Session 161

Kanika is saying, when some tantric is trying to harm, will being in awareness help or something else has to be done?

Yes awareness helps so that you are not influenced too much by the negativity there and then something must be done also to protect yourself. Just like any other disease, when you are affected by the disease, the first thing you do is stop doing those things which cause the disease and second you take medicine from a good doctor. So do whatever is possible in that case. If you are living a very good life, pure life, then nothing will try to harm you and even if they try to do that, there will be no effect. Living a detached and simple life is the key to remain safe. As soon as you have attachments, as soon as you have give-n-take with the world, there will be negativity everywhere. There is negativity in the world that will affect you. Make your life very simple so you have nothing to do with anybody and then shield yourself, protect yourself.

Rohit has a question. How is waking state like a dream? Is there a difference between waking and dreaming?

There are similarities and there are differences. The first difference you will notice is the dream state comes from your memory which you call as my memory and the waking state comes from the universal memory. This is the major difference. The second is of the senses. Physical senses are active in the waking state. In the dream state, non-physical senses are active which are simply extensions of the physical senses. And there are more differences like the waking state has more rules, it is more stable, it is very slow and the dream state has almost no rules except a few and it is very dynamic and almost meaningless. The meaning remains only for one or two seconds in the dream state. Fundamentally both are projections of the mind. One is the projection of the universal mind and there is the projection of a small part in the universal mind.

There are more similarities like when you wake up from the night dream, you land in the waking state. But it seems that the waking state does not end but it ends at the time of death. Just like you do not remember all of your dreams, you do not remember all the lives that you have taken. If you become aware in the dream, you will be able to remember it. If you write them down and so on, the techniques that are prescribed, if you give importance to them, if you are aware in them. Same way, if you are aware in the waking state, you will observe a continuity of states. This is the Turiya state. Then it will become a one continuous dream for you instead of fragmented experiences where one state ends and the other starts. There will be a continuous dream-like state forever.

Whether that happens or not, you need to experiment, you need to explore. All the methods are given to you already and for anybody, any spiritual seeker, this is usually the goal that - I got all the knowledge, the required knowledge, the essential knowledge. Now we need to apply it somehow and the application is spiritual, not material. The essential application is to increase your awareness beyond states. So dream is a metaphor actually. We should not think that somebody is sleeping and dreaming and will wake up. No, it is simply changing states.

Rohithi Singh, so nothing is real in a way. No, you are the only reality. You are real. Only you exist. There is no non-existence. The essence only exists. The non-essential does not really exist. So there is only truth. There is only truth. The false comes and goes in the background of truth. When we say nothing is real, we are rejecting it. For what? To arrive at that which is real. If you simply reject it as a dream, then you arrive nowhere. That is why self-realization is required before you can talk about real and real dream, not dream. There are some people who go on talking like this without knowing the truth and it is a total waste of time. They don't know what they are talking about. Everything is only but reality. That is you.

Rohit is saying, is realization an experience?

It is simply knowing that my assumptions are not true. If you want to call it an experience, yes, you can call it that, but nothing new will be known. Nothing new will happen. Only the old will be dropped. It's a reduction, letting go. If you want to call this whole episode an experience, then no problem, but there is nothing special. No special experiences will happen.

I was just wondering how one knows when one is self-realized.

Then it has not happened probably because it looks from your questions that knowledge was not gained or there is too much confusion. Probably you understood it at the time, but now the confusion has overtaken. When the person does not know what they are, then probably it has not happened. Nothing was understood. So as you know, there is no intellectual knowledge. There is nothing like this. Can you give me an example of what you know intellectually? Please give me one example of that which you know intellectually.

Rohit is saying, I still feel I am a body.

What is witnessing these feelings and these thoughts? Is this witnessing only an intellectual thought in your mind or is it actually happening? Then why did you say it is an example of intellectual knowledge? Give me the second example. What do you know intellectually?

My behavior has not changed accordingly.

Should it change? Is there a law that the behavior should change? That is your expectation. Tell me something which you know only intellectually. Do not tell me your expectations and whatever you planned on doing after self-realization. If you are thinking that I will get self-realization so that I can change my behavior then it is a big mistake. Nowhere we guarantee this thing. That is not the end goal. The end goal is destruction of ignorance and beginning of awareness. Not changing some behavior. This body-mind machine is dirt, a pile of dirt. Changing it will not help anything. Dropping it will help. You need to drop this form as soon as possible. By dropping I mean realize that I am not this form and then whatever behavior is will be naturally there. It will change naturally. So this is called lowering of standards. You have brought down the spirituality into behavior management.

He is asking, should it not manifest?

What should manifest? It is manifested already. Tell me who you are.

Then there is no difference between me and an ignorant person.

Is there a person? Is there somebody who is an ignorant person? Is there somebody who is a knowledgeable person or is there only an experiencer and a series of false pictures? Is there a waking world?

You see there is a lot of drifting. I am asking what do you know intellectually? Give me an example. And what are you telling me, are your expectations which are totally meaningless. Then you are telling me that the person has not changed when you surely know there is no person. Then you are talking about the waking world. You surely know there is no waking world. There is no world. So how do you want it to manifest? First drop your ignorance. Dropping of ignorance is the manifestation. If the picture on the screen changes from one color to another color it is still a false picture. It is still a picture. That which is unchanging is the reality which is already manifested which is the screen. Shift your identification to the screen. Now it does not need to improve. It does not behave. There is no world for it. And there is no person there. That is how it is manifested.

Whatever you are calling intellectual is your confusion. It is not knowledge. So people who don't get it and those who say that I have only intellectual knowledge, they have only intellectual confusion. Knowledge is never intellectual. It is directly present. Knowledge is that which remains when ignorance is removed. So why don't you remove your ignorance? When you were told that all these things are false, they are still sticking to these things, clinging to the person, to the world, to the behavior, which means that you are treating the self-realization as a therapy, as some kind of medicine. The truth is not a medicine for a person. If you want behavior changes and if you want some improvement in the waking world, the answer is in the material world. Psychology, psychiatry, medicines, earning a lot of money, good relations. What works in the illusion is illusion. Truth does not work there. What is the role of the screen in the movie? Nothing. It simply shows the movie. It does not improve the movie. You are the screen. Realize this. Is this intellectual? No. Your confusion is intellectual.

Rohit’s case is very typical. Many people tell me that, look, I know all these things are with and all non-duality. It’s all intellectual. And when I ask them, give me an example of something which is intellectual, they end up telling me the truth. And when I ask them, isn’t it the truth, then they drift into some other subject, actually. The intellect has not stabilized enough even to dwell on the truth. So what is the cure here? Purification. Purification is your cure.

So is it okay to get angry when we disagree with someone?

Does the experiencer get angry? Does the experiencer disagree with anybody? Is there anybody else except you? Who decides what is okay? If I tell you it’s okay, will it become okay? Or if you ask somebody else, because this guru is not good enough, he is not telling me the answers. The other guru says, no, no, it's not okay. Will you adopt that behavior mindlessly? So introspection is needed. Now you were told what is the truth. You want it to manifest, then dwell in the truth, abide in the truth. Is it okay to get angry and all? Who cares? The experiencer is never angry. There is nobody else. There is no disagreement or agreement. These are all false pictures. What is okay in false and what is good in false? What is bad? What is ethical in false and what is unethical in the false? What behavior is good? Meaningless, meaningless questions. Abide in the truth. That is best. It is okay to abide in your true nature, not okay to leave it. So rise above the pettiness of life. You are a spiritual seeker now and you are on the path of knowledge. Realize that there is no world, there are no people, nobody is behaving ethically or unethically or anything. You are not the person. The person is doing the job of executing its program, a stored program. It is a machine. If there is improvement, it is okay. If there is no improvement, perfectly okay. It is dirt. It will become dirt in the end. You already know it has already become dirt. There is no time also.

At this point many people think, what is the use of it then? No use. Use is an illusion. What is the use of spiritual knowledge? Nothing at all. Real knowledge is useless. Only the false is useful. It is useful for the false person, the individual, that is, that you think is manifested. It is not the real part. For the experiencer, which is the real part, nothing matters. Nothing is useful and nothing is useless. It is beyond concepts. So many people make this mistake. They try to use the spiritual knowledge for pettiness, like what should I eat, how many times should I eat, and how I am self-realized, whether I should wash my hand with this soap or that soap. You see, the intellect has not matured enough to even realize what they have received. They have received a big diamond and they are using the diamond as a garden stone or something. What is its use? To tell everybody that I am self-realized? Many people are doing this. They tell their stories, long stories of how they got their self-realization after many years of struggle, after reaching this great guru in the Himalayas, then finally … stupidity, isn’t it? It is very simple. You are the experiencer, abide as the experiencer. Two lines. Rest of it is confusion. Knowledge is always simple. The false, it acts as if it is important, it is totally useless. The person will act as if it is a very important thing that I got self-realized. There is no importance of it. There is no use of it.

Someone is saying, I will not have any questions because any question will take me away from the experience.

Yes, knowledge should make you silent. Not because you don't want to ask anything, but because there is nothing to ask now. Everything remains to be done once you get these three days, three kinds of knowledge. Now, those who are new, they will see that they get the impulses from the mind all the time. This knowledge is useless. I want more. The next bigger course, the next bigger program. This guru is not telling me that which is useful. Next guru. This path, boring. I want something which is explosive, a roller coaster path and so on. So those who do not develop awareness, they will get caught in this storm of the mind. Actually, it comes back with double force because it realizes that I am dead now. I was killed. I was seen as false. So it comes back. All you need to do is sit down quietly and dwell in the knowledge. Let these thoughts come and go because they are completely meaningless. My relations are not improving. I got self-realized. I am committing all the mistakes. My behavior is not improving. It's okay. That is not you. This much you should remember. That is the only thing to remember when we say be in awareness, remembrance. It is just one line or two lines. I am the experiencer. Everything is false. Everything is an illusion. This much is the remembrance.

Now nothing remains to be done. Nothing remains to be said. The mind will say, all this is intellectual. I have read it many times. But it will never say that it has all the evidence that it is real. So whenever you get these doubts, you should ask me or somebody else or whoever has done your program and you will be brought back on track that whatever you are thinking as intellectual is the only real and whatever you thought is real is actually garbage. The garbage is the expectations and assumptions that it will do some kind of miracle to me. You are present as the experiencer. That is the biggest miracle. Now you want to change this dream, these flying pictures. Is that a miracle? No. That is childish. I will do this so that I remain the experiencer. No, childish. You are the experiencer. You don't need to do anything to remain what you already are.

Questions will take me away from there. “Me” means what? Is there a second you which is not the experiencer, which will be taken away from this first you which is the experiencer? You see, still identification with something else other than the experiencer. Realize you are the experiencer, then nothing can be taken away from you. And it is actually nothing. So already everything has been taken away from you and that which remained is you. So I know there can be confusion for some time. You will need to deal with it.

Ashwin is saying, you have once said that seer is the scene. That is not that the moon is created when you see it. It is not there even when you see it. Will you please elaborate further on this?

Yes, it simply means that it is an illusion. We assume that because I am seeing it, it is there. Or we assume that it is already there and I am seeing it now. But none of these ideas are true. What I am seeing is myself only as a false image of myself. Now, many people will say, no, I am this person, I am this human. How can I become the moon? And that means no self-realization. Still thinking that I am a person. And obviously the person cannot do anything. The person cannot create the moon. The thing to realize is that there is no moon. It is appearing to the Brahman. Can the Brahman do it? There is no question of doing it. It is simply appearing, nothing more can be said. I am appearing to myself. This is what the Brahman is saying, not the person. The person cannot say anything. The person is a double illusion. Only the body-mind is appearing, not even the person. So is there a moon when you are looking at it? No, nothing is there. We say that there are vibrations and all. That is only potential. Potential of being seen as the moon. That's all there is. Hopefully that answer is okay for you.

Ashwin is saying, actually there is nothing to say, only silence and that is the finest communication.

Yes, I have seen that people are becoming more and more silent in the Satsang. And those who are new, they also do not speak because they are afraid of speaking. That is why I say the Satsang is for newcomers. As soon as you settle down in knowledge, there is nothing to say, nothing to speak. I am the one who speaks a lot, means no knowledge, isn’t it? Self-realization and this knowledge, spiritual knowledge, will make you silent. Not only in speech, the mind will also go blank because the mind now does not know what to say. Immediately it picks up something. What is the use of this silence? There will be thoughts. You need to simply watch these thoughts. It’s totally useless. Probably I will just sit here forever. That is also a thought. Watch it. I need to do something now. That is also a thought. Okay, do it.

Yes, the mind does not need to say anything. If it says anything, it's perfectly okay. What can we do? There is nobody who can stop the mind. There is nobody who starts it. It does it itself. So it's perfectly okay. It's perfectly useless. And if there is something useful like a question of survival, eating, earning and so on, social duties, you will see that they are happening. It's like pre-programmed. The puppet is running as it was programmed. So that is my suggestion. Never mix the spiritual teachings with the relative teachings. Just now I told him to do the purification. Just before I told him there is nobody who can do anything. You are already pure and so on. So it is not recommended to mix all these teachings.

Shunya is saying, purification is needed to know that you are already pure.

Yes, purification is simply letting go. Removal, which you can do in one day, but sometimes that is not possible.

Session 162

Discussion on questions asked in a test follows.

Why is there ignorance?

We are not trained to think critically, therefore the indoctrination comes in and makes home in our mind. We are not equipped to use our intelligence, so we don't recognize the means of knowledge. We accept books or people or society, our parents or TV or newspaper, as the means of knowledge. We are not trained to do that, the intelligence is lacking here. Somebody needs to tell people that you need to verify everything with your experience only or use logic to find out what is true, what is not, what is knowledge, what is ignorance. People are not trained to do that and what do we call such people in very ordinary language? Not intelligent. Intelligence is lacking. So even those who are considered very intelligent in worldly matters, they have almost zero intelligence in spiritual matters. They have taken care of their survival very nicely, but in the matters of spirituality, philosophy, or science - zero. They lack proper intelligence, not “survival intelligence”. Survival intelligence has its own importance, but that's not required for spiritual knowledge.

So yes, if you want to explain it in detail, you should always say that because of a lack of logical ability, critical thinking, and open-mindedness. Why open-mindedness? Because you got the ignorance and somebody's telling you to look, this is ignorant thinking, this is not correct. And if the person is not open-minded, they will keep the ignorance, and will not let go of it, will not come to a stage of not knowing. Innocence is a stage of not knowing. “I don't know what you're talking about,” like a baby says. “I don't know.” - That is pure innocence. Once you cross from ignorance to innocence, then it becomes possible to teach, to gain knowledge. So open-mindedness is a sign of intelligence.

The intelligence word is like a basket word that contains all these things: logic, open-mindedness, discrimination which is called discretion, discernment. There are many words like this – ability to find out what is true and what is not, getting the required training from the guru, how to find out the truth, knowing the criteria for truth, getting the means of knowledge from the guru. Nobody’s born with these things. We are born with survival intelligence – where to find the food, where to find the women – all these things are inbuilt. How to gain knowledge, nobody knows, you see?

So the root cause comes out to be the absence of a guru. If the guru is present in your life you will get the training, your intelligence will skyrocket, and then you will never fall into ignorance. But the social system, our society, is such that all kinds of things are there except a guru. The guru is actually living outside the society – in the jungle, in the caves, in the mountains. He has no place in society. Everybody's afraid of the guru – he will destroy our ignorance, that is the fear in their minds. So we are living in a downward curve of the vibration right now. This is called Kaliyuga. Everything is reversed here, upside down. So that is why there is ignorance.

Graham is saying, Before PoK, I thought spirituality had nothing to do with logic or thinking. I thought spirituality required devotion and faith, or yogic ability.

It also requires devotion and faith and yogic ability. Actually, the powers and meditate, meditative mind, and all, in addition to intelligence. Spirituality is not simply a narrow application of logic; it is not mathematics. If you don't know what you are devoted to, if you don't know where you have faith, then it is a big problem; it becomes a mindless religion, blind faith. And if you don't know the theory behind the meditation or the training, you don't have the training, if you don't have that intelligence to perform the yogic exercises, it is a disaster. Everybody knows this.

So, spirituality is a very wide thing; it requires a lot of things. And that is why the list of qualities that I have given is enough to make anybody faint, enough to make anybody see the stars in the daylight. It’s a long list. If you read that list and take it seriously, you will never enter spirituality. Impossible to get all these qualities. There in the list, we say this – we should have trust in the guru, we should be surrendered to the guru, that is devotion and faith only. So yes, complete removal of ignorance requires a lot of qualities, intelligence is also required.

What are various opinions about the truth?

And she said it is subjective and based on criteria and all. I can tell you that yes, that is also an opinion – opinion of somebody who is in non-duality, non-dualism, that yes, it is personal, it is kind of arbitrary and so on. But somebody may not agree with this, they will say no, it is not personal, everybody agrees with me, so it must be the absolute truth. Then he is telling his own opinion. So if everybody agrees with me, it is true. If it is written in the newspaper, it is true. If my leader said it, it is true. If it is written in some old book, then it is true. These are various opinions.

There is a long list of opinions about what is true, what is not. A scientist will say if it is repeatable, then it is true. If it is within the margins of errors, it is true. An engineer will say that 0.5 equals to 1 without any problems. This nut is 10.5 millimeters – but he will say, “Okay, we'll drill a hole of 11 millimeters”, no problem for him. So everybody has their own opinions, approximations.

Whatever they see in their dreams is also true for some people. You must have seen, there is a very strange trend, especially in our Hindi satsang. People write down their dreams and ask me about the dreams as if they were true. I saw this strange thing in the dream, now please tell me what is the meaning of it? Totally false, useless garbage, isn't it? But since they are seekers, they must find meaning in the dream. Sometimes you play along. Yes, there is a link with memory, it is sometimes useful because it is a reflection of your psychology. I get a glimpse of your causal body there when you tell me your dreams. But most of the time useless, I already know your causal body. So very amazing, very amusing also, but we take it on as a matter of fun and just to laugh together, that's all. But there are some people who take it very seriously. I saw this in the dream, now something bad is going to happen. You see, these are the opinions about the truth. Some are very loose, some are very strict. And the strictest is this one which we follow. Nothing harder than this.

Existence is the experiencer. How?

How is this existence the experiencer? Are you not the experiencer? Is this human being not the experiencer suddenly? How is experiencer the existence itself? This is the first thing we say in the first lesson, isn't it? After defining the existence and experiencer, what do I say? Existence is the experiencer. And there, people probably leave it that probably he said it, so it must be true. But no, the whole of the program now explains why it is. At least up to lesson number 20, we go on explaining why the existence is the experiencer.

I'll give you the hint. The hint is the essence. Yes, it is zero. It is empty. We don't even say zero, we say emptiness. But then the question will become how is emptiness the experiencer? It should be totally empty, no, it should be a dead space, zero. Why is it alive?

Experiencer is the substance of existence. You can remove the word “substance” and call it “essence”. Experiencer is the essence of existence. It is the only thing that does not change in existence. Essentially, the existence is the experiencer. Can you see?

Mira is saying, Existence is equal to experiencer per experience, where experiences are false. An experiencer is the only truth, unchangeable.

This is what we say in the 3D program when we are giving the knowledge of non-duality. We explain it like this. This is, at least according to me, the finest answer. Everything means only two things – the duality of the experience and the experiencer. They include everything, there is no third. And this duality, one is just like waves and the other is just like water. So, the substance or the essence comes out to be the water or the experiencer which is unchanging. Waves are like the experiences, vibrations only changing, false. They appear as anything, all possibilities are there. That is not the essence. So my essence is actually the essence of existence, and so it is the essence of everybody and everything. The whole of existence is impregnated with this experiencer, this power to behold itself. The witness.

The non-dual point of view is that there is experiencing only, no need to break it down into duality. However, the question was concerning duality only. What I am asking there is, what is the essence of existence? And you must be thinking, “Oh, this existence is a whole big thing, all the galaxies and all the worlds and universes of all kinds and all.” No, that is not the existence, actually. That is the fake show, huge amount of it, huge amount of fakeness because it is capable of doing it. The existence is very simple, it is emptiness which has the capability to witness. Right here, right now, you are that existence. Very simple, that which is simplest is the existence. That which is most complex and biggest is the illusion.

How can you exist without taking birth?

I am birthless. I alone exist. That which takes birth is a body or any other thing, a form, a pattern is born. That is not me. That which takes birth does not exist. It is an illusion.

If this body is non-essential, why am I bound to it?

It’s non-essential. It is only an experience. Nobody is bound to it. You are having an experience of the body. The body is bound, not the experiencer of the body. But why do I need to have all these limited experiences if I am free? People, as experiences are limited, not you. The experiences do not define the experiencer. It can have any experience. That's what Aparajita said, that the body limits the vibration so that they're meaningful. Yes, you will lose meaning if you get all the experience. If you remove the limitation of the senses, which are on the bodies, you will remove the meaning also. Without the body there can be no senses.

The example of the pinhole camera is best here. You want a bigger picture, so you increase the size of the hole. And what do you see? No picture. Everything is coming in on the screen now. Reduce the size of the hole, then the clear picture is seen, meaning appears suddenly. So these limitations are there for a purpose. Now you can say that, but that does not mean that the experiencer is limited. Just like in the pinhole camera, the narrow hole is a limitation, but not of the screen. The screen can take in any picture. You can project anything there and it is capable of receiving it. Only that the more you throw on it, the less meaningful it will become.

Why is this world so solid? Why does it look so convincing that it can fool any intelligent person? All the intelligent people are fooled by it, actually. They say it is real, and the reason is because it is limited. Limited by laws, limited by time, and so on. You see, slow changing, there is randomness but it is not overwhelming. Everything happens slowly and according to the laws. The mind has isolated the randomness out of order. The mind has ignored the disorder, focused on the order. This is the attractor function of the mind, and that is why it looks so solid. Otherwise, nothing, it’s all chaos here.

Akash is saying, When we talk about anything, our mind creates images. Likewise, I imagine a circular mesh flowing freely in the river. River is the experience passing through the mesh. How and why do we imagine the experiencer?

Yes, the river is a good metaphor. The flow of the experience is like a river. We sample only a little bit of it so that it is meaningful. It’s not like a flood of everything. We never imagine the experiencer. There is no need. That which is witnessing the imagination of any kind, is the experiencer. Why do we need to imagine it? You are it. If you imagine it, it will be a wrong picture. Truth cannot be imagined, and the illusion is always an imagination.

Which experience is the experience of truth?

Experiences are changing, therefore, all are false. Without the change, there won't be any experience. And necessarily, that makes all of them false. All experiences are changing, therefore they are false. You don't even need to think about it.

How do layers of memory form out of pure potential?

There are all possibilities there, so vibrating patterns form stable vibrations, and there are processes - the replication processes, self-organizing processes, cyclic processes, independent processes, and so on, and these processes manage to form a very complex structure, which we assume to be layered. It is an assumption, it is a model. So the illusion is not a simple illusion, not a childish illusion. It is something very, very complicated. In fact, it is so complicated it cannot be understood by human intelligence. The Maya cannot be grasped, it is so complicated. And in contrast to that, the experiencer is the simplest fellow, there's nothing there at all. You see the beauty here.

What is evolution?

The simpler becoming the complex is the evolution. At one point, the complexity reaches a level where there is a potential to realize what I am. That has happened in human beings. It is easy to confuse knowledge with evolution. No, evolution is blind. As the environment changes, the creature changes. It evolves in response to the environment. It is actually co-evolution. Now, the creature changes and if this creature is the food for something else, that thing also changes. The whole food chain will be replaced. If a new virus appears, the whole food chain is gone. Remember, the higher you are on the food chain, more chances are that you will topple down because the higher ones cannot evolve quickly. The lower ones can mutate every day.

Decrease of entropy is evolution and increase of entropy is devolution. Like we say, everything is devolving into chaos, randomness. But when there is evolution, everything takes form, it becomes beautiful, it becomes complex, it becomes useful. Like the evolution of a car. When the cars started, they looked like a horse carriage. Actually, the word “car” is a short form of “carriage”, horse carriage. The horses were removed and the engine was put there, everything else was the same. The evolution happened. Now we have beautiful, complicated cars. Same way, everything evolves. People confuse it with progress, but no, the simpler things are also evolutionary. There is an evolutionary mechanism behind them.

How are the layers formed? Evolution, you see. At a metaphysical level, evolution of the vibrating patterns, the metaphysical patterns give rise to the formation of layers from simpler to more complex, more evolved. So the evolution that we see - biological evolution or the evolution of the mind or the evolution of a product is actually the evolution of the layers in the memory. The game is being played in memory. Evolutionary game.

Eating, protecting, reproducing. These are the mechanisms of evolution. You can explain evolution like this. And then the byproduct is a perfect fit to the environment because the other things that have the potential, they are also formed. But they are deselected. They are reduced to nothing because of the environmental pressures. This is Darwinian evolution.

Evolution goes up and down according to the flow of time. Nothing wrong with it. When there is no food humans become animals. When there is a flood, there is war, there is a certain kind of environment which is greedy and war-loving, corrupt humans turn into animals. That is devolution. And when the situation is good, when the environment is right, the animals turn into humans and then into gods and angels.

What are we trying to do? We are trying to evolve as human beings. Not as the experiencer. It is the existence, Brahman itself, it does not evolve. So we are trying to ride the waves of evolution. We are trying to use our intellect to stop our devolution. When society is affected by something bad, we remain isolated from it under the protection of the guru. We don’t fall with society. This is Kali Yuga, and we are still talking about spiritual knowledge. Why is that? How is that possible? Because somebody told us. Otherwise, you are a part of the society by default. There’s a beautiful word in some kind of science, statistics, I think, “degenerate form,” which means it is as good as any other thing. You see, degenerate forms. Very funny word. But that is how everybody is when they are born. Due to guru’s grace, in these bad times, the lower curve of the vibration, we got the opportunity to get the knowledge. We are still evolving while others are devolving. So welcome to pure experiences. You will evolve here. Outside, there's no guarantee.

Jay is asking, Is that not cycling? Is evolution not cyclic?

Yes, you will see cycles in evolution also because it is a vibrating pattern. In the heart of evolution, all these processes are cycles. That is what I am saying. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it's not always progress. Evolution is not always progress. You see, the dolphins had hands and feet. Can you imagine? Dolphins were not like fish. That is what scientists will tell you. Depending on the fossils, they were living on land and they went into the sea. They became fish again. Can you call it progress? No, but that is evolution. Why did that happen? Everybody knows. Ice age, lots of water, no food on the land. Life finds a way. Many creatures, sea lions, otters, whatever, they went back into the sea, turtles and all. Because the environment changed into watery. Whole of the land was inside the water. And these things, they survived. Anyhow, this is something entertaining. You can explore it. You can research it. What is evolution? Very, very interesting topic. And yes, people are full of beliefs about evolution. Some people think it's not true. It’s happening every day in front of our eyes.

Kanika is saying, it’s said that humans have evolved in physical form but their mind is still in the stone age, especially the way humans feel.

No, and the body is also the same. I would like to point Kanika to the fact that the human body is at least one million years old. It has not evolved after that. You see, the oldest human fossil is almost 50,000 years old, something like this. But we know it’s much older and the human body has not evolved at all. But intelligence has evolved because we are social animals. Intelligence evolves quickly. Exactly the opposite of what you said has happened. The body is not evolving since many thousands of years. You can say the mind is evolving. The mind, the intelligence of humans, reached a peak somewhere before the formation of the pyramids. That is when all the spiritual knowledge came down. We became gods and then the fall cycle happened. That is what I know. Probably it happened two, three times more. Who knows? This Earth became almost heaven. There was no death, no disease, nothing, no wars. People were not even eating food and so on. Nowadays, nobody believes it. It's all stories.

Akash is saying, In order to truly experience, do one's senses need to be refined, uplifted, trained?

No, not the senses, intelligence needs to be refined and trained. Train your intelligence. Senses are good as they are. The job of the senses is to make the creature survive. Don't try to change them. You don't need any senses to know the truth. You need intelligence to know the truth. You are the truth. There is no experience which is true. So “truly experience” means nothing. You will only experience the false. Even if you have the finest senses, the experience is always false. That which experiences is the truth.

Ajay is saying, maybe that’s how infinity reduces to finite forms.

Yes, you can say there are all possibilities, but some evolve out of it and they are seen. But that does not make infinity into finite; it still remains infinite. Only some complicated forms are seen now. Humans and gods and so on.

Artificial intelligence’s evolution is not the evolution of energies?

No. It's the evolution of mechanical devices. That's artificial intelligence. Like everything else, machines are also evolving, and one day they will evolve beyond humans. That is almost certain. Some people can see the future and they came back and said that the majority has been replaced by machines, and they look much more beautiful and organic than humans. Humans look like machines before them. I completely believe it. This is the future. Humans are becoming instruments of evolution of better forms, just like bulls, buffalos, and donkeys became instruments of evolution of humans by assisting them. Rest of the story, you know, they are extinct.

