Session 71

Mohammed asked - How long will the coming and going continue for? Sometimes it knows everything and all is peace but, most of the time it is in anticipation. Is this way of being or just a step along the way?

If you are asking about the instability of awareness, then it is going to take a long time. Because of many years of conditioning and many lifetimes of ignorance, there is a habit to fall into darkness and this habit continues for a long time. We have suggested some methods to get there faster. If you practice remembrance using those tricks then it can happen quickly. Usually there is a process of ripening and it happens automatically after a while, after a few years probably. And all we need to do is have patience, keep bringing the awareness, nothing else can be done.

There are people who use all kinds of methods to remain aware but the effort is too much, it feels as if it is artificial. The most natural way that I found is to remain aware as long as you can, of the three kinds of experiences. Bring in the experiencer in all your experiences, that is awareness. And if it slips, let it go, there is no problem, it will slip. Whenever there is a demand from the world or body, it can slip. And when it comes back, just continue. This is what I find is the most natural way. You can augment it by some methods which we have given in the series of videos and see if it helps. If you find one of those methods natural and easy then continue with that method.

If that is what you mean by coming and going then this is the answer. By coming and going we mean the cycle of births and deaths. I don't know whether you are asking about it but I don't think you are asking about it. So I would say the first thing here to improve is your language. Do not make it so ambiguous. Do not make it poetic. Do not assume that the other person is going to understand you. Use the words that were provided to you. I have never used these words - coming and going. So you can use the proper technical words here, the activity of awareness. Will it fluctuate? Something like this.

And then there is no doubt in the mind of the others.

If there is no clarity in the mind then there is no hope of understanding anything. And the whole point of our program is to bring that clarity, bring that discipline while writing, while talking, even while thinking that discipline must be there. Else it is all just a noodle soup of words in the mind. It knows nothing really. There is a limitation in the mind that it does not understand spirituality really. It is trying but nothing will be understood here. Why is that? Because the mind is based on illusion. The mind observes nothing but illusion, creates nothing but illusion. Spirituality is about the truth and so it knows nothing about the truth. How to deal with this situation? We purify the mind. We purify the mind of ignorance. That is all that can be done. One of the ways is to become precise and very accurate. This is the standard practice on the path of knowledge.

Awareness happens in a gradual way, and if it takes time, it is not a big problem. We do not worry about the awareness getting lost because the experiencer is never lost. Being an activity of the mind it is fine for it. It can go away, there is no problem. If you cannot maintain awareness in difficult situations then it can be a problem. When you are relaxed, when there is nothing to do then it can slip.

Roman has a question- is it called a meditation where you focus on an object with eyes open and do you think it is effective?

Meditation is like a medicine. If you have an illness, a medicine is given, only then the medicine is effective. In order for there to be effective medicine you need to diagnose what the illness is. So focusing on objects with eyes open is a medicine. Now what was your illness or what was the problem that this meditation is supposed to cure? If there was a problem and it was cured, yes it was effective. If there was no problem, or you are not aware that a meditation must be done only to remove certain issues, and you simply did it without thinking, then it is a total waste of time.

Sometimes the machine reflects the awareness, that look, I am aware. Where it finds this strange kind of peace, because it is reflecting the peace. That is all that is happening. Awareness is not a big deal. When it returns, you can say that I was always peaceful, and then continue. I don't think that is a big problem. I always do that. There is a storm in the mind of thoughts. And probably the awareness is lost. And there are bodily actions, speech and who knows what. The machine does a lot of things. And then when it returns, I know that I was always there and I was peaceful. Now whatever the machine does never affects what I am. And so I am totally convinced that no loss happened. Nothing unusual happened. No suffering happened. And I am convinced that this is like this since the beginning. As far as my memory goes, it has been like this.

The whole suffering, the whole disturbance, the whole lack of peace was an illusion. And now I am totally convinced that this will be like this for the rest of my life. And I am not hoping or expecting that some magic will happen and the awareness will stay there forever. Although that is our goal, we want to stretch the awareness for as long as possible. But I am not really concerned about these things. It is a kind of surrender now. As soon as you realize that the fruits do not appear on a tree by force, you cannot make the tree produce a fruit on demand, fruits grow when the season is right. The fruit ripens and the ripe fruit falls. That is how you get the fruit. When you know this, you stop the effort. There is no point in making any effort.

As soon as the mind gets a taste of awareness, it is kind of attracted to it and it itself try to keep it on. And it will fail because it is a new thing for the mind. The point to understand is that it is perfectly okay. Complaining that it goes away is also an activity of the mind. The experiencer is not bothered about what goes away or what remains, which is my true nature. When it is not bothered about anything, why should I put another layer on this ignorance that it went away? How should I get it back? This extra thought is an extra burden. It is not needed really. It is unnecessary. Instead of seeing the illusion that there was no suffering, we simply strengthen it by accepting that there was suffering, the awareness went away and the suffering came back. And these thoughts are totally unnecessary. Nothing like this happened. Let me know if you can see this because this is my direct experience.

The peace is always there. There is an illusion of disturbance, like the sky is always there. Sometimes the clouds are there. Nothing happens to the sky. The clouds, they come and go, as you said, coming and going. When the sky is back, it sees that nothing happened to me. Now it does not complain - the clouds are coming, the clouds are going, there is thunder, there is rain. It never says like this. It accepts everything unconditionally. Why? Because it is peace. It is bliss and it is unconditional. So it cannot do it. Even if it wants to, it won't do it. Because the nature of the experiencer is pure bliss. It has no complaints. Now as a reaction to losing awareness or whatever, the mind starts complaining. If there is awareness and there is complaint, it is not a good situation. That means there is no real awareness.

Because if you are aware, you will be peaceful. You won't start complaining immediately that I lost my awareness. Everybody should see this. When I say I am aware, I am actually not really aware. If I have taken the mental activity as truth, then that is not called awareness. You must see the machine as a machine. You must see its operation as an operation, as an activity, which is meaningless. Actually, this thing is so meaningless that it is not even required for survival. The mind is designed for survival. And if it does something for survival, yes, we can understand it. The thoughts, the suffering that it creates without any consequences for survival or anything remotely survival related, is totally unnecessary. And if this knowledge is not present, it means that the awareness was not present.

I must admit that I don't remain aware all the time. But have you seen me complaining about it? I must admit that the mind has its own tendencies going on all the time. You cannot stop it. That is what I discovered. And I saw that all these techniques to stop the mind, they are totally artificial. It is not really required. That's why I don't recommend any techniques. There is no practice. It is not required because in the light of knowledge, it is all OK. The machine has to continue working. The machine will make some noise when it operates. If you don't want this, don't come here. Don't take human birth. Don't assume this apparatus. Don't wear this garment of mind and body. That is what any advanced seeker wants. That is what our goal is. To totally get rid of the human experience. Because ultimately we find that the whole of it is useless. Not only the things that happen without awareness.

All of it is totally useless.

The whole struggle for survival and having these experiences, which are illusions, we find that there was no need really. The food that you taste is an illusion. After knowing this, the food and the taste and the pleasure that comes after it, and the hunger that comes after it, and the punishment that is experienced if you don't satisfy the hunger, this whole thing is a complete illusion. The whole cycle of pleasure and pain, action and consequences is a complete illusion. It is completely useless. It is serving no purpose at all. Except providing you with some kind of experience.

As soon as you understand that I had this experience millions of times, what is the point in repeating it again? As soon as you know this, there is complete detachment from this experience and it won't repeat now. This is your last birth then. Actually you can drop everything today. But there is a momentum to this habit of experiencing, wanting, doing. So it will continue for a while. And then who cares? Let it continue. It has continued for millions of years. Now a few more years. Or probably two or three more lifetimes. In the spiritual field, we measure time using a unit of lifetimes. Just like in astronomy, they measure the distance in lightyears, not in kilometers. The kilometer is a very small unit. Lightyears is very convenient. Similarly in spiritual terms, we measure the time in lifetimes. So if it takes a few lifetimes, not a big deal.

If this does not bring peace, then nothing will bring it. If that is the intention that all this activity, this life is producing is nothing but suffering. Especially if you are unaware. When the awareness returns, the thoughts are like, what was that? Why was that? Why did that happen? When you are under the influence of a desire, you don't know what is happening. The desire has a force. It will make this body act in a certain way. When the awareness returns, you ask this, what was that? Why was there a desire? Why do I need to experience all this? That means detachment is here. This will also become an impression on the mind and next time the mind will be reluctant to enter a human experience.

Just cultivate this quality of detachment. No complaining needed. No need to remain in extreme bliss and peace. Not possible when you are human. Know that you are actually bliss and peace. You are pure happiness yourself. Know that all the time you are that. Yes, the identification will come and go and that is also okay now. The identification is just moments of non-awareness. That's all it is. When the identification happens, identify with this machine, you do whatever is needed. When the identification goes, you are in peace and you know that you were in peace all the time. Then there is nothing to worry and there is nothing to do. The detachment should be given some attention. It should be committed to memory - that whole experience was completely useless, purposeless, just a disturbance of peace, a little bit. Appearance of disturbance.

Remember, suffering is an illusion, this illusion was totally unnecessary for me and commit this to memory. This is going to form an impression on the mind and that will stop the next birth. And then you will never need to deal with the machine again. This is just one point of view. I'll return to this thing, but let me tell you a trick which can be used by many people. Probably everybody will find it useful that when you lose awareness, there is the experiencer, there is the memory of it. Actually nothing is lost except this reflecting ability. Not a big problem. The awareness will come back. You can bring it back using your usual means. And then in your free time, go through the whole experience of non-awareness again. Play it back like a movie in your mind. The experience happened, which means the experiencer was there and the memory is there, fortunately.

If you suffered and there was no memory of it, now there is no way. Now there is no way to get out of it. This is what is actually happening. But if there is a memory now, you should play it back and this time make sure that it is happening in awareness.

This time make sure that the playback is happening in complete awareness. You are reflecting on what is happening. And play it back as if it is happening. The same sequence of thoughts, the same events that happened. If they were physical events, just play them back as if they are happening right now. And keep the awareness on. See if it is generating suffering or not. In my experience, it does not generate any kind of suffering. Same things, same reactions, the same anger or whatever comes back when you recall it, when you play it back. But there is no suffering.

It is seen as the activity of this machine. I am using the word machine knowingly here. I could have said ‘you’. It is seen as an activity of ‘you’. But that is not correct. There is no you. “You” is an imagination. “I” is imagination. Play it back like this for 5-10 minutes. Experiment with it. You will find that if a similar situation arises in future, this playback of the memory will be available to you. This is the tendency of the mind. This is the functioning of the mind that if it sees a similar memory, it recalls it. When you see a toy in the shop, you recall your childhood which is otherwise absent from the awareness. Similarly, when the same suffering appears again, your playback session will be recalled. You will see it now - there was awareness, there was no suffering. I had seen the illusion. Something similar is happening right now. And this has an effect of turning on the awareness. Try it. It is a technique. Although I don't really recommend techniques. It must happen naturally. See, you suffered once, that should be enough to bring in the awareness next time the same situation happens.

I usually give this example of a hot pan. How many times do you need to touch the hot pan to learn that I should not touch it? It is a painful experience. Some of us like to keep doing the same thing over and over again. Some people have this complaint that the mind knows that it is suffering and then why does it keep repeating it? In short, there is no awareness there. And there is no deterrent in the mind to stop. Actually, the mind thinks that I am doing something good by bringing it back again and again. It is a survival mechanism. Mind brings it back again in order to resolve it.

It is a tendency that goes in cycles. It sees it as an unresolved issue. And the unresolved issues are brought back in the waking state. And you will say, no, my life is going on nicely. There are no issues here. Then why is there a dissatisfaction, a memory, a very unpleasant negativity in me? This activity is there without any cause. It may seem without any cause, it is actually so old, so ancient that you don't remember it. So you have resolved today's things. You have resolved last week's issues. And you have resolved last year's issues. Now the mind has nothing to do but to bring something which is 10 years old. And now that disturbs your peace. Now you resolve that also, forgiving and whatever rituals you want to do, you do it. And the mind brings something which is 50 years old, which happened in your past, in childhood, infancy, when your mother slapped you or something like this happened. If that is also resolved, it will bring in something unknown. And now there is no explanation of it, except I can only tell you that it is coming from some other lifetime experience. It's not of this lifetime.

So, this process will continue until all the issues in the causal body have been brought up and resolved. Now, you can see that this process can take a million years. And so, on the path of knowledge, we are not really concerned about this process. In the case of the yogic path, or let us say specifically the Kundalini path, this is a big deal somehow. You need to bring up all these pending issues there. You need to shine light on them. That is what they mean by awareness. And then you let it go. The purification has happened, the correction has happened. But on the path of knowledge, we don't feel that kind of need because it is like a big mountain. The number of issues, they are uncountable. So what do we do? We leave them by saying that they are not mine. The karmic storage is not mine. You just try to be aware of it. That's all.

Roman is saying- When you wake up to your awareness and feel a good sense of self, does that open your root chakra? I have been feeling tingling in the bottom of my spine, so I am curious.

First of all, you don't know the meaning of awareness because you have not reached that part yet, and there is no good sense of self. The self cannot be sensed, which you obviously don't know. You don't know what the root chakra is, and the tingling and whatever sensations that you are feeling are simply illusions. So my suggestion would be to get the knowledge first, instead of repeating these words that you heard somewhere. If you knew all these things, you wouldn't say anything like this. So I am not saying don't ask me what this tingling is. You can ask me. But my question will be, what is your understanding of it? When you are using words like awareness and sense of self, chakra, and all these things, try to know what these are. There is no point in repeating the words without knowing their meaning. So you are at step number zero. Forget about awareness. Forget about your sense of self and chakras and tingling. There is no point in that.

Vidya is saying - To stay in awareness is desire which appears as a thought in the mind. After understanding, there is this awareness alone, then letting things take its course is the only way. The desire may be fulfilled or it may not be. As a seeker, both are fine, and that gives immense peace. Once the awareness has stayed for sometimes, sometimes once, it will continue to show up often, which happens gradually. Being okay with both is surrender.

Yes, that is what I was saying, and she has given a good summary here. Much better than I could explain it. So yes, it is a desire to stay in awareness. We need this desire, actually. Without this desire, our goals are not achieved. But to cling to this desire is a problem. When what we desire is not happening, the reaction is coming from the machine, not from me. Remember that even this desire is not mine. It is a very natural phenomenon. We know that there is an extra dimension here where the mind can go, and we tasted it, we saw the effects of it and this desire arose in us. I experimented with it and now I am getting what I want here. Let me continue with this practice.

There is no constant abiding in the knowledge. And then if it is not fulfilled, which it will not be, it takes time, there should not be another suffering on top of your existing suffering. You have millions of desires that are causing suffering. You added one more, and if it is not fulfilled, then the machine is going to produce more suffering there - “I am not a good seeker, I cannot maintain my awareness, everybody else has awareness, I am not doing it”. This is suffering and this is totally unnecessary.

Treat it just like any other desire but give it the highest preference. Invite your awareness very softly. It is not something that must be beaten into place, cannot come by force, cannot come by extreme effort. Awareness is a natural consequence of knowledge. This is the Mool Mantra; this is your formula, it is a natural consequence of knowledge. You cannot bring it from somewhere and then keep it there by force. If you think you can, then it is the mind doing it. It is the mind trying to fulfill this new wish. And it is impossible because awareness is something that is beyond the mind, or I can say more accurately that the intellect is trying to do it by its usual means, and it fails because it is beyond the grasp of the intellect.

Awareness is a layer which is above our everyday intelligence. It is possible that the ego attaches to it. “My guru told me to remain aware, and he told me that you will become special if you become aware.” This is ego talking. Whenever there is this kind of language - “I am miserable, I am not special, I am a failure”. This "I" is the ego. Intellect will have a different kind of language. “What should I do? Which tricks and techniques are there to bring awareness?” - This is intellect talking.

Awareness is pure happiness. It wants nothing. It knows that I am going to go away, and still, there are no complaints there. Nobody is complaining there; there is no ego, there is no calculation, rationality going on there. It is fine. It is like a love affair of some kind with the experiencer, right? You don't always remember your beloved, but when you remember your beloved, you are filled with the sweetness, that's all. When the awareness is turned on, it produces sweetness in you. The sweetness will become an addiction, and it will keep coming again and again. Before there is awareness, there is annoyance that I don't want these thoughts. I don't want this negative experience or even a positive experience. Well, it is fleeting. This is annoying. And as soon as there is this annoyance, which is a form of detachment, the next step is awareness.

The "I" is also dropped in awareness; there is no ego in awareness. So if there is annoyance and there is no awareness, it means that you are missing a crucial step there. What you think is awareness is simply annoyance. Why did that not happen, which happened last time? Why there is no sweetness, why there is no peace? And you can see that it is not awareness. Because when you are in awareness, there is only sweetness, there is no complaining. If there is suffering, even after becoming aware, it is not awareness.

We fool ourselves by telling ourselves that I am aware. No, we are not. In the human kind, the awareness is still maturing. It is baby awareness. We are not really aware. You don't even know what it means to be aware. I don't want to discourage you by saying that. The experiencer is a profound and all-encompassing aspect of existence. It comprises the entirety of our being. However, as individuals, we are not fully aware of the whole experiencer. Our consciousness is limited to the part that is reflected in our minds, which can be likened to the moon's reflection in ponds or dew drops. We perceive the dew drop with the shining moon but not the moon itself.

In essence, the true nature of the experiencer remains elusive to us. It cannot be made into an object of our focused awareness. Despite this, there's no need for concern or worry. Our awareness has the potential to expand continuously without any regress. This is the time for surrender – to let go and embrace the growth of awareness. It is natural to encounter suffering, and it's alright. Awareness may fluctuate, but it's not a problem. Even if there are numerous lifetimes ahead, it doesn't matter. Surrender is not a sign of failure; it stems from a deep conviction. Understanding that the experiencer is ever-present and that awareness will develop slowly, fosters this conviction. Through surrender, one becomes untroubled by anything, even suffering, as it is seen as an illusion. Conviction brings peace, and the absence of peace often indicates a lack of deep-rooted understanding. Superficial knowledge needs to be internalized and transformed into one's direct experience for true conviction to arise.

In our program, the goal is to make this knowledge personal and experiential, so conviction naturally emerges.

A common concern that arises is the fear of death, despite being told that death is an illusion. The persistent use of the word "I" in this context suggests that the teaching has not yet penetrated the heart. The fear of dying is a characteristic of the individual aspect of the experiencer, the machine's tendency to preserve itself. See, if this thing is not afraid of dying, if there is no fear of death, it won't last for a single day. This tendency enables life. Fear is part of our lives. The fear of death. We get up in the morning, there is a slight fear there that I will miss my bus. My boss will be angry if I go to the office late. Or I am feeling so hungry now, if I don't eat, I am going to feel the pain of hunger. We get up in the morning with fear. Otherwise there is no reason to get up in the morning. What is there to do? We do everything that we do because there is fear. We really don't live our life in joy. We live in fear.

Why are you earning money? Why are you doing the jobs that you do? Why are you engaged in relations of all kinds? All fear. Fear of not getting. So fear and suffering is the nature of this organism.

It survives like this. It's fine. If it is afraid of death, so what? Don't call it I. That is your error. Even after I know that death is an illusion, I am afraid of it. Even after I know that I am eternal, I am afraid of death. What is this? The eternity of life and the experiencer are merely words in your mind. Therefore the fear is always there and it's not a big problem. What can you do if mother nature has designed this thing that it is going to survive on fear. Yes there is a bit of pleasure also. Many of our activities are a result of this anticipation of pleasure. That is also polluted by fear that I won't get it. I better get it now and so on. What can we do? You let the fear be there. It's very natural. Let the creature protect itself.

You are standing in the middle of the road and a big truck is coming at you at a high speed. Now are you going to say I am not afraid of death, I will just stand here? No, you run like mad. Don't waste one second there standing. This is intelligence. Now you are at home and you are still afraid of something. That is some kind of mental disorder. That should not happen. There you can use your awareness. There you can say that I am eternal. Not when you are standing in the middle of the road on a highway. The awareness is of no use there. Awareness is not really beneficial for survival. What is beneficial for survival is fear. So use it.

There is no trouble with the fear you see. The problem is not that there is fear. You have a fight with fear, that is the problem. Fight is there because there is no conviction. The knowledge has not penetrated. There is no acceptance of fear. There is no surrender there, that everything is right. Everything is okay as it is.

Leyla is saying, the old language being used could be just a force of habit.

Yes, our minds are corrupted. The language is corrupted. It is very difficult to get rid of the language. I keep preaching people to purify language and I myself keep saying it. So yes it is a habit and the language reinforces ignorance. When you use the language of ignorance it is going to reinforce your ignorance. The mind, the intellect works on language. The language is its nuts and bolts.

Roman is saying- Are chakras not energy orbs in the body? Why can't you feel sensations in them if there are energy centers where you are feeling?

No they are not energy orbs in the body. The energy centers are non-physical in nature. The body is physical. So how to understand this thing. In Sanskrit we call them Kshetrams. I don't know what you call it in English, there is probably no word for it. The areas in the body where the sensation is felt are not chakras. That is why I told you to go through the videos, go through the course. You will know all these things. I don't know why you are delaying it so much, asking about random things. It is not going to make you progress. It is not going to give you any knowledge. It is not that I cannot answer it, you see I have answered it so many times actually. What I want is that instead of getting the bits and pieces of some random yogic system here and there which is completely useless for you, you get the essential thing so that you never get any question in your life, so that you know everything in the universe.

Follow the instructions. There is no point in watching random videos. You won't understand a single word. So those who are very advanced and have been in the spiritual field for many years, they also find it difficult to understand. It is a highly intellectual thing. You will need to go serially. It will take many years for you to understand. Don't worry about it. If you don't like it, you can leave it completely and take on another path. But then don't do it randomly. Get a teacher, get a guru and try to understand all your chakras and spine and everything scientifically. And these things cannot be understood by words. These things can be only understood by doing it. Just like I cannot tell you that the sugar is sweet and you understand what sweet means. It is not possible. The sweetness is an experience. It must be taken. You need to eat the sugar.

Right now your experience is zero and you are trying to understand chakras and all those things. They are only words. It is like a blind man talking about the moon. Yes, he can write a poem on the moon. It is possible because he heard these words. Moon is bright. Moon is white and so on. He can write all those down, but that is what I call the word soup. It stands on nothing. Your first 10 years or 20 years will be only exploration of spirituality. And it is not bad. That is also needed. All you need is a systematic way to advance and not random blind beliefs. Spirituality is not about believing things. It is about finding the evidence and practicing.

Unfortunately, there are people who have turned this into a system of beliefs. That is not the right path. In some of the ways, some of the paths, the belief is an important ingredient where you must believe in the teacher or you must believe in the concepts. The yogic system is one of those where the belief comes first. Don't ask me what chakra is. Just sit down and meditate, that will be the command from the teacher. The teacher told you not to eat this food and that food and then you cannot now argue. There has to be complete surrender there. This is another path, you see, not the path of knowledge. Which is also good, you see, because you progress a lot faster there if there is faith and surrender. Because all you need to do is follow the instructions.

But on the path of knowledge, we demand evidence. Do not accept it blindly. Why do we do that?

Because we see that it is possible to get the evidence. Then we decide that probably it is better to get the evidence, have the conviction, and then do whatever needs to be done, instead of doing it blindly and hoping that someday it will bring fruit. On the path of knowledge, the fruit is given to you first. Look, this is what it is. And the practice comes later, if you want to practice, otherwise you let it go. It's not important. There is absolutely no practice on the path of knowledge. There are no chakras, no meditation, nothing.

Roman is saying- my main focus is obtaining the awareness that you are talking about. No doubt thoughts are limiting. The reason I ask is because I thought when you open your root chakra, it's the first one, so it's the beginning of the spiritual path.

There is no root chakra on the path of knowledge. These concepts are absent here. They are only concepts. There is no real root chakra.

Anand is saying - Bhakti is belief, Shraddha is spirituality, a radical way of understanding the truth.

Yeah, there is a little bit of difference there. In English, we don't have the words, so I used living faith and blind faith to distinguish between the two kinds of faith that we are capable of. So in Sanskrit, we already have, you see, the Bhakti is actually translated as devotion. The devotion also needs conviction, but sometimes, you see, that can be dropped. You can simply devote yourself to something blindly and Shraddha, yes, it is a conviction-based belief. It's a living belief that whatever I believe in has a substance, has a foundation. That is what I would call a living faith. Although on the path of knowledge, you are not supposed to have this also.

What I tell you is open-minded skepticism. You need to be skeptical. You can always ask why, how, what, and if that answer is not convincing, you either go to another guru or you simply leave the path. There is no point in staying here if there is no conviction. No amount of blind belief is going to help you here. You will end up with nothing, if you use belief as a way to progress here. Do not accept a single word without knowing what that is.

It is not a religion of any kind where you are not supposed to question. Without questioning, without skepticism, there won't be any conviction. Something beautiful will happen as you get the evidence here on the path of knowledge that your living faith will go on increasing. You instinctively know that the next thing that is coming will be true. You know that the last twenty things were exactly as per my experience and they were exactly logical. I have the evidence for that. And the next thing that is coming is going to be true also. Otherwise the guru is not going to say it. He gets nothing by saying it. If it is not useful for you, it will not be said. If I cannot bring evidence to you, I will not say it. It goes in the category of chit chat, which we do a lot in the satsangs.

There is a middle way where you don't have the experience right now, you cannot be convinced and you don't know the truth of it. But still I say it. Why? I not only say it, I give you a means to go there and experience it. Middle ground here, the grey area, where I said something and you say, no, I don't have that kind of experience and then I hand over a telescope to you. Look through the telescope now and that telescope is a metaphor for an experiment. I have experimented in the grey area and that's how I got the confidence to say it in public.

You must have seen that those who do not have an experience behind their words, they fall back to scripture. That shows that they don't have their own experience to tell you. I don't like this thing. Yes, it is another good way to convey the knowledge that this book contains this and that kind of concept. The author of that book said something like this. This is another kind of knowledge, but it is not convincing. It does not constitute any kind of evidence on the path of knowledge. I never mention it actually. I don't bother to remember whatever is written in all these books, only rarely I recall something which is written in a book or said by somebody else. I don't even remember what my own gurus told me. Nothing was retained.

‘On January 2nd of this date, 1999, somebody told me this.’ No, it is completely useless. What happens is there is a question here in front of me. I reach out to the direct experience. I form the answer and I tell you. And then it is gone. There is no need to remember anything. There is no need to read any book. The truth is in front of you. If you cannot see it right now, you will never see it. So that is why we put so much effort on evidence. Without evidence, there will not be any conviction. Without conviction, there will not be any living faith. And then, you are going to progress very slowly. The seed is there, but there is no water and there is no fertilizer. So just sitting there. All these experiments, all these logical analysis and my attempts to show you, instead of telling you, are based on this experience of mine that there is no progress on the spiritual path if there is no conviction.

With this saying, please, can you say something about the surrender in which culminates the path of knowledge?

The path of knowledge ends in surrender. This is something very strange, isn't it? Because when we start on this path, I tell you that our goal is to get knowledge. We are walking on the path of knowledge to get knowledge. This will never happen. That is shocking, isn't it? On the path of knowledge, you don't get knowledge. You get rid of ignorance. Ignorance is being shed here. “I thought this and it was wrong”. Okay, next. “I thought that and it was wrong”. Next, and so on. There is so much shedding, letting go, destroying, reducing, subtracting that at the end of the path, you are left with nothing, emptiness. Now there, the attitude is to surrender.

Don't try to know because the next thing that the mind cooks up, the answer is going to be, can anybody guess? The mind cooks up a thing called X. Is it right or is it wrong? Is it true or is it false? Yes, always false. You know this in your heart that whatever comes before me will be completely useless. There is no point in knowing it or there is no point in investigating it and there is no point in doing any kind of effort for it. And what is this feeling? What is this attitude? This is what we call surrender.

So the path of knowledge will end in surrender, where there is no real need to do anything, about anything. It is not that you emerge as an all-knowing superhuman of some kind, no, you are reduced to nothing. You enter this path as something, as a mountain of accumulation, and that is why the progress is so slow because you are so heavy with the knowledge. The teacher is going to cut down all that, destroy all of it. By the time you finish, nothing is left. And then you don't want to accumulate because you know it is going to be false. Whatever you call your knowledge is nothing but ignorance, right? Why have you accumulated ignorance? Because you are convinced that it is knowledge, because you thought it is true. So you made it your own path, now you are walking with this burden. That is why everything is so dark and heavy here.

Tell me what is wrong in human life, tell me what is wrong in this lower world. It is beautiful, right?

Having a body is a good experience, giving away the body, letting it die is a good experience. There is nothing wrong here. What has happened is that the false has been taken as truth. My body, my money, my house, my land, my country, my race, my religion, my family. I want happiness from this, from that, as if the happiness is something true. My desire, it must be fulfilled at any cost, as if the desire is true. My pleasure, as if the pleasure that the mind produces out of thin air, is true. You have taken the whole illusion as truth and you have buried the truth, calling it false. This is what has happened.

This is what we call it maya because of this reversal. Maya is nothing but your own creation. You have reversed it. That is why it is all dark and painful and so heavy, so sticky. Otherwise there is nothing wrong in this game that we are playing. Nobody wins here, nobody loses, you see. Nobody gains anything. It is pure leela, it is pure entertainment. I created this entertainment, this maya for myself.

No, I am trapped in it. That is the cost we pay. We waste our time here thinking that everything is true and the path of knowledge simply tells you - it is exactly reversed. So why is materialism the exact opposite of spirituality? Because the definition of truth is reversed there. For a materialistic person, the matter and the body is the only truth, fulfilling these apparent desires. The materialist is never going to say that desires are false, although by their own definition they are immaterial so they must be false. But no, there is some kind of darkness there. Even with the opposing concepts, they are able to live somehow in a materialistic way. It is a madness of some kind, it is a mental disorder of some kind where the logic is also reversed. The logic is very simple in materialism that I say it, therefore it is true. This is their logic.

Some more things are then thrown in that I have a PhD degree and I belong to a rich country and I have this skin color, therefore I am telling you the truth and you need to accept my truth. That is another madness I have seen. So that is why they made their own life miserable and they are causing suffering for others. They are destroying the whole of this lower world, otherwise there is nothing wrong here. The false has been taken as truth and the play has been turned into some kind of mindless lowly activity, otherwise I don't see anything bad here.

There was no need to be liberated from this experience, actually. If you have the conviction, you know that you are already liberated, nothing binds you, the illusory stuff is bound, so what, it is always going to be so. The real thing is not bound, which is I. If you don't have this conviction you will run after liberation and whatever, you call it mukti and nirvana and so on. On the path of knowledge we know that these things are illusory, we don't even want mukti, we don't want liberation. That desire is also illusory and if there is a want we say it is okay, it is natural and we let it be there and we watch the fruits of it. So this brings in the surrender because finally we know our error, our “sin” and then it is purified, we let it go and now there is nothing to do.

Anand is saying- you become parmatma yourself and nothing to know beyond it. No reminder, purnamidam.

Yes, we start as something small, thinking that I am something big and then when we shed everything, something interesting happens, instead of becoming nothing, you realize that you are everything also. Now, the intellect is not going to comprehend these things because they come in the domain of non-duality where intelligence cannot go. So we see that everything was taken away from me, still everything remained. What remains when you take away everything out of everything? You were everything in the beginning, everything was taken away from you, what remains there cannot be known by intellect because everything remains. This is the paradox here. Now would you like to keep doing the effort, would you like to keep seeking or would you like to just abide in the surrender that I am whole and complete already? This is where we are going. When I say don't come on the path of knowledge because you are not going to achieve anything, that is going to demotivate a lot of people, I know. But behind this is a reason. You won't get anything, you won't achieve anything here because you are already everything.

How can you get anything when you are already everything? What is there to get now? All you get is this realization that I am whole and complete, I am Purna. It does not matter how much you remove from me, I am going to remain infinite. So ultimately there will be an acceptance of the Maya also that it's fine, it's fine, it's okay, that kind of little bit of distortion is happening in this machine, who cares? But look at the world, there is a lot of suffering and then you laugh because there is no world really. What kind of suffering are you talking about? I see nothing here, it is complete emptiness, there is only me. Peaceful and blissful wholeness is there with joy and suffering, everything. “No, no, no, suffering, suffering, suffering!”

Okay, if you say, we'll play this game of coming out of suffering and bringing everybody else out of suffering, and remember there is nothing else to do. We are not here to fulfill the biological needs, there is nothing like this, there is nobody here, we are not here to fulfill the desires, who knows from where they are coming, the random things simply appear in the mind, we are not here to do that. We accept that yes there is suffering and there is a way to come out of the suffering and then we proceed, we play the game. In the end you come to know there was no suffering, there was no world, there was no individual, it was always the whole. This is beautiful as well as very annoying, it is a big joke actually, it is the universal joke. You must be seeing some shades of Gautam Buddha here because he said something similar. The world is suffering, I know a way to come out of it and the whole of it is pointless, and he laughed. Everybody will come to this realization, don't worry and then we descend back into the matter, no issues here, no problems here and this is what we call - surrender.

Session 72

Somebody asked me one day - what do I need to do to bring more joy in my experience?

Probably I've already answered these questions, but I'll do it in a little bit of detail here today. That all you need to do to bring joy in your all daily experiences is to realize that you are bliss.

This is the short answer that any teacher is going to give you. There is no joy inherent in any experience. The experiencer is joyous. The experiencer is blissful. Our mistake is that we completely ignore the experiencer and we look for joy or happiness outside, in the experience. So you can see this fundamental mistake has been made here. That person is asking, how can my experiences be joyful? It is not possible. Experiences do not give us any happiness. They are a way to express our happiness. They are a way to let the universe know that I am blissful. There is no happiness in the experience. Just like there is no suffering in the experience. Both of them are illusions.

Still, I want to see the bliss outside. That will be the follow up question. Yes, I know I am blissful. But it's not really making my experience blissful. The experience is the same pathetic experience. That is still there. I became enlightened, whatever it means, but it is still the same. The experience has not changed. The body has not changed. People have not changed. The world probably changed for the worse. And my mind is the same. That is the biggest trouble maker. How to get rid of that thing or make it more blissful. Make the bliss shine in those experiences? There is a good solution for this. If you want to see the bliss that you are, outside of what you are, it is impossible, there is nothing which is outside you. But for the sake of this question, we can fall down to that level of duality. And we can say that, yes, your experience is different from the experiencer. And now you need to do a process. You need to do something to transfer the bliss from here to there.

It is called a concessional answer because the person is not really grasping the first answer. And the person is still under this illusion that I am different and the experience is something different. So in that case, what we suggest is you enter a lifestyle which is about giving, which is about expressing the bliss that you are. How do you express the bliss that you are? By sharing the bliss, by sharing the happiness with others. I know that is going to lead to many more questions - “I am terribly sad. I am trying all day. You tell me to go and share my happiness. I am not happy. How can I make others happy?”

Here is another belief that your mental state makes you do things. No, you have the choice to do whatever you want. Your mental state does not matter. We are born very pure. Look at any child. He is crying, he gets a toy, he gets something sweet to eat, now he is laughing, he is smiling. He does not hold on to that crying. We are born pure like this. What happens is, slowly we learn to keep the sadness and let go of the joy. I don't know why it happens. This is human nature nowadays. The bad moments, the bad experiences, bad memories, they pile-up and the good stuff is lost. It looks like the universe is very selective about these things. I never remember anything good in my life. All these traumatic things, they are repeated again and again in front of the screen that I am watching, the screen of the mind. And you tell me to share joy. How is it even possible in these circumstances?

So, become a child again. Let go of your conditioning that places too much importance on suffering.

“Don't tell anybody that you are happy. Somebody will take away your happiness” - This is how we are brought up. Hide your prosperity because thieves are going to rob it. This is how survival works. And so we use the same thing on our minds. Don't express too much joy. People will think you are mad. You just lost your job and you are throwing a party. They are going to lock you up. This is our conditioning.

