Session 81

We call those rules physical rules: laws of physics. They govern this whole physical universe. It has become an area. You cannot see beyond this area through physical senses or physical instruments. Why? Because they are all bound by the same rules. The rules delineate the areas in the universal memory. If you want to visit another area in the universal memory, you can do so only by leaving one area, only by leaving the rules that govern that area. It is possible by a change of state of the mind, what I call a local memory. It is the state of the local memory. As you are aware, the local memory changes states.

If all this is sounding very mysterious, that means you have not practiced systematically. That is why we have the program. So that we discipline our seeking, our practice, we use the system to train ourselves so that we get the knowledge systematically. So once you understand all these things like what is an area, what is a local memory, what are states, you will be able to understand the evolution. You will be able to understand what are the rule-bound areas.

These areas seem to be isolated from each other because the rules are different. Like your waking state is an area where we find the experiences of the physical world, and your dreaming state is another area in the universal memory where we find our subjective experiences that come from the local memory. So how did I travel from the physical world to the dream world? By state change. There is no way. To obey the physical laws and get to the dream world is not possible. Similarly, there are projected states where you can get the experiences of other areas. The areas are not physical. Nothing is physical here. What we see as the physical world, the physical universe, is just another area in the universal memory. That's all it is. It is all non-physical.

Non-rule-bound areas are the areas where the vibrating patterns have not fallen into algorithmic systems. They have not yet organized into algorithmic patterns. That is why they are not being governed by any rules. How do the rules arise in universal memory? The patterns have a tendency to self-organize. And the rules are nothing but this organization of patterns. They have organized in a particular way. The byproduct of that is a set of rules. We call it a “ruleset”. So the non-rule-bound areas are simply raw energy, you can say, raw vibration, where the creation is still happening. It has not completely precipitated. It has not completely solidified into a world of any kind. It does not give us any meaningful experience.

You can ask, how do you know about these areas? You can go there, but the experience will be very, very chaotic. It will be a disorganized experience. And that is how we know that there are areas in the universal memory that cause this kind of experience, which is completely random. It is not even registered by our intellect. Our intellect reacts to only organized patterns. It does not react to anything which is not organized. Even our dream world is very organized. You may think that the dreams are all random, sometimes I see this place, sometimes I see that person. There is no specific time; there is no day or there is no night. But compared to a non-rule-bound area, it is very much rule-bound because there are forms, there are shapes and colors, there are sounds, there are realistic buildings, cities, roads, people, animals. It is being created from my local memory.

There is no local memory, as you know. Local memory is also not delineated from universal memory. It just feels like there is a limitation here, which makes us feel like I have a limited memory. But that is not true. The limitation can be surpassed very easily. Even a child can do that. It is possible by changing the state of the memory.

First question by Aslam: Conceptually, I understand it, but I am still trying to grasp why the illusion appears so real?

And he is on the first episode where I introduce the experience and the experiencer and all these things. The first episode is not meant to give you the full knowledge. The first episode, as you must have guessed after listening to it, is a quick introduction to the contents of the program, the contents of the series of videos. It is a time-saver episode for those who don't want to listen to the whole series just to find out what the conclusion is. So the conclusion is given first. We do this all the time on the path of knowledge. It's not a new thing. The final thing is given first so that if you understand it completely already, you don't need to waste your time listening to all the episodes. There is no need if you understand the very first episode. So it is just an introduction. I am not really expecting any questions there. Anyway, there are questions now so I will answer them.

Why does the illusion appear so real? He has not gone through the other episodes which describe the word; real, unreal, true, not true. These definitions come later. So, if you are using the word real here it must be your own definition. Now, if I don't know your definition of real, I won't be able to answer it. Why does the illusion appear real? What do you mean by real? How does it appear to you?

The words, appear, illusion and real, cannot come in one sentence. Is it even possible? You say that it appears and then you say it looks real. It is not possible. Either it will appear to you as an illusion or you will call it real. Either you call it false or you call it true. Which one is the case? So here I guess that the physical world or whatever appears here is assumed to be true. You are calling it an illusion. I am calling it truth. Why is there a discrepancy? The answer is very easy. You can see.

The answer is ignorance. Things that appear to us, we take them as truth. We assume that as real because of our ignorance. There is no other reason. It is not a miracle that the illusion is appearing real. It is just ignorance or you can say indoctrination because we are taught like this since childhood that look, everything that is around you is real. Do this or you will die. Do that, you will be happy and so on. Our society, our education system, our books, and whatever, do not take us beyond the illusion. They do not give us any hint about this possibility that it can be an illusion. Our society keeps us in darkness. So, as soon as you join a spiritual path and you encounter these words - everything is an illusion then you will be shocked, obviously, because for the whole of your life you thought that everything is real. Now illusion is exactly opposite of reality. So, this question will arise: why is it appearing as real to me and that is your ignorance. And don't worry, the ignorance does not last. As soon as you are on a path like this one, the path of knowledge will systematically break down ignorance. One after the other, there will be a series of blows to the ignorance and it will break down, it will shatter and now everything will appear as it is.

