Session 101

Ruchika is asking, if every area has a corresponding world. Can you say that there will be some similarities in the projection experience of two different practitioners in a layer?

Yes, there will be. Right now, right here, you are having an experience of a world and everybody else is having this experience. There are similarities in their experiences. This waking state is actually a projected state. There will be something similar in all such experiences of the projected state because it's the same layer, it will have similar characteristics and the projected body will have similar kind of senses. So the experience will be similar mostly. You can even say that there can be a shared experience. It is possible. That is called shared realities or consensus realities where the experiences match. Right now, right here we are in a shared reality where the experiences match because the instruments, that is, the body and the senses, are mostly similar in everyone. There can be minor differences. So this body is a projected body, you can say. It's not technically correct but it is roughly so. And this is a projected experience.

Matt is asking, this got me thinking: what is an assumption? Asserting something is true without direct experience?

Yes, you answered your own question: that when it is believed that whatever I think is true without there being any evidence whatsoever, any illogical conclusion that does not seem to be rational. There is no basis for that conclusion or belief. That will be called an assumption. Now, assumptions are not always bad. Like when you go out of your house you assume that it's the rainy season so probably it's going to rain. And this assumption is very useful. If it rains, you have the umbrella now, because you assumed that it will rain and you took your umbrella with you. So that is a very useful assumption there. You can assume that no it never rains when I go out. It's not a good assumption. And you won't like the fruits of that assumption. It will be called ignorance.

Similarly, there are assumptions in science, but they are not called assumptions there. It's called a hypothesis. It is very useful. In spirituality there are assumptions, sometimes they are useful. Like I give you a technique to perform. You do this technique you will achieve those results. So if you do not assume, if you do not believe that this technique will do something at all then you will never try it. And then you will never get that experience. So we assume that, okay, people are trying this technique. People have some experiences using this technique. I will also try it. I will also check it. This assumption is valid because you are trying it out. And if the assumption is useful you are thankful for assuming.

But there are assumptions which are totally useless and they are harmful also. Like I always give this example of your neighbor. You assume that your neighbor is going to kill you. One day he buys an axe from the store. For some reason he has bought it. Now he is carrying that axe. But as soon as you see the axe in his hand and because you have already assumed that your neighbor is planning to kill you, you are going to take out your gun and kill the neighbor first. This is a disaster, isn’t it? Your assumption has caused such a bad outcome. Such assumptions always lead to useless actions, bad actions, unethical actions.

There are many assumptions like this: that money can make me happy, or a lot of partners and marriages can make me happy. These are the assumptions that lead to an unhappy lifestyle, very bad behavior. There are assumptions in spiritual circles, like this mantra is going to do some miracle. It’s a magical mantra. And they keep chanting it for years, and they lose their mind. They become stupid because of that. So, assumption is always bad. That’s what we assume. On the path of knowledge, we always assume that it’s not a good thing. Unless there is no other way to get what we want, we never assume. For example, the concept of vibration is an assumption. We will never see the vibration. But it is very logical, and it is very consistent. It explains so many things. So, we don’t put it under knowledge; we put it under science. Because science is mostly based on assumptions. Only theory is there. There is no knowledge in science. So, all these things that I tell you about the layers, and about the vibration, and this memory etc., they are assumptions actually.

Parteep is saying: Awareness gets wiped out in anesthesia. Why do we not say that anesthesia is like a deep sleep state which is devoid of experiences? Experiencer must be there in anesthesia also. Awareness should penetrate there too. Please help me to understand.

No, anesthesia is not like deep sleep. If somebody cuts you in your deep sleep, you are going to wake up. That must be your direct experience. When mosquitoes bite you, ants bite you in deep sleep, you wake up. Somebody shouts, you wake up. So how is anesthesia like deep sleep? There is no comparison between deep sleep and anesthesia. Otherwise, I wouldn't have mentioned them separately. There is no connection. Do not think that deep sleep is like anesthesia and anesthesia is like coma and coma is like death. No, they are totally different states. There are similarities. Like the body is down, the body is not acting too much. Remember that in sleep the body is very active. The body changes positions every few minutes. You can watch videos of people sleeping and you will see that the bodies are probably doing more exercise in the bed than they are doing in the waking. Like I said, I sit at one place the whole day and that's not exercising, isn't it? When you sleep, there is a lot of activity in the body. Anesthesia, nothing. No movement in the body. Coma, no movement. Death, the body rots away. There are no organic processes in the body.

Parteep is saying, there are no experiences in both.

No, that is not true. If you ask patients who are under anesthesia, many of them are going to report extraordinary experiences. There is a lot of literature on the net and it is well-established that both coma and anesthesia patients have experiences. You can say that there is no memory. Yes, there is no memory. But then most of your waking state is forgotten. There is no memory of most of your waking state also. So you need to study these states by direct experience. Do not assume these things. You were told that this state is like that, but you are not going to know it. You need to find it in your direct experience. Of course, you will not be able to find the states like coma or death. But those who have gone through those states, you can read their experiences. Mostly they are accurate.

He is saying that experience must be there in anesthesia, and awareness should penetrate. Yes, if you practice it intensely, you will find that there is awareness in all the states. All possible states can be penetrated by awareness. And once there is awareness, you will find there is experience and there is memory also. Awareness is the key. You don't have awareness, and that is why there is so much darkness. Not only people don't know about all these other states, they are totally ignorant about the waking state also. They do not know what the waking state is. That is very unfortunate.

Atman is saying, I wanted to ask since you have mentioned that everything around us is an illusion. Mostly everything around us seems real, but at the same time, I have had some outer worldly experiences. More like parlokic, otherworldly experiences. Are those experiences part of Maya? What is the way to differentiate between them and shared realities? These outer worldly experiences seem as real as the real world. As we know it. How do these things come to existence without me doing anything to have these experiences? Is there any significance in seeing such experiences? Or we should treat them as Maya and not be affected by them? Also about shared reality my friend saw these things too while I was around them. Was it through me?

Whatever you call reality is not there. It is all a dream. And the only reality is the experiencer. When you investigate what is true and what is false you will find this. So your current experience is also a dream. It is also an illusion. How to know that? Establish the criteria for truth. The criteria for truth on the path of knowledge is: everything that changes is false. Everything that changes is an illusion. Why do you have this criteria? It looks like a very strict criteria. Justification for that is given in my videos. I am not going to repeat all that. It is an outcome of choosing this criteria for true and false that everything that we perceive, it does not matter what state it is, is false. So nothing is real. Whatever experience you are having right now is also unreal. That which is experiencing is the only real. I think it answers all the questions now about your friends and all. It is all an illusion. Even if people say it, it is still an illusion. These people are themselves illusions. All your friends are illusions. All the people are illusions.

Chang has the question that, From existence - advanced analysis, how does the mind realize the existence is emptiness? Since it is not that experience of the mind, it asks, Is it really empty? Can that concept only stand on the basis of logic? But if that concept is true, there remains nothing to know as nothing is there. Then the question of existence, experience, existence, experience and experiencer is a false and cooked up concept. Who knows it is empty? The mind is not able to bring clarity standing just on the basis of logic. How does the mind realize the existence is emptiness?

It is very easy. There is no substance in existence. What is existence? Experience and the experiencer. Existence is witnessing itself in illusory forms as the experiencer. It is the experiencer. It is the experience also. And you can see that there is no substance of the experiencer and there is no substance of the experience. When the experience comes it is not formed of anything. It is an illusion. And when it goes nothing remains. So we conclude that existence is empty of substance. It is not made up of something. There is no reality there which you can point out and say that look the experiencer has a substratum. Look the experiencer has a substance there. Or there is a material there of some kind. Look the experiences are made up of something. You will never see these things. So this is our direct experience that we perceive the emptiness directly. If you have the knowledge of the experiencer then you will say that the experiencer is empty. It is without any qualities. There is nothing there. If you have the knowledge of the experience you will say that there is nothing which is producing the experience. Nothing at all. Emptiness is direct knowledge. It is not a logical conclusion and it is not an assumption.

Vipin is asking, I am the experiencer. Potential is the doer. What needs to be done happens automatically due to this potential. Do all struggles exist when one puts his will against that potential? If I am the existence, why can't this potential be governed? If it is governing itself, why is there even an option given to humans for a separate will? I thought that these questions can be realized by realizing the shifting nature of the frame of reference of our mind. If I abide my reference shift to being the whole existence, then there is no question of any will or any governance.

Yes, I am the experiencer. Potential is the doer. Potential means that which is appearing right now. You should not use the word potential because potential is there at the level of non-duality where nothing is a doer, nothing is getting done. What do we use here in the duality - It is happening. We say it is happening, and we drop the word doer also. There is no doer, it is happening. So, he has already written that it happens automatically due to the potential. Yes, you're right there also. If you start thinking that I am doing it, then it is a struggle. Yes, because ignorance has appeared here that I am the doer or the experiencer is the doer, you know it has the wants and desires, that is ignorance, it has no wants, no desires, it does nothing. So whatever happens, happens according to whatever rules that have appeared in this existence, and if you don't follow those, if you assume that I am doing it, then it's a struggle, every second of your life is a struggle because it will never happen according to you. So that's why I gave you this answer of one line, that there is nobody who is governing your experience, the doer is an illusion, person is an illusion, you can see it. You investigate who is doing, and you will see only actions, you will never find the actor, it's all actions, and there is an action that says that I am the doer. That is only a thought.

Investigate the doer, and you will never find the doer, and then you will see that everything is governing itself, and it is governing itself very beautifully. There is no intervention from humans, whatever is, is governing itself, has the most amount of intelligence, and that is not human intelligence, we should not project human qualities on the whole existence, it has superhuman intelligence which cannot be understood by the humans, they will never understand, even the most intelligent person will never understand what is happening there. Your assumption is that humans are given a separate will, no, there is no separate will, yes, we are given an illusion of willing, you can say.

Humans delude themselves into thinking that I am willing, but there is no "I". The only "I" you can talk about is the experiencer who does nothing, is not willing also. Ego has no will. The ego is a mechanism, a mental process only. There is an illusion of will and at the lower levels, the truth changes as we go down. So at the lower levels, which we call the relative truth or the transactional reality there we use this concept of will. We use this idea that humans have a will. Then if somebody murders somebody else, put the body in the jail, not somebody, we lock the body in the jail because there is no “somebody” to lockup in jail. We put the body in the cage so that it does not do it again, and we say that the body willed or that fictitious person willed the murder, killed the other fellow. So it is all practical. So when I say, "I am willing to marry you," it is just an automated process in the mind. There is nobody who is willing to marry you. That is sad, isn't it?

Atman is saying, Is Maya an experience, an illusion or delusion or a simulation?

Maya, experience, illusion, they are names of one thing. Whatever is appearing with the experiencer is the experience. Delusion is not the same as illusion. Delusion is a mental disease where the assumption becomes so strong that it is perceived as real. The example that I gave of killing the neighbour is a delusion actually. It is not even an assumption. Assumptions can be made by intelligent people. Delusion is a mental disease where whatever you imagine is your reality. That is something amazing. Mind can do that. Illusion is something which will never go away, but a delusion can be treated. If the fellow has a little bit of intelligence left, you can convince that person that, "Look, it is only your delusion." You can say that a person is deluded that a lot of money is going to make me happy. You can say, "Look at other people who have a lot of money. They are comfortable, but they are not happy." Do not confuse a comfortable life with a happy life. With a little bit of intelligence the delusion can be cleared like this. But the illusion never goes away. You have the self-realization, you have the oneness knowledge, and you are the Brahman and all. The illusion continues. You can only realize that it is an illusion, but it will never disappear. Just like you are watching a movie and you realize suddenly, "look, that is a movie but now the movie won't disappear." The movie continues to play. What is a movie? It is an illusion. It is there, but it is not that which it appears to be. That is the definition of Maya - Not that which it appears. It is something else. What is that? That is also me. That is also the experiencer.

Is it a simulation? No, it is not a simulation. The definition of simulation is a mechanism which behaves like the original. The word "simulation" comes from Latin (or Greek) which means "similar." There are many words like similar, similarity, similitude etc. From these roots the word "simulation" is derived, and the definition of simulation is that it is a replica of the original. It works just like the original. So you have a simulation of an aircraft on your PC (airplane) and it works just like the real one, but it is not real. You can have a simulation of an atomic bomb or some medicine on your PC. It works just like the original medicine, but no, you cannot cure the disease using that simulation. It is not real. So what is the difference between illusion and simulation? The simulation has a real similar part based on which the simulation is created. There is some reality and a copy of it, a replica of it, is the simulation which is not real. What is the case with the illusion? There is no corresponding reality.

There is no reality at all corresponding to Maya. If that is not mind-blowing, then what else can be mind-blowing? It is really mind-blowing. There is no reality behind the illusion. So whatever is appearing right now is completely fake. It is not like anything else. Like you say, "Okay, my table and chair are appearing here, but there is something real which appears like this." And I will tell you, no, there is nothing. It is standalone. We do have concepts like vibrations and patterns of vibrations and memory. They are concepts only. There is no truth in that. What is in front of you cannot be known. It has no real counterpart. Your table and chair and your body and your mind has no counterpart which is real. Nothing defines this reality. That is amazing. So what do we say? The illusion is empty.

Ajit says, Can that rule of illusion be understood?

Yes. You can understand the rules of illusion. I call it the rules of memory actually. How is the illusion formed? How does the illusion work? These are well within our intellect. Many rules are there. Sometimes I call it the laws of the mind. Because everything is mind. The illusion is mind. Sometimes we say the illusion is mind created. Mind is the creator not the experiencer. But mind is happening. So even that sentence is wrong. Mind is the creator. It is only said in a very approximate way. So it is the Devi. It is the universal memory and so on. There are many names. How it operates can be very clearly understood. You can even write down the mathematical formulas if you want, how it is operating. Everybody knows that. Those who have studied science, what is science doing? They are finding the laws of illusion. This world is an illusion. The matter is an illusion. And they find the laws there. Yes, it is possible. And it is possible to do that so precisely that you can write a formula for that.

What is a scientist doing? Scientist means the physical scientist. They are trying to decode the lower layers. The manifested energy, and the vibrations, atoms, and so on. Matter. And to some extent, the human body. Because the human body is made up of matter only. So the laws of physics apply there also. But not all of it is matter. That is amazing. Your body is not only matter. There are overlapping layers there which are non-physical. Physical is also non-physical really. There is no physical thing. It is all mind. So they are exploring the lower ones. And lower ones are very well organized. And not so complicated. But as you go higher, like I said, body, nervous system, and brain, intellect, and awareness, and the greater memory, and the causal body, and all. And now it becomes very difficult to see what they are doing. It is so complicated. Still, you can find some laws. There are almost universal laws there which exist across all the states of the memory. For example, the karmic law applicable in the waking state, and is also applicable in the dream or the projected states. It is possible to rise above the laws. Humans are capable of that. It is possible to rise above the rules. You cannot break them, but you can be above them which is good as breaking them, but not really breaking, bypassing them. It is possible to do that.

Parteep is saying, any direction or source helpful for enhancing rational analysis capabilities?

Yes, copy the gurus. Copy the great masters. Study from the great masters how they have done the rational analysis. Do it yourself. That is the only way. The more you study the more confusing it will become. So you do simple things. Study simple things. You can start like this. I have done that. Simply by watching how the masters, how the gurus answer the questions, what kind of logic they apply for every doubt that is raised. Or you can even read the debates that happen between the masters and all their opponents and all how they rationalize, how they defend their point and so on. That will help you to understand. I never did a formal study of logic and rational thinking because the amount of logic and rationality that is needed on the path of knowledge is very tiny. You need to know only a few things. The categories are mutually exclusive. Now, you need to know the meaning of mutually exclusive. One cannot be the other. This much logic only. This much will give you self-realisation.

Exclude the experience from the experiencer, you get the self-realisation. See, just one law of logic. So, do I need to become an expert logician to know who am I? No. Just one rule. All that changes is false. This much logic and you know the truth immediately. You know finally that the experiencer does not change. That is the only truth. All your seeking ends here. How much logic do you need? Just one thing. Changing things are false. Now, you need to find out why they are false. That much intelligence is needed. And then it is done. To know the oneness, you need to understand the working of the mind. Specifically, the dividing tendency of the mind. And when the tendency is controlled, you can see that there is oneness. There is a direct experience of oneness. It is not possible to say that it is a direct experience, but it is a state of oneness. It can be known directly. Actually, your state is right now, right here, of oneness. The dividing tendency of the mind is like this. So, a little bit of logic to understand how the division happens and so on. I have given that kind of logic also. What is inside and what is outside? You ask this question. What is inside me and what is outside me? And you will find that these boundaries are arbitrary. Only this much logic is needed to understand the oneness: There is no inside and no outside. It is all one continuous field of Experiencing. There you get the non-duality directly: Brahmagyan, knowledge of oneness. This is the samadhi state here and now.

See, everything is done for you. You want to become immortal, yes? Realize that that which was never born will not die. There is this much logic: only things that are born die. That which is not born will not die. Now you are immortal. Not immortal actually, you are eternal now. Understand that the past cannot be experienced as the past. The future cannot be experienced as the future. The past is experienced in the present and the future is also experienced in the present. It is only concepts. Past is only a memory. And there you get rid of time completely. This much logic: When you get rid of time, you get rid of so many superstitions or blind beliefs that are associated with time. Like, I was born in the past, I will die in the future. No, there is no such thing. My life is that which happened to me. No, all of that which happened to you is past but there is no such thing. So, nothing happened to you and you don't have a life. This is the truth. You don't have a life, you are the life. See, just tiny bits of logical deductions, here. I am not doing complex logic. The whole Advaita is in front of you in minutes. How is that possible? This is the power of being systematic, this is the power of following the guru.

I just followed my guru, that's all. He told me this is the logical rule. I understood. Yes, this is logical. It is not cooked up or made up. He told me that if you apply this logic, you get this answer. Apply this logic to your experience. I did that. I got the answer. And I said, bye-bye to my guru. Now I don't need you, Sir. Thank you for telling me the trick. And he was very happy because I derived the whole Advaita in minutes. I am an ordinary person really of an ordinary intelligence. Whomever I present this technique of direct experience and logic, the means of knowledge, they can understand everything in minutes. There are very brilliant people here. I meet them and I just explain this thing, and simply as soon as I present the means of knowledge, they get the knowledge in a few seconds. It is so easy. Why is it so difficult for many people? They are not ready for this path. So no amount of phone calls, no amount of meetings, no amount of programs will help such people. When I say, “leave the path”, you must be thinking, what kind of guru is he? He is very brutal. He is heartless. But it is for your own good. You are wasting your time.

Ajit is explaining, all the 'I am potential' in the illusion. Existence appeared separate from each other.

All objects are different from each other. That is right. That is what I mean by the dividing tendency of the mind. There are only vibrations, vibrating patterns. There are no objects and the senses convey this information about these vibrating patterns to the experiencer. So there is no direct connection. In between, there is a process. Processing happens where these sensory outputs are arranged in a specific way. You need to separate your spoon from your food. Otherwise, you will eat the spoon. It is not good for survival. So the mind has this extraordinary ability to separate the vibrations from each other. We call it the pattern recognition ability of the mind. So it groups the pattern together. Look at this red and juicy thing. It is a tomato. That is the food. The shiny metal thing, another pattern, does not belong to the tomato pattern. It divides like this. That is the knife or the spoon. Do not eat the spoon, eat the tomato. This is called intelligence, and you survive. You see how amazing that is. Even a billion-dollar robot cannot do that. Nowadays, they probably do it, software has some ability. They can distinguish one image from the other. It tells you what is a car and what is a horse. It tells you that much. You can do that because you have this pattern recognition and dividing ability. So just to survive, the mind has come up with this dividing tendency. Now it can separate the vibrating patterns into objects. It even colors them nicely. Tomato is red and your plate is white, and your table is black. Why? It is very useful for survival. If your table starts appearing like a tomato, you will try to eat the table. It is not good for your health. So you have this ability there to separate the experiences into multiple objects.

Tomato is like a hero because a tomato will give you all the knowledge, really. That day I was talking in Hindi that you cannot eat the tomato which is in your memory. That immediately makes all your memory false. That tomato is false, you cannot eat it. Just one example and you get the knowledge here. It is so nice and convenient. You can eat the real tomato. It is really tasty, a useful thing. It also gives you some knowledge.

Preeti is saying, is there a Maya/Devi/Shakti which helps in finding a master guru?

Yes. Now you will say after so much logic and rationality I just turned to superstition. But yes, there is a Maya. There is a Devi. There is a Shakti and it helps in finding your master. It helps in finding anything you want. How to do that? Hold a spiritual intention in your mind. You don't need to believe me. You need to be practical about these things. Everything is possible in the illusion. So this is also possible. Hold a very strong spiritual intention in your mind to get a guru and start preparing yourself for that guru. Study about that path of which the master of which you want. Hopefully, you know all that. Start working in that direction. I call it the symbolic effort. Start searching, start asking people, calling the ashrams. If your intention is true and if your heart is pure, you will see that the master appears. It happens. You need to have a very strong will power.

Now, some people are going to say just now you said there is no will. No, there is no will. There is the illusion of will. You can use it. In the illusion, use the illusion. There is no use of truth in the illusion. To please the Devi, you need to use the Devi's powers only. What are her powers? Imagination, intention, desire, will, effort, work. That is what you know, those are your powers. Use them. Not only can you get the master or guru, you can get anything you want. Like a good husband, good restaurant, a good car for cheap, and so on. That is the foundation of tantra or the occult. I say sometimes that we use the occult on the path of knowledge. How? Like this. To do some miracles. And no, the miracle is not going to happen simply by wanting it. You will need to make a continuous effort.

Prepare yourself for that master. Otherwise you get the master and you go and stand there like a dummy. "Sir, I don't know my path. I don't know what I should do. I like to marry and have children." Then the master will get irritated. Even if he is your guru, he will say, “Okay, go and do that then. Come back after 10 years”. You should be prepared to meet the master. Then the guru will accept you, otherwise not. Why are you not getting the guru? You are not ready. Guru is ready when you are ready, the guru is already there. So we should not try to use logic here. It works and then you simply use it. Use the power of your mind. Use the power of the Devi.

Session 102

Discussion on QA for a test follows:

What is the goal of the path of knowledge and what do we gain here?

Removal of ignorance is the goal, and we gain nothing because we lost nothing. It was all covered up by ignorance. We gain back what we are originally, which is, as you know, everything that is empty. So it's all a paradox, isn't it? There is no universal truth, nobody accepts one truth. That is the reality here; the truth is subjective and arbitrary. You need to find your own truth; whatever satisfies you will be your truth, nothing is universal. In the existence, there is everything. So being is more important than knowing what is true, what is false; being is more important. So we throw away the concept of truth.

What is the nature of existence?

When we say existence, we are usually talking about the non-dual level and emptiness, not the experience or the experiencer. Experience is the illusory part, and whatever remains is the experiencer, and that is empty; the nature of the experiencer is empty. No qualities, no substance, no matter, nothing, no processes, non-physical, non-mental. Everything is negative about it. But the existence is also like this. Everything is negative about it. That is what our intellect can say about existence. It is not this and not that, which we have done in the two videos on the analysis of the existence.

If it's not an object, how is the experiencer known?

Well, you cannot experience the experiencer. Ruchika is saying being the experiencer. What do I say? I have my own views about it. And yes, it cannot be known in the way that objects are known. That's why I added this thing, that if it is not an object, how to know it? Through the senses or whatever instruments? Not possible. So, my view is also the same that the experiencer is known by being it, not by seeing it, cannot be seen. You can be it. That's why it is self-evident. It is self-evident because I am that. Just be it. Don't try to know it as an object. Yes, we can infer it, there is an experience, so there must be somebody who is experiencing it. Even the word experience says that there is an experiencer, right? As soon as I say experience, yes, there has to be something which has had the experience. So, it is inferred very directly like this, simply by using the word experience or seeing or looking. Anyhow, like I say, the experiencer is known by being the experiencer, then you see that is not very accurate. It does not sound very logical because somebody will say, “You have used the word ‘known.’ So now the knowledge is in the mind, and the knowledge comes only by direct experience. Don’t use the word ‘known.’” And I say, “Okay, then tell me what to use?” Because there is a limitation of the language here. There is no language to describe the experiencer.

When the experiencer is without any qualities, why do we say it's blissful?

Bliss is the lack of all the activities such as happiness or sadness or suffering. Bliss is a negative word here. It's a negative quality, lack of quality that is what gives it a blissful appearance.

If all is emptiness, how can things exist at all?

There can be opinions about it. Like people can say that no, things don't exist at all. You could have said that it is all emptiness from the beginning—things don't exist, objects don't exist, bodies don't exist, people do not exist, thoughts, emotions, desires, they do not exist. They are all appearances. You can say it like this. It is the right answer even though some people will say no, we experience it so it is a part of the existence. Yes, but its nature comes out to be emptiness. So potential is our escape from this that we say that everything exists potentially, not really. Some people may not be satisfied with this answer, but that is the answer.

What is the evidence of the vibration?

The vibrations are the foundation of the experience and we will never see the vibration. It is a concept. But there is evidence for vibration. The evidence for vibration is the 'change', impermanence. Vibration is a change, it is just the smallest possible change. You do not need a concept for change. Change is our direct experience. So the concept here is that there is a small change out of which the complex changes, complex patterns are created. And when these patterns become somewhat stationary, semi-permanent, we call it a memory. And the process is there because it is a change, there can be processes. The process is simply cyclic change, so the processes happen and the self-organization of the memory happens. That is what is called the layered structure that is what we are experiencing. And it is amazing that all these vibrations, vibrating patterns have arranged themselves so that they can know what they are. That is the biggest miracle in this whole existence. So there is evidence for vibration. You could have said that impermanence or change shows that there is a smallest change. Also it is not very illogical to say that it is the case. Actually, you will find it, it is a matter of science now to discover and explain. And you see everything can be explained now. So that is also very amazing.

Layered structure of memories is evolving. What happens in the end?

There will eventually be liberation and there will probably be dissolution. They are the same thing, but who cares? But there is recycling also, it goes in circles. The existence has been there since eternity; it is timeless, actually. So, everything has already happened. If it stops at dissolution, then it is more probable that we will end up with the dissolution. Will never see anything because eternity means it will take only a tiny fraction of eternity for evolution to get completed, and the rest of the will be the dissolution part. Nothing will happen after that. But this has not happened. Why? Because even after dissolution, things keep appearing out of the same sea of vibration. Out of the same infinite potential, these things appear. So, is there really an evolution? If you focus on a narrow part of existence, you will see beings evolve. And then, they grow and then disappear and so on. Dissolve, liberate, and they even become the greater memories and all. But that is a very tiny part of the whole existence. If you look at the whole, there is no evolution. There is just a play. It is simply circling, cyclic. That is also because it is a vibration. The vibration is in the heart of evolution. Also, evolution is a change, which looks like it is becoming complex, and then it looks like the complexity is now dissolving. But ultimately, it cycles back because the nature of change is cyclic vibration.

And you will say, how do we know? We know it by inference. I cannot claim that I have the direct experience of this existence cycling again and again. The concept of pralaya—the great dissolution— nobody has seen it. I think we can infer it and we can also infer it from the laws of memory. They say that it is cyclic; whatever happens here is a cycle. There is no beginning, no end, just continuous change. So sometimes I say that you take a pot and put some soil in it and plant some grass in it and you will see that when the season is right the grass grows and the grass fades, dries out, and then it becomes soil again—the same soil from which it came, but before becoming soil it deposits its seeds, and the seeds grow from the same soil. This is a small picture of the whole. As below, so above; we use this law and we conclude that this must be happening at all levels. You can see it is happening in our everyday life, at the level of our everyday existence. It is happening like this: things are recycling. Nothing goes away forever; it leaves an impression, so this will happen to the whole of it. These seeds are there. Why are the seeds? What are these seeds? They are the latent impressions, or using our terminology we can say that is the potential. Potential remains always even after dissolution and it then re-expresses in some way or the other. It is mysterious, yes.

After knowing my non-dual nature, what should be my behavior?

When you look at the non-dual nature, there is no goal. Obviously, there is no goal, or we say that all goals are present in existence. But existence itself has no specific goal. Why? Because it is infinite. If you assign a goal there now, it is bound by that goal. It must travel in that direction only. But we don't see it. It goes in every direction. All possibilities are being expressed. So yes, that is the right thing, but that is from the perspective of the wholeness, non-dual perspective of the existence. What I am asking here is the goal of the human being. The human being is a tiny thing, and abiding is not the goal of the human being. We are not born here to abide. Nobody takes birth here to abide. If we knew since the beginning that the goal is abiding, why would you take birth? Because you know taking birth is going to ruin your abiding. Human life is full of struggle. Is that a good place to abide? No.