Become a child. Let go of the conditioning. Start sharing the joy that you are. You have only one piece of bread. And your conditioning tells you to keep it. Don't tell anybody you have one piece of bread.

And if you find someone having more, just kill that fellow and get the other bread also. This is your conditioning. You reverse it. You take that one piece of bread which is your means of survival now. You give half of it to your brother, your neighbor, whoever needs it. This is a way to break the conditioning. This is the way to share when you don't have anything.

Why don't we do that? We are afraid that we are losing something. Yes, in the case of bread you probably lose something, but if you eat the whole bread, you will die in two days. If you eat half of it, you will die in one day. Not much difference. But the thing about happiness is when you share it, you lose nothing. It is not bread or money. Our survival does not depend on it.

It’s a very easy answer, it's difficult to do. You can start bit by bit. Start sharing. Happiness cannot appear in the experience by doing or getting. You need to be bliss and then it shows up in your behavior, then it is expressed, it is reflected by others. You make others happy, they will make you happy. You make others sad, they will ensure that you remain sad for the rest of your life. Expression is the key. Express the bliss that you are. Forget about your conditioning. You are blissful. Look at your true nature. It is always blissful. Unconditionally happy, unconditionally loving.

There can be follow up questions to this - “I have nobody to share my bliss with. I have nobody who is ready to take my half rotten bread also”. This is a result of your selfishness. Your loneliness is a result of your selfishness. Now you need to correct it. It's very simple. Nobody is with you because they got nothing from you. This is human nature. People stay with somebody else as long as they are getting something from there. Nobody is going to stay with you for giving anything. You see, that is a spiritual quality. Ordinary people don't have this quality. They cannot give. They can only take. And you have also done the same.

You are doubting this saying nobody is there to take it. It is simply because you were very selfish. You never gave anything to anybody. Therefore there is nobody now. There is nobody even asking me because they already know the answer. That he will say no. This is a big problem. Here somebody may think that I am asking them to go and do the charity. No, never do that. Never pay money to unknown organizations. The whole system is corrupt. Whole humanity is corrupt. Do not pay money to beggars. You have just extended his suffering by one more day. It's okay to die. Did not spread happiness.

We can use our common sense here. Giving objects, giving money multiplies suffering. You give some money to a poor person. Yes, he is going to be happy for a few minutes. Then he will come back to you. “I need more money for tomorrow. I need more money for the marriage of my daughter. I need more money because I want a big mansion. I heard that you just give it away. I am just asking you”. What have you done here? You have made a dependent. And dependency is a kind of suffering. Very soon he will learn that you lied. You cannot give him every day. And that sweetness will turn into bitterness. Many people will try to take advantage of you. “I borrow from him every day. He never asks me to return the money. I can exploit this person as long as I want”. This will happen to you.

When you give away material things you multiply suffering. It may look like charity is a good thing. No, it is not. Similarly for service. It is kind of middle ground here. Sometimes you need to serve. And sometimes you need to avoid serving. So again, big organizations, big names, these branded things. Do not serve under them. Probably you will never find anybody who says like this. Who teaches like this? It is my experience. It amounts to nothing. It has to be one to one. It has to be your effort else you learn nothing. You go to a crowd of a thousand people and do some kind of service, but they are not going to change, this is guaranteed. You need to do it whenever there is an opportunity. That is the rule of service.

Do not go and hunt for an opportunity to serve. Let the opportunity come to you. So you are left with nothing here but to give away your bliss. You have nothing. I banned everything now. You cannot do charity. You cannot spend money. This is our ignorance that we think that this is how I need to be useful for people. No. This is a useless waste of time. You need to directly share the joy. You need to directly share the bliss. It can also be a cup of tea. Nobody will talk to you only for a cup of tea. The cup of tea is symbolic here. I am offering you a little bit that I have. Send a smiley on the phone. Good enough. You shared your happiness. That's all. No money needed. No service needed. No big banners needed. No gold. No diamonds. Very very tiny acts. Tiny acts which do not create additional karmic bondage.

Remember this thing. As soon as some money changes hands, there is a bondage. Either you take or give, it is a karmic bond now. You will need to come back here. Is it worth it? No. You cannot see these things with your eyes, when I realize that every time I do something for somebody or every time I ask for a favor from somebody and I don't neutralize it there and then, it goes into my account. I have extended my incarnations, one more life.

We are venturing into this illusion here a little bit. I was never born, but we are talking about the illusion. So, we want the illusion to also be good, even though it is an illusion. So as soon as I learn that, I do not do any kind of charity. I do not give anything to beggars. I do not serve. I do not do anything. If it is not about knowledge, I will not do it. If it is about spreading knowledge, if it is about spreading a little bit of happiness, yes, I am there. I volunteer for it. Everything changed. I saw that the jobs that I am doing are creating bondage. When I left it, I came to know that this is what happens when you take something. I was in the job for money. I was not paying back because I did not like it. It created bonds. Who knows how many lifetimes I am going to spend neutralizing it.

Now I am not doing anything karmic. Immediately I see the effect. Immediately there is peace. You cannot live alone in society. You will need to go to the shops. You pay the shopkeeper an exact amount. Don't tell him to give you a discount. You call somebody for work. They do the work. You pay them. If he says, this is not enough. If you see an expectation on their face, you pay them more. Because this expectation has created a bond. You do whatever it takes to clear the karmic bond. I am able to say it so clearly now that in the minutest thing I see a bond. You don't even realize how deep you are in this Mr. Bond stuff.

The spiritual path is just a beginning. I don't want to discourage anybody. I don't want to paint a pessimistic picture here. You are fortunate that you are coming out of it. There are millions and billions who do not know this karmic law. As soon as I go to somebody's house, I drink water there, there is a bond. They form instantly and they will last forever. I avoid inviting people without any reason. And I avoid going to parties and whatever. If they are giving me something, I don't like it. Not because it's bad. It is going to form a bond. I avoid giving somebody something because it's going to bind that person. So how are you going to manage this kind of trouble here in the Maya? It is very easy.

Do not accept anything from anybody. Whether it is physical or mental support, emotional support etc., all comes in this category because you are demanding happiness from somebody. Do not do that.

Realize your happiness. Why are you asking it from somebody else? Isn't that your ignorance? What is the use of all these courses? Non-dual knowledge and all. What is the use of advaita if you don't know this small thing? So as soon as you accept something of any nature, remember it's all mind. There is no physical, mental here. It's all vibrations. As soon as you make that kind of contact, repay it there and then. I have been in communication, contact with very advanced people. I don't want to tell you the whole story. It's kind of boring. I'll tell you the bottom line that whenever I tried to offer them anything, they rejected it. I'm not talking about ordinary gurus who sell knowledge nowadays. I don't know whether anybody will agree with it, but there is something called guru dakshina, which is now abused and it has been converted into a fees. What happens is if a guru is doing something for you, it is your duty to pay it back. Pay it back in any form you want. Money, service, food. Usually we offer only bananas. This is very funny. A good guru, a true guru will ask you only for bananas. Why is guru doing that? And I was very surprised when I asked it to somebody and I got this answer that the guru is liberating you from your karmic bondage by accepting a fruit. Guru knows that you took something from him. Some teaching, some mantra, who knows what. Now, the guru says, give me something. It is a token. It's a symbolic thing. Do something. Clean my house. You are done. You will not need to take another birth to return these bananas.

I am not saying that it is going to happen like this. You take a birth and then hunt for a person to give a banana to. No. The illusion works in a very mysterious way. We will never know in what form the repayment will happen. What the guru has done there is, taken away this one little bond. It is very fascinating. I did not know all these things. I always thought that these gurus are probably greedy, you see. He is asking for bananas. He cannot buy a banana or what? When I saw even the millionaire gurus, they were receiving fruits from people. I came to know this thing. There is only one path where the guru will not ask for anything and you will be still freed from the karmic bond. And you can guess which path is it? It is the path of knowledge.

When I say, I will come to satsang, I will tell you something. I am freeing you from this karmic bond

there and then. Remember, it is all mind. It is all mental. Only on the path of knowledge we know how it works. By saying that I do not expect anything from you, I have already freed you from the karmic bond. The vibrations are neutralized. You will never feel an urge to give me anything, never. Those who are very sensitive, they will feel a need to return. And on the path of knowledge, you do not feel it. I do not know about everybody, but receiving the teaching is returning the favor. You received it. Yes, it is neutralized.

There is a risk in doing all these things, from the karmic point of view. I am doing it. And there is some confidence now that there won't be any karmic bonds here. Remember that we are all bonded. There is no bondage. There is oneness. It takes two to bind. One is binding, the other is bound. In oneness, nobody is bound. Nobody is binding. If you are doing your actions from that level, you can imagine, no karmic bonds are going to be formed. This is the simple principle that I use. ‘Sir, you help everybody. You are so kind and compassionate.’ And I say, no, that is a bunch of crap. I never helped anybody in my life. It is for myself. You are me. Never forget. I am helping myself. How can I form a bond with myself? How can I have expectations if there is no one else? With this complete awareness, if you do something, it is not going to form any bonds. It is magic. You can try it.

There is this issue of karmic bonds. You need to keep that in mind. If you are not awakened, if you are not acting in awareness, you need to live a simple life, there is no need to serve. There is no need to express your joy. None of your good deeds and bad deeds have any meaning if you are not aware. None of your actions are meaningful if you are not aware, if you don't have knowledge. They amount to nothing.

Ryan is saying, because it's all illusion when you are not aware?

When you are not aware, you create karmic bonds. Now whatever you have done is kind of useless because it has ensured continuity of illusion. But it does not bring you out of illusion. Keep doing anything you want, it will keep you in the illusion. But then, how can we not act? And then there will be a question - ‘you mean all these people who are doing good, they are useless?’

And yes, on the path of knowledge, they are kind of very bitter about it. We don't sugarcoat it. Yes.

If you are not aware, you have simply extended the illusion. You have simply extended ignorance and suffering. You know this, don't you? I gave you an example right now that if you pay a little bit of money, or food to a beggar, what have you done? Is he happy? Is the suffering in the world reduced?

You don't realize what you have done because you are not aware.

There are so many examples, like a person who is 80-85 years old, and you know, suffering from some terrible disease, and you are spending like a million on that fellow. You keep him on machines, you keep him alive. Why? “I love him”. What kind of love is that? Your love is also fake when you are not aware. When you are aware, you know there is no such thing as death. This body, which is completely rotten, broken, is already dead. You are extending the suffering of that creature, plus paying a lot of money to these rich doctors. You think I am doing something good. Isn't that stupidity? Isn't that ignorance? Isn't that some kind of delusion?

No, my intentions matter, the karmic stuff doesn't matter. When you are aware and you say this, I can understand. You don't know anything and you say such things, I cannot trust you. We don't know what we are doing in the name of good intention, in the name of service, in the name of good deeds. That is why whatever you do is completely useless from the spiritual point of view, if you are not aware. You can very well see it in the case of something which is wrong, wrongdoing. Yes, there are consequences. Whatever you do, thinking that it is good is also useless.

It does not liberate you from suffering. Non-action will liberate you. This is written everywhere. How many people are doing it? I will tell you the truth, nobody does it even on the path of knowledge. They know it as a theory. Yes, theoretically correct. I will do whatever I can. I will keep doing whatever I do. Nobody really follows the teachings. “I will follow the instructions of Guru as long as I am getting something out of it”. Every Guru knows this. You must be wondering why everybody is in trouble in this world. What is wrong with this world? They have accumulated this thing. Now they are paying it back. This is what is wrong here.

Coming back to the question, you have spent your whole life trying to get happiness from objects, from people, from relations, or from your government. And from intellectual achievements. What kind of person will want that? You have done that for your whole life. Imagine the amount of karmic stuff it has produced. Can you imagine? It has produced a Himalayan mountain. That is what is wrong with humanity. Now they are paying it back. And not only now, they will keep coming and they will keep paying it back. Isn't this illusion amazing?

I am sometimes afraid of calling it an illusion because it is so real. The karmic law is probably the strongest law of the mind. Hardly anybody knows what it is and we are bound by this law. Do the good deeds, you will get rid of the karmic stuff. No, it will not. It will just postpone your suffering. It is like I tell you that eat this chocolate, enjoy this chocolate, after that you are going to get five whiplashes. Do you call it enjoyment? Do you call it happiness? We have spent our whole lives expecting happiness from these things that are outside me, that are an illusion. And now I suddenly want to reverse it. It is going to take a lot of time. You see, this all sounds pessimistic, but you have seen the light now, that is optimistic. Millions and billions will never see this.

Start breaking the bonds now. Do not try to turn your experience into a joyful experience because that is what you want. Wanting is the trouble, isn't it? What does your real self want? What do you really want as an experiencer? The answer is very simple. Nothing.

Now why don't you try to emulate, bring it forward in your behavior also. Let it reflect in the behavior also. “I don't want anything”. See what happens. Experiment with it. Initially very strange things are going to happen to you. This is unexpected in the domain of illusion. The Maya will be surprised. She is going on humming - “there is somebody who is trying to overturn the karmic law, wait, who is this?” You will become a focus for Maya initially. You need to take her in confidence that you are not going to cause trouble. You are not performing an experiment that is going to mess with the world. You say the name of your Guru. Just transfer the responsibility to somebody else. And probably it will settle down in your life.

I saw very, very strange things. And you know the strangest thing on this planet is a human being.

You try these experiments on a human and you will find strange reactions. Some people called me crazy.

Some people tried to exploit me just like I told you that it will happen. And some people fell on my feet. They declared me as God. These humans, they are strange creatures. None of them realized

what I was doing. I met some seekers also, they could not see it. I met somebody who is just about to become a Guru. They were eligible to be called Gurus. Even they could not understand it. Can you see the grip of illusion on our minds? I got stares from people. What are you trying to do here? You just paid that fellow thousand rupees and he did a job of a hundred rupees. Are you mad? And I said no. This was an experiment. And that day a little child was begging you at the traffic signal and you did not help. And I said - experimenting. I like this idea so much that now everything has become an experiment for me.

Sometimes I ask somebody to do something and it is also an experiment. Nobody realizes that I want nothing. It never happens in this world. I got this kind of comment. This is the first time it is happening here. And I said yes. This is how it should be. And when I try to reverse it, very strange things will happen. Initially you will think that you are going crazy. I need to become “normal”. This cannot last forever. But I am not afraid of experimenting. Try to express your bliss. Try to talk to people without wanting anything in return. Serve somebody without any reason. Just relieve everybody from the karmic bond. And for that you need to be aware. For that you need to know

the meaning of awareness. You will know the meaning of awareness as soon as you realize your true

nature. So this is the key. Realize who you are.

You will be freed from all karmic bondage. No forced birth for you. Because when I say liberation, or freedom from birth it means that you are free to come back to this prison if you want. You are liberated but nobody is stopping you from coming back. The only thing is it will have some purpose or mission. It will be more effective. It won't be a random birth. You will be born with complete awareness and memory of who you are and your goals. There are people who are like this in this world. They are very active. What is the use of this liberation you will say? This is the use, you see. The liberation is not for

sitting in heaven on the clouds and playing the harp or whatever your favorite instrument is, for eternity. That is what your books are going to tell you. That kind of picture is garbage. It is a symbolic thing. No, you don't become an angel. You don't grow wings. Nothing like this is going to happen.

You don't become a god.

The correct word is Bodhisattva which is free from all the embellishments. Bodhisattvas have this freedom to come back in full awareness. We restart the cycle. This time I am free from the karmic stuff but my mission is to free others from this. And I do not start from random people. The Bodhisattva will start from somebody who is a low-hanging fruit. It takes the least effort to pull him out of the pit of karmic bonds. Only a few things remaining for him, he is pulled out. They are looking for such people. I am only a fanboy here and I am also looking for such people. Very difficult to find.

If I see even a spark there, I try my best. You will say, no, you are not a Bodhisattva or anything. What are you doing? You think you are that great or something? If you want to become great, you should start very early. Don't wait for greatness to arrive from the heavens. It's not going to happen. You make efforts to do that. So, that is, you can say, my delusion here. I am trying to play Bodhisattva, it is working. Many people have told me that it helped. Your videos helped, your article helped, and this Satsang helped. That did not make a lot of difference, but even the tiny difference is good enough. This is my experiment.

I would recommend doing the experiments. You will find that not only are you blissful, all your experience is already blissful. The source is here, not there. You forgot this little thing. The experiments are going to teach you a lot, and probably they will attract the attention of the low-hanging fruits, because these people are going to notice you first. He has a YouTube channel and he said this thing. Immediately I received an email there. They noticed me, nobody else. There are probably 50,000 conspiracy channels on YouTube, you know. I am just making up the number, but it's a big number. They are all spreading conspiracies. And an average person will think that, okay, this fellow talks like crazy. I cannot understand a single sentence. Very strange accent. Another conspiracy channel. “World is an illusion. You are not going to die” - it sounds like a conspiracy. So, no, you are not going to change the world. That is why you get the stares from Maya, because she doesn't like it. It is not my world. Please don't meddle in it. You are here to pluck the low-hanging fruit. Maya will allow it. Why does she allow it? In modern words, you can say that the matrix will allow a faulty battery to be taken out. You will not need to deal with the anger of Maya if you do that. By Maya, I mean the illusion or the universal memory. Suddenly, a lot of things are going to become clear for you if you understand this much. This is going to clear a lot of confusion from your mind.

Vidya is saying - it was anyway going to fall off the tree. Hence, Maya allows one to pick the low-hanging fruit. In the same way, a person whose intelligence has reached a point where he is almost close to the truth, Maya makes a way for such a person.

Absolutely. Actually, Vidya used the same words that I was going to use. Amazing. Very good. You know the Maya. Vidya has found the secrets of Maya. Many people know these things, but it is not very common knowledge. Maya is not going to care if you have pulled out one person who is going to go anywhere, it was a matter of time. One lifetime or two lifetimes. Maya is very efficient. She is not going to run after this one thing, leaving all of the illusion. We are personifying this force which has its own intelligence. Just assume that she is the mother. She rules everybody. She knows that the time has arrived. This is the right time that this fruit is going to go, so somebody is picking it up. She won't even pay attention there. She is not worried.

You don't get any karmic backlash from that. Nothing is written in your account. So I do that all the time. I told you that this is going to lead to some interesting conclusions. So this answers the questions like why don't these all-powerful gurus liberate everybody from the illusion for once and for all? Why don't they do something? Sitting in a cave, sitting in the Himalayan mountain somewhere, they just watch. They don't do anything. Now the secret is revealed to you. They are not here to meddle with the illusion. The illusion is perfect. It is producing the fruits. Why would you want to meddle with it? Why do you want to cut the tree? And the Maya is allowing them to do it.

It is a kind of give and take relation because these fruits, if they become too many, the whole illusion will be destroyed. There will be nothing left. They are troublemakers for Maya. She is hardworking. She keeps people under illusion. This is very hard work. So yes, gurus won't do it for the simple reason that it is totally unnecessary and it is not good. This is not the wise action. No advertising. No promises. Actually the guru will make sure that 90% of his students just walk away. He will make it so difficult because he is checking the ripeness of the fruit. Who stays here? He wants to know that. Now that explains a lot of my behavior also. He opened a YouTube channel and in the first video he says don't watch my videos. In the second episode he says that you will fail. You will never get anything. It is useless. Don't go further. Now he does not want his YouTube channel to become popular or what? He does not want to earn the advertising money or what? What kind of crazy fellow is this?

Everybody is asking you to press the bell button. “My life depends on the bell button. I have no job. I am being paid by YouTube for these advertisements. Please press the like button”. There is nothing like this on my channel. It is not an ordinary channel. There are very few like this. There are some, I was surprised. They don't want anything. That explains all the strange behavior that you find in the spiritual domain. Now you must be wondering, what about these gurus who are taking thousands as fees and they are giving nothing but they simply read from the scripture, fool people by providing a little bit of strange experience of some kind? And their targets are the rich people from rich countries. What will happen to them? Remember, Maya is not going to leave such a fellow. They will pay for it. It is kind of already obvious that they are doing something which is not liberating anyone. And obviously their students have no hope of any kind of progress there. They know this verse from Gita, and they know that verse from Rig Veda which goes above their head, and they totally accept whatever the guru is telling and they go home. How are they going to liberate them? I never understood. So you got your answer now.

Maya keeps them because they are good. They are maintaining the illusion in the name of spirituality. “No, I will do mass cleaning. From tomorrow I will just liberate one billion people”. Now see what happens. The first thing that happens will be - you will disappear. Not sure about the one billion but it's peanuts for Maya to stop you. I will fool a billion people in the name of religion and spirituality or some kind of alien stuff. Yes, that is allowed. “Go ahead, please”, Maya will be delighted - “I will help you.” That is why all these things are going rampant in the world. You must be wondering why nobody wants the truth. Why is that? Remember, there are very deep reasons and I am telling you all the secrets, hopefully she won't be angry with me. The thing is even if you know all these things you won't be able to do anything about it. It's kind of guaranteed. You will do what other teachers have done and you will do what I am doing. This you can note down. It's important.

Try to take money for teaching? No. You will very quickly realize where it is leading to. If you have the sensitivity, try to manipulate people. You will realize what happens. Expectations? You will realize what happens. Actually, you will be left with nothing. No options. It is not that you say I am so wise and I am so kind, compassionate that I am doing this. No. I have no options.

Vidya is saying but through the illusion Maya is anyway progressing each one of us to this knowledge. But in the due course, through a certain kind of suffering, Maya lets a person know the truth instantly as well.

That's a good point. There is a paradox in everything. You will find that out very soon. Even the illusion has a paradox because it is complete. It is beautiful. There is ignorance. And then to complement it, there must be knowledge. There is retardation. There is growth. There is devolution. And there is evolution. Everything is offered. There is a perfect balance there. And that is what I call the inherent intelligence in the universal memory. You can imagine that it has perfected itself. Nothing can be improved now. You cannot even change one bit of it. You are thinking of changing the whole world and whole universe and what not, you see. It is endless. It is infinite. It is impossible to change even a fraction of it. Abandon all hopes. Hope is your enemy. Hope will bind you. It is already perfect. Just realize this. It has been done already.

All the arrangements are there for those who want to progress. You want to take a super fast train? Yes. It is there. You want to take a slow train? Bullock cart which goes round and round and after 20 days it reaches the other station? It is there. So yes, Maya provides everything. Only that she says don't break my rules. We are all children of Maya. We are all Maya babies. If a child is causing trouble for her, he receives a slap. No dinner today. But she gives the homework. She teaches the child also. She feeds the child also. It is paradoxical.

You will probably understand a little bit of it. I am trying to understand but I cannot understand

completely. There is no way to understand it completely. There are stories like this in the scriptures, in the ancient books that Brahma created Maya and she was so beautiful that he forgot himself. I think everybody has heard this story. Brahma is the manifested existence. And we are a product of that. So even the creator of Maya does not understand what it is and has forgotten himself. You and I amount to nothing in comparison. But remember, it is only a story. It is symbolic in nature. The message in the story is that don't try to understand it. You will never understand it. Just try to come out of it. And I think it is impossible to totally abandon it because it is me. It is my part.

What we do is, we turn from prisoner of Maya to user of Maya. This is our progression. That is why the Bodhisattva, he comes back, not to meddle with Maya, but to use it. Use it as a fertile ground where new causal bodies are born, they grow and then when they are ripe, he comes back, takes them away without disturbing anything else. Now you know the secret behind all these experiments that I told you. Do not serve. Do not donate. Do not do charity. At least don't do the organized kind of it. What are the organizations trying to do? They are trying to change things in a big way, at a big scale.

When you contribute to them, you are sending a signal to Maya that I am meddling with you. I also want things to change. And that is not good. Even the Bodhisattva is going to leave you because he knows that the consequences are coming. These are the secrets behind the statements that I make. Usually I never say anything without a reason and usually I leave some things without telling the reasons because they are too complicated.

Benjamin is asking - how can you still use Maya when you don't see it?

That is a very good question. If you don't see it, you won't be able to use it. You will be used by Maya. As soon as you see it, you are liberated from it. Either you can use it or let it be whatever it is. Who cares? That is what most of the liberated seekers will do. They will just leave it. Some of them return. Some of them want to continue the game of spiritual ripening. It is a matter of choice, I think. Some decide to come back, recycle themselves as humans or whatever. Some say, 'I don't need to do anything here. It's all okay already.' It's a matter of choice. There are no guidelines about it anywhere because you can imagine that this knowledge has been perfected for many thousand years. And if there was an advantage in coming back or if there was an advantage in not coming back, if there was an advantage in using it or not using it, they would have told you very clearly. I am 100% sure about it. They would have plastered it everywhere. 'You need to do this. Don't just evaporate. Come back and help others.' They would have given this instruction. But no, there is no instruction.

Yes, you are right. You cannot use it if there is no knowledge of it. If you have the knowledge right now, what is Maya, what is not, you can start using it. And by use, I mean don't meddle with it. It's not good. If you are meddling with Maya, it means ignorance is there. Then there will be consequences. The karmic account will become full very quickly. Suffering, ignorance, and unawareness will be the result.

True knowledge is not bookish knowledge, which you need to remember. Once you realize it, it is forever. This is the quality of the truth. You don't need to search for it. You don't need to memorize it. You can simply see it. All the questions are solved. You would have spent all your life in charity and who knows what, doing useless things, multiplying your karmic bondage. Simple realization. Non-doing is the answer. Your whole life is a success now. Enjoy.

By teaching, by sharing knowledge am I not accumulating the consequences? Am I not accumulating the sanskar or the impressions? I told you the secret to that also. Do not expect and you will be safe. Do not take. Only give. And wipe that out also - “I gave you nothing”. Do not take credit. You disappear. Tell them it is not my knowledge. Tell them it came from the gurufield. And that is the reality also. As soon as you say, 'I did this, I gave you the knowledge,' well, it is a karmic bond of some kind. Do not bring the 'I' here. Change your name. Now you know the reason behind all these rituals, traditions. Everything becomes crystal clear. Why did the guru rename the person before initiating? Why was everything stripped off? No home, no name, no surname, no caste. Nothing. Because if you keep all these things which are designed to keep you in Maya, you will not progress very far.

You must have noticed that I keep nothing with me. “Who is your guru? You know so much”. But as soon as you reveal who your guru is, that is also written in the universal memory somewhere. Now you will need to wipe it off someday because there is a little bit of identification there. I came up with something very strange that nobody understands - the concept of the guru field. People think I am lying. They think it is some kind of magic that I sit here with closed eyes and hands in the air, and there is a light shining on my forehead, they cook it up in their mind. So, to avoid that kind of disaster, I have a list of fifty people that I call guru, and I send it to them. These people are my gurus. So you have introduced so much fuzziness in the system, so much uncertainty there that no identification remains. Who is my guru? Now, here it is complete randomness. No impressions had been made in the Maya.

I came to know these things instinctively, not logically. It looks like I knew everything and then I proceeded to do it, executed it, planned it. No. These things you learn slowly, painfully. You are so fortunate. I am giving it away. You don't need to go through it again.

How is this message translated to something useful for an ordinary person who is never going to become a guru? Wipe out all the traces of your good deeds. I told you to do the experiment. Give, do not ask, and you will complain that it is also leaving some marks on the memory. And I say don't worry, if you don't want even that, wipe out the traces. It's very easy actually. You do something good for somebody, and suddenly the happiness is multiplied like a million times. You don't get anything. The other person gets something or does not get, does not matter, but everybody is happy. Now, it is going to be in your account that you did something good. And as you know, there is no such thing as good. No actions are good. How to wipe it out? You balance it by not claiming it. I didn't do it. This is what somebody told me to do, it happened. Do not take the responsibility for the good deeds when you experiment. You will instantly see the result there. There will be peace in your mind. That peace is a result of non-action. This is how you do non-action, you wipe out the consequences of the action. Nobody did it. It happened. It is possible only when you realize that there is nobody, no doer. This is the truth: there is nobody who is doing any actions, and now all the actions are non-actions.

Yes, people are going to tell you that you are great, and just wipe it out completely. Otherwise, it will be balanced one day, and you will be born as somebody who is not so great. That is not good. We don't want that experience. You balance it today. Very mysterious things. Experiment and let me know.

The key point is anything that is done in awareness will automatically be erased. You don't need to do anything because there is no doer here. The doer appears only when there is ignorance, when there is darkness, and then your account will start filling, and then the doer will appear again and again till infinity. You break the cycle by not doing, by not claiming, by not expecting. The result is bliss, and the bliss does not look like a party. It looks like peace. You will be peaceful that day. If you don't believe me, you need to experiment. Do not think that bliss is something unusual. It is the most natural state. You are blissful right now also. Remember. It is nothingness. It is zero. It is emptiness.

When you get this kind of bliss, you are not going to worry about any parties. They don't mean any kind of happiness. Whenever we get pleasure or happiness from outside, it is because the desire that was tormenting you was kind of fulfilled for a while. For a while, because the desire never goes away. It repeats. And that burden, when it is thrown away, gives an opportunity for the inner bliss to shine. That is what is expressed as your happiness. It is because of the absence of desires and absence of action, now you don't need to do anything. That is what you call happiness.

The illusion is very strong that I got it by doing an action that produced happiness. The reason is outside me. But right now, right here, you are blissful without doing anything, and it is permanent. The question was - how can I see it in my experience? It is also in the experience. There is nothing wrong with the experience. Bliss does not look like a shiny, golden experience. It is not rainbows and unicorns. Not that kind of experience. It is perfectly normal, everyday peace. If you don't get that, you will get nothing in your life. If you don't see it right now, you will never see it.

Session 73

When we investigate the reality of the individual, we do not find any individual, and all that remains then is the universal. It is very easy, actually. You don't need to hunt for the universal mind. What kind of experience will give me the experience of the universal mind? Which strange experiences, in which extraordinary abilities, are going to show me and connect me to the universal mind? This is not the right approach. There is a lot of ignorance behind such thoughts. As long as you have assumed that there is an individual who can go and meet the universal, it will never happen. The key is to investigate whether there is an individual or not, and you will find that there is none. Whatever is called an individual is simply a thought, is simply a belief based on our social conditioning. If you have not investigated what this "I" is, who am I, then there is no chance of knowing the universal.

There are many ways to find out the reality of the individual, and on the path of knowledge, we use the direct way to try to point to the individual. For example, just like we point to any other object, I can ask you to point to the individual, and most people will point to their bodies, thinking, "here is the individual," but that is the body, not the individual. The body keeps changing, the body is not permanent. One derives a sense of individuality from the body, that is another thing, but it is not the individual. Most of the body that the individual had is gone now, and the individual will never say that "I am gone." They will always say that yes, the bodies are coming and going, bodies are changing. A 20-year-old will say "I am" in the same way an 80-year-old is going to say, and so on.

You can point to anything in this whole layered system, and you will find that these are only thoughts of individuality. Some things were associated with being the individual, and if you remove this thought of the individual, whatever remains is now universal. This is how we discover the universal mind. The current mind, the current experience is a universal experience, not an individual experience. The happening of the individual or the ignorance of the individual or the concept of the individual arises in this universal mind, not in the individual mind. Once this individuality is dropped, you will find that everything is happening on its own. Instead of the individual acting, the universal is acting. Instead of the individual taking birth and dying, the universal is doing it. These are the processes in the universal mind of birth and death, of taking various forms and discarding those forms. So those who know that this universal is also not me, I am something which is not even the universal mind, I am the witness of these processes, I am the witness of the minds, whether the illusory individual or whether the universal, I am the witness. And this universal mind is also an illusion, it is also impermanent, it is also coming and going. It is not in the beginning, it is not in the end and it is not in the middle.

This is the direct method and if it does not work, the identification remains at the body. The person can say, for example, that I am the body but the body is changing, but I am it. And the person can also say that I am the memories or I am the thoughts and if that is taken away, there can be a thought like I am the universal mind now or anything which is intermediate, such as the causal body.

So we use a more detailed method which is progressive elimination, which I have described in the path of knowledge series, also called the traditional neti-neti method. You check whether I remains or goes. When one of the experiences is examined, whether it is memory, whether it is causal body, whether it is universal mind with anything and you will find that everything is an illusion, everything comes and goes. I remains as a background of these changing illusions.

And now you can drop the universal also and you can say that there is only me, whether it is universal or individual, it doesn't really matter. This division was never present. All there remains is the experiencer and the illusory experience, which is then found to be one. The experiences are arising as non-physical and non-mental vibrations in the experiencer itself. There are no two. So that division can be dropped by checking that there is no separation between the experience and the experiencer. And when you investigate the qualities of the experiencer as we have done in this series, you will find that it is absolutely empty. It has no qualities at all. Your qualities and whatever forms and names are seen are illusions and if you remove them, if you treat them as false, then absolute nothingness remains, absolute emptiness remains, and that is the nature of the whole.

That is how I am, and that is how the universal mind is, and that is how the individual is, and that is how every object is, from the tiniest grain of dust, particle of dust to the huge mountain and the whole universe and the whole universal mind. The universal mind is the same as the universal memory that I talk about in the video series. If you are confused, that is because I have used this word 'universal mind' in the past, but then I found that the word 'mind' is very confusing for many people. So I removed it and replaced it with 'memory,' which is also confusing but is clearer than 'mind.'

Now it is possible to understand the whole world, the body, and the layered structure as a form of memory. The memory has organized itself to produce all these seemingly individual forms. They are not really separate from anything. They are like waves on the water. It is impossible to find a boundary of the wave. The boundary is arbitrary, and they arise in the water and collapse back into the water. Something similar is happening in the case of all the forms.

There are processes in this memory that will brand or delineate a form and call it an individual, and it totally depends on the ignorance present there. If the ignorance is too much, then the boundary of the body is taken as the boundary of the individual. This is how individuality is extracted out of universality. It is only a thought.

What is the utility of this thought? You will understand very clearly that it is necessary to survive and therefore it is there. Nothing happens in this universal memory without a reason. So this drawing of the boundaries, arbitrary boundaries around the body, let us say, or around the mind that the person is going to say, 'Look, I cannot see the other minds. I cannot see what is happening behind my head, and I cannot see what is happening in this other country.' That is my limitation. I cannot think of anybody else's thoughts, and so on, and therefore I am not universal, and all these boundaries are there for a good reason, and the reason is survival.

There is this phenomenon of assuming forms, and the forms if not separated by one or the other means, will not survive. There will not be any wave in the water if nothing distinguishes the wave from the water. It must take an illusory form and it lasts for a while, and then it is dropped in the water, disappears in the water. Something similar is happening. Some of the forms, they will stay for a longer time, and some are so fast that they are not even perceived. So where is this universal memory? It is here and now. Whatever we are experiencing right now is universal only. This is the simplest answer.

There can be more follow-up questions, like how can I become the universal memory, and the answer is very simple: there is no "I." There is no "I" at the level of individuality, so there is no point in this question. It is not possible to become universal because the universal is the absence of the individual. When the individual asks, "How can I become universal?" The only way to become universal is to drop the individuality. It can be done right now also. Investigate the reality of the individual. It falls away, and you can say it is all universal. The individual does not become the universal; the individual disappears, and the universal remains. It is very easy.

How can the wave become the whole ocean?

Just stop being the wave.

It is very amazing that the wave need not disappear. Only ignorance needs to disappear. Only the illusory boundaries are to be seen. That's all. That can be seen by simply trying to find the individual. You will never find it in your experience. You will find various boundaries which are a product of ignorance or which are due to the necessity of survival. Sometimes, this question falls in the category of illusion. Sometimes, it is not possible to show it. The person or the individual will remain trapped in individuality for a while.

There is something interesting that is happening. This whole structure is evolving towards greater universality. It is giving up the individuality slowly, and so we just let it be. There are some paths on which this evolution is pushed so that there remains no doubt in our minds that I am not really the individual. My boundaries are assumptions and so on. And when you follow those practices, when you follow those paths, the doubt is completely removed.

