaviṣyat, vartamāna. So there are different levels and different āmnāyas.

At each level you’ve got different ways of appreciating. Each of these different mantras is the way of appreciating the Universe, it's a channel of communication. You’ve got so many channels on TV, so many mantras. You can have a Rājarājeśvarī channel, you can have a Bhuvaneśvarī channel, you can have a Mahāmāya channel, Kālī, Tara, Sundarī, Bālā, Chinnamastā, Bhairavī, Bagalāmukhī, different channels are there. You can choose one that is appropriate to the level of your functioning. The higher forms are more enjoyable, but you must also appreciate the different aspects. You should be both at sahasrāra as well as at mūlādhāra. As I said earlier, you must balance your Yin and Yang, your Śiva and Śakti aspects. You must probe the world with different mantras, different ways, different peaks. You see the perfection in different ways, but at the same time you must be able to correlate them and also see the unity behind this diversity. There is joy and bliss in the diversity and there is the joy and bliss in unity. The creativity is there in the diversity, and in laya, in reabsorbing back into yourself, the release of tension is there. Tension is there in the creation and release is there in a re-absorption. You must experience both, you must be tense and you must relaxed. Tense, relaxed, tense, relaxed. Bottled energy - is matter. It must become matter, become dense. And un-bottled matter is energy. It must explode into the pure energy. You must be able to do both these things, it is in the interaction between these two poles where you will find bliss.

Question: How does the concept of Yin and Yang reconcile with the concept of Śiva and Śakti? 

Guruji: We can say this in more general terms - the kinetic or a dynamic aspect and a static aspect. If you are sitting on the Earth, then the Sun seems to go around you. But if you are on the Sun, Earth seems to go around you. So the static appears as dynamic from the dynamics point of view. Then dynamic also appears as dynamic from the statics point of view. So dynamic is the more essential nature, you may identify it with anything. But we prefer to identify with Śakti. It is just a tradition, that's all. There is no essential difference between these two. The main thing is the balance between them, the unity of these two. You can say that the static is an asymptotic limit of the dynamic. You can consider a harmonic wave and unless the amplitude of this is reduced to zero, then you approach this static limit. But they are interchangeable, like a kinetic energy and a potential energy. They can keep changing roles from one to the other, as you are moving the pendulum from one end to the other. At the extreme position, it's purely potential energy and there's no motion there, there’s no kinetic energy. 

And when the potential energy keeps getting transformed, it requires more and more speed, more and more kinetic energy after which it gets transformed back into the potential energy. So it keep oscillating between these two. There are different modes of energy and you can change between these two. So there is no hard and fast rule which you can call kinetic. You can give it a different name. It so happened that this role inversion has been taking place all along. For example, whether initially geographically there was Mother worship, it was called Ma - Mother, Nu - the sky. And when it came to India, it became Manu, the male, Manu dharma śastra. So these role inversions have always been taking place and this is one of those role inversions. There’s no essential difference between Śiva and Śakti. It’s just the name you apply to one of the energies.

The Journey of the soul: p3 - being a witness a playing the game; following promptings of a heart; role of a mantra

 

Guruji: I was talking to a lady who phoned me from Washington. I really did not know her. Somebody told her about me and she was talking to me. She said she had been having problems with her husband. They do not see eye to eye with each other, her husband filed for divorce and they have been more or less separated for a year. In this situation I have to just be receptive and keep on listening.

They made reconciliation efforts so she called her husband they met at some place. They initially agreed that both of them loved each other but then they started working on their differences. Once they started working on the differences, they were not able to resolve these differences because they were getting identified with those differences. She asked me, what do I do? What would be your advice in such a situation? This is a problem which is very common in this part of the world. Let me proceed with the analysis a little more before we come to the answer.

Supposing you are hurt, you are injured, are you the being who is injured, or are you the witness of a being who is injured? Supposing somebody hit you badly and you are feeling the pain, you are hurt. So if I ask you, are you hurting? You say: “Yes, I’m hurting”. Do you know that you are hurting? “Yes, I know that I am hurting”. So there is a part, which knows the hurting being. That part is not hurt.