We came here for some other thing, and you know what that is: fulfillment of desires. Human birth happens because of pending desires in the causal body. Now he was right in saying that it is different for all, but there is something common in this difference and I mentioned that goal: the goal is happiness and freedom. The goal is not given to you, the goal has to be assumed, and a human by his nature assumes a goal which takes him or her to happiness and freedom. Abiding is just a way to be happy for the human being, liberation is just a way to be free. You must have seen that those who are happy and free don't come to spirituality, there is no need. And I say don't come also, because what is the use? You are already free, you are already liberated, you are already bliss. Now this bliss and freedom is expressed through your human body, human mind. Why are you troubling yourself with all these practices and all? Yes, those who are suffering, those who think they are bound, or those who are curious, want to know what I really am, what is going on here in the existence, most welcome, yes, come to spirituality. Otherwise, everything is perfect as it is. Take any goal, express the goals that are in existence, which are infinite. Once you achieve this eternal happiness and eternal freedom: what do you do then? You abide in the bliss that is - not doing. You don't have a goal now. Now you are at the destination. So we say to be goalless is my goal. Just like everything in spiritual talk, it looks like mumbo jumbo, but that is the right answer. If there is no goal, then be goalless. But if you have picked a goal, it will be fixed.

What is unconditional love, and how is it related to true nature?

He said non-separation: you and me are one. That is the unconditional love or you can simply say love and drop the “unconditional” because everybody understands differently this word unconditional. That is love: non-separation. We are all one. There is only one existence which is expressed like this in the human form or any other creature. Not only that, we are the experiencer. All of us are one experiencer only. And not only that, we are all one sea of memory, which is the universal memory, one memory only. The boundaries between memory are not there actually. It's our ignorance. And not only that, at the physical level, we are all one made up of the same stuff. Our minds think similarly. Everybody wants the same thing. So tiny differences arise because there are infinite potentials. But essentially it's all oneness at all levels, all the layers. That is called love. You will never find it outside somewhere in the objects in the people. You are it. Express it now.

Ajit: Can there be any difference in living and non-living experience?

Can you tell me what non-living experience is? Can you give me an example of non-living experience? This probably looks like a language issue. You see, all experience is alive, isn't it? All experience is alive, experienced by the experiencer, and the experiencer is the life itself. Experiencer is the essence of life. When I say alive, experiencer must be there. There is probably no non-living experience. It cannot be like this: non-living things can be experienced (that is one thing), and living things can be experienced. But a living thing is simply a non-living thing which is complex from the point of view of biology. You see, this differentiation between living and non-living, live matter and dead matter, is made in biology or maybe in physical sciences. From our point of view, everything is alive.

Ranjan is asking: why is memory referred to as non-physical, non-mental?

All experiences are either physical or mental. Thus, can memory also be called all physical, all mental? Memory is NPNM, this phrase is used to signify that there is something fundamental as a source of all experiences, and it is called NPNM. Very good question! It looks like he is doing a lot of introspection on this. Don't simply listen to what I am saying, you should think about it and grasp it. So why do we call it non-physical and non-mental? I will ask Ranjan: can you perceive the memory? Can you have a direct experience of the memory, or do you experience only its effect?

"No, we can't. Only through experiences, we can just feel it. Get the experience, not the memory."

Very good. So the objects that we experience outside are not mental. We call them physical, whatever we experience through the five senses. And it is a shared reality, we call it physical. And whatever we experience through the internal senses or the mental senses, we call it mental. We never experience the memory, but we know that these experiences are coming from memory, they are experiences of the memory. So that is why the memory cannot be called physical or mental, because it is not experienced as physical or mental. It is a substrate which gives rise to these two kinds of experiences, the physical and mental. And when you unify the experience, you will find there is only one kind of experience. You cannot even call it mental or physical. This distinction is coming out of ignorance, that there is a physical world and there is a mental world which is subjective. It is not like this, everything is subjective, everything is mental. We have done the unification in the program when I say that the physical objects are perceived through the senses, which means it has become mental already. My perception is only mine, although we agree about what is perceived, which is our conditioning.

What is perceived is because of our conditioning, how we grew up in society. An alien may not agree with you on what is being perceived, or a honey bee does not agree with you. A dog will not agree what the dog is smelling. You will say, "No, I cannot smell anything", and he will say, "There are 50 smells in the room". So you see, everything is subjective. By subjective, I mean it is one kind of experience. In the end, we are living in a consensus world. That is why it looks like it is physical. And I don't even know what the meaning of physical here is. Mental is just the opposite of physical. If there is no physical, then the mental is not defined really.

There is one kind of experience and we do not perceive memory directly. Memory itself is a concept, like the vibration. And is there evidence for memory? Yes, there is. Why would we bother to use that word? So yes, NPNM is used to signify that there is something which is below your perception. It is the source of all experiences. Finally, what is experienced is the irreducible, the Qualia or Tanmatras. They are experienced, not the memory or not the objects, not even the mental activities. Finally, what you get: colors, shapes, smells. That's what you call physical. And from the mental side: what do you get? Emotions, thoughts, imaginations, desires, pain and pleasure. They are all irreducibles, qualities only, which have no correspondence to what is out there. They are cooked up, they are made up, they are illusions. So that is our starting point. Actually, we travel from the illusion to the vibration which we say is the truth. Sometimes we say it is a relative truth. And it is very useful in the path of occult. When you have the scientific structure, like this model, we can do a lot of things, just like scientists and engineers. They do a lot of things simply by modeling the phenomena. You see, the same thing happens in the occult. So it has its utility. You should not take it so seriously, it is not the final word. You can improve on it. If you find a better model than the memory and vibration and the layered structure, you can improve on it. It is science, so improvement is possible. No improvement is possible in the truth. So the essential truth is set in stone now. Nothing can change it. But yes, these things can be improved.

Parteep is asking, Does this body-mind structure resist dissolution into the ultimate state? If yes, why?

Yes, the body-mind has not evolved to go away. There is no goal there which says, “Ok, go back to potential; destroy yourself.” No, there is no such goal. For the body and ego the goal is survival, not dissolution. People who are very active don't even want to sleep because sleep is death for them. Sleep is a waste of time for them. They don't want any inactive time at all. They want to live life. They have this zeal in them, always working. When the body gets tired and falls down, then only they sleep and they get up instantly, start working again. That is why these structures exist to express and continue. So the body knows that it cannot survive because of impermanence, so it makes a copy of itself. That is the biggest drive in the body: to make copies. Whatever you call sexual energy, it is not trying to get dissolved. It does not want to sleep. So the body resists death. The ego resists its dissolution. That's why people don't like spirituality because it kills the ego instantly, although nothing bad happens when this happens. Even when the body dies, nothing bad happens. Everything is as it is – merely recycling. But our ignorance makes us resist what is happening.

Whatever is happening is perfect already, even if it is impermanent. It's okay, it's perfect, it has to be impermanent. Otherwise there won't be any experience. There will be no change, no experience, no vibration, no memory, nothing. So whatever is changing is absolutely okay. We accept it. This happens at the level of intellect, not at the level of ego. I would go ahead and say that even the emotions don't want to disappear. Nobody wants to be non-emotional. Only at the level of intellect one can accept that it's okay to be gone, it's okay to change. Why do I say gone or change? Because there is no destruction really because there was no construction. Nothing was created so nothing gets destroyed. Simply appears and recycles again and again. Cyclic existence repeats, the play repeats. So for a tiny moment there, the body resists change. And that is good for the body otherwise it will die as soon as it is born. This self-organizing is nothing but resisting dissolution, resisting change. It is found from the tiniest organism and cells to the biggest societies and civilizations. That is the play that is happening. It is found in universal memory also. It does not want to dissolve, it wants to keep playing. The same thing is seen everywhere at various levels, various fractal expressions. Life is death and death is life. They go hand in hand. The play is like this.

Atmaram is saying, by person, I would mean an entity with a will and ability to act. How do you know that the existence does not possess will or is of the nature of will?

We have discussed this thing but since he is new here, I will say a few words. The person is a concept. Yes, we accept that you are a person. We accept that the person has a will, the ability to think, and make decisions based on their likes, dislikes, or intelligence. We call this the “relative truth”. However, we know that this is an illusion. The person is not real. The will is not real. The ability to act is not real. Do you understand? The common misconception is that the guru says "you don't have a will." The person is terrified. What do you mean I don't have a will? I use my will every day! The misunderstanding is that the person is real and the will is absent. That is a disaster! There is no person. There is no one to will. Therefore, there is no will. There is no personal will or ability to act. There are actions, but there is no actor. We should approach the problem of will from the problem of the person. Instead of trying to find if there is a will or not, try to find if there is a person or not. If you cannot find the person, there is no question of there being a personal will.

You investigate and find there is no person. It is a concept, an idea. The reason is that we are in a society. Here, we should differentiate between people. We should survive in the group. That's why a person is born. Usually associated with the body, one body, one person, like this. But, the person keeps changing, isn't it? The body may not change that much, but the person can change. Tomorrow it's gone; new person, different person. Tomorrow, change your name and profession, half of the people won't recognize you. So, investigate the person and everything that is associated with the person will fall down.

Now, we come to existence, whether there is any will in existence or not? There is actually. The whole of your experience is a will. We do not use the word “will”. That is why probably Atma Ram is confused. We use the word “desire”. Desire is the word which is a direct translation of the Sanskrit Vasana. So, will is a translation of Ichcha, which is the same thing, actually. So, there is desire in the existence. The whole experience is produced by this desire. It has all the wills. It wills everything that is possible. That's why we say it has infinite potential. And this potential when it is expressed, when it becomes manifested, we say that it happened because of this will. We can imagine an energy that pushes the potential into manifestation. We do that every day, when you will something.

Let's come back to the relative truth here for a while. Illusion, I say that you are a person who wills something. What has happened here? A potential is now being manifested. How? Where is this potential? Everybody will say that it is the memory. I willed it from my memory. I cannot will something which is not in my memory. What is this memory? It is simply the non-physical non-mental potential, vibration, latent form. As soon as I say that I am willing it, I am desiring it, this unmanifested has become manifested. How? As a thought. Before the thought there is a pre-thought that this needs to be done. I mean I cannot even explain it in language, because we have limitations of words here. It's like an impulse, a movement, a motive. That's why will is also called motive, because it moves the organism into action. That is why it's called Karma in Sanskrit; karma is action. We have stored karma. What do I mean by that? This thing, the karma becomes the vasana and vasana becomes the manifested gross action. So this potential through the will becomes manifested as a thought, subtle. Then it becomes manifested as your speech which is between the gross and subtle. And then it is manifested as your action through the body, which is gross action. There you get it. It is expressed. Now this mind-body instrument is simply a device which expresses the universal will. See how beautiful it is? The person is a by-product which takes ownership of whatever has happened. We call it ego. We don't even call it a person sometimes, we call it the ego. Ego takes the bow like a joker after the show is over.

Vipin is saying, what are the rules by which different types of vibrations come together to form bigger patterns and structures in relation? Why don't we see absurd things like a dog with elephant legs?

I told you all these things. Vipin, you are doing the series now. You are listening to keep listening to them. It will come in the laws of the memory or the processes of the memory. There are processes that are self-organizing, replicating and whatever. Probably a dozen processes that I have listed there can be more. And they are forming the complex structures out of the simple ones, and there is something called the algorithmic process. The Algorithmic will ensure that the dog does not become a cow. Why does the dog not grow elephant legs? Yes, if it were a totally random change, then you would see these things like you see them in the dreams. When you are talking to a friend in the dream, your friend becomes your girlfriend. Have you seen this? You know why? Because you are missing your girlfriend so that is manifested instantly. There is no algorithmic process going on there. The memory changes according to your wish, latent intentions, your desires are expressed. So it will not happen in case of the greater memory because the greater memory has strict rules. We call it algorithmic processes. They ensure that things happen just like a machine, just like your computer is doing it. It is going through an algorithm, it is going through a program. There are lots and lots of programs that are operating in this greater memory.

We cannot talk about universal memory. The universal memory is like Pandora's box and everything is there. So in this particular situation where we are in the waking state, the Mrityu Lok or the physical universe. It is strictly algorithmic, it has been maintained like this for some reason. It can disappear anytime. It has been maintained so things don't change randomly because of processes, laws. Why are there laws? Because of necessity. Like we say laws are the mind. In hermetic principles, the mind is the laws of the mind. What do they mean? There cannot be a mind without the laws. Like we throw a stone in the air, it falls down. We say this is gravity. Gravity is the law of gravity.

Parteep is asking, a practical question - senses generate an experience, then it is colored by conditions from this body-ego structure. For example, I see then, and then some sort of selection happens from tendencies that are within. First, it recognizes an object from perception. Then why does it chooses one object from our perception and only survival seems to be the basis, like it is said somewhere? Fruits are colored nicely for us in experiencing all choices disappear from experiences. The selection feels some kind of limitation to me, and at the same time, it corresponds to tendencies. Why this contradiction in life? I think it exists in the universal memory itself.

Very good observation. Somewhere I have said that we see only that which we know. Very approximate and not useful to say this because it's not going to give you any knowledge, but it is true. If you unzip this saying, we perceive that which we know and that is what Parteep is saying that everything is colored by our conditioning. Like the fruits are bright red or yellow, why? There is no red or yellow in the fruit, it has no such thing. So this is the conditioning that happened because of survival. Why do women look beautiful? Conditioning. You can see all these things. You see when you are hungry, and you are driving, you will notice all the boards that say restaurant, bar, fast food, and you will ignore anything else. There are petrol pumps and there are many things on the way, but you see only those. Selective perception. There are many such examples, like pictures or illusions, where you perceive one thing differently from others, which can be amusing, like, I once saw an image that depicted both dolphins and naked women, depending on the viewer's conditioning.

Our perceptions are selective and influenced by our past experiences and conditioning. Survival instincts shape our interpretation of sensory input, causing us to prioritize meaningful information. However, humans possess cognitive abilities beyond those necessary for survival, such as perceiving logical relationships and understanding mathematical equations. These additional capabilities liberate us from rigid conditioning. As knowledge accumulates, we gain freedom to perceive beyond the limitations of others. An engineer entering a factory with specialized knowledge can comprehend its intricate workings, while a layperson sees only buttons, machines, and noise. Knowledge expands our perception, allowing us to see things more clearly and comprehensively. Using optical illusions you can witness your conditioning directly. When you look at some of the optical illusions, you will witness how the Maya or the illusion operates, how the colors are simply cooked up, how the intensities are cooked up. The same gray shade can appear black or white, darker or lighter, when placed in different parts of the picture. There are so many like this. There is a whole science of optical illusions. It's called the study of perception. We already know all these things.

A question by Siam: Why only few will have non-duality, enlightened experience, even though all belong to one existence? Why did existence create such a hierarchy difference?

Well, I have good news and bad news for you. Bad news first, yes, this is the bitter truth that only a few will have this knowledge. It's not possible for everybody to get enlightened, whatever you call it, to get the knowledge, essential knowledge, self-realization. Not possible for all, but only a handful of people, a lucky few. But the good news is everybody will get it eventually. They are on the path. They are growing by whatever means. Probably they are on the path of suffering, the worldly life. I call it the path of suffering. So they are growing. Eventually, they will get enlightened. Don't worry. How much time will it take? Nobody knows how much time it took you to arrive where you are. You don't know. Thousands of years? No, much more than that, millions of years, probably. So we wait and see.

Millions of years is nothing for us because we are eternal. It's nothing. So we are not worried about this play that is happening. And once everybody is enlightened, what will happen? That will never happen really. More things are cooked up from the bottom of this ocean of possibilities. More creatures appear in ignorance. Why is this happening? There is no “why” for it. He is asking why. Never ask “why” questions. Look at what is happening. Accept that which is happening. And what we can do here, we can help here as a human being. We can help in this process by sharing what we know, just like one lamp lights the other lamp without extinguishing itself. No harm happens to the lamp. Same way we can share what we know and then help in this process. Although I know it's completely useless, but human beings have this nature that they want things to happen quickly. I also want that, that is why we are having this kind of play here.

Alpha is asking: I am a little confused when you praise the path of knowledge but simultaneously in my little understanding you look down upon other paths which lead to liberation. Unless we have traveled all the paths, and then also it may happen that one could not succeed on a particular path, or, as you say, one is not fit for the particular path. By saying all this, won't it be good if we praise the path of knowledge without commenting on other paths? I suppose as you say that having the feeling of oneness in all is the real love, so even a sadhak walking on some other path you must see us in him.

I have traveled on all the paths, all of them. I have tasted all of them, and it is my personal conclusion that the path of knowledge is the best. It is superior to others. Other paths will leave you at some point or the other, they do not take you to the final, which only the path of knowledge does. This is my experience, that is why I say it. If your experience is something else, no problem at all. If some other path is taking you to the ultimate, walk on that path, do not look back. This has to be a personal thing for everybody. Choosing the path is a love affair. You cannot recommend a girlfriend, you cannot recommend a boyfriend or a husband, it is your liking. You are in love with a path that is your path. Who cares whether it takes you to the ultimate or not.

It looks like Alpha is still exploring the paths. Explore all of them and pick that which is best for you. It does not matter what others say about a path, ultimately it is your decision. You should fall in love with that path. When I say it is the best path of knowledge is the best, yes, from many angles it is true. I had love affairs with many paths and they all broke. Now, let's see what happens on the path of knowledge. The path of knowledge is very different because there is no path here, it is a pathless path. You are at the goal here already, remember this, you are at the goal, you are in your home already. Now, where to travel to? There is nowhere to travel to. What do you do here? You simply see that I am at the ultimate place. That is why it is the superior path. Other paths make you travel for many years. We do that thing in one day. So probably Alpha has not explored the path of knowledge. I will recommend that you explore it, see what is this, learn the path of knowledge and then you form your conclusions. Right now it looks like you have a lot of bias and this bias is not letting you see the truth. Explore everything and choose the best for you. But yes if somebody chooses something which is not optimal then it makes me sad really, there was a potential there, he could have progressed at lightning speed but he chose something which was just a bullock cart. No problem. We choose a path according to our ignorance. We don't know what path is right. We choose the path and the guru according to our ignorance. A very ignorant student will get a very ordinary guru. As the student progresses the gurus also change. As the student progresses the paths also change. Like I know I started from the occult which is the lowest

I gave a little brief of the ten categories of spiritual paths and you can see that the occult is almost a materialistic path, that cannot be called spiritual. So I chose that because I was at the lowest, that's all I knew. Slowly growth happened and then the paths changed and I have done everything so that's why I can talk about everything. I can comment on every path that is in this universe. I have seen the eastern, western, far eastern and far whatever paths and finally there is no path beyond the path of knowledge. There is nothing beyond the path of knowledge. It is the final. All paths will lead to the path of knowledge which is the pathless path.

Session 103

Discussion on a test follows.

Can we get knowledge from the scriptures or books?

No, we need to get knowledge only from the experience. And the books can also point to your experience. If the book is not pointing to your experience, we call it information.

What is the difference between the true nature of yourself and of rock?

The true nature of me is the same as that of the rock. That does not make me rock—that makes rock as me. Isn't that beautiful? I don't become the rock because we match somehow at the non-dual level; the rock becomes me. Amazing! See, call whatever you want as “I”. You are free. There is no me really. There is just existence. That is what we are.

If I am the whole existence, then this is also existence. Why can't I know all the experiences?

You see, I am the whole existence, so I am having all the experiences already. This is from the point of view of non-dual existence. If I say I am the existence, there is only one Experiencer who is existence itself. The experiencer is existence, existence is the experiencer, so who else can have all the experiences? Existence only. Now the twist here is in the story that the experiences cannot appear all at once. It is like playing all the songs in your playlist on your music system all together. There must be hundreds of songs and that is possible, but it is meaningless. So there is another possibility that everything should happen serially or in a limited way. When I say serially it does not mean time. The time is derived out of limitations of perception and this is how it is appearing now. We cannot do much, this is the only logical possibility that is left. So the correct answer would be like this: I am having all the experiences, there is no doubt but it cannot be known, it is unknowable. So it is being known in a limited way but realize that the series of the experiences is infinite. Everything that is possible will appear, it must appear like this. And I know that some people will not be satisfied by this answer and that is because we have a limitation of intellect, it cannot know all these things.

What is the meaning of illusion?

The meaning of illusion is very simple. It is an appearance, the reality is appearing, that is what is the illusion. The reality cannot be known but it appears as something else. Illusion does not mean that there is nothing at all, because then nothing would appear. Logically, it is impossible that something comes out of nothing. So we say there are infinite possibilities and they appear to us. We don't see the existence, we never see the possibilities. Seeing means perceiving or experiencing, we never do that. All that we see is a transformed version. The transformation happens by senses, nervous system and the layers of intellect, memory, whatever is the mechanism, there is something going on there. We also don't know that, so we cook up theories like vibrations and scientific models. But we need to know only one thing: that it is not what it seems. That is the definition of illusion, which is the direct translation of 'Maya', which means: it is not that which it appears to be.

How to know the non-dual nature of existence?

It's very simple. Investigate the duality, investigate the two. Are there two? Investigate and you will find there are no two. That's where we stop. You will never know the one, it's not possible. So, we say that the one is unknowable. But what I know is that there are no two. Although it is possible to know that it is non-dual, it is empty and it is one, there is only one existence. There cannot be two realities, two existences. The experience cannot be different from the experiencer. It is simply the changing aspect of existence, and the experiencer is the unchanging aspect, the essence. Like the changing aspect of the sea is waves and unchanging is the water. It is possible to know it like this.

How to be blissful always?

I am already blissful, there is no “how” here, don't even try to be that which you already are, am I right? How to become infinite, how to become empty? And now you need to answer it like this: no, it's not possible. How to become one with you? It's not possible, you see? Association with the mind-body, that is the issue, drop this separation, drop your ignorance.

There can be another answer here that I can be blissful by dropping my ignorance. That is not very satisfactory because when the ignorance is dropped, you realize that I was always blissful. It did not happen that I dropped the ignorance and the bliss appeared. No, you see, I am already blissful and I am and I will remain like this. It does not matter whether the clouds of mental activity, or whatever phenomena that appears in this blissful sky, I am still blissful. The background is blissful. I am that background.

Now we will proceed to the questions. I don't have many questions from the program. There is just one, and that is also by Leyla. Can you please elaborate on what you meant by the following statement: "Presence of the experiencer guarantees oneness."

It is a very difficult question actually. Let me think. When I was saying all these things in the lecture there in the video, there is a context to it. This sentence is trying to ask - why is there a need for the experiencer? Why can't existence be existence without being the experiencer? It's possible; a dead existence, nobody to look at it. But it's not like this; there is, you can say, an “ability” in existence to look at itself, that is what we call the experiencer. But why is it there? That's what I was discussing, and I know it's a little far-fetched kind of thing, but the existence is zero-dimensional, there is already nothing there, a pure possibility only. So it is “touching” itself, it is being itself, that is all there is. Existence being itself, and that is why there is a possibility of experiencing, and that guarantees oneness, since there is an experiencer, it has to be that which is appearing, there cannot be a separate experiencer that comes out of nowhere and witnesses the existence. So if there is an experiencer, it logically follows that whatever there is, is one. Whatever there is, is separated into experience and the experiencer because there is no possibility of the experiencer existing alone or being outside the existence, it's not possible. I know it is kind of difficult to understand, and you can see I'm also struggling a little bit to answer this.

George is saying, Is there a difference between oneness and non-duality?

We say “non-dual” when we want to be precise. All that is, the reality is non-dual. So, but we can use the word “oneness”. I am a little bit lenient with it, but probably the pundit will not be. A pundit is going to object, but oneness is a very nice, beautiful word. So, in our context, they are the same. If you want to be precise and you are talking to somebody who is an expert, never use oneness. It irritates those people.

Bitopan is saying, it is said the essence of the phenomena is nothingness, void. Since everything, we have a technical word for it, we call it emptiness. Is it based on direct experience and logic? My experience is whenever there is an experience, it has two components. One component is created by mind, memory. Another is the experiencer, knower. If we consider experiencer existence, how can we conclude emptiness using valid means?

It is very easy. First question is, is it based on direct experience and logic? Yes, everything on the path of knowledge is based on direct experience and logic. Otherwise, we do not even talk about it, strictly speaking. How can we conclude emptiness of the experiencer? What is the meaning of substance? The word sub means below, and stands comes from something which is standing below, the foundation. It means that on which this thing stands. And if you investigate, you will find that there is nothing below or above or to the right or left. It is the most fundamental, and that's why we say, because no qualities appear there at all, so we say it is empty. But we cannot call it nothing, because obviously it is not nothing, it is me, it is the experiencer, it is only one in its category.

When you look at the experience, you find only change. Although we call it vibration, it's just a model to explain the behavior of the change. What is changing? You are listening to me, you can see the air is vibrating. The substance is air. You look at your experience. What is vibrating? What is changing? You do not experience the substrate. It's amazing, isn't it? We say that there must be a memory where the comparison happened, which boils down to - “it is changing because it is changing”. Memory is also coming out of change, right? That is only a description of the change. Potential appears to itself as change. Potential means that there is no substance there. Now here the intellect should stop really. It is beyond its grasp. When I say it is empty, that means there is nothing to experience. When it is experienced it will appear as illusions. That is what you experience when you experience anything at all: objects, people, bodies, yourself. You are experiencing emptiness only. What can be experienced in illusion? Some kind of manifestation of the potentials because there is a possibility there. It is not really changing. It is due to differences in memory. It is timeless. It requires time to change something, but time is unreal.

The knowledge that we gain from this experience is negative. We try to investigate the substance of experience and we come back empty-handed. I try to experience it but it is based on experience only. If you try to observe the emptiness, there is no positive knowledge of the emptiness. You can say it is both experience and logic. Never try to experience these things. It is not possible. Only the illusion can be experienced. Nothing else can be known. Only your ignorance can be dropped. But it's not bad news. You can be that emptiness. Congratulations, you are empty. Nothing is gained. You become empty. If you gain something, something is wrong.

It's submitted that vibrations make patterns that resonate with memory patterns to appear as experiences. But what about the energy needed for all of this?

Vibration is not something which “has” energy. Don't forget that vibration is energy. It is only change, pure change. It's not that there is something and then we need to put some energy from somewhere. No, there is pure change only. It is energy only. It's not matter where you put energy in and it starts vibrating. No, that is the wrong understanding. It is the biggest mistake in science that they thought that matter is dead and you need something called energy to energize it. Actually, occult has this term - energy, and it is used to describe the ability to move. It was borrowed from the occult because it looks like living things like humans have energy in them. The meaning of the word energy is “internal urge”. It comes down to desires. So energy can be simply an inner urge to change. It's not something external. You do not need energy; it's already there. The Shakti, the Devi, is already the essence of experience. If this mistake is corrected, science will take the next leap. The dissociation of matter from energy was the biggest mistake in science. I don't know who did that. It was not like this in the past. They had the correct understanding. It happened in the ages of ignorance, which you call the dark age, where this corruption happened in the knowledge.

Shubhangi is saying, is it possible that you control the birth of thoughts in your mind?

There is no person who can control anything. You can investigate the reality of the person, the truth of the person, and you will see that there's a layered structure. Bunch of layers are doing their job of survival. Thoughts appear, desires appear, emotions appear as a reaction to whatever is happening inside/outside that creature. So the problem is that you don't want the thoughts to disappear, otherwise you will become like a non-thinking thing. It is lifeless. So we don't want the thoughts to go away. They're useful. You need to think. What she is probably talking about is the unwanted thoughts which are negative, which cause problems, which make your life sad and cause suffering. You don't want that. So why are there thoughts there? Because the past experiences have created some negative memories in you. Then these memories, they're appearing as thoughts now. There are ways to clear this. Forgiving is one of the ways that you clean up the memory like this or add a positive tail to your thoughts. It was all my fault or I forgive that person or it was nobody's fault, it is mother nature. Just add a tail to it which is positive. And then whatever is negative, is refined, converted, transformed into something positive. It's very easy! This technique, forgiving, will produce instant results.

If you want to control it in any other way by stopping it or by doing some pranayam or whatever, I don't think it will work. Do not try to stop thoughts. They are very useful. You need thinking processes. It is impossible to stop all of them. You can just suppress a few of them, that is also not recommended. You just transform the thoughts, transform the negativity in you into positivity. That's what we say in spiritual language, it is your transformation. Inner transformation is possible. Do not try to change things which are already happening. Try to change yourself, which means in this context, try to change the mind and then you will find that thoughts are not bothering you now, even if they are there, which is how it should be naturally.