On the path of knowledge, we do it using direct experience and logic. Once the doubt is removed, you abide as the universal, or you abide as emptiness. Because if there is duality, there is the universal and individual. When there is non-duality, the question does not arise. This can also be called liberation - liberation while in the body. The forms need not be dropped; only the ignorance needs to be dropped.

Some people have this odd belief that if the body dies, I will become the universal. No, you can try, but it is not recommended. If it were so easy to become universal - whatever that means, it means nothing really - then we would have highly recommended killing yourself first, killing this body. That would become a path. But you know it very well, there is no such path because the body is just an empty shell. If you kill the body, the individual does not go away. The illusion remains. Because the reason for individuality is not the body; the reason is ignorance. The reason is this firm belief that I am the individual, I am not the universal, that will remain forever.

Remember that the body has been killed millions of times already. Still, there is individuality. That proves that killing it once more, destroying the body once more will not work. The only way to come out of this individuality is through knowledge, investigation, experimentation, direct experience, and logic. That clears the mind of this ignorance, and we see that I was never an individual. There was no individual since the beginning, and there will not be any in the future.

The strange thing is the assumptions will be dropped, but the function of the individual will remain. Its function need not be destroyed also. It can function as an individual. This layered structure of the memory can function as an individual, as a body, as a mind, as a causal body also. This is the game that is going on, and that is also harmless. Nothing is gained by destroying these things, and nothing is gained by keeping these things. Nothing is gained except the knowledge. We do not become anything. The humans do not become anything; they remain humans. Liberation does not make you anything else; it simply drops your ignorance, that's all.

Why don't you become anything? Because there is no individual to become. The whole is becoming the individual. The individual will never become the whole. The water appears as waves. The wave will never become the ocean. The ocean appears as waves. This is very simple logic. This is common sense. So, stop trying to become universal. Stop trying to become the whole. Just see the illusion of individuality. This is the direct path.

Why are they meditating? Why are they doing these experiments in the universal memory? Why are they trying to get powers and so on? Because of this basic ignorance that "I need to grow, I need to evolve, I need to expand, I need to get more experiences that are universal." As long as this belief in individuality is there, however subtle it is, the effort will continue. The path will never end. Your seeking will not end. On the path of knowledge, we end it like this.

Roman is saying, "What do you think is the best way to investigate the false thought of individuality?"

As I said, point to the individual, try to see if it is there. What do you call as individual and try to find if it is there, if it is changing. If you point to it and if you find it and if it is changing, it is not the individual because it will change into something else, but the thought of the ignorance about individuality will remain. For example, the body of a child changes into the body of an adult, but the notion of individuality is as solid as before. The child was also saying, "I am this body," and the adult is also saying, "I am this body," but the body is no more. If you look at the body, it is a collection of organs and cells. The individual is not a collection, it is not seen as having components. When the illusory individual says "I," it is not pointing to a group of things, but the body is a group of things and so on.

You can go on investigating, for example, the emotions. The emotions come and go, they are faster than the matter in the body, and you cannot say, "I am one of these emotions." The individual is not found in the emotions. Similarly, thought, memories are very tricky because they persist, and most of the individuality is derived from memory. The body also exists in the memory. "This was my body," they will say, "but it was small. This is my body, it is old, but it was not so old before." This is coming from the memory, this is not coming from direct experience. If you remove memory, you can have a direct experience of it, and then you can drop the identification with the body, the memory gives it persistence.

Now the individual can be fixed on the memory that looks like "I am a collection of memories," but when you investigate the individual memory, you will find there is a faint copy of the events there. There is a copy of all the experiences that the so-called individual had, the so-called bodies had. It is a series of episodes that this individual went through. And which one is the individual then? There is again multiplicity there. There are so many, millions of memories, where is the individual in that? And people will always say, 'I have the memory, I am not the memory.' So pointing works to destroy the idea of the individual. If you have access to the causal body or the subtle bodies or the projected bodies, you can do the same with them and you will find that there are structures that are changing, activities that are happening, but there is no individual and you will find something strange also.

We have this ability to detect that an individual is also an activity that arises in the waking state. So in the series of videos, we have dealt with four states: waking, dreaming, projected, and sleep. And you will find that there is a very strange thing that the individual appears in the waking state. The rest of the three states, there is no individual. Or if there is, it is created on demand. Like in the dreaming state, a new individual is created, a new body, a new memory is there, which has nothing to do with the waking memory, except there is a resemblance there. It is constructed out of the waking memory, but the individual is different, the personality is a little bit similar, but there is even a new world, there are relatives and so on.

Upon waking, that is seen as false. And the case is similar in the projected states. It can become a very real experience, probably more real than the waking state. And upon coming back to the waking state, which is our base, we compare everything relative to the waking state, which is a bit wrong, but we do it because we don't have any stable frame of reference. We do not have a frame of reference which we can call a true state. There are no true states. All these four states and many other states are all illusory, they are all like dreams, one dream ends, the other starts, the other end, something else starts.

So for the time being, we simply assume that the waking state is our frame of reference, and when we compare other states of this memory structure, we find that different kinds of individuals appear and disappear there. And that gives us this knowledge that in this state, which is not absolute, the waking state, the individual is a product of the mind, it is a process in the mind. It is very easy to see actually, even without knowing all this philosophy, it is possible to see it, see that there is first an event. By event, I mean it can be just a perception, it can be a feeling, an emotion, it can be a thought or imagination, and you will see that the first the event happens and later another event happens which brands it as mine.

I did it. I saw it. I heard it. I felt it. I was happy. I am happy. I am sad. I am thinking this. I am imagining this. But the event has already happened, the “I” came later. The I does not appear to be causing the event, the I appears to be an effect of the event. This can be seen by everybody.

I think anybody with an ordinary intelligence will be able to observe this directly that the individual is an effect of activity of the memory structure. Remove the activity, it is gone, which is our direct experience. It happens in the state of deep sleep, because there is actually activity there, but the activity is meaningless from the point of view of the waking state and so there is no individual as we see in the waking state. There is something which we call the causal body, but the individuality is not that sharply outlined, there is fuzziness there.

The waves cannot see the water. All that will be seen is water and the waves arising there, that's all will be seen. If this direct seeing does not work, then you can do the progressive elimination as shown in one of the videos in the series. If you don't want to do that, find a teacher nearby. Teacher will take you through the process of investigation of the individuality. Usually it is not required. It takes only one minute to know that there is no individual.

What happens is because of the survival pressures in the waking state, the individual comes back.

That is its function actually. That is why it is there. That is why this effect is there which claims everything is me and mine, everything and anything actually. It will say the objects are mine, it will say the food is mine, it will say the relatives are mine, people are mine. The I is defined in terms of the society actually. It is very interesting. Without society, there is probably no need of the individual. It is a mechanism to isolate one structure out of the society. Responsibility & ownership. These define the individual, not the body, not the voice or anything else. These things can change, but responsibility and ownership, they are given by the society, given by the group of individuals and that is found only in the waking state. As soon as this satsang is over, you will be an individual, it will be very solid for you. It does not really go away. Only the illusion is seen. So we accept it. Accept the individual. It is very useful for survival. Just do not accept that it is the truth.

You will see this pattern on the path of knowledge all the time. First there is an ignorance of some kind, there is darkness, muddiness of some kind. Then we clear it and we find that everything that I thought was wrong and then the third stage arrives where we accept it back. Now it is purified and I take it back. I have no problem being the individual because I fully know that there is no such individual. There is a whole. That's all there is.

Now life is lived as if I am the whole, but in the form of an individual. Only there is a shift in the point of view. That's all. Live life from the point of view of the whole, from unity. You utilize this illusion to continue the play. You will find that it has no purpose, it has no meaning. So you give it a purpose, you give it a meaning and continue. This completes the path actually. And now there is nothing more to do. If you don't take the third step, you will remain confused - Who am I? Am I an individual? Should I do this? Should I do that? These thoughts will be racing in your mind and then you will find that the path of knowledge has brought you to a more confusing level. I was a good person. I was a happy person before I came to know that there is no person. And that is because you have not taken the final step of surrender.

Roman is saying- if the individual is needed for survival, then that must be what ego is.

Yes, individual, ego, identity, person, they are names of the same thing. “I” is also added into that sometimes. Sometimes we remove the ‘I’ from it and we identify with the experiencer, which is not really needed but this is what spiritual people do. The experiencer is universal, “I” is not needed. Because there is no you, so the ‘I’ arises as a reaction to the other. As I said, it is imposed by society on a particular structure of the body-mind. So if there are others, there is this individual. From the point of view of the experiencer there is no other. So the ‘I’ can be dropped completely but we use it because of our habit and because there is nothing in the language that enables communication without the use of ‘I’ and ‘you’.

If you could form a language which has no I, no you, no time, no space, then probably we will understand nothing. We won't be able to talk because the whole language is based on the concept of the individual in a physical world. The language is actually a language of ignorance. It is useful only in the waking state. There is no language of the universality or we can say that silence is the only language

that describes the truth. As soon as we speak, we are back in the illusion and there we need to use some words, and people have formed so many words. So the general definition is anything that has a form that can be isolated from the surroundings becomes the individual.

There was another interesting question in the same category. This applies to the spiritual people, not to the ordinary people. The question says that isn't the identification with the self or the Brahman, Shiva, Shunya, experiencer, Atman, isn't that a bondage? Or the question is saying that why is there an ‘I’ when the truth is known? That is what we were discussing right now. Even though the language is limited, it can be cleared. It can be clarified in the beginning that there is no ‘I’ but look I am going to use the word ‘I’ which will stand for the wholeness because right now the whole has assumed this point of view of the individual. As a concession I'll say that yes this individual is the whole and actually this statement is totally meaningless but we use it, we use it as a stepping stone in order to bring the other into our own state. If that is not used, the other will never know what you're talking about. Silence is the most accurate description but it does not communicate anything to those who are ignorant.

If the question is very basic then the answer is crafted so that the person understands what is said, and sometimes it's a total lie also, because that is what they are going to understand. That crafted answer is used as a stepping stone, it is not the final. So the identification with the self or the Brahman is actually for practical purposes and that is my opinion. Some people may not agree with it. They will say it is perfectly logical to call the self as ‘I’ or the Brahman as ‘I’ which I usually call as the existence. Existence can say ‘I’, nothing can stop it. Better word is ‘we’ but that is even more confusing. When I say we are the whole, we are the existence, many people will understand it that is much better than the ‘I’. But those who are in ignorance, they will still not get it. They will probably say - I don't know about you, but I am not the whole, I am still an individual.

The identification and the waking state is so strong there that it is not possible for them to disidentify, so the teacher assumes an identification. Okay you are that but I am this, and now please try to see that you are also that, which I am. And again the process is negative. The person who is in ignorance will be shown that you are not that which you think you are. What will happen is if you read too many books and if you listen to too many teachers, without doing the self enquiry, without doing any kind of investigation or progressive elimination, and you are not convinced of this absence of the individual, then the identification with the self or the Brahman will seem real. You will start thinking that so many great people are telling me that I am Brahman, it is written in so many books, and I am Brahman, I am the existence, I am the experiencer, it feels like I am that sometimes and probably I am that.

And what this has done is simply formed one more belief there, instead of removing the ignorance completely from the root. It has simply shifted the identification to a concept in the mind. Something similar to what happens when we shift the identification to the causal body. For example the teacher will tell you that you don't die. This thing called the causal body is taking these forms and you are the causal body because it is more stable, more stationary. It is also impermanent but it will last for millions of years. So something similar can happen that there is something which is more stable and more permanent, and probably that is me, but identification with these concepts is only in the mind. There is no realization here, and it is possible to know that they do not have a realization. They are simply talking about it as a concept. So they will picture the self as something big and eternal and universal which occupies the whole universe. As soon as you form a picture of it, it becomes a concept and the real experiencer is buried behind these concepts.

This will happen a lot to those who are highly educated because too much indoctrination has made a concrete wall in their intellect. That very solid wall cannot be destroyed easily and this wall will be formed again especially in the societies, in the cultures where materialism is very strong. The self remains a concept, a philosophy of some kind because they never bothered to investigate deeply in their mind. There is this kind of fog, there is this kind of internal hallucination that what I think must be real. This is the state of an impure intellect - I am thinking this and therefore it has to be real. And the wall of thought is very solid there, cannot go behind it, cannot cross it. When I say that look you are not aware, you are still thinking, and they will say - what do you mean by aware, I am completely aware. What they are aware of is their thoughts, not of their being. Being is beyond thought, being is not a concept, being is not an object. Indoctrination is so strong that it will not go away for the majority of the people. Therefore we always say that it is grace, not the words, not the books, not the teacher, not any kind of practice. It is the grace that will bring self-realization, nothing else.

We call them blockages and a very big blockage is there on the layer of emotions where the feelings of very subtle kinds are seen, they are seen as the self. For such people, there are brute force methods to break these blockages, and that is the path of experiences. Like one after the other, many experiences are given which show again and again that there is no individual. The problem here is that, in my opinion, this has become a corrupt practice now, and people are running after experiences. The real motive of having an experience, which is not an ordinary experience, not an everyday experience, has been lost. People run after the experiences, "Let me have this. I am so spiritual because I had this and that experience." But your current experience is enough to tell you that there is no individuality. You don't need anything extraordinary unless there is an obstacle, there is a blockage, and then the teacher is going to prescribe a medicine, which is an experience.

You don't need to keep on taking the medicine, or you don't need a higher dose of medicine if the cure has happened, if the disease of ignorance has cleared. But that does not really happen; they simply assume that having these experiences is spirituality. If you know yourself as an experience, then it's already failed. So the individuality remains. The individual is now that which is having the experiences of different kinds, and the individual is that which is seeking in a new form of a seeker.

On the path of knowledge, we simply end this drama completely. No seeker, no strange experiences needed. No practices needed. That is why it is the most powerful spiritual path in the whole universe. That is why I take so much trouble making these videos, taking you through them, answering the questions, and doing this satsang. It is possible that I can recommend something which is progressive, that is only when it is needed when there are obstacles that are too big. Sometimes something reverse happens. Seekers ask why are you telling me all these things? Why are you telling me about the illusion and no individual and this experiencer? There are no such things; there is absolute emptiness, which is conscious and alive and has a light of its own. The whole thing that you told in those 50 episodes is complete garbage, and I completely agree.

You don't need all those things. You see, actually, the first episode starts like this. But if you know what I'm talking about, you'll waste a lot of time listening to these videos. Go forward only if you can't understand what I'm talking about. So if you think that there is an effort in walking on the path of knowledge, it is your own making. It is your own creation. It is your own obstacle. The path of knowledge does not want to take you anywhere. Sometimes I get this interesting comment that you talk too much; there is nothing here to talk about. And I say that I need to cover the whole spectrum of students, you see.

Another question - how do I handle my own evolution?

First of all, you need to see that “I” doesn't evolve, just like I said. Remove the 'I' from here; 'I' is absolute, or you can say that there is no 'I' at all. So the evolution is happening, there is no agency there which can handle it; it handles itself. This basic ignorance should be cleared first, that there is somebody who can manage the evolution. No, the whole does it, and it does it in the most optimal way, most efficient way possible. Sometimes there is a desire that appears there, that I need to do something to speed up the evolution, and that is also a perfect desire in a perfect way, which has appeared there, and it will lead to some action or some corrections which will speed up the evolution. Again, the individual never does anything because it's not there; there is no doer.

So the recommended method to handle evolution is to leave it as it is, don't try to meddle with it. If something needs to be corrected, there will be a desire to do it, and it does not matter how strong the resistance is, slowly the whole structure will move towards this desire, and it will be finished, and the next step will be taken. This is how it works. We are driven, we are not the drivers. Humans have no power; they are the external appearance of the iceberg. The iceberg is 90 percent in the water, invisible, humans are like that. We don't know what is hidden, and so this evolution is mostly from that level which is not apparent; we can see the effects of that, we do not see the causes of that, and we cannot cause it.

Now, this answer is not going to satisfy many people, especially spiritual people. They don't like this answer, "You mean I'm supposed to do nothing for the rest of my life? Should I just sit and watch?"

Remember, the 'I' is again here, remember to drop the 'I' when you speak about evolution and things like this. When you speak on any spiritual topic. There is only the witness; the witness can only watch. It cannot do anything; it does not do anything, and it has no wants to do anything. The want appears in front of it, and the will or this desire that drives the whole thing. The experiencer is just a witness. So even if you say, "I will do something," it is okay. And if you say, "I'll just sit and watch," it's okay. They amount to the same thing.

That which happens is necessary; it will be manifested. It does not matter what kind of thoughts appear in the mind; what happens will happen. If a thought appears that "I have done it; I speeded up my evolution," it is perfectly okay. If some other thought appears like "I'm just sitting and watching," it happens, it is also okay. Both amount to nothing; only the second thought is more equanimous, is coming more from awareness, and the first one is coming more from the seeker's perspective that "I'm doing something."

However, most of us will not be satisfied by this because the energy to seek is too much. So for them, a false answer is given, and the false answer is as follows. It is just like medicine. You give a placebo kind of medicine to those who cannot be in this equanimous state. And the answer is very simple. If you want to handle your own evolution, the first thing you need to do is get a teacher. The teacher needs to be the most irritating kind of teacher in the universe, and that kind of person will tell you all your faults: "You're not good at this, you talk like this, and you think like this." That is the fastest way that I've seen so far in my experience. If you get somebody who simply says that you are great, you are the experiencer, you are the whole existence, you are Brahman, now sit down there and do nothing, probably you won't progress very fast. So I gave you the key, get somebody who is an expert in finding your faults, who tells you that you are at a lower level than expected. And obviously, somebody who is at a lower level than you will not be able to tell you.

Sometimes people are good at finding faults. So, for a householder, the best thing is to get into a relationship, and your partner, your children, your mother, father, they will become your gurus, they will become your teachers. Listen to them carefully, how they criticize, how they find faults, how they react to you. They will speed up your evolution. We evolve here simply by making relations. If you're not in a society, then you need a guru, and the guru must be the strictest possible. If you're not fortunate enough to get that kind of very irritating guru, then use your intelligence, do the self-evaluation. Those with a good amount of intelligence can do it themselves; they can, just like a doctor, who can check for the symptoms, treat himself with the medicine because he's a doctor; he has the skill and intelligence.

If you are a patient, you go to the doctor. Similarly, if you want to handle your evolution, you go to a guru. The bitter the medicine, the faster the effect. If you are a doctor, you have this powerful intellect, you can evaluate your own progress. So there is evolution, but there are obstacles also because of your past actions, past impressions. They need to be cleared, and if you are skillful, you will be able to do it yourself. If not, you need a teacher, you need a guru who is skillful, who is experienced in the field, not in terms of bookish knowledge. People with bookish knowledge can only say things; they cannot do anything.

There is another way to handle your evolution, and it looks like that I have already told, but it is slightly different, and that is surrender. You surrender with a will to evolve; that desire, that intent, must be very strong. And you can do some rituals to keep pouring petrol in that, you keep the fire burning. The fire, the intent to evolve, it requires a little bit of knowledge, especially it requires exposure to somebody who is already more evolved than you. And you must have guessed by now that I'm talking about the path of surrender or devotion. It does not involve worship.

Remember, the path of devotion does not involve worship. I don't say it so many times because, you see, you anger a lot of people by saying it. They are kind of radical and fundamentalist kind of people. So you can take out a devotional component from that, simply use the surrender. And simply use the power of intent to continue. There is no need to worship anybody. And obviously, there is no need to pay money to any institutions. There is no need to pray. The prayer is actually a method of expressing our intent. There is nobody who is listening, except you because you are the whole. The prayer is an expression of the intent; it is not causing anything. The causal relation is reversed here. So a concession is made for people who don't understand these things, and they are told to pray. There has to be somebody, you know, because in the social hierarchy, the lower person, the weaker person prays to a stronger person for food or whatever. That metaphor was transferred there in the spiritual world, and it was catastrophic. People pray to something that is great and can fulfill all their desires; that is the whole corruption that has happened. So I never recommend this part, but in this series, I am recommending it because I have a hope, a small amount of hope that these things will be cleared in the coming years, probably 50 or 100 or 200 years from now. There will be purification in devotional practices also, hopefully.

We already have two or three ways to handle evolution, and on the path of knowledge, there is again one method which everybody knows. You can speed up your evolution simply by remaining aware, which you will be as soon as you realize who you are. Then this realization shows up as awareness, the state which transcends the four states. It forms a background of all the states, and you will find there is a speedup of the evolution. Now do not assume that I am doing it. If you assume that, you're already unaware, you're already in ignorance; that is a sign of ignorance. That is the sign that you have realized nothing at all. So, a good way to say it is, "There is awareness now instead of darkness." And a bad way to say that is, "I am aware and I am speeding up my evolution." That is what an ignorant person will say. Sometimes I also say it because that is what people will understand. There is a kind of blockage there, there is a kind of ignorance, or a belief in ordinary minds that I need to do something in order for something to happen.

"What do I need to do to be aware?" That is the question that I get a lot. You told me to remain aware because there's work that you have given me. It's a new job that I have, which pays nothing. Tell me how to do it. Here is the limitation of the language, because the instruction was formed like a job to be done, it was taken as an action to be done, and then the person is demanding a method to remain aware. So we try to correct it. I use the words like "remembrance" to make you understand that it is not an action; it is simply being what you are. And if you forget, if you slip, you can remember it again. You see, it is like staying awake, being in your true nature all the time. Sometimes there will be activity, sometimes there will be strong activity. It's all okay. Come back to what you are. It involves non-doing; it does not involve doing. And we have talked about it a lot, so I'm not going to repeat it again. Probably, it appears in every other meeting, and you will find that there is a miracle that happens; it speeds up evolution. You don't even need to do the self-evaluation. Your evaluation is always in front of you; your blockages and your resistances are apparent; they are already in front of you, clearly visible.

On the path of knowledge, we handle evolution by not doing anything. It is basically magic; it is the most direct thing that I've found. Yes, there are brute force methods of doing it, and there are methods where other entities and other people are involved. There are ways in which the whole group, the collective mind, the group mind gets a push from each other, and there are more exotic ways. The whole greater mind sometimes creates a whole universe in which conditions are provided for evolution, and you can suspect that we are in such an arrangement right now. We are in a school where evolution is very fast. We are fortunate. If you find suffering in one of the universes, you can simply conclude logically that it is meant for evolving; it is not meant for enjoyment alone. And we find a lot of suffering here, so the conclusion is that we are evolving very fast even without doing anything. So pick any method to handle it or just let it happen by itself; it's all okay because it's happening by itself anyway. And remain aware all the time, and evolution will take care of itself; there's no need to worry too much about it.

Sometimes I call it flowing with the river. Or there is even a better metaphor, which is riding in a train. The train is going there already; the train will speed up whenever it wants to speed up; just relax and watch. In the early days, I used to give this trick that you don't do anything for your evolution; just ensure that you don't fall back, don't do anything which destroys your current progress. That's what I was doing, so don't fall back; don't go backwards; that was my formula. And the train is already taking you forward, so that is the only mistake we can do, that we can fall, we can go backwards. And if you ensure that you're not going backwards, then there is no other way but to go forward; you are already in a boat; the river is carrying you. Just don't start rowing in the opposite direction, and you will be fine. So that is the lazy way to evolve.

How do we know that we are going backwards? How can we find out that I'm not going with the flow, that there is a resistance there which is taking me away from the speeding river, the current? And it is very easy; if you are resisting, if you are struggling, if you are suffering, if you are always sad and confused and fearful and angry, and you are doing the same things to others also, you're making them sad, fearful, and angry, then obviously you are retarding. This is the sign of it. Some people will say, "I'm very good, but all these bad things happen to me." It's okay; it's fine if you're sad because something happened accidentally or because you're about to die next week because of a disease, it's not devolution; it is perfectly okay; it is evolution only because you are not doing it; you are simply experiencing that situation. I won't call it a victim of a situation; there is no such thing. So you find that sometimes you find yourself in situations where it looks like it is suffering; it's perfectly okay.

Don't blame people or something else or yourself for it. Turn it into an opportunity. The obstacle is the path. The resistance is the opportunity. Suffering is also grace.

Session 74

There is a question which is very frequently asked - what is the most effective way to transcend the ego?

The only way to transcend the ego is knowledge, there is no other way. You can have this knowledge by various means, by various paths, but that is the only solution to this problem of identification with the ego. You can have the knowledge experientially by doing some practices or you can simply directly see it using a well-matured intellect, that is the path of knowledge. Ultimately you come to this realization of the illusion of the ego, the illusion of the identity or the small self, the separate self or the person, and when you see that there is no person, what remains is the whole, when you see that there is no individual, what remains is the universal.

Now you will see the problem here that knowing this is not a big deal, it can happen in two minutes, but the identification will shift back to anything which is necessary for survival.

And now such questions are going to arrive that I know who I am, but I keep thinking of myself as this body or my memories, or various spiritual entities like soul and things like that. So my solution to that is very easy, that you can become aware of this activity also. It is only an activity, it is not you, you are that which is aware of this activity. So bring the activity of identification under the light of awareness and now it is perfectly okay to be identified with anything because Mother Nature has made this arrangement for some specific purpose. And that purpose is survival of the individual.

If you see the existence, you will find that we never experience the existence as it is. It is emptiness, there is nothing to experience. What is there is infinite potential to be anything. That potential is being experienced as a series of illusions and we call it experience. The experience is happening now and here. And you will also notice that there is no universal experience. The experience is always an individual experience. At the level of universal, there is no individual and there is no experience.

This is very strange. The experience is always subjective. There is nobody who can say that I am experiencing the whole. They will only say that I am experiencing a tiny bit, one thing at a time, in the form of a very limited individual. So what we are experiencing is actually universal but it appears in the form of an individual. This is paradoxical. This cannot be comprehended logically. When I say that you are the existence, you are experiencing yourself in various forms. Current form is very limited and this is all okay. Everybody understands this much. But what they don't understand is where is the universal in this? Why is existence not experiencing itself as existence? Why does it need to experience itself in the form of a limited individual? Why can't it simply go and experience everything at once? Why can't the universal memory witness itself?

Get rid of the individual memory completely. Now everybody knows that there is no such thing as individual memory. It is an appearance. The universal appears as the individual. There is no real individual. Like there is no real wave in the ocean. The ocean has assumed a tiny impermanent form of the wave. But why must it happen in this way? Still ocean is perfectly okay. Why is it not witnessing itself without doing this drama of individuality?

Benjamin is saying without the limitation there won't be any meaning.

Yes.

Vidya is saying experience is possible only through limitations.

Yes, very good answers. There is no mistake in any of the answers. It is very easy to see that there is no individual. It is very difficult to see why there has to be an individual? Detailed answer is that in this existence there are infinite possibilities, and one of the possibilities is individualization. Let us not forget this. It is possible to be an individual. This is not excluded from the wholeness, otherwise it won't remain whole. There is universal, yes, but to complete itself there is individual also. There is connectivity, yes, but to complete itself there must be separation also. It is manifesting all possibilities.

Right now right here we are in one of the possibilities which is of individuality. It is all very beautiful, it is all whole and complete.

Without there being an individual and the experiences associated with the individual, which are of a very special kind, they are very solid and meaningful, there cannot be any meaning. The worlds that the individual finds itself in are very stable. It looks like there is a purpose here, it looks like there is something going on which is meaningful. The human life or the life of any creature, there is a goal to it.

This is a very satisfying experience. I won't say that it is completely meaningful or I won't say that it has a purpose, nothing like this. But it seems that there is, because it is an illusion, everything is okay here. If I don't find a true meaning, I don't usually fuss about it that there is no true meaning. Nothing is true in the illusion. Why are you searching for a true meaning in the illusion? That's not logical. But it is a good illusion, it's a perfect illusion.

I'll take you back to the metaphor of the movie. If you watch a movie which has no story, just random pictures, pictures change so quickly like those music videos where there is no connection between what they are showing and the song, all they want you to go through, 20,000 pictures in 2 minutes somehow. Because the young generation cannot tolerate anything which is more than 5 seconds long,

so they need to make such videos. Imagine if the movie is made like this, no story at all, no apparent purpose in the movie, nothing purposeful, meaningful happens. Who is going to watch that movie?

Can you call it an intelligent movie? Can you call it a good experience?

And the answer is no, our individual intellect, at least, is going to say that it is meaningless, it is a waste of time. And if there is a story there, if there is a meaning, purpose and people are chasing something

which is of value for them in the movie, the characters, then this is the entertaining movie, this is a piece of art. Now it is worth watching, it is not a complete waste of time. The director and the producer and the story writer have done a good job here and you will find that in that movie there is everything, all the duality is there, somebody is good, somebody is bad, somebody is beautiful, somebody is ugly, there is happiness and there is sorrow and sadness, everything is there. In India we call such movies the masala movie because they put everything there or we also call it a formula movie because there is a formula, that movie is always successful, does not matter what is the story. So right now we are in one such masala movie where there is apparent conflict, apparent resolution, apparent struggle, apparent suffering and totally fake happiness. Maya is a perfect director. Maya is the best director in this universe because she is the only one who has produced this movie. Because there is a possibility of making such a movie, it is there, there is no other reason.

You can only say that it is necessary to express this possibility, otherwise the wholeness will not be wholeness. And there is a kind of experience that the individual provides to the universal, to the

universe or to the existence itself, which is not possible when your aperture is too big, like the camera aperture, when it is too big everything fades into white. You need to have some darkness, you need to have some limitations, you need to turn, you need to narrow down the aperture so that only a few things get in, only a little bit of light gets in and then we get the illusion, then the picture appears, you close it down even further and it starts disappearing again.

It is a perfect metaphor actually, the camera, open it too much, it is gone, it is universal. Close it down and it is gone because the darkness is also universal. You can see the plants and the rocks and the trees, their apertures are very narrow. As the individual evolves, there is an optimal position where the aperture is not too big and not too small. There are more combinations that are possible, like a possibility is there to narrow down individual experience to smaller scales like we have right now, it is a very narrow kind of experience and to expand it whenever it is needed, that is one more possibility and I think we are growing towards that possibility. We want to keep the individual because it is so useful, it provides a very valuable purposeful experience apparently. We also want to transcend the individual and then we can have this ability to widen our view a little, I think we are progressing towards that possibility.

Somehow I think it will never become the whole. It is watching itself, it is kind of engaged in itself via these various possibilities, it is being expressed like this. You will know very soon that there is a gradation, there is a gradual widening of the aperture, this is what we call as spiritual evolution. So it is all perfect, it is all beautiful, you don't need to do anything, why are you trying to transcend the ego, what is wrong with the ego, what is wrong with the individual?

Benjamin is saying, just because truth underlies and pervades all experience, the movie can be taken as real.

Yes, what is fake, what is real? Because the only reality there is the illusion, why do we even divide it into real and fake, why do we divide it into true and false, there is no such thing in existence. Existence is whole and complete, the oneness has truth, it has false, it has the real, it has the unreal. Existence never says that it is real or unreal, these concepts are an invention of the human mind. Remember what is real or what is unreal is totally arbitrary and subjective, you know the reality of the “truth”, it is also fake, it is a part of the movie actually. So when we transcend the individual, we transcend the truth also, because the truth is defined by the individual, there is no truth in the universe, in the wholeness, it is beyond true and false. It is very interesting.

Vidya is saying, through various limited individuals, varied experiences are experienced as one whole, for example, through dream characters, dreamers are experiencing one whole dream.

Yes, it is a good metaphor that while dreaming, I, the one, divides into many and I take many forms in the dream and it is surprising that I take the forms of non-living things also. I become the house, I become the roads, I become the sky, I become the earth, I become the water and I become people and animals, it is a one whole experience. If in your dream you ask the other person what are you experiencing and they will say exactly the same thing that other people say in the waking state - I am experiencing that which you are experiencing.

And why is that not surprising? Because the experiencer is the one, they must experience that which I am experiencing, otherwise there is no meaning, otherwise how can you call it a meaningful dream if every character in your dream is experiencing something else totally? They will experience what you are experiencing and remember this is one such dream right now, the waking state is also a dream where the one is experiencing many. So it will happen like this, I don't know of any other way it will happen, it includes all possibilities already. Now what else can be there, what are you trying to transcend?

Remember the question was - what is the effective way to transcend the ego? Just realize there is no ego, just realize there is no individual, it is an appearance, you don't need to do anything more than that. Why are you sitting in a cave trying to transcend the individual? You are that already. Just don't be an individual. It is as simple as that. And the play can continue because now this ignorance is also washed off that I need not be an individual. You are not an individual, realize this and the play can continue, the dream can continue, there is no other way. The existence is pure emptiness and it must do what it is doing right now, it is all perfect already, and if the change happens it is also perfect, it must change only that way. Realizing this, you will be in absolute peace, no chasing, no seeking, no running, no practices, no gurus, no ashrams, no mantras, no bending the body, no spells, no entities, no worship, this is called freedom, this is called liberation, liberation while living as an individual. It is so simple and it is so beautiful. What a relief knowing that I don't need to do anything to be everything. This is the direct path.

Yes if you don't understand what I just said then it's kind of confusing. Once you realize your true nature nothing needs to be done, disidentification with the ego happens automatically. Then the rest of the time is spent in some kind of purification of the intellect which tries to identify again and again. It hates the movie then- oh it is an illusion, I just realized I am in the illusion, can somebody please take me out of the illusion into some reality!! This madness is also over, once you realize that there is no reality of any other kind. This is as real as it is. The unreal is the only reality. You accept it. That is your surrender. You accept the individual after discarding it.

This is the paradox in spirituality. Now the mountains are mountains, the rivers are rivers, the individual is back in the market, no problem at all. All the problems come because of the struggle to let go of the individual. What are you letting go of if there is no individual? How can you let it go? All you need to do is let go of this belief that there is an individual. What are you trying to transcend if there is no individual? If it is an illusion, do you need to transcend it? No. Simply know that it is an illusion. Accept and continue. This is the simplest practice I am giving you.

Now some people will say I go back and identify with all other things, the body, the mind, the soul, the spirit, I start calling myself as the Brahman, how to get rid of this? And I will repeat the same thing which I said in the beginning, that it is an activity, see it as another activity. Simply abide in your true nature, the activity will become a problem if you try to kill it, don't kill it, simply observe this activity of identification, it is totally fake. The fake individual is trying to gain back its reality, which is perfectly okay.

This is the tendency of mother nature actually, so do not fight Maya. As I usually say, become

a friend of Maya, she is trying to take you back and you say no, you need to say it very nicely otherwise she will become angry. That is the struggle of a spiritual seeker, you need to refuse very politely, and you let this puppet do whatever it does if it wants to identify with the body, fulfill its desires. If it is done in complete awareness, no problem at all, you are already transcended. Where are you transcending? You are already the ultimate. Where are you going? What are you trying to become? You are the ultimate; that is why I said knowledge is the only way, and knowledge is very simple, actually. I am not giving you the biggest techniques in the universe, the most complicated hatha yoga techniques, no, I am giving you two words, that's all. Truth is like this, two or three words.

Remember, transcending, liberation and evolution are a part of the movie. If you think that finally I am out of the illusion, I have become a spiritual seeker, and I am seeking, and I have a super guru here who knows everything, I will be out of the illusion in no time, well, this is just another delusion. It is all happening in the movie; it is a part of the movie. All you need to do is discard it, just watch it, and it settles down.

Vidya is saying - the essence and result of this knowledge is that it frees one from doing.

Yes, I am not saying do nothing, I am saying do everything in complete awareness. That will be seen as non-doing. Is it possible to do nothing? No, but it is possible to erase the doing by being in complete awareness. Such statements leave you with nothing. There is nothing to think after that. So many people do not realize this, and they keep seeking, and they keep struggling, and many people are not even on the stage of seeking; they are totally into the illusion, which is also okay, it is not bad.

There was another interesting question: since the past is an illusion, why do masses hold on to it like it is real?