Let's go back to our mirror image example. I am seeing myself reflected in the mirror, there is a certain part that I see in the mirror, which I am identifying with a particular body. Now, supposing I move my attention away from this part of the being, to identify myself with a different part of the Cosmos that I see. And then again I ask the question, supposing I am hurt. So what I am doing is I have become a witness to this hurt, to this injury. So if you are identifying yourself with that part which is not hurting, which is a witness to the being who is hurting, then you can look at the world as a dream. 

Supposing I go to a dream and in the dream I can be a king. I'm a king, I'm going on a hunt, sitting on an elephant. There are drummers following me, there are wild dogs following me. So we go on a hunt and we locate a tiger. I shoot down the tiger and bring it back home and then I wake up from the dream. When I wake up from the dream, I am not a king anymore, but while in the dream, I am the king. Where does the elephant come from? It came from my mind. Where did the wild dogs come from? They came from my mind. And where did the forest, in which I was going hunting, come from? It came from my mind; it was a part of me. And where did the tiger, which I shot, come from? It came from my mind. So all of these are parts of my mind.

And if I was identifying myself with a king I did not experience the pain, which the tiger was experiencing. So even there is a dichotomy. It takes you away from the hurt situation. And when you wake up, you realize that all these things are yourself. You have a choice. The choice is for you to identify yourself with the particular aspect that you think you are. Or you can identify yourself with the witness, which is the whole other thing, which is seeing you suffering. The choice exists for me to be the world and see myself, then I'm a witness. The witness consciousness pervades this whole world, the whole Cosmos. And in that observation that has got out of myself, I have pervaded every individual, because every individual is seeing me. 

So my witness consciousness is covering all of us, uniting us. So when you go to negotiate with a person you must identify yourself with the witness consciousness. You recognize that you are not two different people, but you are the parts of a dream of a one single individual, adopting to the role-models and you are playing your games. You need not give up your games, but you must realize that you are playing your games. It is that realization, which enables you to play the game more effectively - with detachment, without dying. That’s also a way to overcome the fear. How did the dreamer overcome the fear? He awoke from the dream. Once you wake up from the dream, there is no separateness, everything as unified. You know that it is all an illusion, it's like you are playing a game. Just like the two friends sitting together and playing a game. You are involved with the game and sometimes you get emotional,  but then you realize that it is all a game, then you are able to play better. This world that we are living in is used to be played like a game.

This is why the ritual that we perform is to get the ability of ourselves to be like children again. We find this world so divided, in which we are not able to find anything that is really lovable, so we want to create a sacred space. We want to be like little children playing with dolls. I can express my love to the idol and it will not refuse me, it will not reject me. I can express my love to God and I know that He is going to accept. So the process of change begins with you and you have to start having a better dream. That is the way. You are to live the way of your heart - what your heart says, what your centering says. You must give yourself space for being yourself and your actions must be supported by the promptings coming within you. When you are playing a game of war, if all your actions and your strategy is based upon reacting to what the other person is doing, then you are not a master strategist, because the control rests with the other person. He has defined the strategy by putting the initiators and you are just reacting to them. He knows what your reaction is going to be, so your strategy will not work. Your strategy for improvement of the world must start from not what the world is saying about it, but what you are saying about it. You will discover the deepest roots within yourself. Go to your heart and see what it is prompting. You will find out that it always prompts love and affection, it does not prompt more. We must attack the negativity at its roots, and its roots lie in the heart. Once you go to the heart, the heart is a centering device, there can be nothing except love and light, glory and harmony. So that is the way the sadhana must proceed, it must go according to what your heart says. What your thoughts say, must correspond with what your words say, and your words must correspond with your actions. So correspondence between thought, word and deed are the probing aspects and they must be  guided by your intuition, the heart. 