Akash is asking, how does karma relate to evolution?

Good karma produces a better life, a more evolved person, a more evolved creature, and so on. This is the relation. Bad actions, on the other hand, lead to devolution. Everybody knows this. The human can turn into an animal and take the animal form ultimately because the memory has been affected so badly. So all these criminals, soldiers, and politicians are going to turn into animals eventually. Like we say, the greedy person becomes a pig in the next life because the desires of eating can be satisfied better in the pig body. So mother nature does the needful, you see, devolution.

If you exercise your higher layers, more intelligence, awareness, love, affection, compassion, higher qualities—if you put more energy into them, you know, push your kundalini into, like they say in the kundalini terms, push your kundalini into those higher layers, evolutionary energy, it will make you progress towards better and better humans in the subsequent births. And finally, it will launch you into the higher than humans, para-humans. There is no difference between a human and a god if the higher layers are active. They’re the same except for the difference of the body. There is no difference.

That is why all the saints and all the avatars are mostly placed above gods, actually. Sometimes even gods don’t have those qualities. So evolution is a very complicated thing, actually.

Jay is asking, does forgotten memory become an impression? And does knowledge consist of impressions?

Yes, the answer to both your questions is yes. There is no forgetting, actually. Only the forgetting is a lack of recall, not loss of memory. The memory is an impression by definition. So that which is forgotten is always there. It’s incapable of being recalled, just like a broken hard disk. All your pictures and movies and songs are there, files are there in the hard disk, in the memory, but the hardware has become faulty, so it cannot be read back. The recall, the reading, is not happening, but the memory is intact. As soon as you repair it, mother nature sometimes repairs the connection, and then you get the whole episode. You get the whole memory back, like childhood memories and so on, memories of your first girlfriend and so on. Everything will come back, and sometimes the memory of past lives will come back. Remember, it's not true. It’s all an illusion, but that is how it works.

Does knowledge consist of impressions? Yes, knowledge is impressions. Any experience which goes into the memory, it turns into impressions.

Graham is saying, Doing the experiments, not having any awareness in dream state, but listening to experiments in sleep. Is it possible that one has no ability to dream and projected state experience but find sleep experience possible?

Yes, perfectly possible. Control in the dream and projected states require a lot of talent, which very few people have. But becoming aware in sleep is very natural, actually, because you don't need to walk on the rope there of awareness. How is it in a dream? If you become too aware, you come back in the waking state, and if you become less aware, you fall into an ordinary dream. So you need to be a juggler, you need to be trained to walk on this fine line which becomes wider and wider. You don't fall after a lot of training. Now your dreams will become stable, and you will be able to spend more time in the lucid dream or the aware dream, same thing about the projected state. Does not last if you become panicked, if you become too excited, “Oh, I am projecting” and it’s gone, back in the body. So it requires some kind of extreme talent, so that’s why they are made optional. Even the sleep experiment is made optional.

The waking state requires zero talent. You don’t require any talent, you don’t require any effort in the waking state to remain aware. That is why that is compulsory and most of our life is happening in the waking state. Remember, right now in the human form, the waking state is our life. You need to be aware there, focus more there, not in dream and projected. Those who have the talent, natural ability, and all those who can follow my method and go there, most welcome. Go and do some research there. It’s not bad and do not force yourself. That is what I recommend. If you have some latent mental disorders, do not go there. It will cause problems.

The only problem in the yoga nidra, aware sleep, is that sometimes you will feel tired that I am not sleeping. It's not lack of sleep actually, but still the mind is habitual of this kind of deep sleep and if you don’t provide that kind of sleep to it, it is going to complain sometimes but it has no physical bad effects, the biology is not affected but yes, the psychology can be affected if you don’t put the mind into deep sleep. So I say do it once or twice and then return back to regular sleep. It’s not useful at all. Once the human form is lost, there is no sleep. My nature is such that I never sleep, the experiencer never sleeps. So that can be reflected in the form it has taken, sleep is not really a sleep, not an activity, it is simply a change of state due to ignorance.

When lucid dreams become common, the quality of sleep drops, that is what I was saying initially. Initially, it will look like I am not sleeping because an ordinary dream is just like mindless sleep, only deep sleep, only some pictures. So when you are lucid in the dreams, it will look like a waking state and there is a particular technique that I have given in our training videos, where you enter the dream directly from the waking without going into sleep first. That is called WILD, from waking directly to dreaming and if you are doing that, you will feel as if you’re not sleeping. It’s a continuous waking state. There will be drops in awareness during the dream state, but be forgotten like you forget your deep sleep and then the whole night will look as if you’re awake the whole night. So those who want to do these experiments, don’t do it without supervision. There are side effects.

Graham is asking, Can we use lucid dreaming for the law of attraction?

Well, there is no such law. But what you can do is you can use lucid dreaming for intention. You can use your dream to form a very strong intention because you are closer to the causal body in the dream. And if your intention is strong enough, it will be impressed on the causal body and that can manifest later on.

Kira is saying, But everyone says that what we think becomes reality.

No, everyone is wrong. People should not be the source of your knowledge. If they say something it does not become true. For example, you are suffering from some addiction and you want to give it up. But simply thinking cannot do it. So you need to form an intention, a spiritual intention or occult intention. Now, not everybody can do it, I know, this is art, this is science. So you can go into the lucid dream, form an intention there, and the dream will give you results instantly that you have quit that addiction. That will be impressed on the causal body, and the results will manifest in the waking state. This is an occult technique and the law of attraction is garbage. It is simply a means to sell books, a money-making scheme. It is a corrupted version of the occult technique of forming intentions. And because nobody can form the intention, they don't know how to do it. What do they say? Think about it. No, you can keep thinking about it forever, nothing will happen. Superstition.

Jay is saying, When we think too much of a thing, we are attracted to the thing and our desire to get the thing increases, and we try hard to achieve. Is that right?

No. Thinking is an aftereffect. Thinking does not cause events; it is an effect. Desire causes the event, desire causes the action, not thinking. You can keep thinking about anything; nothing will be done.

Kira is saying, Is there any way to make our wish come true?

Yes, all wishes come true. And it is not your wish. Can you tell me what your wish is? The first thing you need to do is find out what is wishing. We call it the willing or desiring. No desire is yours, you are desireless. And how will it come true? If it is there, Mother Nature will do it. In the occult, we say Devi does it. Devi sends the desire, and the Devi fulfills the desire. This mind-boggling instrument is used to do that action. There is no you, there is no person.

Ajay is asking, why do we use the word non-dual not zero or oneness?

You can use emptiness or oneness. There is no law like this but there is tradition, we say non-dual because the intellect does not go to oneness. When there is emptiness, the state of emptiness, the state of oneness is beyond intelligence, beyond intellect, beyond language also. There is silence there. In the experiencing nothing is happening. So the language is limited to non-dual. The knowledge also does not exist in oneness or emptiness. So when there is knowledge there is ignorance - Duality. We stop at non-dual. That is what can be known. Existence is non-dual. This is knowledge. This is the intellect saying it. Beyond this nothing can be said.

Session 163

Vipin is saying, can there be any experience beyond senses?

Yes, you can have the whole experience without any sense and it will be emptiness. There will be no memory of it, no perception of it.

Poonam is saying, if I have understood correctly self-realization comes with grace, can you explain the concept of grace? Can it be explained?

Yes, it can be explained a little bit. In my understanding it is an event in your life which gives rise to knowledge. It can be meeting your guru. It can be joining this satsang or any other ashram or anything, your spiritual step, major happening and what brings that event is pre-decided. That is what is called grace. It is predetermined that this will happen at this time and it happens. This is my understanding. Who does it? Where does it come from? That is a meaningless question. Nobody does it and it was always there.

Vipin is saying, it is also said that all experiences are experience of memory.

Yes, without memory there is no experience. You can easily see that by removing the memory in slices. Remove your memory of the last ten years and then remove your memory of the last one year and then one month. One day. Like this, when you remove your memory of the last one second you will see that there is nothing. The duality goes away when there is no memory. The division in the non-duality is caused by this memory which in ordinary language we call mind. So what is being perceived, what is being experienced is a memory or a mind. We call it the universal mind. There is no other experience.

The non-dual cannot be experienced. There is no experience and no experiencer in non-duality. It is pure emptiness. In this pure emptiness there is potential to manifest. This appears as a movement which we call as vibration, and the vibration then appears in many forms, configurations. That is memory. Because of the memory, the experience is born and it is witnessed by the existence itself. This is the whole story.

Can there be any experience beyond senses? In that context I was asking.

Because senses are structures in the memory and you are asking what is the experience without memory. So you can imagine now there will be nothing much. There will be no experiencer also. You are asking what happens if I remove the memory because senses are placed in the memory and this is what will happen.

Poonam is asking, is compassion an emotion or is it a state of being? Can compassion emerge without the experience of emotion?

My definition of compassion is understanding the emotional state of another person. Which means if you are feeling sadness, suffering, pain, we have an ability to understand what is going on there without actually feeling it. If you are feeling joy, happiness, love, the same thing. We have the ability to understand and it can be seen that now it is higher than emotion, by which I mean that the emotions in the other person mirror in our own mind, and with the use of the intellect, they are seen as somebody else’s.

You can see the word compassion. There is passion and there is “com” in front of it which means something common. So many higher animals have this kind of ability. You can say it is an ability. It is not a pure emotion and it is not a state of being. It is an ability of the mind. So now can compassion emerge without the experience of emotion? If somebody has experienced no emotion at all in their lives, then this ability will not emerge. But that is impossible.

And if somebody has no higher intelligence of any kind, that these emotions that are arising in me due to somebody else are not mine, somebody else's, still I am able to feel it, then it won't be called compassion. It will be called a reaction. And most of the people simply react. They cannot show compassion. You can say an understanding of the state of mind.

The lower animals don’t have this ability. They merely react. There are some humans who are like this. They do not see the condition of the other. But any healthy mind has this kind of ability. So it is easy to confuse compassion with emotion if you do not have this understanding of what it is. And it feels like emotions are arising in me because of the other, or emotions are arising in me because somebody else is going through those emotions. But that is not true. It is simply an ability.

We also say kindness. It is not an emotion. It is an ability. The willingness, the desire to help somebody because they are in trouble, they need your help, or simply being kind to everybody because this is your nature, not causing any harm to anything, any creature, any object. These are called higher qualities in human beings. They are a result of evolution.

Acha is asking, what are emotions?

Activity in the layer of emotions. The English word emotion means a movement. You can see there is a motion there and there is E there in front of it, which means something internal. An internal movement. Why is it called movement? Because this activity becomes external. It turns into an action. Emotion is an activity that produces action. This is our traditional definition in the yogic literature, in Advaita literature. This is called the juice, traditionally. There are nine juices, rasas. This activity of memory is perceived by non-physical senses. That is, I have given a name to those senses actually. I forgot the name. But it is there in the program, if anybody wants. There is a layer which responds to emotions.

So in lower animals, there is hardly any recognition of the emotion. It simply appears and turns into an action directly. In higher animals, there is this mediatory layer where it is seen that this emotion is arising. It is possible to actually perceive it and drink it. That is why they are called juices. Without this juice, life is very dry. Now you know the meanings of all these words, why they are there. This person is a dry person. What does it mean? No juice. Emotions are absent or very much reduced in that person. My articles are going to give you a full overview of what can go wrong with the emotions. Affliction of the emotion is the biggest affliction. I have seen that almost everybody has a disease in their emotional layer. Everybody. And that is because of staying in a society, making relations with other people causes abnormality in the layer of emotions. So here I should stop.

Kanika is saying, is it possible after a conversation with others specifically about knowledge, a person absorbs other’s low energy and feels drained?

It is possible, yes. But usually, the draining is because of our own spending of energy in explaining all those things. Because when you are dealing with an intellectual subject, the brain activity increases a lot. It is like putting your car in neutral and then pushing the pedal. RPM increases and the engine becomes hot. It is consuming a lot of energy. Already the brain consumes about 25% of the oxygen and a lot of glucose in the blood. This is the biggest consumer in the body. The organ of the brain is expensive and that is why people don’t use it that much. And when you use it for explaining intellectual stuff, you will see that there is an overload there and the body also is tired.

Those who are not used to this much intellectual work - thinking and explaining and speaking continuously for hours - they will feel tired. So normally we say that if you are walking, if you are running, if you are doing any physical work, you will get tired, you need more food, you need energy. And if you just sit there doing intellectual work, then you don’t need much. But that is not true in my experience. Talk for two hours and immediately you feel hungry. I need food, I need water, I need something fresh, a drink or something. Or there will be heaviness in the head and you just want to lie down.

So that is the cure of it. It usually has nothing to do with the other person. Other people, if they are very very negative, then only their presence can have some effect. But usually they are dummies. They are not able to do anything actually. So my suggestion is if you are doing heavy intellectual work just like coding or writing or for example this satsang and so on, listening to the videos, doing your program work, then it is good to take breaks. Take a break every 30 minutes. Do something physical.

Actually doing something physical brings up the energy instead of consuming it. I mean there is a limit beyond which you will be drained. Doing simple work, washing the dishes, washing the clothes and cleaning the floor, something like this boosts energy. Why is that? Because of the increased demand in the muscles, the body burns more glucose and fat and there is a rush of energy in the body. So after a little bit of work, 15-20 minutes of work, when you come back, you have more energy to expend.

So some people must be thinking it is all physical. Then yes it is mostly physical. The physical layers, the lower layers, consume most of the vibrational energy and most of it is taken from food. Food is the source of that energy. But the higher layers, they consume the higher vibrational energy and their source is not food. It is a spiritual subject topic now. How is the subtle body alive without food? This is the commonly asked question. From where does the causal body get the energy? From where does the projected body get the energy?

Now you can enter into the more hardcore spiritual world. This is called the divine energy or this is called the subtle energy, prana in Sanskrit. Most of the prana for lower works comes from the food. So now you know why they prefer to eat pranic food, whatever that is. I don’t think people know anything about it. Simply, they hear it from here and there. Somebody made a video about pranic food and mindlessly, superstitiously, they also start eating it.

It is one thing to simply believe and eat those things and another thing to experiment with what gives you this freshness. So the lowest kind of food is meat. Eating animals is the lowest kind of energy, the lowest kind of vibration and plants are the next but there is something which is more subtle and that is what we call the subtle energies. They are taken from the universal memory which is nothing but pure energy. Just like the plants absorb energy from sunlight. They don't need to eat. They are still alive. That is the energy of the sunlight. Same way, the subtle structures, the higher structures in the memory, are less dependent on the food and they absorb it directly from the sea of universal energy.

Parteep is saying, one has to feel prana within first to know prana from outside food.

Yes, you should have that sensitivity to even see what food causes what kind of reaction in the body, and I have seen 99% of people don’t have this sensitivity. This sensitivity will go up as you progress on your path. It is a result of purification only. This is the whole science of how to sustain on the higher energies. I don’t even have any kind of technical words for this. You will never find this in my writings or any video because the path of knowledge does not discuss these things. We are entering the energetic path here. This is not even occult. This is a purely energetic path. Shakti path. So there you will find a lot of literature about how to survive on this higher energy. Mostly it will be named as prana because this is the tradition. This prana, that prana and so on, various energies will be named sometimes.

So a very good way to reduce your dependency on the lower pranic energies and get it from the higher is fasting. Now you can understand the importance of fasting, why it is a spiritual practice, not a religious or a medical one. You can do it for fitness and weight reduction and so on. But its real use is in lowering your dependency on the lower energies which means it is pushing your evolution a little bit. Fasting will push your evolution. You are preparing this whole structure to survive only on the higher energies, not on the lower, not on the gross food.

That is why many traditions have very very well-organized regimes of fasting and many people must be thinking now I am going to start fasting. So there is a warning here. Don’t do it if your guru never told you. On the path of knowledge, no fasting is needed. I know you’re fasting already. The diet of somebody on the path of knowledge is very satvik which means very light, very less. They are surviving on the higher side most of the time. And if you are thinking - no, I am still somebody who is totally bound by food, like I keep eating every 30 minutes. Then you see you are a beginner. Then your sensitivity has not increased. This is my experience that I find it more peaceful and blissful when there is no food in the body. An empty stomach feels very nice. What is the worst is overeating. Now the day is ruined because I liked something and I overate it. Now for 3 or 4 hours the mind does not work, the body is uneasy and wants to sleep and it looks like I am dragged down because of this desire to eat.

Now you can understand why food and sex keep us in the material world. They depend on lower energies. Most of the time we are born for that because we want this lower experience. It is an evolutionary process only. There is nothing wrong with it. But you should get the experience, not get consumed by that thing. Get the experience and then get out of this world which is food-based and the consequence of that is it entangles you into the material world, the death world. Why? Because your food comes by killing some other creature, by killing a living being.

The vegetarian people, they are very proud of it and all. They are also killing. So you will find that a spiritual person automatically shows aversion to food. But some people take it to the extreme which is actually stupidity. Eat whatever you can and forget about it. But yes it is necessary to spend more time on the higher side, on the higher scale. Get your food from there and the various paths have various means to do that.

There is something interesting I will tell you. Music produces an atmosphere of higher energy. It is like food for the higher layers. You must be thinking music is purely material. It is, yes, physical only. But when it is received in the higher layers through the senses, it has a nourishing effect. So you will see, yes, drums are beating and music is flowing but people start dancing. People start jumping with joy without food. You don't need a lot of food to get the energy from music. Suddenly the body is alive, emotions are flowing. So this is the source you can tap into.

And now you will see why the devotional people, they are doing the bhajan and kirtan most of the time. Even the whole night they sing and dance because they are shifting to this higher side. You cannot overdo it because it loses its ability. The system becomes immune to it and returns to the food. And everybody’s experience must be like this that the presence of a positive person simply gives you a lot of energy. And the highest kind of energy or the higher food comes from the guru. And that is why you must be wondering why people want to sit with the guru, why they want to touch the guru and so on.

It is so much so that they become dependent on that person. If they don’t see the photo of their guru, they don’t meet their guru, if they don’t listen to the voice of the guru, they feel kind of low that day. So it is possible here. Now this is some other path. My knowledge is limited. But as soon as you stop your physical activities and you divert your attention from the lower activities like food, etc., then there is an opening in the higher layers and they naturally want to take in that energy. This can happen, it is possible.

So meditation gives you instant energy because you have stopped the worldly activities, the body is resting, so it lets go of this consumption of the lower and the intellect is also resting and the non-physical gets a chance to express a little bit. So this must be the mechanism there. But there are much better ways to reduce the dependence on the lower and consume the higher. There are more elegant ways to do that and that is the whole path of energy. Evolution using energy as a means, Shakti as a means.

The biggest one in the path of energies is the Kundalini practice and it is a disaster because people don’t know what it is. Those who are interested should practice it under a good guru. Do not do the extreme of it because as soon as you let go of the lower energies, the body will start disappearing. Do you want that? What will happen to your Prarabdha if you do it without proper consideration? If you don’t have a guru, the body becomes completely thrown off the track and suddenly the energies from the higher side start pouring down.

You won’t be able to eat, you won’t be able to sleep. There won’t be any lower functions left and they will be extremely painful because the system is suddenly thrown off the balance. It is an art that is lost now. I don’t think anybody can do it. Sometimes it happens automatically and sometimes you find a very good guru who has this knowledge and that guru will do only a little bit of activation through his intention and then the reduction from the lower side starts and the immediate effect of it is detachment from the world. Your job will be lost. You won’t be able to bathe in those lower energies that are in your office. It is like being dropped into a mud pool. So heavy, so smelly, very bad. So you will prefer the higher and then the lower will be removed from you slowly because the intention of the Shaktipat is working and you will let go of most of your relations because they are all based on the lower forms. All your relations, the human relations are based on the body. The blood relations obviously of the body, the love relations of the body and a little bit of emotions. That's all. These are the lower layers. So you will want to have a relation with the guru because of the higher layers, you see. And then finally you will want to have a relation with something even higher which is not in the physical.

We don’t know a lot about it. So there can be deities and all these things also, intermediate levels where they provide you the food, the divine food. In return, you serve them. So do we see all these things here now? We see the rotten remains of these practices. Not the real practice. I have not seen anybody do the real thing. There are some hidden people who don’t want to talk about it because normal people consider them as crazy. They can go on without food for a month and you won’t even notice. And they avoid society and all because people simply make a show out of them like a circus freak.

Whenever you meet the guru on this path, the first thing he will ask you to take an oath of secrecy. This can be called siddhis or powers and then you are not allowed to mention it. So nobody comes to know. From the perspective of the path of knowledge, this will happen naturally. You don’t need to do any sadhana. On the path of knowledge, you don’t need it. From the perspective of other paths, it is a very difficult kind of practice. I think it is the most difficult thing in the whole universe to control the Devi. I have seen a handful of people who have managed a little bit. That which is natural is the most beautiful, if you are ready to wait for natural evolution on the path of knowledge. Evolution is not merely natural here, actually it is accelerated a hundred times. But some people don’t even want to wait a bit. They want instant results and all they get is instant trouble.

Some people I meet have spontaneous Kundalini awakening, and they innocently say that I have done nothing. I don’t even have a guru. I have not taken Shaktipat. It’s all happening. Don’t be so innocent. That is your own doing. You don’t remember it now. So call your guru, he will do the fine-tuning, make it slower. Slower is better on this path of energy. And that is why it takes 15 years, 20 years, 30 years, and shows effect in five lifetimes and so on. And who has this kind of patience? Nobody has this kind of patience. I get calls like, I am doing your dhyana and I am doing your meditation and the awareness practice since 15 days and I see no change in anything. Like somebody was saying, it’s all intellectual. I don’t see any manifestation of it. Look, this is the path of knowledge. Nothing happens here. Very dry path. No bomb explosions here. Secondly, it takes many lifetimes. Nobody has this kind of patience, you see.

And their belief comes out of their ignorance of the path of energies. They don’t even have one concept of what is a layer and what is the energy and what is the vibration and this concept of food, spiritual food. Nothing. What do they want? The whole benefit in one day. It is like you have nothing, not even a penny in your pocket and you want to be a billionaire tomorrow. Same thing. It is going to take many lifetimes. And nobody wants to hear this because as soon as they hear this, what is their reaction? This guru knows nothing. This guru has no magical abilities. I need somebody who is a miracle guru who can do the kundalini in three hours. The rest of my life I am just spending it on vacation somewhere. This is the level of intelligence in our society, even among the spiritual people.

Ajay is asking, do emotions consume a lot of energy?

All activities of the memory consume energy. Do not experiment like this, you see. Especially when your guru has not told you. There is no need to experiment. Our gross food is very good. Just keep it clean and simple. Simple does not mean tasteless. You do not need to boil your cabbage and eat it every day. No. Make it spicy. Make it delicious, mouth-watering. Even the smell of the food gives you a lot of, you can say, non-physical energy.

Now incidentally, these connections to rituals are so interesting. Why do we offer food to deities? Why do we offer them flowers? The food is useless for them. They do not eat it. But the smell can be transmitted and that pleases them. There is a specific kind of food for a specific kind of deity, what pleases them most. So, you know, Ganpati likes sweets. Odd foods for odd kinds of deities. Kali likes blood, offer her sacrificial blood only. And Shiva, the Shankar, the deity, likes wine or drugs. They smoke in front of Shivlingam or the statue of Shiva. So this is India, everything is possible here. How rich this place must have been in the past regarding spiritual matters and also material matters.

As soon as you offer the wrong kind of food to the wrong kind of deity, you are in trouble. It does look like superstition if you look at it from the point of view of ignorance. But somebody who knows all these things, they can immediately understand. Actually, there are days of the week where a specific kind of food must be prepared in the house. Now we have lost all these things. There is a specific time where something cannot be eaten. Curd cannot be eaten at this time and milk cannot be consumed at that time. But because we are so intelligent and modern, it is all a mess now. It is lost in the chaos of life. And we eat the food that has been sitting there in the packet since six months and we call it a high-class lifestyle. Because I am eating some cookie that was produced in Switzerland and was packed in Dubai and came to Mumbai and now came to my place and six months have passed. But I am very happy because it costs Rs.500 and is completely dead in terms of pranic ability and has lots of chemicals and preservatives which are beneficial for viruses and bacteria.

So that is our level of intelligence nowadays compared to the ancient people who knew each and every food and the condiments and spices in and out. We know nothing. Although I take care a little bit because being on the path of knowledge we are very careless about these things. I know the Shakti is working anyway. I know that my bias has shifted to the higher side and now I am relaxed. Relax and enjoy. Enjoy the six months old food also. No problem at all. What is best if you are on the path of energies? You grow your own food that suits your own body. Cook it in your own ways with your own hands. Put the spice that your body likes, you like. Offer it to the goddess first and then you eat it. Check what the goddess is saying, whether the goddess approves your food or not. And reduce your diet. Consume less and less and less every day. It must match the speed of aging. Actually, aging will reduce if you consume less food, less material food. The lower food produces faster aging, and causes more diseases in the body. This is a well-known scientific fact actually. I am not cooking this up. This is called Calorie reduction, it makes you younger, more beautiful.

The problem in society is they think that eating more will make me healthier. It is the opposite. Eating less will make you younger. The less food will also increase your sexual energy. Why? Because you see, the root chakra depends on the lower food. As soon as you withdraw that thing, the next higher chakra will take over from the chakra point of view and you will immediately see an increase in lust and your partner will be happy actually, isn't it? Same way, reduce sex and immediately you will see other layers, they turn on one by one.

So fasting is not only for food, the fasting is for bodily relations and then social activities, not seeing your relatives, not seeing your friends, not talking on the phone, not watching TV, these are also fasting. Then finally, not speaking, silence. Silencing thoughts and emotions and so on. They will be silenced. You will find that there is a side effect of this. It is already built in by Mother Nature. This mechanism is already there. Reduce your food and your life will be more peaceful and then finally silencing the intellectual activities, your contemplation and thinking about the path of knowledge topics, silence that and then you will be able to tap into the higher side more. This must be matched with our life cycles. There are cycles in our lives. I mean, I don’t want to go into too much detail.

Only a guru knows what to do. There are different practices for women, different for men. Do not mix them. Do not watch a video and start doing it. It can be harmful. Children should not do it. They are already overloaded with energy of a higher kind. They just got detached from the causal body. So there is another interesting thing and then we can stop this discussion on energies - physical existence is the lowest energy. That’s why it dies quickly, comparatively quickly. Death happens. But the non-physical lives on for thousands of years, hundreds of years, millions of years, depending on how much it was cared for, on how good care was taken of that causal body and subtle bodies in between and so on. And that is called a spiritual lifestyle. If you are wondering, what is a spiritual lifestyle? Taking good care of this whole non-physical structure, ensuring its proper evolution, not willy-nilly living randomly.

You can see the field of spirituality is so big, so wide. We have simply scratched the surface of it. When I see this much ignorance in society, it is kind of saddening. We have the knowledge but nobody has access to it and all they have is garbage in their minds regarding spirituality. And even those who have knowledge, they don’t practice it properly. They don’t become an example of it. Whatever is there costs you a lot. A little bit of practice means a retreat in India somewhere in the jungle is going to cost you a lot and the benefits are minuscule, almost zero. This is the affair today but hopefully we will be able to restore everything.

Rajit is saying, I think these paths were designed for people who were not prepared for the path of knowledge for the time being.

Yes, all paths lead to the path of knowledge and the path of knowledge has all paths built into it. Like I say now, don’t think that you are on the path of knowledge and you have avoided the kundalini or you have avoided all these energetic things. No! Where will you go? You are that. How can you avoid it? Your very being is this energy. This Devi is you. No, I am the experiencer. Look closely, that is also Devi.

Rajiv is saying, there was one such Sidh Purush fondly known as Mataji in Gujarat.

Yes, there are many and the real ones, you don’t know their names. They don’t come out and one or two of these, I won’t call them stupid but careless people, they mention it and then you get this whole crowd around them. People doing experiments and all. Nobody can do the experiments, you see. They produce no results. It’s not physical. No instrument will detect anything.

Anjali is saying, wish we can bring that old knowledge and glory back to this world.

Yes, you are most welcome actually. You can do all that. The beginning can be simply from the point of view of knowledge. Publish your knowledge, publish your experiences, so on. Yes, we cannot make people practice. That is not recommended also. Only a Guru can make people practice but the sharing can happen. You can keep it alive by giving it away.

Path of knowledge has the benefit that we understand what is going on. Other paths, they are very mechanical. Do this because I say it - and the intellectual people don’t like it. I have seen that if you go to the Yoga Guru or the Kriya Guru and Kundalini Guru, as soon as you start asking questions, they become angry. They will beat you up. This happened to me also. My Guru used to give me books to read. He had a huge library on Kundalini. Hindi books, Sanskrit books, some English books, Tamil books. And whenever I asked a question, oh look at this book on this page number, and I read it. It’s so cryptic. Nobody could understand what was written there. And I said, it will take me 20 years to understand this one page. It’s like opening the physics textbook and then trying to understand what is written on that page. No, you need education for 20 years to understand one page. And then he laughed. Then he said, stop questioning then. Start learning. Why do you question so much? You think you will learn something if I tell you one or two sentences? Then he called me stupid. I learned nothing, but I learned something important that these things are not small. No pettiness works here.