It is very interesting. What else do you have except your past? The ego thrives on the past. If you remove the past, you will see that there is no individual, there is just pure experience. Our past is also our knowledge, and our knowledge is also our limitation. What we experience is only that which we know. It is because of this illusion of the past. Remove your knowledge, and there is nothing, there is not even the individual. This is like death for the ego, and it is going to resist it because the tendency of the ego is to stay alive. It is a machine built for survival. Clinging to memory is the nature of the ego. You remove the memory, it is gone. Who am I without the memory? There is nothing there. So there is a natural resistance in the ego for letting go of the past.

This is the short answer, and probably this is a very clear answer. It is a part and parcel of being an individual, the attachment with the memory is part of this experience. The memory is in the form of a story that I was a little baby, I was a young man, I was doing this job, I was married to this person, yesterday this happened to me, and notice that it is all ‘I’, the memory is connected to the individual. Now you will wonder why. Why do I need an individual to remember the whole past? Try to remember it without the “I”. What do you have? You will find something interesting that wherever “I” was not there, those events are forgotten. There is hardly any place in your life where the ‘I’ is not there, probably in sleep, probably in dreams, this one is not there, there is somebody else, and you will see that promptly the system has erased all those memories, the only memory that you have is of the waking state, which is tightly connected with individuality.

How can you let go of it? There is no person without a memory; a person is simply a bunch of memories. Yes, 90% of them are gone, but the illusion stays that I am that. You have a handful of memories right now which are useful for your current survival. Today you want to get by using those memories. If I take them away, there is no today, there is no life. So it is not a surprise that people cling to their memories. That is a natural occurrence that a person is defined by his or her past. Take away the past, it's not there. Do you think it's a problem? No, it's not a problem. What is wrong with having a memory? The problem is thinking that I am this memory, that is the only problem. I am a witness of this memory, and as a witness I am already perfect.

If 90% or 100% of those memories are gone or replaced, it does not bother me at all. Yes, but the ego is terrified because it will be erased also, that is against its tendency to survive. As soon as I say that let go of this memory, let go of your negative thoughts, the ego is going to resist because its life is memory, its life is negative thoughts, positive thoughts, all kinds of thoughts. You will see that in your waking state, most of your mental activity is repeating your past, mind is repeating your memory. It is scanning through the memory, and that brings up impulses out of the memory which we call desires, and the body acts on those desires, and you repeat it every day. It is running like a machine, it does not want to change. There is resistance towards changing.

As we grow up, the resistance increases. We do not really mature. What you call maturity is more clinging to what I am as an individual, as a person. With that saying, it feels safe in the past. Yes, today is a struggle, isn't it? Past is something which is stationary, you can change the future, but you cannot change the past. And then yes, it is home for the ego. There is no problem at all. Ignorance is the problem. Even clinging is not a problem because that is necessary for survival. What happens is your experience is not all positive, it is a technicolor experience, all shades are there. And if there is something in your past which is dark, dirty, which you don't want to look at, that is also being preserved as a part of the personality.

Here we enter the affliction.It is like this in all the layers of the memory, if you study it carefully. Those who are interested in splitting hair—if you study all the layers—because when I say individual, it is nothing, it is a collection of layers of memory. Without memory, there are no layers of the memory. There won't be any individual. So all this darkness is preserved as a part, as a structure in the layer. To me, that feels unfortunate. From the universal point of view, it is nothing big. It is business as usual. It is not interested at all—what is dark, what is light, what is a happy thought, what is an unhappy thought. It does not mind the variation. It is a painting that is made out of all these colors. It welcomes all experience. It welcomes clinging to the unhappy parts of our lives. Now, look from this universal point of view, there is so much peace here. I am okay with whatever happened in my past, this is how it happened. We look at it and we continue.

There is no need to react and replay it and then react again and then replay it again from various angles and do the what-if analysis. This is what we call - living in the past. There is no need of it. Yes, there is a tendency to cling to the past, to keep the past alive. Just observe this tendency and let the past be the past. Why do you keep replaying it in the present? There are a lot of things to do in the present. If you don't do anything today, how is it going to go into memory and overwrite the old? There will be a lot of room for the past to appear again in that blankness. The mind will try to fill your blankness with the pictures of the past. Do you really want it?

Past is stale, it is like rotten food. You want today's food, you want freshly cooked nice-smelling food. You don't want something which you stuffed in your fridge two months ago. It is frozen, it is rotten, it is stale, tasteless. Yes, it was the finest kind of food, but it is gone now, it is old. You will see that your most positive memory is also fading, it is colorless now. If you recall it a few times, it becomes boring. The whole of the past is boring, that's why you see there is an anticipation of the future. Otherwise, we won't be motivated to live a life. That is why we say that it is an affliction if you live in the past because there is no motivation to work towards the future then. There is too much clinging, this one activity is dominating too much. There is no individual in the present. In the present, there is only an experience. As soon as the experience is committed to memory, the activity of identity formation claims it. Oh, it is my memory, it is my experience, all this happened to me. So the individual always is in the past, there is nothing in the present right now, right here. There is only experience, and the individual projects the past into the future. So sometimes the individual is in the future.

You have three places to live your life: the past, the present, and the future. The problem with the future is we don't know it. It must be used for motivation. Then you are left with the present. So you must come back to the present, to feel alive. The past is dead, so it is all ok, it is a mechanism. We are born with this mechanism. When we assume a limited form, these things are given to us. You cannot refuse it. No, I want a human birth, but I don't want this mechanism of individuality and past and all this, give me something better. Yes, there can be better, who knows, but not in the human form. You will need to leave this form.

There is tremendous freedom in not being attached to the past.

That is why we are not satisfied with the human form. That is why the recommended way is to get rid of the human form. You can taste it actually. You can let go of some parts of your past as if they were not me, you will instantly find peace in your mind. You will instantly find that a lightness in your whole being that I was not that, who did all those mistakes and who went through all those hellish experiences, or even the good experiences. Because as you know, the mind creates suffering out of the good experiences also. The suffering is in the form of missing. I miss all those good days. I miss that person. I miss that event. This is suffering. It is not happy that it happened, it is unhappy that it is not happening. It is a strange thing, it is an affliction.

As soon as you let go of the past, you will find a kind of lightness as if you got wings. Now you are free, but the more you let go, the less individual you become. So you must draw a line, otherwise madness is the result, which you don't want. Being in the human form, you want to be normal. So the solution is - all you need to do is observe the process of being an individual, observe that it cannot let go of the past because it will die. If it lets go of the past, the ego will not remain. So there is protection from Mother Nature. You cannot do too much of it. Just be aware of the negativity coming from the past. That is our problem. The past is not the problem, identification with the negative past is causing the present to slip away. This is what I see.

Most people are attached to the past. That is not a problem, but they are attached to the bad parts of it, not the good parts of it. They are so attached that they continue it even after death, in the next birth, and following hundred births. What happens is there is an erasure mechanism also where the events are erased, but the tendencies are kept. Everybody knows this. We are born with no memory of the past. It is not that we are born with no past at all. No, we take our past with us to the next life also. They appear as tendencies, nothing is actually erased, only the connection is cut, that also a little bit of it, most of it is we are carrying it right now. It is an accumulation, so this little bit of erasure gives us relief, otherwise, we will never change because the burden of the past is too heavy. So we take advantage of this new birth and we try to become free from the past, that is the whole philosophy of becoming free from your karmic impressions, your karmic bonds.

I can give you a trick that you don't need to die and be reborn and then repeat it a thousand times. You can do it now. If you know the mechanism, you can hack it like a good hacker. Just do it now. See that the past is an illusion. See that nobody did anything. See that it does not belong to me, especially the bad parts. Learn from them and then do not touch them again. You will very quickly find that you are erasing your karmic registers. It is magic.

Disidentification is disidentification with the past only. The past is that which this individual has done, probably thinking that I am doing it. There is really no doer but there is an attachment with the doing. Let go of this attachment, and you will immediately find that your karmic registers are being erased. Your next birth is going to be in freedom, not with the burden, not only the next birth, your next year, and ten years after this. They will seem to be more free compared to today. So this is the trick. Utilize it if you want. I keep doing it all the time. You don't need to forget the past, you need to decide and disidentify with the past. Oh, it happened, so what? So many things happened in this universe. Yesterday there was rain. The day before that was a very hot day. Do I remember all these things? No, I don't because the individual is not involved there. It was not done by the individual.

In the same way, whatever the body does, whatever the mind does, is not done by anybody. There is bondage, but it is very weak. The strings of the past are very feeble. You can break them, cut them very easily, just like you ignore rain, you ignore sunshine, you ignore cold days, and you ignore hot days, you ignore good and bad that happened in your life. Things keep happening all the time. That is going to give you a lot of freedom, which you will never experience if you cling to the past. This is a shortcut, you see. There is no need to totally clean it. There is no need to forget it, and this is called forgiveness for some reason, that we forgive whatever was done by myself as an individual. This is being free from the karmic stuff while in the body.

So hopefully now you know the answer to why people cling to the past, and now you know a trick to become free from it without doing anything. Letting go is not doing. Don't repeat it, don't replay it, like you replay the same CD every day. Don't do it, buy a new CD, watch a new movie. There is huge potential in human life. There is nothing in the past; it is just a device to keep the illusion of the individual going. Use it for that and just throw the rest of it. It's not important, the present is important, the future is important. I saved your thousand lives now. If you make this thing a part of your personality, who knows how fast you will evolve? The differences between a bicycle and a jet plane, just one simple teaching about the past, the self has no past. How is it alive? That is a miracle, isn't it? So thinking that I need a past to be alive is a kind of deep ignorance. I am alive without the past, I am alive with the past.

There was a question- is enlightenment or knowing my true nature, the highest level of awareness and is it only a recognition or remembrance?

Very nice, very good question here. What is higher than enlightenment, and there is a good thing about this question: he has already defined the meaning of the word 'enlightenment' - he says, enlightenment is knowing my true nature. Yes, if you define enlightenment as knowing your true nature, that is the final—absolutely nothing is needed after this. But there can be questions like, 'What about my liberation? What about this body? What about this mind? What about the jiva? What about the causal body? What about God?' I want to merge with God and all.

And let me tell you very impolitely that if there are such questions, that means the enlightenment or the self-realization has not happened, or that means you did not contemplate, you did not think about the implications of your true nature, because these questions are totally meaningless when you know your true nature. Liberation of what? Merging with what? You are the only one there. Where are you going to find somebody else to merge with? You are the whole. What are you going to liberate into? The body and mind are illusions. Even if you do something to them, they are impermanent experiences. They are good as they are. What are these thoughts in your mind? What can it mean when you say all these things? It can only mean that you keep aside your realization, and you are back on your old track, not going forward, going backward again. That is stupidity. That is not enlightenment.

Now, I am not saying that you should not ask questions. Yes, you see, realization has happened. Now there are questions. Now here you are going to need a teacher because your mind is not going to cooperate here. So, a teacher makes it very quick. The teachers, fortunately, on the path of knowledge, are very impolite. They get irritated very easily, and so fix the mind very quickly. There are other paths which you will like. Hopefully, everything can be done on the path of knowledge very quickly, but some people don't like it. No, my answers are very important, my questions are very important. Okay, then try some other path which is designed for stupid people, and there you can do all the meditations to merge with the God and you can do all the Kundalini experiences to liberate your causal body, and they will feed you all the sugar-coated knowledge.

Yes, you are this big being, yes, you are this whole universe, yes, you get all the powers and all, yes, you will meet this big entity and that big entity and this miracle and that miracle. These things are for people who do not get it directly: self-realization, end of all, end of everything. No realization, means seeking, doing all kinds of circus. There is no liberation, there is no merging, nothing happens to the body, nothing happens to the mind, they are illusions, nothing happens to the causal body, it is a bigger illusion. Is the world suffering? Look, there is no world also, it is a dream.

So, if the self-realization has happened, it will be final, if there is action, no problem. The action is happening in the complete realization, complete awareness. You see, this illusion must continue; this body-mind must continue. And then there is nothing wrong with that. What kind of realization is it if you want things to change or if you want to stop things from changing? Both are idiotic thoughts. What is wrong there? I got self-realized. Now I need to do this thing, and I need to live my life like this and so on. That means self-realization never happened. You still think that it is my life. You still think that you are the doer. This is very irritating, and no teacher can stand this thing. I am self-realized, but I need to do something. What kind of stupidity is this? And so they will be kicked out of the path of knowledge. Remember, if your teacher is so strict, if your teacher is so impolite and looks like your enemy, then you are very fortunate. You will be out of this mess in no time. If your teacher is a very sweet person and is promising to fulfill all your desires, all these very illogical, irrational desires that you have after realization, then your whole life will be wasted. This is what I mean by having a teacher who is very strict. They don't like it; they will break and shatter your illusions mercilessly. That is the only way I have seen actually.

I have never seen anybody who got out of it using the sweet paths, using the long-term paths. They keep traveling on it. What are you doing? Yes, I am worshiping this and that deity. Is it ok? Yes, I am benefiting a lot. Ok, then for a million lifetimes, the deity will keep benefiting you. That is what deities do. What about your liberation? Yes, the deity told me that I will get liberation in the future. What about your liberation? Yes, this and that meditation will bring liberation. It is going to dissolve my causal body in no time, and they continue like this. Is it even possible to dissolve it? Is it even possible for a deity to liberate you? Why is that deity not liberated yet? What is he doing in heaven? It is the same thing as an astrologer telling you that you will get gold. The gold is in this direction in the future. Why is that fellow so poor who knows everything about all the gold in the world, who can predict the future?

If your guru does not get angry by your saying that I got the realization, but I have these questions, then there is no hope. Then you have booked a ticket to a vacation that is going to last forever. So if you are on the path of knowledge, and your guru keeps beating you, you are very fortunate. It is very simple. It is a recognition, yes, that yes I am this, I forgot, continue. It is highly boring. There is no firework show here. There is no grand symphony orchestra, nothing. So I forgot my real nature. Thank you. You told me my real nature; that should be the end of the spiritual path. It is so simple. It is a non-event. Why do we keep talking about it endlessly? Because of ignorance. Ignorance is a big event, actually. Can there be a bigger miracle than ignorance in this universe? Knowledge is very simple. It is not a miracle. And either you are going to laugh once you know your true nature, or there will be tears of joy. That is the only reaction I have seen on the path of knowledge. There is nothing more than that. Once you know your true nature, it is like remembering, and then nothing needs to be done. Why do we keep doing it? Why do we keep lecturing? Why are there satsangs and so many videos and programs? Why are there so many meditations and practices? Because the seeker won't accept the simple truth. It is very irritating, I tell you.

Session 75

Remembering the ignorance in all of us helps us show compassion to others because no one is intentionally behaving badly on purpose. It's all due to ignorance.

It is a very good understanding that ignorance is the root cause of suffering. And not only my suffering, it is the root cause of the suffering that others are inflicting on people. They are doing it because of their own ignorance. Others are suffering because of their ignorance. And you can immediately see a need to eradicate ignorance completely from us humans. I cannot simply sit here and say that my ignorance is gone, now I am in bliss.

You will find that somebody will come and disturb that bliss because they are ignorant. Our bliss is somehow dependent on somebody else's ignorance. Because we are all connected. Because we live in a society. You will say, no, my bliss is very solid. But whatever it is, it is not a good experience. It is irritating. Yes, we are back in bliss. We are established in bliss all the time. But there is suffering when I see somebody else suffering due to their ignorance. I can admit that. And probably many of you will admit that. Even though we are able to remove most of our ignorance, when we see a little bit of ignorance in others, we can experience a tiny bit of suffering here because somebody is causing suffering or somebody is already suffering due to their ignorance.

You need to see your ignorance. Once you have done that, you need to see the ignorance in others. And that is why, especially nowadays, I am putting a lot of emphasis on the eradication of ignorance from others. When you join the path, the whole focus is on your ignorance. You will find me saying that don't worry about the world. It is not going to change. Don't worry about the people. You cannot change them. You can only change yourself. Just leave them alone. They are on their path of suffering and they will arrive at the correct path sooner or later. This is my emphasis. Because I don't want you to get distracted in fixing others. When you yourself are buried under ignorance, I don't want you to even try doing anything for others. It is a distraction. It is an obstruction, an obstacle. And probably it will fail miserably. I mean, you can try, but it is always best to clear your own ignorance first and then look after the others as much as possible. It is not compulsory. But I need to put that seed back in the soil, after eating the fruit. Once you have gained the essential knowledge, then I change my tune. You must have seen this. It is very strange. And you must be wondering why. Just a few months ago or last year probably, he told me not to even look at others. Which teaching is valid here? Should I help others or should I not help others? This is the question here.

Just like I have said many times now that there is a time when you should do both. There will be a time when you should not worry about others. And there will be a suitable time where now you need to take care of this little suffering that we experience when we see ignorance in others. Probably that was not her point when she said that no one is behaving badly intentionally. It is because of ignorance. That actually stops the ego from reacting. That is very good. If you realize this, the ego will stop reacting to the bad behavior of others. But that still will not stop the emotional layers from reacting. There will be an emotion of sadness or frustration or anger, a little bit. “Oh, it's not mine, but whatever it is, is not good”. And yes, it is not going to stop the intellect also from saying that why can't we fix this? So when that desire is dominant in you, you are ready to eliminate ignorance from others. So it is a matter of right time. Don't do it if you're not already ripe. And do it when this desire has arisen in you and you are capable of doing it. The tiniest bit is okay here. Usually, I've seen that the big efforts fail very badly. Small efforts have a chance of success.

Leyla is saying helping you is helping me.

Yes, we are all connected. And so we will get the fruits of it. Remember, there are many births remaining. You will need to come back here. Better to do something before you go so that when you arrive back, you are back in a better world. That does not mean that we need to come here. That simply means that if we need to come here, prepare some ground.

Vidya is saying, the seeker on the path can differentiate knowledge and ignorance. But a person who does not know anything about this path may not even know that they are in ignorance. So until and unless someone raises any questions, it is better to show compassion and be silent.

Very good point. The question is the beginning of the demolition of ignorance. If nobody is asking, we need not say anything. The ignorance is multi-dimensional. Those who are ignorant, they do not know that they are ignorant. Yes, I agree with you here. The pain and suffering are an indicator of ignorance.

But most of the people will blame something else for their pain and suffering. They are not going to find an ignorance there which caused it. The cause will be projected outside somewhere. So the ignorance is not seen. The darkness is so much that nothing is seen there. It is always something else. It is always somebody else who is responsible for the suffering.

So as soon as there is a question, there is a door that is open, and now a little bit of light can enter this darkness. We are doing exactly that. When I invite you to satsang and all the various channels through which people are asking questions, I am inviting only questions. This is a Q & A session. The Hindi Satsang is also a Q & A. I do not do anything except Q & A. Actually, I cannot even speak if there is no question. Most of my content is in the form of Q & A.

So yes, we should remain silent. Do not do anything to remove that kind of ignorance. It is going to fail. If there is a question, then there is a recognition that I have some ignorance. Otherwise, why will I ask any questions? We wait for the question.

There is an interesting point of view here that people are going to say, no, you don't wait for the question. You are actually teaching. You are broadcasting your content, you are broadcasting knowledge. And I say that there is a subtle question there. Those who are not searching will never find my content. Those who are not searching will never see the video. It is not that I am forcing it on your face like they do it on TV because you have only this many channels and now whatever they show, you must watch it. They will put the advertisement right in front of your favorite program. It is a very bad situation there. We are not doing anything like this.

So a person needs to search a lot to reach this kind of knowledge. And this search is a query. This search is a question. They are asking for it by searching for this kind of content. Otherwise, they will never search for it, which is true. An ordinary person does not even know the keywords to search. Do you think anybody is going to search for the layers of the memory or even words like ignorance? The ignorance ensures that there will be no questions, there will be questions related to survival only or there will be questions related to whatever desires and distortions they have in their minds, not related to spiritual matters. It is not that there are no books. There are thousands of books on spirituality. There are probably a million videos on spirituality. There are hundreds of teachers. And you must be wondering why nobody is enlightened here? Why does nobody have any clue about knowledge? Why is it still something in margins? And the reason is very easy to find. It is ignorance. They never find it because of their ignorance.

There have been experiments, at least in this country. I know of some experiments. There are some experiments that are still going on actually. We are so ignorant that we don't realize that these are experiments. The goal of such experiments is to distract the ignorant person using some means. It is something fake most of the time. And when they are distracted, when you get their attention, you deliver your message, you plant a seed and hope that one in a hundred will listen to you. There are experiments going on like this. The frontend is like a user interface. It is completely fake. It hides the actual program, which will be like a lot of databases and commands. The user interface is very pretty. It has all the pictures and so on. It has all the sounds and stuff in it. It has nothing to do with the actual program. It is just a presentation. Somehow sometimes it is so surprising that a teacher will look like a complete fake when you see the teacher for the first time or meet the teacher for the first time. And if you stay with them for a year or two, you will probably see the depth there. If even after a year, you don't see any depth, you see only fakeness, that means they are genuinely fake, which means it is not an experiment. There is nothing in the backend. There is only a user interface. So you better leave such a person. So there are things going on in this world about which we have no clue. The gurufield is very active.

I have noticed that I have lost the desire to search for more knowledge.

Well, that is a good sign because on the path of knowledge, we do not really get knowledge. What are you searching for? Destruction of ignorance. Fortunately, ignorance is based on nothing. It is hanging in the air. It is like an air castle. So you pull a brick and everything falls down. Everybody must have noticed this. There is a reason we call it a direct path because I know which brick to remove first. I know that if I remove this one, this foundation stone, the whole of ignorance is going to come crashing down. That is how we use the path of knowledge. It is direct. And once that happens, there is nothing more to know because all your questions are due to ignorance. When the ignorance is cleared, which can happen in one day, then there will not be any question. There will not be any search. That is the success of the path of knowledge.

In all other paths that I have seen, there is a progression, and it looks like it's not going to end anywhere. But this path ends as soon as it starts. What is the reason for this? Why is this happening? Because there is no knowledge. Remember, in this whole emptiness, knowledge is also non-existent. It is also an appearance. What happens on the path of knowledge is a refinement of ignorance. You will never get any knowledge. I need to make it more clear because in the past, I have not said this so clearly. I always emphasize getting more knowledge. Why? Because this is how we start. Newcomers, even if introduced to the negative knowledge, will not get it. I cannot introduce you to the path of knowledge by giving you negative knowledge. You will never get it. I could not get it for many years actually.

Why don't they tell us anything, I said? There is nothing to tell. That's why they don't say anything. By "they," I mean the teachers on the path of knowledge. Whatever you have assumed, whatever you think is all garbage, is all wrong, cannot be justified, cannot be proven, no evidence can be produced, nothing can be said logically about whatever you are thinking. Whatever you are believing blindly falls down. But nothing is given in substitution for your beliefs.

That is the power here on the path of knowledge. Nothing will be given to substitute your beliefs. This will not happen on any other path. Any other path is like a conversion. It converts you into something. It converts your one kind of ignorance into another kind of ignorance. There will be a path that will say, "Look, look, you are not the body." And the person will say, "Really? Then who am I?" "You are the soul." Now here a conversion has happened. Now that fellow who was believing that I am the body is now believing that I am a soul. Nobody knows what a soul is. At least you know your body. And they assume something imaginary, you see? The ignorance has deepened here. They assume a soul of certain shape and size and characteristic. And then they go and look for it.

"Oh, I am the soul. How come you don't know it? Who are you? Why are you searching for the soul somewhere? Look for it in the books." It is a journey into ignorance of a different kind. That's all. And it gives them an illusion that I know something now. No. These paths are not going to clear your ignorance. They simply convert your ignorance into something else. This is especially true about religions. They simply give you a new set of beliefs. And now you spend your life in darkness, sticking to the new darkness. Actually, your old beliefs will never go away. You simply adjust those to fit into the new belief system.

Ignorance goes away only with knowledge. What kind of knowledge? Negative knowledge. The knowledge that chisels away the hard stone of ignorance that is covering you like a grave, like a coffin. You need negative knowledge. Negative knowledge is not going to substitute your beliefs.

I've never said this clearly actually. Very interesting that you brought this up because yesterday I was writing about knowledge on our new project, the wiki. And I have given many classifications of knowledge there. And there are probably 10 or 20 kinds of classifications of knowledge here in eastern philosophies. And one of the classification is - positive knowledge and negative knowledge. And in non-dualism, the positive knowledge is a no-no. It is banned. It is never given except as a medicine. You are not supposed to convert the person into another belief system. You are supposed to destroy ignorance. And that is done using the negative knowledge. You realize that whatever I thought was wrong, this is the negative knowledge.

Evidence on the path of knowledge is direct experience and logic. And I've kicked out everything else. But it seems that the ancient people were more intelligent. I always find that the ancients were a thousand steps ahead of us. So they had included a kind of evidence there, which we don't usually include. And that is called non-availability. They said this is also evidence. And now you can understand why. Because non-availability imparts negative knowledge. It is very difficult to understand at first. You will say, what he is talking about? What is non-availability? What is negative knowledge? I don't want negative knowledge. I want only something good. You see, the words are very confusing. If it is not available, how can it be good for me? If it is negative, how can it make me happy? These are thoughts of a totally ignorant mind.

These are thoughts of somebody who is not even walking on any path, especially the path of knowledge. Once you walk on this, once you get a taste of it, once you see that every day the guru cuts you down, he snatches something from you, he robs you of something, every day this will happen. Then you will realize the value of negative knowledge. Then you will know the real meaning of what it means to be free from ignorance. Nothing will be given to you. No knowledge will be received if you talk to a guru. And how is that beneficial? You will say. Remember you are going home. Remember that you are whole and complete and pure and eternal already. Why do you need knowledge? For what?

She is asking, why is this happening? If this is not happening, you should be worried. If your questions are not going away, if you find yourself in the trap of new beliefs, you all know how to identify beliefs.

They do not have any support. There is no foundation. If you find yourself in a net of words and words and words, there is nothing there except words, then you are in a very bad situation.

I am not saying that the other paths are not effective. They are effective, but they will not take you to the last step. Only negative knowledge will simply, indirectly, without any effort painlessly, it will free you from all the ignorance. So the desire to know is actually ignorance. What you want is a desire to not know. What you want is negative knowledge.

Not knowing is my true nature. Why is that? Because my nature is pure emptiness. If there is something to know there, then it is an impurity, right? If there is knowledge, it is an impurity. If there is ignorance, it is an impurity. I need to be completely empty. I need to just be, that's all. Being is my nature, not knowing. There is nothing to know in me. As long as there is ignorance, there is suffering. As long as there is positive knowledge, there is suffering. So your ignorance will be gradually refined, less and less of it remains, and then one day there remains nothing.

If you force yourself to ask a question, why is there nothing? Why is my nature like this? Why is there only emptiness? You will find that there are no positive answers. You will be asked to surrender now. Surrender your intellect. It is running like a car engine runs on neutral. What does it do? The car is standing there, it's not going anywhere. Simply heats up the engine and simply makes noise. There is nothing to know. Let your intellect rest for a while in this not knowing and you will understand the true meaning of bliss.

A comment from Vidya: If we can explain this way, knowledge is a noun as per the common parlance. All we know in this world is about the knowledge of an object. But in the direct path, there is no knowledge, no concrete noun. But pure knowing happens if one is seeing things as it is. Is this understanding right?

Yes, you're absolutely right. What has happened is we don't really have a word for knowledge really. All the words, they point to ignorance. So in English, for example, when I say knowledge, it is always positive knowledge. I know what this object is. I know what its color is. I know what its function is.

I know how much it costs and I know how great it makes me look. People respect me because I have a shiny object. This is knowledge and it is complete garbage. You can say that on the path of knowledge, the word Gyan stands for knowing how it is not, knowing the reality behind it. There is a negative meaning here because the whole of it stands on negative knowledge. And whenever I use Gyan, it will be like seeing how things are not the way I thought they are. That will be the knowledge. For example, you can say self-realization is actually negative knowledge. It is a realization that there is no I, there is no individual. People want self-realization so that they can know what is I, what is me, who is me, who am I. Actually, it takes away the I. That is what I am going to call Atma Gyan, knowing what I am not. It is the same as not knowing anything about the I. The ‘I’ has been cleared. It is gone. So it is amazing. The more you dive into the path of knowledge, the more you will fall in love with it. There is nothing like this in this whole universe. When I say no other path will give you this realization. Yes, because they are based on positive knowledge. We should not confuse the words positive and negative by their usual meaning. Negative is not bad, positive is not good. Negative knowledge is simply less ignorance. Positive knowledge means more ignorance. It is very interesting.

Most of the qualities that we impose on the self or on the emptiness, you will find they are all negative.

Non-local, non-temporal, non-causal. Everything has a “non” in front of it. Even bliss is a negative word. Bliss is an absence of pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness. I am very careful when I use these things because you will never find me using this because I know people are going to misunderstand me. Look, you need to attend to the bliss which is a complete absence of everything. And nobody wants that bliss. They want something which they can hold on to. Everybody is afraid of letting go of the I. I want self-realization with the I, not without the I. And I want the bliss with the ego present there. I want immortality with the body present there.

It is like a stupid thought. You want a perishable thing with immortality. How is that possible? You want bliss with all the mental activity. How is that possible? You want to abide in the self with an ego. You want to become whole and complete while remaining an individual. How is that possible? And so they never progress. Surrender all these beliefs. Surrender all this accumulation and wanting and clinging and you will progress backwards. You will come back home. Your nature is very pure. There is nothing there to hold on to. As soon as you hold on to something, it is a sign of ignorance. And knowledge is one such thing. Let go of knowledge. It is complete garbage. It will only give you a headache. There is nothing to know here. So obviously these teachings are not for newcomers. They should go for knowledge.

Now the question on pain. Why is there pain? How does it exist?

There are two kinds of pain. The first is physical. Everybody knows that. And the second is mental. I think everybody knows that also. There is nobody here who has not experienced pain. Everybody knows the purpose of physical pain. It is a signal from the body that something is wrong. Do something about the body. That's all it is. So if you are asking me about the purpose of the physical pain, it is very obvious. It is there to keep us alive. It is a positive thing. Without pain, the organism will die in one day. So the pain receptors are everywhere in the body except in the brain. That is strange.

And even the tiniest thing is being registered. They are everywhere. And pain is just a form of touch.

Even the internal organs have those kinds of sensors. And it is simply there just to keep the body alive.

The purpose is survival. Without this mechanism of sensations, this body will not survive even for one day. Hunger is a kind of tiny pain. When you are not breathing, there is a small painful moment there. And you start breathing again. If you keep overeating, what do you feel? There is pain. There is discomfort in the stomach. So it is all there for your benefit. Mother nature is very kind. She has provided us with pain.

Now let us switch to mental pain. Now we do not really understand why it is there. Which actually means suffering really. We should not use the word mental pain, we use the word suffering. And again, suffering is a sign that something is wrong. There is a defect somewhere. Something is unresolved. There is a wound. There is damage somewhere in one of the layers. Actually the body is one of the layers of memory. If you know the body, you will be able to know other layers, they are similar. Body has a mechanism to heal itself. The pain tells the body some correction is needed. It heals and the pain goes away.

Something similar is happening in the other layers. The pain is a sign of damage. Some experience has left a little bit of damage. And there is a self-corrective mechanism there that heals. And the person returns to normal. And the problem happens when it does not heal. Now it becomes a constant source of suffering. But experiences keep happening and they leave a mark. But that suffering also does not last because of impermanence. The problem is when it reappears again and again for some reason. The reason is very simple that it has not healed. Either the cause is present there to keep it alive, or you are holding on to it for some reason. You are not letting it go away.

Probably it is revenge. Probably it is jealousy. Probably it is a shame or anger, fear of some kind. And the attitude is not like okay things happen, I should continue with my life, should let go of the past. Instead of that, my future is my past. This is the attitude. I will do exactly that which takes care of my past, which reinforces my past. If this is the attitude, that means it will never heal. It means you are not giving it a chance to heal. Now, just like the physical pain, this suffering is also an illusion. It is just a signal. And there is no point in holding on to this thing. Yes, it is a bad experience, but what can we do? There is a natural process that heals everything. You should let it go. Let the process take over and it will be forgotten, it will be healed, it will be gone. The suffering will never appear again.

There is a lesson. Yes, the lesson is permanent. Like touching a hot thing and then there is pain there for a while. But the lesson is going to remain. That will prevent you from touching the hot pan or fire or firecracker again. It will stop the future damage. That is the purpose of learning. In the same way, whatever happened to you emotionally or at the level of the ego, intellectually also, there is a purpose there. The purpose is learning. You learn something about that event and you never repeat it. Yes, the pain is gone, the suffering is gone, but the learning, the lesson will remain with you forever. And it has a good purpose that it protects you from further damage.

If you keep doing it, that means there is some mental affliction there. It will take a long time to heal. So these mechanisms have a function. It is not that bliss is taken away by suffering. It is not that bliss won't exist if there is pain. The pain does not cover the bliss. The pain happens in the background of the bliss. And the suffering happens on the same background. It does look like the suffering has covered up the bliss, but it's like clouds covering the sun. It's impermanent. Why does it look long term and permanent? It is your ignorance. There is nothing wrong with the natural process. The natural process is perfect as it is. First, it is signaling to you damage. Second, it is giving you a lesson by making it very unpleasant and irritating. But if you don't let go of it, don't let the natural process take over, then it is never healed. So we all have these kinds of old traumas or old events that are in the memory. What do we do instead of learning from them? We bring them up again and again, and we repeat the reaction, which happens in all the layers of the mind, including the body. The suffering affects the body also. It puts the body in a fighting mode, which means all the energy is now diverted to the immune system. There is a reaction from the immune system, and that causes disease. If this keeps happening every day or even two or three days per week, it is enough to keep the body in a fighting mode. Not only the body, all the layers are in that mode now, so you will find that there is an increase in your irritation levels. There is an increase in your emotional sensitivity, like you start crying for small things also. You will find that your intelligence will drop like a rock. You won't be able to think much because the intellect is on hold now.

There is something more important here. The natural processes, they know how to deal with all these things. They put all that which is unimportant in the background now. No energy is given to that. So a person who is suffering automatically becomes dumb and stupid. Their intellect does not work. A happy person is very intelligent. I mean I can go on like this, but you know the effects. It is a kind of defect that looks like it is covering the bliss, but it is a natural mechanism that happens in a self-preserving system. Now I know these are some big words; they are not going to solve the problem. At the practical level, the problems are solved by knowledge, by enduring the pain, going through it, learning from it, and then not repeating.

There are people who utilize various ways to get rid of it, like they become alcoholic or drug addicts, or they try to distract themselves using this pleasure or that pleasure. You see, my girlfriend left me; now I need another one. One was not enough to give you the lesson so you distract yourself again. Such people never learn, and they are always in one or the other suffering. Even their pleasure is momentary; it becomes a suffering. There is no pleasure actually for such a person. When you are under the grip of a fever, even the tastiest food is bland. You cannot taste it. Your taste buds are gone. They are not needed now. The body is fighting, so all those mechanisms are silent. The energy is withdrawn from there. The body has no use for tasting anything now. Your pleasures are overtaken by the disease. In the same way when you are suffering, even the biggest pleasure is dry. You cannot enjoy it.

So once you know this very complex system, you will be able to decide a good treatment method for yourself. Yes, it happened. Yes, things happen. Yes, damages happen in the body and in the mind. There is a healing process. You help that healing process instead of resisting it or making it worse. This is possible only when you know all these things. And you will see that your bliss is never disturbed because bliss is an absence, like space. Nothing disturbs it. There will be short reactions for a few days or probably a month also, no problem. Then you can forget about it.

One more question - What does an enlightened person do after enlightenment?