So these four things must be in total correspondence, then you are Divine. Now I would like to invite questions from you and I would like to answer them to the best of my ability.

Question: What is the role the mantra plays in achieving the results within the thought, word, deed and emotion?

Guruji: The mantra is an internal sound, which you keep producing again and again and again. It becomes very familiar to you after a few repetitions. Even if you had a meaning associated with that mantra, that association may not last long. So it becomes a sort of a pattern of sounds, which just keeps on going again, and again, and again. In a sense a mantra is like a selective filter, which has certain characteristics. When you are uttering the mantra inside the mind, subconsciously you're making these subtle movements of the vocal cords and they're activating certain regions of the brain. These sounds have a propensity to evoke image patterns. So if you are familiar with the filter theory, there is a certain Q-factor, quality factor associated with the spectrum of the channel that is allowing the information to come through. So you can say, in a sense, a mantra defines a channel of communication with the deepest aspects of the knowledge that are there inside of yourself. Now we all realize that our genes encode all the information about the entire history of the life process itself. Right from the lowest of primitive stages of life, up to the highest stage of evolution that we have come to, all this is recorded in the human gene system. 

And that is a subconscious part of the memory. You have lived as a tiger, you have lived as a reptile, you have lived as a plant, you have lived as a fish - all these memories are there inside of your mind. Now which of these memories is being pulled up by the presence of the mantra? I'll briefly indicate to you how the mantra works. Supposing you are studying for your examination and somebody is playing a loud disco music just next door. You will not be able to concentrate on what you are studying, because that sound is interfering with the thing that you are trying to do. So sound as an effect of interfering with an image that you are trying to process, right? So this sound can be an external sound or an internally generated sound. The internally generated sound is a mantra. So when you are justing sitting and just trying to keep your mind still, there are some thoughts coming in and the sound mechanism, this mantra that you are using, is a means of interfering with that process. You have been able to give your total attention to the image that is coming through when there is no disco sound. However, when the disco music is there, you cannot concentrate. So in the same way you will not be able to give all your attention to the image that is coming through. So in a sense, it helps you to detach yourself from the thought that is coming through at that point. 

And not only that, the level of awareness that you can give to either the sound or the interfering thought, both of them are lower than their fully conscious level, right? Because this is interfering with that and that is interfering with that, so you cannot concentrate on this, nor you can concentrate on that. So the level of awareness, the level of focused attention that you can give, to either of them comes down. If you approach the mantra japam or the recitation of the mantra again and again with the idea of being a detached witness to what is happening and when some thought-current comes along, you do not try to pass a judgement - whether this is good, or bad, whether is desirable, or undesirable. Don’t evaluate, don't cognize even. If you happen to cognize because of the nature of your mind's functioning, just say: “Oh, how interesting!”Supposing an image comes up that a demon is chasing you and has your neck and is pressing you. If you are able to detach yourself from that idea, you can say: “Oh, how interesting!” It's like watching a horror movie. You see that there is a person called Bhimji, who is being chased by the demon,and the demon caught him and is squeezing this fella and he is going to die. But you are watching that process, you're not identifying yourself with Bhimji. But you are saying: “There is a person called Bhimji who is being attacked by the demon, how interesting!” 

So if you can retain that detachment, then this thought-current will not be able to hold on to you and it will just pass away. It is your interest that makes you identify yourself with something and then you start experiencing the pain or the pleasure of the situation. To give an example, supposing you go to a movie theater and in the beginning you are seeing people surrounding you - there's an interesting couple doing something, there are children, you wonder if the fan is working or not. All these things, you're aware of the environment. Once the movie starts, your mind gets totally absorbed in it. You identify yourself with the hero or the heroine and you are fighting the fights of those people. You are enjoying the loves of those people. Your mind is totally identified with that. You are not able to remain detached anymore, so you have become entrapped in the role that is being laid out for you by means of the audiovisual experience. So it is this entrapment that causes your attachment and your experience of pain and pleasure. But the moment you are able to withdraw yourself from Bhimji and say: “Aha! I am not Bhimji, but I am witnessing a person called Bhimji, who is experiencing this,” then it becomes a play.