Okay, Satsang is going on and you go to the Guru and ask - Guruji, what should I eat? If he is a good Guru, he will beat you with a stick. It will take many lifetimes for you to convert yourself into this kind of person who can manipulate the food and energies. So if you don’t know, eat that which comes naturally to you. Don’t try to find a shortcut into the path of energy. It will fail. You will be harmed, that is sure.

Radha is saying, PoK is for purified people.

There is some purification that has already happened in those who are attracted to the path of knowledge. Their lower side is already clear, a little bit. It should be cleared up to Vishuddhi, I say. I come back to the old model again and again because I myself forget all the names of the layers which are more advanced. But everybody understands Vishuddhi.

So what do you recommend before coming on the path of knowledge? Clean up the basic survival. Clean up your sexual desires. Then a little bit of detachment from the world. Reduce your relationships, to a bare minimum. Have a lot of control over emotions. Emotional people will never succeed on the path of knowledge. They will get trapped there in the Anahata. There is a very important kind of energy which everybody is starving from. That is called love, affection. Nobody gets it. That produces a distortion in the Anahata. Something which can be given unconditionally is absent from this world, absent in your society.

So up to this, if it is cleared, then the grasping power appears for the concepts like non-duality and the experiencer and the emptiness and so on. Then the intelligence starts working. Before that nothing will be grasped. It’s mostly like animal tendencies before that. So the guru chooses based on the configuration of the mind. You can see now that the path of knowledge is the last. And hence the population here is the lowest. Most of the seekers are dwelling at the bottom layers and we don’t disturb them actually. We don’t say that okay don’t go there because that is a lower path. Don’t go into the occult path or something. Go wherever your nature takes you. Usually I say your path is that which you like most. Your guru is that which you love most. It is all a complicated scene here.

When somebody appears in the satsang or wants to contact me or wants to talk to me, regarding the path of knowledge, not regarding all these things, then I understand that this person is ready for a little bit of knowledge. And then we hold their hand and then we make them walk on the path of knowledge. Then they become pundits in 6 months. This is a miracle. We are not a miracle baba kind of miracle. We are doing this higher miracle every day. We do not bring out the ash from whatever you see, flowers or the head of somebody. We bring out the ignorance and throw it away. We burn it. We don’t burn that havan or yagya. It’s all non-physical. Higher side, the real yagya is within.

Then most of the people are trapped on the lower side. Out of compassion, we let them be there. Because you were there, I was there. Everybody was there. As soon as the path of knowledge ends, seeking itself ends, what remains is - I alone. I was not able to see myself. Ego is there because of seeking. Yes, extroverted people, they will never be able to find their true nature. You need to be introverted. And a little bit of evolution must happen. Like she was asking, what is grace? This is the point in evolution, where you find yourself, where you end your seeking. It is not stopping, it is not ending any other thing. It is the ending of seeking only, ending all the confusion. This rat race of spirituality ends on the path of knowledge. Others, the manifestation continues. The world continues. The creature continues. The illusion continues as usual. But now it becomes more interesting and less limited.

As soon as I find a limitation in a seeker of the path of knowledge, I immediately do the surgery. Immediately try to remove it. What? Are you still limited? Even with all this knowledge? You cannot do this one small thing because you are afraid of your father or your husband or your boss? These are newcomers, you see. Still learning to break the chains.

Suraj is asking, is music only worldly stuff or is there any relation between music and spirituality?

Just like I said, music is the food for the higher layers. So the more melodious it is, the more beautiful it is. You don’t need food. You see, these people who are into music, they forget eating. They forget socializing and whatever, you know, the Facebook crap. And they are into the music, nothing else. They are getting nourished there by the music. Similarly, other arts are also the same. And similarly, intellectual work. There is no need for food sometimes. There is no need for sleep sometimes. And people wonder why. You never sleep. It does not look like that you eat. You don’t do shopping either. What kind of person are you? You see, the person on the path of knowledge has already left the personhood. Already left humanity. You are preparing to become purely non-physical now. So that is why, sometimes the success in your projection experiments and non-physical experiences, they became the gauge of evolution. How evolved a person is, was judged by how many strange experiences they are having. But that is not 100% correct. The real measure, the real standard of knowing the spiritual growth or evolution is how less dependent we are on the material. The criteria should not be how many strange experiences, fancy experiences you are getting but how detached you are from the lower side. That is the true standard of measurement.

And look at our self-evaluation videos on the path of knowledge program. Those who are doing self-evaluation, listen to those videos. How nicely the criteria are chosen. Do I say anywhere that if you had this kind of strange experience, you are doing great, your evaluation is good? No, never. Simple things are given. Based on those simple traits, we judge, we evaluate our evolution. If you have a guru, then you don’t even need those videos. The guru is doing that job for you. The guru evaluates you every day. So you can relax and enjoy wherever you are. It’s fine, isn’t it? The scale of evolution is infinite. Why are you in a hurry? Enjoy the journey. It’s endless. But yes, if you are suffering along the journey, then we need to give you medicine a little bit. If you are enjoying it, if you are in a blissful state, while doing the work of evolution, if you are doing it happily, blissfully, enjoying it, then you don’t even need a guru. The guru will leave you alone. Are you in bliss? Are you enjoying it? Yes sir, yes sir. Okay. You don’t need to come to satsang either. So evaluation is necessary. Usually the guru will do it. And in my case, I don’t do too much. I look out for the major blockages and if I can clear them, I do it. Otherwise “the file is sent up”. Then a lot of circumstances change in your life. Don’t think the miracle will happen one day. Usually it takes a long time. After sending your file, I don’t even look at it. Useless, isn’t it? You simply believe that the work will be done and I don’t even tell you because you get a lot of expectations from that thing. He said he did something and nothing has happened. Five hours have passed. Five hours. Wait for five lifetimes at least before asking.

You have a mountain of obstacles, but don’t worry. It’s a play. It’s a playful journey. Some people must be thinking, well, simply give up eating tomorrow. No, if your desires are not fulfilled, that will cause harm. It is not a forceful method. It is a natural method. It will drop. And I’ve seen the trend that the lower drops in this fashion - bad things are given up first like cold drinks and meat and the unhealthy food. Then whatever is unnecessary is given up and then the impure is given up. Impure means cooked by somebody else. And then you see the purity begins and then the higher layers take over little by little. This is the trend. This cannot be forced.

Although this is part of knowledge, we are totally careless about these things. But because of my upbringing in other paths, whenever I see a problem, I usually advise people. So these things don’t work, you see. Forcing yourself not to eat, you will simply fall sick. Forcing celibacy, it will simply distort your mind. These energies are very strong. Sometimes I need to reverse the gears. Eat more. Have more girls. Go out in the society. Do a job. Because of the imbalance that has happened on the higher side, the lower was not taken care of. Probably because of this hurry to evolve. So never do anything without asking your guru. Do not ask the wrong guru. Do not go to the path of knowledge guru and ask about food and all. Go to the proper guru if you want the path of energies, if you like it.

Varun is asking, since the experiencer does not know anything and only experiences, then who knows the changes?

Change is also an experience. And the experience does not know change. Experience experiences change. And the intellect knows what has happened. The intellect analyzes the change. This change has happened. It was like this in my memory. Now it is like this in my memory or present experience. This knowledge acquisition is done by the intellect. And the experiencer is the witness of this whole process. I am asking Varun, what do you mean by changes? Which changes are you talking about?

Day to day changes, changes in emotions and thoughts.

They are experiences. And the experiencer gets those experiences. We say it like this more accurately. Some people will say experiencer knows these things. But our definition of knowledge and knowing are different from others. Experiencer is the ultimate witness. And if these experiences are arranged, operated upon, analyzed, managed - that is the intellect. Layer of intellect is doing it. Knowledge is also an experience and it is also witnessed. It is actually not correct to ask these questions. Who knows this and who knows that? There is nobody to know anything. What can we say? There are experiences and there is knowledge, which is also an experience. There are changes. There are daily changes. There are yearly changes. There is nobody. And we say there is witnessing or experiencing. That’s all that can be said.

Session 164

Jay is asking, can we establish control over the mind?

Yes, but you should remember that there is no “we”. Never use the word “we” in spiritual matters. It is okay to use it as a group for informal conversation like we are meeting here in the Satsang. It’s okay, but when you dive into the spiritual language, it should be accurate. So you should ask whether I can establish control over my mind. And if you know, there is no I. There is no one who can have control of the mind. But still the control is possible where the mind controls itself. It is already doing that. All the layers of the mind are self-controlling mechanisms. So the control is already there. It is natural control. For example, the layer of the body. When you are hungry, there is automatic control that it will go for food, it will eat the food. When the stomach is full, there is an automatic signal to stop eating now. These are control mechanisms.

Why do I always tell you about the body and food? I was accused of that - I always talk about the body and food. Because most of the people know only this much. It is very easy to understand. Control mechanism is already there. Similar to the body, there are other layers and there are control mechanisms there. So, it is already doing its job naturally. However, due to some afflictions, it can go out of control. It can do one activity too much. It's possible. For example, somebody says something to you or you fail in something. Let us say you fail in your school exam or college exam, interview and it produces sadness. Which is very normal, which is very natural. It should be there. You fail now, sadness must be there. But in some cases, it goes on beyond 2-3 days, then goes into depression, then the fellow commits suicide, so on. That is called affliction. Unhealthy mind. There you need control. Now who can establish the control there? There is nobody.

Now the training must come and the training that trains the mind to control these things. In order to control, the first thing is you must be able to identify that it is out of control. There is an affliction. It is doing too much of one thing. Smoking one cigarette is okay, but it is smoking four packets per day. Something is wrong, isn't it? Drinking one glass of wine every week also is okay. If the body mind system is always drunk, addicted, something is wrong.

So, if it goes beyond the limits, some training must be given to fix it. That training will be called purification. Something is wrong there, now you need to purify it. Or you can also say therapy or treatment, we call it purification. Now how to do purification? First, there must be recognition that something is wrong in this thing. Many people don’t have this much awareness. The light is almost zero there. They cannot even detect that there is a problem. Somebody comes and tells them there is a problem. Or when they fall sick, their life is disturbed, then only they recognize that I need to do something. Then they don’t know what to do actually. In this society, nobody knows what to do. Yes, they can treat a little bit of disease in the body, a little bit in the mind, but there are many layers in the mind. Nobody knows all these things. So, they come to the Guru. Then the Guru installs a program there, which can control the mind. The mind controls itself using that instruction of the Guru. The instructions are always like this - Do this, don’t do this. And you must remember, follow the instructions. And how will you remember? There must be sufficient intelligence there. And there must be sufficient awareness there.

By awareness, I don’t necessarily mean the awareness of what you are. If self-realization is there, then obviously the self-correction will happen automatically. But even if it is not there, at least there must be some recognition, awareness of the body and what is going on in the mind. Even if you don’t know what is mind. Even if you don’t know that I am not the mind. Just assume that I am the mind, something is wrong with me and then follow the instructions. And what is the method to control it actually? Depends on case to case, person to person, time to time. So, it is not written in any book. And there is no manual for fixing somebody. It is always the Guru and student. The Guru listens to the student, observes the student and then prescribes a purification method. So, usually we do the knowledge transfer first. If the intellect is working, the knowledge is absorbed. Awareness of what is going on arises.

Simply knowing that I am not the mind gives you enormous control on it. Why can’t people control their behavior, their mind? Because they still think I am this thinking machine. I am this pile of emotions. And some people, they are even lower, they think I am the body. So, depending on the status of the student, the discipline or the medicine or the solution is given. That is why I keep saying - express. Tell me what do you want? Tell me how you feel? Tell me what is going on in your mind? I will come to know anyway, but the source code of the mind is given away if you simply talk.

Sometimes, some Gurus are very big experts. They can see the face and tell. They can see a photo and tell. And people like me, they need to do research first. I spend almost six months or one year with the person to know the person. But sometimes, one or two sentences are enough. There are some people who can masquerade very easily because our society is based on a fake person, fake persona. What people are inside, they never show it outside. And that’s what they do in front of the Guru also now that it makes the job of the Guru very difficult.

Never hide anything from three people - the doctor, the lawyer and the Guru. Their job becomes very difficult, they may prescribe something wrong. So if you want to fix the mind, which means control the mind then you must open up in front of the Guru. Then the Guru will check you, check the causal body. We go beyond the psychiatrist and all these people. So we employ the non-physical means, sometimes the intention is used and so on. Plus we give practical advice also. The Guru will never do it to any random person. If the Guru sees the possibility of spiritual progress, if the person is already on the path then only we take this kind of risk because it’s a risky thing to manipulate somebody’s mind.

The student must be on the path already, must be making efforts to know, must be gaining knowledge, the awareness must be increasing and then there is some point in doing the work on that person. If you meet me, I have this problem, please fix it. I don’t even know who you are, what to fix, where to start. And then the general advice is given, something like this - you are the experiencer be in the knowledge be in awareness.

The Guru talks standard spiritual talk and obviously nobody likes it, nobody practices it, nobody takes the instructions because the background is lacking, knowledge is lacking. So what do I say? Ok you came to me, now start following the instructions - this is the program, this is the course, these are the videos, absorb them. Usually what do I see? Simply joining this group, simply listening to Satsang, simply being in the spiritual environment, the mind self corrects. Why was I so stupid? I did this and I did that - these thoughts will be in your mind. That means correction is happening, purification is happening. There will be aversion to the things that you are addicted to, there will be aversion, detachment with people. You think these people give you happiness? They give nothing actually they waste your time. That is also purification.

A whole series of purification videos is there if Ajay is interested, go and listen to the series on purification first. Those who are impatient, those who don’t want to go through the program, don’t want to follow my instructions, there are mechanical methods to purify. But simply being in knowledge does the job. It may take some time but the purification happens as soon as you come to know your true nature. Sometimes it is so fast it is amazing. In one week the person is transformed completely. Otherwise it takes at least a few months, a few years, and in some cases, very odd cases it takes a few lifetimes because the past impressions are too strong. Sometimes the student says I am perfectly ok, I won’t change, I am intelligent, I know what I am doing - these cases take a few lifetimes.

So in summary the mind is controlling itself. Due to ignorance, bad impressions, bad samskaras, it goes out of control then it must be brought back in control. That is possible only by approaching a guru, following the instructions - discipline - knowledge - awareness - these are the key words.

Jay is asking - what is brain fog?

It’s a wrong notion that the brain does anything and the fog is in the brain. No, there is only organic matter in the brain: blood and cells, and all those things. It is simply a condition, which is like tiredness, unable to function. The treatment is very simple: rest for a while, go to sleep for a while and it will be ok.

All these layers, they are working non-stop. They never stop; they reduce the activity and they increase the activity, something like this goes on but non-stop. Sometimes there is a lack of energy, tiredness, and it refuses to work. It happens when you have taken too much work from that layer, and then the obvious way is to stop and do nothing. It will happen mainly for intellectual work. That if you are doing a lot of intellectual work, after a while thinking becomes erroneous, the logic does not function and so on. Physically also you feel tired, and the solution is to go out and take a walk, and sit down in your garden and play with the animals or children or listen to music, watch a movie, something which is non-intellectual, and then refreshment happens. Our body, this system is not designed to work continuously for hours. So if you are doing physical work, take breaks; if you are doing mental work, take breaks; if you are doing spiritual work, yes, you need to take breaks.

Especially, if you do a lot of spiritual work, energy work, pranayama and all. You won’t feel it, but inside the system is breaking, inside there is wear and tear in the higher layers, and then it shows up in the lower ones after a week or two. Sometimes I ask people to simply give up the spiritual work, which means attending the satsang, watching the video, writing the lessons or reading the books. Those who are doing the dissemination, they are asked to stop it, don’t talk to anybody for one week, and then it recovers and then you can go back to normal. And if you do it extremely, then yes, there is a possibility that some damage can happen, but it recovers. And the best way is not to go extreme in your practices. Those who are doing the dreaming practices and projecting practices and so on, it is possible to do them in extreme and then these layers get tired, some extraordinary symptoms can happen, because they are extraordinary for us, because it is something new for the practitioners.

Initially you must put an effort, but then it should not become your regular routine. Sometimes you need to sleep normally, no need to become aware in the dream, no need to project anywhere. Too much dose of spirituality makes you tired. This whole system must be balanced from bottom to top. Do some physical activity, light activity. Just clean the house and cook the food, good enough, wash your clothes. So for example, in my house there is no washing machine, there is no dishwasher, there is no vacuum cleaner, and I don’t eat the outside food, ready-made food. It is not that I cannot, I can, I can hire a servant and servant will do everything, but I know what will happen to this body. The body will rot away or it will become really fat and ugly.

Similarly, I do most of the mental work, intellectual work, and so on. I try to get involved with the emotions using music and friends and so on. The knowledge of the layered structure will enable natural functioning. Those who don’t know, they can make errors and they can go extreme, but those who have knowledge, they will immediately identify where the imbalance is, and they will immediately be able to correct the balance.

Back to food. Food is my favorite metaphor because you can understand it. If you understand one layer, you understand all the layers, they are essentially the same. Somebody told you, be detached from the food, and now you are eating boiled rice and boiled cabbage every day. What is this? Extreme, isn't it? Eat some nice food, spicy food occasionally, and if you do that every day, this is another end of the extreme, isn't it? Don’t do it too much. Your normal food should be very pure, simple, although tasty, but there can be occasions where you serve your tongue; it is needed. Otherwise, this creature goes into depression, you see. This thing is not made for this kind of treatment, it wants pleasure. If you provide it with pleasure, it is happy. Make it happy, no problem at all. If you are doing it in awareness, where is the problem? If you are not doing extreme things, where is the problem? Are these things bad? No, extremes are bad.

There are some people who keep eating - oh no, I look like a hippo, and then they stop eating, not eating for many months, then their eyesight goes down, their hair starts falling, and skin is like a fused bulb, and so on, you see? Extreme here and extreme there, where is the balance? Same treatment must be given to the other layers. Bodily pleasure, yes, don’t do it too much; it becomes boring. You end up not talking to your wife or your girlfriend for many months, it gets boring. There also, some balance must be there. There also must be some distance. Same about the emotions. If you are too emotional, then you are immune to any emotion, it does not affect you because too much time was spent in emotions, you become insensitive. Now same for the intellect, keep doing all the projects, then it gets tired, and now you have no creativity. We call it burning out, creativity burnt out, why is that? Too extreme.

So breaks. Same thing about spirituality, you are trying to be aware, aware, aware day and night, and then burn out. Now you don’t even want to be aware. Initially I know a push is required, initial kick start is required. But that should not become the routine, it should be well balanced. We do three months of intense practice that you already know. Three months more, let us say, after that if there is awareness, okay. If there is no awareness, perfectly okay. You should not push it; you have tasted the awareness, is it sweet? Yes, then the mind will go to it, it will get tired of the unawareness. Suddenly, lightbulb-like awareness, then it will fall back, no problem at all.

The awareness will arise as soon as something important must be done; if it does not, no problem. So ultimately, it should become natural instead of forced or extreme. To change the track, it takes a little bit of energy, but once you are on the track, it should take only corrective work. A little correction here, little correction there, course correction, and the guru also can help here. That’s why I ask for reports from many people, all the people. But just like you are sending me reports, send reports to yourself. After the program is over, keep sending reports to yourself, keep a diary - I am progressing like this, now I am progressing like that, keep doing the self-evaluation every three or six months at least.

Parteep is asking, have you tried zooming in and out into dreams? It’s an awesome experience.

I have not tried it. When I become aware in the dream, I get spellbound. I actually forget to experiment; the images are so lifelike, so convincing. I cannot even believe that it is a dream sometimes. The mind refuses to believe that it is a dream, and then I forget all the experiments; the experience itself is spellbinding. This is all personal, somebody can have a different kind of experience, somebody can have a different kind of attitude. Because I know this is a desire fulfillment zone, so within seconds, I am busy in fulfilling desires, whatever desires are currently operating; I forget about the experimentation.

This is about the dream and about the projected states. My first instinct is to find the guru; where is my guru today? And they know I am coming, so they hide, and I simply wander here and there; I never do any experiment. So, we do that which is our instinct. Still, there is hardly any interest in experiments because these states are so, you can say, awesome. Yes, if you do it every day—by every day, I mean regularly—then you will get bored of all these activities, which is equal to the worldly activity, isn’t it? And then your mind will be oriented to experimentation.

I have done my own experiments and all, and then I lost interest. The most interesting dream is right now, right here—that which is happening, which you call the waking state. That is the most interesting dream, although it is not awesome, not spellbinding or anything. It is most useful. Do your experiments here, get the fruit of it also. Don’t be afraid of the fruits of your actions. Is there any fruit? Is there any action? No, jump into the dream, you have the knowledge, you have the awareness, how can you act in a wrong way? There can be mistakes here and there. If you have a guru, then chances of mistakes are almost zero. If you ask your guru before doing anything—any kind of madness, craziness—just ask, or if you don’t want to ask, just tell him, inform him.

If, in the waking state, when the desire fulfillment happens, then this creature gets very cautious. Anything that is there will be executed. Then the creature will say, “You have to be very cautious”.

Yes. The caution is only this much, that you are not causing any harm via your experimentation. If some of your actions, some of your craziness, can bring out another person from ignorance, then go for it. Fruits can be good also. It can be lying, it can be deceiving, it can be manipulating, it can be anything at all. All is good, you see, because you have done something good.

Actually, Guruji, this is required because I meet more people than before. I am seeing that people are not ready for the path of knowledge. They have to be prepared even for the path of knowledge. And the interesting thing is that the people are so distinct, that every person’s sensitivity is different. Like, say, some people are sensitive in listening to music, some are sensitive towards dance, some are sensitive towards contemplation. Then, through the most sensitive part of their life, is then converted into a door for self-realization.

Yes, you are exactly right. The guru finds a door into the mind. Where does the interest of that person lie, and we enter through that door. Now it is an art, but it is mostly craziness. Never hesitate in jumping into the world of action. We are not here to simply sit with eyes closed. I understood that much. Actually, I have done a lot of that also. Always do something crazy which produces some good effects in this dream. This is a dream; this is your experimental ground now.

Who cannot experiment? Those who don’t have the knowledge, they need to be cautious. Do you need to be cautious? Little bit. That’s why I said, just tell your guru if there is a chance of something going wrong. Then the guru will simply come and interfere in your matters. Guru is not going to sit and watch. They can sit and watch - let him do whatever he is doing - he will know. If it involves somebody else, then the guru will interfere, otherwise, you are given the freedom to act, especially on the path of knowledge. That is why there are no restrictions, no ethics, no morals. We know everything. When the person gets the knowledge, he is always right; even his mistakes are right. They produce some effect. Once you have finished your karmic account, now you won’t be able to live here; the dream will be over for you. So what do we do? We take up more stuff, more karma will be taken up. And obviously, it’s not yours; you take up somebody else’s. Get involved, because it is not mine now. Whatever fruits come, it’s fine. And if it goes into some kind of extreme, there is gurufield. They do the clean-up after the mess has happened; nothing to worry.

Guruji, I was also discussing with Ashwin, social interaction has completely stopped now. Towards action, there are only two options that are seemingly apparent: either sit in silence or do the knowledge dissemination. After 3-4 hours of sitting in silence, then I pick up the pen or start doing something in the computer for knowledge dissemination. These are the only two choices in front of me also.

Yes, this is the story of everybody who passes through the difficult task of getting knowledge. After that, life is easy, so easy that you want some difficulties to arise there. Otherwise, it is boring, yes. Just like he said, you can only sit peacefully or you can do some service. There is no other interest left. And if there are any desires, you see, some people can have them and they can be converted into service also. It is possible to convert them into service; those desires can be fulfilled while serving people. So we convert everything into spirituality. Ultimately, there is nothing more to do. Nothing else is interesting.

When I go to the projected states, other worlds and all, what comes to my mind? How to use this for the benefit of others? Almost nothing has remained for me here; I can leave this place, this dream, anytime. But you see, when these thoughts come, I realize - where am I going to go? This is the only place where my services are needed. So automatically, this will happen. Some people are self-conscious that, “Oh, I don’t have any compassion; I cannot serve. I don’t even have time to serve”, and so on, and they feel that I am not there where the guru is. Don’t worry; you will be there. This is how evolution happens. A time will come in the life of everybody, when they will be capable. This is my estimate that everybody will become like this. Their own prarabdha will be exhausted. They won’t be able to sit quietly; either they will leave or they will take on more karmic stuff. Nowadays, I am looking for an opportunity to take on the karmic stuff. The more difficult the case is, the more interested I am. But usually, I prefer to work like this, behind the curtains.

Guruji, the only thing preventing me from leaving is the loans we have taken.

Yes. Whatever you have taken, you are now returning, and those who are already in some kind of bondage, don’t worry; convert the bondage into an opportunity. You have taken, now give it back twice, double the amount. I don’t know; there must be something which is remaining. But this feeling of paying it back is very dominant. And that’s why when people ask, “Why do you do all these things? You don’t even take anything.” And I don’t have any answer, actually. This is how it is. Now it’s payback time. Many people will not understand what I am talking about here because this is step number seven and it is not our usual conversation.

Jay is asking, if you give someone things and he doesn’t pay back, will there be a strong bond here?

If you are expecting the return, then a bond is formed, obviously. So, any spiritual person will give without expectation. I don’t need to tell them, they do it automatically, give without expectation, don’t ask anything in return, don’t even think about it. And it has become my nature that whenever I give something, there is no thought of getting it back. Sometimes, this ego comes back - “now it is my loss” - and then immediately the awareness also comes - what loss? Is it mine?

But you need to exercise your intellect a little bit. Somebody is asking for a few rupees; yes, you give them that much. But they are asking for your house and your car and your wife and your child. No, no, no, don’t give it away, with or without expectations. No extreme should be done.

I am not expecting; I am free from the bond. But what about that person? Is he not bound to me if I serve him, if I give him something? And there is a solution to that; you free that person from the bond also. Not expecting does the 50% work, but he is still thinking - “I need to return it someday”. Now what do you do? You simply call him, tell him that look, this is yours, this is not mine; you don’t need to return it. Whatever it is, not only physical objects, not only money, not only physical help, it can be more subtle things like emotional support, love, care, even intellectual knowledge, skills. Like I am giving away all these things, but I need to free that person from the bondage by telling that person very clearly that you don’t need to return anything, I am not going to ask you to return anything. Simply saying will erase the bond in the causal layer. You need to say it honestly. Simply saying it will erase the bond. Many people must have experienced this, that I say these things - nothing will be asked in return. And immediately, I see an opening there; they open up like babies; they have never experienced this kind of love, affection, and oneness, togetherness before.

There is always give and take in your relations all the time, isn’t it? Do this, and then I will do that. Only a guru can offer this kind of unconditional giving, where not only he is setting himself free from the action, he has set the other person also free. There is an immediate feeling that the guru is leaving me. Some people are afraid, they try to give me things. I understand why, they want to bind me. But I say, “Look, you don’t need to give me; just ask me, what do you want? If I can give it to you, I will give it to you.”

There is a little bit of ignorance there because I am not asking anything. I am just cutting myself off. But no, it is my nature not to ask for a return. I am giving my example, but everybody who is on this path of knowledge dissemination, they will become like this. One day, you will feel like it is a burden to take. Even after telling people not to give me anything, sometimes they drop things in my house. I have no place to keep that thing in my house, even though my house is mostly empty. That one thing, where should I put it? Everything is occupied already. Where does it go? It’s a pen, it’s a pencil, it’s a diary. But there is no place in my house for these things. They give me useless things, which I don’t want, don’t like, or don't need. No problem at all. Sometimes this anxiety of the student can be relaxed by taking from them, but then later it is given to somebody else, who may really need it.

Akash is saying, I find myself again and again trying to get the crux of the concept of karma. It gives me a headache to understand this concept.

We call it a law of the mind, and it is the most difficult, and it is the most important also. We say, your training will happen in the field. I can teach you the theory, but you will never understand what it is, it’s too complex. So your life is your training. Till you get the knowledge, you don’t even pay attention to it; you don’t know what kind of creature is this karma. But as your awareness grows, as your knowledge grows, then you will start recognizing it like a spy solving the case, you will start getting the clues here and there, and you will find that it is not only complicated, it is the most perfect and most beautiful law in the universe. It is like chess. If you don’t know how to play chess, then it is very boring, very complex. Even if you know it a little bit, it is very difficult because the other player will beat you every time. But as you become good at chess, you will start enjoying it. You will play it for hours with anybody. You only need a good player. You don’t even ask their names. Play with them online or wherever. It is a pleasure now.