Usually the answer is the welfare of the world, but that is not really needed. I'm very careful when I say these things because, you see, people can start doing it, and then it has bad effects. So not the welfare of the world, welfare of seekers. This is the phrase that I use mostly, that don't waste your effort in fixing the world. It cannot be fixed. Don't waste your effort converting people. There is no point in that. Those who are seeking, yes, we need to focus there. Make yourself available for the seekers, and the rest is done automatically. You will know what to do. As soon as you face the other seekers, you will know. No training is needed. Your experience is your training. So for me, the world is very small actually because fortunately, there are not many seekers. So I can concentrate on a small number and serve better. For a spiritual person, only spiritual seekers matter. I think we should give them more priority. Sometimes you will need to serve somebody else who is not a seeker. So it's not a big problem. You will need to just draw a line somewhere, and then you can do the welfare. It should not be done for everybody. That adds a little bit more detail on what we said previously. And that is the answer to this question. What should one do after enlightenment? If you are still tangled in the doer, doership, and what should be done and all these things, you see, probably the enlightenment has not happened yet. So seeing the perfection of it all is enlightenment. Not doing anything, letting it happen is the only thing we can do.

Vidya is asking, "All there is experiencing. But I have come across that the experiencer is given importance in many Advaita teachings. What is the reason for that? I have seen that everywhere you go, there is Atman-Atman. Nobody is asking about the Brahman, and nobody is asking about this union."

Initially, when you enter any path, you will find that there are more people at the beginning of the path. I'm just assuming here that the path of knowledge has a progression because not everybody gets it completely. The understanding comes slowly. It is not because there is a problem in the path. There are problems with the student. There are obstacles and things like that. The qualities are not present. They are cultivated slowly, and then they finally get it. So just assuming that it will be a progressive path depending on students, there will be more students in the beginning phases. Then as you go forward, you will find that they start dropping, many of them leave it. They find something else. And as you progress even more, you will find people become silent. They don't talk much. Nobody writes any books. Nobody does any Satsang at all. In the Satsang, in the books, there is newcomer material most of the time. The introductory thing in Advaita is your true nature. That is how we introduce self-realization. There are more Advaita paths where other things are introduced. The experiencer is introduced first, mostly in the Vedanta tradition. The experiencer is your true nature, not the experience, this division is made here. And because they are in the beginning, all the talk is about the experiencer. That is what people are trying to concentrate on. You will find that most of the books are full of experiencer. And most of the talks are about who I am, self-realization, and so on. And very little remains of the experience part.

Because in Advaita, the experience has been dismissed as an illusion. Now, what can you talk about the illusion? I have talked about the illusion, there is positive knowledge there. But we dismiss it completely. It's not there, we say. So nobody talks about the experience. And experiencing is forgotten here because you have forgotten the experience. It is a very important part of existence that is manifested. How can you forget it? Yes, it is an illusion. There are things to know in the illusion. Actually, there is a lot of negative knowledge there also. The word Maya is a negative word. Everybody knows this. “Not that”. This is amazing. Now, if it is not what you are studying about? This is the natural viewpoint on the Advaita path. What is there to study in illusion? Remember, there is nothing to study in the experiencer also. It is complete emptiness. It is completely formless, shapeless, tasteless. Nothing is there.

It is my opinion that we don't hear about the experience, experiencing and the oneness so much because the newcomers form the majority, and they are kind of stuck at the experiencer. So everybody talks about that mostly. They believe that realizing the Self is the final deal. And I actually agree with it. I agree with 90% of it. That once you know your true nature, probably nothing remains to know. What is there to know? This experiencing is also seen as the experiencer only in a dynamic form, that's all. This is the experience of oneness, which is not an experience really. This is a dissolution of experience into the experiencer. Now you will need to choose a word and the word is Advaita itself, “not two”.

I have given it an English synonym, which is “Experiencing”. And it is a new thing for many people, but I've seen some teachers use it. Advaita is again a negative word which says - not two. Experiencing is the state of being in the not two. Experiencing is very easy to grasp. Yes, it is there in front of me. Even if I don't know the two and not two, it's fine. When I say that, show me the two, and people say what two, which two. But when I tell them, look at your current experience. Is there an experiencer different from experience? Immediately, 100% of people will say no. That is oneness. What else do you need? It is so simple actually. It's right here in front of me. The oneness is probably easier than understanding all this experiencer stuff.

Experiencer is bliss, infinite, and timeless. Understanding these concepts about the experiencer requires a little bit of intelligence. Oneness, nothing; it exists here and now. Describing it becomes impossible; the description ends with negation. In the oneness, the illusion holds no significance. Experiencing is the key, transcending the illusion. What kind of illusion are we talking about? There is nothing in the experiencing; as soon as we speak of illusion, you might inquire about reality. However, there is no such duality in the experiencing; it remains completely non-dual. The word "illusion" becomes invalid when discussing the oneness, for there are no duals here.

Nonetheless, there is something special about the experience. Even if we let go of the illusion, the experience remains. Many confuse experiencing with the experiencer. The English word "consciousness" suffers from a similar issue, being a dual word that is often treated as a single entity. "Awareness" is another unfortunate replacement, while "experiencer" remains a clear term encompassing both experiencing and the non-existent experience, which is merely an illusion. The experiencer never fades away, dissolving the experience but persisting itself. Attempts to describe the experiencing prove futile, and discussions tend to focus on the greatness of the experiencer. However, in truth, there is nothing great about the experiencer. It is absolutely nothing. It's absolutely plain, empty and normal. People expect the experiencer to be grand. Like it should arrive with a military band or something with the fire shows and people shouting and gods and goddesses showering flowers on you because you realized what you are. No, it does not happen that way. At most, you will see a tear in your eyes. At most, you will get an emotional reaction. Tears of joy or a little bit of laughter. It's very ordinary.

Like I was telling you about the user interface and the fakeness in spirituality. It was made very big and important, in a fake way. Look, this is important. Look, this is the biggest thing. Look, even gods don't have this, which you got. Look, it is going to give you heaven, free you from all suffering and births and whatever. Why was that done? In India, we embellish everything, so we did it. And that is because ordinary people or even the seekers are not attracted to this idea of being nothing, of being nobody, egoless, non-individual emptiness. Remove all this stuff, decorations. It is nothing, really.

Experiencer is a non-individual. We keep saying, "Look, it is infinite; look, it is universal." There is only one of it, and everybody's the same Experiencer. And still, people cannot let go of this thought that it is me. And you will find people use the word "I" with the Experiencer a lot. "I am the Atman, I am that, I am this. Also, it is kind of a terrible situation here. And I tried to bypass it by using my own words, and probably it is also confusing. I have seen that the best treatment that the Self and the Atman and Experiencer and Consciousness have got in only one path, the biggest of them. There are no doubts there. Buddhism, yes. Only in Buddhism, there are no doubts at all about what it is. I was fascinated when I read a book by Bodhidharma. He is so sure of everything, he is so clear. And I immediately became a fan because nothing clears your doubts. Everybody should go and read some good books on Buddhism, and then you will simply throw out this garbage of Consciousness, Awareness, Experiencer, Experiencing, Existence. Throw it away, there is nothing like this.

"Oh, it exists, it exists." People immediately think about the objects around them. "Yes, something exists." No, that is not what I mean by existence. Stop using your intellect. Your intellect has nothing there to grasp. You will always grasp the wrong thing. You will pick the objects always. When I say Experiencer, you are going to pick some feeling which is inside your body. What is the use of this word then? Only in Buddhism, they got rid of all this by saying Shunyata. Now there is no place to stand for you. There is no existence there. Those who don't understand this thing, they call it nihilistic philosophy because nothing remains there. But it is not like this. Everything remains in its true form. Yes, nothing remains as you think it should be. You have always thought that existence is this, existence is that, nothing of that will remain. Sure, you can call it nihilistic. Who cares? The true nature remains, which is again a negative knowledge, and it is perfect.

Now, why do we go through this circus of Atman and Experiencer? I take you through three or four steps there and probably just leave you at the self-realization. They will know it one day. I am very careless about this. And that is because students are raw. They are not capable of grasping it. Nobody likes emptiness. They want to be somebody. Great, eternal, infinite, omnipresent, and who knows what. They are given that. Okay, take this. What is this great thing? Oh, it is the Experiencer. It is the Atman. And now everybody is happy. How great this path is. I am spiritual now.

I will tell you it is next to nothing. Even the falling of a dry leaf in a jungle somewhere is a bigger event than you becoming the Experiencer. Yes, why is there a tear in your eyes? Why are you smiling? That is not because you have become the Experiencer. It is impossible. It is because you have thrown the burden of ignorance. That relief can be expressed. It is an emotional moment. Yes, sometimes. It is not because you became something great. It is because you dropped the great burden. Why can't you see this? The burden was the problem. The greatness was the problem. It is your problem right now also. I am that. Brahmasmi. The Brahman is something which is the greatest. Yes, it is the greatest zero you can draw. Draw the biggest zero in the universe. That is Brahman. What are you going to do with it?

Those with true realization have no ego left. No feeling of grandeur is left there. They become small. They become humble. They say I am nothing. This is the sign of true realization. There is a reason behind it. I mean, if it were really great, I had no problem becoming great. There was no point in remaining humble and small. The fact is, it is not great. It is not big. It is very tiny. Only shunya is closest to reality. Now these things cannot be understood by intellect, and so we don't say it that much. We stop at self-realization, and we hope that the natural tendency of the mind will take over here. Many of the concepts will be dropped. You stay with the teacher, you observe the teacher, and he has dropped the experience long, long ago. Why don't you do something to remain in awareness? You are giving us lectures to remain in awareness 24x7. I don't see you doing it. And the guru is going to smile because there is no need really. There is no real need for doing this circus. The experiencer is always 100% aware. The thing that you are trying to refine, make it sharp or whatever, is not going to last. Actually, it is not there. It is completely useless.

When I say that there are no practices on the direct path or the path of knowledge, then yes, there is no practice here. Why do we keep doing the practices? Because probably a little bit of ignorance is still there. Now, we cannot say that don't practice, people don't like that also. “He is not a good guru. He never gave me any good practice”. And I see that if you don't give people practices, they don't feel fulfilled. So, you have to fake it. One day, they get tired of the practice, and then I say, okay, don't do it. It's not needed.

Session 76

Ryan has a request- I would like to know more about the gurufield.

Everything that we experience is an experience of the memory. Everything that appears here can be said to be coming from some kind of memory which is non-physical and non-mental. The memory is experienced as physical objects and as mental objects. That is the whole of our experience. There is nothing more than that. There is no other experience. So we say this is how existence is appearing to us. Whatever is possible in the experience is appearing, seems to be coming out from a universal memory. Physical objects are just mental objects projected outside in a space. The whole of our experience is actually of one kind. It is mental. What do I mean by mental? It has to be coming from a memory because the essence of the mind is a memory. Without memory there is nothing. Mind is just memory and processes around the memory.

Ultimately the whole existence seems to be a memory of some kind. Information knowledge base,

database of information of some kind. There are all kinds of things here - from absolutely random

patterns to absolutely magnificent, well-organized, highly evolved patterns. They are all memories. They are all just bits and bytes, pure information. That is what we are experiencing. That is how the whole existence is and of course it is being experienced. Existence has this capability to experience itself. That is what we call the experiencer form of existence.

This is the whole story. This is the biggest picture possible. There is experience, there is experiencer. Whatever is being experienced is actually a non-physical, non-mental memory or a metaphysical memory which is actually just patterns that are probabilistic. There is a possibility of these patterns to appear. Nothing material. Nothing mental. Nothing at all. Therefore we also call it emptiness.

Everything is arising out of emptiness. This emptiness is me. It is my nature. That is what I am. I am the whole of it. Infinite, timeless, eternal being in which these waves of probability are playing and they appear like patterns of information. Now among these patterns is a possibility of evolution and when these patterns become complex enough we call them organisms.

It seems that there is an evolutionary process that is going on among these patterns and better and better organisms are being formed. I have called them entities. An entity is a pattern that looks as if it has a goal-directed behavior. It looks as if it has an intention. Intention means goal-directed behavior. Out of the word intention comes the word intelligence. Anything that displays an intent is not random, is not mechanical. Anything that displays a little bit of intelligence is called intelligent. So there is a possibility of formation of intelligent entities, and human beings are one of those entities. Hopefully they are. Some of them are at least. Rest of them are just machines. So there are many such beings.

There are many such entities and when they evolve to a higher level they lose their individuality

because individuality is just a step towards universality. We have seen that. As soon as we gain this knowledge that I am not an individual, I am the whole. Well that is the end of individuality. Now you need to remind yourself of this knowledge. You need to abide in this knowledge all the time and you will be freed from this ignorance that I am the individual. For entities who have done that, we have a special name for them and they will be called gurus. They will be called rishis and they will be called bodhisattvas.

There is a hierarchy of these highly evolved liberated beings. Liberated entities who have grown past their individuality and who have immense amounts of knowledge. Where are they? They are here. Right now. Right here. Everything is right now, right here. As you know. The existence is pure emptiness. Timeless. Spaceless. Non-local. Non-temporal. Non-causal. And everything about it is negative. It is completely empty. So everything is here and now. It exists as a potential to manifest anything. And so this group mind, this group of evolved entities which have merged together is present here and now. We are all one already. We are merged already. The difference is there arises an illusion in our waking state. Otherwise if you come out of the waking state it is all one. It is all one universal memory which are these infinite amounts of patterns of various kinds. From totally random to inorganic, to organic to intelligent, to super intelligent, super human and so on.

You must have studied the layers by now. Those who have not studied all these things will never know what I am talking about. And that is why the gurufield is kept as the last part of the program. There is no introduction to guru field in the whole of the 60 or more episodes in our series on the power of knowledge. I am still producing it. There is still so much to produce that sometimes I think it will take another year to produce all of it. I think that people are not going to watch it because it is too big. Because it is too extensive. But don't worry. You will reach. I have given you shortcuts. I have given you some way out of this highway of information. There are some divergences there where you can diverge out of the program. Those who want to continue will continue. It is not a big deal actually. It is just long. The knowledge of the whole universe is here so obviously it will be a little bit long.

The pure experiences version of the path of knowledge is very unique. It has the least amount of corruption and dogmatism imaginable. It is the clearest teaching so far in this universe. And it is all coming from the Gurufield. Now these entities are hyper intelligent. I will not call them human. They are not humans, they are super humans.

Are they angels or gods of any kind? No. They are bigger than that. Angels and gods can only dream of becoming a part of the gurufield. It is much bigger. Are they the producers and creators of the universes? No. That is bigger than that. When I talk about Bodhisattvas and Rishis, they form the highest hierarchy, the highest part of the hierarchy. There is nothing bigger than that. So when I talk about Gurufield, you can now imagine that I am talking about something so big that we are incapable of even understanding what it is. You see a god is a tiny whiny thing. It can only create a few memory locations in the universal memory. An angel is just above the humans. The humans turn into these divine beings. The beings of light, they grow, they evolve out of human birth. They become all these non-physical beings. We are already non-physical actually. We are anchored here so it looks like we are physical but there is nothing physical about humans.

We are talking about something so big that we just surrender. Just surrender your intellect and accept that I won't be able to understand what it is. So how to deal with this Gurufield? It is very easy. You need to create a metaphor for it. You need to interpret it in your own understanding of it because I have already declared that you cannot understand it. Nobody can. It is beyond any intellect. They have a kind of intelligence which is not really intelligence. It is a way of being. They are like that. There is no distinction between their way of being and their acting and their thinking. It is the biggest advance that universal memory has achieved.

They are right here, right now and I say ‘they’ because these are groups. These entities have merged into one. They have realized their true nature which is unity, oneness and they abide like this. They possess an infinite amount of knowledge because they are everything already. So obviously we form a metaphor and then we try to take advantage of the Gurufield. That is what humans do. They are very selfish creatures. If it is not giving me something I am not interested. The Gurufield can give you everything. You want a new universe to live in? Yes, they can give it to you. It's nothing for them. You want a new planet, new earth for yourself? Yes, that is easy. You want a job? Yes, it is possible. You want to marry somebody? Yes, they can do it. And above all if you want knowledge their doors are always open for knowledge. Other things? Well, they are not important. That is all an illusion. But they can do anything. It is very useful for human beings because we are always looking for something which can do everything because I am very petty, something very small, I am always looking for something bigger to do my work. If you extend your arm to the Gurufield, it will come down to help you. It is nothing but me. It is the whole universe. It is the whole existence appearing as Gurufield, the highest possibility. It then tries to help its own parts which are still under darkness, which are still evolving. That's all it is.

Now make any metaphor you want. Just don't make it religious and kind of hard-headed and superstitious. Make a metaphor and use it. Be selfish, as selfish as you can in using the services of the Gurufield. They are delighted if they hear that I want to use you. Any teacher, any guru will be delighted to see a student who wants something from the guru. That is the best day for the guru, when people say - “I want to be your student, I want to learn what you have”. “Yes, most welcome”. That is what the energy of the guru is. Their tendency, their energy is to teach, to impart the knowledge. They are always looking for an opportunity. Imagine the biggest field of gurus in existence. They are very much interested, if you want to learn.

How to approach the guru field? How to contact or how to communicate with the guru field? It is very easy. Have an intention to grow spiritually. Have an intention to know. Have a curiosity. And I am not only talking about spiritual matters. You can have an intention to know scientific stuff. To know engineering and arts, mathematics, anything at all. They are interested because it is a knowledge base. They have the knowledge of all the arts, all the sciences, anything at all. If you are interested, you can contact Gurufield.

How can I contact such a big thing about which I don't know anything, about which I don't have any evidence?. Remember, you don't know it. You don't have any evidence of it. So you will need to start with faith. You will need to start with an experiment, try it. How can I contact them? Is it possible? Yes, because it is me. If it were not me, I wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Remember, I am everything. I am the whole existence. So I can contact myself, obviously. There's no problem here. What is the problem? The problem is ignorance. The ignorance stands like a wall between the whole universe and this individual. Ignorance is our boundary. Drop your ignorance a little and the Gurufield is going to help you do that. Starting with an intense desire to know anything at all, they are most interested if you want to know something which is of basic nature, which is of fundamental nature, which includes your own true nature, the nature of existence itself, the nature of the world, the universe, the nature of life and all. If you have these basic questions that help you evolve beyond human, then the Gurufield is most interested. Then they will just walk down to your house and knock at your door. Things like this have actually happened. You won't believe me. The gurus simply appear in the bedroom of the seeker, and there are stories upon stories.

As soon as you have this intention and you are sincere and honest about it, start making some effort. Show that you are interested. Show that it is not something you do for a weekend, once a year and then forget about it, like on Guru Poornima or whatever you celebrate. It's not a once-a-year thing. It has to be 24x7x365. That must be your dedication. Start making an effort. I know, knowledge does not come by effort. Knowledge requires something else. So your effort is simply showing the Gurufield that you are interested. When you come here, sit in the satsang, listen to me or to the other videos, other gurus, other teachers, read books – what is that? You are showing that you are interested. This is your nature. You are curious. You want to know. You have nothing else to do in your life now. You have done whatever was needed and desired, and you have seen it all. You are mature enough to realize that everything you have done is garbage. This is a big realization. When you reach here, a little bit of maturity in the intellect has happened. Now you are ready to receive, and the Gurufield is ready to give. Now it is their effort. You have done your best. They will manifest whatever is possible for you so that you progress. Even the strangest events will happen in your life. They will do a total surgery on your mind if you allow it.

It's ignorance, actually, that we don't allow, we don't have the surrender to progress fast. We have erected so many walls around us that even the Gurufield does not want to interfere. People are in absolute darkness. Why is the Gurufield not doing anything about them? Well, they don't want to. There is no intention there to grow. There is no will. Yes, people don't believe in these things. If you laugh at me, saying that I don't exist, why would I want to help you? I will leave you on your own. You are free to do whatever you want. Individual freedom is respected, it is not that they are not getting any help. Everybody is getting help, even if they don't want help. But it is very rare. Those who are materialistic, those who think that their job is to earn a lot of money and hoard it and have hedonistic tendencies, are violent and stupid; they are left as they are. We don't mess with these people because ultimately, suffering is going to teach them. So, there is already an arrangement. You see, this whole universe has evolved into a teaching mechanism. We make progress, we do evolve even without asking. But if you ask for it, yes, then the highway is created for you. A big jet is sent to you, a jumbo jet, and then you can travel in that. Instead of walking in circles, round and round. Billions of people are simply lost.

It looks like I am making up some kind of story, and therefore we do not introduce this concept until the person is mature enough to understand it. This introduction is also a kind of fake introduction. It cannot be introduced to you. I can introduce you to yourself, and from there on, it is your effort. From there on, you are on your own to discover the Gurufield . It is your own part which is unknown for you for some reason.

So, this is the Gurufield , and this is the way to contact it. And what will happen now? Once you contact it, everything that comes in the way of you and knowledge will be cleared. When will it be done? As soon as possible. As soon as you are ready. They are always ready. Seekers are not ready. They have a tremendous amount of resistance. The Gurufield is trying to teach you self-realization. "No, no, I want powers. I want to know how the world works. I want to get more food, more land, and more mates. Can you do something for me, please?" So, the Gurufield laughs and then leaves.

It is our own stupidity and resistance that we cannot take advantage of this highest possibility there is. It is helping itself. The Gurufield knows that we are its parts. I am their part, and they are my part. Whenever you want, you can be ready for it. It is all experimental, you see. That's why I don't say too much about it because it looks like a fairy tale. I say only a few things, then I tell you to do experiments. All these experiments are going to attract the attention of the Gurufield. You can say that they have a big screen there, a control room. On that big screen, every individual glows like a tiny lamp, one lamp for each individual in the whole existence. And they are watching it. As soon as you have this tremendous intention of growing, progressing and knowing, your lamp will start blinking. It will turn red on their screen. Now they are totally on the job. One more has arrived. Now find out what is causing retardation in his progress. What does that individual want? Give him whatever he wants.

We are all going to turn into the Gurufield. Whether you like it or not, that will be your job. Bodhisattvas will be your job. We are also getting trained here. You will get all these qualities of the Gurufield automatically as you progress. I have seen this happening with my own eyes. I don't know why I do it. Everything happens automatically, as if it's predetermined in the spiritual universe. When someone approaches me with desires and concerns - wishing for this, wanting that, seeking answers or with unmet expectations - I find myself naturally responding, almost instinctively asking, "Tell me, what can I do to assist you? What is your heart's desire? How can I fulfill your wishes?" These words may sometimes leave my lips playfully, yet they are sincere, carrying a genuine intention to provide aid.

Interestingly, upon uttering these phrases, a noticeable calm seems to envelop the other person. Perhaps they've rarely encountered such a sentiment before. It's not a feigned gesture; it's an authentic willingness to help. As I express my readiness to grant their desires and bestow whatever they seek, a subtle pause arises. A tranquility settles in, though it's not a euphoric leap of discovering a wish-granting genie. The pause arises from the realization that these words aren't mere lip service. While skepticism might creep in, the mind halts upon encountering this earnest love, compassion, and care. The cessation of suffering briefly unfurls as their mind encounters this genuine intention. Naturally, this pause is transient, for the mind's fluctuations return in time. Some individuals are at a loss for words; they may question what they could possibly desire from me. Yet, there's a heartwarming resonance in this interaction. Remember, only a true guru embodies the ability to bestow, while others can only receive. Self-interest courses through our human veins; it's inherent, even in our cells. Cooperation too stems from self-interest - an exchange for something gained. A symbiotic dance, motivated by personal gain.

Amidst this backdrop, envision a boundless field, the universe itself, defined only by its generosity, not wanting or yearning, but only giving. Picture yourself facing this limitless expanse. Will you hastily compile a wishlist or simply stand in awe? It's akin to a moment of instantaneous wish fulfillment. Curiously, once desires are granted, a peculiar thing occurs - the desire for wanting dissipates. I have a habit of extinguishing those frivolous desires, dismantling them one by one, leading you to a state of bliss. Here, bliss thrives, unburdened by craving, untethered from want. The heart of bliss is the absence of yearning. My being, already whole and complete, makes desire illogical. Possessing everything, I can only offer, not accumulate.

If I have everything, I can only give you. What can I take if I have everything? Not only do I have everything, I am everything, and therefore, those who have this realization are the only ones capable of giving. Actually, they are the only ones capable of saying it. When I say, 'Tell me, what do you wish for?' it is coming from that place, and that's what makes them silent, peaceful. There is a light there. There is a moment of blissfulness there. The person stops. It appears as love. Some people just start crying. I have seen it. They need to only see me or they need to only hear me, and they start crying. Now, there is nothing wrong here. It is their own projection. The Gurufield is working through this instrument, and they are projecting something there.

Only a guru can love you truly. Nobody else. I don't think that I love everybody. This 'I,' the individual, never loves anybody. It is a selfish thing. When the individual disappears, the result is love. Love is a sense of being one. Love is not togetherness. It is more than that. It is simply being love, being one. So I am love. I do not have the quality of love. I am it. When I say, 'What do you want?' I am showing my real nature, and that gives them a glimpse of what is coming.

When you face Gurufield, they are forever in this position: 'What do you want?' Yes, you can tell them a list of things you want. Yes, it will be done for you. Don't worry. You can tell me that you want 10 million right now, two houses, four cars, and at least six girlfriends. You can ask me, and I can only say yes. I will never say no. But I'll never tell you when, that is the catch. The universe will fulfill all your desires, it's a matter of time. When will it happen? No one knows. It is a desire-fulfilling machine. That's all it is. The by-product of this process is learning and evolution. This is how desire fulfillment and the field of occult are connected to spirituality.

On the path of knowledge, we take a shortcut and we just kill the desires. You know how it is done. 'I want this.' And I say, 'Who is this who wants? Who has these wants?' And then, if intelligence is mature enough, you will see that there is nobody there. These desires are random phenomena in the universal memory. Who will be there to get it? And you see that there is nobody. What is it that you are getting? And it is just digital dirt. There are numbers in the memory. What are you going to do with it? “I will be very happy”. And that is the crack here through which the Guru enters the mind of the other person. This is where the ignorance is showing up. Yes, tell me what makes you happy. Is it the fulfillment of desires or is it the giving up of desires? Which one is more peaceful? Which one brings you bliss? And any intelligent person will see that desires are endless. I have done that my whole life. I have spent it like this, fighting the desires, and they never give me any peace. They never give me any bliss. Whatever bliss I experience is because the desire was fulfilled and then, for a moment, there was no other desire, and so the bliss appeared. And it does not last because the other desire is always present there. This happened, now the other thing.

So when this is shown, the desire is dropped. It is not fulfilled. Remember this. When I say, 'Tell me, what do you want?' What I give you in return is freedom, not the things you want. These things are going to trap you. These things are your prison. Things are the bondage. They are the chains. That will be also given to you if you don't realize what I am saying. I give you freedom from that. The mind knows all these things. The memory is non-temporal. It already knows what is coming. It already knows the next experience, and therefore, people start crying without even knowing what is happening. “I felt completely empty when I talked to you. There's nothing to think about. You told me that I will fulfill all your desires, and I had no desire left”. And I say yes. The mind already knows. Somewhere, something knows what is coming. Freedom is coming. And that manifests in the form of a very blissful emotional reaction. Laughing is not good enough, crying. Some people go silent for a week or two. “What happened there? Why are you not talking?” “There is nothing to talk about now. I can only say that I was a fool all my life”.

Benjamin is saying, all of my entity was only a bad habit. The more I drop it, the more I change. Many desires just fade away.

Desires are not bad really. They're very natural. What is bad is that I have thrown myself into the pit of desires. I became a slave to the desires instead of controlling them. Instead of picking and choosing what I want to do, I let the impulses in the mind drive me around like a slave. Remember, in the old days, people were very happy to have many slaves. An animal is not enough. You need a person to pull your cart, and the rich person sits in the cart, and there are almost a dozen slaves pulling the cart because a lot of gold is also loaded, and a lot of stuff is also loaded, along with 20 wives. So, the cart is pulled by humans, and there is a driver there who has a whip in his hand. If the humans stop pulling, there is a whip lash on them. It really hurts a lot when it hits you. It rips off the skin. So the slaves were treated like this, and the person who had the slaves was called the biggest, a superior person in the town. This is how we have evolved. So it is the same thing about the desires. There is a burden of desires, and there is a mind which has the stick or the whip. We are going to evolve out of this slavery of desires, and the suffering that we experience when we don't fulfill them is like the whip lash, is like the stick. We carry all these wounds from the past. Why do we have them? It's all because of the slavery of desires.

Imagine you as existence, complete and whole, becoming what you are now. This isn't true, though. I didn't cause it. It's all an illusion. But now is the right time. Now you must break free from it. Why live your life like this? There are better ways. You can control these desires, making them your puppets. A desire lingers in my mind. Now, armed with the superpower of awareness, I can make it vanish. I can do whatever I wish with it. I can transform it or even push it away. “Stay away. There's nothing here for you”. This is how we find bliss.

“No, I can't. I have a job, family, things to tend to. I'm surrounded by negativity. I live in a less civilized country. What can I do? I'm driven by these matters. How can you tell me to be free?” My advice is to set an intention. Begin where you are, even if it's the worst place in the world. No problem, set an intention. The guru's energy will pull you out, wherever you are in the universe. Earth is favorable compared to some of what I know. Picture the darkest corner of this universe where you're lost. Where your mind is in chaos. Think of those confined in mental asylums, in dark cells. The window, a mere two by two feet, with thick bars. Food is tossed in from beneath the door. Is it awful? The individual's mental state is a living nightmare. What turmoil is going on in their mind? Fear, anger, constant self-talk, head-banging, suicide attempts. There's no remedy. This happens on Earth, and there are worse places.

But the guru's energy can rescue you from there as well. And now we're here. In a place with a glimmer of light, a single star shines in the darkness. A tiny star. Look at it now. Seek it out. Ask for help. Don't worry. You're in a good position. If you grasp all these concepts, if you're hearing these words, you're only one step away from heaven. What kind of heaven? It's a heaven of knowledge where you attain everything. Where you achieve freedom. Freedom from all forms of suffering, forever, eternally. This is what the guru's energy will bestow upon you. And then, finally, you progress significantly. The progress here is swift, like a superhighway, merging you with the guru's energy. And then, your inclination is to draw out all your other suffering parts from the darkness. There's nothing more to do. It's understood that they aren't genuinely suffering. They are the forms, remember, they are just patterns in memory. Some of the patterns are manifesting negativity. That is perfectly okay—nothing wrong here. But still, your energy will be like this, that you will want to help, you will want to give because you have gotten everything; you want others to have it.

It is highly experimental. Try it, don't make excuses. “I am in hell; nobody will help me”. Just make an intention and see what happens. Make an intention to evolve, to progress on your spiritual path. Now, it is not that the Gurufield is only loving and caring. No, it is unconditionally loving. If your bondage is a golden palace and 20 cars, well, remember that will be taken away. “I can't remain without that other person”. The first thing that will happen is that the other person is going to go away. Either he will die or he will find another girlfriend because that is your bondage. You are not asking for things, remember. You are asking for freedom here, so freedom will be given to you. Sometimes the bitter medicine works; some people are too wishy-washy, and they will be given sugar-coated medicine. The fruits will come later. Today it looks sweet, but tomorrow it will start to hurt. It happened to me a lot of times. Why are my desires not fulfilled and boom, everything gets fulfilled, and then I am left there to suffer the consequences of desire fulfillment. Everybody knows it, I think.

Everybody who has a little bit of intelligence knows that fulfillment of desires brings consequences. There is nothing there which has no consequences. None of your desires leave you empty. You get momentary pleasure from fulfilling desire, and then the whole of your life will be spent in managing the consequences. This is how it is; this is what the learning is about. It is like a bank loan. You take the loan; you think, "Oh, I achieved something. I got the stuff that I wanted," and then for 25 years, you keep paying them your hard-earned money. This is how this Maya/illusion is. It will make you fulfill desires, and then it will produce a consequence; you will keep paying for it for the rest of your life. What kind of arrangement is that? Is it life? Why am I trapped here? Think about it. Why did you take the loan? Whatever you bought probably was necessary for you, but now you're stuck with it. The object that you bought is making you pay the money for the rest of your life. Can you enjoy that object? Many people will say no. Whenever I see the thing that I bought when I took out a loan, it looks like a burden to me. I remember all the hard work that I'm going to do in the future to pay back the loan. It does not really bring any kind of satisfaction. Some people think I'll get everything, and it is going to make me happy. Everybody will like me because I'm rich now. I have all this stuff. Remember, nobody likes you, they like what you have. If you are in this kind of culture/society, even having things is not going to make you happy. It's not going to make anybody happy, really, because all of them are selfish. So nothing is achieved in the end, and your whole life goes in paying back the consequences. The technical word is “karmic law”. We pay for what we do.

Benjamin has some comments - Grace is a hand for the earnest and sincere seekers. This earth is blessed with many hints and pointers for those who don't like the taste of fulfilling one's desires. We were promised a world, but it was only an illusion. It takes a little time to get it.

Wise words. Very nice. Yes, I'm in hell but you see the door is open. Why are you sitting here? Who is telling you to live here? Get out of here. Ask for help. Those who have gone past this stage, they know how to get out of this prison and they will be very happy to show you the way. Remember, the guru is always ready. The student is not ready. “Look, there is the door”. “No, I have my relatives here. No, I have my dog and my cat also”. “You want them or you want to get out of the door?” You see, the seeker is not ready because of their attachments, fears and blind beliefs. Sometimes the guru needs to lie. Sometimes the guru needs to take away stuff. Sometimes the guru destroys things because it is compassion, because it is kindness. Sometimes it is given to that person and then the suffering that comes out of that thing is a teaching. This is how we progress. Don't delude yourself that you told me about the Gurufield and now I have the key to the universe. I can get anything I want. It can be the biggest mistake of your life.

You don't know what you want. You don't know where to go. You don't know how deep in ignorance you are. All the hell can break loose on you. This is always guaranteed. I don't know whether anything good will happen in your life or not but one thing is sure that it will be like a roller coaster from here onwards. Everything will be disturbed. Everything will be destroyed. The dream will start shattering. Each realization, each word of the guru is going to shatter a part of your dream. It is very uncomfortable. You want liberation today? It is going to be very painful. You want everything? Yes, it can be given. But you are given only that which you can handle. Nothing more than that. This is grace, isn't it? Why am I not liberated yet? Well, consider it as an act of kindness. But you are not given everything. It is not so simple. Actually, it is simple but we make it complicated. It is going to be like this till a special point. That special point is the day where you meet your guru in the human form. Before that will be Gurufield which is unmanifested. It is far away in terms of physicality. So, it needs to manifest. And the best manifestation of the Gurufield in the physical world is a human guru. I call these people the guru-person.

Remember, the guru-person is not the guru. He is a person. Whatever he does for you is the action of the Gurufield. And the Gurufield will manifest in many forms, not only as a person, but the person is the most comfortable form. Probably it is the most uncomfortable thing also to deal with. But it can come in any form. From a rock to some kind of angelic beings or things like that. It can be anything because it is everything. It is powerful. But meeting a guru-person will be a turning point and that will steer your life away from suffering. You met the guru-person, now it is a matter of time. The Gurufield has done their job of putting you in contact with the guru-person. Now they have a channel to instruct you directly. Initially it was just a hit’n’trial. Gurufield can hear you because you are its part. You cannot hear them. You are too small, too limited, surrounded by walls. So, they need to do miracles in the margins of natural laws to grab your attention, to send you messages and so on. That cannot go on forever, you see. So, the best thing Gurufield can do is put you in contact with a seeker who is already advancing nicely, even if not ideally. He is two or three steps ahead of you, that's enough. If you get somebody who is very advanced then probably he won't talk to you and you won't understand what he is saying. You want somebody who is just one or two steps ahead of you, so that you can see where he is and then you can follow that person. If they are so far away that you cannot even see them where they are, then it becomes very difficult to follow. If the guru is very close to you, then yes, he will hold your hand.

You will find that I do that all the time. Like those who are in the program, what is happening to them? It's hand holding. This is spoon feeding. I'm jealous of you all because this never happened to me. I had to struggle to make a little bit of progress. It took a long time. There were so many resistances. I don't know why. Everybody has them. Even those who are in the program, they have huge resistances. Some refuse to write, some refuse to listen, watch the videos. There must be some reasons. What can we do? We simply wait for grace. Gurufield brought you here, now Gurufield will do whatever they need to do. It is their job, not mine. My job is over. I have given you that which you need. Your resistances are too heavy. Now we wait for them to go away. Guru is patiently waiting for the seeker to take the next step. But don't think that the guru is going to stand there forever waiting for you. He progresses forward and the other people take his place. That will happen. Don't think it is going to happen in one year, two years or even 10 years. This goes on and on for many lifetimes. I know that it is going on for me since many lifetimes now.

