Going beyond attachments

 

Krishna means the most attractive. He is the divinity, the energy that attracts everything to it. Krishna is the formless centre that is everywhere. All attractions from anywhere come only from Krishna. Often people fail to see the spirit behind the attraction, and merely hold onto the outer shell. And the moment you try to possess the shell, you will see Krishna has played a trick, you will be left with an empty shell in your hands and tears in your eyes.

Do not be tricked by Krishna - be clever like Radha. Krishna could not escape from Radha because her whole world was filled with Krishna. If you can see that wherever there is an attraction there is Krishna, then you are Radha, you are in your centre. The mind moves towards beauty, joy and truth. Krishna tells Arjuna, “I am the beauty in the Beautiful, the strength in the Strong, the wisdom in the Wise.” 

In this way he arrests the mind from moving away from him. Attachments cause feverish breath. Feverish breath takes away your peace of mind. Then you are in pieces and fall prey to misery. Unfortunately, most people do not notice this until it is too late. Before you get scattered too much, gather yourself together and rid your breath of feverishness through surrender and sadhana - spiritual practices. When you are drowning in the ocean of attachments, surrender is a life jacket you can put on and wait for the rescue team. 

Without fighting attachments, observe your feverish breath and go to the cool place of silence within. Your first step in this direction is directing your attachment to knowledge, to the Divine. Your non-attachment to the mundane is your charm. Your attachment to the Divine is your beauty. Craving comes from encouraging thoughts of pleasure. Yet the actual experience of pleasure may not be as pleasurable as the memory of it.

Whether you encourage a worldly thought or a Divine thought, they both bring you pleasure. Worldly thoughts lead to indulgence, which brings you down from pleasure to some disappointment and dejection. Divine thoughts take you up from pleasure to bliss, intelligence and progress in life. Worldly thoughts bring pleasure only as memory, while Divine thoughts materialize as reality.

What is a Divine thought?

 - That, I’m not the body, I am bliss, satchitananda, I’m unbounded space, I’m love, I’m peace and light.

What is a worldly thought?

 - Worldly thoughts are about money, sex, food, power, status and self-image. Truth is hidden by the golden veil of the mundane. Pierce through this thin glittering sheath and know you are the sun. 

In the world, everybody is after GOLD, some are after GOOD, only a few are after GOD. Transcend GOLD, transcend the GOOD and reach GOD.

Understanding one's desires

 

Desires for sensory pleasure are electric in nature and these desires get neutralized as they move towards the object of your senses. If, by your skill, you could move your desires deeper within you towards the centre of your existence, another dimension of everlasting pleasure, thrill, bliss and undying love will be yours. 

Lust, greed, power and jealousy are powerful because they are nothing but energy and you are the source of it - the pure electricity. Dedication and devotion maintain the purity of your electricity, moving you upward. When you realize that you yourself are the electricity of pleasure, your cravings subside and serenity dawns. Also, remembering that you will die makes you alive now, and frees you from cravings and aversions. 

The wise ones are always careful not to get their minds entangled and dizzy. This couplet needs to be pondered over and over - a whole lifetime is not sufficient to digest this knowledge. Desire kills joy yet the goal of all desires is joy. Whenever happiness has disappeared from your life, look deep within and you will see it is because of desire. 

Yet all that we desire is happiness. No creature desiring unhappiness is ever born, never has it happened before and never will it happen in the future. When your small mind gets tired of running here and there, of wandering everywhere, it reaches the conclusion, "My desires have killed my happiness". A person who has conquered his desires is called "Mahavira". All desires are for happiness. That is the goal of desire, isn’t it? But how often does your desire lead you to the goal? Have you thought about the nature of desire? 

It simply means tomorrow, and not now. But joy is never tomorrow, it is always now. How can you have desires when you are joyful? And how can you really be joyful right now when you have desires? Desire appears to lead you to happiness, but in fact it cannot. That is why desire is maya - illusion. How does a desire arise? A desire arises with the memory of a pleasant experience or with past impressions. A desire might also arise through listening. 