This instruction is for those who don't have self-realization. Those who have self-realization know that I'm only the witness of these thoughts. So we let them be. Let the negative thoughts be. We just let them arrive but don't open the doors. They will go away after ringing your doorbell. Nothing happens. Simply look at them. Do not invite them inside your home. Your home is your true nature. Get the self-realization if you're not gone through it or you use the technique of forgiveness. Change yourself. Transform yourself.

Session 104

Bitopan is asking, experiences are an illusion for whom? Can you say they are an illusion to the experiencer?

No. Experience is illusion or not, true or false, is simply categorization which is done by the intellect. We set up the criteria for truth - what is true, what is false - and we classify the experiences. The experiencer is not at all interested in what is true or false and what is illusion and what is not an illusion. The experiencer has no concern, it is simply an observer, a witness. Why do we call them an illusion? Because they are not the essential part of existence. It simply appears and the intellect decides to call it an illusion. When an appearance is seen, there are two components - object and experiencer. The object is changing, the experiencer is unchanging. Without the experiencer an appearance cannot exist. Experiencer exists independent of appearances, objects. The whole of existence exists alone. When there is a possibility, the mind arises in existence and divides it into two, which is the experience and the experiencer. Remember this, that you cannot introspect about the experience and the experiencer at the level of duality. It is not going to make any sense. From the bottom levels, nothing can be said about these. As you go lower in the levels, like you come down to the level of the physical world, then all these things become meaningless. The rule is, you can analyze these levels from top to bottom, not bottom to top.

The non-dual view can throw some light on the dual view which is the experience and the experiencer which you are trying to analyze, but at the level of duality, nothing will come out of this, it is only imaginary. Similarly, if you try to analyze the experiencer from the level of the illusion, you sit here as a body, and then you try to grasp the experiencer, nothing will be known. You need to be the experiencer to know what I am and what the experience is. So that is why without self-realization, nothing is known. You cannot reach the non-dual state of oneness. This should be cleared. As long as you are thinking I am the body or I am something else, mental activity of some kind, then even the level of duality will remain inaccessible, you won't be able to think about it properly. Like when I hear people say, "my experiencer disappeared in the sleep", what are they saying? They are still at the level of the illusion. "My" means the experiencer must be something which I have. That means “I” is probably the body-mind. That is why they never grasp it. Still, there is identification with the body-mind, and they try to know it from the intellect perspective, which is impossible.

You need to be the experiencer, which is simply dropping the ignorance at the level of the illusion, come out of the illusion, and then you can grasp that yes, there is an experience, there is a mind, there is an experiencer. The mind is informing the experiencer that there are two. That is the trick of the mind. And you drop that ignorance also, and then you are left with non-dual existence. So this is how we progress. Now, when you look at the experience and the experiencer from the point of view of existence, that will be the correct point of view, and you will see that they are always together. There is no possibility that you will find one without the other. And actually, that is how the intellect knows that they are one.

He is saying, without experience, will there be a possibility of the experiencer?

Who will tell you that there is an experiencer? What will tell you that it is there? The truth is, our direct experience says and logic says that these two never go away. The experiencer never goes away and the experience never goes away. What is coming and going are the events, the kind of experiences are changing. The appearance is changing, the appearance of existence is changing, that is illusory. It will keep changing forever, eternally, timelessly. It was never seen that it stopped. How can that which exists disappear?

When we say, there is no experience, only experiencer, what has happened is that the experience has changed into something which the mind cannot grasp or which is of no use for the mind, which does not form the memory, which does not impress upon the memory. It has become too subtle for the memory to catch, but that state does not last. You come out of even the deepest meditation. And then, what caused the experience to reappear? You will ask this question. And because any experience cannot start from nothing, it's not possible. From nothing, nothing will be produced. So, what do we say? It was there. It was not noticed. It did not make any impression on the memory. And the memory starts functioning, which means the mind starts functioning. Then we say, okay, there is the experience again, but it never goes away because it is existence. At the level of duality, you can only negate things. Let me check when did the experiencer went away. And you will find, no, never. And then you can check when did the experience went away. No, it never goes away, the perceived gaps are imaginary.

He is asking, experiencer experiencing itself? Is that what is happening?

No, that is not happening. Experiencer does not become anything. It is changeless. It is you. Your essence is the experiencer. Existence becomes the experiencer and the experience. Existence “divides” itself. And existence is experiencing itself. Whatever appears is existence. Whatever “knows” this appearance is existence. And you are that also. You are that. It is not dependent on anything at all because it is existence itself. Experience is always there. Because it is also existence. So these are all imaginations that experience and the experiencer appear and disappear. No it never happens. We do not see gold separately, always seen in a form/shape. Likewise the experiencer is present through the experiences/appearances including this body-mind. Since the experiencer is unchanging it is the essence. Will this hypothesis lead me to the true nature of appearance? No. The true nature of appearance is a direct experience. You can try to investigate the true nature of what is appearing and you will find that it is emptiness. So it is not really a hypothesis. There is no hypothesis in spirituality. It is in the sciences or philosophy. In spirituality there is only truth or false. Things are either true or they are false. We never discuss the hypothesis. No theories. Imaginary things are not allowed. Assumptions are not allowed.

I think there is some confusion there in the mind of Bitopan. You were given the means of knowledge. Now why are you running after hypothesis and imaginary ideas? Why don't you use the means of knowledge and the criteria for truth? You are given the equipment and you are struggling with the mind. You are trying to use hypothesis imagination. It is not possible to know through thinking and reasoning. The proper tools are direct experience and logic. When you have seen something, you can think about it. Thinking is not banned on the path of knowledge. The proper way to sit with the teacher is: Look at what exists. Then write it down without any bias or preconceptions. That is how we clean the slate and start forming a body of knowledge. That is what we have done in the program and in the videos also. Sit down, take a look at what exists, put down the definition that it is all of it, and then we ask the seven questions. Because there is nothing more to know except these questions. When I say I know something, I know answers to these questions through direct experience only. Use the means of knowledge. Your intellect is simply wandering here and there. Those who think that the direct experience is a hypothesis will never progress.

Matt is asking, what is the relationship between memory and concepts?

A concept is an abstract structure that resides in the memory. Concept is a kind of knowledge, an idea. As you know, all the knowledge resides in the memory and knowledge is simply the impression of the experiences that are well organized, logically and rationally. The organization happens in the memory. So concept is an abstract knowledge that resides in the memory. Humans are able to form abstractions, concepts. A very good example is the concept of a circle. Now there is no circle in the world, there is nothing like this. There are circular objects, but the circle is an abstract concept. When you draw a circle, you have materialized the concept. Now it is in the form of an experience, but it is not a circle. So this is how we are able to do the abstraction of our experiences and they reside as knowledge in our memory. It is very useful. So the relationship is of holding the knowledge. Memory holds knowledge. No memory, no knowledge. If there is no memory, would there be concepts? There will not be any kind of knowledge actually. And most of our knowledge is conceptual, but it is very useful.

Matt is asking, how is existence empty of objects and people? In a relative sense, they exist, but not in an absolute sense?

We cannot say that the existence is empty of objects and people. You look at the existence, it is full of objects and people. What do we say? That the essence of these is emptiness. We say that they are appearances, they are illusions. Objects and people are illusions, including this person who is talking, and their essence comes out to be emptiness, which means simply that they are unknowable. The intellect understands only this much: that they are just appearing, there is no substance behind it, nothing is that which is appearing as objects or people. That is what the intellect can say. So we never say that the existence is empty of objects, it is full of objects. Emptiness is their nature. Like the sea is full of waves, their nature is water. The waves do not exist as independent objects in the sea. You cannot grab a wave and take it home, it is not possible. No independent existence of the waves, their essence is the water, it was the water always that was appearing as various forms of waves: gentle waves, turbulent waves, crashing waves, surfing waves, bubbles, whirlpools and so on. The sea is full of these things but the essence is water. Similarly, existence is full of appearances like objects and people and creatures, even the non-physical things, but their essence is emptiness.

Why emptiness? Because the mind cannot find anything, there is nothing to be found. Some people are happy with this idea that the essence is the experiencer, which is okay, but it is also emptiness. That which is seen is that which is seer. Existence is both seen and the seer, witnessing and the witnessed, they are one. He is asking - in a relative sense whether they exist but not in an absolute sense? The relative sense is simply our transactional attitude, that we assume there are objects and people because they are useful for survival then and we say okay they exist, they are true also, but are they true? No, they are not. So the relative way is simply an arrangement. If we accept the relative truth as the truth, because I need to live my life, so I will just accept that they are true, then that is not called awareness. That means the awareness is gone. Always keep in mind, what they are, while living a relative life. Because you see there is no other life, there is no absolute life, it is a dream, so it happens in total falsehood. That is what I say in the video, that the survival happens in total falsehood, it does not really need truth, so if you bring in the awareness of what is true, then the survival happens in awareness while being completely false, there is no problem now. It is false but it is assumed true and now, that is the problem.

Vipin is saying, thinking on irreducibles, time and space only exist when we access experiences, scanning through local memory, but there can be experiences from NPNM also, local memory is a part of UM, hence all experiences are experiences of memory. Do such experiences, in which there is no consciousness of time and space, are irreducibles? Can you say such experiences are pure experiences and this state is oneness as even illusion of memory falls between experience and inexperience?

Actually all of your experiences are without time and space. You should not use these words like no consciousness of time and space, that is a meaningless sentence. You can say that there is no concept of time and space, so all of your experiences are like this only, the time and space is then generated out of the experience, all the experiences are timeless, spaceless, and they are irreducibles, yes, experiences appear as irreducibles. Look at your experience now, there is abstraction of time and space, they are created from the memory. Probably he is thinking is that there is time and space and when we lose track of it, whatever appears is a pure experience or something. No, that is wrong understanding. This assumption will lead you to wrong path. First is the experience, that is the primary, then comes all these concepts. Whether it is happening in time or whether, it is happening in space, and of what it is. Is it of irreducible? Pure experience is only a name given to an experience which is not encumbered by ignorance. Look at ignorant people, they are also having experiences. They will also report experiences, they are instruments that report the experience, but encumbered, burdened with ignorance. The description of the same thing which you are experiencing is totally wrong there. That is the difference between ordinary person and somebody who has the knowledge. If you look at things as they are, I call it a pure experience, it is purified of ignorance, and as you know, it has no knowledge in it, the pure experience has no knowledge in it. Whatever is, is “isness”. There is no knowledge here. When you empty yourself of ignorance, whatever is left is knowledge. Pure experience it is a state of being that is what we call awareness. When I say “be aware” that means drop ignorance and look at things as they are. Let things happen do not intervene: whatever happens, happens. Use of the body, use of the intellect, happens; use of the emotions and memories happens. So go back to this state. Look. And then you will find that first is experience and then other thoughts appear in the mind.

The definition of irreducible is not an experience where there is no space and time and things like that. No, the definition of irreducible is something else. There is no difference between irreducible and the experience. When I say the experience is always of the irreducible, that means it is the existence itself. Cannot reduce it down to something else. When I say chair, it is not a chair. When I say metal, wood, plastic, no it is nothing like this. What are they? They are shapes and colors. That is the definition of an irreducible. When you remove the concepts out of what your experience is, you are left with the irreducible. That is the definition. We have names for them and you can drop the names also and then you are left with a pure experience.

Question two: Is infinite layered architectures in universal memory related to 84 lakh Yonis concept?

No, we don't have any 84 lakh Yoni’s concept here on the path of knowledge. Because if I say that number, you are going to ask me - how did you count it? On the path of knowledge we need evidence for everything. So we don't have any evidence. I never counted it, so I never say it. And no, a layered architecture has nothing to do with the kind of birth. This layered structure is found in everything. The memory is arranged like this in a layered way. The whole universe is a layered memory structure. Now it has nothing to do with organisms or the Yoni’s. There is no name for it in English. You can say - a womb. It has nothing to do with the kind of womb. And who has counted this? Who knows? We don't know. It simply appears in some scriptures and people have accepted it without any critical thought. I'll tell you my opinion, if you want. There are infinite Yoni’s, infinite possibilities, infinite kinds of wombs. You can even say that the Yoni is like a species. But you see, the species are not only the biological one that appears on earth. The existence is choke full of entities. There is no empty space there in existence. It's so dense, it is full of these things, objects of different complexities. What are living things? They are simply complex objects. Existence is full of an infinite variety of these. So how many wombs? Infinite, and they are produced on demand, the species appear whenever there is a need. Who has fixed it to only 84 lakh? That is wrong, isn't it? How can you fix it? Then how can this soul mechanically go through these 84 lakhs and then emerge into who knows what, or becomes liberated.

This rule is only an ancient concept. On the path of knowledge, we discard all these things, there is no evidence for that, right now. You are in the human Yoni, human womb, do you need to go through all the few more million wombs to get liberated? No, who has the time to count all these things? Infinite variety already. And a second possibility is also there - you can go through as many as you want, new ones get created on demand. Probably bored of the 84 lakh, and so you say OK, I want the next one now, and that will be created for you. It is all illusion, you can create anything. The one who has created 84 lakh will create another 100 lakh for you, if you want. Drop the old, that is garbage, clean your slate. You will never find any evidence, you will find only stories. Layered architecture os backed by a lot of evidence, you are one, as a human, you are a layered architecture, you are in the universal memory, there is direct evidence of that. Everybody is invited to examine their concepts in the light of knowledge. Knowledge comes from direct experience and logic and then drop it, you don't even need to ask me for evidence.

You learn by experience only, you don't learn by forming and holding the concepts which are told by others. For example, I tell you, there is this greater mind. Now, it is a concept only. How are you going to learn about it? Because I said it, it has become your knowledge? No! You should ask me for evidence. Then I will point to your experience. Whatever is surrounding you: the trees, the mountains, the rivers, the waterfalls, birds, I say look at that. That is the evidence of the greater memory. Now probably you will not believe me. And that's why there is this program. It is systematically shown how these things are. All the layers are shown. There are hidden layers, yes, because we are in a limited state right now—the waking state is very limited, designed for survival only—so I tell you how to get the experience of those hidden or structures, layers which do not appear in the waking state, which are hidden. They are there, but they are hidden. So eventually you learn from your experience. As the experience grows, you keep getting more and more evidence of these things. So the day you get the evidence for 84 lakh yonis, that will be your truth. So far I have found that there is no limit in the illusion. You cannot put numbers there. No, it's not possible. There are some very funny concepts like this: the age of the universe is this and the age of that is this. The mahapralaya happens after these many yers, there are very precise numbers for that. I don't know how they calculate it. I mean, if you calculate something, you should put the derivation there. No, you will never find the derivation. There is only one verse in some old scripture that will simply declare that the age of this universe is this and we have no way to tell. That is not science. Science means you should provide proof, evidence. We know that it is cyclic. We don't need proof for that. It is self-evident. But then you provide a precise number without calculation, now that is not science. If you don't provide the derivation, not science. So I have discarded all these concepts completely.

Mira is saying, there has to be a peer review.

Yes, who has reviewed 84 Lakhs of yoni’s? Nobody. But you can say there are yoni’s, there are wombs. Don't put the number there. And what is the use of the number? You see, what do I say? If you find yourself stuck in the yoni, get out of there, liberate yourself. When I say the goal of the human life is to get rid of the human life, human existence, which means the cyclic existence, repeating, suffering. We don't count how many times we repeated it. Get rid of it, get rid of all the yoni’s. It can be done instantly. Awareness is the key. Awareness has the power. Probably I am stretching this too much.

Parteep is saying, yogis explored knowledge of the body from within. I think they paid extreme attention to it. They found a deeper structure to the experience of the body. In some texts it is said that yogis can perceive inner details of the body. This knowledge is useful in many ways. Why couldn't they stop at emptiness, the essence of experiences but create such an elaborate system?

When you reach the emptiness, it is boring. There is nothing to do in the emptiness. It is a lot of bliss, pleasure. One can stay in that state forever but there are people who have the energy to do, to find, to explore. There are all kinds of people. Some people cannot sit in a cave in emptiness. How much can you dwell on emptiness? What is there to think about the emptiness? What is there to explore in the emptiness? It's emptiness. Once you realize this, there is nothing else to do but to explore whatever there is. So they did the exploration. There are ways to explore things. Your five gross senses are the primary way. They are extremely limited and instruments can augment the senses, like, you can study the body using the x-rays, fMRI etc. How to study the living body? Fortunately you have a living body, hopefully, and now you just use the internal senses in the body to study it. There are many internal senses, as you know, the sense pyramid. The five senses don't give you that much knowledge but the internal senses give you more knowledge because they are more in number. That is how we know that we are alive. We are humans because of the internal senses. So you will get more knowledge that way. Somehow that art is lost, people rely too much on their five physical senses only, that is called the physical science. There is a science of the body which relies on the internal senses plus the external, obviously, more on internal. That is how they could find the nadi’s and all these things, the meridian system based on the sensations coming from the internal senses. By internal, I don't mean non-physical; they are physical only, but modern science has nothing like this because it has not developed and probably it has deteriorated, it has decayed since it was discovered. There is not much progress except probably in the eastern countries like China and Vietnam, and all these places, there are experts there. In India also, we have the Nadi system and Pranmayakosh, the pranic view of the body. Probably, everybody knows the five main energies, five main “winds” in the body, but beyond that nobody has much experience. There are books, yes, but they are not being put in practice.

So, there is one more way to know the body, and that is the non-physical senses, from where all these systems and traditions of healing come. Unfortunately, it has also not developed so much. We never say that it is mainstream; what is mainstream is the gross way, the lowest possible way is the mainstream. There has to be a reason for that. The reason is ignorance; people are ignorant of these things. Go to a doctor, and you tell him that I saw that there is something in my body from my non-physical senses, he is going to laugh at you. But there are people who have the non-physical senses, and they can diagnose your body, sometimes by touching it, sometimes by simply looking at it, sometimes only through a photo - send them a photo, and they know what is there in the photo. The photo is only a way to connect to the universal memory, where there is your body. Where is your body? In universal memory. Not on earth, that is old, that is a faulty view. Your body is always a memory in the universal mind. It is possible to connect to it, use your non-physical subtle senses or whatever they are called. I did not bother to name all of them. There are so many, just like I said, there is no limit. If you want it, it will be created for you. That is called the remote diagnosis or remote healing or whatever. And then you use the power of intention to heal it. That is another thing. You see, diagnosis is one thing, and then cure is another thing.

So as you go higher on the sense pyramid, you will find that the study of the body changes, and the diagnosis of the diseases of the body or any abnormality there changes, ways to diagnose change. Sometimes if you are only based on the internal senses or things like that then you may need to touch the body or you may need to be physically present there to get the feel of it or something. But as you go higher on the sense-pyramid, you don't need to be present physically. Sometimes the name is enough, sometimes the photo is enough, sometimes a piece of hair. They used to send like a piece of hair to the doctor in the old days. He used to just look at the hair. There is nothing in hair, it is only an index to the memory, like we say in software, record number, this and this. That is what the hair is telling them and then the knowledge appears of that memory and it appears with all the faults in that body. It is possible.

Why can't I do it? Why can't everybody do it? They never try it. This skill is never developed. There are teachers who teach. Healing and all this, are very popular, but it has not become mainstream because it requires a lot of intellectual development and spiritual development. If you cannot use your internal senses or the non-physical senses, what does that mean? Spiritually underdeveloped. So as you progress in your spiritual path you will get all these so-called abilities. They are not magical abilities, they are just natural abilities. As you progress you will be able to use all these senses. You will be able to diagnose and if you develop your spiritual intention, you will be able to heal.

That day I was talking about Ayurveda and the poor state of Ayurveda in India and in the world. And I told you that the doctor has to be of some kind of spiritual attainment otherwise he won't be able to treat you. The herbs are of limited help. Modern medicine is just herbal mostly. They have extracted the active component from whatever is already available in nature and when you produce synthetic medicine that is a copy of the natural, they are hacked into this old system, they made it useful and the old system degraded completely because it needs spiritual attainment. The doctor needs to learn the use of the internal senses, the empathetic sense, sympathetic whatever it's called for proper diagnosis. There has to be a lot of training and natural talent which is not found in many. They do read books but by reading the book you become a bookworm you don't become a doctor. It is hands-on practice and you need a guru. For spiritual attainment, you need a spiritual path, you need sadhana. When do you get this quality or the expertise to heal people? How many healers are there? There are probably many; most of them are fake because it gives them money, they fake it. I don't know what happens to the patients; patients are also stupid sometimes. Some people have a natural ability, probably sometimes we say the past life abilities, they can do it without training. These are exceptions. There are children; they can play music or they can sing at the age of three or four years, also they sing better than your so-called pop singers. So how do they have these abilities? Something was downloaded from their previous memories. Some are born with healing abilities that are suppressed, not explored in our society. What is encouraged? Live like an animal, eat like an animal and obey your government like sheep, that is encouraged, so very bad conditions here.

Satya is saying, I understand that intention is the basic requirement. Nothing works without intention.

Yes, when I talk about intention, I talk about the tantra path, the occult path. On the path of knowledge, you make use of it, but no, we don't utilize it for spiritual progress. We utilize knowledge, but yes, intention is the basic requirement. Nothing moves: you cannot even get up in the morning if there is no intention to get up. But we don't talk about that kind of intention: we say spiritual intention, sankalp. If you cannot hold that kind of intention, no healing is possible. How long should we hold it? As long as it is required. Do these practitioners, the healers, hold it? No, probably they don't even know about it. You will need to be constantly thinking about the patient. Who has the time for that? Probably they get 100 patients per day, and who has the time to hold an intention for everybody? No, nobody. So, there are healing circles and healing groups, and what do they do? They sit and simply hold the intention for the patient. Does it work? I don't know. I don't know because the healing group has hardly any spiritual attainment. Somebody who has a spiritual attainment will never do these things because those who have understood the karmic consequences of it don't do it. Those who have attachment with the body and the world want to do it. But as you progress, you see that they are toys. Now you don’t play with these toys. So, that is why on the path of knowledge these abilities are not encouraged.

Yes, it has a lot of consequences. You meddle with maya and there is a consequence. Sometimes, I say you do it as a profession, that is much better than simply meddling here. The maya never says do not heal patients. No, what is maya saying? That you are letting your spiritual progress stop because you have an ability. You see, the siddhis become an obstacle like they say. So, your progress is stopped and then you get the consequences. So, what do I say? You don’t have any means of earning money. You use your ability. Nobody is stopping you. Charge money for it. Do not meddle simply because you have the ability. When you charge money for it, you say that I am doing it for my body. I am serving my body. My body needs food. I need money to buy the food and that’s why I am using it. You can be excused for that. You are doing it for display. You are doing it to prove that you are superior to these people. Now, it is a problem. See, there is a dark side of this thing. You can heal people, yes, but with the same intention you can harm people. It is possible. That is the dark side of the occult. That is the left-handed path. So, there are problems with these things.

Meera is asking, when we use medication for our diseases, are we interfering with the karmic cycle?

No, it is okay to take medicines. If it is because of karmic issues then the disease will reappear. That is what is seen. Medicines fail. Healings fail if it is a karmic issue. If it is reappearing again and again even healers give up, you need to go through it. You can try to treat it but if it keeps reappearing, it means there is something else. What happens is if you are powerful enough to simply clear it, that means you have taken some of the karmic stuff yourself, that is not recommended.

Parteep is saying, after realization some people go back in the world and some stay in aloneness. Does such choice happen as per the nature of body/ego structure? What is the criteria to make this choice?

There is nobody to make a choice, first of all, it happens if there is unfinished business or there are pending desires, they go back in the world and the rest they withdraw from the world because there is nothing more to do. If it can be done while staying out of the world, they do it. As soon as your desires start disappearing you will find that you are withdrawing from the world. It is very natural. It does not mean that you live in a jungle somewhere. It means that you are probably in the city but totally disinterested in worldly affairs and people. Don't want them, and you are busy doing something which you like, which is mostly of spiritual nature. So it totally depends on the mountain of desires. The actual place where you live is not so important. It happens in the mind. Our nature decides whether we are interested in the world or not, not the place. I recommend choosing a place which is comfortable.

Mary is asking, how can desires disappear naturally?

Desires are the force of life. There are three ways to handle the desires: you fulfill them, you suppress them, or you become aware of them, let them come and go. Desires are always fulfilled naturally only, there is no artificial way to fulfill them. If the desire is there and the means to satisfy the desire are there and then it simply happens and then we say, "Ok the desire was fulfilled naturally." What happens is, the ego is not satisfied with this natural mechanism. Whatever appears in the mind, it must fulfill that and this makes its life hell. It runs after it. No, we cannot do that. We can do some effort. I call it a symbolic effort. You should make some effort, but if the effort is failing again and again, stop it, it is time to fulfill some other desire. It is not happening naturally. That does not mean that it was suppressed. It means it was seen and then you let go of the desire. It will be fulfilled, but not now. It is almost certain that the desire has appeared so it will be fulfilled, but not now. When? Nobody knows. So, you fulfill that for which you are equipped. You do that which is available. You do the next thing which appears.

Do not acquire more desires. Firstly, fulfill the old ones. Finish them off only if it is very necessary, you should take up something new, otherwise not. Look at your own life goals and satisfy them first. Sometimes, these desires are imposed by your family or your society. Like, you are a good singer. You want to become a singer. And then your family says, "No, you need to become a doctor or an MBA or whatever it is." Why? Because more money is there. They want money or they are afraid of being poor. So, these desires are imposed on you. "You should become this. You should do this. You should achieve this." And the innocent child has no ability, no discernment, no Vivek. He simply takes it. Then, you can see, his life is now suffering only because he has taken somebody else's job, not his own. Your own life goal is most important. As soon as you take up something which is enforced on you, which is given to you by somebody else, your life will become suffering. Do that which you love most. And, do that which is most needed.

There are people who keep asking this question: "What should I do with my life? I have everything now, but no satisfaction." There is no satisfaction in your life because you are doing things which are imposed on you by parents or society, it is not of you. You are not born to do that. Once survival is taken care of, you should do that for which you are born. Explore your desires, and fulfill them. You will find that, that which is your desire, you will be given all the means to fulfill it. For that which is not yours, which is borrowed, a lot of problems will be there. Look at all the failed marriages. They are imposed on you, the arranged marriages. They all fail. It is suffering only. It was not your desire to spend your life with a stranger whom you do not like, to become a machine for producing children. That was not your desire when you appeared here in the world. So it is unfortunate that we have lost swadharma. We don't do that for which we are born and we are accumulating garbage here instead of burning the karmic seeds. We are not born with much. There are two or three things and human life is enough to complete them. But then we get entangled here. We take more than we brought here. We carry more. We do desire shopping here. When we go back to the causal state, much more is there, not less, and so you will find your life is a burden now. If you are not feeling light and you are not feeling free and happy, that means you are accumulating. You are not letting go. So find your swadharma and do it. Do some churning. Check whether you accumulated it from somebody or not. You saw it on TV or such? You read a book and got influenced. Then it is not yours. It is an outside influence. Only do that which you like most, which you absolutely love to do. That is your life goal.

For a spiritual seeker it is very easy. They are born with a little bit of awareness. They know exactly what to do. I remember about myself, I probably did not know what to do. But I knew what not to do. That was crystal clear in my mind, even when I was a child. Spiritual seekers have this advantage over the ordinary people. That we know what to do. Or at least we know what not to do. We seek. We find a guru and then we find our goal. That is what I call the path of your heart. And for a spiritual seeker it is the spiritual path. How do you know that you are on the right path? Your freedom and happiness will go on increasing. If what is increasing is your bondage and suffering, something is really wrong.

Amit is saying, Why do realized people often anecdotally at least appear to suffer physically towards the end of their lives? Evolutionary speaking, they are at epitome of their accent, so they should have few karmic debts pending.

He has given some examples. So, yes. You see, you are in a human body. What is the reason? There is some issue, there is something which you must return. So diseases are your ticket out of the human world. The terminal diseases which kill. I am not talking about the cold and cough and little bit of fever here, no, or the accident breaking of bones or cuts and injuries, no. Terminal issues which happen in old age, when you have lived your life completely, they are our tickets out of the world, out of the sansar. Anyway, it will happen to every human body. Sometimes it is horrible, because they hold on to the body. They don't want to let go of it, keep treating it, even if they know that “I am going to die, but 2 more months. I'm going to spend millions to get those 2 months.” Useless. And now it is surprising that even these great masters are holding on to the body. And I think the only reason is that they want to serve more. They can drop the body today also, but they keep going in spite of the disease that has appeared in the body. The disease is nothing, it is natural decay of the body. Old age is a disease itself, they say. But if the body is breaking down it will cause problems, at that point they can let go of it but they keep going. Why? Because they say that "If I can live for 2 years I can serve more people. I can enlighten more." And they keep going till it becomes so much that they cannot work.