The journey of the Soul: p2 - how God has intended us to be; limits of sense perceptions; thinking and feeling mind;

 

Guruji: Now what do we mean by a better dream? You take any person in the world away from a group and corner him or her and ask the question: “What would you prefer - peace or war? What would you prefer - love or hate? What would you prefer - violence or affection?” You'll find out that the answer in every case is unique. There can be no two opinions about it. We are made as children by God, and if you want to know how we were made by God, all we have to do is to look towards the children. A child, unless he's indoctrinated - whether you are a Jew, or you are a Christian, or you are a Muslim, or a Hindu, no such distinctions exist in the mind of the child. They go to everyone with the same love and affection, everyone can kiss them and they are just bundles of joy. That’s how God had intended us to be.

And what do we make of ourselves? We imagine ourselves to have certain identities, certain role models. We are molded by the society as well as our family; we have these roles and we tend to get entrapped in them. We have to realize that we are much bigger than what we think we are. Let me try to explain this concept in a slightly different way. The way we perceive this world, is conditioned by our senses. We have five channels of communication in the world, of knowing about the world. Either we see it, or we hear it, or we smell it, or we touch it. So let us look at the characteristics of each of these things. Let’s look at our sense of sight. What is near to us appears bigger than what is far away, that’s an inverse square law. So it is acting like a local magnifier. Out of the entire electromagnetic spectrum that is available for possible vision, we only see one octave - from 3,800 angstroms to about 6,000 angstroms. We do not see the ultraviolet, we do not see infrared, we do not see a microwave, we see none of these things. If we want to see, we have to develop separate instruments to be able to do that. We are spectrally delimited and we are locally magnifying. Let’s look at our sense of hearing. What is inside of this room, we hear, what is outside, we do not hear. And the sense of touch - you do not know what is more than two millimetres away from your body. The skin doesn't sense that. There’s a very sharp cut off. That cut off occurs two millimetres from the surface of your body. Once you go inside the body you do not have a feeling. The feeling is there only on the skin surface. The skin also measures the temperature and it also measures the pain, but these are all local. If somebody is pushing a tube through your arteries, you won't know it because you don't feel the blood that is flowing through, do you? So the feeling is confined only on a surface. Every one of our senses of sight, of smell, of hearing, every one of these things is acting like a local magnifier. Now, having understood this, suppose I ask you to wear a scanning electron microscope, which magnifies everything by effect of 100,000, attach it to your eyes and discover how this room appears to you. We may keep on searching this room, covering every bit of it for a million years, a billion years, but you will never make out how this room looks like. 

In order to see this room as we humans see it, you have got to throw away that scanning electron microscope. The range of this instrument is not appropriate for having a universal vision. Our vision is also limited in so many other ways. For example, we said that what is near to us appears big, but what is faraway from us, appears small. So in such a sense what kind of an emotional interaction with the world I can have? What is closer to me is more important to me than what is far away, right? So the affections that you have, the attachments that you have, these things are brought about by the nature of your senses. If you think of a small cube, a wooden cube and hold it there, it appears with a certain size. You are not able to look at this thing from all points of view from all directions in space. Your view is conditioned to one particular angle of looking. If you are able to look at the cube from all possible directions, how would that cube look like to you? Would it have a spherical geometry? If you were able to look at the cube from all possible time slots, how has it evolved to becoming the cube today? It was a piece of wood, and this was a part of a tree, if you go back in time. It was a seed and it was the earth. And before it was the earth, it was an intergalactic dust. And before that, it was merged into one single point, at the origin of the Universe, the Big Bang. So you see, if you trace its history towards later time, again you will find that it's going to merge into the Cosmos. So let us admit honestly that we do not have a universal vision, because we are born with the senses with which we are observing and these senses are limiting.