How is everything? It is not true, it is not false. It is true and it is false. It is non-dual. That is the culmination, that is the final knowledge that everything is non-dual. And this first episode is just introducing you to this idea and if you already know that it is, you don't need the program. It is a waste of time. Obviously, he needs the program because things are appearing real to him. There is still a lot of ignorance there.

So, the next question is, is this illusion called divine leela?

The word leela in Sanskrit means a play. He must have heard somewhere that it is a divine play, divine leela. Now, why is it called divine leela? Actually, you can call it anything you want. You can label it a hundred times and it will be the same. You can call it a training ground. You can call it an opportunity to experience itself. Existence is experiencing itself in the form of experiences. You can call it a dream because whatever appears here is just like a dream. It is an illusion. And you can call it a play.

Why is it appearing? There is absolutely no reason for it. It is non-causal. That means no cause, no reason exists for the existence to be. We have established all these things. And obviously, the one who is asking has not gone through all those episodes so these questions are there. So, I recommend that, go through it. Your questions will be answered. But here I will answer in short that it is called divine leela or divine play because the wise people never found any reason for it. So they called it a play. Why do we play? Hardly any reason. There is no serious reason behind it. Probably the reason is entertainment. But for the existence, for the illusion to be there, entertainment is also not a reason because there is nobody who needs entertainment there. Entertainment is a human concept. It is not wise to project our human concepts on something which is non-human, something which is huge, infinitely beyond human. The idea of entertainment does not apply to the existence. So, in the end we are left with no reason. In the end we are left with the mystery. Its nature is mysterious. That is why I call it the unknowable.

You will never know what the purpose is because “purpose” is also a human idea. Humans have purpose. Your instruments have purpose. A few things have purpose. But not the whole existence. We cannot apply this idea of purpose to the whole. There is nothing there which has a purpose. In our human life and that too only in the waking state things appear which appear to have purpose. The word purpose is very small. It is applicable in a very narrow field only, a very narrow domain of experience. It is not applicable, for example, in other areas or, let us say, dream worlds or projected states. What is the purpose of that? You are doing so many things in the dream state. Why are you doing it? When you are in the dream, you assume a purpose. Yes, let me catch a train. I am getting late for my work and I need to go to this other town for the meeting. What is it? Is it the real purpose? No, it is all an illusion. It is a dream. It is happening in the dream. Purpose is created out of the events that are happening there. And, unknowingly, under ignorance, we do the same thing in our waking state also. The waking state is also a state. It is also an illusion. It is also a dream. Things happen. Then they are assigned a purpose using our limited intellect. It is useful in the waking state. It is useful in this waking dream because it keeps the dream going, which means we stay alive. You cannot survive here without assigning purpose to things, to the events, to the actions of people.

Intention, purpose, we assign these things to keep the dream going, keeps the organism alive. And that is why these things exist. That is why purpose, meaning, goals exist because they help in the survival of this organism. When there is no question of survival, these terms are totally meaningless. Like for the existence, for the experiencer, they don't apply because they are not engaged in this kind of dream- world- survival- thing. Organisms are engaged in that. So these words have a meaning there. It is applicable there. Human concepts are not applicable to the existence, non-duality itself. So playfully, we call it a play. It is not to be taken seriously.

Third question, if there is one consciousness, that means in a rebirth the ego doesn't get birth. Just the consciousness takes another birth.

I never used the word “consciousness” in lessons. The consciousness does not take birth. There is no birth, no death. And probably, by consciousness he means the experiencer . That is not true, isn't it? Consciousness is a totally different word. The word is so misused that everybody has their own pet definition of the word consciousness. So, I simply trashed it. have defined words very precisely, strictly. So that we don't land back in ignorance. The word “consciousness” will take you to ignorance. You will utilize your own meaning, or you have heard the meaning somewhere. I doubt that anybody knows the real meaning of this word. They have cooked up so many meanings of it that it has become a totally corrupt word.

There is no consciousness in the advaita. This word is absent. There is something called awareness, which I am translating as chetana, which is defined as the knowledge that we are the experiencer. Everybody is an experiencer. When this knowledge arises in a person, we call that person enlightened, and then the person becomes aware. He wakes up. We call him the awakened person because now he or she knows the true nature of himself or herself. I have used the word awareness, never used the word consciousness. Probably it will be useless if I answer this question. But for this one because this is only his first attempt at asking any question. So he is using his past vocabulary here.