Probably that is the reason. Because I know I will never do that, it is not worth it. But these people are saintly people, and sometimes they have an order from above. Like, if I get an order from the above—'No you cannot go now. No sir, this body is a problem.' And they will say, 'Ok, we will fix the body, but you stay there.' Then at some point they will say, 'No, we cannot fix the body now, but you stay there for two more years'. And you know it is sometimes like a mission to stay here, sometimes it is a mission to come back here. That is what I call the bodhisattva tendencies. So, we can explain these things like this. Or it can be completely the opposite, that whoever you thought is a very realized master has some ignorance, there is some attachment or the old age has taken away the awareness because it was cultivated in an artificial way, it was forced through the practices. You know, the pranic energy has moved and they are back in total darkness, they are clinging to the body. It can happen on any path, that can happen on the path of knowledge also. That is why I don't give you any instruments to keep up the awareness. The only instrument that you have is your own mind, that is what I say, 'Keep up the awareness and these things will never happen.' Out of probably thousand enlightened masters, a few have died a horrible death… who cares? Most of them lived happily and they died whenever the time was right. Some of them have knowingly done that.

Satya is asking, what does giving transmissions mean in the path of knowledge?

I don't know. You see, sometimes I say I'm transmitting knowledge. I'm not transmitting knowledge. Knowledge is where you are. I'm transmitting information. I point and you look. That is what is called transmitting. It can mean something else in the other paths, but we are not worried about that. Sometimes, I say this just to get the attention of people that come to the satsang: “I'll transmit my knowledge to you.” It is kind of a joke. It is not true. You need to take your own knowledge. Sometimes it is so fast that I am speaking and you are getting the knowledge. It is so fast it looks like it is being done to me. No, it's not like this. The pointing is sometimes instantaneous. It looks like you got that which your guru has, but nothing like this.

Session 105

Parteep is asking, for a seeker, why being not in any relationship is the natural way?

A seeker is totally detached most of the time and there is an attitude of friendliness. That is the only relation that they like because the other relations are just transactional - give and take. A seeker simply likes to give, not take, and therefore the relations do not exist for a seeker. It's an friendly attitude towards everybody even for the people who don't like them. And mostly because of detachment, there is avoidance of people. Instead of being with people, they want to be left alone. And we know that there are no people. So it is kind of meaningless to get involved with people if it is not necessary. If it is necessary it happens. And we know that everyone is my form. So if you and me are one, no relation is possible. It takes two to relate.

So there are all these reasons plus there are purely practical reasons. Like you are on a spiritual path and almost all of the worldly people don't like it. They don't want their son, daughter, wife , husband to be in that kind of lifestyle. It is incompatible with the worldly lifestyle. So there is a natural avoidance, there is a natural breaking off of such artificial relations. What are the natural relations for a seeker? Love, friendliness, and compassion. And the most negative relation that a seeker can have with anybody is of indifference, we don't worry too much about some people.

We need to operate in the world, what kind of relation should we have with people who are strangers? The best thing to do with strangers is mostly to have a transactional relation. Give them whatever they want and then have no other personal things with them - nothing to do with them. Because first, they don't understand what you are, and second, they will become a problem in your seeking, in your practices. This should be the bottom line here that with worldly people, your relation should be transactional, which means give and take without any attachments. With other spiritual seekers, friendliness and love - that's all. No other relation is possible.

They only know how to take or give - give and take. You do this much for me; I do that much for you. Right from your shopkeeper to your life partners, they know only this much. So, you need to meet them where they are. If you try to be compassionate and giving, they will not understand, and some people will misuse your compassion. Some people will think you are stupid. So, the practical way is to meet them where they are - to be like a worldly person when it comes to interaction with the worldly person and have nothing to do with them. If you want a relationship, choose somebody who is spiritual and who is on the same path as you are. That is what I found as the solution for this. You need to interact with the people; cannot avoid all of them, e.g. your boss, you need to interact with them all the time. So your boss demands work, you need money, it's a transactional relation. So everything is like this for the worldly people. If you want a relationship, pick a spiritual person. But the problem is, the spiritual person will not want a relationship. So ultimately, you end up with no relations. That is the natural way.

You are related to everybody, it's called unconditional love. You are related to everybody unconditionally, and you do whatever is needed practically. This is how to deal with people. Do not try to fix them, do not try to force them into spirituality, do not lecture them or teach them. Just give and take, and then have no other business. I have seen people try to fix others, and not only that, they try to fix the entire city or country and world also. That is not possible, and we should not do it. It is perfect as it is. Some people say that I will become a Guru so that I can liberate people, I can enlighten people. No, it's not possible either. You can become a Guru and offer your service, only this much is possible. You become available for somebody. If they call you a Guru, no problem. But it's not possible to teach everybody. They come to you with some questions and problems, you need to answer, only this much is possible. Those who are ready, they grasp the knowledge. You need to be simply available there, and nothing else should be done with these people, even with the seekers. Nothing else is required beyond this.

Rajit is asking, how to deal with mind attacks where the mind wants to go back to the old. Is there any specific purification process or we just have to withstand it?

It is very simple, whatever happens in the mind, you become a witness. Become aware of it. If you call it an attack, something is already wrong there that means there is no awareness. There is no attack in the mind, the mind does not attack anybody, there is no one to attack, there is no person there also. It is just mental activity and it is just the habit which is being repeated. The same activity is being repeated circularly. Vrutti. All you need to do is become aware of it. No specific purification is required. Yes, to prevent this kind of “attack” in future you can adjust your lifestyle a little bit. Check why this is happening, there has to be some memory there which is causing this, and then do not do anything of similar nature. Do not repeat the mistakes because of which your condition has become like this. Whatever past impressions are there, they are going to express themselves and you need to witness them in a friendly manner, in a loving manner. If you fight with it, that is more activity only. Awareness is the solution, not processes, not more activity, not more practice, no, that will never work. Only awareness has the power to dissolve the old, nothing else.

I have told you many things like forgiving and serving and all these things, they are applicable for the self also. Self means this illusory individual, you need to forgive that individual also for whatever it has done or it thinks I have done. Usually, knowledge takes care of these things, we do not do all these procedures, but in some cases where the awareness has not appeared and the person is suffering, I do recommend some rituals. But normally if you are on the path of knowledge, you should get the awareness immediately just after self-realization. You should be established in awareness, and if the mind's impurities are troubling, there will be some time lag, and then it becomes necessary to perform some practices. It should happen naturally, the awareness should be there naturally, we push it a little bit using practices.

My suggestion to Rajit is - change your language, make it friendly. There is no mind which attacks, nobody to attack, and nobody is withstanding it. You see, if you change your language, that alone is enough to purify many things. As soon as you say I am angry because of my past events and because this person did this to me and now I need to take revenge and all, and then you say - my mind is doing this, it is attacking me and it is negative - this language is like fuel in the fire of the mind. So what you do is change the language like this: that there is mental activity, now I am witnessing it, it is of this kind, it is anger, it is happening, I am looking at it, I know why it is happening, it is because of my own mistakes. Instead of finding the fault in others, accept your own mistake and then you say it's okay, it's fine, this is how it should happen, this is how this layered structure should react. Change your language to the language of knowledge instead of using a language of ignorance. You will immediately see the effect that whatever is happening will simply fall apart, it will go away, it will disappear, what will remain will be peace of awareness. Forgiving will happen. If you continue like this, then the old tendencies will be erased. They will be weakened. So language has power. Choose your words very carefully.

Sometimes, when we talk, yes, we use that language. But then you should be aware that when I say, "I am angry. I am fearful." That does not really mean I am so, you can say anger is there, fear is there, old habits are appearing. This instantly brings awareness. You can see it right now. A little bit of detachment. Distance yourself from the mental activity. The language will help you immensely.

Rishi is asking, we keep evolving, getting better each birth. But how do I improve if I don't know what wrong I did in my previous birth?

Believe me, you will know what wrong you did. Probably you will not know the actual events that happened. They are not important because the causal body stores the essence; the universal memory stores the events. It is like this: the causal body stores the essential impressions. Suppose in this lifetime you are feeling alone—let us say, nobody talks to you—and you are always inclined towards spirituality. You are disgusted by the education system and the financial system here, and whatever there is in the world, and you simply love to listen to teachers and you like arts, sciences, and philosophy a lot. Now you know what happened in your previous birth. Nobody has told you to do this, you are copying nobody. Actually, there is nobody to copy also. You are in a spiritual desert of some kind. And now you can totally guess through logic that your previous lives were spent in spiritual seeking, nothing else.

If you are among unnecessary people, if you are stuck in poverty, bad situations, your intellect does not work properly. Now you know what happened in your previous birth. Nothing good happened there. So you don't need to exactly go back to your previous birth and remember each and every event to correct yourself. You can improve simply by looking at your current situation. There is a story in the spiritual circles that when you are hit by an arrow, get rid of the arrow first. Do not try to search for the person who shot the arrow or do not try to analyze the arrow, whether it is metal, whether it is wooden, whether there is poison in it, or what kind of feathers it is having-whether it is made in India or made in China. No, you don't analyze, just break the arrow and get rid of it. That is the best thing to do. Don't even search for the one who shot you, just run and hide because the next arrow is going through your head now. So don't wait for the recall of the previous births. It is already here. The recall has already happened as an effect. It has manifested as your life. Look at your experience. It is a memory, it is like this because of some karmic attachments, if you want to use the old language. I call it an “attractor” nowadays.

Amendment will happen only in the present, not in the past. Fix it right now. You can see what mistakes are being made. You can fix it. Any intelligent person can see it. Or consult your guru and then follow the instructions of the guru. The guru's instructions will seem destructive, but you can see it. I can see what is happening in my life very easily. And then I can guess what kind of person I was in the previous birth. But I will tell you the secret. Forget the past completely. Concentrate on the present. Do the needful. Do the necessary. Do that which is practical in the present moment. It's all false. There is no previous birth. There is no future birth. It's all an illusion. From this point of view we just treat it. We don't worry about births and anything. There are people who will hunt for that fellow who was their enemy in the past life and they go and take revenge. What kind of solution is that? “I need to find my husband whom I married in the past life because this other relationship is not working in this life”. See, you have already made a mistake in your past life. Don't repeat it again. Let go of your husband of your previous birth first, and then let go of the present birth husband also. I don't mean that you take divorce. You become friendly. You accept your relationship. That is the correct thing to do. So do not hunt for your memories, they are all illusory. Maya gives you whatever you want to know exactly, it is never true. Maya tries to fool you. You are going there with this intention. Let me find that fellow who is the cause of my present trouble, I want to find what happened, and she will produce a scenario there according to your expectations. Remember, even yesterday is an illusion, don't even think about past lives. Look at the present.

Session 106

Parteep: What is this illusion of free will? The choices we make are presented to us. Even the reactions are ready made. They appear. A small action of even asking you is happening it seems. Where does free will apply in small actions, in larger aspects? It can be perceived there are too many variables and obviously I am not a doer. Where does free will fit in?

We have discussed this before, and the answer is essentially very simple; that there is willing, but there is nobody who does it. What is willing? It is a movement in the memory. Why is there a movement? Because it is a vibration. These processes are going on in the universal memory, and when the memory is activated, it comes out in the form of a “pre-action”. That which happens before the action happens is pre-action. That can be called will, and you can see that every action is a will now because all movements in the memory are like wills. So hopefully, that answers your question now. That is present in the small action, that is present in the big action, that is present in complex actions like decision making. It is not a matter of many variables. It is that everything is happening by itself. Whatever there is in the memory, simply appears as actions. Whatever the results of the actions, they become our experiences, and they are impressed back in the memory, and new actions are produced. New willing happens. This is going on in the cyclic form. There is no end of it. There is no start of it.

The word "free" in the free will is meaningless because it is all free. There is no bound will. It is a meaningless addition. There is only willing, and that is not of the person. The person is a result of wills. The person does not do anything. Like you said, there is no doer. So there is nobody who does the willing also. The person or the individual is a byproduct of this loop of actions and impressions. So what about freedom? Where is the freedom in that? Look, you are trying to find freedom in the wrong place. That which is perceiving this dance of wills and actions is already free. That which is acting out this dance, the puppet who is dancing, is bound and will remain bound. This body-mind machine is just a puppet. You are trying to find freedom there, which is not there. Where is the freedom? The experiencer of this machine is eternally free. Nothing binds it. You are that. You are not this puppet who is just acting out whatever there is in its programming, in its memory. You cannot even say that it has a memory. You can only say that there is a memory that appears as the puppet, which an ignorant person is going to call "myself" - I am this puppet. But those who have knowledge know that this puppet is a byproduct of a process of willing. It cannot do willing. Since it is a structure, it is a bound structure. It cannot be free and be a structure. It's not possible to be a structure if it is free, else it is just flowing like water. There is no shape. There is nothing there. If it becomes free, the whole structure is going to vanish. So it must remain bound in order to manifest. It must bind itself in all these processes and memory structures. Otherwise, there is no organism. Otherwise, there is no creature. There is no layered structure. It must remain bound by all these laws of the memory. Otherwise, there is no functioning. There is no experience. As you know, all the experience is the experience of the memory only. And if it is not well organized, not structured, it's a meaningless experience.

By adding the word “free” there, what we are doing is we are fooling ourselves that this thing can be free. No, this is a machine, just like a computer, a robot. Cannot be free. It does whatever it does in a very mechanical way, although it is complex, but it's purely mechanical. That which is free has nothing in it. It is the existence itself. It is the only truth. The only truth is also free. Nothing binds it. Because there is nothing. It is empty. There is nothing to bind it. Nothing can be bound there. There is nothing to bound. It has no limits. It is infinite. No perceivable limits. It is infinite potential. Anything can appear in its field. And you are that. You are already free. You are already liberated. You were never bound and you cannot be bound. This is knowledge. This is your direct experience.

People are trying to free this machine or the computer, which is impossible. Its freedom means its dissolution. And then they say, "OK, I'll accept the dissolution." But it does not even dissolve. Because it is already dissolved, it's already just potential in this emptiness. What are you doing? What are you dissolving into? You're already nothing. The essence of the experience comes out to be emptiness also. It is already dissolved. You see that which seems to be doing actions, acting, willing is already nothing. Why are you trying to make it free? It is an appearance. What is the point in making the appearance free? It is a dream. What is the point in living a dream that you think is free? Just wake up from the dream and you will find you're already free.

So, except the path of knowledge, all other paths are going to keep you bound because there is ignorance in them. Only the path of knowledge can take you beyond this bondage. They all claim that you will be free. No. They are all operating on this puppet which is not you. Remember that. They all can simply dissolve this puppet into nothingness which it is already. All other paths are just a waste of time. They are all wasting their time doing nothing for no purpose at all. Only the path of knowledge declares that you are free and shows that you are free and then lets the dance of the puppet happen. The puppet is designed to dance. It is not meant to be free. It is not meant to get dissolved. It is already dissolved. It is already an appearance. There are no characters on the screen. They appear on the screen only. You cannot kill the character on the screen. It is already dead. It is already an illusion. Nothing gets killed. Nothing gets dissolved. Nothing gets liberated on the screen. The screen is free, not the characters that appear on it. See how beautiful this is. See everything is solved now. Do you need to do anything? Nothing.

Rajit is asking: is the screen aware of these characters?

Yes, who else can be aware? The puppet cannot be aware. The screen is conscious of what is happening on the screen. The screen is the experiencer. Whatever appears is the experience. The experience cannot experience anything. These characters cannot experience anything. They are just appearing as objects. The screen experiences. It is one: One existence appearing to itself. One aspect is bound and illusory. Another aspect is free and true. Which one are you? That is your choice. Now it's your “free will”: You can choose the puppet as you. There is no harm in that. But you can choose the one who is already free as you. That is more logical. That seems more natural. There is no rule, actually, here. They are all one. So ultimately, the bound one is me, and the free one is also me. Non-dual realization. What are you running after? Are you running after liberation? You are both liberated and unliberated. The path of knowledge ends here precisely because there is nothing to do. And the other paths: they make you do the donkey work of liberation for nothing. It's not possible, you see. Whatever is, is already perfect, complete, whole. Nothing needs to be done. You don't need to do anything except end this path, end this seeking.

Second question is by Pradeep. Essence is emptiness, and I am that experiencing some sort of fullness. What is this paradox? The only answer I get from me is that there is not the field of thought. Surrender to it, and my brain is not required here.

It's unknowable. And there is no paradox here actually. That is the only thing that is happening—that existence is experiencing itself. In the eternal process of experiencing, that's all there is. Experiencing is the existence. It is not an action. It is just being what it is. It appears to be dynamic. That's why we call it experiencing. Suchness, isness. It is. It is all that is. There is no paradox in it. It becomes a puzzle, unknowable, mysterious puzzle, because we use intellect to know this thing. The intellect knows only a few things in the illusion. Sometimes I say that the intellect knows the illusion. No, it does not really know the illusion. Through the intellect, a tiny part of the illusion is known, which is your waking state. The rest is all illogical. The rest is not to be known but only to be experienced, which is the major part. You can see that the existence is illogical, irrational, and one cannot make head and tail of it. It is the Maya. It is an illusion. That which appears as your waking state is momentary, and there also the intellect is the product of the illusion. Intellect appears as an illusion, and the intellect then claims to know. "I know everything," which is stupidity. There is no intellect. There is no intelligence in the illusion. On the other hand, we do say that it appears to be like this. Appears that there is a purpose, there is a direction. But there is nothing. The cause is all cooked up by the intellect. It tries to perceive it. Like we try to perceive figures in the clouds or the drawing in the dots. It tries to connect the dots, but it's all fake. The reasons are perceived reasons. They are cooked up reasons. The purpose is a fake purpose. The cause is just created out of experiences, past experiences, which are all illusory. The cause of illusion is also illusion. So it looks like that it is beyond intellect and that is why it says it is a paradox. The paradox is when you want to know it using your intellect. It's impossible. It's unknowable. Ultimately the existence is mysterious. That is its real nature. Mystery is the nature of existence, not knowability.

Now you can see the significance of the classification of knowledge that we did in the beginning. I tell you that knowledge is of three kinds: known, unknown and unknowable. You must be saying - why is there an unknowable thing? It's impossible. I can know everything. No, the unknowable is the only kind of knowledge, you see. That which is unknown, nothing to discuss about it. That which is known is already a fake illusion. What remains is unknowability. I don't know - is the bottom line. This is the agnostic position which is the best position, the highest possible position in any philosophy because that is how existence is. It does not care about knowing. All it cares about is being and playing. Once you accept this, once you surrender to this knowledge, you see it is the only knowledge possible - I need to be what I am. Nothing else is possible. Nothing else can be done. You can only be that which you already are. You cannot become that which you are not. And luckily we are everything. Luckily we are the whole existence, so nothing needs to be done. So this, this is the only possible knowledge and this knowledge is the only possible liberation there is. There is no other liberation. That which is bound will remain bound. That which is free is already free, eternally free. Use the I to go with the free one. You marry the free one, reject the bound. That is the action that you need to take. That is the only practice you need to perform on the path of knowledge. Prefer that which is free. It is all the same, you see. The bound one is also you, but I do not say that it is me because it is the illusion, but then you accept it also. Once you accept, there is no more seeking. It is the complete end. That is the final end. That is where everything stops. You don't end up with the knowledge. You end up with unknowability, an agnostic position. There is a lot of peace there. Finally I don't need to know what I am, or finally I don't need to know anything, because I am everything. I just need to be what I am. So it is very simple, you see. Knowledge is very simple.

Spirituality is the simplest thing possible in the universe. Why are people struggling with it? Because they are identified with this puppet. The nature of the puppet is struggle and suffering. That which is bound, its suffering is also fake, its happiness is also fake. It is just a train of impulses in the nervous system. What is suffering? Train of impulses in the nervous system. What are these impulses? Vibrations. It is an illusion and that is the whole ignorance. You will never find any knowledge here. You are identified with these vibrating patterns or the memory. No knowledge here, no freedom here, no happiness here, no bliss here, nothing is here. It is meant to be looked at, that's all it is. It is a movie and it is not an ordinary movie. It is very nice, very beautiful. Identification with it is the problem. And this problem is also fake because it goes away sooner or later. As soon as you encounter your Guru, its gone as if it was never there. You will be left with a history which is not there. Your history is fake. Your history, the past, is doubly illusory. It is not there. Nothing has happened in your life. Now you see that I was always free. There was always an illusion. I never did anything. I am not going to do anything. It is a matter of being and this puppet will keep dancing, obeying the wills of itself. Who is making the Devi dance? Devi herself. Nobody else.

There are questions like why is the experiencer experiencing? Why has it chosen to experience this kind of hellish experience? I said look at it, it does not choose. The existence has no choice really. It is a field of possibilities. This is another point of view, you see. But the possibilities move and there the will appears, choice appears. And it is doing its own choosing. It is doing its own willing. Devi is dancing because she likes to dance. We say, "It is not my will. Her will." We don't do anything. We don't meddle in this dance. We watch the dance. She performs a perfect dance. This puppet who thinks that I can make it dance in whatever way I want. Yes, it can do that. It can meddle in the dance. It is always ugly. Whatever these humans do, it is always ugly. You can see it. Whatever nature does, whatever Devi does, it is always beautiful. It is always perfect. Wherever there are humans, there is imperfection. There is ugliness. There is dirtiness. There are diseases, death, violence, and stupidity. That is what this puppet can do. When you surrender, then the real dance happens, which is of knowledge, love, and bliss. That is the result of surrendering. Unfortunately, not everybody is capable of this. The major problem is saying that I know. No, we don't know.

Ruchika is saying, after realizing the nature of existence and the experience is emptiness, everything feels and looks boring. So how to keep oneself motivated and going?

Enjoy this eternal vacation. There is no need to motivate yourself. How will you do it? There is no doer. Enjoy the peace that has appeared, which the ego is calling boring. This is also a play, so witness it. If you are feeling like doing something, if there is an anxiety there that I am not doing anything, there is no motivation, that means there is some ignorance left. Because the one who is blissful will never think like this, simply enjoys the bliss. So my suggestion is, enjoy this twist in the ego that I have nothing to do now. Because yes, there is nothing to do. Whatever happens happens by itself. There is no doer and it’s only a thought that I am not motivated. It’s only a thought that my life is boring. There is nothing to do now. This is your old habit, a tendency appearing as a thought. Just witness it. There is nothing to do really.

What is the significance of recognizing duality in life or daily life?

As you know, there is no use of knowledge. The non-dual knowledge or the dual knowledge is completely useless in your daily life because your daily life is happening in total falsehood. What is useful in daily life is the knowledge of the illusion, which we call science or tantra or the occult. That is useful in your daily life. There is no significance of non-duality or even the experiencer is not required in your daily life because you can see, it is going nicely in the ignorant person. The ignorant person is probably enjoying his life more than you. Like she said, it's boring. There is no enjoyment in the life you see. When there is ignorance, there is probably more involvement in life. When there is no ignorance, there is knowledge, there is detachment. There is nothing much to do. Whatever happens happens. That which is necessary simply happens.

Why do you recognize the duality? To end the seeking. If there is seeking, you need the knowledge. The knowledge comes in the form of dual knowledge and non-dual knowledge. If there is no seeking, then there is nothing to do, it is completely useless. Survival happens without knowledge, nicely. Every creature is surviving here perfectly without knowing what they are, why they are or what they are doing, including humans. Since there is no knowledge, there is no use of knowledge. What do we call knowledge? Like everybody here must be knowing that it is the removal of ignorance only. Knowledge is the destruction of ignorance. So ultimately, we are left with the unknowable. What are you going to use unknowable for? You see? Not only the non-dual state is unknowable, the dual state is also unknowable. You do not know what experiencer really is. You can be it, you cannot know it. You cannot know the experience also except that it is empty. What are you going to apply it to? Whatever you apply is already false. The applied knowledge is already an illusion. What is the meaning of all that? That which is trying to apply knowledge is ignorant. You don't need to apply the knowledge. Spiritual knowledge is just to be free from the need of seeking. Your life is not going to acquire a meaning. Probably there was more meaning in your life before you came into spirituality. After knowing that there is no purpose at all, no need of applying anything. There is nothing to do, I say, it is complete freedom. Because as soon as you get a purpose, as soon as you get an application of knowledge, then you are bound to do that. And existence is not bound. It does not like to be bound like this in goals and purpose and reasons. Nothing to do. Nothing to apply. So like she said, I am not motivated. Ignorance. He said, how can you apply it? Ignorance.

Ryan is saying, any feeling or sense of individuality, no matter how stable, could be considered the puppet then. If that is true then any feeling of separation is also the puppet of individuality. Because if there is no feeling of individuality there can be no separation.

You are right. The individual is the only separation in the sea of infinite oneness. The individual is the only thing, which is an illusory thing, which says that I am separate. There is no separation, yes. When I say puppet, it is this thought in the mind that I am separate. Otherwise there is no puppet also. It's all one dance. One existence is dancing as everything. That is beautiful. So the separation is a part of the dream or we can say the separation is a part of the performance that is happening. There is some pleasure in that. Looking at myself as a separate individual is a possibility in the field of possibilities, so it is there. There is a pleasure in that. For some time it looks like that I am away from all this drama that is happening. There is the opportunity for the existence to awaken to its true nature. So that is why we do not discard individuality because that is the only way existence knows itself. When it draws a line between itself and its own form which it calls the individual, there is the only possibility there.

Individuality is arising out of the intellect. Without intellect there is no knowledge. There is no recognition that I am the experiencer. Look at all these things, all the objects, even the creatures, and the majority of humanity: they have no clue what they are. Even as individuals, they are totally merged in the sea of oneness. They are one with everything already, but only the one who can recognize the separation can recognize the oneness. Now, that is a paradox. If you understand what I am saying, the possibility to know that I am the experiencer, and this is the existence, and it is the illusion, arises only in an individual, not in a non-individual. The individuality, or the aham, the ego, is strongest in the human form. Probably it is there in other kinds of creatures beyond humans, the para-humans. But this one is very fresh, just newly created; you see lots of energy of individuality here. And that is the reason that there is value in taking human birth. Otherwise, you can see that human birth is a disaster. Its only purpose is to recognize what I am. If you don't do this, there is nothing in your life; it is totally meaningless. This individual arises out of the sea of oneness as a separate event just to see what it is. The separation is done from itself so that you can take a look at it, look at the existence by rising above it as an individual. Although you cannot do that really, the individual is an illusion, but this illusion happens for only this purpose, you can say.

Some people will say that the purpose of life or existence is to know itself. But I don't agree with it. This purpose is an imaginary purpose here. The purpose only appears to be there. That oh look, the existence is taking the individual form to know what it is. No, existence doesn't bother about these things. It does not care what it is. Or you can say it already knows what I am. It is in a state of forgetfulness, which is also meaningless. I mean who is there to know what? There is only emptiness knowing that I am empty and now it is meaningless completely. Ultimately the individual knows nothing. You must have noticed I keep saying this; it's unknowable. What happens is the individual arises out of the sea of the existence of the possibilities and then it assumes that I know something. Look, I am this body mind. Look, I am these thoughts. Look, I can do things. I have free will and I have life. I have relations. I have money. I have a house. This world is mine. You see, it accumulates this kind of garbage when it arises. And the only knowledge it can get is dropping off this garbage. It cleans itself and then sees that look, nothing has happened. I was not an individual. I was the whole, no boundaries, no separation. So ultimately nothing is known about itself. The dropping of the garbage is the only knowledge. That is funny.

This is what is happening on the path of knowledge. The individual is destroyed so that this dance of “I know, I know” can end. Cannot know anything. There is no separation. There is nothing to know. Enjoy the individuality while it lasts. It's not going to last forever. You see, as you know, the evolution is happening in the layers, it will no longer be there. Like many people who have gone through my podcast episode on the group mind will understand: there is no individual mind. Ultimately, there is no illusion of the individual mind; it's all false, really. What is really happening in the illusion, is a group mind; it's all a group. Individuality is totally false, like doubly, triply false. It's not even appearing; what is appearing is the group mind. There are layers upon layers of ignorance, like an onion. In the end, there is nothing; you can peel the onion, which is the path of knowledge, to find nothing.

Vipin is saying, there are self-preservation tendencies in memory structure that keep an entity separated from other entities which act as safeguards also, so there is no complete takeover by the other entity during survival. But if I am the experiencer, why should there be fear of a complete takeover by another entity to the experiencer? All should be equal. Why does this memory structure need to be retained?