Same way, the game of karma is very difficult. Once you master it, there is no limit; you can do whatever you want. And the actions of such a person will never be understood by ordinary people, even the students don’t understand why the guru is doing these things he is doing. There is a funny thing that if the guru makes a mistake, he can always say that look, I am so advanced; I did this thing knowingly. You will not understand why I did this; it is the karmic payback from 50 lifetimes ago. The guru can hide his mistakes like this by pretending to know too much. Students are always impressed - oh, he is the guru; he knows a lot.

There is a lot of fun here and a lot of learning also. If you start slowly, then you are safe. Don’t go crazy initially. Know the rules and then you can break the rules; this is a rule in the tantra, in the occult. You need to know the rules and only then you can break the rules. This is a universal rule of rules. Also in the art field, anybody can distort a painting, but the artist who knows the rules, aesthetics, when he distorts it, the painting is going to sell for millions. Any itsy bitsy artist can distort the figures and draw the painting but nobody is interested in that. In music, only a great singer can break the rules. Similarly, a spiritual seeker when he is advanced, he can break things. It is possible, and yes, nobody will understand it.

Akash is asking, What action one must do in this realm? What are the right actions?

It is very easy, you see. That which gives you happiness and freedom is the right action, not only in this world, it’s universal.

Without knowledge of karma, how does one know the best action?

It will be difficult, but you see, mostly the actions are already pre-programmed in the creature. We already know to some extent what is good, what is not good, and so on, general instinct. Plus, there are past life impressions. But you will never know, and the solution is to find a guru and ask the guru. After knowing all the laws of the mind, after getting your first hand experience with all the laws, you will be in a good position to decide your actions. Before that, there are thumb rules like this, happiness and freedom and so on. So we should not copy others; all actions are unique, all people are unique, they need to decide their own actions. One action can be good for others, but the same action may not be good for you. So find out what your life goal is and achieving it skillfully is the proper action. Walking on the path towards your life goal skillfully is the right action.

Vipin is saying, Potential is expressed, manifested through infinite minds. Everything exists in potential form. Then, regarding the great work of inventions and creations like rockets, can it be said that such words are downloaded and expressed in the waking world through beautiful minds?

Here, the potential becomes manifested, and nobody does it. There is nobody to do it; it happens automatically. You can use these kinds of words like downloaded or channeled or influenced, many words. But actually, nobody knows the manifestation, it is merely a probability.

Potential is converted into actuality using this body-mind instrument, and the instrument is so dumb that it thinks that I did it. And the other people will reinforce this belief that you did it. But nobody does it. It is like the glacier melts and becomes a river, and the river flows into the sea, and the river becomes a lake. Same way, there is a big iceberg of potential that keeps melting and trickling down, becomes actuality, then disappears. This is the play.

So we think that these technologies, these inventions, they are great, but they are not great actually; they are accumulations. You are talking about rocket technology. It looks like somebody downloaded and simply launched the rocket, when you are sitting here today. It will look like this, and yes, your books and history will also tell you that this rocket was made by this fellow and then it was launched to the moon and so on. And you will be amazed, like how can they do this? But look at the real mechanism there. It arrived drop by drop, the knowledge comes drop by drop.

Initially, the rockets were made in China; the invention was done there, and it was for entertainment. The fireworks, or it was used for spinning the wheels and so on. And that technology was copied throughout the world. And you know, the missile was developed in India by Tipu Sultan; he invented that. Then all these things were copied by the West, and they invented new weapons. And one of the weapons became a means to launch a satellite; that was done by the Russians. They used the weapons to develop space technology. That was copied by Americans, and then the moon thing happened, you see, all the rocket launching and all is now common.

So, can you see? Who takes the credit? The one who has the gun in their hand, the powerful one, takes the credit. They write history books, they write Wikipedia. But knowledge is always a group thing; it appears at many places very slowly and builds up - an accumulation. The major milestones are recorded in history, and the names are written before them, but nobody knows the real inventors.

He is saying, accidental experiments certainly turned into great inventions.

Yes, the fellow does not even know what this thing does. He mixes the wrong chemicals one day or he is experimenting to find something and finds something else altogether, and you see, he gets the credit, while the same mistake was done by many people before him.

Siddhant is saying, Wikipedia is fishy.

When Wikipedia started, it was a treasure house of knowledge because I think honest people were writing there. Then organizing happened, then corruption happened, then the politicians and all these people got into it. Now it is a complicated affair where you cannot write a single word there in Wikipedia. It was open to all before; you cannot write there now, a few people control it. So I never go there except for the scientific knowledge, that much is okay there, mathematics, science; it’s okay. But anything else, you will find only garbage in Wikipedia. That’s why I started my own wiki.

When I start something, there is always a long story and the reason behind it. When I saw the bad situation there, there is no open way to accumulate knowledge now, so I started my own. That is also now not open to everybody because I started getting all the spam; people were adding spam articles there, so it is restricted. But anybody can apply for an editor. I don’t have too many rules there.

The problem with this credit-taking or thinking that one person sits and downloads everything from the NPNM is a big mistake. We should not think like this. It is trickling down like rain; some people gather a spoonful, some people gather a cup, some people have a bucket. This natural process is happening, so everybody should open their eyes and see what is happening, how the manifestation is happening, and check the people who want to take the credit for it. Totally ignorant people, the more ignorant a person is, the more willing he is to take the credit to become famous.

Most of the things were not done by the people who say “I did it.” They were not done by them; it is always accumulation. From here they hear something, from there they read something, these inventions are always incremental. Mostly the reasons for taking the credit are patriotism. The leaders want their country to look good, so they declare that everything was invented by their people in their country, and everything invented in other countries is low quality, a copy from our country. Open your eyes and see that this is happening in the world.

Those who have power, they manipulate the world; those who are poor, they simply tolerate. So the good thing is, cycles happen; power also shifts. So the history is grayscale, there is nothing black and white in history; therefore, I never read any history nowadays. I know what it is; it is total garbage. You will never know who invented what. There will be contributors to the knowledge, surely, who took a big step; their contribution can be recognized, but we cannot call them inventors or discoverers.

Whenever I try to study these things a little bit deeply, I always find that humans always knew everything since the beginning; it is very strange. You know the theory of evolution, Darwin takes the credit. I see all the same laws everywhere, in all civilizations, actually, using different words. And the older it is, the clearer it gets. So what do we say? Everything repeats in circles, in cycles; nobody invents anything actually. Everything that you can invent is already invented, many many times. Everything that you can discover is discovered many many times by many many people. This dream is cyclic, not linear; everything is already done, even in this place which you call the physical world or physical universe; it is done in some other infinite possibility. What does it mean? Everything has happened lots and lots of times. So yes, it is very very mysterious. I don’t pay attention to anything nowadays; it’s all very boring actually.

Session 165

Aparajita is asking, in step 4 attention practice for the initial one month is only for concentrating outside strictly and also fixing an object and not changing it, have I understood it right?

You can change the object. The point is to divert the attention from outside to inside. That is one thing and the second point is to discipline the attention. We do recommend changing the object of attention from outside to inside, first it should be some object outside, gross object, then the bodily feeling, then the sensations in the body, then the sound in the ear, something like this, half physical, half non-physical and then some imagination or sound in the mind and finally you need to let go of it and remain as you are. That is the proper practice but what happens is because of their old practices, people get tangled in the attention practice.

As they proceed in step 4, I actually reduce the practice, I don’t increase it, we reduce it to zero and focus only on the awareness practice, on the inclusive attention and it must be done by only those people whose attention is very bad. So these two are the objectives of the attention practice. Like we say in the video, most probably it is mentioned in the video that without attention there is no hope of awareness. What is awareness? That I am the experiencer of all the experiences, illusory experiences and where is the attention? It is drifting, it is not steady, nothing is attended to actually, it’s all mechanical, reactive life.

As soon as you attend to something, you obviously become aware of it, with awareness should come this thought or a state of being that I am not this, it is a negative thought, I am not this, I am not that, objects - no, body I am not, any thoughts, any feelings or emotions I am not. This is the awareness practice and the thoughts can be - all these desires are coming, all these thoughts are coming, all these feelings are there, pain is there or pleasure is there, hunger is there and the actions are happening. This is the state of awareness, not being the doer, not being the thinker but being the observer, this identification is the state of awareness and it is helped by the attention. If you don’t pay attention to whatever is happening, the mind gets nothing to be aware of, even these thoughts will not arise and the inclusiveness will not happen. This is the point of attention exercises and if the attention is not moved from outside to inside, inside means in the mind, then there is no possibility of awareness also. Introversion must happen, like we say “look within”, that must happen. Usually the attention is focused totally outside in the world, so to make it more inclusive, we recommend that you travel from the gross to subtle in steps, from gross objects to the body, from sensations of the body to the subtle objects, then totally non-physical and then none of the objects.

If you include all the experience, it means you are not attending to something specific and then you reach this open space of awareness, whatever I call as experiencing or sahaja samadhi and you taste it a little bit, continue your life as usual in awareness, there is no need to extend the attention practice beyond 15 minutes or 20 minutes, no need at all, this is like weight lifting, there is no need to lift the weight whole day, 15 minutes, 20 minutes is enough and then the muscles build up.

Graham is asking, You say questions in satsang are for newcomers, but I sometimes worry if I don’t ask questions about the experiments, I will do them wrong, and if other questions are not asked, ignorance will be uncorrected. Should I ask, or is it better that at this stage I use my logic and experience and ask the gurufield and answer independently?

Everybody is most welcome to ask questions, and what I say is that the satsang is more beneficial for the newcomers because those who have advanced, they have fewer questions obviously, and some have no questions at all. So, at whatever stage in the program you get the questions, they should be asked. And then after saying this, I also suggest that sometimes it is better to wait for the answer to come from within. You can call that the gurufield. Sometimes, if you are patient, write down your question, think about it, let go, and wait for the answer. If you don’t get the answer, then yes, satsang is the only way. Why am I saying that? Because you see, after listening to all the videos, after getting all the clarification, after doing all the experiments, the mind must be now prepared to answer everything by itself. But if that is not happening, then yes, satsang is open for all.

Graham has another message, This past week in awareness practice, there was a feeling that no effort was required. Then there is concern that effort is dropping too early. The knowledge that I am the experience is solid, but other facts that follow from that, that I am not the doer, others are me, I am Shiva, do not automatically arise. How should we assess the need for effort in awareness practice in the experiments?

It is very easy. If your bliss is lost frequently, if your peace is disturbed frequently, then more effort is needed. Otherwise, let it happen effortlessly. The scale or the instrument to measure your awareness is the bliss, joy, state of joy, carelessness, and all these higher qualities that arise: compassion, love and so on, and dropping of pettiness, carefree attitude, these things are the measures. If that is the state, then no effort will be needed. In fact, if the awareness goes away after attaining these higher states, then we don’t worry because it is bound to come back.

The thoughts like “I am not the doer” and so on, if they don’t come, there is no need to bring them, there is no need to force them. Why is this thought not coming in my mind? Is that natural? No. And if the thoughts come, then you need to become aware. Awareness is most important, not the other thoughts.

The problem with this is that people try to “do awareness”. It is not possible. Awareness is above the action and awareness is above and beyond the thoughts. So how can you bring it by this lower activity? All you can do is surrender in the lower layers, let go of the action and let go of the thoughts, and you will find there is awareness. So the more you try to do it, the less the awareness will be because you will remain in the mind. The point is to rise above the mind, not to “do it”. Let it be, let things be as they are and notice, observe.

Graham is saying, I have all those positive senses by your grace, things going so smoothly, worry just let it. If there is no storm then the boat is already sailing nicely, there is no need to bring in the storm.

That is the whole point, we need to drop the practice as soon as possible. Just like we drop the attention practice, we drop the awareness practice also, there is no need to do it, it should become your nature to be aware, it should not remain a practice. Just like riding the bike, if you keep practicing all your life how to ride the bike, that is not very logical, something is wrong there. You should practice riding the bike for a few months and then it should become your nature. You sit on the bike and the bike runs, does not fall. See it is common sense, very simple.

Why can’t people understand the simplicity of the practice? Because of their past, they are coming from the paths where the practices were so convoluted and so difficult and so you can say enigmatic, mysterious, the minds of the people are now completely distorted regarding what should be the practice. So what I have done is I have cleared it up a little bit, but still I could not make it this simple - be that which you are. One line practice, no need to correct your behavior, it will correct itself, no need to change anything, things will change themselves. Just observe whatever is happening. If no change happens that should be observed and if change happens that should be observed. If this dream takes a good turn, no problem at all and if it is going as it is smoothly no problem at all. Nothing actually needs to happen. If nothing is happening, you are simply aware, it is the best state. And if there were lots and lots of impurities and lots of challenges in your life and they are now getting solved, then also it is okay.

Some people will get this kind of explosive corrections done in their mind, which is okay. And some people because they are already pure mostly or they have minor things or it is You can say some imaginary impurities, I need to be like this, not like that because somebody else is like this, imaginary failure in self-evaluation, so that is not good. So what do we recommend, you practice for 3 months under me, then your program ends or you move on to other things. But continue the awareness practice in the background and drop the attention practice totally. If you keep doing the attention for many years, what does that mean? It means that you did not understand what attention is, why it is being done. Probably it is producing some kind of reward in the mind to which the mind has become habitual. It has become dependent on this sitting practice. Probably there is a notion in the mind that this is called spirituality. To sit with your eyes closed is called spirituality - That is the wrong notion in the minds of many people. That is called a practice, that is not called spirituality. Bringing your life fully in this moment, in complete awareness is spirituality. The awareness and the knowledge component makes ordinary life spiritual life. Remove the knowledge and awareness, back to ordinary life. It is so simple. Add all the practices and all these things, yes, like a lot of madness, depending on the person, what do they like to do in their life, but that is not spirituality. What you are still doing, there is still effort, there is still compulsion to do, it is not called freedom. Freedom is to let go and just be.

Rajit is saying, These attention practices triggered my earlier practices which I shared with you that day.

I recommend giving up the old. At least for the time being while you are in the program, you should give up the old because what happens is people fall back into the old pattern, and I hope that after three months, six months, whatever, the old will not be required anymore. That is my hope. But if you still need to do the old then continue it after the program, no harm.

Some people were asking me should I join this new course, should I do this new meditation and all. I said yes, go ahead. After the program, you are the master of your will. Since the program requires a bit of discipline, that is why people are stopped from doing whatever they are doing. If it is something harmless then okay, continue or there are major problems in life and some tantric practices are needed, okay, continue. Sometimes I add to their practices.

This happened to one person, he said I cannot let go of worshipping the deities in my house. I said add the deities into your collection of deities, like he had five or six of them, and it is an old pattern to worship them because if you don’t worship the deities what is the fear in the mind? They will become angry at you and something bad will happen in my life - superstition. So he could not let go of it. I am in awareness, I have the knowledge but I cannot stop this practice. Okay, I said add more, add a picture of Shankaracharya, add the picture of Saraswati there and add photos of Ramana Maharshi and all these people. Let your worship take the form of the path of knowledge now, worship the path of knowledge. I don’t know what happened after that but hopefully the uselessness of that practice was seen because when you are standing before the deities obviously you forget the path of knowledge. So these more deities were included, more gurus were included in the worship, Guru Nanak and all these, and then instantly the mind remembers what am I doing here. So sometimes some tricks are useful to get back on the path. Sometimes letting the practice, old practice happen will be useful but not always, 90% of the time they cause problems.

After getting the knowledge, immediately there is a question: what is the use of this knowledge? It does not look practical and obviously there is no use of it, it is not practical, it works at the higher layers. The knowledge is not something which should be employed or which should be done, it is not a training of some kind that okay I gave you this knowledge now do this. That is your indoctrination that if I learn something in the college and school now I need to do it, but the knowledge on the path of knowledge is simply clearing of the impurities, clearing of the ignorance, that’s all it is, purification of wrong thoughts. See how simple it is. Again and again I will focus on simplicity. No need to make it so complex that you are lost in the path of knowledge, then what is the use of this path then? If this path is also doing the same thing that the other paths are doing, what is the use of this path? If it is also making you go round and round in practices and some strange kind of lifestyle and so on, then it is useless to be on this path.

Wear this, don’t wear that, eat this, don’t eat that, there is nothing here. Simplify, reduce, let go, minimize, destroy, this is the practice. What happens is, people cannot deal with this simplicity because the mind likes complexity. After the self-realization is there, nothing is needed. The natural abidance should happen immediately. This has happened to many people, I am not saying that everybody fails, no. Brilliant people are there, they hear me and the path ends there. Nothing needs to be done now.

In my case also I continued many practices even after realizing the true nature because of the inertia of the mind and obviously the body continues to live, so continuation of the desire fulfillment. This wheel will come to a stop somewhere, who knows and then slowly the letting go happens. Slowly we realize that this is a dream and no amount of fixing things in the dream works. What works is waking up from the dream. Keep fixing the dream forever, it will keep giving you something to fix. The nature of the dream, maya, is such that it keeps giving you something to do, something to fix. This is the trap, now you need to wake up, let go of fixing everything. We are not meant to fix it, we are meant to leave it.

This is very difficult for people, knowledge is easy. Give them the most difficult practice in the world, easy. Ask them to climb the mountain, very easy. Letting go is most difficult because of the inertia of the mind, it has done nothing but a job of accumulating for many thousand years, probably million years, who knows how many years, the years are not meaningful, many lifetimes. It has done only accumulation, you cannot simply reverse it, the train will crash if you stop it suddenly, so we will let the train continue and then keep turning it in the reverse direction. Until it goes round and then reverses back and the letting go starts. And if this is not happening, simply keeping the awareness on will turn your train backward. Awareness is nothing but stopping and looking. Practices are letting the train run for a while, same with the desire fulfillment. I say fulfill it, why? That is your nature, that is what you do. If you stop it suddenly, it’s like an accident, a crash. So we break it slowly, then turn it back and this happens naturally actually, you don’t need to do much. Keep the lights on, that’s all I ask.

No, I lose it here and there and then after three hours of awareness there is no awareness for six hours. I say no problem, it is there, there is forgetting, that’s all. Some people have this fear that I am going to lose my awareness forever, I will forget whatever I learned. Remember that the learning that happened is not something which you should remember. It is not a memorization of the teachings, it is a cleanup of the ignorance. Will the ignorance come back? No, if there is enough awareness, it will not repeat. That is why I keep giving this example of a hot pan. If you touch the hot pan, do you worry that I will forget how it feels and I need not touch the hot pan again? Never worry about it, it will not happen again and even if it happens, yes, next time it will not happen. Will you forget your real nature? What is the loss in that? You are eternal, you cannot change. So even forgetting does nothing to the experiencer. You have the proper impressions in the causal body and it will come back. If it comes back after many lifetimes, no problem at all because you have eternity. How much is that? The mind cannot even grasp what is this and it worries about small things that today I was not aware. I forgot everything. Look at the eternity.

Yogin is saying, Older people in the house want to worship deities, and the younger ones don’t want to. After having knowledge, I understand both are incorrect. But should I stop older people from what they are doing and ask the younger generation to learn basic principles?

No, you focus on your progress. What people are doing is not our business. Focus on yourself. Get rid of your ignorance and never return, never come back in this world. One of the qualities of a seeker is detachment from worldly affairs and detachment from people. If you are still looking in the neighbor’s house, what they are doing, what they eat, what they say. You are spying on the neighbors and you are trying to fix your neighbor's life. “You should do this, you should not do this.” That means you are lost. See what you are doing, see what needs to be done in your house. Are you here to fix the life of your neighbor? No, simply be friendly with the neighbors. Help them whenever they want help and then continue with your own life. Be selfish. Detachment from the world is a good quality. Not caring about the people is a good quality. Improving others is like a beggar trying to donate millions to others. Is it possible?

Siddhant is saying that an average person doesn’t want knowledge.

People are a big distraction on your path. Leave them alone. And if somebody wants knowledge, send them to satsang. Send them to a program or the channel or whatever. Don’t deal with them. After the program is over, you will be given a chance to deal with people, those who are interested. Not before that. It takes a lot of training. In the ancient days, the students were isolated from society. They were not allowed to mix with people. Some were not even allowed to marry. That caused an evolution of 20 lifetimes in one lifetime. Nowadays, we don’t have that kind of discipline, but still there are some recommendations which we should follow. And it was not that they were restricted to the ashram life for the rest of their lives. No, after the training is over, the guru grants permission to engage with people and, as you know, it is all fake. The web is spun. You spin the web to trap the people and try to get these people who have the potential to rise above the normal, the ordinary. This is what has been happening since ancient times and we are continuing. I have never seen anything more beautiful than this. The wheel of dharma, the wheel of spirituality is the most beautiful phenomena in the universe. We are also doing that.

So those who are interested in people, hold your horses. Wait for the permission. Whether I should do this with the people, whether I should do that with the people, there is a lot of ego there, a lot of ego, and it will be a disaster with this kind of mental state if you do something with the people.

Parteep is asking about the cyclical nature of the layers and their needs and requirements. Parteep mentions that the layer’s workings are cyclical and that their needs cannot ultimately be satisfied as they keep recurring. Parteep also mentions losing interest in the needs and workings of the layers and asks for guidance.

You see, it is automatic, it is going on nicely. Mother nature is doing it, so we need not interfere. That’s all I say. Even if it is cyclic, nothing wrong, let it happen. It is cyclic, but there is progress also. The layers continue to operate, but they also evolve. So all we can do is not to restrict evolution. Let it happen smoothly. That’s all. That is also letting go.

So, I won’t say the layers are not satisfied. They are doing what they are doing. It is not good to expect nature to stop working. What will you do at most? You will stop one creature; you will derail one creature. That’s all you can do. This one. What about all the countless creatures? All these people, nature will operate through them. There is an infinite amount of it, and it will continue. What we do is we lose interest in micromanipulation of the layers. Give this creature a good direction, and then it will continue. Arrival of a guru is the beginning. Otherwise, it is trapped in cyclic existence. As soon as the guru appears in your life, there is a little bit of a break. Then the evolution continues as it should. Just a simple correction of a kind.

So the more advanced a guru is, the less he actually does. I have seen this. The more advanced they are, the less they interfere in the student, in the world, and so on. And those who are still involved with the people in the world, trying to educate people, trying to improve the world, trying to stop the wars or whatever. They have a lot to learn. We are doing all these activities. Yes, we are also on the lower side actually. The greatest of the great guru simply sit and listen. They listen to the universe, and whenever there is a need, whenever there is a cry for help, a request for help, they do a minor correction there, and then go back to listening. You can imagine like this, I am just making a story of it. Listen peacefully to the universe. Whenever there is a need, whenever something can be improved a little bit, just improve it, and then leave it. It’s done. I think this is the best way to operate as a bodhisattva. And the dirtiest way is to incarnate in the world and mingle with the people, get involved in their lives. It’s dirty work. Somebody needs to do it sometimes.

Leyla is saying, what you said about all this being a dream and the more you try to fix, the more there will be a fix. That’s exactly what I needed to hear. Endless, endless. Wake up. Stop doing.

This is never said frequently because people misunderstand these teachings. Those who are not ready, they will simply assume that the guru is telling them to sit at one place and do nothing. You need to do that, which is important, which is necessary. That will happen anyway. Then there should not be a reaction that I am doing too much. No. There is a need to do something, it must be done. That is why I don’t repeat it that often because many people have not reached that place where they can understand this thing. I think Leyla grabbed it.

Ashwin is saying, sometimes a seeker understands intellectually the three-day program, but they again go back to their original way of living and thinking that this knowledge is true, but it’s not practical to use this. Can anything be done so that they are more ingrained in knowledge or is it fine to leave them alone?

Let them take their own time. It’s a very good question. It's best to leave them alone. What I usually do is, you see, I give them the option to join the main program after they have the three-day program. I give them the option to join our group here, the telegram group, or I send them to the channel if they are interested, if they are shy kind of person, does not want to interact in the group. They are sent to the channel, podcast, and so on. So that much you can do. Bird feed. How can you ask the bird to come to your house? Put the bird feed in front of your house and the birds will come. Can you trap them? Can you cage them? Can you keep them on the path of knowledge? No. So it is perfectly okay if they go back to their life. What is wrong with that? It is not our mission to fix the life of somebody. Our mission is to plant the seed. Three-day program does nothing. And those two out of ten people will want to take up the path of knowledge as seriously. And then it is your duty to help them. If they come back, then it is our duty to help them. If they go away, then no problem at all. We cannot manipulate. What I do is put the bird feed in front of them. That’s all. I do encounter some people who are not at all ready for this path. And nothing is given to them then. They are actually encouraged to leave. They are discouraged from joining. How do you know that? Simply, while interacting in the three-day program, you will come to know all these things.

Parteep is asking, I know intuitively that’s true. Do not come here again. What is the source of this? Is it your Guru who told you first about this?

Yes, yes, obviously. The Guru points to all this knowledge. Otherwise, there is no way to know. What do we say? We know this from our experience and logic. But the Guru points to your experience and tells you the logic. There is no way to arrive at these things by themselves. Very rare. Actually, my Guru never told me this. Do not come here. He told me only a stupid will come back here. His style was like this. It’s a more direct, more piercing style. I am also like this, but you know, I have diluted it a little bit because people are not ready to hear these things. Only stupid will come back here. They rebound. They resist this kind of teaching.

There are more Gurus there who present the human birth as some kind of disgusting event. I don’t even like them so much. But I know why they do this. There is nothing wrong with human birth. They are trying to reduce the attachment to the body and the world so that this thing evolves above this. So they are lying, you see. Spirituality is full of lies only. There is nothing to say which is true. Nothing at all.

Nowadays people are so attached to the body and the world and so on, especially in the western countries, that you cannot say that you are a pile of blood and bones and then don’t come back here. Nobody will listen to me. So it is gold coated, branded and then it is sold. All lies only. So my Guru lied less than me. The more direct a Guru is, the more difficult it is to accept him as a Guru. And the more sugar coating and all this drama they build up, they are more attractive. So you can say I was fortunate that I got the Gurus who were so direct. No waste of time at all. No time wasted. Whenever you ask for practice, you get a scolding. What practice? No, this fellow is doing this practice and that fellow is doing that practice and I am left behind now. I am not progressing. My Guru had a good solution to this. He simply hacked into the ego, you see. Simply used to destroy the ego whenever he could get an opportunity. It is not that I don’t tell people directly. I do tell them directly. First sentence is mostly the direct thing. When I say it is not working, then you need to set up a story of some kind.

Parteep is asking, Can’t other paths than the path of knowledge be given online at least some percentage of it? In the lecture parts can be given online.

Yes, lectures can be given online. The theory can be given online. But if it involves practice, then the presence of the Guru is necessary on the other paths. Only on the path of knowledge, the presence of the Guru is not necessary because it concerns your own experience.

There are six or seven groups of different paths. A Guru is absolutely necessary. Personal interaction is necessary. And especially on the yogic paths, discipline is necessary. The energy paths, yes, you cannot leave the Guru for one day also. The devotion, nothing is given. In the devotional paths, even nothing can be given online. There is nothing to give there. The Guru is there as a father figure only. Who is sitting there and simply motivating people. That’s all. No knowledge is there. No practice is there. Simplest, that is why it is widespread.

But about other paths, yes, a lot of discipline, a lot of complications, a lot of knowledge, a lot of practice is seen. And only the theory part can be given online. And I have seen that it is totally useless. Because the spiritual paths are practical in nature. Most of the time. Path of knowledge is purely intellectual. So don’t even need to see the Guru in person. Things are not done here, things are shown here. So you can see it wherever you are without doing anything at all. That is the beauty of this thing. Those who cannot see even after showing them, they should go to the other paths.

So we start at the path of knowledge. The Guru starts there. And if that fails, then something else. And if everything fails, go and marry, reproduce, live a happy life. Don’t worry about spirituality. Not needed at this time. Yes, spirituality is not for everybody. One in a million gets the message here. So what do we do? We don’t want to make it popular. We want to make it effective. It is like medicine, you see. Not everybody needs the medicine. They are happy. So if the people are happy in whatever kind of life they are living, they don’t need anything. They are not even curious or their curiosity is about other things. The illusion. So we leave them. Just like the doctor is not trying to make the medicine popular, the doctor is trying to cure those who require the medicine, who are not well. Same way, we are trying to cure ignorance. Those who require it.

So the real spirituality always remains underground. Whatever you see, these popular gurus and all, they are not doing something spiritual. They are doing something social. That’s why they are popular. And yes, they have that trap laid down. The net is spread like this sometimes. It is made popular. But spirituality will never be popular. What is popular? Occult, magic, mumbo jumbo, gods and goddesses, religions. These things will be popular. So I have seen something reverse. That the more popular a guru is, the more useless he will be. He won’t be able to sit with you. He won’t be able to answer your questions. There are canned answers. Everybody gets the same answer. He won’t even remember your name or face. These are the popular gurus. All you can do is read the book. That’s all. These gurus don’t write the book. Their students write the book. All you can do is watch the videos and read their books. The less popular the guru is, the better it is. Less number of students, better.