Many of you must be having this kind of intuition, although you cannot prove it to anybody, and there is no need to prove it actually. You can see your tendencies and there it is, you see. It is so easy. You are here for the long term because there is nothing else to do in this universe, in this existence. What is there to do? Are you here to collect the digital dirt? Are you pulling the cart of desires as a slave and enduring the pain? That is not life. There is no life without freedom. Recognizing your bondage is progress, you see. When I start telling these things to people, some of them become sad, they are disappointed. I went to him and he told me all the bad things about me. Why did you come to me then? You came to a fellow who is on the path of knowledge expecting that he will tell you good things about yourself. That is a big mistake. The teacher is not to say everything that is good about you. He will make all efforts to not do that. There are good qualities in everybody but the teacher picks out the worst quality, points to that. “Look, you need to work here. You are like this. You are greedy. You are opportunistic”. So on, you see. And there will be something which you cannot see but the guru can see and then they tell you. It feels really bad.

I was told many things by many teachers and my decision was always that he is not a good teacher. He does not know how great I am. He does not know the big ambitions I have to progress spiritually. He has no respect for me. I am not going to go there tomorrow. After a week, I realized it is an act of grace, nothing else. After a week, the fog in the mind clears up. The intellect starts working and I can see that, yes, he told me that because that is what I wanted, because I went there to progress. If nobody tells me my faults, how will I progress? Ordinary people will not tell you your faults, they will laugh behind your back. They won't tell you anything on your face. They want you to remain like that. Humans are very selfish. They will actually lie to you that you are great. You drink two bottles of whiskey every day. Great. Why don't you spend more on it? Drink three. That will be great and post the pictures of you getting drunk on the internet so that everybody knows that you are great. You think they are your friends? You think that they want you to progress? No, they are enjoying your stupidity. They are using you as an object of entertainment. Those who tell you your bad points, your shortcomings, even if they don't want you to progress, they have actually helped you to progress.

So don't worry, I don't start like this - you are good for nothing. No, there are some teachers who will start like this. If you meet such a teacher, you are very lucky because they don't waste time. I waste a lot of time because I want to see whether that fellow is going to stick or not. So very slowly I introduce them to themselves and it is all kind of downhill from that point. You think spirituality is going to make me great? No, that is your delusion. It will turn you to nothing.

The Gurufield works in mysterious ways. I don't claim to understand what it is. Especially those who are under ignorance, will never understand what is going on in their life. Don't try to understand it. If you are sure that you are being guided, then just go there, go with the flow. Everything is going to go in the right direction even though it feels like it's going backwards sometimes. It is not because Gurufield is doing something wrong, or they did not understand you because you speak some other language, no, it is not like this. You don't have to pray in Sanskrit. You can simply make a wish to progress. There is a little bit of matter of faith here and the faith is needed because you lack knowledge. It is not necessary to have faith. You can gain knowledge. I am sitting here to give you everything. What do you want? Tell me, what do you want to know about the Gurufield? Yes, I am going to put you in their contact. You need to simply ask. There is no need to have faith. But no, I will rather have faith than take this trouble of listening to all of your highly technical lectures.

Even the biggest scientists in this world don't understand what I am saying. I don't expect anybody to understand. And most of it is experimental anyway. So, I put you on the experiments. Anyhow, on the fourth step, there are experiments. You will know it very intimately because the Gurufield is you. Right now, I am sitting here and there is a Gurufield. Can you imagine? It is actually very simple. It is not a miracle. You are listening to Gurufield. It sounds like a commercial break in the radio. There is a song and then they will say, you are listening to Red FM or something like this, you see, with a jingle. Whenever you are in a satsang, whenever you are watching a video or listening to any kind of these lectures, you can hear the jingle in the background. “This content is brought to you by Gurufield”. It is very simple. It is right here right now. No miracle is going to happen on step number seven. And it is all donkey work for you. For the seeker, there is no freedom from the work. You will be given work all the time for many lifetimes. The thing is, you will want it.

Session 77

I sound like Osho? Thank you, that is a compliment. Many people have said that, you are not the first one. Many people say, especially in the Hindi channel, in the Hindi satsang, 'Why is that?' I was born very near to the town where Osho was born. Osho is from Jabalpur. I am nearby, somewhere. That's why we sound the same to untrained ears. He speaks the same kind of accent in Hindi which I speak. It is not a coincidence because I heard him a lot, for many, many hours. Yes, I picked up all the styles of people. I'm influenced by two or three people. If you listen to Osho, he speaks very, very slowly. Sometimes I need to speed up the video 2x so that I can finish it. Why is this happening? There is a reason behind it, because it is not coming from our habitual memory. When we speak from habit, it is very fast. We only talk 50%, and we assume that the other person will fill in the blanks, but it's not possible to do that when you are talking about spiritual matters. There is a connection there that is going on, and it is very spontaneous. That's why it is a little bit different when you talk in this kind of setting, but I picked up some more styles also.

There was a time when I could not speak anything. I could not even think of public speaking. Why has this changed? It is because of the grace of the great masters. You will find all masters, they are speaking now. Everybody is here. My advice to everybody: if you want to cultivate this art of speaking which is very valuable, what I would suggest is - start refining your speech. Start by expressing yourself as much as you can, and I'm not saying that all of you speak very badly, no, it's already very good. I use a very simple trick. Turn on the mic on your phone or whatever recorder you are using and start speaking. Now initially, nothing will come out of your mouth. It is especially true that if we speak normally all the time, but when somebody puts a mic in front of you, you're standing in front of a few people and they tell you, 'Okay, speak now,' and then the mind goes blank, 'What? What do you want me to say?' I note down a few points on a notepad, five or ten points, and look at the points, start talking on them, whatever you know about them, you speak as if you're talking to a friend, and you pretend to be the asker also. 'I spoke about this thing, probably somebody's going to ask me something about it,' and then you add a line in your talk that, “Yes, I said this, but I think you're going to ask me this question”, and then answer it yourself. It looks like a play, a game, but it is going to train you in speaking. And it is not only speaking, there is inner listening that is happening. You should pay attention to that also, it should not be a ramble, pay attention to the source also, and if it is coming habitually initially from your own memory, don't worry, it's all fine. If you play it back and it sounds like garbage, yes, it is. It will happen initially. Don't give up at this stage. It is because it is coming from our habitual memory, the survival memory.

Leyla is saying - that is so strange. Someone recommended that I record myself speaking just the other day.

Yes, take it as a sign. These are all signs. Expression is our problem, you see. There is a little bit of suppression. I'm not saying it is present in all the cultures and all the families, it is not. But we never find an opportunity to express ourselves in the matters of spirituality. Since we are so intellectual, we are on the path of knowledge. There is no other way but to be intellectual. Your bodies do not express a lot, your emotions probably a little bit. Most of the expression is by speech. If you don't do that also, I will say that it's a kind of mild suppression.

Why do we have satsang? It is an opportunity to express, nothing else. Do you think I'm giving you any knowledge? Everybody should do this. Don't feel shy, don't think that it is childish. It is actually enjoyable. And when you think you are ready, get it published. Everything that you speak should be published in a most professional manner. There are dozens of podcast directories, services, and players. It is like radio on demand. I have never seen anything better than this actually. There is nothing to watch in spirituality, it is all audio, which is very good actually. That is why this skill is useful.

Copy the master that you like. You will find all these influences in my voice because otherwise, it was ordinary. Refine your language, make it so beautiful that everybody is captivated by it. Yes, initially, it doesn't happen. Don't worry, it's not magic, it's all practice. This is a spiritual practice. Why? Because not only you're connecting to the Gurufield, as we discussed in the last satsang, talking to yourself is talking to the divine because you are the divine. Don't think it is a small thing. Yes, you should take it lightly, but seriously. And second, when it finally gets published, you are connecting to every seeker who is hungry for knowledge, who is hungry for satsang, which means company of knowledge, who is actually waiting for somebody to come and speak to him. And when he hears your voice, yes, it is a service. I'm not saying that you need to say things which nobody knows. There is nothing like this actually. Spiritual knowledge is repetitive, everybody says the same thing.

Why should I take the trouble of doing all this again? Remember, your trouble can be a blessing for somebody else, just like somebody took trouble to tell you, and it was a blessing for you. Don't worry, I'm not saying that you need to do it; I'm saying that you will derive a lot of pleasure out of it. It's like a win-win situation. I'm very lazy, actually. I don't want to do all these podcast services and all. I don't want to open it for anybody, and there is a reason behind everything I do. If it is not necessary, I'll never do it. I'm kind of the laziest seeker in the world. There is a necessity, there is a reason behind it. Leyla received a sign. Many of you have received signs. Actually, you never paid attention. We are all like this, we don't pay attention. We are creatures of habit. Our speech is also habitual, and therefore when the universal mind finds no way to express in a novel way, it simply gives up. "Oh, there's no opportunity here," it says. "I'll find somebody else." That is a waste. Reach out. You need to take only one step, and nine steps will be taken for you.

Ryan is saying, "One of your satsangs, you spoke of Nagarjuna and discussed his emptiness philosophy. Would you talk more about this?

Nagarjuna is my favorite, but unfortunately, I cannot talk more about what he has given us. I mean, I'll talk some fluff to you if you are interested. I have never gone into the depths of what he has given us. Sometimes I say that Nagarjuna went two steps ahead of Gautam Buddha, and I know nobody likes to hear such things, but that is my perception. I was trying to find a text which explained what Nagarjuna has to say. I was surprised that nobody knows about it, and it is good that you are bringing this up because it is reminding me that I need to do that. One day I'll do that. One day I'll decode what he has to say. But the problem is that somehow I know that he is telling me the same things which were told by other great masters in a slightly different language. I think Nagarjuna took the final step.

Why nobody knows him? Because it's like the high end of it. Nobody knows what is at the high end. They know that which is exposed to the public. And yes, Gautam Buddha and these people, they have done a great job. Bodhidharma and all, they were public figures. That is why we know so well what they have taught. There is something which we don't know, which was never publicized that much. So I am not saying that you don't know all these things which Nagarjuna is saying. No, I've already told you, actually. And what I'm saying is that he pioneered it. I never heard anybody else say those things before. I was surprised. It does not mean that nobody said these. It simply means that we are not exposed to that. I did not discover them, yet probably. Nagarjuna revealed some things to us which are very important, and they are all in the book Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. It's also difficult to pronounce.

Ryan is saying- I thought it was very powerful what you said about his teachings.

I know nothing about him, but the deeper insight about emptiness seemed very interesting. Now the problem is, I also don't remember what I said about him. You see, it's kind of difficult for me to remember everything. His contribution was showing that emptiness is not really emptiness. There was a kind of debate going on about what emptiness is, what did Gautama mean by that. I remember the emptiness comes from Shaivism, actually, not from Buddhism. Now, I don't say these things because people don't like it. They don't like the established knowledge to be shaken by some random fellow on the internet. So, it is my impression that if you dig deeper, you will get all the connections. Gautam Buddha was not brought up in a desert of philosophy and spirituality. He got influences, he spent his life with monks and sadhus, and all kinds of philosophers. The Shunyata originated in Shaivism. It is not an original discovery, there is nothing original in the whole of spirituality. It's always re-telling. Do you think I tell you anything new? No, never.

What has happened with Buddhism is, it was not expounded in Sanskrit. I think that was a big mistake, and it was intentional because Sanskrit was held captive by the upper caste community, the priest class in India. They were not allowing anybody to even read it or teach it. So, he picked Prakrit or Pali, which are like Latin and English. You can say Latin is Sanskrit and English is Pali, a degraded form of Sanskrit. It caused a lot of problems. People are still debating what was written in these books because a lower language was picked. I'm not saying it was a bad thing because that was needed for his time. Gautam Buddha cleaned up everything. It caused problems for people like you and me because the original meaning is now no more. Now all we have is interpretations. So I'm not trying to get any knowledge from these texts. What I'm trying to do is confirm. Let me check what I know, whether they came to the same realization or not. This is my curiosity. There is nothing else. And then don't think that you'll find something new in Nagarjuna's philosophy. Nothing more than what I already told. It is almost guaranteed that what you will find is a very precise refutation of positive knowledge in Nagarjuna's philosophy. He removed even the last bit of positive knowledge that there is something in the end. He admits that we will never know, and he brought Buddhism to a proper nihilistic position. Everybody calls it nihilistic, it is not so. This is the kind of dry philosophical discussion which is best left to the philosophers. We are very practical about all these things; I don't pay too much attention.

Muhammad is asking - could you talk a little bit about the emptiness from your experience?

How can we talk about emptiness from the experience? There is no experience of emptiness; that which is my real nature does not become an experience. But we can talk about it in negative terms. What is it that you don't ever experience? There is a reason that it is called emptiness; it is because it cannot be experienced. It is not dark, it is not black, it is not space, it is not absence. Whatever you bring up, you can say it is not that. If you can imagine it, that is wrong. If you can say about it, that is wrong. And why is that? Because the intellect cannot capture it. The intellect is designed to capture only phenomena, only objects. And so, the whole of the knowledge will be negative. You will say, then what is the use of negative knowledge? It purifies. Negative knowledge has the capability to purify our intellect, and a pure intellect, also known as the pure mind, is our aim. This pure mind is the closest thing to emptiness. If you say a knowing is present in the pure mind, that is also impurity. Who is there to know? If there is a thought that "I am" and "I am" knowing, it is an impurity. It is not empty anymore; it is a phenomena of some kind.

Muhammad is saying - is this the same emptiness as in deep sleep or under general anesthetic?

There is no emptiness in deep sleep, and there is no emptiness in general anesthesia also. They are just different states of the mind. The funny thing is you cannot get hold of emptiness. You cannot make it appear in any form; you cannot make it appear in any state of the mind. The states appear; that is their nature, they are appearances. You can take any state, X state, Y state, and all, they are not showing you the emptiness. And the funny thing is, all of it is happening in the emptiness; that is the funniest thing. That's why there is a saying in these philosophies - emptiness is not empty. Emptiness is the womb of all possibilities; all the states arise out of emptiness. So where are you trying to find it? In which state? Which state is going to show you the emptiness? All the states show me the same thing. What he's saying is, don't look at that which appears; look at that in which it appears. That is my real nature. Don't try to grasp it using your mind, using your intellect, because you are going to give rise to more phenomena; you're going to give rise to more states. Is it that? Is it this? Am I looking at it? Do I need to go to sleep? Do I need to take a drug injection to kill my mind? Emptiness is not empty; you need to look past the stuff that it is full of.

Why don't we do that? Because our training is to look out; our training is to be engaged in the illusion. And the whole of Buddhism, the whole of the practices, they are simply a way to remove this habit. When somebody says, “Get established in your true nature, you're wasting your life”. What does that mean? Stop paying attention to all these illusory phenomena; that's what it means. You will say, how will I stay alive? And these words are coming from very deep ignorance. We should not laugh at these things because we all come from this point. You want me to pay attention to that which nobody knows and nobody can perceive and nobody can understand. Why? What about my life and all? So here comes the guru, and these things cannot be known without the help of somebody who has not done that already. You will remain trapped in the intellect for the rest of your life if nobody tells you.

Muhammed is saying, last question: Does the emptiness know itself?

No, it does not. Knowledge is an impurity. Any kind of knowing, if it arises, is an impurity. Remember that even when you're doing whatever you're doing—perceiving, thinking, meditating—even the slightest, the subtlest of the actions that you are engaged in, it is still there. “I need to stop doing everything, and it will appear”. No, that will never happen. Nothing appears. We call it emptiness for a reason, because nothing appears. Stop trying to grasp the emptiness as an appearance. Many people do that. I also did it, you see. Be it, because that is your nature. You need to realize that there is nothing there except emptiness, and there is no way to be it because you are already it.

You can drop the ‘I,’ ‘me’ also, because it is an impurity. When I say, ‘I am,’ the emptiness is already not emptiness. It's already "I." Probably it is true, but what is the use of it? There's no use of it. The illusion is useful; the truth is useless. In my opinion, it purifies the intellect. Abiding in the emptiness will produce a purification of the intellect. And since all other/bottom layers are governed by the intellect, not in all people, probably, but in spiritual people, that causes an end of suffering. What can end the suffering? More illusion? People are trying to end the suffering caused by the illusion by using more illusion. Will it work?

Benjamin is saying there is a fear of doing the program as an ego, like saying, "I learned the language, I progressed, etc." It's like it is going out, while the most spiritual way goes in.”

You have a lot of fear, yes. You have a lot of resistance. Be patient. I'm waiting; you also wait. Everything is impermanent; fear will also go away. You think it is my problem? No, it is the problem of everybody. Every seeker has these kinds of problems—fears, resistances, delusions. Do you think I'm free from problems? No, nobody is free from problems. Nobody is free from resistance. Nobody is free from impurities. There are uncountable numbers of them. You think knowledge will purify you? Yes, probably, but not accumulating it. The negative knowledge will purify you. I was saying that people try to fix these things by accumulating, like he said, going out. Where is the “out”? Where is everybody going? Unfortunately, I have nothing more for Benjamin. I wish I had tricks to bring everybody out of the ego or whatever it does. Negative knowledge is going to purify, nothing else. “Let me do this, let me do that”. Stop doing it. You are accumulating more by doing.

Now, the big question is how to be empty. If you start doing something to be empty, you already failed. That is the rule here, which everybody will tell you, and especially in Buddhism, they will tell you this. “Oh, you came here to do something? I'll give you something to do. Clean the ashram, clean the toilets. And if you want to do more, I'll give you more work, like bring water and bring firewood”. I don't know what happens nowadays because our lifestyles have totally changed. Now, we hardly do any physical work these days. “Write down articles, write a book. Translate the book into this language”. And you have tons and tons of books. It is given as a distraction to the student. These things do nothing. The advice is, simplify.

Ryan is saying - I am not sure if it is clear, but it's like nothingness being uninterested in any experience or identification. The nothing that seems to exist is without any feeling.

Interest appears; disinterest appears, they are the same thing. Joy appears, suffering appears; they are the same thing. Can we say emptiness is not interested? Well, it appears to whom? It appears to the emptiness. You make one statement about the emptiness, and I can guarantee you that it will be wrong. I am not saying you don't make the statement; you should then refute it. Do not let it stand there unchecked. Remember that all the feelings appear here, and all the non-feelings appear here. Probably that will stop all this doing that you are doing. I am not going to keep you in surprise anymore. How to be empty? And you're telling me all the statements are wrong. Whatever I'm doing is wrong. Why don't you tell me? And I'll simply repeat Bodhidharma here, that your current state is of emptiness. This ordinary state is of emptiness. Don't study, don't read, don't write, don't do, don't not do. It's all a waste of time. The nature that you have right now, right here, is emptiness.

It is devoid of all that is. It is devoid of all that appears. It is devoid of consciousness, awareness. These things appear here. There is no I. It appears for a while. This is the real nature of everything. There is no need to do anything to reach here. Now you will say, "Oh, you're talking about non-duality." And yes, there is no difference. There is no difference between non-duality and Buddhism. Why do you think it will be different because they use different words? No, it's not different. Try to see that it's all emptiness already. And then, what do you need to do? And what do you need to stop? How can you stop that which is not there? How can you do that which is not there? And that's why it is necessary to read Nagarjuna because he reached this conclusion.

Sir, I want to stop my thoughts, and to do that, I need to know the source of it. I need to know the cause of it. Where is it? And he destroys everything. He says that is foolish. The appearance, the illusion, will invent 100 causes if you want to invent it. I want to reach this state, and that is foolish because the appearance will bring you a thousand kinds of states if you want it. It will do that. So, we are all trapped in this, and there is no way out of it. Because we think there is a way out of it, we try, we struggle, as if there is a way.

Give up the struggle. You are already at home.

This is what I could understand from the teaching, and now it is your job to kind of verify whether this kind of interpretation is right or not. It will be completely useless. Yes, I know that truth is not of any use, use the illusion. If it does not bring peace, like he is trying to find a solution to his resistances, the egoic problems, impurities, you will keep doing that for the rest of your life if you don't realize the simple thing that you are trapped in the illusion. You will keep doing it. That's why I said, I'm sorry, I don't have any tricks for you. I don't have any solution for your problems. There needs to be a problem in the first place. As long as you are perceiving it as a problem, it will be a problem. The illusion will create more if you want. Oh, you want solutions? Okay, it will create more solutions for you also. This never ends.

After I came across the teachings of Bodhidharma and Nagarjuna, the first thing that came to my mind is, "I'm a fool." I was deluding myself thinking that I've become spiritual. Notice and let go - this is your formula now. When they say, "You is the problem," which creates confusion in the mind, there is no you, isn't it? Yes, there is no you. You're right. Anatman. Why do we go through all this trouble? You are the Atman and all, just to reach Anatman. Somehow we cannot let go of the idea that there is me. You said emptiness, but I am the emptiness. My nature is emptiness. Get rid of that also. Let go. Yes, this thought came to mind. Now it should go just like everything else. The other option is very attractive, which will keep you here forever, that I have become something, that I have become empty, or I have become something more than empty. You can play here forever. It's not bad. It is optional. I would call it impurity.

Have I achieved the 20th state of meditation, the final one? You just fool yourself. You just wasted 20 years. Some people will say, "Finally, I understood emptiness. Now let me make use of it in my daily life." That is a big impurity. Nobody understands emptiness. Understanding is an impurity. I need to implement it - it's a big delusion. I told you, this knowledge is useless. Go and earn money. Go and marry somebody. Go and do all these things. Get the gold and diamonds. They are useful. You want to use spiritual knowledge in your everyday life. No, don't use it. I see all the time, people are busy with doing something “spiritual”. I'm not saying it is wrong. You can be busy as a hurricane. Who is there to stop you? The problem is, they are busy thinking that they are arriving, they're busy thinking they're spiritual, they have a goal. I got the teaching, I'm implementing it. Today I did this, and after one week, I'll reach that state, liberation. This is what I call busy. And you can remain busy forever, like it's been forever already, you just don't remember. Many lifetimes have passed being busy, there's no problem in being busy, be busy while being empty. This is what I could understand. Hopefully, you also got it.

This knowledge gives me immense satisfaction that I am absolutely fine the way I am as a human, and I have to do nothing, things are happening on their own accord. Troubles come and go, as humans, we exist and then we perish, and that is just fine, that is peace. Finally, I can sense that there is a peace in you now which is absent in many people. The problem is you have a goal and you're trying to reach, which you never reach, and now you need to accept this also, it will continue like this. Simply realize that it is empty, that's all, empty yourself. Now everything is fine.

One day your mind will start complaining, this is not happening, that is not happening, I wasted my life, that teacher said this, this path is so attractive, and now you accept that also and then you let go of that also. No, I'm spiritual, I should not cry, I should not laugh also, and I should speak like this all the time as if I'm the biggest master in the universe. I cannot eat this kind of food, I need to eat only boiled rice every day, and you will remain like this forever. What do you want to do with all this illusion? Eating boiled rice is an illusion, not eating it is an illusion. You're trying to find a way out of it by creating more illusion in your mind, you're deluding yourself that I found a way finally, the next day you get up and everything is the same. Why do I never arrive? This is because you're struggling in the wrong direction.

Desiring and not desiring are equal, there is duality here, so they are equal, that which is opposite of something is equal to that thing actually, it completes the circle in the background. Left and right, if you extend them behind your head, will merge together, there is no left and right, it is all mind-created, it is all one. "I should desire this, I should not desire that”, “this is a good desire, this is a bad desire”, it's all one. You need to discard the whole of it, not one of it. Being in a problem is equal to not being in problems, and a problem is equal to the absence of a problem, they're all one. The formula here is very simple, you see. Treat the duality equally, be equanimous. Treat all appearances that are of dual nature as one, and you are in the right place.

I have nothing to teach. Everybody who comes to satsang is actually wasting their time. Who will say this in this world? Only somebody who is on the path of knowledge. Everything that you say, everything that you type is an illusion. Which satsang, which program, which article? It is all a trap for you all. Why don't you see it? Then, why do I sit here if there is nothing to be done? You see, that is also a trap, and this trap is for me, not for you. Who will say such things? Don't run after spiritual things. Don't read books. Somebody who is on the path of knowledge, they say all these things. People don't get it. They say, "No, I need to read this book. Why don't you recommend books to me, which is the best book on non-duality?" And the trap starts here. Then the guru plays with the trapped mouse here. When I opened the door, you did not escape. This is a big mistake. Now, I'll play with you till you are done with it.

There is nothing wrong in the illusion, there is illusion alone. The problem or the confusion is when a part of the illusion is preferred to another. But spiritual practice and enjoying a party in the club is all the same.

It’s a very good insight. Remember to be in your true nature and you will see everything is the same. It is amazing, isn't it? Look, what has that tradition become? I don't have any objection. Sometimes you need to do all this, wear the robes, and they need to be of a specific color, and you need to shave your head, and then the big glasses, and then you read in front of people. This is all a trap. It is all there as long as the mouse is happy. When she says that the problem or the confusion is when one part of the illusion is preferred. Prefer whatever you want. Can you stop the mind from preferring things? What kind of mind is it if it does not prefer things? You need to realize that preferring one thing is equal to preferring the other thing, and then go and do whatever you want. The message here is not to stop the preferences. The message here is to treat everything equally, and then you will be freed from the suffering. It has some interesting effects on the causal body and the illusion in general, but we should let go of that also, and that should not become our game that, "I will do this to cause something odd in the causal body." Remember, there is no causal body. There are no sanskaras.

You want them. Yes, this endless maya will create an endless amount of sanskaras for you. It is all empty. It amounts to zero in the end. On the path of knowledge, the goal is to become goalless. The aim is to become aimless. You want to reach somewhere, and the emptiness will create whatever you want, and you will remain there forever. You manifest your own prison by simply thinking about it. Isn't that a miracle? Become aimless. The delusion is, 'I have somewhere to go.' As long as you have this delusion, the illusion will keep feeding you. There's no end to it. Your causal body is growing because it has so many things to accomplish. When you become aimless, you have dissolved it instantly. Where is it evolving to? It's all garbage, it's all an accumulation, it's all digital dirt.

I gave you something which is kind of an instant cure for the people who want liberation, right? You want liberation, I can liberate you today. What is your goal? Tell me, "Oh sir, I have this goal." Drop it, and you will find your mind is now empty. You wanted to see the emptiness, this is the emptiness, when you are left with nothing to do. Don't you find bliss there? Don't you find peace of the highest kind? It is a tremendous relaxation, it is not going to last, there will be impulses that will push you to do something. Okay, I probably need to clean my house now. I have nothing else to do. My spiritual study is over, my meditation is over. You will be back in illusion. This is the nature of the mind, it cannot stop, it does not stop.

Benjamin is saying - having read so many scriptures, this shameless mind still likes the well-trodden ways until the cement of equanimity has leveled all ground.

There is nothing to achieve. It is very funny because you will not get it on the day when we are so habitual of the trap that we don't want to escape. Have you seen those animals who are put in cages 24 by 7 for almost half of their lives? And now they want to release the animal in the wild. And what happens? That animal is so afraid of freedom that it does not want to go out of the cage. It just goes into the corner and won't come out of the cage, even if the door is open. And if you throw it out of the cage in the wild, in two days it will die. Some spiritual seekers are like this. Should I go out and be free? Well, the doors are always open. Why are you thinking? There is fear of being released from my prison. This is the mode of operation of the ego. On the path of knowledge, progress is equal to no progress. If you are progressing, what does that mean? You will keep progressing forever. The door is open, where are you progressing? If you are progressing, you must be progressing back in prison.

Be aimless. Don't progress forever. I can look back at my life and I can say that I've progressed, but the next moment I see that I'm exactly where I was. Because there is apparent change, it hardly matters because the apparent change will change into something else, it will appear as something else. We call it progress. There are appearances that come and go. Do not mistake it for progress. If you want to progress, yes, the emptiness is very kind. It will bring all kinds of progress to you. Like we say in that way, Maya will keep you happy in the cage. She brings you food, she brings you mates, she brings you protection, security, bodies, worlds. There is something to do in the world. There are problems to be solved. There is your corrupt government and there is crime and there is war. She brings you everything. Like we were talking about the masala movie that day, Maya is a very talented director. She makes the perfect movies. So you should immediately stop progressing. We usually don't say these things to people who just arrive here. Actually, we do. I make it very, very clear. And the thing is, the animal does not want to go out of the cage. And so we serve whatever is possible in the cage. It's not that the cage was not broken for you. Many people do not see it. That's why nothing changes, because it's already open. In the end, it will look like you never progressed anywhere.

The realization is not that I have become something great. The realization is that I am the same since the beginning. The realization is that I don't need to progress. There was nothing wrong.

Why don't you give me any practice? Why don't you give me anything to read? Why don't you give me any mantras and chants? Sure, why not? I can give you a ton, a truckload of these things if you want. That is not a real service, actually. Then I won't be able to forgive myself for doing this to you. So very respectfully, very kindly, I send you to some other guru. I send you to some other path.

Session 78

(The serial number or date of this session is unknown)

There will be an experience after the body is gone and that will depend on the tendency of the causal body. Usually there is no memory of what happens when the physical body is not there. Now we are entering into speculation as you can see because I am not dead. I cannot tell you what happens after death. So there are ways to find out, like the best ways to die, but we are not in a hurry, everybody is going to die, finally we can find out for ourselves.

Now, because the activity of the mind is not like the waking state activity, where the waking state memories are being perceived, there will be a different kind of activity of the mind and that activity can be sensed if your awareness is very high, if you give it a lot of importance, then the causal body will open an account there for

you and it will store all these memories there, which you can withdraw, like you might withdraw money from the bank account. You can withdraw those memories when you are in a different state of mind, like when there

is a new body and then you will know that oh there was some experience after the destruction of the last body, but for an ordinary mind, for the ordinary person, like ordinary causal bodies, there is nothing, there is almost no memory of what happens, it is a latent state.

It is tricky and therefore we do not go too much into after-death situations. If I talk about these things which you are not experiencing right now, then it becomes kind of noodle-ly, it becomes a noodle soup, so I do that only when you have extreme clarity about basic concepts, I do that only when you are totally clear about what you are, what mind is, what body is, what Maya is, when you are clear about these things, then I will talk about the causal body and activities of the causal body and I always take it with a lot of salt because they are all speculations.

Just few days ago I uploaded two episodes on the mechanism of incarnation, not reincarnation, the reincarnation is finished in two or three episodes, it is mechanism of incarnation where I go into detail of what is the relation between the physical body and the causal body and all that, but you will always come up with concepts and like ideas and blind beliefs if you listen to that because the necessary background is absent. If the background is there, you have marinated or you have soaked your mind into awareness, you are aware all the time, then it is somewhat fruitful to talk about the extraordinary experiences, the other dimensions, the paarlokik stuff and the experiences without the body, the experiences beyond the physical world, otherwise no, it produces more ignorance. I have seen that, people believe the stuff that I am saying, it is not to be believed, you see, the experience is infinite, just like the experiencer and what will appear here, you cannot determine it, you cannot say that only this and this and these experiences will appear, we cannot say it. We cannot even say for sure

what will appear tomorrow. Because we are so habitual of the cyclic nature of the world, we can predict some things like the sun will come up tomorrow, probably it will be rainy, probably it will be dry, who knows, but the details, nobody can predict them, it is infinite, it is expressing in its infinity.

The physical experience of the physical world is somewhat stable and that is why we assume that it is predictable.

However, nothing is predictable here, that is the problem. That is not the whole story actually, the whole story says that everything has already happened, so let us not go there, and you will be safe, because it is kind of mind-blowing thing that is happening right now, this life, this experience is totally miraculous, it should not be here, anyway.

Nick is saying, if there is no individual mind and only the universal mind exists, why am I not able to know others' thoughts and memories?

Another very frequently asked question. The I that is trying to know other thoughts and memories is this limited mind, you have taken a limitation simply because you wanted to isolate yourself from other thoughts and memories of the universal mind. Thoughts and memories are happening in the universal mind and there is an appearance of a limited individual here and that limitation is exactly this isolation from the other memories and thoughts and that is why you are not able to know it.

If the limitations are taken away then you are all the thoughts and memories. There is no individual mind, the limitations appear in the universal mind, the limitation appears as this idea that all there is is this mind, my mind, it cannot see beyond this thing, that is the limitation and that is what I mean when I say when you look through a pinhole on the black cardboard. Right now our situation is like that, we are looking through this pinhole, we do not know what is on my left, what is on my right, that is we know only that which the senses are telling us. What can the senses tell us, the senses are like a pinhole, the senses only tell that which we call as physical. We can see the bodies of other people, we can see objects, few objects here but we cannot see all the activity of the mind.

That is the illusion of individuality, not being able to see everything is exactly the individual. If you take this cardboard away, what happens, everything floods into your eyes. Imagine if you are able to see everything, it will be a meaningless experience. I again give you a metaphor because it is very difficult to imagine that, imagine if there are 8 billion people here and you get thoughts of all the 8 billion people, you become aware of all the 8 billion people's thoughts, it will be a hellish experience. I don't think they think anything useful anyway. So if you are able to see everything at all, then what will the experience be like? it will be pure noise and like a white screen in front of your eyes, that is all you will be able to hear, that is all you will be able to see or perceive.

Let us say if you are able to smell everything that exists in this world, on this planet, what will it smell like, it won't be any meaningful experience, you can smell something like a flower or fruit only when it is isolated, only when it is one experience at a time. That is the whole point of taking on a limitation, otherwise this wholeness, this Brahman, Nirguna Brahman wouldn't have taken it on, who would like to give up his own freedom? So it is an advantage if you can only experience one thing at a time and exclude all the experiences. In absence of this

limitation there won't be any experience, remember it, there is no individual but there is this experience of being limited. That is what we call an individual, but when looked through the point of view of Self, there is no limitation actually, the limitation itself is an appearance. It is for the time being and let me tell you what is the experience of experiencing everything, it is Shunya, when you experience everything it looks like nothing.

Let us go back to our metaphor of movies, let us assume there is a screen and one movie is playing on that screen, now you can clearly see what is happening, now project another movie on the same screen, exactly same place, I am not saying in one box, one movie, second box, second movie, no, overlap the other projection on the same movie. Only one screen full of two movies. You can still see some things. It is like sometimes we come to know the thoughts of our friends or our child or wife or husband. When you live in close proximity with people, you will sometimes get this paranormal stuff. The mind sometimes breaks the barrier and gets the thoughts, but it is like that - two movies playing. But it will look like only one movie is playing, but some fancy stuff is happening, very strange things are happening there. Sometimes there will be one actor from one movie and sometimes there will be another actor from another movie, but you will think only one movie is playing because you don't know somebody has projected the second movie. This is how a telepathic communication looks like, it looks like my own thought and whenever there is telepathic communication, people don't know it, they assume that it is my thought.

I have explained this topic in a lot of detail in the podcast episode on influences of the mind, if anybody is interested, there I went into a lot of detail on how one mind influences the other mind.

There is no real individual mind here, it is getting the influences, it is actually ignoring most of the influences that are coming from other minds or you want to call them other minds, other parts of the universal mind. We are ignoring almost 99.9 percent of that. The little bit that gets into this limited piece of mind, we assume it is my mind, we assume it is being thought by me, the memory is mine. The mind is extremely capable of producing this illusion of it being my memory or my thought, because when you look at what the mind is doing, the thoughts and memories and desires, they are already happening, the mind then owns it. There is a process in the mind that owns - it is mine, it is mine because only I see it, only I know it. No they are not your thoughts actually, they are thoughts of the universal mind, the awareness has been limited

up to this much, that is what you are experiencing.