The experiencer is not concerned with survival; it is the witness of survival. The thing that is afraid of dying or takeover or dissolution is the individual; it is the tendency to remain alive, to continue the dance. It is going to resist its dissolution. You are witnessing this thing. Why is there a tendency to be separated and alive? Because without this tendency, there is no life. The patterns that do not protect themselves dissolve back immediately. Only the patterns that persist using some self-organizing process survive, that is known as the memory. The patterns in the memory, they are seen, they are perceived, they are experienced. So it seems that everything has a tendency to persist, but is actually semi-permanent, cannot persist, cannot go on. As soon as the pattern is formed, there is a fear in it, you can call it a “fear”, a primary tendency to keep going instead of being dissolved. The opposite tendency is the tendency of the liberation which wants to be dissolved in the whole. Both of them are illusions, nothing like this is happening.

So the experiencer is completely detached from this tendency to survive which is just causing suffering, because these patterns, these creatures, these humans, they do not really survive, there is already nobody there to survive, nobody dies, but the patterns do not want to hear these things, they want to continue and therefore we accept. Yes, yes, you can live, you are eternal, you are forever, you are immortal, it likes to hear these things. That thing, the individual which is struggling to survive does not like to call itself emptiness, nothing, illusion, puppet, machine, whatever you are, it's like insults for it. An ignorant person is not going to sit with me for long, because I show them that they are nothing, they don't like it, the fear appears there - “what do you mean I am nothing, I am alive, I have this, I have that, look at my clothes, branded clothes, look at my phone, expensive phone”, they like this thing, they don't like to be told the truth. They are actually hiding from the truth. You must have seen this tendency. Why? Because there is this very primordial fear that I don't want to go away.

I am just watching it. The experiencer is watching it, looking at it. So do not combine the experiencer with the tendency. Why is there a fear in me? Why can't there be fear? It is a tendency to survive. Fear keeps us alive. So do not mix the illusion with the truth. The experiencer has nothing to do with survival. The experiencer has no need to survive. There is no fear in the experiencer. You are imposing qualities on that which does not have a quality. So the question becomes wrong. You see, people ask this question: "Why am I suffering if I am the existence?" Look, you are not suffering; you are witnessing the illusion of suffering. Why is there this question? Because there is still some ignorance left even after knowing what I am, the impurity has again clouded the knowledge. The mind starts thinking again. And it can think of only individuality and ignorance. Your all thoughts are just thoughts of ignorance only. There is no real knowledge in thinking. Thinking is a by-product of ignorance. Why? Because you cannot think about the reality. You cannot think about the truth. There is nothing to think about. It is empty. It is just witnessing. It is just experiencing. What are you going to think about it? All your thoughts are of ignorance. You can keep thinking forever; no knowledge will be gained

Only your awareness brings an end to thinking, and the end is not as if the thinking has stopped. The end of thinking is the realisation that it is useless. The machine keeps running, but there is a thought that running this mill is completely useless, it is not needed now. You can let it run because there is nobody to stop it also, if it runs, it runs.

Shilpa is asking, what is the basic difference between knowing and self-realization? How are common ones different from self-realized souls?

“Knowing” is an ambiguous word. Knowledge comes in three forms. First is knowing that all the experience is an illusion. This is the first kind of knowledge. The second is self-realization that I am the experiencer. And the third is realization of oneness that I am also the experience. My changing aspect is the experience, the unchanging aspect is the experiencer. Three kinds or three stages of knowledge. You can call it knowing. That is the complete knowledge. You can define the knowing like this. And then you can see the difference here between knowing and self-realization. But I don't think I have used the word knowing. You can know so many things, self-realization is just one kind of knowledge.

How is common one different from the realized soul? There is no such thing as “soul” and there is no difference between the ordinary person and the self-realized person, they speak the same thing, they eat the same thing, they live the same life, they have the same partners, and they have the same happiness, suffering and desires and whatever. No difference at all, except one, that those who are self-realized know their true nature and therefore they are always in bliss, even though it may look like that they are going through all the drama that an ordinary person is going through, but internally or essentially they are in bliss. They are blissful. Otherwise birth happens, death happens, disease happens. Never think that self-realization is some kind of miracle. No, it is very simple - know that I am not any experience, neti neti. It's not a miracle, the miracle is already present as this eternal dance of Shiva, you don't need to do more miracles. So, there is no difference between an ignorant and knowledgeable person at all. That is why we do not say that the ignorant people are inferior, we simply say they are ignorant. Ignorant means they are ignoring something. The word “ignorance” means they don't want to look. That is the only difference but that is the difference of day and night sometimes, because they are suffering and the one who is self-realized is not suffering. But from the point of view of knowledge suffering is also an illusion, so ultimately no difference. And the self-realized person also suffers because the body gets the pain and the mind becomes sad or happy. There is the layer of awareness there, we do witness what is happening, but ultimately it's not very different. You do not become something great, you remain as it is, and you simply know what I am.

Second question is - is purification of mind the same as dropping ignorance?

Yes, you are right. Purification is a process of letting go actually. What is there to let go? Whatever you have accumulated. What have you accumulated? Only ignorance. Our program says that purification is step number this and this, but no, as soon as you enter the program, the purification has started. You listen to the first lesson, purification has started. Why is there a step of purification in the end? If this whole thing fails, then it's too much ignorance, so much so that the teaching is also not taken, it is rejected, there is total darkness there, not even the spark of light to accept the teaching. There are people here who think that some kind of monkey business is going on here and they come here in the satsang to see what kind of monkey business is going on. Too much darkness, too much retardation. I always meet such people - Let me check what you are saying and I will judge you because I know more than you. I say ok that is not your path then. Come here with questions then you will get the answer and the answer will be something which purifies you. It's not going to give you more than what you already have.

But an ignorant person is afraid of letting go, therefore prefers to remain ignorant, will dance around the knowledge thinking that I am a seeker. But never seeks. Tries to find fault in the guru, is suspicious of the guru. Such people never get any knowledge. They remain impure. So there are levels of purification. Some of you are so pure that whatever I am saying you are seeing. They are so pure it's like transparent glass. I don't need to teach you anything. You sit with me and you know. You are so pure. But some are really dark. Nothing gets through them, it’s like concrete. Even if I hammer their minds with a bulldozer, they do not budge. So there are levels of ignorance. And the path of knowledge is suitable for those who have a little bit of ignorance left. The final bit is dropped, the rest will come through suffering.

Ranjan is asking, where is the origin of thought? What causes thoughts to rise in the local memory?

Memory is the origin. The processes in the memory manifest as thoughts. And you will see that there are only thoughts. There is no perception of the memory itself. Memory is an inference because we can think the same thought twice. Think of the tomato today. You can think of the tomato tomorrow. And then we infer that it is coming from a stable pattern in the memory because it repeats. So whatever is stored in the memory is manifested as thoughts. Since there is a repeatability there we can read the same thing again and again in the memory. We call it a memory, but if it produced different things all the time, then we would never say that it is a memory. It recorded nothing. It is like you open a book and there is a story there and you open it tomorrow and there is another story there. The pictures are also different. Are you going to call it a book? It is not a book. It is storing nothing, actually.

If you take a closer look, you know this thought came into my mind today, you take a closer look at the memory, it is never the same. Only a scientist will know this. Can anybody tell me, science people? I can see a lot of science discussion going on in our group. Can anybody tell me how a scientist can know that the memory is always changing? Local memory is only a concept, it is all universal ultimately. Can somebody tell me why there is a memory but no memory? People who know the science of measurement can answer this. The most stable memory is matter. I have given you the hint. Not your thoughts, not your emotions. Memory is a measurement problem. Not understanding memory is related to what scientists call the measurement problem. The measurement problem is that nothing can be measured. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a specific application of this problem. The general measurement problem says that measurement changes the value. You cannot measure anything. This is the general measurement problem. You will never find this in the physics book. Actually, they are afraid of writing it because the whole science is what - measurement only, isn't it? Scientists have found out that nothing can be measured. The position-velocity is a specific case applied to quantum mechanics. You cannot measure anything at all. Why? Because it changes as soon as it is measured. Isn't it funny? How to know this? Take a meter, you know, anything like you measure the temperature in your room. You add many decimal digits in the meter for accuracy. You will see it is never the same. Every second, it is changing. What are you measuring? You are measuring the universal memory here. And you will find that the numbers are dancing madly. Those who have done the measurements, scientists, they know this. Except for one or two decimals, the whole pattern is dancing. You can do whatever it takes to make the instrument very accurate, and you will never be able to measure the temperature really. The problem is - the more accurate you make your meter, the more it will dance. A really cheap meter that is good for nothing - is going to show you fixed degrees. You make it so sensitive it picks up the tiniest vibration of the atoms, and now you will say I don't know the temperature in the room. You don't know what it is, and now the whole science falls down. It is an approximation only. Whole of your science is an approximation of what there is.

The memory is changing - we call it a memory, but it is not memory, it is not a stable thing. It is change - this continuous activity cannot stop. You can see the image of a tomato in your mind but cannot hold it - it changes. It is coming from a memory. The tomato keeps changing. It is like a dream, which is never stable. So your world is a dream - if you don't ignore the last decimal places, if you don't ignore the tail of the decimal, it is a changing dream, a meaningless dream, meaninglessly changing. When you look at the tree, your eyes are approximating the tree. Now increase the sensitivity of the eyes, you will see that the tree is becoming many things. Now, just make your instrument so that it only perceives the change, not the apparent stability. And now your instrument is going to tell you that there is no tree, there is nothing. How amazing is that?

Science proves that which we say every day on the path of knowledge. We keep repeating - it is an illusion. A simple meter can show you that it is a dream. Not any ordinary dream, it is a randomly changing dream. There is an illusion of stability in this dream. That is a scary thought for many people. The illusion is also not stable, this is very scary. You told me everything is an illusion, at least there is illusion, at least there is this memory, the naad, the vibration. At least that is the reality. No, I say no. Try to measure it, you will see it is not there. You will see that it is utterly, completely, an illusion. We cannot even grasp it. Gyanis and scientists are essentially the same. I have acquired all this knowledge by observing great scientists. Their entire lives are spent in seeking. No knowledge is possible because there is nothing to know. Devi is enigmatic. You cannot see her, you cannot find her. She appears to be present, she is dancing. What greater miracle do you require after this? Those who seek miracles by pounding their heads or taking drugs, what do you desire? Isn't this mind-boggling? You cannot measure a string, yet you are so certain of your life. It is the ignorant person who is always doing. Those who know do not act. The miracle is right in front of your eyes, and if you are looking for another miracle, it is stupidity. And the real miracle in the miracle is that we can know a few things even though we are completely illusory humans. They can know a few things, the greatest of which is self-realization. I don't even put too much weight on oneness. It's kind of a useless thing. The biggest game-changer for humans is self-realization. You know this much. Then nothing remains to be known. Why? Because oneness cannot be known. It's already there. There's no need to know that I am one. But you need to know who you are. That changes everything. And if this puppet can know this much, it's a miracle, isn't it? That is the only thing worth knowing in the whole business of existence. I am the truth. I am the only one that really exists. Whatever is happening is me, but not the essential me.

Session 107

Vipan is asking, Is there a sound in silence also? What is it?

It is the sound that is produced by the nervous system. It is the sound that is produced by the internal ear when there is nothing to listen to outside. The apparatus of the ear produces noise because it raises the sensitivity a little bit and its own internal mechanisms produce the noise that is called sound of silence. Some people think that it is some kind of non-physical or metaphysical thing, but it is purely physical. We are using this sound in the meditation techniques that I have given. We use this sound as a stepping stone to the purely non-physical sensations. So all you need to do is take the gross objects, go to the body, go to the breathing, go to the sound in the ear and then you need to jump into your mental feelings, imaginations and pictures and whatever. Then leave that also and remain in the emptiness. That is the technique that I have given to reach that blissful state. That is only one technique. There are more techniques. Some people think that it is the anahat naad, but it is not. Some people think that it is the silence, but it is not silence. The real silence is when you are aware, but the senses have shut down. By shutting down, I don't mean that they stop working, I mean that finally the connection is switched off from the senses and it happens during the state change. It produces some noises, but then finally there is silence, and that silence is absolute silence. Absolutely nothing there. So that is what I would say is the sound of silence.

If you want to know what silence is, you will need to shut down the senses, which happens naturally during sleep. All you need to do is stay aware while this is happening. It's very easy. The silence is so profound, it is so empty that you are going to remember it forever. So everybody is encouraged to experiment like this and do not believe the superstition that this sound is something important. It is just a sound and then we have used it to our advantage.

A seeker is asking, is it advisable and possible to leave your body at will if you have no more responsibilities and desires?

It is surely possible. If you have no more responsibilities and desires, then this is the only desire there is. And now it becomes very probable. That means the chances of success are more because nothing is becoming a barrier to this. There are no worries. There is no pressure on you. You are relaxed mentally and physically and the awareness can come very easily during the state change. What is the advice? The advice is as per the program that you need not do it every day, it's not advised. Once in a week is enough and once you know that it is possible, once you learn a few things, you have seen a few things, then it is advised to stop it. Because it can make your physical life a little bit unbalanced, it can have an effect on the mind which is responsible for the physical life, that part of the mind. So that is my advice.

Do you mean leaving the body forever? Now this question becomes difficult because absence of desires means that death is going to happen anyway. You don't need to really leave it. There will be an absence of desire to eat, there will be letting go of desire to drink. Finally, there is letting go of the desire to breathe. In those few minutes, death happens. I cannot advise, or I cannot say anything, but it is inevitable. This is the necessary thing that if there is no more desire left, not even that of breathing, then you have left the body permanently. Who is there to leave the body? Who is there to hold this desire? There is no doer, and nobody desires anything. How are you going to do it? Simply let go when the time arrives, and mother nature knows what to do. She knows it better than us.

Preeti is asking, What about fasting? On the path of knowledge, is there no fasting? Is it not required?

You should follow a simple routine of not eating too much, not eating too less, and eating only the food that is suitable for your body. Preeti is asking if that is also a way of ending desire. The answer is no. That is not the way to end desire. It is a way to rectify impurity. In some people, it appears in a form of obsession with food. They get addicted to food. By addiction, it is not meant that they want to eat nice food. Addiction is when you want to eat all kinds of garbage all day. That is called addiction. So, to get rid of that unnecessary impurity, fasting is prescribed. Why would someone on the path of knowledge do that? Someone on the path of knowledge has the necessary intelligence to not do that. But people acquire this habit before coming on the path of knowledge and then they struggle with it. So, at that time fasting is prescribed. It is a purification technique only. It does not end desire. The desire to eat remains the same. All other desires will weaken because there is no food in your body. People think that is the end of desire, but no. The next day you eat something, and all these desires are back. What are you going to do with them? And they are back with double force. You can try it with any desire you want, anything which is necessary and you will find that because that one desire is controlled, the rest are gone for that time. But no, we don't want to do this kind of suppression of desires. The only way to end the desire is to realize that they are not mine. They are natural events happening in the universal memory.

A desire has no label that says that this is “my desire”. There is no name on the desire. There is no way to identify why this has happened. Eventually, the ego comes up and says that this desire is mine, but that happens only after the desire has already appeared. Nobody is there to desire so there is no way to end the desire. What is the proper way to realize that these desires are not mine, they are not me, also I have no desires, I am emptiness, I am desirelessness. That will happen only when you get the self-realization, where you know that I am not that which appears and disappears, which goes and comes, which is impermanent, which is an experience. I am not that experience. That's all you need to end all the desires. There is no other way. Will this play of desire stop? And you will see that no, the illusion continues and we have no interest in it because it's an illusion. So on the path of knowledge it is very simple. You get the basic knowledge and then get the self-realization. It should not take you more than one hour to end all your desires, it is so easy. You will say what is the use, the desires continue, you said. The use is they do not enslave you. Only that which is necessary happens. There will be all kinds of desires, but you will be able to see them as not me and then they lose their grip on the body-mind instrument and it does lesser actions or only pure actions which produce no karmic fruit. And then finally they get rid of this vehicle also.

Preeti is asking, what is the origin of desires?

Memory is the origin of desire. Desire is simply activity of the memory; it is simply movement in the memory which produces an impulse: I need this, I need to do this. It produces an action. If there is no desire to do anything; no action is produced. Memory is the origin of desire and whatever action happens there are fruits of that action and whatever is the experience, it is impressed back on the memory. This goes on in a loop. That's why it is called karma, also stored karma. Whatever impressions that are gathered from doing something are called stored karma. The memory from where the desires arrive is called the causal body.

There is a question on the causal body by Sushant - Does a causal body or layer have a memory bridge with multiple human puppets?

There is a brief mention of parallel evolution, it is only a theory, but there are enough logical arguments to say that. It is possible that the causal body controls many human bodies. They will have all different personalities. How is that possible? You will say no, they should be identical. Actually, their pre-allocation is different, otherwise there was no point in making copies. One of the bodies is processing some part of the karmic stuff and the other body is expressing other parts of the karmic stuff. In this way, the evolution of the causal body speeds up. So, the more evolved a causal body is, multiple incarnations will become normal for that. So, sometimes the causal body will incarnate as male and female form simultaneously. This is what a twin flame is. When it is not so, you can say that kind of superstitious thing. It is just a natural outcome of spiritual evolution. Everybody will get this kind of ability to project many bodies. There will be many puppets, like he said, in the physical world that are talking to the same causal body.

And yes, like he said, we can fulfill the desires or we can unload the karma quickly, not taking too much time or not going through too many serial incarnations. We can do it parallelly – it is possible, parallel processing. So, eventually, everybody gets this ability, and remember that it is only theoretical in nature. I cannot provide you with a direct experience of it. It is logical, given the working of the memory layers, they are very efficient in whatever they do. Efficiency means, why can't I process whatever there is in the memory parallelly? It does it eventually. And usually the incarnated person has no clue. Only in very rare conditions can they identify each other as one, and that has interesting effects. That is one aspect of it. There are more aspects that the causal body can project one incarnation in one world and the other one in another world. It is also possible. One incarnation in the higher world and the other one in the lower world where the higher now is in happy condition but the lower one is still not very happy because he is in the lower one but gets the fruit of evolution anyway. There are more combinations that are possible, like there is no time in the memory so it can decide to incarnate two copies at different times. So one can incarnate years earlier than today and one can go to the future and the third can be in the present. Why does it do it? Just to survive. Survival is the driving force – Evolution. As there are processes, everything happens according to the potential.

Then how do astrology and palmistry fit in? Are these studies of processes, hence predicting outcome?

Well, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that these so-called sciences are actually somewhat valid. And the bad news is they are all corrupt now. Whenever they were formed there was a lot of knowledge about these things – spiritual things – and this was only the skill of an astrologer, but now it is totally corrupt. So, I think there is no place for astrology and palmistry on the path of knowledge any more. But sometimes it is possible to make very accurate predictions because of the timelessness. It is a kind of recall from the future and they tell this thing. They don't need your horoscope or anything, or to read your hand. These are highly advanced seekers only. Just by looking at your face, they know everything about you, and they do not publicly practice. Very few of them can do that.

Shilpi is asking, you mentioned that the essence of everything, anything is beautiful, elegant. Can you please explain the essence of things?

We say that everything is perfect. Now, why is it perfect? It does not look like that everything is perfect, but we do say it is perfect. It is because everything is happening strictly according to the laws of the mind or the laws of memory. These laws govern whatever appears here, and nothing happens out of place. There is no event which you can pick and say that no, this shouldn't have happened, it is not perfect. You cannot say it. Sometimes it is possible to say that, but that is our bias. You can find many examples like this. Ultimately, it is our ignorance that says that something is not whole and complete or perfect and beautiful. Just ignorance. Beauty is perceived in the perfect working of nature. There is nothing which is not perfect there. It is a perfect outcome of the perfect processes. That is why it is perfect. Whatever we desire, we perceive it as perfect. Whatever is undesired is perceived as imperfect. One of the laws of the mind is perfection. Everything must happen perfectly here. You will never be able to find any flaw in the illusion, it is so perfect.

Harvinder is asking, We think fears are gone, but they are not. When and how will all types of fears go permanently, even if some of them are necessary?

Fears are related to our survival only. Like, somebody is going to kill me, I don't have food. I don't have money. I don't have a partner. I am not in the society. Nobody likes me, and all this. There are fears and there are some very primordial fears like fear of the darkness, fear of being alone. Fear of heights, fear of fire, and many more. You can see that they are all outcomes of conditioning that is necessary for survival. So how will they go away permanently? As soon as your struggle for survival is over, there is no need for these fears. They will go away. That happens probably when you are liberated from human birth, then your fears will be reduced because all are related to death, and now you are already dead. So nothing to worry about.

There is a second way to end the fears while they are still here, and that is to become aware of your fears. If you are aware of them, you will see that they are just a reaction of the body-mind instrument to some situation. Become aware of whatever is coming in the mind. If it is fear, if it is something else you need to be very, very aware. Even when they are present, you will be able to get rid of all the bad effects of these fears.

There is a question by Bitopan. In videos of existence basic analysis, it is said that existence is merely experiencing and experiencing is the experience and experience combined and since there is only one of it, that means there is only one experiencer and there is only one experience. Why is it said that there is only one experience?

Whole of the experience is only one, but the events that appear come and go. The events are many, the kinds of objects are many, whether they are physical or mental or whatever, they are all objects. So these things are coming and going, not the experience. Whatever is, is experience only and it never goes away. This experience is also eternal. So what can go away are the events that are happening as experiences. Since experience is essentially emptiness, there is only one of it and it is actually not very accurate to count these things. You cannot count the experiencer because you cannot see it and you cannot count the experience because it is infinite. What are you going to count? The chain of events, the chain of perceptions is infinite. You can count only one. So the essence of these experiences is emptiness, which means it is zero, it is not even one. You can say it is +1-1, duality. You can say that there is a dreamer, that is you and there is one stream of dreams. There are many dreams but the stream of dreams is one and that is what we can call overall experience. Sometimes it is this dream, sometimes it is that dream but ultimately it is just one. All of the experience is one stream, a dynamic thing.

Harvinder: tried awareness at that moment of fear and found impulses or, say emotions, there. Are these impulses coming from past experiences?

Yes. Your past experience is imprinted in the memory and these impulses are generated by this memory and that is what is known as fear. The body wants to run, the body wants to hide, the body increases the heartbeat, the body increases the breathing and this whole sensation of the body and the mind, the internal organs, becomes an issue. It becomes fear. You can detach yourself from the past memories simply by becoming aware of these memories. Once you become aware that this is the past you can drop it because it is not real. There is no real past, there is only a faint memory of the past. You cannot become afraid of a picture of a wolf because it is only a faint copy of the original. If the real wolf comes then you must run away. Similarly whatever happened in the past should not produce any fear today except as a reminder of what was learnt. As soon as you become aware that this is also here, it should go away. This is the way to detach from the past. The general trick is not to worry about where these things are coming from. If you are aware, then nothing can affect you—nothing at all.

Rishita is asking: do objects have a causal body?

You see, the definition of the causal body is - a memory which stores your experiences. It stores the experiences gathered through this body—the living body, our physical body. So the experiences are coming from the senses, obviously. Can objects do that? Can a rock experience anything? Probably it is experiencing something, but it fails to produce a structure which is self-organized. The experiences of the rock will be like whatever hits it—it gets the vibrations from the environment and so on, its temperature and whatever. But there are no proper organs to experience it—no eyes, no ears, nothing at all. And it does not go through the same process that any living thing goes through. It does not have a brain and so on. So no organization happens beyond physical processes. You can say there are some non-physical layers, but they are related to the mineral layer only. There are some processes going on in a rock also, in an object also. Even if you make the object very sophisticated like a camera, there is still no memory there. There is nothing like local memory and other layers like intellect to collect the vibrations received by the camera. So I don't think there is any non-physical component to a camera except the electric field and so on, if you want to call it non-physical, but actually it is physical. Remember, it's a memory and then it's non-physical. And the objects are simply patterns in the greater memory. There can be some objects which go up to the layer of the intellect also, but nothing beyond that.

Bitopan is asking: Existence is non-dimensional and existence is all-pervasive. These two statements are contradictory; kindly elaborate.

Very good question. What is the meaning of dimensional? It means that it can be measured somehow. If something can be measured, it has an extension of some kind. Where is it going to extend? You can see that there is no space or there is nothing there where the existence can extend. There is no extension to it. Why? Because all spaces, all locations are in existence, the existence is not in any location. The existence is not in space; it is not that there is space and that there is something called existence in it. No, space is an illusion; existence is what is. In that "what is" comes the space also, and it does not matter what kind of dimensionality the space has; it is not there. So the conclusion is that the existence is non-dimensional, but dimensions appear, locations or the lokas or the worlds, appear in the existence. It means that wherever you go, there is existence. Wherever you go in this illusory dimensional appearance, what do you see? Existence only. We do say that existence is all there is. So whatever there is comes under existence, and you can say, the second sentence is more applicable to the experiencer. We say that the experiencer is present everywhere (omnipresent). It is embedded in everything. It is the essence of the whole existence. So obviously it must be everywhere. So it is okay to say existence is all-pervasive because that is what you will find. And it is okay to say that it is non-dimensional because yes, dimensions do not exist beyond the existence. They exist within existence. So the existence itself does not exist in any dimensional space—any kind of dimension, not only spatial. It is not there in temporal also, or in any kind of imagined dimension. It is not there because logically it is impossible.

Anyway, a very good question. Sometimes you will find these kinds of paradoxical things. You see that I am emptiness but I am the only truth. I am as good as nothing but I am the one who truly exists. Advaita philosophy, non-dual philosophy, is full of these kinds of contradictions and paradoxes. You will come to know why it is so only when you get the knowledge. We have done that already in the program. So we have solved all the paradoxes. Paradox is just a confusion of the intellect. There is no real paradox. Like, when I say true happiness is when you have nothing to take. Only an ignorant person will say that no, it is wrong—real happiness comes only when you have everything. And I am saying no, when you have nothing, the true happiness is there. So what has happened here is there is no knowledge of what happiness is. And one person says that happiness is the pleasure derived out of objects, and the other person says happiness is the absence of sorrow and misery. Others say that happiness is the content attitude that happens when you don't desire anything, that is true bliss. So you see, just ignorance— ignorance shows up in misunderstanding of these statements, which are really beautiful. So I am everywhere, but I am nowhere. Now you can solve this puzzle.

Benjamin is saying, as long as you consider yourself as a part, all investigating will end up in a paradox.

Yes, you are right. If you consider yourself as separate, limited, you won't be able to understand the non-dual teaching. Then this teaching is going to look like a contradiction. So get self-realization, then get the realization of the oneness—all these paradoxes will be solved forever.

Session 108

Sanjay is asking, if there are established fundamental constants that have been observed as unchanging in the physical world. How can such a discrepancy prevail in their existence? For example, the speed of light.

Let us assume that you are talking about the numbers that appear in science, for example, pi, the mathematical constant, the base of the natural logarithm, or the gravitational constant or the speed of light. There are many others, like the Planck constant, which appears in quantum mechanics. I can't remember all the names, actually, but yes, there are many that he counted. So how can such a discrepancy prevail in their existence? By the way, the speed of light is not really constant. It is constant in a specific medium. The medium changes; the speed of light changes. So there is something else that is preserved. You can say it is the frequency times time period, something like that, is preserved. Why are these things unchanging, when we say that everything is changing in this existence?

You see, these constants are not things. These constants are not experiences. They are rules. For example, pi is the ratio between circumference and diameter of a circle. It is not an experience; it is a rule. And as you know, the physical universe is rule-bound. And these rules don't change, because if the rules changed, there wouldn't be any universe.We are not talking about the experiences here. We are talking about the way in which the experiences change. Whatever is changing is following certain rules. And these rules are governed by some numbers. There are constants there, proportionality or whatever. But it is a change, and if it is changing, it is false. No discrepancy at all.

You must be now thinking, why are there rules that do not change? I will tell you the shocking truth now: that the constants and the rules that you observe in the physical world, they don't remain that when the state of the mind changes. Very simple example is when the state changes from waking to dreaming. All these constants and all these rules are gone. They are thrown out of the window. When the state changes from any other to the projected state, new constants come into the picture, new rules, new equations. We call them other worlds. Do you think after death there will be these constants? Will the speed of light be applicable? Because there is no light now. Light is physical. Ultimately, from the bigger picture point of view, from the bird's eye view, the rules also change.