A desire can be triggered through association with certain people or certain places. Someone else’s need or desire may manifest in you as your own desire. When someone is hungry, you might have a desire to feed them, or if someone wants to talk with you, a spontaneous desire may arise in you to talk with them.

Eliminating vices

 

If you cannot eliminate vices, magnify them. Worry, pride, anger, lust, grief - give them a bigger dimension and a different direction.

What is the point of getting angry about small events? Be angry about the infinite, about Brahma. 

If you cannot get rid of pride, take pride in owning the Divine. 

If you are bothered by greed, be greedy for satsang. 

If cravings gnaw at you, crave the truth. 

If jealously haunts you, be jealous about seva. 

Be averse to aversions. 

Attach yourself to the Guru. 

Get intoxicated with the Divine. 

Joy is love for what is. Sorrow is love for what is not. 

Birthday gift (May 13)

On May 13:

As the birthday boy I'm asking for a gift from you. Drop all the anger or any kind of hatred today if you have towards anyone. Give all the bitterness to me. You keep only sweetness in your mind. Just blossom that's the gift for me.

Doesnt mean you have to be all sweet and goody goody to people. Be firm where you have to. But dont use any abusive and bad language for anyone in hatred. Your mind should be clean and blossoming as a flower.

Problems keep happening in life. What remains despite them is the truth. You are pure. you are the space. That is the truth. Keep reminding yourself that 'I am this'.

And this truth dawns in you when you are free of the bitterness. 

Getting rid of vasanas

 

How to get rid of vasanas (impressions)? This is a question for all those who want to come out of habits. You want to get rid of habits because they give you pain and restrict you. The nature of a vasana is to bother you - bind you - and wanting to be free is the nature of life. When a soul does not know how to be free, it wanders lifetimes craving freedom. The way to come out of habits is vows. A vow should be time-bound. 

For example, suppose someone says, "I will quit smoking" but cannot do it. He can take a time-bound vow not to smoke for five days. If someone is used to cursing and swearing, he can take a vow not to use bad language for 10 days. Don't take a vow for a lifetime - you will break it immediately. If you happen to break it anyway, don't worry, just begin again. When you fulfil your vow, pick a new starting time and renew it again. 

Slowly increase the length of your vow until it becomes your very nature. This is sanyama. Everybody is endowed with a little sanyama. When the mind falls back into its old patterns, two possibilities can happen. One is, you feel discouraged, you blame yourself, and you feel you have not made any progress. The second possibility is that you see it as an opportunity for sanyama and feel happy about it. Bad habits will clog you and drain your life energy. Without sanyama, life will not be happy and disease free. 

For example, you know you should not eat three servings of ice cream or eat ice cream every day. If you do, you will get sick. Just give a positive direction to your life energy and you can rise above any habit through sanyama. All those habits that bother you, bind them in vows, in sanyama. Take a time-bound vow today and make a note of it. 

If you break a vow, make a note of it and share the time and date at the next satsang. Continue it again. Tie those habits which bring you pain in sanyama. Your inability to break a habit, causes a pinch and when you are deeply pained by something, the pain will rid you of that habit. If you are pained by your shortcomings, then you are a sadhak - a seeker. Pain takes you out of addiction.

Senses create different types of fire

 

The senses are like fire. Whatever you put into your senses burns in this fire. A fire of toxic material creates pollution and bad smell. But if you burn sandalwood, it creates fragrance. The same fire that supports life can also destroy. A fire can heat your home or burn it down. 

Celebration happens around a bonfire. Grief happens around the fire of cremation. A burning tire creates toxic fumes. A ghee lamp lights your way and purifies the surroundings. Does your fire create smoke and pollution - or are you like a camphor flame that creates light and fragrance? 

A saint creates light and the fragrance of love. He is the friend of life. A fire that creates light and warmth is of high quality. A fire that creates light and a little smoke is of medium quality. The fire that creates smoke and darkness is of low quality. 

Learn to distinguish these different fires. When your senses are engaged in goodness, then you will create light and fragrance, when engaged in impurity, you create smoke and darkness. It is sanyama that transforms the quality of fire in you.