Let us go back to the metaphor of movies, let us project 10 more movies on the same screen, it is like getting thoughts, impressions, influences from 10 people around you, now it is going to be a very confusing experience. You can see there are some movements on the screen, something is flashing on the screen, but now there is no way to make any sense of what is happening on the screen. Now project 1000 movies, or 8 billion movies on the same screen, what will be your experience? You can now visualize what will happen if a billion movies are playing on the same screen, it will be total chaos, it will be no experience, or it will be dark because the light is now blocked almost, or it will white which is equal to dark, there is nothing to see. The experience is always dual, like it is a mixture of black and white, if it is all white, no experience, if it is all dark, no experience, so whatever is your favorite color, you can assume it, the color is on the screen, nothing is happening. When you limit things, the experience becomes meaningful, that is the answer to your question.

The area of the mind that is now enclosed in a tiny part, which is our body actually, it is totally attending to the senses, it is ignoring everything else, so once there is letting go of this body, which will happen gradually, the area of the mind that is within your awareness will expand. That is sure to happen, I have seen it happening for myself and for my Guru, and for many people. They come to know what is going on in other minds. You will find there are extraordinary experiences there. Now I do not ask anybody to believe them blindly, because if it is not your experience, then it is not true, so just continue the purification of your mind, and you will find that not only these current experiences and the current memories and thoughts and perceptions are not yours, nothing is yours. There is no limitation, the limitation that is there is to produce a specific kind of experience, that limitation is taken on by the causal body. It is a bigger experience than the physical body experience, and the limitations of the causal body are taken on by the universal mind, just to have a specific experience. It is all collected back in the universal memory. There is no individual memory. Who is actually experiencing through the pinhole? The universal mind is experiencing itself through the pinhole, the memory is of the universal mind, it is not your memory, the limitations are taken on by the universal mind, not your limitations, they won't stay. Don't worry about it, enjoy the experience, someday you will be able to know others' thoughts and memories and you will regret it. This is the best experience for you right now.

Ajay is saying, it seems impossible to stop experiencing, which means that you are always experiencing, when you say how to continue the experiencing.

Is there even a second when experiencing is not there? The illusion is that I am not experiencing. Who is having this illusion that I am not experiencing? There is the experience of this thought also. How to get back into experiencing? It is just a mind chasing its tail. It is happening, in the form of this seeking, and that is, chasing its own tail. Just remind yourself, I was always experiencing, I am experiencing right now, and it will be there. There is this timeless, eternal experiencing. Don't believe what your mind is telling you, what you think is not experiencing are different states of the mind.

He is saying, it looks like the mind fails to look at the experiencer, because it is busy attending to forms.

Well, do not give precedence to the mind, mind is not primary, only the experiencer can experience, the mind cannot experience, the mind is an experience itself. So mind cannot look, the mind is not something which is endowed with the quality of looking, it is something which appears in consciousness, it does not have consciousness of its own, a separate consciousness which will look at your real consciousness, it is not like this. So yes, the mind is engaged in objects, let it be, the experiencer is engaged in looking at the play of the mind. There is never a moment in your life when experiencing is not there. Probably he wants to be in the samadhi, you are always in samadhi. There is no content in the consciousness. What is appearing is always an illusion. It is same thing which is looking at itself. When I am looking at objects, I am looking at myself, when I am looking at the body, I am looking at myself, when I am looking at the thoughts, same thing, when I am looking at other people, it is me. So when there is this fluctuation of the mind, when there is forgetting that oh look, I am busy in

objects, I am busy in activities, I am busy in worldly activities, lowly activities, that is just ignorance, that is a thought that appeared in the mind which tried to divide the experience into a separate experience of the world and a separate experience of the experiencer. It is not possible. Just acknowledge that there is this thought, come back in awareness, come back to the experiencing, whenever you forget.

The mind cooks up a story that I need to pay more attention to what is experiencing. No, it's not possible, the attention is an activity of the mind. That which is experienced is you only, you need to dissolve this ignorance,

which can be done by critically examining your mind. Why did the mind say that I am not the experiencer, why did the mind say that I can look at the experiencer? Critically examine these thoughts, they are all made up things, there is no reality behind it. Experiencer never goes away, the experiencing never stops, this is our direct experience, everything else is thoughts in the mind. Do not buy that stuff.

Examining should not happen in future, the examining happens in the now, so anyway, if you want to do it tomorrow, do it tomorrow, but I have seen that the critical examination starts now as soon as you hear the words that I said, it is instantly available to you. Remembrance is not going to happen from tomorrow, it is available to you now and it is timeless. Remembrance is coming back into timelessness from the activity of the mind which is time. If you are thinking that it will happen tomorrow, it will happen next year when I grow up, when I progress spiritually, then it is a wrong concept, it is a wrong idea, it will never happen like this. If it is not happening now, if you are not letting go of the mind now, you will never let go of it.

I am not saying that you are incapable of doing this and that tomorrow or after one year you will become capable of doing this, no, it is not also like this. The opportunity is now, timeless now. If you find that you are incapable of stopping the experiencing, it is just a futile activity of the mind, the mind cannot start anything, the mind cannot stop anything, the mind cannot stop itself, the mind cannot start itself. It is all tricks of the mind, it is resisting, it wants the attention to stay at some other place except the place of emptiness, it is resisting that. Look at the resistance and it will go away. Become the watcher of the mind, which you can do right now, which is the place of timelessness.

Anil is saying, tendencies of the appearances never stop, does the universal mind have a death as a whole? Completely nirgun?

There are two answers to this, the first answer just now I gave, that the nirgun is all there is, the tendencies are not, so it is already not there, it is already dead in a sense that it is an illusion. So its appearance and disappearance does not make any difference from the point of view of the nirgun, it is empty. That is where we can go, that is our limit of thought and intellect, the buddhi, it cannot go beyond that.

Now to answer this question in another way, does the universal mind have a death as a whole, yes it does, the experience goes through cycles, but it never goes away completely, it reappears, it comes back. Just like there are

cycles in the human body, there are cycles in the mind, human mind, and there are cycles of the causal body, deaths and births and so on, and there are bigger cycles of creation and destruction of the universes, physical universes and other universes, then there are even bigger cycles of creation and destruction of the greater minds, and then there is a mega cycle which is creation and destruction of the universal mind. But it restarts, it cannot be stopped, the experience never stops, mind is the only experience there is. So I answered it in two ways, now pick anything you want, both answers are ultimately the same.

There is no mind, do not worry about what is happening here, because it is pure change, it keeps happening.

When it goes down, there is lack of entities and objects and any meaningful experience, we call it destruction, but what has happened is these patterns have fallen into chaos, patterns have fallen into potentiality, randomness, we call it destruction. When they rearrange themselves and produce a beautiful experience, meaningful experience, we call it creation. But the activity is going on, the activity is continuous, it may appear as this, or it may appear as that, it may appear as bright and colorful, it may appear as dark and dull, it is cyclic, it does not stop really, but it goes through cycles. Cycles is the nature of Maya, everything is cyclic, from the tiny particle to the whole of the universal mind, it goes in cycles. So when it goes down, you can call it death of the universal mind, if you want, but the meaning of death in our culture is kind of total destruction, it never reappears, but that is not the case with universal mind, it reappears.

And how do I know this, I don't know this directly actually, it is an extrapolation of what we already know about the mind, and because we apply the principle of as below so above, and you can get an idea of what can happen above. It will be nothing unusual except that which happens below, on a bigger scale, that's all. Nobody knows how big it is, the time, it does not apply here. The concept of time also fails, because when there is no universal mind, there is no time, not the physical time, not the mental time, not the causal time or whatever, nothing is present there, because there is no time anyway, it is timelessness. So talking about the creation and destruction of the universal mind in time has no meaning. Time is happening in timelessness, so you will need to come down one step into the time, and then you can see there are cycles of time, because it is timelessness, it cannot start and stop, logically, and the only way in which the time can appear is cyclic. It appears in duality. There will be a one cycle, then there will be another cycle, and it goes on like this, like a pendulum

swinging is cyclic, that is time.

Time cannot start and time cannot end, it always is a cycle, because it comes from timelessness. Like minus one and plus one add to zero, because zero is all there is. Plus one and minus one are its manifestations. Time

cannot appear itself, the mind appears as time, and the activity is always cyclic. So you can say that there are points in the cycle which resemble death, where the manifestation becomes the shesha, the shesha becomes manifested after that. It is also described as a snake that coils up, goes to sleep, and then rises up. So you will

find Vishnu sitting on a coiled cobra, but the cobra has five or six heads, and it is standing up, that is a picturization of what I just said. Vishnu denotes the universal mind, or at least part of it

Tendency of appearances does not stop, at least in my opinion, it is difficult to have a direct experience of that, but we can extrapolate and we can use logic, and when you know that it is already stopped, there is already

nothing here, nothing is really happening, whatever seems to be happening is an illusion. Like looking through a pinhole, things appear, remove the pinhole, nothing appears, that is the genuine state of the existence, nirgun state. Even the cycles of the universal mind are illusory, the universal mind itself is ignorance.

Anil is saying, creative limitations are equal to possibility of meaningful evolution.

Very good, so he gave everything in one formula. Whatever I was trying to explain, like I was struggling to explain, is this one line, Anil's line. There is no meaning if there is no limit, try to meditate on this. Can there be a meaning, can there be an evolution of any kind, like a progressive experience of any kind, if there are no limits? This is the play, if you don't want to play, then simply discard the illusion of limitation, if you want to play, it is okay, it's fine, it is a play only. Limitation is assumed limitation, it is an illusory limitation, that's why we call it play. The whole evolution is not like progress of something, it is like a play. I assume a limited form and then I try to struggle to become unlimited, this is play. Nothing is really meaningful in the end, nothing needs to evolve, nothing needs to be liberated, nothing is in bondage. That gives us a front seat to watch this play. Now engage in the play with this background knowledge, with this background of peace that you got through your knowledge.

Nick is saying, if all colors are mixed, black will remain, regarding 1 billion movies on screen.

It does not matter what color, only thing is that you understand that no meaningful experience will remain, if the awareness is not limited to one experience at a time. That's what we are having, we are having one experience at a time, because that is the most fruitful configuration of awareness, otherwise there was no need to take a birth, otherwise there was no need to construct the bodies and senses which limit us to this world. Nothing good is happening here, whatever good appears disappears within a few minutes, a few days. Nothing really is worth going for here. So we wouldn't take this kind of experience, if we could experience everything at the same time. Look at this thing, you see, there is no meaning in experiencing this thing also in limited form, and there is no meaning, if you could experience everything. You would say that, oh yes, it is the same stuff, just many of them, like I have done that, I tried to experience many minds through practical ways. Just study the behavior of the person and you will know what is in the mind, because the behavior is a reflection of what is in the mind. People do fake behaviors, that is the big ability of this monkey, that it can fake the behavior, but this is not the stable state of the person, the fakeness is dropped, eventually. If you stay with that person, the real person comes out, eventually. Now you can see what is there, there in the mind of that person, and I have seen that there is nothing new in any mind, no mind is worth looking at, including your own mind, which you think is my mind. It's not your mind actually, there is no individual.

These tiny experiences in themselves, they amount to nothing, the whole amounts to something, that is why we do not want to associate ourselves with the individual. There is a tendency to evolve, otherwise this tendency won't be there. What is our pursuit, our pursuit is purification of the mind, and then purification of the other minds. We try to do it by becoming an example for others. Look, my behavior is like this, can you see, yes, and if you agree, change your behavior. Something like this we are trying to do, we want the whole world to become like a yogi in samadhi, which can be very difficult or impossible, it won't stay that way, but we are trying. This is again a play. Realize this and be happy, like Avadhuta says, let whatever is happening happen.

Vikrant is saying, so I was in Phuket for the last five days, and I happened to take some mushrooms, which were psychedelic, and just wanted to experience it once, but I met some entity, I believe it was Gaia, so when I experienced something like this, I was asking questions of my life to it, and some feminine form answered my questions in my voice. But how do I differentiate between the experience of actual feminine within me, talking to me in my voice, and the fact which was hallucinogenic, but I recognized her as Gaia in that instant.

Now these kinds of experiences, they are very very personal, they are given to you. That is not something which you go and get it, they appear to you, and there is always some kind of lesson there, and it is very personal. If you know your mind, then you will be able to decode the experience. Usually people don't do that well, I mean they find out these things, and they keep doing it because the experiences are beautiful, they are extraordinary. They are not like our everyday experiences which are boring. They keep doing these explorations and adventures and experiments, but they should be done only for the purpose of learning. The first thing you can learn is that the limitations of the mind can be dropped, like Nick was saying, why can't I experience anything except this tiny thing? You can if you have the explorer thing in you, if you want to explore and experiment, there are ways to cut down the limitations which are not really there.

What these psychedelics do, they cut down your sensory pathways which are in the brain, they interfere with whatever the senses are sending you, that frees the mind to drift into other locations in the universal mind. The other channels open up, because the limitations were not really there. It is like concentration of attention on the physical senses, the five senses, the waking state is like this. You can do it without psychedelics also, there are non-destructive ways of doing it, more elegant ways to do it. That is what the whole practice of attention is. You learn to drift your attention out of the physical, also called out of body, but it's not out of body, nothing to do with the body. Beyond the body, you can say, you can take it beyond the body and it's also called the astral projection. If you are interested, we have discussed techniques and all, there are three part lectures in Hindi, which I am going to do in English on my video channel. But on the podcast page, there are discussions about techniques of taking your attention out of the physical, and then you will have this kind of experiences, which Vikrant is talking about.

Psychedelic technique is a shortcut, which you should not do too much, because it will break down your mind, or if the mind is not ready, you will get a bad trip. So yes, the psychedelics will inform you of the possibility, the possibility to break out of limitations, or it will simply teach you that look, there are no limitations. The waking state is a very temporary state and it is not going to last. Look at the eternity and look at the lifetime of the body, a few years, it's not going to last. So your limitations are temporary, what we do is we enjoy the limitations, because we know for what it is, but if you are in ignorance and the suffering, then you need to explore, you need to find out if there are any limitations or not, and then the psychedelics will help such a person. Because if nothing else is working, then the brute force will work, you see, that's why it is so popular in the western countries, because they don't have access to the meditational techniques, or the elegant techniques there. We have the access, we know all these things here, how to do it, how to shift your attention to other experiences, other than the sensory experience, the experience of the physical senses. You can do it, sitting here right now.

There are no limitations, and what this experience is teaching us, that the experience can appear in any form, like he said it appeared in the form of some goddess, Gaia is the goddess of the earth. Yes, it will take a form which

your mind can recognize, and it will take a form which this ego thinks is very respectful. It won't appear as a dancing pig on the screen, because you're going to dismiss it, yeah, that was a funny kind of experience you will say, but if it appears as a goddess of some kind of god or Ganpati or Hanuman, you see, many people get these experiences, then you are going to pay attention, then you will be shaken up from your sleep. Look at the experience, and since it spoke to you in your own voice, what it is telling you is that the form is you, the form is nobody except you, you are appearing to yourself. That was probably the symbolic meaning, that was probably

the teaching. So yes, it's a good experience.

Anil is saying, it makes a difference within the ignorance, there will never be a time when there was no sense involvement.

Yes, when you have ignorance, there is this need to evolve, I get your point. When there is ignorance, this whole drama of evolution appears. Evolution will clear your ignorance and lack of ignorance will stop this need for evolution. That is what we are going through right now, every seeker is going through an evolution which is a progressive dropping of ignorance, an embodiment of knowledge.

Vikrant is saying, I know it can be just an extension of my mind maybe.

Yes, if you see that there is no individual mind, then the extended mind is you, you can identify with the universal mind, and you will get experiences like this all the time, even in the physical world. It appears like this, it is trying to teach itself, something like this is happening here, so as you progress, although there is no such thing, as the ignorance gets lesser and lesser, these synchronicities and these extraordinary experiences go on increasing. This is the experience of every seeker, the universal mind starts coming into view, the individual disappears. You can now experience the infinity that you actually are, and the limitations will start dropping, and as I said, you can accelerate this process, it is in our hands to evolve, that is the good news. That is the advantage of taking a human birth, it is not possible to do it in any other form, not even the godly forms, they are all limited. They are trapped in their pleasures, the animals are trapped in their less evolved intellect, but we humans have the right combination. This soup is the greatest soup in the world, which you call the body mind. It is made by an expert chef, just the right proportion of intellect, ignorance, suffering and pleasure, just the right mix. There is no other opportunity like this, the human birth. Use it to know what this whole thing is. It's not available to anybody else, on this planet.

Anil is saying, there will never be a time when there will be no sense involvement?

No, there will never be time, the senses change, the senses never go away completely, they change in quality, characteristics and magnitude. For example, when you enter from waking state to dreaming state, there are senses, but they are not your physical senses, they are senses in the mind. The actual senses are always in the mind, there are corresponding sensors on the physical body, the actual sensing happens in the mind. So yes, there will never be a time when there is no mind and it is not appearing as no sense. There will always be senses. There will be different senses. Like right now you have a sense which is able to perceive one movie, probably after some evolution, you will get a sense which is able to perceive 10 movies at the same time, who knows, it is a sense, mind is sense, the activity of the mind is sensory activity only. The thoughts are regurgitation of the sense data only, the memories are nothing but the recorded sense data, you do not have any other memory. This beautiful system, it is all memory in the end.

The memory is being limited, you limit what gets into the memory through senses, that is the only limitation. Sensory limitation has advantages, like we discussed, if you do not limit it, there is kind of no meaningful experience. If you limit it, you get limited experience, but it is beautiful, meaningful, and it is helpful in the evolution of the mind, to look at what it is. Senses are just limitations on the universal mind, you can say like this, and gross senses, the physical senses are the biggest limitation, it is the lowest you can go. Probably you can go lower, like plant life and all, they have very very rudimentary senses, but in the physical world you get the kind of lowest configuration of senses. That is why it looks so limited, that is why it becomes boring after 50 years. Those who do not find the physical world boring after 50 years, they are like children. It only means that they have not experienced their 50 years completely, somehow they missed life, they missed the movie. That is why they want to watch another movie. Usually if you live your life fully, completely, after 50-60 years you should lose all interest in it, because it is too limited. Only these many things are there to experience, which is kind of boring. That's why the goal that has been kept for the seekers by the great masters is liberation from human life, liberation from human birth. Don't come back here, there is nothing good here. After a few runs of the same movie, why do you want to watch the same movie? Evolve, experience everything, and the experience will always be limited to some extent, it will be a new experience. Then you will get bored, then you will move on, and this is the evolution of the mind, this is the evolution of the causal body. It will never stop, it will always be limited by some or other kind of senses, it can grow in size and dimension, but there will be limitations. Without limitations, no experience.

Vikant is saying, how do I differentiate between the experience of actual feminine within me, talking to me in my voice, and the face which was hallucinogenic, but I recognize her as Gaia in that instant, how do I differentiate?

It is not different from you, it is your own mind that is appearing in a different form. Probably it can be your guru, it can be your spirit guide or something like that. Ultimately it is you only appearing to yourself in different forms. So take the lesson, move on to the next experience. The real explorer does not limit himself to external means, for example, if you evolve out of human birth, you won't be able to use mushrooms now. What will help you? Your mental training. Because there will be a mind, and if you have trained it, now you can use it, you can use the training to do whatever you want to do. Mushrooms are kind of crutches, it's like a wheelchair. You can walk, so why prefer a wheelchair? Do not depend too much on external means, develop your own technique.

Once the mind has gone through that track, the track opens up, it becomes a possibility for the mind to go there again, to attain that state of the mind again, which the psychedelics took you to. Using the psychedelics a few times will etch a path in your mind, where it will become possible to go there without the psychedelic. Many people do not try it, because they assume I'm incapable of going there without eating a mushroom or something, LSD or DMT or whatever. The possibility is already there, that's why the substance could take you there. So once you know that it is possible, you can search for a way to go there without the substances, without breaking the nervous system or the body. It is very much possible, I've done that without psychedelics. I was fortunate I came across these attention shifting methods. We do it anyway, when we fall asleep every night. Every evening, the possibility opens up for exploration of the greater mind, for leaving the limitations.

There is something interesting that our culture was a big culture, it was a big civilization. Whole of the world was this civilization, it knew very well the meaning of going into the night mode. So the Sanskrit word for evening is Sandhya or Sandhya kaal, which means evening, Sandhi means joining, there is a dhi here, which means intellect, so Sandhya is the time when the intellect is between knowledge and ignorance. This word is not present in any other language in this world, that points to a culture which was well aware of these activities of the mind, which was well aware of the greater reality, now it is all destroyed. We are now back to monkeys, devolved into something lowly. Look at the language, it will tell you. That's why people recommend learning Sanskrit. I did that in my school but could not do it too much, it's very difficult for me, but those who are interested go and learn Sanskrit, you will become spiritual automatically. You will come to know why things are called the way they are called. So every evening we have this opportunity to enter the greater mind, find a way. I have already described in detail, so follow my techniques which I use or follow something else and once the mind knows how to go there, it will go there without substances also. It is like the mouse, when the mouse goes to some place where it finds food, it leaves a trail of pee, the next day it knows where to go because of the smell and the mind is like this, it leaves a trail, it knows where to go.

Once you open the door you cannot close it, this is the formula in occult, this is the saying in occult. Once you open the doors of the mind to the greater reality you cannot close it. Prepare your mind first, because if your mind is not prepared, if it is not purified it can open the doors to hell also, which means it can open the doors to bad experiences also. If you have hate, anger, fear and all these blind beliefs and things like that, you're brainwashed by your society or religion or things like Hollywood movies, then please don't do it, you will open the gates to hell, purify your mind first, get the knowledge. Become fearless. Then you can explore, if you are interested. Sometimes it is premature to do these things, that's why you need a guru, that's why you need guidance. Do not do it without guidance or if you're very sure that you know the mind, you have some control over the mind, then you get into it. Which is what I did, you need a very good control on your mind, if you're easily distracted, if you have many tendencies, if you're very fearful, if a spider can also cause panic in you, don't do it. Prepare your mind first.

Nick is saying, only my mind is in my direct experience, everything and everyone is in that mind, how do I know that other minds really exist and what if my mind is creating all other minds like in the dream?

Great question, it is going to be a lengthy answer, so I'll tell you in short. The only experience there is, is the experience of the mind, if you call it as my mind, it's okay, but there is no other mind, you can call every other mind that you think is other mind, they are all my mind, they're all your mind, there is no other mind. So to know other minds, you will need to know only your mind and once you know your mind, you will know all the minds. So how to know your mind? Probably you know the body, which is a layer of the mind. It appears in perceptions, the body that you see in the mirror is a perception, so it is also in the mind, it is a layer of the mind. Then probably you know the etheric body, we also call it the sense body, like hunger, pain inside the body, pleasure inside the body, heaviness, sensations that come from inside the body. Like muscles movement, balance and all, that is another body. That is another layer of the mind. Then you know the emotion part of the mind, this another layer of the mind, which produces emotions in you. There are more layers like the reward and punishment layer. There are gross kinds of emotions, there are more refined kinds of emotions like love and pity, curiosity and all these are emotions, that is a layer also. Then you know the layer of the intellect also, the layer of the mind which produces thoughts, which does the analysis, which knows skills, which knows mathematics and has logical abilities and there is another layer which knows arts, which is creative, which knows to sing, which knows to write poems, engage in professions like engineers and doctors and things like that, they are expressing

that layer in their profession. But you do not know all the layers of the mind, which is possible by practice, which is possible by looking. For example, there is a layer which is a tribal layer, it is a combined mind of everybody in your tribe, in your society. There is a layer which represents the whole planet, there is a layer which represents the whole universe, there is a layer which represents the whole universal mind.

So I have given you a short introduction, there are probably thousands of layers in between, we do not know all these layers, our experience stops at the intellect at most, we do not know anything beyond that. So how to know the other minds? Know your mind, know all these layers of the mind and try to know the other layers which are missing from your experience, from your waking memory. We experience all these layers actually, but they are not in the waking memory. So try to get the experience while being aware, which means keeping the awareness on and that is the way to get that experience of your own mind, it is all your own mind, you see, all the bodies are your bodies, so to get those experiences.

You will need to keep your awareness ON 24 / 7 and ride the cycles of the mind, the mind goes through all these layers every day actually, ride these cycles of the mind. Once you get a taste of what these different layers, also called the bodies in yoga, they are called different chakras or bodies, once you get the taste of the layers of the mind, boundaries of the experience will start expanding and there will be a memory of this knowledge because your awareness is present. So this is the way to know. Right now you are the whole mind actually, but you do not know it, it is not being downloaded into the waking state memory, because the waking state is concerned with survival of this organism. So it will take practice, it requires knowledge of the mind. You can go through

the material that I have posted on Podbean website, because there are very long lectures on universal mind and the techniques to experience it and all these kind of discussions, if you want, there are endless amount of discussions on the layers of the mind and the universal mind and how to explore it, how to know it. Go through it and it is the opportunity of a lifetime. I have never seen this kind of material in one place, which is on this website pexp.podbean.com and it is all audio form, that means you can listen to it while doing other things, working or traveling or whatever. It is always fun to discuss it in the satsang also, but here only you see, I cannot go on and on for whenever on the universal mind, so if you get any doubts after listening to that, then please discuss it here, that will be better.

Start by knowing what you are, first clear the fundamentals, otherwise you will be lost in this endless universal mind. There is a lot here that is happening, you will never find a shore of it, it is an endless ocean of creation. Even if you start exploring, nothing meaningful will be found because it creates stuff, you see, it is your own creation, as you explore, you create, there is actually nothing here. The drishta is the srishta as we say in Sanskrit,

drishti srishti, the observer is the creator. When you understand this, you will understand everything. When you understand your own mind, you will know all the minds, this is guaranteed. Now it will look like a big job, no it's not a big job, you see, it can be done in a short amount of time if you are talented. If you have tendencies like, no I don't want to know this consciousness stuff, I don't want to listen to spiritual lectures and all, is it too much, just give me a mantra and send me to that heavenly place where I know every mind and all, it's not possible, without knowledge, no possibility. All yogic exercises, all tantric exercises, practices are there to impart the knowledge, it is not there to impart a specific experience, like Anil said, the experience is useless, meaningless, it's kind of distraction. Knowledge is meaningful, so start by knowing what you are. It is the same everywhere, probably this body mind says that, oh my mind is different from your mind, no, it's all the same. It can cause more ignorance, if you start from a bad foundation, you will become a scientist, you see, like the science has lost its way, because it starts from the foundation of materialism, which is stupidity, so they have lost their way, they do not know, they cannot explain even one percent of our experience, the materialistic science. We have done this a lot in India. Very advanced people in the scientific field could not explain even one percent of our experience. That is why it will fail, if your foundation is not correct, the foundation is your essential nature, the no mind is the foundation,

We have the ability, what is stopping everybody from exploring their minds, getting into the universal mind, the layers that I hinted at? It is ignorance or it is a blind belief that I am incapable of experiencing it. We are fully capable, everybody is capable, just that some people have more talent, just some people give more importance to spiritual practices and some people are passionate about it, they reach their first, others are distracted in the

petty stuff of the worldly things. That is not the goal of our lives, the goal of our lives is not to get lost in what is happening here, it's all useless. Our goal as a seeker is to explore, start by exploring what you are, start by exploring the mind, there is only one mind and we are totally capable. The key is me, the lock is me, the ignorance is me, the knowledge is me.

Meeting your guru is also a dream, it is a part of the dream, you are never lost actually, you needed something to remind you that you are engaged in the dream and it can be mushroom, it can be guru. Some people will have a lot of respect for the psychedelics, they say it is my guru, DMT is my god, because it took you out of ignorance. So yes, you can explore and do whatever you want, the real thing is formless, does not need mushrooms to know itself, you can know it right now, you are that.

Session 79

I have seen that a lot of progress happens when you listen and ask questions. But that is still only 50%. The real progress or the advance happens when you answer the questions. This is very important. I'm not trying to convert you into some kind of preacher of the path of knowledge. You take this advanced step. You should turn from an asker to somebody who answers. I keep pushing people. It is irritating for some of them. 'Why don't you write? Why don't you start answering calls? Why don't you do this? Why don't you do that?' And the problem is the student does not know why I'm saying it. And another problem is, I cannot promise you that the advance will really happen. That's why I keep asking, but I never promise anything. We can only try. So, that is what is going to happen. Now, the program is there just to discipline it, just to push it a little bit.

I know some people don't like to be pushed too much. Program is not for them. There is a reason for everything. The program is not only to give you the information, it is to change you. Because I'm thinking that the motivation behind it, the intention behind it is - the way I changed, I want to give you the same experience. The real change happened when I expressed. Listening did only 50% of the work. You see, if you don't listen, then what are you going to express? That is obvious. The real change will happen when you express yourself. When you attempt answering.

On step number seven, I'm actually going to teach you to start expressing yourself publicly. It's all training, it's all just experimentation of some kind and is optional. And actually, on the path of knowledge, there are no rules. This is very strange because I am very strict about it, and then I say there are no rules. Yes, as soon as you commit to it, there are rules. You said, 'I want this thing,' and now there are rules. Or you can be a free bird, 'I'll do my own thing.' Yes, then no rules. That's perfectly nice, perfectly okay. There is no discipline on the path of knowledge. On other paths, the guru will make your life hell. 'Get up at four o'clock, then do this, then do that.' No tea, just herbal tea. Then he will decide what clothes you are wearing. He will decide how you sit. No, your back is bending, no bending, sit straight. I mean, there will be a lot of hand-holding, yes, but there will be a lot of micromanagement on other parts. I don't know how they manage with a thousand seekers. You see, but that is not the tradition, the tradition is always one-to-one. The guru sits with the student, there's no other way. Not only the path of knowledge, what we see around us when we'll take a look at the videos and listen to these teachers and read the books, is the surface of the tradition.

One guru, one tradition, that is the rule.

Even in the major traditions, the guru decides what to do, there is freedom there. So what we see on the surface, only when you start joining the guru, then you know, you will be taken deeper, then real micromanagement will happen. 'Oh, you are taking interest? Yes, now I'll manage whatever you do.' So, on the other paths, the strictness is too much, that's why people drop out. It is at the personal level. In our modern world, nobody really likes it, and that is why the path of knowledge is most suitable for this time because individuality is huge, the ego is huge. So here, the ego gets a lot of freedom. There is no micromanagement. I never tell you to get up at this time and take a bath with this soap and eat only specific food and talk only in a specific language. No, there's nothing. It is very good for the ego actually. The ego is happy here. 'I know everything now, I have become Brahman in one day.'

So, it is ego-friendly. Just like there is eco-friendly, we have the ego-friendly path here. It is not challenged much. On the other paths, the ego is beaten every day till it is no more. There are some variations of the path of knowledge also where this happens. For example, Zen, not really ego-friendly. I made a mistake of joining a Zen community some years ago. As soon as I joined, I was attacked, 'I,' the ego was attacked. I did not like it at all.

If you choose freedom, then you are on your own. If you wish to be trained, then you will need to follow things, otherwise, there is no fun in that. There were some places I joined where I made real progress when I gave up my intellect, and surrendered the intellect also. I don't recommend this because this is the path of knowledge, and there are other paths like Kundalini and all, where you need to shut down the intellect.

It becomes an obstacle for a modern person, educated person. It will sound horrible. What do you mean, 'shut down the intellect?' Because the intellect has become a part of the ego for a modern man. By modern, I mean from this kind of lifestyle that we are having. When we meet somebody, we talk from the level of the intellect. It's hardly heart-to-heart, not anymore. We are not expressing our emotions most of the time. We are not being the self. We talk from the level of the intellect. What job are you doing these days? Which is the new project you're doing? And what is your child doing? Which university degree is he running after? It's all intellectual talk. That is what is considered civilized, that is considered the talk of an educated person.

We are not allowed to express our anger, fear or love, at least not on the first meeting and not in public at all. Public meetings are all intellectual. So that has become a part of the ego. And when I say, 'Okay, surrender your intellect,' it is impossible. I could not do it. I joined the wrong path, but I saw that real progress happened when the intellect was shut down. I'm not talking about the path of knowledge. Please don't shut down your intellect here. It's really needed. We are actually using intellectual capability as a knife here. It's a totally different way.

In other paths, the intellect is an obstacle. The guru will tell you, 'You think too much.' And especially if you go from the path of knowledge to that other path, you won't be able to adjust quickly. 'Sir, why did you tell me to do this?' 'How dare you ask me why? Why don't you simply do this? Otherwise, get out of the ashram.' That will be the typical answer you will receive. You are not supposed to question. That is unacceptable for some people. I'll tell you my experience - I stopped questioning and the progress happened. I'm not saying that it will happen for you. You see, it's not a guarantee. Especially in the parts that involve manipulation of the mind and the body, there, the questioning attitude is not going to help. Surrender helps, especially surrender of the intellect. For that, you need complete trust in the guru. That is very rare these days. I know nobody trusts their gurus. So we have completely bypassed the process of surrender, which was an essential requirement in the past. We have found a way to deliver the knowledge without this very challenging thing. You don't need to surrender.

Ruchi has a question - how to correctly answer questions on the path of knowledge?

Introspection is important. The answer appears automatically. This is the characteristic of anything which is true. Anything that is true, it should be obvious by itself, should not take effort. You put two plus two and four is obvious, it does not take any effort, and the verification is very much like this. You put all the things in the question together and see what appears out of that, use the means of knowledge that are given to you.

I can tell you a trick which I use a lot. You write down the question, keep it in front of you, just like you have it right now, and start talking as if you're talking to somebody. Right now you're talking to me, so probably there is nervousness, there is a little bit of pressure there, that everything is getting recorded, it's going to be published, people will laugh at me. Nobody will laugh at you, you see, and this is a very courageous thing, nobody does it. I do that all the time, that is why I started recording these things, ultimately when I found that they are worthy of publishing, they got published.

Most of my recordings are actually a practice session. I don't want to say that they are useless for you, no, they are useful, that's why they're published. And when you take a topic and you start meditating on it, which means thinking on it, what is your direct experience? Is it true, what points are true? You cross-question it and so on, and there is no need to impress anybody, nobody's checking it, you will see that your intellect has changed a little bit after this session of talking. From listening to talking, there's a big step, and I would recommend you do it in your free time. What is the difference between thinking and talking? The talking materializes your thoughts, once it is out of the mouth, well, it is done, it's like an arrow. Now the intellect will try to hold on to what you're talking, you can see it, if you've spoken something. Intellect tries to take that direction. In the case of silent thinking, because nobody's watching me thinking, it just jumps from one place to another. While talking, you need to be precise about what you say, and that trains the intellect.

As soon as you find that I have spoken something I shouldn't have, I've taken the wrong track, immediately you take the other one, and that is the right thing to do. Do not try to follow it if it leads nowhere. 'Oh, I was thinking in this line and now it produced zero results', and that conclusion is also important, and that should go in your recording if you're recording it. Then you try again. These are the baby steps. Speaking is a great tool, utilize it.

I would be very nervous if somebody told me to answer such questions which sound very advanced. They're not really advanced, they're basic knowledge. There are advanced questions which I never exposed you guys to, that means that you will leave the path immediately. There are unanswered questions in every philosophy. I think Advaita is the only one which attempts to answer them all. But you know, the real nature of existence is unknowable. There will always be unanswered questions. Why is all that changes false? I know that you know this. It was told in the video. There was another video which was about the justification of it, and I remember you wrote the right notes there. Here you cannot be superficial. Those who come from the traditions, they will try to answer using big words, and it looks like they understood because they have these big words from Sanskrit or Pali or Latin, and everybody is happy. He knows a lot because it looks like he knows the words, he must be understanding the meaning. But what happens is the ignorance hides behind the big words, technical words. And you must have seen that I simply removed all of this complexity from the path of knowledge. I do not give you any words to memorize, really. It's plain English.