There is this immediate worry that how will this thing operate then? How will people get knowledge? We don’t want people to get knowledge. That will be an egoic thought. Somebody needs knowledge. I am important. I will give knowledge to everyone. We need to serve, be available, offer your service. Nobody needs knowledge. They need a lot of love and service. So offer your body-mind to those who need it. Not to everybody. Those who want it, they will approach you. And the spirituality starts when the student approaches the guru. The spirituality does not start when the guru appears on TV. Something else happens there. I am calling them the Lok Gurus. Which means the pop gurus. Popular gurus, like pop stars. Their job is something else. Nobody wants to listen to the spiritual stuff from these gurus. They want masala. They cook up the controversy and so on. It is not that they don’t have the knowledge. They have everything. They have realized that the people don’t want it. So they are trying to set up some traps.

We do that in our own way on the path of knowledge. By dropping down to other paths. By talking about the other paths. Publish it. People search for it. And they get trapped. It is very entertaining to see all these things. What has happened is a little bit of evolution for that person. These things should not be done without permission.

Session 166

Monika is asking, according to Lesson 33, a seeker comes under which waking state?

The lesson is also saying that all these states, they repeat, they go in a circle. Not only the waking state, dreaming, projecting, sleep, death, birth, these states, they are repeating, so they are repeating in the seeker also. Now the waking state has many sub-states and they are also going in a cyclic manner.

As you can recall, there are three kinds of waking states, you can say roughly dividing them into three kinds, the lower, the middle and the higher waking states. So a seeker is mostly free from the lower. For example, there won’t be any madness, there won’t be any criminal states and the animalistic, they will be absent most of the time in the seeker, but they can happen, you know, there are various kinds of seekers and mostly the seeker is in the middle and the higher, oscillating, so egoic state, shifty states and then the concentrated states and the aware state, they are exchanging, they are going in cycles.

But you can say that the seeker is like every other memory structure out there, which means any other human being, except he has knowledge and is now biased towards higher states, higher waking states. There will be a little bit of awareness in the daytime, that means the waking state, and the awareness will seep into the dream and sleep, etc. There will be seepage of the awareness, which means habitually the awareness will occur in other states other than waking.

Not much difference is there between the seeker and the ordinary person, except because of knowledge. But the main point to keep in mind is these states do not last, they come and go. So a seeker is not continuously in a specific kind of state, not possible. You can say some things about the master, but if the master is embodied, then again there will be cyclic states, possibly there will be some higher state which will occupy more time in 24 hours in the master.

Poonam is saying, I had something to talk to you about also here, like you said that the seeker as awareness sometimes seeps into the dream state, and that's so true, and sometimes for a few days I'm experiencing the same thing, and in the dream it's usually we are experiencing the emotions or the feelings a lot more in a very small amount of time, especially during the lucid dreams and all, and when the awareness is there, I know that it's just an experience, and sometimes it gets so frustrating, like I'm experiencing every other thing other than just myself, and that gives me a lot of pain, like why cannot I experience myself, why do I have to experience something out of me, an emotion that is existing because of something else, why can't I experience myself, I don't know why, but it hurts me, it's so difficult to explain it, like why is it so, why can't I experience just my pure self.

What are you experiencing now?

It's a joy just to be in everything and to get involved in everything and see and feel that everything is just me, but especially during the dreams that's what's happening, throughout the day it doesn't bother because probably I'm much more aware and the knowledge is there, but during the dreams it's like I slip into that state where the emotions just arouse in me and it takes a bit time to get aware, and then that's really frustrating.

You see right now your experience is yourself only, this is the non-dual existence which is experiencing itself, now there should not be any question about this thing that why can’t I experience myself, the experience is also you, never forget this knowledge.

About the dream, is the dream true? If not, then why are you bothered so much?

Probably it is because this experience of myself is quite new to me and those emotions that I had been attached to were very strong at some point and so it's still, there is a residue that's still working inside.

Become aware of all these things, become aware of whatever the mind throws up after waking up because probably in the dream it's total darkness, it does not know anything, but after waking up recall the dream in complete awareness knowing fully that it's all false, not only the dream is false, your waking state also is false and it is you. Here we should not employ the emotions or intellect, it's beyond it, now you need to be what you are. Simply be what you are and everything is fine now, you are into the mind, you are giving importance to the mind and what the mind is saying, so on, it is not important at all, the present movement is important. If it recalls the dream, recall it in awareness, write it down in your diary, this is the dream practice and resolve to be aware in the dream, go with this intention in the mind to bed just before falling asleep, make a strong intention whatever dreams will be I am going to be aware and look at the videos of the dream exercises, experiments, that is all you need to do, whatever you are trapped in now is totally unnecessary.

Poonam's question, taking a cue from this question, I am reminded of Dr. Brian Weiss's book Many Lives Many Masters. A few of his patients related unexplained pain, all tests showed a healthy state of the body. Regression took them to memories of past births where they had been hurt on the same spot that was causing them pain in the present life. After this session with him, the pain vanished. Guruji, can you throw some light?

A very interesting experience. Let us take phobia, for example. You look at something, an animal or a spider or something like this, and you are terrified. Now the spider has never done anything wrong; the spider has never bothered you before, a tiny spider. But there is a memory of it in the causal body. In the causal body of millions of humans, there are memories of disgust about spiders, cockroaches, snakes, and so on. Even the fleeting shadows in the night, everybody is terrified of it. Why is that? The evolution has happened in this way. There is a very strong impression of these events because they were proven to be very dangerous in the past. So the causal body contains all these things built in, and that is why it is expressed as fear, phobia. Sometimes it is very strong, and then the patient needs to take the treatment. So in the same way, each and everything is impressed on this causal body, and the causal body produces these experiences.

Now you can experience pain, a memory of a pain. Let us say the last time you got hurt somewhere, you got touched by a hot pan, there is still a memory of the pain that it caused. It is an experience of recall. There is an impression of this experience being painful. Now when it is recalled, it actually produces a copy of the sensation of pain. We are going a little bit deeper into the mechanism of the memory. It produces an exact copy of the sensation, and it can be felt, actually. But there is no real pain. You can do it right now if you want. You can recall something. Something about the traumatic or disturbing events in life. Somebody rejected you, somebody betrayed you, your partner or someone. Now the pain is impressed in the memory of that event. It is very powerful, and whenever there is a recall, it produces the same sensations, same emotions. Do you think that the pain is memorized? No, the memory is producing a shadow of pain, not real pain. Because these events can be very strong, they get impressed in the causal body, and they appear for many lifetimes. Usually, there is no need to treat it; it is just another passing experience. Nothing wrong with it. But when your life is affected in a bad way, dysfunction happens because of these causal impressions, then treatment is necessary.

I don't know how psychiatrists do it, but on the path of knowledge, we do it in a very simple and effective way. We know what it is, and then we become aware of what it is. Now it is rendered ineffective, and when it is not repeated, it is removed. You cannot say it is removed, but it stops doing what it is doing. The memory becomes a neutral memory instead of producing an explosion of sensations and emotions in you. It simply becomes a neutral memory. “Oh, this happened”. This is the power of awareness and knowledge. Never confuse the shadow pain with the memory of it. Memory is false. The whole of your life is in your memory. The whole of your life is false. The present moment is the only truth. Future is always false, obviously, it is pure imagination. So what are you left with? The present moment is sufficient, full, whole. It is the only truth, that which is now and here, and is eternal, is the only truth. Whatever shadows and all this garbage are there, totally false.

You see, who cares if it is a spider that is causing it, cockroach, or your partner of a thousand lifetimes ago when you were a monkey in the trees? Is it necessary to get bothered by these things? In the dual level, we say, these are not me, pay attention to what you are, that is more important. That is necessary, all this monkey business of the mind and memory is totally unnecessary. Unless you are experimenting, you are trying to know something, then your memory is like a dissected frog in the lab. If you need its scientific knowledge then it is necessary. If you are not interested in that kind of experiment, research, just dump it.

Then how will I learn? I have all these experiences that made me learn. Okay, remember the lesson, don't remember the event, and don't let it overpower you to produce all these shadow copies of the sensations, emotions, and even the dialogues that can be heard back of people talking to you. What are these shadows of recall? Memory, false. You need to become aware that this is happening, a natural event is happening, okay, none of this is me. Will it affect you now? Will the past control the present?

Why is your past controlling the present? Why are these dead things producing living pain? Your mood is instantly off when you recall something bad. Why is your past affecting your present when there is no causal relation at all? The lessons that you have learned from the past have become your knowledge. Yes, act from knowledge. No need to dive into the memory. The more you dive, the more control the memory has on your present. We don't want that; we want freedom.

So not only the memory is false, not only it is producing shadows, copies, and fake sensations, it is totally unnecessary, useless, and it binds you. What kind of intelligent person will let it happen? What to do? Drop it. Nothing to do, drop it, it's useless. Just like you throw trash, you throw it. Why do you give it so much importance? Your mind is entertained endlessly by this drama. Even if it is painful, it likes it because it feels alive by doing that. If there is only peace and bliss, the ego is almost dead; it needs a little bit of drama, and then the mind is biased towards negativity because of the survival pressures. It will recall something bad. “This was not processed, process it now, go and kill that fellow who insulted you in the past life.” What is the use of it? No use.

In Sanskrit, we say, the karmic samskaras, are fruitful in the present time, they bring a fruit in the present time, karmaphala. See how beautiful this word is. They need not, but they do, the reason is ignorance, no knowledge of what is happening. This instrument is working randomly, without any control. What is it producing? Pain and suffering, even though the body is healthy, even though you are eating well, even though your family and everything is okay, you are totally secure, still it manages to produce hell within you. What is responsible for that? Ignorance.

It is your direct experience. It is perfectly logical. These things are not given to anybody. When a patient approaches the psychiatrist, the psychiatrist tells him, “Look, it is a very serious matter, it is going to take 6 months of treatment. You come every week, pay me this much.” This last line is most important; if you treat that fellow today, payment is gone, it is a loss. Nobody wants to treat these things; they know that he is going to stay alive. “My license of a registered practitioner, nobody can take it.” The only important thing is money; it is a business. The false memory is actually bread and butter for somebody. This is your society of “highly ethical” people, they pretend to be ethical, they are sucking the blood of their own patients. This can be cured in 2 minutes, by awareness, forever, it will never trouble you again. If this teaching is given in schools and colleges, 90% of suffering can be removed instantly from the world. Because it is all mental, it is all memory only.

There is a kind of pain which needs immediate attention, some damage to the body or some damage to the mind, one of the layers, there you need treatment immediately, that is necessary for survival, if you don't treat it, less chance of survival. But 90% of it is useless garbage in the memory. I know why people give that much importance to it, they think it is me, it is mine.

Sweety was saying, “my dreams”, why are they yours? Did you order them from Amazon.com, “Send me 3 horrifying dreams”? Now are they mine because I bought it? You never bought all these things; they happen naturally. They are not yours. Simply removing the “my” tag will reduce the effect by 95%. Not mine. If somebody else is dying, somebody else is in trouble, we are not affected. This is the power of letting go, dis-identification. So much pain is being caused in the world. Too many people are affected. If something happens in our neighborhood, and unfortunately, it happens in your family or to you, only you, it's yourself, then yes, then you are affected because it's mine now. It is me, or it is mine. It's amazing; identification makes the day into night, night into day, day and night difference. So I can go on like this, but you get the point. Not important at all. Be in awareness, reject these things. If they are not important, do not take any action. If it is not necessary, do not take any action.

Mary is asking, is it necessary to write down dreams in step number 4?

In step number 4, when you do the dream experiments, it is suggested that you write them down because then you will remember them. When you remember them, there will be a chance of attaining awareness, more chances of becoming aware in the dream state. That will lead you to the Turiya state; that is the goal of experiments, full control over all the states. How can it happen in just 3 months? No, the 3 months are just observation time. You need to do it for the whole of your life, I mean only if you are interested, you see, not necessary, not mandatory, they are optional experiments. The waking state experiments are necessary because most of your life is happening there, not in dreams or projections or sleep. We think that they are not important. You have not grown to that level where they become important to you.

Just yesterday I was saying this thing, wait till you grow to that level where the dreams and projections become important to you. Where your majority or a good portion of your life starts happening in dream and projection states, then you can worry about them. Your life is happening in the waking state, are you worried about that? No, dreams are doing this and dreams are doing that, and I am not getting that experience and I am not getting this. Your effort is in the wrong direction; your effort should be on waking. But nobody wants it; ordinary life is boring. Not interested in paying attention to daily work, not interested in becoming aware in that daily work, 9 to 5 jobs. It almost feels like a dead body, nothing exciting. The most exciting day is the weekend for you, isn't it? The most dreaded day is Monday because you are going to turn into a dead body that day, a zombie. Why have you done this to your life? Who is stopping you from living an adventurous life?

When I became aware of this thing that I am responsible for the bad condition, for becoming this zombie, 9 to 5 zombie, your “civilized” societies produce it. Such a good deed they are doing. I simply dropped it; I simply said no. Why are you a slave to these things? You say life is boring because you are not independent, you are not independent financially or emotionally or intellectually. Knowledge is also not there; what these people stuffed in your mind is your knowledge. So you need to cross these three barriers to make your life adventurous. Now every second is pure enjoyment. Every second is freedom; it is like growing a pair of wings. I am not lying; the angels are shown with wings. It does not mean they have wings; it means they are free. You are not.

Someday these dreams and all the other fantastic states will become important for you. Right now, the waking state is important; have you mastered it? Have you made it less boring? Is it blissful? Is it intense? Is your pre-allocation getting satisfied? Where are you going to satisfy it? When are you going to complete it? See, you are not going to finish your pre-allocation in the dreams or other states. Nothing happens there. Waking. Because you have ignored the waking, it is a less than optimal life, and is not being lived to the full intensity which you should as a human being. Nothing wrong in being a human; but you have become a zombie being, that is the problem. Am I right? Still fascinated with dreams and so on, fix your waking first.

Mary is saying, memory and mind are such big exaggerators. Why recalling memory is strengthening it? Why is there always a difference between reality and what the mind perceives? That means everything is fake in this illusion?

If you recall it ten times, you have given it, let us say, ten watts of energy. If you recall it a hundred times, you have given it a hundred watts of energy. Now it has become stronger because by recalling it, you have given more importance to it. Now it can overpower you easily. Am I saying that we should forget it? No, don't forget it, you see, because there is nobody to recall it. The recall happens first, and then there is a thought that I am recalling it. There is no “I” there; it is all mechanical. First, the recall happens automatically; then this identification happens. The person springs up, takes the ownership of the recall, “I am doing it.” The suffering begins, then it says, “I am suffering it.” This refreshed state is stored back in memory. Fed back. So the more you recall these things, the more effect it has. It does not mean that we suppress it and stop recalling it, or somehow distract ourselves. It means you become aware of it.

Control does not mean suppression or destruction of the memory or of whatever is happening naturally in the layers. It means observing it with full awareness, and then it actually completes its cycle and disappears. It is not going to stay, it is like a guest. If you offer drinks to the guest, if you offer tea, coffee, snacks to the guest, the guest is going to stay for a long time, isn't it? He came for twenty minutes; now he is going to stay for one hour because you are entertaining the guest, you are serving him. So these memories, especially the negative ones, are like guests. Don’t serve them tea; kick them out of the door. Let them finish, whatever they are doing. Who knows what mind is doing by recalling the memory? Let it recall; let it produce whatever junk it is producing. See, it is processing it; it is the function of the computer there. And you observe it; are you done? Yes, get out of here; I am not affected at all. This is the life of an aware person. You are strengthening it by recalling; the awareness reduces it to nothing. If it comes back, let it repeat in awareness, and you will find that it stops coming now. The guest who is not entertained will find something else to do; he will not bother you again.

Why is there a difference between reality and what the mind perceives? See, there is no “reality”, there is only perception; that is why we call it an illusion. There is only perception; whatever we call as the irreducible experiences, that’s not reality. So if there is no reality, there is no point in asking what is the difference; your illusion is your reality, your dream is your reality. There is no separate reality; the mind does not distinguish between memory recall and perception. The memory recall of cutting a lemon and tasting the juice of the lemon will make your mouth water. What does that mean? It is taken as real; it has produced the effect of a real lemon. The layers do not distinguish between perception and memory recall, and that is why when you are in the dream, which is purely memory generated, you cannot doubt that this is not real because the awareness is zero, and because the memory bridge is absent, there is a full belief that what is happening is real. However strange it is, the strangeness does not guarantee that you will take it as false; however strange your waking state is, you take it as truth only. This waking state is also very, very strange; you are habitual of it; that is why it looks normal. You say it is normal; something slightly goes wrong, and you say - paranormal, unreal, hallucination. The whole of it is a hallucination, you see. If you get a hallucination every day, every second, every minute, you are going to call it truth.

You should watch that movie, “A Beautiful Mind.” His hallucination was his truth, wasn't it? The professor, mathematician, the extraordinary genius ability gave him extraordinary mathematical talent, but then it gave him this hallucination also. There are many people like this. Who knows what is a dream; who knows what is reality? There is an interesting dialogue in the movie “Inception”. In an African country, somewhere underground, everybody is on a drug of some kind, a drip, and they are in the dream. So that fellow there, the organizer, says, “Their dream has become their reality; they need to come there every day to wake up.”

Just like you wake up in the waking state in this world every day, mechanically, mother nature puts you in the waking state; this is your reality, you need to come here. Is it true? You have forgotten what is true. You think there is a separate reality somewhere. It's totally false; it's totally a dream; the only truth is the dreamer. If you forget the dreamer, then it's painful, yes, it is confusing, it is disturbing.

Don't give the knowledge of illusion to somebody who has no self-realization because you are opening the doors to the madhouse for that person. If somebody is convinced that everything is a dream without realizing what is true, then obviously their mind will get disturbed. Those who know who I am, they are entitled to know that everything is false; otherwise, they are going to become crazy.

Poonam is asking, recalling happy memories invigorates, is the reverse for unhappiness. Why does it, in what way does PoK recommend we relate to memories of the present lifetime?

Just like I said, you do not have any control over what to recall. Otherwise, you would always recall the good ones, the happy memories. What usually happens is that happiness is forgotten instantly, and there is a clinging to the worst possible memories, and the fulfilled desires are forgotten, and there is a clinging to the unfulfilled ones. No gratitude towards what has been given. You are a billionaire, but you lost a coin, and now your whole day is ruined. So this is the natural thing that is happening.

Our recommendation is that you be aware of whatever comes; you don't have any control over what to bring. There is nobody there; the ego is an illusion too. There is no person who decides, “Look, today I am going to recall this.” No, impossible; it comes automatically. The only freedom you have, you can say, is to become aware. This creature has no other freedom; it is a machine. The knowledge gives you this freedom, the knowledge gives you wings to fly away. No knowledge means you are trapped; you are in prison. My recommendation is to get the knowledge, the rest will happen. If you micromanage every memory, when are you going to live your life? Get the knowledge; highly recommended.

Some people can ask, what is the use of this illusion, such a terrible thing? I can be better off without the illusion, without any experience, without the waking state or any other kind of useless state. That is the point of view of the one who wants to be liberated from the experiences. There are two or three kinds of seekers, one fellow wants to enjoy the illusion, the occult tantric way, embraces it. He will say, “This is me.” The body is me. The second fellow wants to liberate everybody else first; yes, total madness, I know; that is how they are - bodhisattva vritti. And the third one, “I’ve had enough of everything; I want to reduce it to nothing, dissolution, dissolved state.” Although it will never happen, that is also an illusion. The nature of the illusion is changed; you will never stay dissolved forever obviously, you are not there right now either. So whatever you have dissolved is also of no consequence.

The real liberation is to understand that there is no person right now; there is no individual right now. Now what are you going to dissolve? Now the other two are more promising. Now I will tell you the secret; you can be both at the same time; you can embrace the illusion because it is you, obviously. Nothing wrong with that. And then you can try to liberate others also, there is more fun this way. You are not bound to choose one; you can choose all three ways, all three goals of evolution. “No, no, I am the experiencer.” - That is stupid; you are the experiencer since eternity; you will remain that; this is not a goal; this is a realization. The goal is concerning the creature, this memory structure which is evolving. What is your goal? You can be all three.

The whole, the dissolved one, you are already that, there is no individual, so what are you going to dissolve there? These vibrational patterns? What will you get by dissolving them into nothingness? Nothing. You are already that; you are already dissolved. Live for others because there is no you, as an individual, there is nobody. And the third thing, getting involved in the illusion, a lot of fun. It's very colorful. Once you know there is nothing right and wrong, once you know you have no limitations, you are not bound by rules, the more you evolve, the more there is to play. Your capabilities increase. Right now, a tiny-whiny memory can control your whole life - I don’t call it evolution. It takes only common sense to decide, so I have already decided. That is what is happening every day for me. Choose wisely. Do you want to spend all your life treating this thing? - Nothing good is happening, this problem is happening, and this fellow is doing that; your husband is doing that, and your wife is doing that - Do you want to spend your life like this, or do you want to jump into the rabbit hole? Choose your pill right now.

I was discussing with the biology teacher that let's say when a person inhales more oxygen like in some meditation practices or let's say in pranayama, then she was saying that more oxygen produces more ATP in the body, and more energy is released. So, I was saying to her that because of that more energy, obviously, the person will become more conscious. That previously, let's say the legs were not that conscious, but after inhaling more oxygen, even the experience of legs will come into awareness. So when we use it sometimes, that particular layer comes into the picture. So we say as a model that this particular layer has got energized.

My knowledge is limited because I’m not on the yogic path right now. But what happens is the oxygen will only activate the physical layer, which means the body and the nervous system, only these two. What happens is when this is activated to a certain level, when you are not hyperventilating, only the required amount of oxygen is taken, slightly more than normal, then the interface with the higher layers and the lower layers becomes stronger. It is not that the breathing exercises are activating the higher layers. The oxygen never reaches that point as the oxygen is consumed in the body only. So there is an invigoration, there is an adding of energy in the lower layers by a certain kind of breathing. If you simply breathe like mad you will faint, too much oxygen. Controlled breathing can be found in many pranayama practices, and they actually cause good communication between the higher and the lower.

The lower is mostly kind of inactive and gets activated only when there is danger or there is a beautiful woman or something, you know, survival, otherwise it is mostly passive, it is doing nothing. So how to motivate it? Breathing. Then whatever your intentions are, whatever your desires are, they find a way into the body. Now your house will be cleaned in 5 minutes, food will be prepared in 15 minutes, you are inviting guests etc. What is this? More “alive” life. But breathing is not going to affect any of the higher layers. There are other exercises to affect the higher layers, in which I am not going to go. It's a whole new topic now. There is a specific technique for every layer, as Sadhguru does it, and many Kriya Yogis do it. You must have experienced it. I am saying that this whole thing is a path of energies.

Bhava Spandana will activate the layer of emotions. Actually, I have experienced it for a short while, and it is very easy actually. You can also do it with a partner. The partners face each other, and they tell 5 things that were positive in their life, the most important things that were positive, like you got a job, got married, and you got a child or whatever, should be something positive. The other person also says something positive, and it works best when these two people are of the opposite gender. And after you finish that short dialogue, you will see there is activation of the emotional layer.

Actually, when we did it in the presence of Sadhguru, the effect lasted for many hours. I remember this thing, I was in Mumbai, there was an event there, and we did as he instructed. I was facing a woman, and it felt as if that person was my friend, since many many years. Actually, we sat together for the rest of the program, it was an amazing feeling, a smile on the face and so on.

It does not last, why? It is a temporary activation only, the same way there are ways to activate other layers. It should not be done without a Guru, you don't know what you are doing. You will find the tricks, you will find the techniques everywhere, in the books, in the videos and all, but I never recommend these things. Our method is top down, you activate the topmost layer. I have given you the technique. This layer is called the layer of awareness, it is activated simply by remembering the knowledge, remember it, who you are, what is this thing that is looking, what is this thing that is being experienced, is it real, is it a dream. You will see that it is activated now, this is also called the Ajna in Sanskrit, and then it commands. Ajna means command, it commands all the layers below it, it activates everything, now your life is joyful, now your life is intense.

There is a misunderstanding among people, mostly the ignorant people who are not on the path, that knowing that everything is an illusion will simply make me inactive, dumb. Just like I said, don't do it without a Guru, a self-realized person has a different notion of these things, an ignorant person, this information simply damages him. So life becomes more intense, actually, when you know what it is, the layers will spring to life, they won't become inactive. Actually, you won't be able to sleep; the dreams will be your satsang. I remember this thing, many of my dreams are simply teaching people and getting taught from other masters. I say leave me alone in the dream at least, but no, same thing. Who knows what is happening in the other worlds, other layers, and so on? What kind of projections are happening there? We don't remember that in the waking state now, but you are very big, and this whole thing is energized.

Our way is very important actually, you think that it is intellectual, you think that it is not strong. What do I think? I think it is the most powerful thing to do, yes you can eat some kind of grass or something, tea or something to make your body energized, stupid things, or you can breathe, the energy body or the etheric body is energized, you do the bhava spandana, or whatever to make the emotions rise up, but it is all childish, in front of what I have given or what our masters have given.

Why is every student not like this? They have different kinds of impurities in them. All of you who are present in the satsang and who are in the program, all of you have a different kind of impurities in them, so all are experiencing different manifestations. Some lives have become so intense, few of my students got burnt out. Sometimes burning out happens, then I tell them to get away from spirituality, stop the satsang, stop reading, stop watching, eat more, sleep more, go out for tracking, walking, whatever makes you more physical. Imbalance happens there because of too much activation, that is why we recommend never to do it without a guru, you don't know what you are doing, it's too powerful.

Parteep is saying, even the silence of such a person will be powerful.

Yes, only the body is silent. Your mouth is closed, but all the layers are speaking intensely. It is vibrational. Anyhow, there will be activation of all the layers. Your body will become hyperactive or won't need sleep, and you won't need too much food, especially the bad kind of food, toxic food that you are eating. Sattvic food, yes, you will eat it because even though the body does not need the food energy, but some material is needed because the cells are dying all the time. They get replaced by new ones and hence need fresh material. You need that much food to replace the material because the energy cannot create the matter. Energy can only energize the matter.

The physical body is material, but the other bodies are non-material. They are even non-mental also, the higher ones. So the need for replacement of the matter makes you eat; otherwise, you don't need to eat when you are on the path of knowledge. Can you believe it? Remember that not only that the Swadhisthana will be activated, too much sexual energy will be there. It does not mean that you get out of control. There will be awareness; it will be ineffective. There will always be a fire of lust in you, there will be too much love in you, because the emotional layer, the heart center will be activated. Your speech will open up; there will be magic in your speech. Your voice will become attractive, and the intelligence will open up. You will understand who is fooling me and who is troubling me, and whatever you say is brilliant. That means your whole life will become easy actually. And then you are on the right path. Suddenly instead of riding on a bullock cart or something, you are in the Ferrari. You are on the superhighway now. This is what we call living intensely.

Although other people will perceive you as a normal human being, eating, sleeping, cleaning, cooking, doing the job and watching some crazy videos and sitting in the satsang for 2-3 hours, craziness it is, for an ordinary person, you sit here and listen to this crazy fellow for 2 hours, they will be amazed. I have seen there are some people in our groups; they have joined all other satsangs also. I think every day there is a satsang now, some days there are two, and they have joined all of them. I say, what is going on? What do you do? You don't have any life or what? One is enough, no? But no, such a person is now fully alive, not a zombie anymore.

So remember you are given something very, very powerful. Your impurities stop you from intensifying it. I know nothing because I have forgotten everything and it has no effect on my life - What has happened here? This path is not for that person then or the impurities are many and patience is zero. I Don't want to wait for the results? The result has already happened. The result on the path of knowledge is knowledge; you got the knowledge, yes, that much should happen, and the rest will be done slowly or sometimes quickly. We don't do more than that; activate the awareness. If you want to play with the lower layers, be careful, anything can happen there which is beyond human control. People run to the doctor; but the doctor knows only 10% of the body actually. What does the doctor know about the spiritual layers and the mental layers and the spiritual life? Zero. Run to your guru. If you don't have a guru, cry in the corner; nobody will help you. Do not do this.

Many new people have come to me asking for guidance, and one thing is common in all of them, that they all say that they cried when they interacted with me, having left with no other options in their life.

I always say, crying is a manifestation of purification only. Some things troubled them so much that they gave up the effort now, and instantly everything was dropped, the effort was in the wrong direction, in the material side. Probably trying to get happiness from objects, people, relations, and intellectual stuff and money failed, so now they're crying. But instantly all these things were dropped, and purification happened, now there is an opening, and the gurufield has been patiently waiting for this opening to happen for 25 years. And when this opening happened, there is a bit of willingness to listen to a guru, instantly the guru is dropped in front of him, airdropped from a helicopter in front of them.