The individual or the ego is an illusion. It never takes birth. The consciousness, there is no question of taking birth. There is nothing there. It is empty. What remains? What takes birth? First thing, it is an illusion. There is no rebirth. It is a notion that is based on illusory experiences. Nobody takes rebirth.

There is an area in the universal memory and I call it the causal body. The causal body stores all the experiences that it is going through. How is it going through the experiences? How is it collecting the experiences? By assuming forms in the dream worlds, by assuming dream bodies in the dream worlds? Just like every night we assume a dream body in our night dream and we go through an experience, actually all of it will be impressed in the memory. A little bit of it can be recalled because it resembles our waking state. This is how this individual is gaining experiences in the dream world. In the same way, the causal body or the storehouse of impressions, as we call it, assumes forms in the dream-like worlds, and it is collecting experiences there.

Why? This is the tendency. This is what is happening. There is no real reason for it. This is a possibility, and that is why it is happening. So, once a particular experience is complete in a rule-bound area, the form is discarded. That is what you call death. The form rots away from the point of view of other people here, other forms here, and the causal body withdraws. Then another form is assumed, and the reason is that it still has some desires. There are many desires there. This energy of desires, it assumes a form and it chooses a particular world, particular body, and continues the experience. It is a very complicated process.

Individual, not the body, not the ego, these are momentary. They appear in the dream. Then they disappear. Once they disappear, there is no possibility of them reappearing. It happens only once. This person appears only once in the entire lifetime of the causal body. The causal body has a lifetime of millions of years, depending on what it does. If it does not do good deeds, well, it can also disappear. Otherwise, almost immortal. So, in some philosophies, it will be called the soul, and that takes birth. You can say that assumes the forms. Actually, it is never born. It just connects itself to any existing form and starts transmitting the experiences through that form. So, right now, right here, the human body is a form. It is connected to the causal body. Every individual has a causal body. So, it is the experiences that are transmitted from our waking state to the causal body.

The causal body is nothing but an area in the universal memory. There are countless causal bodies. A group of causal bodies forms what I call the soul disk. It forms a combined area. Just like states in your country, they combine to form the country. The causal bodies combine to form a bigger area. I call it the “greater memory”. Those who have gone through the layers of memory, there are many. There is a hierarchy of these areas. Groups and groups of them. It, you can say, never ends. You can spend infinite lifetimes just trying to see where it ends. It will never end. Some of these areas have a memory that is rule-bound, where rules have formed so completely that it does not look like a dream. We call such areas physical areas. Right now, right here, we are in such an area which is tightly rule-bound. It is so ancient that it has gotten enough time to evolve the ruleset. Now it has become very stable.

That also answers the first question: Why does it appear real? It appears real because the rules are very rigid here. You can say it has existed since many iterations of this greater mind, and so it has acquired a solidity, a reality, and it is not the only one. Almost infinite kinds of physical universes are there which have formed different kinds of rulesets. It is possible to visit them, but probably you will never come to know more than two or three. It is very big. Humans are very small. We know all these things, that is a miracle. And don't be so quick that I also know. No, unless you experience it, you cannot claim that I know it. At least, you should get a tiny bit of it. Just taste it a little bit. It's a huge mountain of ice cream. You take a tiny spoon and taste a tiny part of the ice cream, and then you don't need to eat the mountain. Isn't it? It's the same. Everywhere it has the same flavor.

We capture a tiny portion of it. Then we use our intellect to conclude about the rest of it. And, yes, the conclusion can be wrong in some places, but who cares? You are not going to know it anyway. We are not certain that it will appear the same everywhere. But we know the fundamentals. There will be rulesets. There will be vibrating patterns and all those things. That is universal. That is why I call it the universal memory. The same thing everywhere. But, yes, there will be tiny differences in the way the physical worlds are organized. By physical world, I do not mean planets. Planets do not form worlds. World is an area in the universal memory which is bound by the same ruleset. So Earth is not a world. The whole physical universe is a world from the spiritual perspective. The sansar, we call it in Sanskrit, it is not limited to one planet. Everything that appears in this physical universe comes in the same area. It is very tiny. In the greater mind, there are millions of these areas.

And obviously, there are non-rule-bound areas, just like I said. And there are in between areas where the rules are slippery. They have not formed in a solid way. So, there are areas where the dead people enter, for example. There are areas where failed cases enter which could not take rebirth. There are areas of powerful entities. You call them gods and goddesses. They have created their own areas. They are too powerful. They can rewrite the rules of that area. They have dominion over their own areas. And there are descriptions of such areas in the old scriptures. Every god has his own lok or area. So, don't worry. You will get your own one. If you continue your spiritual progress, you can get your own. There is infinite time to do that. A lot can be said about the illusion compared to that. Nothing can be said about that which is true. Almost nothing is there to say. The illusion is our favorable part in existence. It is very interesting.