Your attachments are the sources for your appreciation of the Universe, of your division of the Universe into so many different fields, of your classifications, of your cognitions. All these things are based on that drawing out of yourself from yourself. And this multiplicity, this projection is coming from the nature of your senses.

There are two ways of knowing things. When I say that I know that this is a glass, then my mind is functioning, thinking mind is functioning. It’s comparing this object with so many different objects and it has ruled out all the other possibilities, which did not belong to this. It was compared to a cat, it was compared to the tiger, a lion, a human being, a library, a book, all these comparisons have failed. It said - it is not this, it's not this, it's not this, it's not this. And among all the glasses it has abstracted certain kinds of information and recognized that this is a glass. So it is when you say that you know something, this act of knowing is like a knife, it is cutting or separating something from the rest. It is divisible. The nature of knowing, the act of cognition is dividing the whole into parts. Okay, so the more you want to know, the more you want to become an expert about something, the finer and finer is your discrimination going to be. You are cutting the Universe into smaller and smaller slices and trying to appreciate this and maybe trying to synthesize the relationships between them. But basically the knowledge is divisive, the thinking mind is discriminative. 

Discrimination is the faculty of the thinking mind. So this means that given a starting point, which is yourself, you're going into branches, you are dividing yourself into your thinking mind and your knowing mind, and then you are going further into branches and subbranches and so on. You are going down into an ever evolving tree. You are going to the roots, so this is multiplying. In other words you can say that thinking mode of being is a centrifugal force, which tends to move away from the center. If you are standing on the top of the tree on the surface of a sphere and the sphere is rotating. Let us say, only at the center you are stable. A little motion away from this, you  are pushed away and you are in an unstable equilibrium. So a thinking mind is behaving like a convex surface on which you are sitting. It is defocusing, it does not remain focused at a particular point because it wants to go out and search.The feeling mind is the opposite of this. It is a centering device, it's based on love. Here, what you are trying to do is to eliminate the distinctions you are seeing - without your eyes, you are hearing, without your ears, you are thinking, without your mind. The feeling is a centering device is the way of the heart. The heart is the receptive thing. When you are in love what do you do? You make love. You embrace and that is uniting. It is making 2 into 1, if you know how to make 2 into 1, then you know how to make 3 into 1, because you can first convert 3 into 2 and then 2 into 1. And by a process of continuous successive reductions you can bring an infinity into 1. So the love is a uniting principle. And knowing is like pushing away from yourself. It is something like hate. If you hate somebody, would you like to be near that person? You would like to push them away. 

So when you try to discriminate with the thought, when you are trying to know, when you try to cognize, when you try to name somebody or something as belonging to this or that, you are creating a division between yourself and the other and this division is the cause of the trouble. It will not be the cause of the trouble if your two modes are functioning.The probing or the pushing away and the inviting or receptive functions are balanced. This is what they say in different languages, in different cultures. They are called by different names. In the Tao, the merging of the Yin and Yang, the positive and negative energies. The male is probing, knowing, thinking mind, acting. And the female - the receptive aspect. So when you balance your energies, when you balance this probing, this action, the thinking with the female principle, which is based on love, then this action that you are performing in the world becomes meaningful. This action must support and be supported by the female aspect, the receptivity.

Journey of a the Soul: p1 - reflection in the mirror; how to change a world?

(Satsang conducted on 31 May 1991 at the Rājarājeśvari Pīṭham, USA)

Guruji: Swamiji, would you like to say a few words? Alright. I’m honored by this august audience.  We have many intellectuals here: renunciates from the Holy Śaṅkarācārya order of Shringeri; we have devotees who are doing serious sadhana, and we have plain simple human beings, to which category I belong. So it’s harder to speak in front of you. I need some strength to speak in front of you, so I will invoke the Devī Sarasvatī onto my tongue, so that what is in my heart will be on my tongue. 