I also get all these cases, when they break down from their material lives, then and only then they pursue a spiritual life. It is unfortunate but you know that's a good way. As soon as they get some relief, they're back in the material life. Why? Guru is there, no? If something bad happens, you'll fix it, like you know the doctor fixed my last disease. I'm now eating here and there because if something bad happens; he will fix it again. A will for spirituality has awoken, but the intelligence is still zero, so again we wait for some time, they will come back. However, some people are intelligent, and they see the value in spirituality, and they never leave. As soon as you taste it, you will never leave it; there's nothing else which is more important in our lives.

Varun is asking, Is frozen food healthy?

It depends on what you are freezing. If it's vegetables, okay, it's fine. Do not freeze the cooked food. Not only will it become tasteless, we don't know what it will do to the body, because cooking means some chemical alteration has happened, it is boiled, hydrolysis, and so on. If you freeze meat and fish it can be a big problem because we think that they are going to stay like that when frozen, but no, because of the complexity of the animal body, it keeps degrading even if frozen. How nice it would be if you can keep everything as it is in an animal body by simply freezing it. That means you can freeze yourself right now, wake up after 100 years in a better world, hopefully, you know, not a destroyed world. Is it possible? No, you can read a lot of research. It is called cryogenics, and they have found only one thing that no matter how much you freeze it, it is going to get damaged, the cellular structure and the chemicals and all these things in the body are destroyed. Because they're highly active, you see, it is not meant to be frozen; it is meant to operate. So it will change. There is a certain minimum temperature and if you freeze below that temperature, the body is damaged. If you keep it above that temperature, it will degrade; it will be rotten because many of the cells in our bodies are actually bacteria. The bacteria cannot be frozen easily. They are active, and this cryogenics was developed when there was no concept of the biome or the body was not seen as an ecosystem then. Nowadays, doctors and scientists see the body as an ecosystem rather than as a separate machine, which is operating independently. It is not independent, so you cannot keep it independent. It is a dynamic structure, so the whole field has collapsed, because the temperature range in which the body can be sustained will actually degrade it, and will actually rot it. Freeze it below that, and it's already damaged because the chemicals freeze, and they break all the cells. The body is 70% water, when it is frozen, it expands and breaks the cellular structure. So when it is unfrozen, you get a dead body.

The good thing about vegetables is their structure is very simple. It is glucose, starch, a little bit of protein here and there that's all there is. If you freeze it, it will remain that way; it's not going to change too much. Even the cellular structure is destroyed, no problem; it is going to stay like this. So that is my logic, actually. But what is my recommendation? Always eat fresh food, buy it from vegetable market, cook it, and eat it immediately. The vegetables should be kept fresh in the fridge. But beyond that, don't try to experiment too much with the food. The plants are to be eaten alive. Freezing them kills a lot of stuff in the plants. So what do I get from the market? All fresh vegetables. And there is a very good thing about the seeds: they are already frozen by Mother Nature. Nothing is happening in the seed, nothing. Wheat, rice, chana, dal, are amazing seeds. So grains and vegetables are the best food for humans, especially for seekers.

Guruji, there is one thing that when I was observing the process of all the layers, then actually your most important video in the program, which I came across, was in Hindi where multi-layered things are explained. So based on that, I got one thing, one observation that all the intentions, let's say sexual intentions, intentions for pleasure, for relations, for speaking, and even for awareness, all these things come in the form of desires and intentions. So while these yogic people and other people who categorized this based on layers, they actually categorized the desires. This is what I want to ask because all these things, the functioning of the layers, comes in the form of intentions only.

Yes, the activity gives rise to a result, that result is whatever you call as desire. Activity of the causal layer causes many desires, but let us say hunger, the desire to eat is an activity of the lower layer, the body, the activity produces a demand, something needs to be fulfilled, that will be called a desire. So yes, sexual activity is a desire, emotional activities, fulfillment of emotions and intellectual activity, knowledge, creation, arts, and so on, you have a desire to create. So a very good observation, the activity is the desire.

How do they form the hierarchy that let's say hunger and pleasure are there or sexual things are there or some other activity is there?

There is a law of layers, the program mentions it that the higher layers control the lower layers plus there is a logical relation like this that the nervous system cannot exist without the body, so obviously the body is the base for the nervous system. Instead of one upon the other, you can arrange it left to right, no problem, so it is only a convenient model. Actually there is nothing above and nothing below. Your intellectual desire is actually equal to hunger from the point of view of mother nature, it is not higher or lower, so this is only convenience.

Anita has a question, Is recalling, remembering good memories or qualities of a close being (a pet) after it's no more fine? If remembered out of compassion?

As I said, there is nobody to recall anything; the recall happens; the memories simply come, why, when, how, we don't know all these things, it's a process going on, then they turn into desires like I said, some action can happen, you can look at a photo, or you can cry a little bit, or you want another dog now. Actions happen because of these. If it is necessary, then it is okay, if it is totally unnecessary, you don't need that thing now, then the recall may be there, but action is not required, enjoy the recall, if there are good memories, enjoy them for two minutes and do not get attached to them, “I want to recall it every day because it feels so nice,” - what is that? Ignorance. When it happens automatically, you see a dog somewhere or a cat whatever, fish or your plant, and you recall something good that happened, and you drink the juice of that, whatever is produced by the mind, it's all fake, it's all an illusion, anyhow, there is nothing else to enjoy, so enjoy the illusion and let it go. That is fine. Acting on it is a waste of time and energy, that is not fine.

Vipin, there are personalities in the waking state that are highly ambitious with a great intention to achieve their goal. They put so much energy that others follow them like leaders also. Can they be compared to tantrics? If not, what is the difference?

Yes, even without knowledge, some people have mastered the energy aspect. You see the leaders and the military people; they are very energized in their middle layers, social layers, with a lot of social intelligence, although they may know nothing in terms of deep knowledge. So when people have such energy in them, they can do things that ordinary people cannot. They can lead, fight, and command attention. They are charismatic, people become followers. The same applies to artists and other individuals who may not possess profound awareness or knowledge but have significant personal power. Then there are yogis, spiritual seekers, and those on a higher path. They may appear gentler and less active in the conventional sense, but they wield immense power, often beyond ordinary intelligence. However, they tend to have fewer followers compared to the more sensationalized leaders.

Regarding the term “tantric”, there is some truth in it. Tantrics are not just those who work with higher layers or states; individuals like the ambitious and energized leaders you mentioned are also on a tantric path in a sense. They have evolved to manipulate society or matter, and they can create things, objects, and innovations, making them part of the tantric field. It’s worth noting that the Sanskrit word for technology is “tantra.”

Siddhi is saying, one of his quotes is to avoid eating things which come with a barcode.

Nowadays, even the fresh vegetables have barcodes. I have seen it in the supermarkets. So you do not need to take it so seriously. Yes, the best thing is to go and graze in the field itself. No, actually, we are humans; we have intelligence. Check whether it is fresh or not, check what is the effect of that food on your body, and if all is well, even if it has a barcode, buy it.

Sometimes we need to buy frozen food also, like paneer. It is frozen for two months, three months, but we know there is nothing living in that, it is already a chemical. But if it is cooked, it should be consumed quickly. My rule is to consume it in 24 hours. On summer days, you cannot consume the food which is cooked in the morning, in the evening; you need to throw it away. So what is the solution to this? Cook only that much which you can eat, there is no leftover then, it is easy to clean also, clean your plate immediately after eating, less waste of time. You will avoid overeating like this because you don't have too much control over overeating, but you have a lot of control over the amount that you cook. If you bought a full bag of potato chips, it's almost certain that you will eat all of it, but if you need to cook potato salad or aloo paratha or something like this, you know how much is needed for me and you cook only that much. This gives you control over diet.

Obviously, you are not going to eat raw potatoes, so you can keep a kg or two of them in your house. So there are a lot of advantages of eating fresh food cooked by yourself and consuming it quickly. This is called purification of the body, a healthy lifestyle. Most of the people are not following it, that is why they need more things like drugs, alcohol or cigarettes and violent movies and politics and wars to make them happy because the body is not blissful, you see? Just like any other layer, if this body is well balanced, if it is well-fed, by well-fed I don't mean too much feeding, normally balanced diet, it will be blissful. So blissful that you will forget that there is a body, no pains, no heaviness, it will rest. It will not rest too much; it will do its normal work, it can lift weights, it can climb stairs, it will not grow old, it will remain beautiful, attractive, clean. See how many advantages there are.

You need to follow one or two rules only: get the fresh food, cook it yourself, cook it in the quantity that is healthy, not too little, not too much, and do not keep it forever rotting there, consume it quickly. There are more guidelines about the health and hygiene which are given in our purification videos, step number six.

Varun is asking, can you explain how Sadhguru is trapped in different life forms in a human body? Sadhguru explained that in Kailash, he had a very intractable life form and the life form fell trapped and then wanted to get up very fast. The human body in which he was trying to trap it had a bowl of water just by the head. The water started boiling; there's a small video of it. Joe Rogan wanted to find out how this happened. Obviously, Sadguru didn't want to explain to him.

You see, I'm also not able to understand it, so I won't be able to explain how he did it. I can tell you what it can be. It is simply a temporary possession, as we have explained in our program. It is possible for some non-physical creature with a little bit of ability to get hold of a physical body because the connection between the causal body or the subtle body and the physical is only an energetic connection; it is not that they are in the physical body, they are not. But you can say that there is strong communication with it, very strong communication without any wires. Any strong being or even a human or a tantric can possess another body. The body is only like a car; anybody can drive it if they have the key. So what Sadhguru is probably demonstrating is that he knows such people on the other side, and he can ask them to do all these things. It looks like he is saying, “Look, you guys are puppets, you guys are idiots, you don’t know anything.” What happens by doing a little demo like this is that it increases his popularity. Obviously, he will never tell you why or how he does it. It’s a lot of help from the other side and his Guru, obviously.

So it appears that he is following a command from his Guru to make spirituality popular. I have never seen him do more than that. Probably he has an inner circle where he is putting people on the fast track, evolving them and so on. But for people like us who are outside or who are merely his disciples and seekers, not much is revealed, not much is given. But what is given is a seed-knowledge that there is a different dimension to your material life, that whatever you thought is material life is not actually material. That much he can plant in the minds of ordinary people, making spirituality popular. We call such people Lok Gurus. Now, it’s not that he is only a Lok Guru; he is also a Sat Guru. It's not that he has no self-realization or doesn't know that this is an illusion. It's not that he doesn't know the things we know. Obviously, being my Guru, I know he knows. But right now, the job he is doing is almost crazy, totally crazy. He is driving a bike across the world or something like this. You can see their popularity strategies. Whatever he does is appealing to masses, he appears with a beautiful actress on TV, a lot of videos exist where he says nothing actually, empty words but installs a little bit of curiosity in viewers. You scratch your head, wondering what did he say, and you are pulled in.

Pandurang is saying that there are beings from different dimensions.

Yes from some different non-physical worlds. And who knows, they can be humans who are dead, who are seekers, and then they are not incarnated so far. But yes, because he is Sadhguru, he needs to sensationalize it so that people pay attention. There is one more Guru who does things like this, his name is Sri M. He has books that are very popular, and what is written in the books? Some serpent man came from the serpent world and did this, and then a UFO came and who knows what. What is the effect of it? People take his classes. They are initiated into what? Serpent world? No, they are initiated into Kriya Yoga, which causes evolution. So most of the time, they are just a circus to attract ordinary people who will never be attracted to spirituality. It's like a baby who refuses to go to school. What do you say? You will get friends there, there are big dinosaur toys there, there is a playground there, and your teacher is going to tell you very good things. You will get chocolates. What does he get there? Homework, exams, political history written by politicians, all kinds of garbage. So when his life is ruined, and he becomes an employee in a multinational company making other people rich, serving like a slave, only then he realizes he wasted it. Anyhow, it is not meant to be an exact metaphor, but you encourage your child like this to get education.

Similarly, gurus do many things to trap you. They lie. You will not regret it. And like the school, you are not going to regret it. You will be thankful to the guru that you told me that story on the Mansarovar, and I joined you, and now I am an evolved being who possesses other bodies. See, those who cannot be convinced by intellect alone, by knowledge alone, they should go and join these gurus. Highly entertaining and very good for your growth. Those who like no-nonsense knowledge should stay on the path of knowledge. Probably, this is the most entertaining thing on the path of knowledge. We bare the magician; we say, you know, we make him naked. The magician has nothing to hide now. That is what I find most entertaining here. We know everything here. That is the problem and also a very entertaining thing. Ask me this, I already know what it is. So the mystery is gone. But the most mysterious thing is you. You will never know what it is, but you are it. The whole existence is you. Nothing can be known about it. You can know a few snippets of the dream. It's a dream, isn't it? Anything is possible here, and you think, how exciting, how mesmerizing, how mysterious. But these small mysteries hide the biggest mystery, which is you, the non-dual existence is you. This is final.

Session 167

We'll discuss some of the questions from the test.

When can we say the knowledge ends?

The ignorance ends, not the knowledge, and when the fundamentals are understood, there is nothing to know. It is not that you will end up with a lot of facts and books, piles of books of knowledge; nothing will be left there. So it's more accurate to say that the ignorance ends. The knowledge is of the illusion which will never end, it is infinite because the illusion is infinite. How much will you know if you know the whole world? There are thousands, millions of worlds to know.

Can an ignorant person know that he or she is ignorant?

Some people can have a hint that they lack something, but they don't know what they lack. As soon as they know, it is gone. If an ignorant person knows he or she is ignorant, and he'll, she'll try to get knowledge immediately. The correction will start as soon as the ignorance is known. Why do people stay ignorant for the whole of their lives? The dissatisfaction is not knowing that I am ignorant. Dissatisfaction is the result of ignorance, its outcome, a side effect, suffering, stupidity, bondage, working like a donkey fulfilling everybody else's desires. What are these? Symptoms of ignorance. An average person will never know anything. The fellow does not know the meaning of direct experience also, and his study is mostly a study of books and rote learning.

My opinion is that ignorance when it is known will no longer remain ignorance for long. Actually, the sign of ignorance is that the fellow is convinced that I know everything. I am the most intelligent human on this planet, the person with the most hubris and superiority complex has the lowest intelligence on this planet.

Which qualities of a seeker make him/her an exceptionally gifted seeker?

The qualities of a seeker is a very precise video about it in your program. Memorize all this, so you should immediately produce a list of most important qualities when you are asked such a question. Gifted seekers, yes, they have more of them. Everybody has potential, everybody has possibilities, but the gifted ones are masters of these qualities.

Which book has complete knowledge?

No book has complete knowledge; there is no knowledge in the book. The book is written after the knowledge is there; the book is not a source of knowledge; it is an expression of knowledge, and all people on the path of knowledge should do something like this, get the knowledge which is your own effort, direct experience and logic and the hint of the guru. These are the ingredients of the recipe of knowledge. Now write the book, recipe book, right? Yes, the book of me, my book; you can write “iBook.” It’s a fashion nowadays to put “I” everywhere. There’s so much ego involved in consumerist people, “I” means great; it is going to sell the product. So write the “iBook.” Who am I? Everybody's doing it; you should also write your own.

The recipe is made first practically, then the book is written. Have you ever seen a cooking book where the cook knows nothing about cooking and is writing books, or he knows everything simply because he read the cookbook, never cooked anything in his life? Is it possible? Same way, there can be knowledge in the books, which will be an expression of what the person knows. But you need to get your own knowledge. We have thrown out the books as a source of knowledge in our program, at least in my system. We got rid of it. But they're useful only after you get the knowledge, and they're useful for the illusion, obviously.

Experiencer knows nothing, please comment.

Knowledge is an accumulation in the mind. Experiencer has nothing, zero. It is pure and empty, so no knowledge. It is a witness of the knowledge, ignorance, everything in between.

Experiences depend on the experiencer. State your opinion.

Is experience dependent on the experiencer? How is the experience dependent on the experiencer?

One doesn't exist without the other; they both are together. Yes, no experience without the experiencer. We are talking about the dependence, the relation. Dependence assumes that one follows the other, right? Your child is dependent on you, let us say, social situation. So you have an independent existence without your child. And let us say the fire depends on the fuel. So fuel is already there, then comes the fire, which cannot happen without the petrol or oil or whatever. Can we have this kind of dependency relation between the two? The relation is of oneness, not of dependency. You know, this is a very subtle question. I know a very difficult question, and many people have this kind of opinion. I'm not going to say that it is wrong to call it a dependency. But then you should have an understanding that this word is not suitable. The word hints towards a very peculiar relation, but it's not a relation, actually. It takes two to relate; but there is only one. Is a relation possible? Is dependency possible?

I gave you the example of fire; the fuel exists without fire also. But the experiencer does not. It is never seen without experience. Amazing! And the experience was never seen without a body. And so that is the cause of ignorance, that the experiencer depends on the body. There begins the materialism. You can trace it to the word dependency because the word dependency was not understood by the materialist. The argument is the body comes first, then comes the experiencer of the body, which is dependent on the body. Is this argument correct? Obviously, a totally illogical, stupid argument. The body was never seen without the experiencer. The idealist has the opposite argument, like the experiencer is the fundamental, and the body appears in it. The body is dependent on it, and that is the trademark of Shaivism and some other philosophies. But non-dualist knows. In this whole universe only non-dualist people know. Others, I don't have any good words for them.

Can the intellect grasp the non-duality? No. So it is very natural for these kinds of confusions to be there. What is dependent on what? You are trapped in duality most of the time. You are discussing duality. I mean, there is nothing to discuss in non-duality. It is silent.

Why is the layered structure repeatedly going through the cycle of incarnation?

It is going through the cycles of incarnation for the fulfillment of desires. It will continue doing that till most of them are fulfilled. This is the traditional view also; everybody knows this thing. Now there is science behind it that explains how this is being done. But the question is a “why” question; you need a reason there. And don't worry; the final reason will never be found. Only immediate reasons can be given, immediate causes can be given, and not the final cause because there is no final cause. It is non-causal.

What causes mental distortions?

Ignorance is the bottom line. Society adds to this already poisonous thing, ignorance and stupidity, and the traumas and struggles and madhouse that you live in. It is a madhouse, your world, that causes mental distortion. Otherwise, we are very pure. Even the causal body is very innocent; it is just a structure, a beautiful structure. Coming here causes ignorance and mental distortions. Simply taking birth in human society, especially in this time, in this age of darkness. It's not totally dark because there are points of light here, stars in the background of darkness.

We are not complete without knowledge, yet the existence is already whole and complete. How is this possible?

We are not complete without knowledge - is a false statement. We are complete even if there is ignorance. When that belief is dropped, what do you find? I'm whole and complete already since eternity. So the knowledge is simply coming back to this realization of what we already are. It is not a completion. “Oh, I'm incomplete, I got the knowledge, now I become complete.” - No, this will never happen. You will never become complete. Only there will be a realization that I was always complete and whole. I am the whole. Ignorance is also part of wholeness. You see, the Brahman is everything. It also has ignorance. Why should it leave out that possibility? It cannot leave out the possibility.

Vinay is saying, Isn't it the end of seeking instead of the end of ignorance?

Yes, yes, you are right. End of the path, end of seeking, end of trouble, end of suffering. When you know your true nature, it ends so many things. End of bondage, end of birth, death, and so on. You see, there are many fruits. But we are focusing on the knowledge here. When you get the knowledge, the seeking is obviously going to end. What are you seeking now? Now that's why I urge people to not get lost in the illusion so much. I kill their practices, it is just a habit. You are mechanically doing your practices even after getting the knowledge. It is like you turned off the fan, and the fan is still going on. So I simply put a broom in the fan and stop it.

Raja's question - Can we understand that likes and dislikes are majorly due to our pre-allocation? Of course, some are required over time of this life due to sweet or sour personal experiences.

Yes, perfectly right. Many of your likes and dislikes or preferences are mostly coming from your pre-allocation, which is not a correct word. More accurately, they come from your causal body. So you get the fragrance of your past life there in the likes and dislikes and preferences, which you can see in the children, little kids. They come with a built-in personality, if you observe carefully. Not all of them, some are raw, some are blank slate, but many of them. And in this lifetime also, again, they accumulate many of the preferences. The world can change, new things can come, and so on.

Question two, The self is just a witness of all experiences, and there is no free will. Then do we need to play a double role? One role as you have realized who you are, and the other as one as per the ignorant environment in which you have to live.

No, don't open the doors of a mental asylum. You have to play only one role, which is being a human. Whatever environment it is, play the role of a human. Can you play the role of the experiencer or the self? No, you are originally that. You see, when an actor is playing the role of, let's say, a superhero, is he playing two roles in the movie, one which he is in real life and the other, Batman? Is it possible? No, he's only playing one role of Batman. And then he realizes, he gets glimpses of what he actually is outside the screen, outside the view of the camera. Actually, he's always in the knowledge of what he is, but he's playing the role for the movie. The whole illusion is a movie. You need to play your role there, evolve, learn, enjoy, fulfill your desires, struggle, suffer. This is the movie. It has all the masala, a Bollywood movie. In the end, there is no marriage, you know, except if it is Bollywood.

Then you don't need to play the role of self. You are the self. Let this play happen in the background of peace and bliss of what you are. See, you are the screen. You are not the movie. Don't try to make the character out of self and try to play it on the screen. What kind of ignorance is that? We'll never do that. What is the meaning of awareness? Simply knowing that I am the screen and then letting the movie play on this screen. Is that difficult? It is easier than breathing.

And he's asking, Can you talk about astral projections and the difference with projected states? Is a similar technique used to induce it?

Yes, it's very similar. And the word “projected states” is a general word, which is a spectrum of all projections. Astral is one of the possibilities only. So astral projection comes from the Western occult, and you will find that many explorers use this term. But there are many more who will also talk about other kinds of projections. For example, the etheric projection, or you can say even the ectoplasmic projections. Those who are in the occult, they know all these things. They're more difficult to achieve, and they're more lifelike. By lifelike, I mean more like the waking state. The astral will be more like the dream state, where you get the dream body, but it will also be very convincing, actually. These series of projections can happen as all your bodies detach from the physical. This is occult language. Please don't assume that there are bodies, and they detach. This is cryptic language. When you get the experience, you will know why this language is being used like this. So what is the difference? Projected states include all kinds of projections. Astral is that specific kind of projection. But there are opinions about it in the occult world. There will be a difference of opinion about what is the meaning of astral. In our program, obviously, we threw out the corrupt words.

Now, when you get the knowledge of the layers, you can associate one projected state with one layer, am I right? Or a group of layers, like in the waking state, the physical and so on, up to the emotional has been manifested in the physical form. The pain and pleasure and all, what are these things? They are these groups of layers, they have been manifested. Whatever you call a human being, it is a projection of the memory. It's not real, a memory only, but then, what happens when the attention shifts from the lower layers? They are not lower, actually. They are simply other projections. But when you shift it to something else. By shifting, I mean completely forgetting the lower. By forgetting, I mean, you have the knowledge of what you are in the waking state, but you don't have the experience. That is what we call forgetting, sleeping. And now, which one of the layers will be activated first? It will be in the etheric, just above the nervous system, because the nervous system and below has been put to sleep. There is no knowledge of it. So that is the first one that will be induced. If you want to induce something, what do we do? Our techniques should reflect it. Like he has asked about the techniques also. So our techniques are dependent on what kind of projection you want. I have given a general technique.

Shift your attention to any layer, you will get that projection. Just when you stop listening to your inner sound, the ringing in the ear, the hissing sound of silence, there you have achieved a separation from the nervous system. That is the etheric projection. Most of the people will find themselves still standing in the room, floating in the room. There is no place to stand there, no floor, no room. They find themselves in an energetic copy of the physical. But you can leave it, it's very limited, almost physical. Then there comes the astral, which is the world of emotions, desires, a little bit of intelligence. Yes, that is the proper astral. And then comes the higher projections, which you all know what they are.

When you are reading the Akashic records, it is a very high kind of projection. You cannot call it astral. But because of widespread ignorance about the states and projections and so on, there are not enough terms in the English language. I mean, who knows, there can be terms in the occult language. But, I've never seen many terms in Sanskrit either. And because this knowledge is kept so confidential, there are no proper words. And for the first time in our program, we have opened it. Still, I'm not giving them any specific names. I simply say, “Look, there is a projected body corresponding to every layer.” And sometimes the neighboring layers, they are grouped in, they influence the experience.

So, technique is mostly shifting of attention, forgetting other layers. That is the basic technique. You can build your own technique. I have not given any detailed techniques. You can find them in books anyway. There are very good books on astral projection and other projections. And there are some books on mental projections where in the gurufield and all those things come from.

Parteep is asking, What's this position called when I project another body in this waking state, but I cannot touch objects? It can just pass through them. I can see, but any specific word activity is possible through this projection, but consequences cannot be seen.

Projecting another body in the waking state is called bilocation. Go and search. I mean, this is not our path. I don't know. You can call it bilocation, multi-location. It is possible because you are in the projected state right now. Project any number of bodies, if you know how to. But then, if you are doing it, it will be a big achievement. I want to know if Parteep is doing it. Are you doing it? You saw another body in the waking state?

I have seen other things which correspond to some non-physical senses. I have seen some other things, but not me. But the question is related to what I can see, after lying down or in a 45-degree angle when we are on the bed or at some place, then the complete waking world can be seen.

It is not bilocation, then. Bilocation means you produce an entire body in the waking state. Everybody can see it. What you are describing is the overlapping of waking and projecting. There, the memory bridge is so strong that your attention includes the waking. It is possible. So it is another projection, only the waking has overpowered it with this transition time from the waking to projection without entering the dream or sleep. Very good progress in this field. Experience, write down your experiences.

But one thing is that action is possible in this. But what about the consequences? How do we see the cause and effect?

Yes, there will be consequences. By projecting, we cannot bypass the karmic law. However, what will be the consequence in the waking state, in this world, physical world? The name of the waking state is the physical world. What will be the consequence here? Hardly any. Unless you do something so strange that causes consequences in the physical world, there won't be much consequence. But yes, there will be consequences in your astral world or wherever you are. You see, who knows where you go? The action is not possible in the physical world. If you can act in the physical world by being in the etheric state, it's possible in the etheric projection, like the ghost phenomena, poltergeist phenomena is etheric projection. So they can cause a little bit of consequence here, but not much. You need a physical body to actually produce a karmic consequence in the physical world.

Mary is asking, How is it possible to read the Akashic records?

It's very easy. Go to step number four first. There, the technique is given. You need to make an intention in the emptiness state, in what you call zero point state. That state where there is perfect silence, you need to make an intention, a very strong intention that, “I want to read this kind of history or future.” And you will be taken there. Who knows what can happen after that? It's all an illusion. So everything is possible there. And these videos explain all kinds of experiments that you can do, major experiments, dozens of experiments. One of them is reading of the past. It looks like we've opened Pandora's box now. Projected state, fascinating.

Vipin is saying, in the dreams which are a kind of projected state it is seen that quality of experience influences the body in waking state, like general relaxation in case of pleasant dream and tiredness in case of unpleasant dream, these fruits of dream are there in waking state?

Yes you're right, but how much? A bad dream occurs and then you wake up with that experience. The remains of horror will be physical effects, your heart will be beating fast, you're breathing fast, there will be sweating, trembling, some people scream or jump in the bed. The dream is so horrifying. These are the consequences but they will go away in five-ten minutes. If the consequences remain for many days, what has happened here? Firstly, lack of intelligence, secondly no awareness that it was a dream, taking the dream as true, some kind of childish thing. There are some people, even seekers, who think the dreams are true. They have some meaning. No, they're garbage with no meaning at all.

Sweety is saying, silence is so profound that no desires remain there.

It's perfectly okay if you want to enjoy the silence which happens from disconnection from physical senses and now you're hanging there in complete 3D blackness or the “zone”. There are many names actually. It's your choice really, you can stay there, come back after two hours. It is very blissful but those who have work to do they cannot sit and then they make the intention to come back. Many projections fail because people are lost in the blissful states. No problem, if that's what you like you do it but if you get a desire then you will be able to form an intention of some actual projection experience.

Parteep is saying, many things happened. There's no interest really in projection, somehow waking is preferred. Does a great master also lose interest in projection?

Yes, you see when a newcomer joins this business of projections and altered states, there is interest, one or two experiences, and then it becomes boring. So we know we are in the projected state right now, isn't it? The waking is a projected state. There is nothing but projection only. Even if you die, you will project in some world. So we stop paying attention, we stop doing it unnaturally, and whatever is provided by mother nature is the best.

Enjoy your stay here. You are a guest in this physical world for a little bit of time. Do that for which you are projecting here. What are you doing here? Get hold of your pre-allocation, get the knowledge, get the guru, and stop projecting in this world again. What is the use of this place?

Deep is saying, and I'm assuming, to do bilocation, again, intention can work. Just pull all energy behind it, one point.