I've tried to keep all the simple English words so that you don't need to hide behind the technical words. Now, so one day somebody told me I was explaining something, somebody told me that if you cannot explain it to a five-year-old child, that means that you do not know anything, you're just cooking up the answer. I don't know whether that is true or not because I've tried that. A five-year-old child will never understand these things, no matter which language you use. There is simply no ability there. So what I do is take a middle path and never water down the content so much that it looks like you're trying to make a five-year-old child understand these things. Keep it difficult enough that the listener is challenged to raise his or her level of intellect. Never dilute it so much while not trying to hide behind big words, words of some long-lost language in which the original scripture was written.

That is totally another activity - study of scriptures and interpretation of scriptures. It should not be confused with introspection, verification, and Q&A. I've seen that it happens a lot, and then people are lost in the literature, translation, interpretation. We don't want that. Fortunately, on the path of knowledge, there is enough clarity. So probably in the first few meetings, the guru is going to show off his knowledge of the scriptures, and then when it comes to one-to-one, the real substance shows up there. The scriptures are abandoned. That is the place where the real knowledge transfer happens.

Before we end today, I'll go back to the question that was asked by Vidya. So, she asked me about the mutual exclusiveness of the experiencer and the experience because I caught this mistake in her article. You can go and see the article where she said that the experience and the experiencer are mutually inclusive. I know why you said this. Your explanation is very nice. It is right. Mutually exclusive means two events are independent and cannot happen simultaneously. What do we really mean by mutually exclusive or inclusive? The term 'mutually exclusive' is a technical word used in logic. It is used only in logic and signifies that two categories cannot be interchanged. When I use this word, I simply assume that the student is familiar with basic logic. Here, remember, this is one of the qualities of a seeker, that they know what is logical, they know the basics of logic - the inductive reasoning, the deductive reasoning, and all those. On the path of knowledge, we assume that you have gone through all that, you are prepared by the guru or your education system. It is terrible to see that the education system does not prepare you like this. They make you a parrot. So, I struggled with all these things, and finally, I found my own way to understand logic. You don't have to become a logician, you don't need to become like a lawyer. If you become like a lawyer, it will be very good for you. Lawyers are very precise about everything.

“Mutually exclusive” is used for categories that you cannot mix. I'm going to give you a simple example. Like, dogs cannot become cats, and cats cannot become dogs. Am I right? And that's why we'll call these categories mutually exclusive. If something falls in the category of dog, you can never say that it is a cat. You try to push the dog into the category of cat, no, it's not possible. Now, these two categories are mutually exclusive. They exclude the other. There is a mutual exclusion here. As soon as I say this thing is X, the other is excluded. Now, no matter what you do, you cannot put them in one category.

I said the experience and the experiencer are mutually exclusive. Why is that? That is our direct experience, that is what we see, actually, that is what we can establish thoroughly, that the experience cannot become the experiencer, and the experiencer is never experienced, it cannot become an experience. And you know the reason behind this. As soon as I say that the experiencer is being experienced, well then, who is the one who is experiencing it? It has separated itself out of the experience. Now, whatever you're experiencing is some event, some other experience. You're not experiencing the experiencer. Similarly, the experience cannot become the experiencer. As soon as I say that this table is experiencing something, the table is being experienced. There is no way to establish that the table has any kind of ability to experience anything.

This knowledge is very basic, it is so fundamental - the mutual exclusiveness of the experience and the experiencer. We have given it a name which I've spared you. It is called the drishti drishta vivek or if you just combine the words like they do in Sanskrit, 'drgdrishtavivek'. It is difficult to pronounce, it will be kind of impossible for people to know, but this is the most fundamental concept in Advaita. That's why I removed all these words, you see. Isn't your life heavenly now? I could have used all these words, it would have taken you another one year to just memorize all this. Now, I was not so fortunate, I had to go through all these things.

So, this mutual exclusiveness of the experience and the experiencer has to be established by everybody. The condition is so bad that even the great scientists do not do this properly. They will say that the brain creates the experiencer, fully knowing that the brain is an experience. You cannot put it in the category of the experiencer. This simple logical mistake is made by even the most intelligent people on this planet right now. And that is the difference between a philosopher and an ordinary street-smart person. They don't know these finer things, they are trained to think like this.

There is a superset of categories where you can include the mutually exclusive categories. For our example of cats and dogs, the superset is called 'animal.' So, the dogs belong to the category 'animal,' yes. The cats belong to the category 'animal,' yes. Now, in this superset, you can include them together. That is funny, isn't it? The cat can never become a dog, and the dog can never become a cat, but surprisingly, they are both animals. They can be seen as an animal with four legs and tail, same thing. There are differences which make them mutually exclusive, and there are similarities. Essentially, they are animals.

Now, let us take this analysis to the experience and the experiencer. Both the experience and the experiencer, they belong to the superset of existence. The existence can be seen as experiencer, and it can be seen as the experience. One of them is false. True and false are completely cooked up, and are made up by the mind. In existence, there is no truth and there is nothing that is false, and there is false and there is truth. It's whole and complete, everything gets included there. You see, the experience and the experiencer are special categories. They are one, seen as two.

I'll give you another example, which I give normally. The example is heat and light. Heat and light combined is fire, so the fire belongs to a superset, and the subsets of the fire are its two qualities of being hot and producing light. Now, can the heat become the light? No, not possible. You see, light cannot become heat, not possible. Light is a separate quality, heat is a separate one, both emitted by fire. Fire can be seen as hot, the fire can be seen as light. Similarly, the existence can be seen as the experiencer, the existence can be seen as the experience. Although they are the same, just like light and heat are just fire.

The existence is never seen as one, it is always seen as two. But can you say that the heat exists independently of fire, or the light exists independently of it? No, never happens. They are always together. It is seen as two qualities because of the dividing tendency of the mind. The mind divides the fire into two for whatever reason. Similarly, the existence will never be seen as one, it will always be divided into two, but that establishes the existence. You go deeper into the matter, and then you will understand. A superficial understanding does not work on the path of knowledge.

So, ignorance comes out when we challenge our knowledge. Whatever is heard, we need to verify it. That's why we are doing this experiment now. I'll take you to the basics, the rest is your interest. If you are interested in things like this, otherwise you can always close the chapter and abide in the completeness of your own being. There is no need to do the intellectual circus. Some people prefer it, some don't. That's why I always provide you exit gates. At every step, there are exit gates. It's not necessary, but it's a lot of fun. And the real pleasure is in understanding. It is like a burden which is taken off from the intellect. 'Oh, it means that,' and now the rest of your life is fixed. Now, you'll never get confused by these things. Now, you'll never get confused by questions like why are there two, why don't we see the existence if it is the reality. Remember, the answers are already there, that's not important. You need to arrive at the answer. This process is important, which is verification. There are no pathways in your mind right now to arrive at the answer, although you know the answer. Try to create a pathway in your mind to arrive at the answer. Use these questions as examples. There will be thousands of questions for you. If you want more questions, just let me know. I'm full of questions. I don't have any answers, actually.

Session 80

(The serial number or date of this session is unknown)

This is the characteristic of any great person that they turn every experience into a learning opportunity, even death. What follows is a story, again, there is no truth in whatever I am going to tell you. It is something which was collected through somebody else's experiences, other people's experiences and teachings of other masters who witnessed death and my own experiments, which caused almost-near-death kind of experiences. So when I say there are ways to know death, yes, there are, but it does not involve dying. It does not involve destruction of the body. It is recommended that you go there with a very pure mind so that there is some use of that experience, you can conclude something from that experience instead of simply wishy washy things.

Death is the destruction of the body. There is an assumption there that the mind is lost and the consciousness is also lost. That is the end of the person and that is the end of life. And there is probably darkness, probably not even darkness, nothing is there. The physical world continues after death. Other people continue. They see the body becoming dirt. So it is a mixed bag of truths and beliefs. Yes, the body is destroyed completely. That is true. We can see it. And yes, the person is gone. The ego is destroyed and the activity of the body stops. And yes, it is true that the world continues. Other people continue. The world does not disappear when somebody dies. It is also true. Now about the total disappearance of this thing called mind and consciousness, that is disputed. Nobody agrees on these things. When I say the mind has disappeared, then I should be very, very certain about this thing.

How will I know that the mind has disappeared? Which instrument will tell me that the mind has disappeared? Yes, the instruments that are attached to the body that tell that the body has stopped.

It was producing these electrical impulses and all that is gone. Mind is not impulses. It is not electricity.

It is not an activity of the body. Although there is a very deep connection between the mind and body, the body is a part of the mind and the mind is part of the body. However, they are totally different kinds of experiences. If you see it, the physical body is a different experience and the mind is a different experience. Disappearance of one experience does not guarantee disappearance of the other experience. It does not guarantee that.

So it is illogical to conclude simply by looking at the dead body that the mind is dead. That is an unscientific way of experimenting. Why? Because it is a subjective experience. Only conclusions that you can arrive at must be from the point of view of the subject. Objective conclusions are of no use.

It is absolutely true that the body will stop, the activity of the body will stop, the electrical chemical activity will disappear. And since ego is based on the body, the person is just either a body or most of the time it is just a memory of having a body and they all disappear, they are gone. That can be concluded. However, the other part cannot be concluded if you are not dead yourself. That's why great people are waiting for death, everybody who wants to know about death, because it is going to be a big revelation, they are waiting for this event, especially the yogis and other seekers. Although our society is so narrow minded that we do not say these things openly. They will be terrified of you if you start saying things like this. They will simply admit you in a mental asylum. Your job will be lost. Your wife will leave you. Don't do that. Yes, you can say that in the spiritual community where you will be understood. So please do not conclude anything if you see a dead body. Do not conclude anything about the mind. A form has disappeared because the form appeared. Now that does not mean that all the layers of the mind have disappeared.

Mind is a layered structure and there is no doubt about it because we can see all the layers right now, right here. You can see the body, it is the bottom most layer. You can see the electrical activity of the body, also called the etheric body, the sensations that you are getting from the body, the pain, pleasures and all these things, they are functions of the body and they are a layer of the mind. There is an emotional body, that is one layer and then there is a layer of intellect. There is a layer of awareness on top of it. So it is a multi-tiered structure. It is not just the body and it is not just activity of the body, it is not breathing, it is not simply heartbeat etc.

The funny thing is that if the body is in good shape, it can be brought back to life simply by giving some electrical shocks or by artificial breathing. The person reappears magically, dead body starts walking and talking. What happens when the heartbeat stops or the breathing stops or the brain activity stops? Nothing really happens actually, it can be brought back to life. These “mental” things continue, that's why all of the memories are there, everything is as before when the person comes back. So when all these bodily symptoms were there, all of it did not disappear because when the person was brought back, he was fine. It was not possible to do that even 100 years ago, nowadays it's possible. Now more and more people are being brought back. It is an everyday affair in this world now. And everybody takes it for granted that flat lining of the brain or cutting off the parts of the body and stopping the heartbeat or breathing does not mean death. Everybody agrees now, but it was not the situation in the past. Medical science was not that advanced, but I am not talking about the distant past. In very old societies, death was known, they knew somehow that it was not the end.

Death means you lose lower layers only. It is a destruction of the lower layers. Even if you are a skeptic, you can only say that I don't know about the higher layers because no evidence can be gathered, it is a subjective experience, the higher layers do not appear in the objective world. It is stupidity to say that the higher layers are not there. Those who are materialistic will simply conclude this like a knee-jerk reaction. We do not believe such conclusions, we need experimental evidence. How can you get the experimental evidence? By experiencing it yourself. That's why I said, don't worry about what the people say.

Parveen is asking- but if a dead body is brought back, will she remember the death experience?

That is an interesting question because some people remember, some don't. I mean, after death there is no I, actually, who knows what is remembered?

Parveen is saying, Anita Moorjani shares her death experience.

Anita Moorjani, a very famous case of near-death experience, but there are thousands of people who will tell you what happened after they were dead, when the activity of the body stopped. They sometimes are able to recall their experiences. In my opinion, there is no near-death experience because you are always alive. You can say near-body-death, even though it's not accurate. But remember that near-death means that the body is intact. There is a defect in the body somewhere, which the doctor has corrected, and now the experience of the body has returned. This was not possible in dark ages, now it is possible, and more and more people come back from the dead, and it is possible to compile a report of what happens during these experiences, almost-death experiences, and people have done that. You can go and search, read, it's vast literature there, so those who are interested, go and study the near-death experiences.

Although it is all happening as a matter of chance, nothing is controlled there because if the person is dying, then nobody is bothered about the experiment, they want to bring that person back as soon as possible. Coincidentally, data is recorded, there are very authoritative figures, wise people who

witness this happening, and there are very intelligent people, like there is a person called Alexander, I forgot the last name, he is a doctor probably, a very reputed doctor, and he himself had the near-death experience. Now he simply lectures and shares his experience of that, it totally changed his life. I have personally seen people who came back from dead, and because their intellect is not so advanced, they think, oh, it happened, I came back and I saw this and that, and it is a good experience for them, but they cannot make much of it, because they are not seekers, they are not scientists. So there are thousands of people like Anita Moorjani, who will give us a glimpse of what is the possibility.

I will take you back to the layers of the mind. The lower layers disappear. There is no doubt about it, however, you can argue about when they disappear, like the body takes a certain amount of time to decay, isn't it, the electrical activity and breathing and all that can stop very quickly, but our yogic tradition will tell you that the physical body is first to decay, it is the first to irrecoverably lost, that is what a real death actually is. If you can recover the body, it is not death, according to my definition, it must be totally destroyed, it should become dirt, it should rot away, so that there is no way to bring it back, then you can call the person dead, otherwise not.

Yogic tradition, who have observed this thing very closely, will say that a second body, the etheric body, decays after many days of the physical body. Those of you who know the Indian tradition nicely, you know the dates, 12 days, some people will say 10th day or 13th day, whatever, the etheric body or what is called Pranamayakosha remains, the Prana keeps flowing for a while and because it is non-physical, it cannot be detected by instruments, but it stays. The yogic seer, the yogic vision, clairvoyance, whatever it's called, can see it, the etheric body is there and it looks like the physical body.

Parveen is asking- can Pranamayakosha identify its family?

Memory is there, there is no person in Pranamayakosha, but there is tendency, because it is so close to the family members, we do not have only a physical connection to family, we have an etheric connection also, the pranic connection is also there, especially with parents, so it gravitates to the family. But for an ordinary person, even in their waking state, they are almost zombies, half the time they are dead, so once the death happens, the Pranamayakosha simply floats away somewhere. Sometimes a very deep attachment is there and then you can sense the presence of the dead person, it is possible. It is because of too much attachment to the family members, but I will not say that there is an identification or something like this, and they identify the family member. It will be a kind of attraction. So the personality is gone, after a few more days finally its connection is lost.

Your after-death experience will depend totally on your waking life, by which I mean how aware you were, how evolved you were in the waking state. If you have a very aware life right now in the waking state, if you have a sadhana of a lifetime, then probably there will be a person there in the form of an etheric body, probably there will be awareness. There will be a willful activity in that ghostly figure, it will try to contact the family members, it will try to leave a message and it will like to animate some other body like a bird or a crow or a snake or whatever.

I don't really believe these things but I'm just presenting it to you, that's why I said there is no truth in whatever I'm saying, if it's your experience then you will know what I'm saying. It tries to leave a sign somewhere, probably a mist on the bathroom mirror, something like this, that I'm well, I'm dead, but I'm here, not really dead and when the time of decay of this etheric body is over, it disappears. Some yogis can hold on to this. That is a totally different matter now. You can manipulate that also, the technology is available. An aware mind can go to the other side, enter the non-physical experience, just like we enter a dream every night. That mind can enter non-physical experience and will remember, if he is in total awareness, all these events will be committed to memory, otherwise not.

How many people are aware during waking state? 99.99% are sleeping here, so what do you expect their experience to be after death? It will be even more unawareness, it is like going to deep sleep directly. A little bit of dream-like happenings here and there which are forgotten in a few seconds. That's all there will be. The more aware you are in the waking state, the more aware you will be after death and more will be retained in the memory. I'm not saying that you will be the same person, no, you won't be the same person, but there will be remains of personality. For example, when we dream in the night, ordinary dream, there is a person there, who is that? You say, I was there, it was me, but when you notice carefully, there are differences in personality. Your waking personality is not exactly the same as the dream character, because probably not all of your mind is active in the dream, so there will be a made-up personality. It is made up depending on the situations, what is happening there, and if you have a guide, you will be reminded of who you are. That brings back the memories of the waking state, and now the waking state looks like a dream. Time is distorted, the space is almost not there, you do not know where you are, you do not know the location, and so on. It is a very muddy experience, to say the least. I don't think there is much to the experience, but you see, you can go up to there, and there is a possibility to come back if the body is intact. That is what near-death experiencers will describe.

There is something interesting that will happen that the causal body kicks in at this stage, and it will replay all that has happened in the waking state, which you commonly call as human life. It is something mechanical, I don't know why it happens, but it is reviewing, like a slideshow, like a movie, everything will be played back. Because there is no time, it looks like everything is happening at the same time, and in a split second, everything is played back. Some people, if they are revived at this point, will actually tell you, my whole life was shown to me. Who showed you your recent past life, who projected that movie? It is their own mind, it is their own causal body, that is preparing for the next birth. It wants to review what happened, so that it can assess some things, it can plan for the next birth, it is you, you can say.

You do not have that kind of experience, or that kind of knowledge, understanding of what these all layers are, so you will associate yourself with the body, and when you come back, you will say that somebody else has shown me what happened, because you do not have any reference to call it myself. The causal body, we are unaware of in the waking state, we know only the waking body, the physical body, and a little bit of other bodies. People are totally unaware of whatever is inside this body, by inside I mean the mental bodies, so I just skipped many bodies, in between there are a few more. I jumped to the causal body, because that is the one that decides the experience after death.

If the causal body has been prepared by many lifetimes of sadhana, of practice, of being aware, which means you are an evolved being, then your experience is going to be totally different, you are not going to perceive any difference between the waking state and after death state. Moreover, the causal body, because it is just a jumble of memories, seed, it will actually project a body, a subtle body. It can be a sphere, it can be like a human. The shape and form is not important , but it can project a body, that body will consult with other causal bodies, especially with your guru, if there is one, and there has to be, otherwise this situation will not arise. Without a guru, nothing is possible, so you will find the guru is always there, actually he is present right now, and he will guide you through the whole process of death. If you have a guru, if you are a seeker, if you have an aware mind, somebody will come, other presences will be there, other causal bodies will be there, to interact and guide you.

The causal body will form a temporary apparatus, with some senses, hearing, seeing and all, you probably don't need to taste and touch, so you will be a ball of light or something like this. And you will see other balls of light, who knows, or other entities, and they will present themselves in a form which you can recognize. It is much more complicated than that, so non-verbal communication, non-physical communication will happen, and there will be an experience. If you have spent your waking state in awareness, it is almost guaranteed that there will be an experience, but if your whole life has been spent in sleeping, which means not aware, a materialistic person, then the next thing that a causal body is going to know is, a baby's body, next birth.

There will be a total blank between this death and the other birth, no experience will be there, because that causal body is not evolved enough to experience anything. So it either happens mechanically, or if you have a little bit of krupa or grace, somebody else will choose your next birth. It is usually the universal mind that does it, which means it will happen mechanically. It will happen according to the biggest wisdom there is, it knows the best. The next appearance will be as a baby, human birth, or probably if you have done something really bad in the past, then animal birth. Or no birth, that is a very bad condition, you don't want to be in that condition. I discussed two sample states - where there is total darkness, and where there is total light, total awareness. There are intermediate states, with different levels of evolution of the mind, and they will experience different kinds of after death scenarios.

Anil is asking, how is no birth worse, because probably you will be stuck in a limbo?

The limbo is a state where the causal body cannot decide what to do. It's a state where the causal body is almost in a shock, and does not know, is completely lost. Probably because the wrong deeds are so many, and the burden is so much there, the causal body becomes almost dysfunctional and cannot even take a birth. I'm not an expert on this thing, I cannot tell you much, but the ancient wisdom says that such a causal body will form a body of a ghost, and that ghostly body will repeat its visions again and again. It is like a faulty computer, you can say, it gets stuck, hangs, repeats the same process, and brings out the same pop-ups. Like sometimes your browser gets stuck, do you want to continue, you click yes, and then again pops up, do you want to continue, yes, again, yes, and it used to happen in old computers. And we had no choice but to press the reset button, power off and on again.

Mind is an information system, you see, it's very similar to a computer, so it will create a body, it will play back those scenarios, it does not go past that. This means the evolution of the causal body stopped now, because of the wrongdoings. By wrongdoings I mean something which shouldn't have been done, something which you shouldn't have ventured into, like murdering somebody, raping somebody, or stealing, or lying to your parents, there is a long list. Nobody believes in these things now, but ancient people will tell you, sages will tell you what can cause no birth. It's the worst thing, because the evolution of the causal body is stuck, probably nothing can be done about it. It will continue experiencing the same things again and again. You must have guessed by now, it is called hell. Hell is not a location, it is a state of the mind. You can experience hell in the waking state also, if you do something wrong. It is a hellish experience, just export it to the causal body level, where who knows what is there, how can we even say what happens, it will continue till the energy in that event is there.

If there are many such events, suppose you were a king and you killed many people, burnt many houses, and many bad wishes were slapped on you by those tortured souls, then it will take a long time for that energy to be spent. Probably after that the causal body will be reduced to something very puny, lowly, and it will start the evolution again. That's why we say that if you do something wrong, you will get a birth in a very low yoni. Now you can see how that can happen. If you consider the information model of the mind, it is very much possible. So please do not do anything bad here, remain in awareness, it will make your causal body's life very easy and smooth. Otherwise it's the universe as usual, it keeps happening, the universal mind does not care. There are billions and billions, uncountable causal bodies there, and they are all evolving at their own speed, so it is okay to go through the hellish experience also, because it is also for your good, and don't worry, everybody goes through these kinds of traps. Even if you have lived a very very pure life, there can still be something, there can be something from the past life somewhere, who knows! That's why you need a guide. The guide can pull you out of hell if he wants, if you are useful to him. For your guru, if you have some potential, he will take the trouble of dropping the rope, he will pull you out. Now this is all lost, this tradition, that was so much prevalent in our country, when people knew all these things, it's all lost, so that's why when I'm talking, it looks like I'm telling you a story, a far-fetched story.

When people say - death is like deep sleep, they are right actually, because for many people it will be like that. For ordinary people, there is nothing that happens in their life, they eat, sleep and reproduce, and they die. There is nothing much to review, nothing much to do. You see, guru is also happy, okay, go on, go on, run of the mill, go back into the world and so on. Whatever tendencies are remaining, whatever desires are still lurking in the causal body, the causal body will continue its business of rebirth and more experiences. So they are right when they say it's deep sleep. When that person is born again, they will be born with no memory of past life. Many people ask this question, if there is rebirth, why is there no memory? It is because your births are absolutely unaware, they happen in darkness and your death also happens in darkness, your life happens in darkness. What are you expecting? How can you say that I should remember? The memory is connected to awareness, do you remember everything that happens in a dream? No, you're back in the world without any memory of what happened in the dream, and even if you remember it's gone in two seconds. Some people say that little children remember their past life for at least six months to one year of age. As soon as they start talking, well, it's gone, the mind is now fully trapped in the physical world.

So just like we forget the dream in a few seconds, we forget the past life and after-death experiences in a few months of coming here. There is no wonder, there is no surprise that this happens, because for many centuries, you are sleeping, you're dreaming. It is not the case with awakened people, those who die with full awareness, they have full memory of the after-death experiences. We should not assume that it will be something extraordinary, it is not. It is the chatter of some kind, chit-chat, and then probably nothing, and then little bit more chit-chat, nothing, and then next birth, but this birth will happen with full awareness. Probably there is a choice there, because there is awareness, the causal body gets a choice. What womb to take, what parents to choose, what kind of country, location, and even can make a to-do list and arrange its life a little bit. Although I don't think it micromanages these things. Even if there is a guide, it will not be micromanaged. He will simply say, okay, your agenda - get rid of anger, and then he will kick you out, back in a new womb.

If there is awareness, the birth will be in full awareness, there will be some memory of past lives. I am not saying that it will be crystal clear photographic memory, it's not required. You will remember one or two things - my parents were these, I was born in this village or city, my guru was this, and your tendencies will manifest very quickly. Like, if you liked music in past life, in this life you will be gravitated towards music without anybody telling you. You will pick up the tabla, harmonium and piano, and you will start playing as if you always knew these things. These tendencies will manifest very quickly, if there is a little bit of awareness during the birth. Somehow you are again trapped in unawareness. That has a lot to do with your parents, with the kind of society and community that you are born in. If you are surrounded by zombies, then yes, your plans will be of no use, till the time you meet a Guru or you encounter a book, or you see a movie, for example. If you are born in India, then it is almost guaranteed that you will stumble upon spiritual knowledge.

There can be numerous more experiences. Sometimes if you are very advanced you will be taken to a location which will resemble heaven. These stories that you hear, there will be very good buildings, parks, everything will be made of gold, or your favorite metal, and there will be beautiful angels, people, and love and light, whatever, and you will spend probably a few hundred years, a few thousand years there, if you want, because there is full control now. You will get a body of your choice, the causal body is now evolved enough, it knows how to manufacture bodies, it's not dependent on the universal mind to provide a body. This body is not my body, it is loaned from mother earth, which is a part of the universal mind, the greater mind. Like a factory, it is manufacturing bodies. We possess a body, we do not create a body, it is a case of possession of the body. So just like you possess your home that is built by a builder, you pay the money and you start living in the home, something like this.

Actually it is amazing that we get this kind of instrument, this machine, advanced computer, for free, isn't it amazing? And look how we use this. We do not make full use of the human body, it is such a marvelous instrument, we got it without asking. Even if you think that you are not evolved, even if you think you are not a seeker. You think you are some kind of puny materialistic person, don't worry, you are still very much evolved. The fact that you have a human body says a lot about your evolution. You are very much evolved just because you have this human body with a very refined intellect. Please do not misuse this thing. Simply because you have a human body, this is the tipping point, actually, after this, there are heavenly experiences, after this, there are godly experiences. We are all Gods in the making. Those who advanced a lot, they need not come back into the human body, unless there are some pending issues, you did something wrong. You will know what was wrong only after your review has happened, not before.

Right now, we do not know what wrongs we are doing, and I am not saying that you stepped on a spider or you killed a rat, no, that is not wrong, there has to be an intention of doing something wrong. Intention matters, not the action. You will know all these things, right now we don't know, and if you are qualified, the causal body will be in a state to finally leave human birth. With no human birth the physical world will be gone. Now, some people have this kind of delusion or ignorance that, oh, I won't be able to come back, don't worry, you can always come down! Going up is a problem, isn't it?, coming down is easy, the causal body stores everything, you can go down to the birth of an animal also or a plant or mineral also. There are tendencies, they are stored, they can manifest, all you need to do is have a desire of taking a birth in an animal body. You can say, oh, I was never a bird, I wanted to fly and all, you have a tendency, you have the blueprint of a bird also in your causal body, and if this desire is there, and if the desire is very intense, you will find that there is an egg ready for you to receive you, and as soon as you are born as a bird, you forget everything. Because birds don't need to remember anything. These desires are fulfilled one by one, and the causal body is purified to an extent that it does not need to come down, and that is the promotion to the godly bodies, which is called Devayoni in Sanskrit.

Yoni simply means womb. You get a body of your choice, or probably the body that is fit for that kind of environment in which you are now going to spend some more time. Nobody comes back from there to tell, except the Bodhisattvas, except the enlightened people who still have attachments here, who still want to teach humans. Or who are bound by the Guru Agya, the command of the Guru. They need to finish some work, they will come here, do something about this world, and then they go back. We do not know for how long this evolution of the causal body will happen . Finally it will merge in the universal mind. It's all a play, the universal mind is playing like this. Just like you thought that probably it's a good idea to become a bird again, the universal mind keeps thinking. Let's restart the universe. Something like this, it's a play. It's happening. And where is the consciousness in this whole story? You see, this is like a movie, consciousness like the screen, it never goes away. Don't worry about consciousness, it is the fundamental ground of being, it never goes away. It does not even take part in the story. Do not assume that consciousness will be gone after death, no, it is already nothingness, it's already emptiness. That which is born goes through death and all the states, and that which is unborn, will never be dead, it is timeless. Death and birth happens on the screen of consciousness. You are the screen. Everything is happening in space like consciousness, this 3D screen of consciousness.

Hopefully that will clear some of the misconceptions about death, but that's all it will do, it will not give you any knowledge, please remember this. This is a story, this evolution is as illusory as anything else. Experiences after death are as illusory as the waking state, this is all a big illusion. This is Maya and that is Mahamaya. Your experience as a disembodied mind is also an illusion, do not mistake it for reality. So what these things will do is prevent you from forming any blind beliefs, that's all. You will need to verify them, do not fall into traps of beliefs.

We die every day, we come in contact with the causal body every day, we go into the hellish locations and heavenly locations every day, only that you are not aware. If you practice so that your awareness remains on after death, enduring the state changes of the mind, including after death states, you will get a glimpse of how death is going to be. And now you can see people talk about their deaths even when they are alive, they will get a glimpse even when they are alive. Sometimes it happens to some people, some good deeds are behind that. Why does it not happen to everybody? Because they are not ready. Do not try to put all the mental experiences into one slot, that is stupidity. There is variety in individual minds.

We cannot judge anybody else's experience. Some day you will progress to that level and you will see your death, you will see how it will be. Sometimes we see the glimpses, sometimes the people who are on deathbed will tell you that my grandmother is here to pick me up, my dead father is here to help me cross over, and so on. There is no end to such stories and we ignore them as hallucinations. But it is possible, but not always. And for a yogi it is better to not wait for hallucinations to happen or to be at the mercy of chance, it is better to go and do some research and some practices and get a glimpse of how death is, how it can be for you. So for most people it will be deep sleep, because the person is gone, there will be no memory of this birth, because it is illusory, it does not matter. And for the causal body, it is not really its agenda to produce all kinds of weird effects by sending the memories down into this unit of itself.

We are a part of the causal body right now, so it has a different agenda, it has an agenda of evolution, it will send only those memories which are extremely important for evolution. And the memories are not like a book or a movie, they are in the form of tendencies - you need to do this, you need to do that, this is like a pull in you, that is your swadharma for this birth, that is what you are born for. So in the after death experiences we can glimpse it through yogic practices by remaining aware during the mental states changes in the 24 hour cycles. You will encounter the causal body, and you will encounter your soul family or whatever group you belong to up there. If you are advanced enough, you can do that planning right now, you can do the review right now, and you can leave the world right now if you want. It is open ended, hardly any rules here. So many people have done that, and they will tell you that not all deaths are the same, because not all births are the same, because not all minds are the same. The after death experience is not going to be the same. If it is not your experience, it does not mean that there cannot be other kinds of experiences. The experience is forever, the experience is eternal, only the types of experiences differ.

Anil is asking, can we witness shift into and out of deep sleep?

What has happened to me is the mind dips in and out, it is not so stable, because no practice at all. Like I said it was a krupa or it was a grace event of kundalini. Kundalini does these things, and there was a dipping in and out of these states. I have done a lot of astral projection practices also, I have engaged in that kind of practice for at least three years, and I saw the same pattern again and again. The mind goes into unawareness, and then suddenly you are floating in the room or in some other area, in a heavenly or dark or some other location in the universal mind, fully aware, fully awake, you know your name, you know your date of birth, you know your phone number, only thing you don't know how I got here. And the same thing about deep sleep, you know I am here, probably you do not worry about all these things, but you know “I am”, and then there is a dip in awareness, and then dream, and then gone, then waking state, egoic activity starts, and then you are wide awake in waking state. This is my experience. And probably we can, if the awareness comes up, just as the dream state is ending, probably you will witness a shift into deep sleep, and it will be nothing extraordinary.

Actually it is nothing magical, there are these images floating through your mind, there are sounds floating through your mind, and slowly they become more and more distant, and there is silence, that is deep sleep. It is not anything magical, and then slowly the mental activity starts again, there is this noise, that noise, and bells, and like honey bees buzzing, and then images start floating, they take a form of a story, and you appear in that story, and your friends appear, things appear, buildings appear, and the mind engages in that, consciousness is involved in that. You are aware, you are witnessing, and then everything disappears, again silence, so this is the experience of Turiya. It is not really a fun thing, but it is good, because it gives us knowledge. That's what you're looking for.

When we go to bed, we do not fall into deep sleep directly, we go through a few states in between. If you pay attention, if you have a microscopic view of states of the mind, and then you will find that it slowly fades into deep sleep, we do not jump into deep sleep. So yes it is possible to do that, usually you will end up in an experience instead of deep sleep, that is what most people who do this kind of practice will tell you, that it is a shift into another experience. Because the mind is active, the mind is aware, so it likes to have an experience, it does not want to go to deep sleep. And actually I've heard, probably it's not true, but who knows, that some of the yogis do not like deep sleep. It is a completely useless state of the mind, because sleep is required for the body, not for the mind, and probably the lower layers of the mind, the ego, the things that are connected with survival. So the energetic body goes to sleep, the astral body goes to sleep, but the higher bodies which are simply higher layers of the mind, they are active.

For example, communication with your guru is continuous, it continues in the deep sleep state, because that's what they like, and they do not want to be totally inactive, because they are in a hurry, they want to complete the work. You will hear this thing about the yogis, the yogi never sleeps, he's always in samadhi. So it is possible to completely control all the states of the mind. A yogi will not dream also, because it's totally useless. It's a random experience where we do nothing at all. If you go to sleep hungry, then you will dream about food. If you do not have a partner, you will dream about girls and women, and if you are going through a bad time, poverty or enmity or wars, you will dream that. It is a repeat of the waking state for many people, especially the non-seekers.

So the yogi or a practitioner will not want to enter a deep sleep, he simply takes a shortcut into the causal body, takes a shortcut into the higher dimensions if you want to call it so. He's always in contact with the causal body and the gurus, many masters. There is a higher agenda there, which is of no use in the waking state also. So what they do is simplify their waking state to bare minimum, eating, bathing and just washing their clothes and back into the cave, close their eyes and turn the eyeball upwards, gone, back in the causal plane, no dreams, not much waking and always awake. Only the kind of experiences change. And don't worry, it will happen to you also, it will happen to everybody who is on a spiritual path, it is almost guaranteed.

So now people can ask, why do they even bother about this physical world then, because cave and river and river and cave, and whatever their disciples bring out of begging in nearby villages, why are they here? That we cannot know, that is the agenda of the causal body, probably it is spending the karmic stuff by being here, probably there is command from the guru - go and sit there, your presence is needed in Himalayas, do the taam jhaam (drama), whatever is needed for these poor people, miserable people. It will be over very soon. The next birth will not be there, such a person will wish for the death and the death will be there on his door, it is also controlled, it is possible to do that, because you can see there is no death. Death is simply like a snake leaves the outer skin, it is taking off the clothes, that’s all it is. You are so afraid of it, it is your ignorance, there is no death like you think.

So I went far ahead and took a lot of time, but hopefully it was useful for everybody. I do not really promise to answer all your questions, because you see these experiences are not my experiences. I am somebody who is alive here in the body, and you should not believe them, it should be a guideline for you. My intention is to simply dispel the blind beliefs. Do not be afraid of death, and do not cling to death, it will happen. Everything that these wise people have said is going to happen, do not be anxious, just enjoy whatever is happening right now. If it is death, it will happen, if it is rebirth, it will happen, if it is in between experience, it will happen. A smart yogi is the one who converts everything into a learning opportunity, that is what we should do. We should use this experience, this waking state fully, completely, totally. Do not waste your life. Human birth is very precious, you are already very much evolved. Do not kick yourself - no I am something lowly. No it is not like this, it is a long journey and we are almost 50% there. Human birth is in between that which is extremely low and that which is extremely high. Only that I cannot show you, I wish I could show you, but I cannot, you will need to see it yourself.

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 youtube. The softcopies are available on https://gyanmarg.guru/ww

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

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

Tarun Pradhaan

Pune 2024

tarun.pradhaan@gmail.com