Feeling at home, everywhere and with everyone

 

Feeling at home, wherever and with whomsoever you are is what I would call the true evolution of human beings. For that, we need to take a look within ourselves. Thirty years ago, there was so much prejudice towards spirituality and wisdom. People would want to keep it at arm’s length and believed that it was not for them. Today, there is acceptance. People are willing to try it and once they see that it benefits them, they are less prejudiced.

Life comes to us like a gift, a very charming gift, but we seldom open it. It’s all about opening ourselves and being open. Life is a gift wrapped in golden paper, which is waiting for each one of us to unwrap. Many of us are too formal, but such an atmosphere is not conducive to knowledge.

We need to be in an informal atmosphere to know something about ourselves and gain deep wisdom. When you meet somebody, you ask, “How are you?” Now I have a question for you. Did you really greet the person or did you do it as a formality? Most of the time we exchange pleasantries, we really don’t mean it.

But, if the same words come to you from your grandmother, they carry some energy, some vibrations, and some presence. Life becomes so dry and the world becomes charmless when we relate at a superficial level. In the coming decades, the biggest challenge in the world will be mental depression. Belongingness can create a better atmosphere and environment around us. It is for us to create that environment.

Can you feel at home with everyone? Then you can truly say you have evolved. For that, we need to go within. A baby smiles 400 times a day, a teenager only smiles 17 times, and an adult hardly smiles. We don’t smile from our hearts.

Why is that? It is the stress and the tension that we carry. Meditation can help you get back to your nature, which is pure innocence. Then a smile comes from deep within, that nobody can snatch from you. We should all dream of a stress-free and violence-free world, one where there is total belongingness. 

Fulfil your desires - by surrendering them

 

As long as some desires linger in your mind, you cannot be at total rest. Every desire or ambition is like a sand particle in the eye! You cannot shut your eyes nor keep them open with a sand particle inside — it is uncomfortable either way. Dispassion is removing this sand particle so you can open and shut your eyes freely! The other way is to expand your desire, or make it so big — then also it will not bother you. It is a tiny sand particle that irritates your eyes — a big rock can never get into your eyes!

If you have a desire coming into your mind right now, at this very moment what do you do? You work to fulfill that desire. After it gets fulfilled, do you know where you will be? It will lead you to the very same place where you were before the desire rose in you.

So let us understand, what is this quest all about. A teenage girl sees an expensive dress and immediately falls in love with it. But like all beautiful things, this one is too expensive for her to buy. She tries to convince her father to let her buy the dress and tries every possible way to make him understand that the dress is worth the price and maybe even more. The father refuses despite of everything. The young girl gets so upset that every party and function she goes to, she feels incomplete without the dress. Each time she sees the dress in the window sill of the showroom, her heart tugs from inside. After a lot of tears, bickering and ranting, the father finally gives in, and buys her the dress. The girl is delighted. She wears it to every possible party and function, but after two years, the same dress lies in a heap of clothes that are being discarded. So you see desire taking a life form and finally being turned into nothing.

How to deal with desires? Just do not give too much weight to the fulfilment of desires. Don’t fight it off. You have no control over them. Desires come up. Instead of holding on to them, or daydreaming, just surrender. What is surrender? It simply means that when a desire arises, just offer it to the divine or higher power and say: “If it is good for me, let it happen.” And then let go of it. When you offer everything, then nothing can take you away from your centre.

Life teaches you the art of letting go in every event. The more you have learnt to let go, the happier you are and as you start being joyful, more will be given to you. Taking a good look at desires and realising that they are futile, is maturity or discrimination.

But surrender doesn’t mean the absence of action. Don’t just make an affirmation and say “Okay, I shall have a good job” and let go of it and do nothing about it. You need to do whatever is necessary. Act, surrender and be free.

With dispassion, you can enjoy the world freely and relax. Dispassion can bring so much joy in your life. Do not think that dispassion is a state of apathy. Dispassion is full of enthusiasm — it brings all joy to your life and allows you to rest so well.