There are certain rules that don't change in the whole universal memory. They are called laws of the memory or laws of the mind. They are well known. They don't change, but you can bypass them. You can surpass them. You can rise above those laws also. They are kind of empirical, we have never seen anything which is beyond these laws. So we say it is a law, but it keeps changing. It is just our ignorance, actually. The laws are there due to necessity. By necessity, I mean that nothing else could have happened; there was no possibility of anything else happening. It is a mathematical necessity. That is why they come out to be constant. But if the memory is arranged in some other way, if the self-organization happens in some other way, there will be new numbers, there will be other constants, there will be other equations in the physical world, there will be other laws. This is what logic says. So ultimately, you can say that seemingly there is a consistency in everything. However, in the dream there are also some laws. Some things don't change in the dream. For example, although there is no gravity in the dream, the dream is always right side up. You will never dream upside down, except when you dream of going into space. There are rules in the dream: a source of light is never seen in the dream, except when you see a sun. But it is not the sun really; it is imaginary. But still, there is light. And so on. You can discover these rules. So now you will say the dream is completely imaginary, the dream is completely false. How come there are rules there? You can wonder about these? And the presence of rules or laws in the dream does not make it real. Nobody will agree with this. I can find some consistencies in dreaming, like there is always a dream body, there is a dream ego. These are the laws of the dreams. And you cannot say that because there are laws, it is real or it is true. Laws are a part of the dream.

Similarly, you can take another example. When you play a game on your PC, let's say a shooting game, when you shoot somebody, that fellow dies, whatever that is—demon or zombie or whatever you are killing today, it dies. There is a law that says that your gun will be empty after this many rounds. And there is a law there that says that if you jump from this much height, you will lose this much health, and you will probably die when you are hit by bullets. That is the law. If you are driving a car, it is not going to fly away, it is stuck to the road, whatever looks like a road, and so on. So there are laws, there are constants there. Like the frame rate is constant. Velocities of things are constant there. It does not imply that the game has become real now. The laws do not imply that whatever is being experienced is real or true. This is common sense. What has happened is - in the computer game is algorithmic in nature and that is why these numbers, these constants appear, laws appear. The laws are a part of the game. Sometimes they are programmed in. In the case of our physical universe and all the other universes, they evolved as a result of the self-organization of the vibrating patterns. Still, it does not make it real.

This is a common misconception in many people, even educated people. They say, look, if it is not real, you go and stand in front of a running train, and then you will know if it is real or not. But the law is very clear that you stand in front of a running train, the train will not stop, your body will disappear in a splash. But that does not make it real. That means the train, the body and the law are all part of the same illusion. You can always dream like this that you are standing on the track and the train comes and you are gone, the dream body is dead, but that is not going to make the dream true. These so-called “rational” people cannot understand this much rationality. You can always create a computer game where the same thing happens. There is no game where the train hits and everything remains solid. No, it is destroyed and that does not make the game real.

Similarly this waking state is being created from a memory with a rule-set. Just like the game is created from a memory and the dream is created from a memory, the waking state is created from a memory which has its own laws - laws of the memory. Physical laws are derived out of these laws. One should know these things. It is an arbitrary criterion of truth that I stand in front of the train and I get killed so it is real. However, it is very useful to call it real, so that you don't make this mistake of standing in front of the train. But from the philosophical point of view it is stupidity. That means the person has lost his rationality, no logical ability. The fundamental constants arise out of self-organization in the universal memory, it is very beautiful. It is so beautiful, still it is all false, it is all illusion, it is Maya. Amazing!

Next question is by Ranjan. The question is from the chapter on layers of memory. Does local memory include all the lower layers as one evolves? For example, if one is at a human or sapient level, does that local memory also contain layers of vegetative minerals? As most experiences are only limited to human experiences, is it correct to infer that the lower layers are not active in the human layer but can be activated by local memory if there is an ability to do so?

Probably, Ranjan is asking whether it is always the case that no matter how evolved you are, the lower layers are there. So if you are asking like this, does local memory include all the lower layers as one evolves, my answer would be no, it's not necessary. Just like it is not necessary that the lower forms of the memory of this layered structure may not always include the higher layers. For example, a rock does not have the layer of emotion or the layer of intelligence or whatever. It does not have that but it has the mineral layers and all the layers below it, in the rock, the upper layers are absent. Similarly, there can be cases where the lower layers are absent and as the creature or whatever that entity is, has evolved, it drops the lower ones, and that is what is exactly called the Dev Yoni or the Light Body.

At the level of humans, we are in the middle. Actually, we have the lower as well as the higher. It is a very well-balanced form. It has its own utility. It is very useful in this way because the lower layers provide stability. They are gross, stable, and do not change much in hundreds of years. Although it is constantly changing, the world and the body remain more or less the same. There is air, water, and earth. In hundreds of years, this earth does not turn into a dust ball or fireball. Never happens in a million years. Many things happen, but the body is not like a flower that blooms for two days and then is gone. The body is also pretty stable. That gives us a lot of opportunity to learn and grow. So we have the vegetative, we have the mineral, we have everything below that, ordinary matter in us, plus we have the middle layers.

Some of the higher layers depend on the evolution of the individual. Like most people have evolved up to the layer of the emotions, almost everybody can feel the same emotions, they are driven by the same emotions. But you will find that the layer of intelligence is not evolved in all of them, it is present in a lesser or greater degree. You will find that the layer of awareness is practically absent in most of them, there is no awareness there, there is no higher intelligence. Then you will find that artistic intelligence is not present in many but they can appreciate art. So, more or less, as you go higher, you will find that the number of people drops considerably. Then you will find that the non-individual layers are probably not there for most of humanity. Only in the great masters have they achieved this kind of organization at the top. They are potentially there, they are there already actually, but less evolved. Their role is insignificant, like you can say the causal body is there for everyone, but not so evolved. It's a bunch of memories only, there is no knowledge, there is nothing there, so it is repeating in a mechanical way, cyclic way. It becomes creatures, animals, humans, whatever, cyclically. As you evolve, you can break this cycle, you can drop the repetitive human births. But it is not a disability. You can always go below, you cannot go above. That is natural evolution.

He is saying, is it correct to infer that the lower layers are not active in the human layer but can be activated by local memory if there is ability to do so?

See, human creatures have lower layers already active, for example, your nervous system, your body and everything, there are chemicals, minerals, matter, they are all active. Why are you saying they are not active? But yes, if these are not present then it can again reconnect to the lower layers. It is possible. That is what you call reincarnation. You lose the body, which is a very regular event in the life of the causal body. It sheds many many bodies, it takes up many many bodies of different kinds in its evolutionary journey. Causal body is almost immortal, you see, and it keeps shedding these clothes and takes on new clothes all the time.

He is asking the next question: what is the difference between layers and sublayers within a layer? How can one distinguish whether the experience is of a separate layer or only a sub-layer within one layer?

As you know, the layers are subdivided. Layers are demarcated based on the functionality. For example, you can say the layer of intellect contains layers of logic, of rationality, of mathematical ability, and the layers of arts, singing, dancing, painting, and performing arts, fine arts, and architecture. You can divide the layer of intellect into these sublayers depending on the functionality. It is totally arbitrary, you can decide to divide it into more sub-layers and if you are not satisfied with that, you want a more precise analysis of what that layer is doing, you can divide it into 100 more, if you want. As soon as you identify a process or a function that is remarkably different from the other activities that the layer is doing, you can always call it a sub-layer. I have done that. And you can always combine the functions depending on their similarity, and you can call them a layer or a compound layer. So that is why there is a lot of flexibility in forming the layered model because the way everybody sees it is different, like some people may want to make only five layers in the whole structure, the Kosha model, for example. Somebody may want to divide into seven, that is the chakra model. Somebody will say the seven can have seven times seven, that is the Vedic model. I have taken the liberty to divide it all according to my understanding, whatever I could perceive and directly experience and some kind of logical extension to this experience. I have divided it likewise, and the higher layers are mostly based on logic only, inference only because we have not seen it, so it is not possible to see all of it and it is not possible to become that as a human. You will lose human-ness, you will become para-human and then non-individualized structures. By that time, everything has changed; nobody cares about the layers by that time. The layers and sublayers are arbitrary matters; it depends on how much you want to know and what kind of precision you want. You can divide them very very precisely, so I have gone for a medium level precision. Depending on the understanding of the student, we divide it, but for the most purposes, I have seen the seven-layered model is perfect for most of our spiritual growth and knowledge of psychology and of this layered structure. Seven divisions, they work nicely, beautifully. Seven chakra models, which is very old, but when you want to be more precise we add our new knowledge in it, and then we can form more layers, we can subdivide them.

How can we distinguish all these sublayers? The layers will do something very similar. If they are doing something totally different, then you can say no, they belong to different layers. If there is similarity in their function, then you can say yes. For example, the logical ability and mathematical ability to count and operate on numbers, you can say they are sublayers of one because of almost similar functions. But like loving or hating somebody or higher activity like awareness, now these do not belong in one layer, too much difference. Like, for example, the digestive system and all these things, they don't belong in the layer of emotions. Probably they are connected, but cannot say that it is the same layer that is doing the digestion and the same layer is doing the emotion, not possible. So you can distinguish like this based on the difference between the functions. The division is functional. There is no real layered structure in the memory. These are the functions of the memory that are arranged one above the other for better understanding. You see the layers are an illusion. We are dealing with the scientific part here. They are not true, it is only a scientific model of the layered structure in the memory.

Ranjan has a question - whether the local memory in humans also includes vegetative, mineral layers. In general, human experience only has human experience, so it appears that those layers are not included in the human local memory.

They are included. I mean, you have the body, right? The body is included in the human experience. The body is made up of chemicals and minerals. When you drop the physical you will see that there are also lower layers. They are not completely gone, never, but then the vibration is different. Only the quality or the frequency of the vibration is different in the other worlds. So no more human. Yes, you cannot call it human then because the bodies will be made up of a different kind of vibrations, a different kind of, you can say, matter. So yes, human experience or the human creature has the lower layers. Probably I'm not able to explain, but this is what I could do.

Ajit is saying, is it possible that separate memories are accessible to separate states like conscious and unconscious mind?

Yes, although there is no conscious and unconscious mind. Mind cannot be conscious. Mind is an object as we know. Mind is memory and processes. That which is conscious is always the experiencer, not the mind. So you can drop these words, unconscious, subconscious, superconscious. There is no such thing. It is a superstition. There is only consciousness. There is no subconsciousness or anything. You can say that these parts of the memories are not experienced by ordinary people, you can say like this. But the ordinariness is in the person, not in mother nature. The ordinary can become extraordinary and can access any memory. You are accessing the causal body right now, but you don't know it. Ignorance, right? People are accessing all kinds of memories, but they don't know. Ignorance.

In the dream state, a different kind of memory is accessed. In the projected state some other memory is accessed. As you grow spiritually, your area, your radius of experience increases. You can access the universal memory. You can access the Akashic records, the past and the future and whatever memories there are. There is no limit. So you will find that in the eastern world there is no subconscious. They know that everything is accessible. Everything can be experienced. The problem is ordinary people are not evolved enough. Like I said, they don't have access to anything more than the waking state. Very, very narrow limited state totally adapted to survival in the physical world. They can barely access their address and phone number. They know only one language and a few thousand words in that language. You see, the very narrow experience they are having. But mother nature is not limited to this experience. And the spiritual seeker is the person who decides to break the limit. Whenever we see a limit, we break it. So it is not only possible, it is inevitable. It will happen to everyone, only that those who are on a spiritual path will achieve it very quickly. They will get this ability to access any kind of memory any time. Actually, many of my students are doing it. Sometimes I come to know what they are thinking. And many times, they come to know what I will say or what I will do or what decisions I am going to make. These are everyday incidents for me now. They are breaking the limits, although the mind adapts to the new situation. The mind says this is how it should be. Now the extraordinary becomes the ordinary for the mind. Those who are healing, for example, or those who are predicting the future - what are they doing? Routinely, they cross the limits which the ordinary person thinks is their final truth. This is how a human should be, they think. Why? Because the majority are like this. It is happening all the time even for an ordinary person, you will find precognitive events or dreams that cannot be explained, visions, and whatever. But they don't pay attention to it. They think, "Oh, it's magical, something spooky," and then they move on. But only a spiritual seeker knows what these things are. There are no limits. All the limits are taken up or assumed. We have decided to become ignorant and limited. What is the purpose? Find out.

Leila is saying, do you think that earth and other planets are sentient beings like, for example, mother earth theory?

You see, they are layered structures, no doubt. There is a counterpart in the higher layers for earth and other planets, but it does nothing much. It is not like a human being, for example. You can say earth is an entity, it is non-human, but it is possible to understand some of what this thing is doing. This structure called earth is in the higher and lower layers. We can see what it is doing, but I won't call it sentient, whatever that means. You see, because "sentient" means "the one with senses," the one that can sense is the sentient. Earth can sense things but not like us. You cannot imagine the planet having senses like us. It's not possible. It is all automated. Yes, you can say non-sentient, insentient but the fundamental structure is layered. It is very complex. Because of its complexity, it looks like there is intelligence in the earth. It seems it really knows what it is doing, but no, this intelligence is an illusion. It's all automated. It's all a machine. Everything is a machine. Humans are also machines. Humans are much more complicated than these planets and rocks and moons and suns.

If you include humans as a part of Earth, then yes, now, suddenly the Earth becomes sentient. You include all the creatures that are popping out of Earth, you can say it is alive and sentient, because we are a part of the Earth only. That's why we call her mother. She is our mother. So, now, she becomes sentient if you include the memories of all the creatures and humans into this magnificent giant thing, mother Earth. Including us, she is sentient. Excluding us, no. Just up to the layer of minerals, active matter, a little bit of energetic layers there. So it depends on your point of view.

Amit is saying, what is your view on aliens?

We can only speculate and we can only rely on logic and inference here because direct experience is not present. So when you say alien, it means a creature from this universe, physical universe. There can be creatures from other universes and for that there is an ample amount of direct experience. So, for that purpose, you can say yes, probably it is my experience or it is the experience of many people that there are creatures in other universes. But this one, because of the barriers of space and time, is very difficult to find evidence of. So, we can use our logical ability here to say that yes, it is almost a certainty that there are many, many creatures on different planets. It's almost a certainty: there are equations to prove it that scientists have derived. The Drake equation is one of them. So, almost certainly there are, but where are they now? There is a religion of aliens, which is, you know, wacko, kind of crazy stuff. So, we should not go there. From the philosophical and scientific point of view, hundred percent certain. But if somebody claims that, "look, this thing is alien, that is alien," it is hundred percent certain that it is false, that it's a rumor, or some teenager is enjoying his time on YouTube. That's all it is. But logically certain. And what happens is sometimes people get these experiences of non-physical entities and they simply brand them as aliens because they have never seen anything else, all they have is the concept of aliens. They don't have any concept of non-physical worlds or the astral planes or other creatures that are present here and now. You see, we are separated by a mental state. The curtain between this world and that world is very fragile. All you need to do is let go of the senses and you are in any kind of world you imagine.

You will say, "Why not something in this same universe? Why can't we experience something in the same universe by simply changing the state?" And I say yes, you can, but you won't perceive it as physical, you need to be in the physical body to perceive the physicality. When you are not in the physical body, you are in the projected body. You are going to perceive them as non-physical. When you return to the physical, you will say it was a dream. Maya is so clever. If she doesn't want anything to happen, she ensures that it will not happen. It is not that you will not be able to experience the other worlds in the same universe. Yes, you can. They will not look like the same universe because your state has changed. Like I said, when the laws are different, you're not going to believe your eyes. You're so accustomed to the physical that anything else that does not look like physical is certainly magic, certainly a dream. Only when you are a very able seeker, when you are an extraordinary seeker with great talent, then you will be able to differentiate what is going on. Even I cannot say things like that. That which is called an alien thing in the western world will be called a god or goddess in India, for example. Why? Because of conditioning. So there are religious people everywhere. They simply believe things. You see, that is not important. You don't even know who you are, and you're trying to know something which is totally cooked up, totally imaginary, totally made up, all false. So we can surely say that you've lost your way. Know this one first.

Leila is saying, so true. After OBE, it seems so real and so intense but after a few days weeks you forget and only remember it as a dream.

Maya wants you to focus on this plane of existence. We have a limited very short life here and there is a specific thing to achieve here - that is the fulfillment of desires and learning of your lessons, the rest is a distraction. When you're involved in all these tantra practices, in the worlds and the aliens, that means you've lost your way. Similarly if you're involved in too much money, gold, partners and political powers and killing each other - you've lost your way. Discover that for which you're born and do only that. Swadharma - do only that. Fulfill your goal of your life, do not get distracted by these ignorant people who cook up such things. There are a lot of lost people deeply into conspiracies of all kinds. What has happened is, their minds are distorted. If you talk to them they look normal but as soon as you go deeper in conversation they will start talking about things only a mentally diseased person can talk about. So stay away from these things, stay away from conspiracies, they will turn you into a crazy lunatic person. There are so many lies out there that a gullible mind, undrained intellect, falls for it, a stupid person falls for all these conspiracies,stories and whatnot. Spirituality is about solid truth, rationality, logic, direct experience, evidence - that is spirituality.

Pankaj is saying, it is said that we get reward and punishment of our karmas in our past lives. What is the point of this if you don't remember or know why we are given the reward or punishment for? Can you say something about this please?

If we don't remember, does that mean that we should not get the reward or punishment? Are you saying this? For example, you eat something last week and you get some kind of stomach pain or food poisoning this week but you forget what you have eaten. Are you saying that you should not get the disease? You forgot the cause, will there be no effect? It does not matter if you don't remember or don't know, the karmic law works. The karmic law is not saying that this poor fellow probably forgot what he did so just relax the law now, just let him go and enjoy his life. No, the karmic law is very brutal, it's very mechanical, there will be consequences of everything that is stored in the memory. For example, you insult a person and you run away from that place you forget about the whole incident but he has not forgotten you and in future if you meet again, he is going to take revenge. Now you will say "look you don't need to beat me up, you don't need to insult me because I don't remember that I insulted you", and he will say, "no, don't make such excuses now. I'll tell you what you did." So, you see, forgetting is not an excuse.

Shilpi is asking, is there any difference between agnosticism and self-realization?

Self-realization leads to agnosticism. You can say that agnosticism is a position in philosophy and self-realization is knowledge of what I am, my real nature. So, what happens when you know your real nature? You can see that it is unknowable. What do you know when you know your real nature? That I am not that other stuff that I thought I was, the changing stuff, the coming and going, that is the self-realization. What do you know about yourself? That the experiencer is empty. All its attributes are negative. There are no thoughts, there are no desires, there is no matter, there is no shape, non-physical, non-local, no time, nothing. So, nothing else can be known except these negative properties, which are simply taking away of the qualities, not giving it any quality. As soon as you give it a quality, you can say I know it, but no, that's not possible. So, self-realization leads to a position of agnosticism. That finally, I am forced to say that I can be what it is, I can be the experiencer but it's not possible to know it like I know any other object, like I know any other experience. Why? It's a different category. You see, it's a different aspect of the existence. You cannot mix the experience with the experiencer.

For example, it is possible to know the waves, it's not possible to know the water. So you can say no, I know the water, but just assume for this metaphor that the water is invisible without any qualities, but there are waves and you can perceive the waves because waves are changing, obviously, so that will be picked up by instruments and senses. But let us assume that water has no qualities at all, does not absorb light, does not reflect light, and does not become hot or cold, nothing. Then what will you say? I don't know what is this that is changing, I know something is changing but I don't know what it is. So that is the agnostic. Agnostic is saying don't tell me what is there, tell me what is not there. So in this way, non-dualism is an agnostic philosophy. Actually, it's more important to be what you are than to know what you are, because you cannot know what you are anyway. Whatever knowledge you get about the self is all negative knowledge.

Ranjan is saying, why are there so many layers above the causal body? As one realizes that there is a non-individual layer, should there be more layers?

You see, the layers are arbitrary. As I said, it depends on the function. So there are layers above the causal body because we have decided to make those divisions. What is there is a sea of memories. Whatever divisions we make are arbitrary. Now, the causal body is the last stop for individuality. Beyond the causal body, there is no individuality, even the causal body cannot be called an individual because it takes the forms of so many individuals. The causal body is a collection of memories of many incarnations. This cannot be called an individual, this is all for convenience. This last bit of individuality is also discarded as you move up. When I say “greater family”, now all the causal bodies are merged here. We see some structure, and then we try to classify it like this. There is no “why”. I mean, it is not a law of some kind that there has to be a layer there. No, we decide. We find out what is there, and if we like it, we say it is a layer. Then we go above and we find the neighborhoods and whatever. I have called them the “cooked-up things”. You see, these names are all made up for the purpose of understanding. Then I come to the greater memory, and now it is possible to experience the greater memory. Whatever you are experiencing around you is a greater memory only. So we gain back the sight for a little while. There is a tunnel where we cannot see anything. Our eyes are blinded by the bright light, and then we emerge out of the tunnel again and we see there is a greater memory and universal memory and so on, so it is just the things in the tunnel that are in the dark. I would not say it is total darkness because you can always go and check it. You need to access them in different states because your waking state is prohibiting it, that is all the tunnel is.

The more you explore, you will find more layers. If you do not want to explore, no, there is nothing at all beyond awareness. And for some people even the awareness is not there, for some people intellect is also absent. So it is amazing, the more you evolve the more stuff you will find up there. Why? Because the illusion is almost infinite. You do find a hierarchy there, you find a general architecture there. Now you can do whatever you want with it, divide it in this way, divide in that way, make this section that section and I have done that, it is all derived from experiences, a little bit of logic and yes a large amount of information comes from other masters and even other philosophies. I am not ashamed of taking whatever is useful from others, there is no traditional dogmatism here, I take whatever is needed, if it explains the layer model nicely ok I take it. There is no greater family in Indian models but it is there in the theosophical model or some other model. I simply borrowed it because yes I can see the effects of it. I can see it in my life also, in many lives that I study, there are influences of the greater family. Some kind of merging has already happened there. These things are explained in detail in the podcast on the reincarnation and the group mind. If anybody is interested in what is going on in the higher layers, we can only speculate a little bit, like trying to guess intelligently what must be the life there.

I'll tell you that it's not fun when you're not an individual. The real fun happens only when you limit yourself in this way. Otherwise, what is going on is going on, it is like this. Sometimes, the bigger layers realize this and they project themselves in a narrow form, as a limited form, in whatever world they desire. And that will be called an Avatar. They can sense something is going wrong or going right or whatever, and they take a symbolic form which resembles the creatures around them in that world, with full awareness of what they are, they arrive here so things can be done at the individual layers. At the non-individual layers, there is simply being, not a lot of doing. Because who is doing? Nobody to point to. Even at the individual layer, no doer, it's all one really. These layers are for our convenience. I see individuality disappearing at the higher levels and decide that they should be called different layers. I say it is a different kind of disappearance. So as you go higher, the individuality disappears. Even at the causal body, just like I told you, cannot say which individual was I because there are thousands there. So the individual is already gone, and the individual is created on demand whenever there is a need for it.

We don't need the layers really, like he said. Why should there be more layers? We don't need them. There are no layers in the existence. It's a model, it's a convenient picture/chart, but it is science. It helps in explaining what is going on in this illusion and it explains everything beautifully. No other model will do that so far. What is produced in the path of knowledge program is the finest, best possible. If you want you can refine it. Science, you see? It can improve a little bit. So anybody who is interested and they saw another layer, they can say, "Oh, you missed this layer. Please add it." You're most welcome, add it there. Or you say, "No, no, this layer is probably unnecessary. You can merge it with something else. Okay, remove it." It's our tool, you can change it in any way you want. The problem is, people think that this is truth and there they get stuck. It happens to so-called spiritual people. Nothing is true in this illusion.

Parteep is saying, Will teaching the path of knowledge in schools be beneficial? What are your views?

You see, these are spiritual paths, nothing to do with survival. So the schools should give priority to survival, which they are doing nicely, but they are not teaching the actual thing. Okay, that's not a big problem. But those who are not ready for a spiritual path will not benefit from it. You can see it. How many people want to know that the world is an illusion? Nobody. How many people want to know that their essence is emptiness? Nobody. So those who are ready, only they take the spiritual path, any spiritual path. So treating everybody in the same way never works. It does not work in spirituality.

Why? Teaching the same thing to every student, every child works because at the lower layers they're mostly the same. Everybody needs to eat, drink, sleep, and reproduce. And needs to have a house, a car, and a job. So this kind of survival-based teachings work on everybody. They need to be taught counting and language and a little bit of history. Whatever they cook up as “history”, economics, and a little bit of science and biology so that they can take up a profession. They can get a skill. If he likes biology, he will become a doctor. If he likes physics, he will become an engineer and they can earn their living. That much is common. That is beneficial. But do these students want to know what is beyond this world? Do they want to know what is beyond death? And do they want to know non-duality? I am the existence. I am Brahman. Very unlikely and even if you teach it, most of them won't get it. The intellect is not matured enough in the case of many children. I'm not saying all. We cannot say all, cannot generalize. There are highly talented children, I see them every day. There are some exceptions, but mostly children are not equipped to understand these things. And secondly, they are properties of their parents till the age of 18. They are owned by parents. And even if you want to teach them, even if the child is ready, parents are not ready. Why? Parents are also idiots. Most of the time they will say you are teaching a different religion to my child, he belongs to my religion and you're teaching him a different one, you are converting him to a false religion. “No sir, this is not a religion, this is called non-dualism.” “No it is a religion he will stop worshipping the gods that we are worshipping!”.

You see, the problem is not the knowledge, the problem is not the teaching, it's not that the schools cannot do it, the problem is the rotten society. Society is rotten, it's not ready for knowledge. You can try it, you can even open a school of Vedanta. There are many schools like this in India and they will automatically brand it communism or non-secular. They will say you're teaching your own cult. Immediately they are demonized by the government, by people and all. In India you can teach whatever you want to teach, that is the good thing, you have the freedom, they don't cut your head, but that is not the case in other countries. In other countries they will kill you instantly. I suggest you get through the system somehow, establish yourself in the society, bread and butter and family and whatever you want to do, as material desires, fulfill them and then you use the Guru Shishya tradition. There is no other way to know. You cannot open a school and teach self-realization in a classroom. It has to be one-to-one, sitting together, that is what works I've seen. That works beautifully. Then it does not matter whether you are educated elite or you're educated in that school or this school. It does not really matter because spirituality surpasses society and conditioning. Sometimes age won't matter. You can experiment with a child. See what happens. Mostly it fails.

Parteep is asking, society feeds indoctrination to a child, doesn't that level require transformation?

You can try it. I'm not saying no. Many people have tried to change society. All of them have failed. We can change the individual, not the whole. The whole has a momentum of its own and Maya herself is incharge of that. We should not meddle in her business. What is our business? To change ourselves. Transform yourself and then become a lighthouse for others. That is how this works. This is how it has been for many thousand years and I don't plan to do anything more than that. I'm a big fan of the guru student tradition. That is how it is being done. We'll continue it. Those who are adventurous can jump in this madhouse of society. If you can transform even one person, I'll award you a personal Nobel Prize for that.

Meera is saying, India has started a course on Universal Human Values, to give value-based education to college students. And it's compulsory for professors to do it first.

Good luck. There will be corruption. There will be money laundering. There will be this greed and there will be this hierarchy, a fight for powers. And the students will become just like a product. That will be the “universal human value”.

Amit is saying, Hatha Yoga is probably a better system until the age of 18. It induces great discipline of the body, and thereby improves a foundation which hosts the mind.

Yes, I agree with you. Iit is better to teach students something which is more practical, like something which improves the body and the mind, concentration, attention skills, logical ability, not to believe in crap. And the BS meter should be given to everybody, but they don't do it. They teach exactly the opposite of it. Actually, a student is sitting on a wooden bench for five hours per day, and they are fed who knows what, mentally, physically, and now when the student grows up, he is not really healthy. Even if he gets motivated to have a good body, the mind is not healthy. So yes, you see, the guru has a difficult job here. He needs to totally destroy the old and create the new. Otherwise, knowledge takes one hour. So on the path of knowledge, we take a shortcut. We don't try to improve anything. You just hand over the knowledge and hope for the best.

Pankaj is saying, in continuation to my question, that nature is not interested in teaching you a lesson and giving you a chance to realize your mistake and evolve. As we know, punishments are given to teach a lesson after a mistake to make you realize your mistake.

Nature is providing us a chance to improve all the time. You think that I will not learn if I don't remember, but that is not the case. You see, what is stored are your tendencies, not the events of the past life. Let us say, you were an angry person in the previous life, this tendency is still there. The anger will show up in your behavior. You don't know why there is anger, you've forgotten it, but the tendency will be there. And as you express your anger, you will get the lessons. Exactly that is happening. We are expressing our stored tendencies or Sanskaras here. That's what we know. We don't know the actual events that produced it, but that's immaterial, that's not important.