See, it takes nothing to experiment. It takes a lot of interest only. So go ahead, experiment. But you see, I don't guide people on these things. Yes, there is no rule that you cannot make more than one copy. It is memory only. You can make N copies. But if you can achieve one copy, that will be a very big deal. That will be a very great achievement, especially in the physical. In the dream, or in the projections, it will be easier, but still difficult. Again, the greatest of the tantrics cannot do it. There are reports, actually.

If you read the Tantra Bodhi action of our wiki, a technique is given to create a copy if you don't have the natural talent to copy yourself, yourself means the body and mind in the waking world. Then it can be done systematically, piece by piece, manufactured, and the technique is given in our wiki in the occult section. If you can produce half of it, it will be a good start.

Let's say bilocation is done. Then we can show it to another person, maybe another lovely seeker, so that he can confirm. And I'm asking, is this the way to confirm that the other one can also see it?

Yes, bilocation is very peculiar, because not only others, you can also see it. When the etheric projection happens, it actually will look like you are coming out of the body, and then you can see your physical body in the bed. There are many reports on this phenomenon. You can see the physical body. Sometimes the point of view will flicker from the physical to etheric, and etheric to physical. Same way, you will be able to see your bilocated body copy, and via bilocated, you will be able to see the original. People won't be able to tell the difference. The differences are very minute, only another tantric will be able to capture it, because it will be an empty shell. Anyhow, if you can produce one copy, nothing can stop you from making another, and send them off to do some work, meet people. But you see, there are some limitations, which I should not discuss right now.

Nitin is asking, Long back, I had a dream a thousand kilometers away about a real incident of an accident of my father in which he died. The dream was almost similar to what actually happened. How can this be explained?

This is called premonition, and the explanation is very easy. The non-physical, non-mental memory is timeless. It already has all the impressions, and we call it - pre-written or predetermined. Sometimes you get a glimpse of it. Now, you should not hang on to these words. You see, the words are simply explaining these experiences, but they don't explain anything actually. They give something to intellect to talk about.

So is it possible? Yes, thousands and millions of people get this. What happens is they do not discuss it with people. Then they tell their mother, father, partner, but because of fear of being called a freak or crazy, they do not tell everybody. But there are major incidents where many people get the warning or they get the information like this, that “Be ready for this event. It is going to be a heavy event for you,” and they get all this help to prepare for it.

So that is the Akashic record for you. It has already happened. Not only has it happened here now, the same thing has happened many times. That is mind-boggling. Repeat, repeat, repeat. This is the illusion. Cyclic existence, it is timeless. There are all possibilities. This is the explanation. You don't need to know more than this because the more you know, the more complicated it will become, and then it is useless.

Nitin is saying, it happened on the same day of the incident.

Then it will be called remote viewing. When the time is exact, it is happening, and you're knowing it, then this kind of premonition will have a different name. Now that will be called remote viewing, but it is essentially the same thing - information coming from the UM. It is also called clearvision in occult. Many people get it.

Session 168

Discussion on questions of a test.

Why do people find ignorance more comfortable and easy?

People are lazy because knowledge takes a lot of effort, a lot of intelligence, and it is hard work to think, to cultivate the skills and the abilities to know, and people don't want that. People want to be lazy, whatever is told, okay, it's fine, it is the final truth. Your mother told you something? Yes, finally I got the truth from nobody else, no one else other than my mother. And so everybody fills you with garbage as you grow up, and as soon as you are an adult, you have converted from a human to a donkey, thanks to society.

And just like Shreya said, lack of critical thinking, believing simply believing or disbelieving the guru, another common thing you see. I will believe everything else, including TV, politicians, and the military, but not guru, gurus always lie. So this is the condition of our society.

Is knowing the truth optional?

Can you live your life perfectly normally without knowing the truth? Because all of your life is an illusion, it only needs the illusion. It does not need the truth or you can say it needs the relative truth, the transactional truth. So if you take the truth as that which does not change in everyday life, then it is not optional, you see. Everybody needs to know at least some amount of truth, even in the transactional sense.

Where is the experiencer when it is not manifesting in the world?

Just like she noticed that the question is wrong, there is a problem in the question. It is saying two things that are wrong, first it is asking the whereabouts of the experiencer. Experiencer has no place, it is non-local. Then it is also saying that when it is manifesting in the world, but it is not manifesting in the world. The world is an illusion; it cannot be found in the illusion. Actually, we do the opposite; we remove all the experiences of the world, body, etc to arrive at the experiencer. It is not manifested, the unmanifested is me, Nirgun, that which is without qualities cannot manifest. So there were two problems in the question. The sufficient answer is - I am not in the world, no question of where. Now I am not of the world; the world is in me; all the manifestations are in me. The manifestation is within me; this is the sweet and short answer, so let's go forward.

Can the true nature be known before knowing the illusion?

What is your experience? Did you come to know about your true nature before knowing that everything is an illusion? Or you had to first know, somebody had to convince you that look, everything is an illusion, only then you came to know about your true nature. What happened in your life?

In the 3D program, we first start with self-realization. Who you are is told first, which is simply the knowledge of self, is simply refutation of the blind beliefs about the self that I am born, that I will die, that I have a shape and size; these things are removed, this is self-realization, so you know something is known here.

When people say no, it cannot be known, it cannot be experienced directly, you see, there is no direct experience of the self or the experiencer, so this can be achieved without going into the details of the illusion, this can be achieved without bringing in the definition of true and false. We simply assume that the world and the bodies are true, but we can still remove them from the essence, they are seen as non-essential. Then in the second step, we can find out that the non-essential is not constant; it is changing forms and names, it is created by the mind, and so then we come to know it is an illusion.

What is the last knowledge? What is it that once it is known, everything is known? We do talk about self-realization as if it is knowledge. When people are saying that it cannot be known, that means that it cannot be known through senses or intellect. The self will never be known as an experience; you cannot experience it. You are the one who experiences everything; you are the experiencer. If it can be experienced, it is not you; it is your being. This is knowledge.

So there seems to be little confusion about the word known, knowing, and known. So when the word known is used in the formal way, organizations of the experience in the memory, that is knowledge. Then yes, the experiencer is never organized in the memory; it is not to be found in the memory. It is the witness of the memories, so in this way there is no knowledge of it, but self-realization is an organization in the memory. What the organization consists of is - not this, not that, negative knowledge, and knowing this, remembering this will be called awareness in our terminology. The difference is very tiny, you see, very subtle; try to grasp the subtleness of it. You can easily call self-realization as one kind of knowledge, negative knowledge, but you cannot say that the experiencer is known directly; there needs to be a little bit of discrimination there, it is very tiny.

In this question, we are asking about the process of getting knowledge and how to know the true nature, whether this can be known before we can go on into the illusion. Simple common sense answer should be there.

Yashraj is saying, this can be known that the experiencer cannot be known.

That is what I call negative knowledge; it cannot be found in the world; it cannot be found in the body; it has no shape, no size, all negative, but still, it is knowledge. Yes, the experiencer does not make a direct impression in the memory; this color, that sound, no, that kind of knowledge will never be found, not an object, no objective knowledge.

When knowledge of illusion is given first, what will happen to the seeker? That depends on their constitution or maturity, actually. This is my experience in the field of teaching on the path of knowledge. And then it is sometimes harmful if people are told that your life is a lie, it is fake, your body is fake, your relations are garbage, whatever you think about yourself and about others, totally cooked up stuff. Obviously, they will be depressed, they won't like it, they will hate their guru. There are some people like this, and they laugh at these people who call the world an illusion when they see the suffering and the issues in society, and their own condition is suffering. For those who cannot accept suffering as an illusion, it is even considered unethical that a guru is sitting there and laughing at the suffering, look, a play, a drama, a dream, and they then attack the guru by saying that look, if you were starving, if you are getting killed, if you are getting abused, then you will come to know it is real.

So to avoid this kind of disaster, we provide self-knowledge first. Once this base is made, then telling that the experience is an illusion does not have any bad effect on the mind. At least this is my opinion, that is how the program is designed, you must have seen. Then we actually remove all doubts by saying that in the illusion, the illusion works; the truth won't work in the illusion. In the illusion, in the play, only the script works; you cannot show the camera in the movie, you see, like they say, the illusion breaks; only the special effects, explosions, they work there nicely.

Play the play fully, knowing that it is a play; you suffer the suffering and love your friends and kill your enemies, it is all fine. Now know what you are. Then this makes the non-dual knowledge acceptable for an average seeker. There are some special seekers, and for them, it is perfectly okay that everything is a lie. Actually, they laugh at it; they are released by this knowledge; they are liberated. Finally, I don't need to worry about anything, they say. Finally, I don't need to worry about death and disease and disability and all these major sufferings of a human being. I don't know who I am, but you know it is all fake, so no problem at all. Then they go ahead and explore the illusion; they are called tantrics; they love it, actually. They become lovers of the Devi, not bothering about who I am. It has some side effects but it's okay. Depends on how much impurity you have, how much attachment you have to this illusion. If there are too many impurities, too many attachments, then telling that everything is an illusion has a bad effect, so we send them away. Go and do yoga or something; chant the mantras and sing the bhajans, then come back after 20 years. I tell them self-knowledge, very easy, no side effects at all, except for a few people.

How can a seeker experience oneness?

Yashraj is saying, there is no process; if oneness can be experienced, there is again experience, which appears to the experiencer.

Very good; that is all you need to say. Shreya went into some other explanation, but there is a one-line explanation - Oneness is not an experience. Otherwise, it would also come and go; it could also change. One person can have it, others may not have it, but oneness is the nature of existence; it is one. You cannot have anything else except oneness, and if it is experienced, it will be divided into two; that is what is happening. The existence is trying to know what I am, and in the process ends up dividing itself because it cannot be seen as a whole. Still, it can be known as a whole, and you can be the one. How to do that? You are already it. Just remove your ignorance that I am not the one. How to remove ignorance? The Path of knowledge.

So if people remember, there are substrates of the waking state. There are three major categories of the waking state: the lower, middle, and the high. The first answer is the right one, egoic state. The person is hopelessly dependent on something, somebody, trying to survive. Insecurity, obviously egoic. Emotional attachment. Now some people will say it is higher. No, it is not higher. Emotional support is higher. When you support somebody emotionally, that is pity, compassion, kindness, am I right? Emotional dependency, emotional attachment is lower. Again ego, it wants something, demanding nature. Give me this because I love you. Is this love? Love is giving, not demanding, not taking. So the egoic love has demands, conditions. Selfless love is unconditional. No demands. Actually, we are happy to fulfill the demands of others. We fulfill the desires of others. So the real love, the unconditional love, is non-egoic, selfless. Not demanding, serving, surrender, peace, fearless, not insecurity. So yes, a full book can be written on this topic. It will sell very nicely because this is the biggest problem in the world after money. Nobody gets love because they don't know how to love. Even those who get the money, they don't know how to love. They love only money, and they try to buy the love with money. Very, very dark situation here. Ignorance.

Which state offers unlimited experience?

Pragya is saying, senses are limited in all states.

Very good. Recall the metaphor of the pinhole camera. If the hole is made larger and larger, the experience disappears actually. The meaningfulness in the experience disappears. It gets all the vibrations. It must be limited to be meaningful.

Pandurang is saying, we can have unlimited experiences sequentially.

That's right. When it is done sequentially, it goes cyclic actually. The experience is not linear. It is in cycles. So the states change. Actually, you can say the reason for state change is so that we can sample each and every kind of experience. You can say Brahman is a genius engineer. He saw that one state can be very limited because of the limitations of the experiences. So what he did, he designed it. Don't take my words literally. I am just a storyteller. So he redesigned the equipment, body-mind machine so that they can change states. In the day, you get the waking state experiences. Limited, but you get it. Then the dream, then the projected, then the sleep, then death and birth, all goes cyclically forever. And because it is forever, ultimately you experience everything. By you, I mean Brahman. Nobody is there to experience anything, except Brahman, except the experiencer. Existence itself is the experiencer.

Sri Ayurveda is saying, the whole is just randomness.

Actually, I won't even call it randomness because there is also order in existence. The whole has both randomness and order. Both structure and non-structure. It is not purely random. Actually, it will look like randomness to our limited mind, our limited intellect. It won't be able to make sense of anything. It is like playing 100 songs simultaneously. Each song in itself is ordered. It is beautiful. When played alone, the song is a piece of art, music. When everything is played at once, it is not that the order has disappeared, the beauty has disappeared, no. Our intellect cannot now recognize anything there. There are many limitations. And to overcome these limitations, the experience has been spread out.

Einstein said that time exists so that we can avoid everything happening at once. He was joking, obviously. He knew there is no time. So he said, why is there this illusion of time then? Because if everything happens at once, there is no meaning in that. So the film has been spread out one frame at a time. How beautiful that is, you see. We think I am limited. But this limitedness gives us meaning. Now you know the answer to the question - Why does Brahman take limited forms? I know there is no why and how, but poetically we like this answer that there is no other way to experience itself. And therefore everything has been turned into pieces. The non-duality is lost in the jungle of multiplicity. So we go reverse and we combine everything. That is the path of knowledge. Yoga, Union.

Akash is asking, what are pure experiences?

Experiences not clouded by ignorance.

Akash is saying, what is the ideal thing to do in a movement?

Do that which is necessary. Actually, it is easier. Do not do that which is unnecessary. That which is necessary will happen. That which must happen ideally will happen. Stop doing that which is totally unnecessary.

There is one question from Shubham. In a video, Ishwar Puri said, “Consciousness always creates experiences opposite to our true nature so that we can enjoy or appreciate what we have. That's why we have suffering, pain and certainty in the world.” Please throw some light on this.

This is a very poetic way of saying that duality exists so that we can appreciate positivity. Negativity exists so that we know the meaning of positivity. So why is there suffering? So that we can know happiness. Why is there pain? So that we know the value of pleasure. So on. Without the darkness, you won't know the value of light. Without the bad food, you won't know the pleasure of eating good food. So that is the meaning here.

There is some benefit of opposites. There is some use of negative experiences. If you don't know what is bad. You will not recognize what is good. So if you get something which is good, yes, now you will appreciate what you got. The same thing about ignorance. If you all have ignorance, you won't appreciate the value of knowledge. So ignorance is a way to get us to knowledge and then see the value of it. And if this experience is not given, then the value will not be seen. So there can be opinions. Why is there no better way? Why can't we know the value of happiness without suffering? So on. You see right now, right here it is like this. So accept it. There is no point in imagining things when they are not there. The experience is dual. It is by necessity. It cannot be anything. And the effect of duality is that there are opposites. So hopefully, you got the answer. And his style is not so direct. He uses metaphors, stories, and so on. Still, it is very, very clear. It is more clear than any other teacher that I have found on the path of knowledge.

Muni is saying, now everything is clear after having heard you and following your instructions, but most other gurus are cryptic. They hide more.

Everybody has their own style. Actually, the guru is never wrong. The fault is in our understanding. We do not ask the correct questions. Then we interpret the meanings without asking the real meaning and so on. They will teach you the same thing. Then you need to ask for clarity. Otherwise, the guru will assume that you don't want to know. They are actually cleaning up the crowd. Who wants to know? Like this fellow who came, I know nothing, but he wants to know by answering the questions, not by asking the questions. Immediately removed him. He was not interested in knowing actually. Then he started arguing instead of following the instructions. So the gurus are looking for the right student. It looks like they are hiding, but they are filtering. Who wants to know? Who has curiosity? Just gives a hint. And then looks in the crowd who wants to know more. Makes a cryptic statement and checks who will sit in my satsang and who will go away. There can be some gurus like this. They have this kind of style. But some are very direct, and somehow I like those who simply say it without waiting. Tell me what you know. And I am like that also. Not everybody is like this.

Graham is saying, many times I thought you misunderstood me when I asked a question. But when I contemplated your answers I found I had misunderstood myself and change happened.

Yes, there is a possibility, you see. There is a possibility that there will be misunderstanding. But it gets cleared after a while. That is why I put so much stress on defining words so that there is no misunderstanding. Should not use improper words. By improper, I mean the ones that are not defined in our terminology. Secondly, I ask you to write precise questions. Not noodle soup of words. It causes misunderstanding immediately. Should be short and sweet. Look at the questions in the exams. Not more than one line. How precise they are. That will never cause misunderstanding.

Another thing is if you go step by step there won't be any misunderstanding. What happens is people come here and start talking about the highest kind of philosophy in the world. And when I ask where are you? “I just joined today”. Now there will be misunderstanding. The best way to approach a Guru is with folded hands. Please teach me this and this. Precise. And then let the Guru do the judgment. Let the Guru do the assessment from where the teaching must be started. So the Guru will usually ask these questions. What do you do? How much do you earn? Do you have a family dependence? And also these things will be asked. If he is perfect he is immediately taken in. Otherwise he is sent back to the world. Come after five years. Now because we are online I don't get this luxury to interview people. Hundreds, thousands of people are there. I have only this much option. Give them whatever I know in as short a time as possible. We don't have the luxury to choose the student. So sometimes misunderstandings happen. Sometimes a good student is also thrown away. Baby with the bathwater. It's okay, it's fine. We have limitations for being online.

Rahul is saying, What is understanding? It seems no understanding is final except the ultimate truth.

We never use the word understanding. I have used this word only once in my blog where I tried to define it. The definition was not so good, so it was dropped. It should be used only in an informal way, the word understanding. What word do we use? Knowledge. “No knowledge is final except the ultimate truth” - this is better. It's still not precise. You can say no knowledge is final except the knowledge of the self. Anyhow, understanding is a very poorly defined word. Like we say, I understand the subject. Means, thorough knowledge, I can answer anything on this subject. When I say I understand this person, that means I have been with that person for a long time. That much I know from the usage of the word. But when you say I understand who I am. What does that mean? You can write a book on who I am? No, that is not correct, so we don't use this kind of thing.

I understand that everything is an illusion. I don't know, I understand. But when you say I know everything is an illusion, then I can help you to go further, to go beyond the illusion. When you say I know who I am, then I can tell you the practices and so on. So the word knowing and knowledge has been precisely defined, and that's what we use. Because understanding is a very kind of broad word, it can be used for everything. Everybody will define their own words. So there are people who have defined these words differently. There you should be very careful. Do not impose your meaning. You should ask for the meaning of the words. Do not look them up in the dictionary. No philosopher uses a dictionary. No guru will use a dictionary. They simply make up the words. Why? Because they are not using the words to convey the knowledge. They are using the words as a pointer. Stand in. The real thing is experience. Once you get the experience you can tag it with any word you want.

So all philosophical systems have their own terminology. Those who are lost in terminology will never know. They will remain ignorant. You can say they will never understand. Those who mix philosophies, terminologies, no hope. So the key to knowledge is precision. Be precise. Choose a language. Choose a system. Stick to it till you get all of it. Then you are free to do whatever you want. Cook up your own after that. But the key remains the same. Be precise. Keep one word for one thing. If there are two words for one thing you need to simply say it is the same. This is not poetry. Path of knowledge has no poetry in it. It is not left open for interpretation.

Session 169

There is a question by Ashwin. Can you please explain why there are few seekers who get the glimpse of self-knowledge during a 3-day program, when later on, they are not interested in knowledge and get back deeply immersed in their daily routine and ignorance like before?

They are not ready, the fire for seeking is not there, the desire is not there, and the impurities are too many. The impurities get hold of them, they start behaving in the same way that they used to behave before, they think in the same way, and the ego gets nothing in the 3-day program. The ego is reduced to zero, so it comes back with double force. There is knowledge, the knowledge is seeded, it is latent, but it is not accepted in these cases.

But I have seen there are only 2 or 3 cases out of 10, 20-30% cases where this happens. Those who are really ready, those who are seeking, those who wanted this knowledge, they are deeply affected, change happens in them, they want to progress, they are more curious now, they want to know more, and they join the group and they join the PoK program and they follow the instructions precisely and then they experiment with this knowledge. So those who are ready, they will take off, those who are not, they crash, the answer is simple. How is one ready and the other is not? That is grace, we cannot do anything about it. The job of a guru is to seed the knowledge, wait for the right season.

Deep is saying, I have found a solution for such people, keep such egos busy with questions.

Sometimes it helps to shake the ego a little bit, but when you see resistance, it is best to let go, they are not ready.

Vandita is asking, always one should do that which is one's own pre-allocation that gives the most happiness. How to identify this?

It is very easy actually, but you will need to sit for at least one or two days, probably one week, and write down what you really want to do, which gives you the most satisfaction, and the source should not be from outside. It should not be that desire or work which is given to you by your parents, friends, society, or other people. It is always that which you are naturally attracted to, which you will do when you are left alone with no other issues in life.

I call it churning. Do I really want to do this? Is this my life goal? What will give me the most satisfaction if I do something.

There is one thing here that should be kept in mind. Some people simply incarnate without any life goals, without any target to achieve in this lifetime. Or you can say their target is simply to take the human experience of being a human, whatever humans do. These are newcomers in the human womb. But others who have taken a lot of experience already, 10, 20, 30 births, accumulate so much that finally they get something to do. Finally, they can find out the right goal, right target here.

Actually it is very obvious for some people. Some people are totally materialistic, and all they want is more money and more relations, and that is what they are doing for the whole of their life, which is not bad, they are at that stage of evolution currently. Some people go one step ahead, and they are interested in arts and sciences, good jobs, and so on, intellectual achievements of some kinds. Like when people say, “I want to become a doctor” or “I want to become an artist” etc, they are going for intellectual achievements. The goal is very much set there, and for a spiritual seeker, the goal is obviously knowledge, liberation, and so on. There are different kinds of seekers, for some, the goal will be powers and extraordinary experiences, but for an average seeker, it is usually to take up a path, find a guru, and start the practice.

If you don't find a definite goal, then you should ask your guru, it is very simple, he will provide you with a goal. It's a question of liking, there is no logic here. If there is surrender, whatever guru says will become your goal, and then your progress will be very, very fast. My advice is - those who cannot find any life goal or their goals are so shallow and useless that it's a waste of a lifetime, they should approach the guru and ask for a goal. Those who are born with a definite goal, they should continue.

So to find out your pre-allocation, sit down, do the churning, don't hurry in this because initially the goals that come up will be from the ego or from the implanted goals of the society. It will be your conditioning that was given to you in childhood, so hopefully. And there are some teachers, there are some gurus who can look into the causal body and find out your pre-allocation a little bit. So I managed to do that for some people, and it is very ordinary. So far I have never found anything which a person really wants to do in their life. They are mostly lost, mostly, and they are simply fulfilling the desires of others. That is what I see for 90% of people. They have no life of their own, they are simply following the sheep mentality, that's all they are doing.

Someone is asking, could you please talk more about the ecstasy experience during the spiritual journey.

My answer will be disappointing, so you better not ask me or you better be ready for the bitter pill. All these ecstasy experiences and all kinds of firework experiences, they are simply illusions created by the mind and they are completely useless. You will not progress even one inch if you get such experience.

What are they? They are by-products of purification. It is simply as if you are carrying a 20 kg weight on your back and you are walking in the heat, and when you reach your destination, you put down the weight and you relax. That is very much like ecstasy and release, pleasure, that's all it is. Nothing extraordinary has happened. You are freed from that unnecessary burden. So for a few days, it will feel like - okay, I am flying in the clouds, something like this. But don't worry, it is also impermanent, it also goes away.

The real experience that you want is of the bliss and peace where there is no ecstasy, there is nothing unusual and extreme. What are people doing? They are looking for extreme experiences. That is foolish. Equanimity is the real experience.

I know nobody likes this when I say that because sufficient maturity is not there in those people. I also started with such things, I want this thing and I want that thing, I want this state and that state. So then I saw that everything is useless, they come and go. The permanent state is of bliss, which is simply emptiness, being empty and conducting your daily life in total peace without impulses, without the unnecessary, most naturally when you flow in life. That is the best experience so far.

Wanda is saying, I don't want very worldly things, enough of it.

See, you want them to survive and when survival is taken care of, it is totally unnecessary. You have to draw a line where your comfort is for the worldly life to make the body comfortable and to make the ego or the mind feel secure a little bit and after that line, you should stop. After that, your real pre-allocation starts. But for some people, the pre-allocation says that - do the worldly things because their desires are unfulfilled so far. They do all these things which worldly people do, family, jobs, marriages, children and then in this lifetime they will not progress beyond this but as soon as you get a guru everything changes, not before that.

So now your job is to find out what is not worldly and there is good news and bad news that you will end up doing nothing but worldly things as long as there is a human body, it is necessary but it can be done in total awareness. The good news is the path of knowledge will give you the highest goals in a few days. In a few days, the path of knowledge is over and there is nothing more to seek in the spiritual field also. Now what will you do? That is a big topic. Usually, I say there is nothing to do, continue the experience as it is because it is going to continue for eternity. The experience is eternal, it is beyond time, and nobody is there to do anything, so there is no point in thinking now, it is simply happening, you become the witness of it.

Doing the worldly things is still doing, doing the spiritual things is still doing and letting everything happen is non-doing. So our goal is to become goalless, our aim is to become aimless and our job is to do nothing, simply be the witness. I know newcomers don't like this thing, they say what kind of boring guidance is this, I want to achieve this, I want to achieve that. So in such cases my suggestion is go and achieve it, come back after 20 years.

Parteep is saying, Guruji, with the desire like, let's say when I was sitting in the office, some desire just occurred that there are so many intelligent people around sitting here and they are not getting the knowledge despite a person is between them to share the knowledge. When that with the symbolic gesture of hand, when the desire was happened, the body also loses some energy along with it and with that energy, it can be seen that although the desire manifests immediately, just after hours 2-3 people just came and discussed, the purely materialistic person actually came and discussed spirituality with me, and I could see that okay, this is how the desire works at the level of illusion. Obviously, the body loses energy.

The question is, Guruji, like the great masters like you also are and Sadguru also are, how do they create the Sankalp so much that that Sankalp affects the whole of the earth, so do they really get that much energy behind their Sankalp to manifest even the simple desire that okay, people should have this knowledge. So I know these things happen but if we talk about at the level of illusion, can great masters put so much energy behind their Sankalp to distribute the knowledge?

Very good question. Yes, this will happen to you. Just like I say, your material desires may not be fulfilled. They may be fulfilled, who knows, but for the spiritual desire, you may see extraordinary events happening. They are given, and as everybody knows by now, Gurufield is behind it. One person cannot do this. What the person does is he disappears. The person disappears, and this shell becomes empty. His body and mind become an instrument, and the Gurufield starts using it. So, the energy or the Sankalp is of the Gurufield, not of the person. The person can only surrender. The desire is also not of the person, obviously that is a deeper topic.

Let us assume that there is a desire of the person. Now, the person simply asks for this to be fulfilled. And if it is a spiritual desire, he needs to simply state the desire, fold your hands and say it, no rituals needed, and it will be heard. You need to get out of the way, and then this body and mind will be used. You will say exactly that which helps the other person. You will do exactly that which makes the other person progress. It can be anything, and the events will happen exactly the way which are needed. So, you can see that this is not the person who is doing it, it is something else, and we call this tendency of nature to spiritually progress, evolve spiritually. There is a name for this tendency, and that name is Gurufield.

So, it has happened to you that you have connected to the Gurufield. Step number seven is working for you in the program. There are many people for whom it worked actually. I was surprised that it was so easy. It is so easy to connect a person, connect a seeker to the Gurufield and then everything happens automatically. You are having a very good experience, and the pure your desire is, for example, it is selfless and unconditional, you don't want anything in return, no expectations, then more chances are that it will be done for you. And sometimes the rules are bent, the rules of the illusion are bypassed. Actually, they are not bypassed, it's a deeper process, but for us, it looks like it's a miracle of some kind. We cannot understand what is going on. So, yes, always desire that which is beneficial for others.

Just now I was saying there is no doer, and the path of knowledge gives you everything. Then what to do? This will be the question. As I said, do nothing. But an ordinary person will not be satisfied. They have the energy, and if there is no goal, that energy is wasted in doing unnecessary things. The impulses arise, and then the actions happen, the unnecessary actions happen. So, what do we do? We fulfill somebody else's desires because there is no desire left for me. So, I take on others' desires, try to fulfill them. This is another level of guidance. You can simply say things, and you can tell them what is knowledge and what is not knowledge, what is evidence, what is not evidence. This is one level - listening.

There is another level where you intervene in the causal body and take a little bit of pre-allocation from them, especially the negative part, and the guru then gets the fruits of those tendencies, and the seeker, the student, progresses very fast. This will happen very rarely, but that is the next step. So now, experiment with fulfilling others' desires. We don't want to fulfill everybody's desires, especially of materialistic people. It's going to end up without any fruit. There won't be any progress for that person. But the desire of a seeker is paramount. That is the biggest thing in the universe. If a seeker desires something, it must be fulfilled. So, take up something. Somebody wants something. If you can give, give it. Usually, it is very small. Most of the seekers, they do not want material things, but they do want something which is non-material, non-physical. Most of the people have never received any unconditional love in their life. They have never received any support, guidance. They don't have any true friends. They have friends, very helpful friends, but a true friend is one who will make you progress. That is my definition. So, the guru is the best friend, actually.