praṇo devī sarasvatī vājebhirvājinīvatī

dhīnāmavitrayavatu hariḥ oṃ

śrī gurubhyo namaḥ hariḥ oṃ

ayam muhūrto sumuhūrto astu 

The world we live in today is a world of contrasts. Sometimes we wonder while seeing the trees and not the forest, whether the humanity is proceeding in the proper direction. When we see that some of the major decisions, affecting the peace prospects in this world, have being taken in a fashion, which perhaps leaves room for improvement. We all share a concern in this, we share a concern for the way we are treating our mother nature and we ought to be doing something about that in a more positive sense compared to what was done before.We as individuals sometimes feel insecure, anxious, fraught with fear, not knowing how to resolve our own problems, let alone dealing with the problems in the world. The question arises in our minds, if we want to leave a world in a little better place when we leave it, than when we entered it, what is the way that we should start going about it? Where does this process begin, and how does this process spread?

Let me start with an example. One of the first realizations I had, was when I was standing in front of a mirror. I was seeing myself reflected in the mirror and I smiled and the mirror image smiled, I laughed and the mirror image laughed, I cried and the image cried. After a little while I was wondering whether I was seeing my image in the mirror or my image in the mirror is seeing me. Who is the real me? Whether it's located in front of the mirror or behind the mirror? And then a train of thought followed and I started talking with myself. Supposing I wear a bowler hat and the image would have a bowler hat in it, and supposing I was like Ravanāsura, the demon king, who had ten heads standing in front of the mirror, then that image would have the ten heads. If I imagine myself to be Mahākālī, with ten heads, twenty hands and twenty legs, standing in front of the mirror, I would see myself with ten heads, twenty hands and twenty legs. Supposing, I was ten people myself, ten separate individuals, and I stood in front of the mirror, then I would see ten different people as my own reflection. One step further, if I was the world myself and I stood in front of a mirror, I would see the world as my own reflection. However many people it has, however many cars it has got, however many highways, however many suns, galaxies, stars, however many trees, it is all a reflection of myself.

Then I understood that my mind was a mirror so pure that it was reflecting myself to me and I happen to be the Cosmos and I'm seeing myself. So in this moment of realization there's an equation between me and the world that I'm seeing. The world is mirroring me. If there are parts of me that I do not like, then those would be the parts in the world, which I see, which I am not liking. If I want to see the world in a better way, then I must start improving the parts inside of me, so that they could be reflected in the world in a better way. Then I realized that any process of change must begin with who? Myself! The process of change begins with you. You are the center of the world. You are the world. For a moment a little fear grabbed me. Am I all alone in his world? Is there nothing else beside this world, other than me? This feeling of absolute loneliness, that there is nothing else besides you in this whole world and it's all really just a mirror of yourself. It is born inside of you, it's growing inside of you. All the multiplicity, all the differences that you see are like a dream, which have arisen in your mind's eye and they are going to vanish like a dream in your mind's eye. I am the container of the Universe. If you want to prove, that A contains B, what would you do? Deny A, and see if B can exist. So if I want to prove that I contain the Universe, what do I do? I deny myself, and see if the Universe exists. The existence of the Universe is conditional to my existence. The first reality is reality of my thoughts. The world out there is a derived reality from these thoughts. If thoughts are imaginary, then the world which is derived from this set of thoughts cannot be a higher reality than the thoughts themselves. Do you follow me?

So the process of bringing about a change I want, in the dream that I am seeing, must start with a better dream. I must start dreaming a better dream. I must make believe to myself that I must create a reality, which comes from within my own self, and this reality becomes the model for what’s happening.Is it not this function of management that you make a prophecy, and make that prophecy come true? You have a dream, the great presidents of America had a dream and they worked for it and they made those dreams come alive. You and I, every one of us, can have our dreams and make them come true. We must understand that every one of our dreams is going to manifest sooner or later. How soon they are going to manifest? That depends upon the clarity of our thinking, the clarity of our projection into this. So the process of change has to begin from within ourselves and we have to start having a better dream.