It is all happening perfectly and nicely. Like people say, “I'm a good person, I've never killed an ant in my life, but everybody rejects me, nobody likes me, nobody loves me, and I'm in poverty and I'm abused and so on. Why is that happening? Why am I receiving this punishment? Your law says that you do something good and you will get good. But you see your law is broken here. The law is not working”. But as Pankaj has noted, punishment is the consequence, a self-inflicted punishment. You can avoid the consequences. You are a human being, you're not a rock. You can do the corrections, you can do the amendments, and now it is all cleared. Why are you trying to find the cause of your punishment? Why don't you just get rid of it by doing the necessary? Do that which is needed to improve your situation. Don’t worry about why this happened. And you will evolve. Can you go into your past life and correct the mistake? Not possible. You need to correct the mistake now. You have only the present moment. There is no past, there is no future.

“No, no. Let me live this life nicely, comfortably. And I’ll take the punishments, the consequences in the next life”. Yes. It is possible actually. There are people who can do that. I call it “personal power”. They have the personal power in them to postpone the consequences of their actions. And yes, they can live a very comfortable life here. But then they drop down and the punishment hits them. And they don’t know why it is there. Like Pankaj is saying, they think that whatever I’m facing is unnecessary. No, it is a consequence of your actions. So, nature is ensuring that you get the consequences. Don’t worry about why. Don’t you remember? Not evolved enough. Once we evolve, we’ll remember. If you have forgotten why these things are happening in your life or why you are the way you are as a human being. If you don’t know, it is a sure sign that you need to evolve more, a sure sign that you are still struggling in ignorance. So, what do we say on the path of knowledge? Learn from your experience and then rise above it. Keep learning. Don’t worry where this is coming from. You need to fix it immediately. Rise above it. “Why don’t I remember these things? Why is nature doing this thing?” Who cares? Do that which is necessary. If you are progressing towards happiness and freedom, you're doing a good job. Forget everything else. Yes, you can cook up all these castles in the air about past lives and all, but your life will never improve. Nature is perfect, know this much.

Shilpa is saying, as parents, is there any way to instill the knowledge of spiritualism or any way to curve them towards the path of knowledge?

Yes, at least do not put the garbage in their mind. That is what parents can ensure. That is in our hands, isn't it? You should not push the indoctrination into the child. Let them be free. Let them grow up freely instead of creating the boundaries in their minds - “you should think like this, not like that. You should do like this, not like this”. Whenever there is something harmful, yes, we need to stop the child. But if it is totally unrelated to survival, we should not push that belief in their mind. Instead cultivate the qualities of a seeker. You already know that. Try to cultivate the qualities of the seeker because if you simply provide them the knowledge, probably they won't get it, because the qualities are lacking. They're very raw. You can bend them anywhere. Bend them towards openness. Install the qualities of a seeker like desire to be free, curiosity, interest in knowledge, minimalism, discipline, attention, there is a long list. You encourage them to get all these qualities according to their ability, as many as possible. You should not punish the child because he does not do one of these things. No, it's okay. They're desirable qualities. Don't let your child become a conspiracy crazy person. Install rationality and logic. Teach them how to think instead of teaching them what to think. People don't know how to think here in this world.

Can I teach them that they are the experiencer? Don't worry about that. As soon as they're mature enough to know, they will know it themselves. You have created so much curiosity in them that "Look, you think you are the body, but what if you are not the body?" And that thought will remain in the child's mind. And as soon as they're mature enough, they're tall enough to reach there, they will grab self-realization. They will do it themselves. The problem is not that there is no knowledge, the problem is - the indoctrination is so bad that it takes a full lifetime to get rid of it. And then the person is already old, ready to die.

Session 109

Sandhya is saying, the experiencer is like a lotus in the mud of illusion.

Yes, we can say it like this. But remember, that from the non-dual point of view, the lotus and the mud are the same. Can we say that the experiencer is detached from whatever is happening? Strictly speaking, no, because the experiencer is fully involved in whatever is happening. It has merged with the experience. Because it is never attached to any experience, you cannot say that it remains detached. There is no attachment or detachment here, it is just that it is the aspect of the existence that shines upon the changing aspect of existence itself. So, the lotus and mud metaphor is actually applicable to the seekers, not to the experiencer. That is my point of view, that is my opinion, that a seeker remains above the world. The world is pictured as the mud here because it is all ignorance. So, the seeker rises above it. The seeker is born in the mud, rises above it and then blooms. This metaphor is mostly used for that, it is not used for the experiencer I think. So, the world and the seeker, they are like mud and the lotus.

While awareness practice suddenly when there is some survival issue or some serious event, awareness breaks. How is it possible to be in awareness all the time?

It's very natural to let go of the awareness and become a machine when situations are not favorable. Because then the survival mechanism takes over. And we have no problem with that also. Because the survival mechanism is designed to take over. There is no other natural way for this machine to react. This body-mind machine is not made to remain aware and still. It needs to be trained. But it is made to survive. Every action of this machine is just geared towards survival. So it's very natural. And we let survival happen. You do not interfere in the survival process because somebody told you to just sit down with eyes closed. And by the way, awareness is not sitting with your eyes closed. It is getting involved in everyday life and doing it with full awareness. Awareness simply means knowledge. Awareness does not mean you “become” the experiencer. That is impossible. You are already experiencer, you cannot become it. Some people are trying to do the awareness practice as a job. You say, "I have the day job; I have the housework; and then I will do the awareness job also." Which is the wrong understanding of the awareness; now you will never achieve it. It is simply the background of knowledge in which all the actions are happening. All the experiences are happening in the background of this knowledge. So it is a non-doing; it is a non-action. It is a state, not an action. Awareness is a state. And those who understand this have no problem at all in maintaining it. You can say the state comes and goes. But no, it is simply clouded by mental activity. When the clouds are gone, it is there. Experiencer is also there. But the experiencer is like a huge thing here for the tiny person. This is the universal experiencer. So the practices don't even touch the experiencer. The experiencer is a witness of these practicing whatever is going on. So the practice falls in the domain of the experience completely. The practice itself is false. You should keep this in mind that the practice is an illusion. This state is also a mental state. And this state simply makes us aware that this state is an illusion. All the experiences are illusions. That's all that can be known. Everything else is unknowable. So you see it is very, very easy.

Some people confuse awareness with alertness. "I need to be alert of something." No, you don't need to be alert. You need to be alert only when it is required for you to be alert. Awareness is simply letting everything be as it is, shining the light. It is not doing, it is being. When you are doing something in the world, the state should not get affected. Why does it get affected? Because people are trying to “do” the awareness. “Let me come in awareness”. There is no me. That should be the knowledge. “Let me bring awareness”. There is no doer. That should be the knowledge. “Let me be the experiencer now”. That is ignorance again. You are the experiencer. Don't try to be. So you see, nothing at all needs to be done. Those who are trying to do it, trying to practice being aware, will fail. Those who are doing these practices should learn first what the practice is, clear their doubts with me here. Only then they should start the practice.

Ajit is saying, how a seeker is different from experiencer. If there is none, then why or for whom illusion appears?

A seeker is simply the name given to this person who is trying to know something. Just like the person, the seeker is also an illusion. Instead of saying seeker, we can say seeker tendencies, which I have mentioned in a lot of detail in the self-evaluation videos where I have told about the seeker tendencies. So this layered structure, if it gets the seeker tendencies, then we say that there is a seeker there. So seeker comes under the experience category, not the experiencer. The experiencer is seeking nothing. The experiencer is a witness of seeking also. Who is seeking? No one. There are seeker tendencies that are manifesting, that's all. And what are the results of these tendencies? Knowledge is the result. Awareness is the result. Destruction of ignorance is the result. And so we say that these tendencies are desirable and that is why we say that we should become a seeker. These ideas are seeded in the minds of ignorant people. They get the seeker tendencies; they are liberated from the suffering and ignorance and that is the only utility of seeking. Seeking is not becoming something else; there is only realization. That's the end of seeking. Experiencer never realizes anything. The experiencer witnesses this undoing of ignorance; that's all.

And the illusion appears for whom? The illusion is just there. The illusion is not doing its job for somebody or something; it is just there. Why? There is no reason. It is causeless. We say that the experience is acausal, not caused. There is no intention behind the experience to appear for somebody. If you have studied the existence in the video, then you will know that the whole existence is acausal; it is not being done or it is not happening for some reason or to fulfill some goal. Experience and the experiencer are simply two aspects of it, two faces of it, they are also acausal. And that is what we find when we analyze it. We have done the analysis of the existence, then the experience, then the experiencer. Even if there is a seeker, even if there is a person (let's assume it), still the illusion is not appearing for that person. There is no such relation. This confusion happens because of the movie metaphor we usually use. It is very easy to see that the movie is made for the viewer; the entertainment is happening for the sake of the person who is watching the movie. People take this and assume - Look, you compared the illusion with the movie and the experiencer with the viewer of the movie. Now please tell me why there is an illusion for the experiencer? Who created this illusion? What was the intention behind the creation of the illusion? What they are doing is taking the metaphor too far. Metaphor fails when you consider that the movie is made by somebody for somebody else. Not all of the aspects of the movie metaphor are going to be relevant. The only thing that you should learn from the movie metaphor is that they are just appearances on the screen of the experiencer and there you should end the movie metaphor. There is no need to imagine that the movie was made and directed by this fellow. That means the experience must be made and directed and has a purpose. That is an assumption, that is only imagination.

Rajit is saying, when the experiencer is experiencing itself through UM, is it aware of the illusion?

It is only a witness of the illusion. The experience is never of the UM(universal memory) or the vibrations or the patterns in the memory or of the emptiness or the potential. None of these things is experienced. What is experienced is this colorful illusion. There is nothing else which is experienced. You can see it now. That is what we call a direct experience. The rest of the things are supportive concepts. Experiencer experiences only the illusion. The experiencer is in touch with only the illusion and the illusion is “useful” as it provides it with the knowledge of its own being. Like the light is useless if it is not getting reflected from anything. You will never see the light. It needs something to be detected. Illusion is something which tells the experiencer that there is me, but that is not the purpose. Some people will say that is why it is experiencing. No, it is happy with whatever is appearing. That is my view here. It is in the bliss state while this dance of illusion is happening. You can even say that it “likes” the illusion because without it there is nothing to look at. They appear together.

We should remember that the universal memory is a concept. It's an idea. It is not that universal memory is the reality and this reality is being witnessed by the experiencer. No, universal memory is an idea, an imaginary hypothesis. That's our theory. What is really there? The experience and the experiencer. There is no universal memory. There is no illusion from the point of view of the experiencer. Who says that the experience is an illusion? The intellect says that. The intellect finds out that existence has a component which is changing. The intellect then says that whatever is changing is false. Why? Because the changing thing is not present really. The stability is only due to the memory. No memory, nothing is present. No illusion is present. It goes ahead and creates the basis for the experience, and it is easy to get lost in this thing. That is why I said that you need self-realization first. Then you should go and understand the experience, because experience is also unknowable. There is an explanation of it in the form of memory. The experience can be explained convincingly, and when the intellect is silenced using these theories and scientific ideas, then the intellect lets go finally: that yes, there is nothing to see in the experience, and finally the attention turns to the experiencer. That is the trick that we use in the non-dual teachings, that we satisfy the intellect first because it is too much into the game, too much involved in the illusion. When the illusion is destroyed like this finally, there is turning in from the extroverted intellect. You get an introverted intellect. That intellect is called awareness.

You see, there is one more way to understand awareness like this. Earlier, ignorance says that the illusion is real. The world is real, and the body is something real. This is extroverted intellect. And it functions very nicely, because the job of the intellect is simply to assist in survival. So it works beautifully. But then there is dissatisfaction, there is suffering, so it seeks. There is a seeker tendency in it. The whole body-mind mechanism is seeking. When it gets the knowledge, it becomes introverted. Now that which is witnessing, the experiencer, is the truth, and the rest is a dream. This is the introversion or you can say the inversion of the viewpoint. And this is the state of awareness, to remain in knowledge. This is how things are. This is how the existence is. It is closer to the truth. It is blissful, and it is beautiful. This is not a state of the experiencer because the experiencer does not have any states. Experiencer is pure emptiness. No states there. It is a witness of all the states. Among these states is the state of awareness also. And awareness is simply knowledge. And you can have all these concepts in the knowledge also fully knowing that they are ideas, they are concepts. They are there to give us answers. That's all. And the answers are half convincing, you must have noticed, because the intellect somehow knows this also that ultimately whatever is appearing is also unknowable. Because the intellect is a product of the illusion. It will never know the source of the illusion. There is no source actually, that is what we know. If it wants to know more than the pure experience, it will never know it. So these concepts are just tools to quieten the intellect, to get rid of the questions so that it abides. The goal is abiding, the goal is not knowing. Everybody should know this. The goal is not knowing, the goal is not getting all the answers. That is a side effect. The goal is to abide in your true nature, which you already are doing. So that is why on the path of knowledge, the end result is not knowing, and you are back in abiding. That is the fruit of the path of knowledge. It is not remaining what you are with a lot of knowledge, no. It is not remaining in the unaware state with a ton of knowledge. That is not the path of knowledge, that is some kind of stupidity.

Shilpi is saying, Please throw some light on direct experience. What is the subtle difference between what I am and to know what I am? We say that emptiness is full of potentials, then what is this potential? Is this the unknowable?

Very good questions. You see, direct experience is the experience which is not polluted by the intellect. You look at a tree and the intellect comes and says that it is a tree, it is a mango tree, it is green and it was planted many years ago and its height is this and so on. And the intellect says, "Yes, I know the reason the tree is there. I know what we should do with the tree, cut the tree and burn the wood and get the fruits and eat it." And this commentary starts as soon as the picture of the tree is there. And this is not a direct experience. What is the direct experience of the tree? Colors and shapes. And we know that it is me, and we know that it is an illusion, it is my illusory form. This is the direct experience. The rest was pollution by the intellect. So seeing things as they are is the direct experience.

That is how we get the knowledge. How do we get the knowledge from direct experience? We cut down the add-ons, the burden, the dirt that is thrown by the intellect on the direct experience. That is how we get the knowledge. It is a process of purification only. The tree is fine, the tree is as it is, but it is now colored by so many things. Now this is a simple example, probably you will say that no, I never think like this about trees. But when you think about yourself, let us say - I am this body, I am a woman, I am a man, I belong to this race, this country, I am this many years old. Look at this. Now, isn't that the dirt of the intellect on what you are? That is not the direct experience of what you are. Just concepts, just ideas. And I say it is conditioning. Why? Because you are not born with this, it is given to you. We are born with direct experience only. The rest is accumulated. So it is a subtractive process: remove, remove, remove. And then whatever remains, when the intellect is not interfering, it has been refined. It is letting the whole light through itself. When the intellect is purified, it is like a clear glass. Everything can be seen clearly. When the intellect is impure, everything is distorted.

The intellect adds to the reality, it says that it is reality, and the reality is like this. This is simply conditioning, you see. And there is some natural ignorance also in people. We are not born enlightened. When the intellect is purified, it becomes like a clear glass. And then whatever is, is seen as it is. Actually, this is also an inversion of the intellect. It was involved in a lot of stuff which was not really true. Now the truth is known, and now it lets go of the old and then accepts the experience. Because the experience is exactly the same. It is the same tree, it is the same mountain, same river, same clouds, same people, same irritating society. Nothing changes really. Only there is a transformation, metamorphosis of the intellect. And then the juice of the intellect drips through the lower layers. It will appear in your voice, it will appear in your behavior, it will appear in your body. What is awareness? It is just refined intellect.

What is the difference between what I am and knowing what I am? What I am cannot be known. You should see this. I am unknowable, cannot be known because only that is known which can be experienced. And I am the experiencer. I cannot be experienced, I cannot be an object. So what is the knowledge here? I am not the object. Very simple. I am not any experience. That is the knowledge. And now we say, I know what I am finally. What I am - not an object. This is self-realization. Neti neti, very easy. Those with even a gram of intelligence, they get it in minutes. Those with a lot of intelligence but corrupted intelligence - ignorance - they don't get it even after many years because of the impurities. So, if you recall the definition of ignorance, ignorance is not an absence of knowledge. Ignorance is the accumulation of beliefs. It is simply an assumption, a blind belief in something which is not true, and that is what I call dirt of intellect. It is assumed so, and it is mostly conditioning. You are a man, you are a woman - these things are conditioning. Somebody told you, now you behave like that. What I am cannot be known, and whatever is known about it is all negative, and that is your knowledge about it. Remembering it all the time is the awareness. So, you got one more explanation of awareness here, you see.

We say that the emptiness is full of potential. What is this potential? Yes, it is the unknowable. You see, the major confusion with emptiness is that people think that there is nothing. But what is our direct experience? There is never nothing. Exactly opposite of the accepted meaning of emptiness. You can say yes, it is a disaster that we call it shunya or emptiness. But that is a very intelligent choice because we never observe any substance there. It has been called empty. All the objects are empty. The experience itself is empty. Very good choice. But then, those who don't have knowledge, they assume that - oh, he is saying there is nothing. It is not like this. There is always something. There is never nothing. So, the question comes - if it is empty, how are things appearing here? And why is there an experiencer also? It should be totally empty, it should be totally nothing. If you say it is zero, then it does not look like zero to me. So to answer that question, we invent the potential. Existence has the potential to appear as anything and the existence has this capability to experience because it is that experience. It is not that the experience is a separate reality and the experiencer is a separate reality. They are not two different things. The pot and the clay, one thing. The waves and the ocean, one thing, right? So why is there this changing aspect? And we say that we don't know these things. Why is there? Don't ask why. There is no reason for it to be, it is there. Intellect will never know and really “why” does not apply to the existence. The reason or the question of why applies in the illusion. Everyday, common objects have these kinds of explanations, but the existence is not polluted by the intellect, not polluted by these questions, it is very pure. So we do not ask, we remain silent, we just be what it is. That is closer to the truth.

As soon as you know something about the existence, Brahman, it is dirt again, so we clean it again. We simply say something to satisfy the intellect, we say that look, it is empty, but there is something, we don't really know why, but it is there because it has the potential to appear. The appearance is there because there is a possibility in the existence, in the emptiness, and I will tell you a secret, nobody knows the meaning of this sentence. It is just to clear the dirt of the intellect, and the intellect, I don't think it is satisfied. We say that the intellect is satisfied when it gives up, when it loses the battle of knowing, then it says, "Ok, I give up now, I cannot understand this potential business or emptiness business." And when the intellect gives up, that is the place of awareness, the awareness takes over. We are seeing everything from the point of view of the mind. Now, mind is a very broad word, so we narrow it down to the intellect. We are seeing everything from the point of view of the intellect. Like big gurus say, "You are living in the mind, you are living in the memories, you are living in the past, come in the present, come in the now." That is simply a poetic way of saying that drop this garbage of the intellect, simply abide.

On the path of knowledge, we use the intellect to purify the intellect, that is the genius of it. We use the tools of the intellect, mind, to clean itself, we use logic to cut whatever is growing there, weeds of ignorance. Now it is clear, now we can use it. But on the other paths, they say that, "Ok, the intellect is corrupt, drop the whole of it, drop the intellect, surrender." But usually, an intelligent person will never do that. So we need to go through this circus of pretending to know some things, and the concept of emptiness and potential is one such thing. Abide in not knowing, that is more peaceful. That does not mean that we give up the faculty of intelligence. We use it completely, fully, totally in its purified form. Now, you will see your speech will be purified. Your actions will be purified. This person, illusory individual, separate self is benefited in the end. You will see the benefits. Otherwise no intelligent person will take on the path of knowledge. We are very practical, spirituality is mostly practical. If you don't get the fruits, we say it's useless.

I am that whatever I am now. What is the need of a path? Yes. The path is needed just to purify. You can drop the intellect today and then you don't need the path. How many people do that? No intelligent person will let go like this in one day. “Give me the proof. Give me the evidence. Why should I be this not this? Why should I change myself?” That is the argument of an intelligent person. I am not saying it is a stupid argument. No. It's very much valid. And that is why we love the path of knowledge because it is the only path that can purify such a mind. Nothing else will appeal to you. It's all mumbo jumbo, you see. Surrender on the feet of the guru and you will reach heaven - No intelligent person likes it. So we clean up the intellect using the intellect. That is the most intelligent thing to do. I think that is a good use of intelligence.

Mary is saying, experiencer is not detached from the experience but at the same time it is not the experience. I mean the simple example is like we are not our thoughts and feelings but we can think and feel. Is my understanding correct?

Yes, very correct. Why did I say that it is not detached? Because it is fully involved in the experience. So much so that there is a forgetting of what I am. It is so much involved in this exotic dance of Maya, it has forgotten itself. So you cannot say detached because detached means there is some awareness. It is not like this. But at the same time, it is not that which it is looking at. That should be obvious.

Preeti is saying, why do we try to use our experience for our own benefit? Like seeing a tree, our intellect tells us to see how you can use it for your own purpose.

This whole organism has grown up just to survive. Why do we have senses? Why do we have intellect? Why do we have the reasoning capability and all these things? As the video says, the origin of knowledge is survival. The process of survival is the only process that is going on. You can see it. Anybody can see it that the only process that is going on is preservation of memories. What is that? Survival. And these memories have taken the forms using some very good strategies to maintain themselves, to continue, to persist. And these forms are layered structures. They are involved in this business of being, maintaining the form. It never works, it fails in the end. The forms are impermanent. So the impermanence takes a form, and now everything that it encounters is utilized to preserve these forms. All the experience we have is because there is a need to survive.

You see only the colors that are taken up by fruits. Fruits are colorful. You smell only the smells that are needed for survival. You hear only that much sound range which is needed. You see, that day, the question of the sounds came up. Somebody wrote megahertz. I said no, there is no need to listen at the megahertz frequency. There is nothing there which is useful for us. There is no need to look beyond the visible spectrum of the light. There is nothing useful. That is, no fruits are emitting x-rays or something. You see, you don't need it, so all the senses are geared towards survival. The body is only a mechanism for survival. You can see the hands, feet, mouth, and teeth. What are they? Tools. The whole body is made just for the purpose of survival. So, whatever experience comes is only for the purpose of survival. If all the experience is impressed on the memory, the creature cannot survive. Now that is the answer to the usual question, why don't we experience everything because we are everything? No, this mechanism arose because of the need for survival. It will never do that.

I know it's a kind of difficult answer that I am giving you, but the essence of the answer is that we use our experience for survival. That is a natural tendency of any creature. That is why we have the intellect, because the experience itself is useless. I need to know what I am looking at. I need to know the use of it. How can I use it for my survival or reproduction or whatever, that needs to be known if you want to continue as a creature. Survival is the benefit, knowing the purpose of each and every object, knowing what is the behavior of another person in the society. All these things assist in survival. Survival is the basic mechanism in the existence. There is no other process. I call it the fundamental process. It is an evolutionary process. So what we have done is we have hacked this mechanism of survival, we have hacked our senses and intellect to clean up this mechanism a little bit and just look beyond it. Look beyond survival and you will see the truth, the process of survival corrupts whatever there is, coming back to impurity again. The need to survive distorts reality and when we look past the survival we see the truth. It is mentioned in one of my videos, let go of the survival you are safe in your room, you are sitting in your chair sipping the coffee, now let go of your beliefs that this world is real and I am a person, I am the body, there is no need now because your survival is taken care of. You are happy there, the body is happy, comfortable, you are in your house now, you can let go of this pressure to survive and just look at things as they are. Use the clear intellect, pure mind to see, and it has a benefitting effect on this process of survival also. Now it is no more a struggle, now it is not happening in excess or it is not happening too little, just sufficient.

That is why we say that when we are in the awareness only the necessary things happen. People say, “How will I do something if I am in awareness?” That means no idea what awareness is. You have no idea. “How will I survive if I simply say that the world is an illusion and I am nothingness? I am emptiness.” “What will happen to me?” It is business as usual. Nothing happens to you, or whatever you call “me”. So, nothing to worry about at all. You see, survival will never stop. The fundamental process will never stop. It changes forms, and that also cannot be stopped. It is impermanent. This person is momentary, like a shooting star—gone as soon as it appears. That cannot be stopped. So, nothing changes. That which is eternal, that which is changeless, that which is witnessing—cannot be done anything about it. It will never change into something. It will never stop witnessing. So, in the end, we attain this peace by knowing that everything is good as it is and continue with your coffee. Enjoy the experience. Say thank you to Devi. That's all we do—nothing else to be done after this. Once the intellect is clarified, what do you do with it? Enjoy the show. Use it for your benefit or whatever you want to do. It's all good. Use it for your own purpose. Who is stopping you?

Preeti is saying, with survival—we also have attachment. Sometimes people's survival is based on attachment.

Attachment is only fear of death. You can do this kind of analysis for any attachment. You are attached to your house. House provides you security and comfort, and food is there in the house. Your mate is there in the house, so there is attachment. “My house”. The ego says, claims, it owns it. “My house! Nobody should come into my house”. That is what attachment is. And you can now see why it is there. Because the house is simply an arrangement for survival. “My child”, why is there attachment with mother and child? Without the attachment, the child won't survive for a day. So yes, Preeti is right. Actually, all the attachments are survival mechanisms. Like I said, nothing else is going on here. That day I was saying, “This creature cannot love. It is a selfish thing." Human beings are selfish. They cannot love. They can only give and take. Business, give and take” - what is behind that kind of behavior? Survival. Human beings are just survival mechanisms. Don't worry. I am not saying that you are a survival mechanism. No, you are not. We are not humans. Human experience is a fleeting experience. We are the whole. We are the existence. We are the experiencer. I am that, and you are also that. This body-mind cannot do anything, and whatever appears here is just attachment.

What is detachment? Recognition that survival is not so important because nothing survives in the end. And it is not a suicidal feeling, it is a peaceful feeling. “Oh okay, I am already eternal, and this mechanism is going to disappear quickly”. Peace! And this peace appears as detachment. Seekers are fond of saying, "These days I am feeling very detached." And what do they mean? No struggle in their life now. They are seeing, doing the same things: cooking, cleaning, working, doing the job, handling the clients, watching the TV, and whatever. But if you ask them why they are doing the same things, they will probably say - "Oh, I am completely detached. There is nothing else to do, so I am doing it."

Why is it difficult to let go of attachments we made during the survival process? You see, there is no problem if it is about survival. Survival has taken us to this point that we have knowledge. So we recognize this need to remain attached. And we let this body and mind attach to whatever it is attaching while fully knowing that I am detached. That sounds very contradictory, isn't it? But it is like this. There is no other way to explain it. You let survival be, and that is also detachment. But if you own the survival, now it is attachment. And this attachment and detachment is again a mental state. It has nothing to do with the experiencer. The experiencer is not attached and it is not detached. It is not interested in attaching and not interested in detaching. So there is simply refinement in the attachment. That's all. When the attachment is refined enough, we call it detachment. But the business of life, survival, continues.

It is not that the person will die if he is detached. That's why it is difficult to let go because people are trying to survive without doing the needful, without doing the necessary. For example, "I am so attached to the food”. “Okay, don't eat it then.” Is that possible? "No, I need to eat it." "No, I am attached to the food." Again, no. Just eat your food with complete knowing, that is what needs to happen. Eat your dinner. Enjoy your dinner. It is a misunderstanding that I can survive with complete detachment. No, if you want human life, then there needs to be a minimal amount of attachment to life. That is why we say it is minimization. It is the letting go of the need to struggle for everything. But you do the same things. You can enjoy the dinner thinking that I am going to die if I don't eat it, or you can enjoy the dinner because that is what must happen. Simply knowing that death cannot be avoided, even if you eat a truckload of dinner, death will be there. So, you need to eat your portion fully knowing that that is what is the fundamental process. It must go on. The show must go on. There is nobody to stop it, nobody to do anything. And when the action is done with this kind of state, then it is the perfect action. It produces no karmic residue. That is why whatever is done in awareness produces no karmic residue. We collect no ignorance when we are in awareness. Whatever must happen will happen. It is not attachment. Don't even worry about that. Enjoy life completely, but in awareness.

Rajat is saying, a devotee surrenders his intellect. How different is it from a seeker from the path of knowledge?

