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.
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