Help others. Ask the desire of the other person very clearly. You should directly ask, “What do you desire?” And you will find confusion on their face because they don't know what they desire. That's one thing. So, you help that person to bring out the pre-allocation, bring it out. Let them say it from their own mouth, and you do whatever is possible. And if it's not possible to fulfill their desire by any means, then you pray. Your prayer has more energy, more power than an ordinary person because of your good deeds and because you have spoken the truth. Your speech has more power. It will be heard more. Like in your society also, if a big person, an important person, is saying something, he's heard more. There will be statements in the newspaper, in the news, even if it is something very simple, normal, ordinary, but that is heard everywhere. Same way, your speech will be heard. You have this power now.

If nothing happens and it all looks like there is no effect of my prayer, no effect of my desire, and it is all failing, then don't worry. It's not going to happen for all the cases. There is no consistency here. So, we need to do our part and then let it go. Do not run after it, that I could not fulfill this one desire of one seeker. No problem. Something else will be fulfilled when the right time is there. Something else will come out.

Parteep is saying, I'm experimenting with lots of people to guide till they become ready for the path of knowledge. Exactly that is happening through me, which is useful for them. Sometimes I have to go after them, chase them for fun. Guru chasing disciple.

Very good, very good. Continue. Don't be afraid to make it adventurous. The more madness there is, the more effective it is.

Puneet is saying, Where do all the memories actually store? I mean, all the birth memories. Why does it happen that one forgets everything when taking rebirth? If any seeker had made good progress in previous births, it will be good to remember that up to what point he reached, and it will be helpful for them.

Yes, very logical. Where are the memories stored? “Where” means a place, unfortunately, there is no place. There is no hardware, there is no data center, there is nothing in the skies up there. But there is a non-physical and non-mental memory without any place, without any time, non-local, non-temporal. Now, some people will say it looks like a fantasy because they are used to seeing only physical or sometimes mental. Like they will say that my memory is within me in my head. There is no such thing. There is no “my” memory also. There is no place for it. And the truth is always stranger than “reality”.

There is a non-physical, non-mental structure. It is made up of vibrations. The vibrations are also me, my non-essential part, and these vibrations organize. They become memory. The place or you can say the theoretical part of this non-physical memory, where all the memories of all previous births are stored, is called the causal body. If you know this theory, it's a model. Where are they stored? Then you can safely say that all these memories are stored in the causal body. Now, simply memorizing these names is not going to be beneficial for you. So, if you're interested, take up systematic study, do the full course, the path of knowledge program. The whole of it, the whole of your experience, world, body, mind, everything is nothing but the experience of this memory.

Now the next question is, what happens in the reincarnation? Why can we not access this memory which we have painstakingly accumulated, we have done the hard work for so many lifetimes, and now it is wiped out? Many people will say that, and these people have no spiritual background. For them, it is wiped out. Yes. And my experience is that which is necessary will appear in every birth. Even some negative things, they reappear. The memories never go away. What happens is, for a person who is not evolved, has never touched the spiritual side, it is a complete wipeout before birth. And it is done by mother nature for the protection of the creature. If you're flooded with all the memories of all the lives, or let us say a major part of it, even 10 or 20, then the confusion will be so much that this creature will not survive. What do you need to do for survival? Where is food? Where is a job? Where is my partner? And where is my office? Where is my house? This much, this life is very simple. How to grow food, how to do the work, do you really need to know what happened 20 lifetimes ago? No. Probably you need to know that which is your pre-allocation. The pre-allocation is the only part of the causal memory that is remembered. “Remembered” means it is accessed in the form of desires, likes and dislikes, preferences, tendencies. So, you see it's not wiped out. A small part is given to conduct this life. This system is so beautiful, it is so foolproof, and so perfect that I have never seen anything like this. I cannot even imagine creating such a nice, highly complex system of births and deaths and memories. It is the most natural. The most natural is the most beautiful.

So, it will help you if you remember your pre-allocation. That also includes all the knowledge that you gained in previous lifetimes. Don't worry. What do we remember in our normal lives? Ordinary lives. The events that were most important, the rest are forgotten. Ten years ago, what did you eat for breakfast? What clothes were you wearing? Where did you go and what did you do? Forgotten. Not important. Routine, mechanical life. But the major events, births, deaths, marriages, and so on are remembered. The impactful events will be remembered. And an ordinary life has only one or two events per year like this. Very boring lives. The rest is simply eating, sleeping, and watching TV. Nobody remembers that thing. Same way, if your past lives were ordinary, where nothing much happened, then nothing will be remembered. And nothing wrong with it. It's natural. But if your past lives were eventful, where you achieved big things, where you made big progress, then it is guaranteed that its effect will be seen in this life. You will be born as a genius. The child will show tendencies which even grown-up people don't show. There will be immediate success in your life, whatever you do becomes successful. You get the path, you get the guru, you get everything that you desire. And these people have a very strong pre-allocation, we say. They have achieved a lot. They have progressed, evolved a lot. And they do some important work in their life. They do not waste their life. By important, I mean that which benefits humankind.

So, you see, it totally depends on your level of evolution. If you're not evolved, that means everything will be wiped out. It will look as if I came here from nowhere, and I am going nowhere. It's a goalless, aimless, meaningless life. And if you are evolved enough, if you're following some path under the direction of a good guru, then you will be born with a specific goal, specific aim, a meaning. And you will do exactly that with full determination.

And yes, the past life events are not important, the impressions are important. You got a bad impression in the past life about something, then it will manifest here. There will be aversion to that activity. And if you got some good impression from the past life, it will manifest not as a memory of the event, but as a tendency. And you will do that. See, many people are born with all these memories. Or you can say the effect of the memory is seen, not the memory recall. Sometimes, very rarely there will be a memory recall of the past life. And then people say you are crazy, you are mad. And then we suppress it totally. Children have this tendency to recall past lives, but society suppresses them. And by the time they grow up, they have surely forgotten everything. Little kids still have a strong connection to the causal memory. But as we grow up, we become involved in the world, and then we lose this connection. But the tendencies are still there. So, the more pure your life is, the more destruction-free your life is, the more influence of the causal body will be seen. Now you can understand why seekers withdraw from the world, they go and live in solitude, far away places. Why do they do that? Because they are trying to connect with their past. The distractions prevent us from remembering or manifesting past achievements.

So, if you want to remember, there are methods, called the spiritual journeys and all. It can take the form of a real physical journey. Then you withdraw into an ashram or a place where you can live comfortably but without distractions, no TV, no newspaper, no news, no neighbor, nothing else. And then the mind is freed to manifest the past memory. If it is done under the instruction of a guru, then it is more effective, faster. Otherwise, it will take many years.

In short, I will say that the belief that everything is forgotten is false. The people are incapable of remembering, or you can say producing the effect of it, and that's why they simply assume that everybody forgets. Not everybody. Those who are capable, they know everything. Not only you will know your own causal body, you will know everybody else's past. The possibilities are endless. So research into this area. We have the full system for that. That is called the path of knowledge program.

Parteep is saying, with intensity, the body becomes light, and it demands heavy food. If I do not give that heavy food, it senses the energy can crackle out. But the body manages to eat heavy food to get grounded. Any suggestions? Is tamasic food also a requirement for the body?

The body will take whatever it helps to balance the various layers. So if you are doing a lot of spiritual work and your head is always in the air, you know what can happen. There is an imbalance now, and you're almost leaving this world. So the body then reacts, and it produces a desire to eat tasty food or something like this. So whenever you get this desire, you can try it, no harm at all. Balance is the key. You should not do too much of everything.

Sometimes you withdraw from the world, withdraw from eating, and so on, and you're spending hours and hours doing the program, listening to the satsang, listening to the spiritual masters, doing the 3D for others, consulting others, talking to the seekers all the time. And then the imbalance happens, and the body reacts. Manifestations happen in the body. So what do we do? We balance it out, stop this spiritual activity. Too much of it has happened, so now you need to take care of the lower layers and fix them. Eat well, sleep well, do not do anything else, and then the balance is restored, and you can come back with new energy, full of energy.

So you should alternate between the material life and the spiritual life and do not do both of them in extremes. Like people say, “No, I don't need sleep now, I don't need food also,” and they give it up totally, and then you will die. Extreme is not recommended. That's why people who don't have a guru, they fail in these things because they don't know what to do actually. They don't know how to handle the new dynamics, play that is going on now. So the higher you rise, the lower you fall. Sometimes it happens, there is burnout, and your sensitivity will go so high that even you cannot sit with an ordinary person, a worldly person in the same room, and so on. It is very uncomfortable. So what do we do? We moderate these things. Everything is done in moderation. Eat your daily food, light food, the sattvic food, tasty food, fulfill the demands of the body, and then it will let you do whatever you want to do in the higher layers.

Akash is asking, is there a karmic bondage between guru and shishya?

Yes, otherwise, they will never meet, and that is the strongest possible bond. Your other relations are weak, I mean flimsy, give and take kind of relations. Only the guru and disciple bond is the strongest. It continues for many lifetimes. Actually, I see it is never broken. The impression of the guru is so much on the disciple that half of the causal body becomes that of the guru. You must be seeing this in your daily life that the student becomes a copy of the guru. The student talks like guru, walks like guru, behaves like guru, laughs like guru, says things and does, follows the guru, even the minute things. So the impression is so strong that the guru becomes the disciple, and the disciple becomes the guru. That is manifested in every lifetime. And so when they see each other, they immediately recognize each other because they are the same, they are one. So you cannot call it a bondage, you can call it a connection because bondage means you cannot get out of it, but the connection you can break anytime. It is not really bondage, it is a surrender, or it is love, you can say, but it can break. If you don't want that relation, that connection, it can be broken. Usually, if you leave it as it is, it will stay forever, it never goes away.

Session 170

Rahul has some questions, so we will start. Number one is, what is that which is gaining knowledge on PoK? Who is ignorant, whose ignorance is getting removed? I am just the witness, the experiencer and that is already perfect and complete. Can you please comment?

Initially we say that it is the person when you don't know who and what, when you don't know your own essence. We say that it is the person who is gaining knowledge on the path of knowledge. The person has ignorance and so on. But we learn after knowing that there is no person, so nobody was gaining knowledge and nobody was ignorant. There is ignorance and there is knowledge - That's all we can say. Knowledge is witnessed and ignorance is witnessed. It does not belong to anybody.

Number two, I am witnessing continuous recall of memories, only recent ones from work that are transactional in nature, every now and then. Some other memory processes are commenting on these arising and driving actions. Is the functioning of this creature completely mechanical?

Yes, whatever you are witnessing is perfectly okay and is perfectly mechanical. It is completely a mechanism. The experiences form impressions on the memory and the memory then self-organizes according to the needs of survival and it produces actions. These are all happenings. So the only thing which is not mechanical is your presence, the witness, the experiencer. Everything else is bound by laws, it is all simply vibrating patterns.

Number three, can knowledge create experience? Do we also experience from our knowledge?

Knowledge illuminates experience. It does not create it.

Number four, how to expedite the progress on the path of knowledge program?

Dedication, lack of distraction and love for knowledge, your curiosity, discipline. These are the qualities that will cause fast progress in this program. And giving top priority to knowledge, that should be your life goal. Then it will become very fast. Otherwise the priority is given to something else, you are distracted by so many things, then it will drag on for many years. Hopefully, Rahul got his answers.

Akash is saying, as one evolves, one is going from free will to more and more deterministic reality. Is this true?

No, there is no free will. The reality is already deterministic. It is rule-bound. It is not reality; it is illusion.

Rohit is asking, why does experiencer manifest as Jeeva and Jagat?

Which means the creature and the world. The experiencer is the witness. It is unmanifested. The existence is manifesting as various forms, worlds, and inhabitants of the worlds. And existence is experiencing its own manifestation. But the experiencer, because it is a dual concept, cannot manifest anything. It is unmanifested; it does nothing at all.

Akash is saying, is learning one of the reasons?

No, there is nothing to learn. If you do not accumulate ignorance, there is nothing to remove, nothing to learn. Everything is perfect as it is, except the ignorance. And learning is simply the removal of ignorance. The ignorance is due to lack of intelligence. And due to indoctrination by society, who also lack intelligence.

Rohit is saying, is it okay to help or serve needy on the path of knowledge?

What is right, what is wrong, is decided by the seeker, not by the Guru or anybody else. Unless you have completely surrendered to the Guru and you say, “I don't know what is right and wrong, please, you decide everything for me”. Then the Guru will tell you what is right, what is wrong. Otherwise, the Guru will tell you what are the consequences of your actions. So I will also tell you that there are consequences of all of your actions, including serving anybody. Now is it right, is it wrong, is it ethical, unethical? You decide based on your knowledge. If you are intelligent enough, you will be able to decide it.

If somebody else tells you to do this or do that, then where is your freedom in that? If you are dependent on somebody to even do an action, good or bad, where is your freedom? Do you want to spend your life asking people about whether it is okay to do this or okay to do that? Or would you like to cultivate the intelligence to decide yourself, what do you want? Then the question is how to have this kind of intelligence where I can know instantly, automatically what is right and what is wrong. Then the only way is the path of knowledge.

On the path of knowledge, knowledge is given, which makes you completely free, so free that you know what is right and what is wrong. You don't need these tiny pieces of advice on everything, every action; you can decide it. The path of knowledge makes you independent. Other paths will keep you dependent. They have commandments, they have written rules, what to do, what not to do, and that is why they enslave people. Only the path of knowledge sets you free, nothing else. It gives you the ability, it gives you the wings to fly.

Nayana is asking, the psychological trauma or hurt memory even knowing that it is just a reflection creates so much emotional turmoil and changes the state. You flow away from awareness, so increasing awareness is the only way?

No, increase your knowledge. See that all this memory or trauma or whatever is simply impressions in the memory. And see that the reflection and all simply adds energy to it. It adds so much energy that the memory actually becomes stronger. So the emotions and so on, they arise due to these activities, totally useless and necessary activities. I can understand that if there is a need, the situation demands some kind of activity, some kind of memory, then it should arise, it should produce the required emotions and actions. That is very much understood. But you have a very peaceful, sophisticated, prosperous life, everything is good and now these memories are playing - That can be only called a psychosis, mental disorder. That is completely unnecessary.

So this knowledge will give you this kind of intelligence to immediately detect if there is some kind of activity going on which is unnecessary. And then if you watch it in complete awareness with a state of forgiveness and acceptance, then it will dissolve. It won't repeat again with that intensity. And even if it repeats, your knowledge will repeat with it. That is an illusory action/activity, and then it won't pick up the energy to disturb this creature again. This is the process of purification. Continue. If you do not have a path, if you do not have a guru, then it is a hopeless condition.

Akash is asking, what is love?

It is the knowledge that the essence of everything is one. Get the knowledge first. Asking hundreds of questions will not give you knowledge. That will simply, you will accumulate a mountain of facts. This question has this answer, that question has that answer. You will become an encyclopedia. Memorized facts. Getting knowledge will give you the ability to answer any question under the sky. What do you want? You want to spend your life asking simple or trivial questions? Or do you want the knowledge which will make you answer any question in the world? What will an intelligent person choose?

Rohit is saying, I get confused because Advaita means no one is different from you. How to deal with others?

With compassion, kindness, love. That is how we deal with others. Because like you said, no one is different from you. They are your forms. Now this question should not arise. If this question is arising, how should I deal with others - That means you have ignorance. Means you have also memorized some facts. That Advaita means this and that, you have not realized it. You have not seen it with your own eyes. That is why there are these doubts in you.

Vipin is saying, is it understood that the concept of Shiva is equivalent to the experiencer? It is understood. But can you throw some light on shivlings and sound om? Asking out of curiosity.

Yes, the shivling is a representation of the same thing, the creation. And om is a representation of the vibration which starts from zero frequency to infinite frequency. Just like om starts from the lowermost to the highest note. That represents the creation. Shivling also represents the same thing.

Vipin is asking, form is given to Shiva.

No, it is a representation. They know that Shiva means “nothingness”. Representing something does not give it a form. Symbolic.

Sushant is asking, what is your opinion about youth and euthanasia, meaning that killing people because they are too sick to carry on?

It has to be their own decision. It has to be their own like or dislike. This option should be given to everybody. And if they want it, they should be given it. Given that thing. Otherwise, you are free to do it yourself. Why even ask somebody else to do it? Will it be considered suicide? No, suicide is a mental distortion. It is a mental disease. And it is done to escape from the pain, while ending one's life when it has already ended is a very intelligent thing to do. It is like throwing trash, throwing what is useless. Now you don't need any doctor. You don't need any medicine. Simply stop eating. It is the natural way to die, so everybody can do it. Nobody needs to know it. It should not become a social matter or a public issue, it is your personal matter. Suicide is completely different. There the person has no knowledge. Does not know anything about the body, does not know anything about the afterlife. Has no guru, has no path. So these two things should not be compared. And those who compare these two things, they are stupid people.

Rahul is saying, I couldn't find the definition of mind. Is it found in layers of memory?

No, we do not use the word mind. It is useless and a corrupt word, which has many meanings. So it is removed from the program. What is there is memory and its activities and its states. That's all there is. In English, there is no word for this thing. In Sanskrit, there is a word that is called Chitta. Nothing good in English, so we removed it. Because what do people do? They do not listen to what I say in the video. They go and search in the dictionary. What is the meaning of mind in the dictionary? And obviously, it won't match with what I am saying. And so they don't get any knowledge. So we redefine everything there.

It might be a repetitive question. But isn't realizing oneself also includes realizing everything in this world? Is the reverse also true? If someone is too much involved in worldly matters, it means he is on the right path because the day will come when he will be done with all there is, slowly?

No. Realizing oneself means that there is nothing else there except one-self. There is nothing else worthy of knowledge which is worth knowing except my essence. So the reverse means everything has a meaning. Everything is worth knowing except what is me. And that is a complete disaster, you see? That is standing upside down and trying to walk. So that is not the right path. Even if you continue accumulating in the trash of the illusion, you will never realize what you are. Actually collecting all that knowledge will make you mad. There are some people here who think they have a lot of knowledge. They are crazy idiots, stupid people. Simply knowing what you are will liberate you from this impulsive tendency to know useless things. Either you clean up, which means knowing what you are, it is a clean up, removal of ignorance or you accumulate the trash. Accumulating trash will not mean cleaning up. It's wrong logic.

Ayushman is asking, was Dvaita/duality, and Vishishta, made so that we can have a different perspective on Advaita? Philosophies and understanding is the easy way. Or was it made just to contradict Shankaracharya's teaching? Diving deep into philosophies makes things more strangle. What is your advice?

See, those who understand don't need to make any new philosophy. Whatever is in the Vedic literature, in Upanishads, as told by Shankaracharya and thousands of rishis and philosophers, is the only Advaita. And these inferior interpretations of the only knowledge there is are made by those who could not understand it. This is my opinion. So just get the natural best 100% pure Advaita and simply throw away the rest. That is my advice.

It is often said that all paths lead to liberation. How true is this? Even if he doesn't choose a path, the evolutionary forces that you mentioned will still push the individual towards liberation.

Now it totally depends on your definition of “liberation”. But knowing my true essence. That will take only 20 minutes. Do we need a path for this? What do we need a path for? Is to bring that creature to this state where he can know his true essence. So the path will not liberate, the path will purify. Those that are progressive paths, they do nothing. They actually make the person spend some time. That's all. Time killers. So that they naturally evolve in a good environment. And remain pure enough to get the knowledge. Which takes only 20 minutes. So if all these paths lead to knowledge of my true essence, then we won't need the path of knowledge. You can pick anything and then you will get this thing. But why do we get it only on the path of knowledge through direct experience and logic? You should think about it, contemplate.

Praveen is saying, what is the best way to always remain in the state of consciousness during a busy worldly life?

First, you should take up a good path, like the path of knowledge, where this is the only practice. Second, you should join a good guru who is teaching the path of knowledge. The guru whom you like. The guru whom you trust. And third, follow the instructions. Very easy. One, two, three. Get the path. Get the guru. Follow the instructions. That is the best way. If you want a two-minute trick, I don't have it. If you want a mantra or some kind of magic, I don't have it.

There is nothing wrong in staying in worldly life. What is wrong? Why do you want to be in the state of consciousness? Whatever that is, you know. Are you unconscious now? I am asking Praveen. Why do you want that? It looks like you are fully conscious now.

Praveen is saying, I am conscious right now but in a state of ignorance.

So, your goal should be to end the ignorance. If you are already conscious, then why this question - how to always remain in the state of consciousness? That desire is already fulfilled then. Now you are saying, I am in ignorance. Now your next desire is to end the ignorance. So, how will you end the ignorance? Same process. Get on the path of knowledge. Get the guru. Follow the instructions. What is it that you don't know? I am asking Praveen now. What is it that you don't know? What is your ignorance?

Praveen is saying, despite knowing all the things, still I feel that the impact of true knowledge is very less.

But I am not asking about the impact of knowledge. You said, I am in a state of ignorance. What is your ignorance? What do you want to know? It is not good to change the topic. Let us stay on the topic. The topic is that I am in a state of ignorance. First you were unconscious. Now the consciousness has come. Now you are ignorant. Now you are jumping to the impact of true knowledge. So, where is this discussion going? Nowhere. Can we stay on one topic at least? I can already see the problem - Lack of attention, confusion.

Akash is saying, if everything is deterministic, then what is ignorance? Should we surrender to that deterministic force?

You see, ignorance is simply accumulation of assumptions, unfounded assumptions, blind beliefs. That is what ignorance is. It has nothing to do with deterministic or nondeterministic. If everything is not deterministic, then also it will happen because of the low intelligence of human beings. There is no relation between determinism and ignorance. It can happen in both ways. And should we surrender to that deterministic force? If everything is already determined, then what can you do? Is there a logic in asking should we do this or should we do that? If it is already determined, nothing else can be done. You don't have any option then. You don't have any choice. So, why are you asking? Think about it logically.

Siddhant is saying, off-topic question, is it possible to do a Prana Pratishtha on a computer?

See, it must be done according to the instructions of your Guru. So, ask your Guru. Usually, it is something which will last for one or two thousand years. And I think your computer will last for no more than four or five years. You can take that risk. And if your Guru is that stupid, leave that Guru.

Sandeep is asking, can experiencer experience without Chitta? Is Chitta present everywhere like experiencer?

Yes, it is present everywhere. It is the only thing that is manifested. The memory structure, the universal memory, UM, is the only thing that is manifested. And there is no other experience other than the experience of the memory. It is the objects, it is the bodies, it is the worlds, it is the mind, senses, it is everything. So, can we experience anything else besides the memory? It all is the experience of the memory.

Akash is saying, what can we do then?

Always do that which is necessary and always do that which you like most. Fulfill that for which you are born. Find out your life goal and accomplish it. Actually, I say it in every Satsang. The problem is people don't know what they like, what their life goal is, what they are born for. This is the main problem, isn't it? Can I give you something to do? Yes, I can, but your independence will be gone. You are already doing what others are telling you. Now the Guru will join the group of people who are commanding you. That's all that will happen. So, find out if you don't know. Find it out yourself.

Praveen has the answer. I mean to say that the impact of Satsang is not forever. Why do I forget all the things and come again in the previous state of ignorance.

You mean you already have the knowledge and the only problem is that you forget about it? There is no such thing as the impact of Satsang. Satsang is not here to produce an impact on you or to make you remember something. The Satsang is here to clear your doubts, to answer your questions. Now, does it mean that you already have knowledge of some kind? Like you said, the previous state of ignorance. Which means, do you get knowledge here in the Satsang? No. I answer questions from all the seekers. A variety of questions. That is not called knowledge. This is a Q & A. Knowledge is of three kinds. Self-realization. Second, realization that everything is an illusion. Third, realizing that everything is one. Do you need the “impact of Satsang” to remember it?

You have not answered my question so far. What knowledge you have and what ignorance you have? Do you have all these three kinds of knowledge? That is complete knowledge, isn't it? There is nothing else to know except these three things. You can completely discard the knowledge of the illusion. Simply say it is an illusion. It's done. And you can discard the knowledge of the non-duality or oneness because it is that which it is. It is always one, whether you know it or not. You are that. It is hardly useful in daily life. Then remains the knowledge of the self, also called the self-awareness or awareness. How much time does it take for you to remember who you are?

But first you should know who you are. First you should know what is your essence. Has that happened already for Praveen? Okay, you are just an experiencer. You can write it down somewhere, write it down in the places where you usually look. You don't need Satsang to remember this. And if your memory is so poor that you forget who I am, then you don't need any technique. You simply need to keep it in the memory. There is no technique to become “the experiencer”. You are already it. Then how to remember it? Remember it just like you remember everything else. Like you remember your name. How do you remember your name? Why don't you forget your name? Why don't you forget that you are a man, not a woman? And how much time does it take for you to remember that I am a man? There is just one thing to remember, isn't it? You can forget that you are a man and you can forget your name, no problem. But is it even possible to forget that I am the witness, I am the experiencer? Because in case of all the other things you need to access your memory to remember. But to find out who you are, do you need to access the memory? Do you need to search in the memory, where am I? No. You are here and now witnessing, absolutely present. The brightest light there is, is you. Can you simply ignore it? Can you simply say, I cannot see who I am? So you see, you don't need anything. You simply need to be present.

And if you forget who you are, that means, you know, there must be a lot of impurities. That means the knowledge has not really happened. It was heard from somewhere and then it was believed. This was said by this Guru and that Guru and it is written in this book, so I must be the experiencer. You need to realize what you are. I always give this example of touching the hot pan. If you touch the hot pan once, how much practice do you need to avoid touching it again? Once only. You realize this once only that it is hot and then you don't touch it. This is very easy. Actually, being in awareness is the easiest thing to do. And some people will say, no, there are thoughts and there are actions and the experiencer is lost in that. No, it is not lost. All thoughts, actions, they are happening in the background of the experiencer. Some people say that I forget that there is a background of the experiencer. There is no need to remember it. You need to know there is a background of the experiencer. That's all. Whatever happened, happened in this background, it is so simple.

What do people do? They sit in meditation for 10 hours per day with eyes closed so that they can know what they are. That is ignorance, isn't it? They don't have any guidance. They don't have any path. Simply doing it because somebody told them. Saw a video of that kind. So if you are the experiencer, nothing can change it. Even the forgetting of it is not going to change it. There is no need to do anything artificial to bring it. If you want to remember what I am all the time, something is wrong, isn't it? Be that which you are all the time because that is what you are. It cannot be anything else.

Hopefully Praveen got the answer but I don't think it will help him because the problem is not that you forget. The problem is that the experiencer was not understood clearly. The hot pan was not touched actually. Otherwise there is no need for any practice. Or you can take the reverse practice that whenever the ego comes up and this play starts then you need to realize that this is not me. Simple. You know that all these activities of the ego are not me. And if the ego is operating in the world, no problem. That is what it does. No need to stop it to become the experiencer. It will never happen. You are already the experiencer. No matter of stopping, starting, remembering, forgetting will change what you are.

Akash is asking, how to stay detached like a lotus flower?

Realize that you are already detached. Are you attached to anything? You are the screen on which all the events are happening and when the events happen, they leave no mark on the screen. It is simply the knowledge that I am already detached. What is attached will remain attached. What is free will remain free. Be that which is free. It's very simple.

How to be that which is free? Know what is free, know your essence. That is free and is detached from everything. So that's why I said, take the knowledge. You can ask a thousand questions but you will just accumulate facts. You know what you are and then you will answer every question there is in the world. Just like I do. Do I remember answers to all your questions? No. I simply know what I am and answers come from this one knowledge of the self.

I don't know why Akash is delaying the 20-minute knowledge. You don't have 20 minutes to get the self-knowledge but you have hours and hours to ask these questions. How is that possible? I am asking Akash, how is it possible that you don't want to know the key but you want to know all the facts? So after hinting so much also, if somebody does not want the knowledge, then obviously they are not ready for the knowledge. Those who are ready, they simply come here and ask for the knowledge, the ultimate knowledge. They are given in 3 hours actually. Those who get the knowledge, they don't come back asking these questions. They have only answers.

Anita is asking, what if one goes on touching the hot vessel?

That is stupidity. Any intelligent person will see once and will be done with it. Those who get the knowledge, they don't have doubts. Even if there are small doubts, they will be cleared very quickly, surely.

Parteep is asking, are real temples always consecrated?

Temples are not consecrated, only the statues are consecrated. Nobody has the time to set up the whole temple.

Why doesn't the knowledge click and how does it click?

The reason is very simple. The person is not ready. There are too many impurities and the intelligence has not developed enough to understand. When these impurities are cleared, when the time is right, then the same knowledge will be accepted.

Shubham is asking, does hermeticism also fall under the path of knowledge?

Yes, it is exactly like Advaita.

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 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 : https://pexp.podbean.com

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