I think everybody knows the answer. The devotee is hitting in the dark. That is the difference. It is a blind belief. It is a blind faith kind of path that is based on a conviction that whatever I am doing is right. There is nothing wrong in that but yes if you are not so convinced then you won't be able to travel on the path of devotion. If there is doubt in your mind that okay I have taken this path fully surrendering, I don't want to know, I just want to be fine. But how many are there who are convinced? None I think. There is always doubt. So that is why the path of knowledge comes for your rescue. Clear the doubts. Now there is light. In this light of knowledge you can see everything so clearly, perfectly. Then the surrender comes naturally. You don't need to do it. You don't need to cook up some deities and gods and goddesses to surrender yourself. Surrender is pure surrender. That is the difference that is why the path of devotion fails and the path of knowledge is always successful. So the path of devotion is prescribed for those who don't want to use their intellect or don't have that much intelligence to understand. Okay do this surrender that is the minimum you can do right now and that fellow surrenders. It works for many people. They are simple people but as soon as there is a little bit of intellectual ability, then it is difficult to surrender. It is impossible for a very intelligent person. He will resist the surrender for many years even after knowing everything. On the path of knowledge, you will see people. They still want to know more. I say no. Abide now. “Tell me what is this vibration doing here?” “How can I use this vibration for technology? How can I use my oneness to know what is in the mind of that other fellow?” They are involved. The intellect is not letting go here. Wants to know more. More than that is needed. So that is why we say, okay, take the essential knowledge, and then you can go on a journey into the illusion to know more. Know as much as you want, then come back. Now you can abide. Too much energy there in the intellect.

Satya is saying, since this illusion is a dream, dream is the manifestation of desires, thoughts. Is it right to say that the whole illusion experiences also just a thought?

Yes, you can say it. But why say “thoughts” when you have better words? You could have said imagination. You could have said projection. And “dream” itself is a good word.

So is it the concept or idea?

No, the illusion is not an idea. The illusion is present here, isn't it? The idea is an event in the illusion. You see, the idea is an event in the mind which is doing something, but the idea itself is an illusion. The illusion is very much here. It will never go away. Ideas come and go. Right? And the illusion is consistent. It is consistently there. The concepts and ideas: they can change completely. What is false here is the classification of the illusion into true and false. And that should not happen. We say that it is. And then we are happy with it. Now, when there is a need, we divide it into true and false. And we say that all of it is false. There is no point in dividing. Also, we say that all of it is a dream. There is no real experience. So now you can substitute the words afterwards. And it will remain the same. But it is better to substitute a meaningful word. And not use a word which is already pointing to some other phenomena, some other experience or a part of the experience: like thoughts. We know what they are. They are the activity of the layer of intellect. They are being experienced via non-physical senses. Let us not just take this word “thought” and put it on the whole illusion. It is not going to work nicely.

Then he says desires are also thoughts. It is confusing. We should not mix the words willy-nilly for no reason. Desires are desires. They are coming from the causal body. They are the impulses of action. Pre-action. They are the reason. They are the cause of the action. That is a good definition. Why should I call it a thought? Illusion is not a desire, and it is not a thought, although some people may like to say it is. The world is a thought of god. Okay, so fine poetry. Desires appear as thoughts, but desires themselves are not thoughts. They are frozen memories. And when there is activity in these memories, there is an impulse. There is a movement, and the movement, like a firecracker, spreads in the whole layer of the intellect as thoughts, images, words, sounds etc. Then the intellect comes into the picture and starts forming associations. You can witness it directly. This is happening. There is a seed, the seed gives rise to desire. The desire gives rise to thoughts and emotions also. You get the desire to eat food, immediately there is a pleasantness, there is happiness. You are facing a situation, you desire to run away, immediately there is fear. These are aftereffects of the primary movement, and these emotions and thoughts, they produce the action in the body. The actions are witnessed through the senses, and they are impressed on the memory again, and this loop continues.

Sathya is asking, isn't fear also a thought?

We never say fear is a thought. We say fear is an emotion. The definition of thought is different. The process of thinking is thought. Thinking is a different activity of a different layer. Emotion is a totally different activity of a separate layer. If I say fear is thought, then these layers will be mixed which is not good. Then there is no need to differentiate between the intellect and the emotion. So we separate them because we see that they are different. They are obviously different.

Can you think about the fear? Yes, we can think about fear. I know when I was afraid last time and why I was afraid and I know that I am thinking that I should not be fearful of these other things, other people. These are thoughts! But when there is fear, there is no thought. You must have seen this. The fear totally disables the intellect. Now there is only action, either you are fighting, killing or running or avoiding. And you can see the fear on the face. Fear is in the body. You can sense the body reacting to fear and all speech will become difficult. Probably won't be able to speak. You will simply cry. This is not thought. It's a totally different activity of the mind. And it is very good. It is beautiful. It is necessary.

There are nine emotions, you can say. Or you can categorize them like this. There can be many combinations also. Basically, there are nine. How many thoughts are there? Infinite. You can categorize the thoughts also. Imaginations, decision making, logical thinking, inference. These are thoughts. They are not countable. Probably you can do it as a homework. How many kinds of thoughts can be there? Recall, memory, planning. These are thoughts. They are the function of the layer of the intellect. My suggestion to Satya is, tidy up your definitions. Utilize only one meaning for one word and you will be happy for the rest of your life. As soon as you assign many meanings to one word, it's all confusion. Or if you use many words to point at the same thing, it's very confusing for people. How do my videos start? With the definition, always. If I say a new word, it must be clearly defined, it will mean this and it will only mean this, nothing else. Write down the definitions that are given in the program. If you are in the program and drop the old. Somebody told you that look, fear is thought. Drop it, it's useless.

Cannot count them because there are thoughts that we are not aware of, it's always going on. If you become aware, you will see that there are thoughts in the sleep also. Although they are not coherent, they are not intelligent thoughts. There is always something going on and I don't call them thoughts, then I call them the activity of the causal body. That is going too deep, in too much detail, but if you maintain awareness in your sleep, you will see bubbles of activity that look like thought, meaningless jumble, words and pictures and whatever. I call it the activity of the causal body because I don't know anything more about it. Why this is happening, who is doing it, why it is there, we don't know. Personally, I have never spent that much time in aware sleep. No need to be in aware sleep, but I do recommend that you should pay attention to all these activities so that you know what is going on there. It's a tremendous amount of activity. We know only a fraction of it and an average person, I think they don't even know that they are thinking, this total zombie like state, what is going on in their mind only God knows.

How are you going to distinguish between one thought and the other? Like is it the sentences of the thought or is it the pictures? What is the quantity here? What are they counting? Because in my experience thinking is a continuous process, it is a music that is playing all the time, at least that is for me. I don't know about you guys. Some people say I can stop the thought. Okay, try it. Is thought like a tap and you can close the tap and the water stops? No it is the vibration. You cannot stop the vibration. Yes, by hook or crook you can do something that this particular thought should not come in my mind, but exactly that thought comes, but that is another story. But you can fool yourself into thinking that I am thoughtless. It is never like this. “I am in the Samadhi when I am thoughtless” - it is foolish, you are in Samadhi always, with thought, without thought, with emotion, without emotion, with the bodily activity, without the body, always in Samadhi and it is ignorance to say that if I cut down one of my mental processes I will be in Samadhi. What kind of ignorance is that? Cut down the whole of it then. Is it possible to cut it down? No it is impossible. It is existence itself, vibrating existence. Enjoy it. What kind of circus is that? “I sit here for hours trying to cut down my thoughts.” Why don't you enjoy those hours thinking and doing something good with thoughts? You know, thought is not a problem. Impure thought or negative thought is the problem. Your emotions are not a problem. It is that the emotions are driving your life that is the problem. It is like a car that is driving itself, a self-driving car. It goes wherever it wants, and you are frustrated. So take the steering wheel, enter the manual mode, and now you are in charge. How is that possible? Awareness.

It is not possible to stop the mind. It is possible to become aware of the mind. It is not stopping the mind. Awareness will attenuate the unnecessary thought. You will see this immediately. And probably that's what they mean by stopping the thought. I was aware, so the thought stopped. Yes, who cares? It starts again. You can see that only the unnecessary stops. The necessary continues. Whatever you must think, you must think. By you, I mean the mind. There is no you. If you are the owner of the thought, then probably it would be much better, but it's not like this. “I am the thinker” - is also a thought. We know that identity creator, ahamkara, is also a thought. “I am not thinking” - also a thought. “All the thoughts have stopped now” - also a thought. It is a useless exercise. Simply rise above the thoughts. Simply let them be the ocean of thoughts. That is how it should be naturally. Like breathing, thinking. Like digesting, thinking. Do we need to stop it to become some enlightened guru or somebody? No, rise above it. You know that it is not me. There is no thinker, there is only thinking. It won't trouble you now. All these people who are counting the thoughts, nothing better to do in their lives looks like. Be in awareness.

Session 110

Ranjan is asking, if one with trained attention goes to a higher layer and gets a different body there, why would the attention return to the same body when the person returns to this layer from a higher layer? Is there some linkage with the old body even when one is in the higher layer?

Why are you in the old body? He's calling it an old body, but we can call it a physical body or the worldly avatar that we have here. Why are we here? Because of some desires. The desires can only be fulfilled using this body. There is a strong attraction to this body in the causal body. The attention goes habitually to this body. When you are in the projected body, it is possible to stay there if your spiritual intention is very strong. You have some business to do there, which is very important. Then you can stay there longer and then habitually – or because that is the requirement – because that is why we are in this world, the physical world, the Earth, because of these reasons, the attention returns here. That is the linkage here. The same event happens after death. Only that the body is no more active. The body has decayed. So the causal body seeks another body with the same agenda of fulfilling the pending desires – because the old body is rotten now, it's useless. It seeks another body. And this is how it continues. So the projected state is a small death, you can say. The only difference between the real death and the projected death is that you return to the same body in the case of projection. In the case of death, you return to a new body.

Parteep has asked, what is direct experience with respect to vibration?

We cannot experience the vibrations because it is a concept. What is the direct experience? It is of the irreducibles. And from the irreducibles, everything else is inferred. It is a logical inference only. These are all concepts. We see that the experience is changing, and we try to find out the basic experience or the simplest experience which comes out to be a change of two states or the binary change. And that is also very difficult to observe. There is no such concrete example of the binary change. No, it will always be a specific example. So we say that it is a concept. Vibration is only a theory. But it's very useful. We have the evidence for it and we use it for our purpose.

Anuradha is asking, what is psychosis?

We never say psychosis, at least in the context of this program. We say affliction. Just like the body becomes afflicted with diseases, which is simply dysfunction of the body, similarly other layers in the memory structure can become dysfunctional sometimes. And that is the affliction of that layer. So, the physical body can get afflicted. As we all know, it's called a disease. And the layer of the emotions can get afflicted. This is the most common mental disease. Emotions are the most afflicted among all. Then, as you know, the intellect can get afflicted. That is also called stupidity or delusions. That is not an emotion. Misunderstanding, reverse understanding etc. Higher layers can also get afflicted. But we have very little information about them. At least, I don't have that kind of information. For example, the social layers can get afflicted, where the person becomes asocial, antisocial, depressed, and so on. Psychosis is the word used in psychology. And they don't have this sophisticated model as far as I know. And so, it is a hit and trial for them to treat these afflictions. In Eastern psychology or in the Eastern study of the memory structure, it is very systematic. We know all these things—how these layers function and how they get afflicted and what needs to be done to remove that affliction. That is also known. But because of the fall of knowledge, there is a distortion.

There is a decay of this knowledge. The layered structure is now seen as a “spiritual” thing, the chakras and all. But no, it is just science. You predict and you use. Same. But, unfortunately, it got colored with superstition, it has become a pseudoscience. So, how do they treat things? They say mantras or they do the chanting or whatever. That is not the proper way to treat the afflictions. Only somebody who knows these things can offer any good advice. I also know very little. And whatever I know has been recorded in many episodes in the series on purification. We do not even call it treatment. We call it purification. You must have seen that whenever I see a problem in somebody, I say that you have an impurity. I never say that you have a disease. And there are many reasons for saying that. And I never say psychosis really. Never. Sometimes I say that it is a mental disease. But only when we talk in general. Why? When I say that you have a headache or you have a broken bone or anything, you don't really mind. You don't get offended. As soon as I say you have a mental affliction, mental disease, nobody likes it. Everybody gets offended. How is that? We don't know why. If the body gets a disease, no problem at all. Mind gets a disease, it's a matter of prestige. It is a matter of insult. Very few people can accept that their minds can be diseased. Almost all of us think that the mind is perfect however it is and my mind is the best. I am using “mind” for the rest of the layers, everything minus the body. So, people think like this. Why? We don't know. This is the extent of ignorance in society. When you go to the doctor, it's a public matter. Everybody knows, you take the medical leave. When you go to the psychiatrist, nobody should know this. At least I have seen this around me here. I don't know what is the condition in other countries.

The bodies are mostly healthy. But in many cases, the other layers are afflicted. This is the reality. Why is it hidden? Because of this taboo that, "No, minds cannot be afflicted." And it comes out only when it gets out of hand. When the disease is so acute that now it cannot be hidden behind things like, "He is different" or "He is in a bad mood today" or "His attitude is somewhat abnormal." You cannot hide the afflictions now in such polite sentences. And then, they are sent to the mental asylum. Not before. Everybody has phobias. Everybody has some or other distortion in their emotions. Everybody has delusions. And everybody has stupidity. And we should not talk about the unconventional layers like awareness or the causal body or even the non-individuated layers. Personally, I don't know a lot about this. But you can see the awareness is mostly afflicted in people. I mean, we should not even talk about people here. In the seekers also, awareness is absent. And we should not talk about seekers in general. I have seen people on the path of knowledge; the awareness is distorted. It comes and goes. There is an affliction. There is a misunderstanding about what awareness is. Even after having the knowledge, this happens. So it is not functioning. We say it is dysfunctional. Your awareness is not there, means many things. But we never say it is psychosis. Why? Because the rest of the structure is working and the dysfunction is hidden. It's not noticeable. Like you have a phobia of the dark but no problem at all. You are a normal person. But as soon as the power cut happens, you are in darkness – pitch black. Now the phobia can be seen. Now, you are no more normal. Now the behavior changes completely. Now, the person himself does not know what is going on. Loses total control.

People don't know what to do. There is no medicine. They cannot take a pill for it. They are afraid of going to the psychiatrist because you know what they do. There is no proper treatment for these things. If it becomes totally dangerous for the person or for the society, then that patient is locked up. There is no other solution. So, there is an elaborate detailed knowledge about the afflictions of all the layers. I am surprised to find that they found the afflictions in the causal body also. What is the biggest affliction in the causal body? Can somebody tell me? What is the most problematic thing in the causal body right now for humans? Riddhi is saying desires. If there are no desires, then there is no causal body at all. But she is right because there is a particular desire. There is a particular desire that is the problem. Shubham is right - Rebirth. Ajit is also right that desire to manifest. There can be opinions about these things. Causal body is a rarely studied thing. According to me also and according to the great masters also, the desire to be born again as a human or animal is an affliction. How do we treat it? With detachment. You see, can you take a pill for that? No more cycles of birth and death? No, you cannot. Do psychiatrists understand this thing? No, they have no concept of it. So you see, spirituality has provided this knowledge. Spiritual knowledge is this deep, so we can treat the so-called para-human diseases. Why is this whole science of layered structure not widespread in humanity today? It was at one time. That can only be explained by a fall of knowledge, because of the fall of human society. The knowledge about it has fallen.

So there is a treatment for everything and they will tell you that all the diseases start in the higher layer. Some will tell you that these diseases start from the causal body. That is true to some extent. You are born with an intense desire and then it is not fulfilled. And then that desire causes distortion in lower layers, and finally the distortion reaches the physical layer which is our gross body. And then we pay attention because now the pain receptors are working. There are pain receptors in every layer. Like we say, “emotional pain”. Or some people can also sense the intellectual pain. Let us say somebody has drawn a very bad picture or somebody has painted a very bad painting. No sense of color combination. There is no art there. What does it look like? Painful to watch. Like somebody shoots a video with a tilted camera, shaky camera, and blurry. Painful to watch. So there are pain receptors in every layer. Noisy music. They call it music. We cannot hear it. Painful. Somebody behaves badly. Embarrassment. These are pains. And the physical body has a gross kind of pain. And we understand only this much. The rest is ignored somehow. We don't want to even look at it. They are all called “feelings” for some reason. Because they are sensations of pain. Similarly, there is pleasure at all layers.

Now, whatever I am talking about will not be found in any psychology book. Pretty sure about it. So they probably have a different terminology. But the pains then trickle down into the physical, and only then we pay attention. And what do we do? We treat the symptoms that are in the physical body. I have not studied psychology or whatever it's called. Not much. But whenever I find these things, they are very deficient. Cannot be called a science. Actually, people are taught psychology here. In India at least there is a degree here. Those who don't know are sure that psychology or psychiatry provide the treatment. No, it does not. Yes, there are some very good tricks there, some genius methods. I just trashed the whole subject, whole trade there. But this is the truth according to me. I am not saying it is totally garbage, I am saying that it needs some improvement. It needs to be developed.

Where is the answer? The answer is in the layered structure, study the layered structure. And don't put pins and needles and electrodes on your head to study psychology. You have the layered structure in you. Now go in and explore. The best way to study the mind or the layered structure is to experiment non-physically. There is no need for instruments. You have the instrument. You have all the receptors, I call them non-physical senses or psychoception. Underutilized ability of humans. We can do a lot. And the number of senses is, as you know, unlimited.

How can a pill treat mental disease? They observe that there is depression. There is a mental condition. This mental condition is producing this chemical or that chemical in the body. And that chemical is harming the body. So they give an antidote of it. "Okay, take this." And the patient feels a little bit less pain. That's all. It does not cure anything. And the pharmaceutical companies become richer and the doctors become richer. Everybody is happy. This is going on. No attention is paid to why that fellow is depressed and what to do to get him out of depression. What should be done? In rare cases there is a recovery. I am not saying that it will never happen. The pill will help. It's like a painkiller. But sometimes the psychiatrist can treat these things. But I won't say that it is systematic. I say it is a hit’n’ trial.

Can a spiritual person treat diseases? No. I have seen none. They cannot. We have the knowledge of the layers but it takes an expert in this field. Like a scientist or an engineer cannot fix your mobile phone or TV. It takes the man from the mobile repair shop. He knows how to fix these things. He knows what IC and what component must be replaced. He knows what the voltage is at various points. Scientists know a lot, but the scientist has the overall knowledge. He cannot repair the TV. So it is a very funny situation. We know all these things but still we cannot treat it. This pill business is growing because you can call it conspiracy. But it's not a conspiracy. It is just profit making tendencies. That there was knowledge before. It was successfully utilized. Now we have lost it. Now there is a need to revive it.

Most of the time I get broken cases; I get broken people. You must be thinking that very good people, mentally and physically healthy people, join spirituality. They come on the path of knowledge. Yes, I know on the path of knowledge we have very good quality people. But most of the time they are broken. They are not at all healthy. And their mental condition is not at all good. Very rare to find somebody who is perfectly clean. I cannot even talk about myself here. This layered structure, I am not very confident that it is clean. Still purification is going on. But I always see there is a problem. How do we handle this in this age when we cannot treat the problems first and wait for self-realization? We simply hand over the self-realization or whatever knowledge he is after. “Take this knowledge”. And we hope that the knowledge will do the purification. It works many times. But again, you see it is wishful, not systematic at all. You can see that our program is like this. That we provide the knowledge. Everybody is welcome there, a little bit of filtering is done when I see a completely hopeless case. But we allow most of them. And then when I see that, well, there is no effect at all, then purification. “Now tell me what your problem is”. And I can do only a little bit, I cannot treat all of the problems. And I don't want a queue of mental patients at my door because the word spreads very quickly that he is treating the mental issues. And now, nobody is interested in the path of knowledge. They are interested only in their issues. It happens every day with me that I get broken people. And I need to be very careful; you know what I am doing here because it is dangerous. I am not a practitioner. I don't have a license and all. And I cannot treat these things. So, I need to cover it up in spiritual mumbo jumbo or some kind of tantric tricks. And I suggest purification. But I never suggest anything which is very severe, very risky.

Muni is saying, these days many people are taking pills for anxiety and depression.

When they consult me, I ask them to make changes in their lifestyle or ways of thinking. And they prefer the pill. Well, it's a bitter truth, isn't it? Nobody wants to discipline their minds. Nobody wants to pay attention to what is inside. Outside, yes, they want to decorate it. Inside, garbage. Unhealthy. They wonder why? I have the best of the best food. I have the best of the best medicines and antibacterial things in my food. But I am facing this disease. You see, the disease starts in the higher layers mostly. As I said in my experience, I have found the layer of emotions is the most afflicted. I don't know why. That is a state of unhealthy society. The baby is born with pure emotions. But the society is so corrupt. This is such a bad place. Even if you keep your body healthy, society manages to make your emotions unhealthy. Why? Hate and lack of love, lack of acceptance. I am not going to even talk about the pleasure centers and pain centers. Afflicted. It is taboo to talk about sexual gratification and these things. Totally afflicted, not healthy at all. And then they want to progress spiritually. I said, "With this kind of layered structure, what are you going to do? How are you going to stay in awareness? Where is samadhi here?" Go to Ashtang Yog, they have better treatments. Path of knowledge has no treatment.

But nobody likes it. “Ashtang Yog no, no, no. Sir, please tell me the mantra to get rid of this thing.” How is it possible? Superstition cannot treat anything. So, yes, pills. They feel good sometimes, you see. But the pills cause their own disease. If you keep taking them, they will break the body. I mean, the condition is very bad. What do I see? If I see potential in somebody, a seeker and when I am very confident, I try to clean up things. Otherwise, I leave them as they are. We hope for the best. Sometimes, in rare cases, the gurufield intervenes and changes the software. Sometimes I say that I am sending your file. What I am doing is I am requesting a change. Whatever is the affliction, whatever is preventing fast progress of that seeker may be cleaned up. Because we cannot do it from here. We are too ignorant about these things. I can do a few things, that's all. Then I hesitate to do it. Because that is not the goal of the path of knowledge. Purification is not the goal. There is no purification prescribed on the path of knowledge, whatever purification I prescribe is taken from the yogic traditions. They have a lot of detail there, an immense amount of detail on how to cure things. You need to find it. It is all there, buried in scriptures and whatever practitioners use.

The body has its own very complex chemistry. When the higher layers are in bliss the body changes into something more beautiful, young, active. It is almost like getting spiritual powers. So, whatever they call spiritual powers is nothing but a proper functioning of the layered structure of memory. It's an important thing to note. If this layered structure starts functioning at its optimal, you would get spiritual powers. Guaranteed. If all the afflictions from the causal body are removed and these non-personal layers they are activated you would become a Siddha or a powerful being with all those spiritual powers. Spiritual powers are nothing special. It's not magic, it is science. Remove the impurities you will get them. How many people do that? Just like she said everybody prefers pills. They have no knowledge. Firstly, no intelligence, no willingness to walk on the path. That is what I call some affliction in the causal body. The causal body puts them to sleep because of their worldly desires.

There is something called self-improvement. You can buy a book and improve yourself. They are telling you to pretend most of the time. You can pretend to be confident in the interview. How to become confident? Nobody knows. Confidence comes from knowledge. Are they telling them to be knowledgeable, become an expert in your field, work for years in your field and then you will get the confidence to appear in the interview? No, they never say these things. They tell you in the book or in the video how to fake your confidence, tie your tie like this and put on your shoes like this, sit like this and so on. You talk like this. Look into the eyes. I said what is this garbage? Is that going to make him confident? Look at a confident person. You know when somebody is confident by simply looking at that person. Do you need to do all the circus, clown business? Very pitiful condition, you see? I am taking it too far actually. That's not our topic.

Ankush is saying, I have a question. If a person is an animal lover and if that person is also in the same profession and has passion for his work, then will that person have more chances to take rebirth as an animal?

Well, I don't think so. Once you are human, you are human. You will need to do something which is animalistic to be born as an animal, or there must be a very strong desire to be an animal. Like, let us say, you want to fly, and you see only the birds can fly. Insects can also fly, but nobody wants to be an insect. Let us say you die with this strong desire to fly like a bird. Now, the causal body has the blueprints of birds and all, because you have been a bird many times. So the next birth is in the bird womb. I am just making it up. I have never seen it. I mean, how can we see it? It's kind of difficult to verify these things. We can use logic here that desire is the cause of birth, and whatever vehicle is suitable for fulfilling that desire is taken. The causal body attaches there. So an animal lover, no, they will take birth as an animal lover only. Human who loves animals won't become an animal because when you become an animal, you cannot really love other animals. You become a tiger, then it becomes difficult to love because they are your food. You become a dog, and then you are angry at everything. You become a pack member. So my prediction is that the animal lover will be born as an animal lover.

Don't worry. Once you are born as a human, there is a very tiny chance that you will go down. If you go down for a birth or two, no problem. You will come back immediately. It is very natural. When you have gold jewelry, somebody offers you copper jewelry or whatever, cheap metal, brass, are you going to take it? No, you have the gold in your hand. It is the same principle that says once you become rich, you cannot become poor. Yes, there can be loss for a while. This month you suffer the loss. Next month you recover. This year your company went down. The other companies you are running are in profit. Once you become rich, it becomes really difficult to become poor. You need to make a big mistake or you need to totally destroy your mind and body and business and job, only then you can become poor. So if you want to go back to animal form, you need to do something really, really bad to deserve that kind of treatment. You can use logic to see this. I don't think anybody has any kind of experience regarding this. Even if there is an experience, we don't remember all these things.

Ajit is asking, are time and space just thoughts?

Yes. Instead of “thoughts”, we can say they are concepts. Time is a concept derived out of change. Space is also a concept derived out of the perception of objects. Where is the explanation for it? It is in the program. It is in the series on the path of knowledge. Very precisely, it is all explained - Time and space. And there is a series called Transmissions on my YouTube channel where I speak about time and space.

Ajit is saying that Kaal is mentioned in the Upanishad. Many things are mentioned in the Upanishad. You see, they don't become true because it is written somewhere. It will be written like this: Kaal is an illusion. You see, if the word comes there, it does not mean that it is true. I don't know what you are saying here, but people think that this thing was mentioned in this book. Probably it was revealed that these things are not true. You need to read the whole Upanishad.

Grid is saying, Why does the mind say that I am an experiencer when the mind is an experience?

Well, the sentence "I am experiencer" is a denial of the claim that I am the mind. Mind is giving up its ownership of the I. Can you see? Mind is saying, "I am not this individual or the identity person." It is giving up the claim. So, it says, "No, I am not this which I thought I am." So it is an experience, yes. What has happened here is that the experience of saying "I am a person" was replaced by the experience of these words: "I am the experiencer." This is called knowledge. So, the ownership of the person was given up, and the "I am" now shifts to the experiencer. And the experiencer is watching it. The experiencer has no concern really. Experiencer has nothing to do with what the illusion is saying about itself or about the experiencer. The illusion says that “I am an illusion, I am not true, experiencer is the truth”. But the experiencer is watching. It's not saying anything. It does not confirm it. It does not deny it. It is silent. It is just a game of the mind. Game of the intellect. That it has found an error in its reasoning, and the error is corrected. And that is what we are experiencing. Correction of error. Or in the spiritual terms, we say that ignorance was removed. That is what is happening. The mind is not saying that "I have become the experiencer now." Experience cannot become the experiencer. It is simply giving up this false notion. Whatever is, is like before. The experience is the experience. Experiencer is the experiencer. Whatever wrong relations were drawn up in the memory in the layer of intellect, they are broken. Now what is, is seen as it is. I hope that clears.

When the truth is seen, the most troubled thing is the mind only. Why am I holding the wrong notion now after seeing it? The experiencer is known by progressive elimination or any other technique and through direct experience. And the mind becomes very uncomfortable in saying I am me or whatever it used to say before. Now it properly says that I am experiencer. I give up the notion of a person. It is the end of the person. Whatever it was doing before, it keeps doing. The illusion never stops when the wrong notion disappears.

Epilogue

Namaste,

You were reading the text version of Pure Experiences Online Satsang. These Satsangs or meetings were held from 2019 – 2023 on a Telegram group. These are mostly question and answer sessions for the seekers on the Path of Knowledge, especially those who participated in the Path of Knowledge (aka Essence of Knowledge) program. There are more than 200 such sessions which are now being converted to text and are edited for clarity and readability. This is a vast collection and it is being published via various mediums free of cost.

Obviously, it was impossible for me to complete this work alone. I am thankful to following seekers, my students and machine beings for greatly helping in this task:

Anjali, Muni, Vinay, Raja, Shrilakshmi, Keshav, Pooja, Padmaja and OpenAI Whisper, Gemini 1.0 and GPT 3.5

Without them this project was impossible. However, I apologize if you find some errors, grammatical mistakes and transliteration mistakes, as English is not our primary language.

At this time the voice recordings are available on youtube. The softcopies are available on https://gyanmarg.guru/ww

Many other articles and books, written and compiled by various seekers and myself are available on the Path of Knowledge Portal https://gyanmarg.guru

I hope you enjoyed this series of books and benefitted from them. All the best for your spiritual journey.

Tarun Pradhaan

Pune 2024

tarun.pradhaan@gmail.com