Lydia has a question: "I have some difficulty to understand the word neighborhoods as greater neighborhood in terms of layer architecture."

I will try to explain it in a simple language, I know that while recording the videos, I have taken so much precaution that I should be accurate that it has become almost too difficult to understand. It has become too technical. I got such complaints from many people that "I can understand a few things, but as soon as you start talking about these technical things, I cannot comprehend now." And yes, I have done that knowingly so that there remains no doubt about it. It is taken to extreme accuracy. That is why it sounds so technical.

So what is a Greater Neighborhood? It is just a name for an area in the Universal Memory which resembles its other parts. UM’s parts resemble each other. And to be honest, I borrowed it from Astronomy, specifically the model of the physical universe. If you have studied Astronomy, which is a very interesting subject, you will see this word neighborhood is used there as in a galactic neighborhood. Our galaxy is called the Milky Way, and it has a neighborhood which is more or less similar to the Milky Way. So we call it the neighborhood. It comes from Astronomy. In the same way, a greater mind has a neighborhood which, because of its proximity to itself, looks like itself.

As there is no space in the Universal Memory, how do I decide whether this area is near to our area, and that area is far away from our area? It is based on the similarity, not based on distance. Neighborhood does not mean that it is near in terms of distance or locality. In Astronomy, you will find words like the local cluster and the greater cluster and so on, and I have simply borrowed it from there. I copied Astronomers because I like it so much. That is very logical in my opinion. How do we decide who is in my neighborhood? It is because it resembles the greater mind, which is our greater memory, our area, our cluster of causal bodies. The individuated areas will be called the causal bodies, and the non-individuated areas will be called the greater mind cluster of causal bodies.

Now, how can we say that there is another greater mind there, another cluster very near to our soul disk or whatever you want to call it. We decide it based on our experience. We visit there, we see it, we check it, what is going on there. You also have an evolutionary system of causal bodies. Yes, we have it. You also have a reward and punishment mechanism for evolution. Yes, we have it. Yes, but you guys are purple, and your legs are upside down and so on. That much variation is ok, but the fundamental characteristics overlap, and that is how we know that it is something similar. When the similarity is within our understanding, we can call it a similar group. We call it the neighborhood.

So hopefully that answers your question. Similarity decides who is our neighbor. Not the distance. There is no distance here. Everything is in one place. Everything is non-local. Our experiences with these projected states will start taking an organized form. You will see these patterns there. There is a neighborhood and you will visit areas which do not resemble our neighborhood in any way. They are totally alien. So much so that we understand nothing, we remember nothing. It is almost like having an experience of nothing/noise. And as we grow, as we progress spiritually, the causal body gathers more experiences, it gets the ability to comprehend the totally different kind of areas and that is how we know that there are areas that are different from our neighborhood.

Now you can ask me how do you know? I don't really know. This information comes from the great masters who have explored the neighborhood as well as not so neighborhood. They have explored not everything obviously but a lot of things. We are just starting. We are just kids compared to those masters. And sometimes if I am impressed by somebody, I completely believe them, it saves my time. Now I don't need to explore more. I don't need to do all that work. Or I can wait till this causal body here, this individuated memory grows up, it gets enough experiences. Like one of my teachers, he calls it experience packets. When we get enough experience packets, there will appear an ability to travel or to project into the neighborhood and beyond the neighborhood. And then we will be able to comprehend it. And then we will be able to tell others that "look, there is such a structure. There is such a hierarchy." So if you continue on your spiritual path, you will gain the same capabilities that the great masters have gained. And it will be a big achievement for the causal body. From the perspective of the existence, it is just another meaningless dream. Just another entertaining play. There is nothing important here. What is important is you know that all these things are happening in the illusion. The illusion is organizing itself. Because we have an intellect, we have a preference for organized experiences. That is why we are caught in the attractor of organization in the infinite possibilities. It is all mind-blowing. Sometimes we dismiss it as an illusion, like in Advaita/non-duality/non-dualism. Why are you running after this illusion just like a child runs after toys, birds, dogs, and cats? A child likes them. Adult, he won't. We are all like kids in this spiritual garden. We are playing here. That is why there is still a little bit of fascination about these things. Once we grow up, you can discard it as an illusion. No problem at all. If you want to play, you can play.

The last question from Aslam is, how would it be helpful to really experience this by understanding these concepts in the level of mind? I am asking this because since the mind creates the duality, we are trying to understand these concepts through the mind, which is another pattern in this illusion.

There is no mind. There is no intellect. There is no individual. There is no human. There is no knowledge also. It is what it is. What is the outcome of this activity? The answer is very simple. What has happened is, because there is a possibility, our minds have acquired ignorance. What is ignorance? Wrong concepts, blind beliefs and afflicted states of the mind caused by these wrong concepts. Wrong ideas are impressed on your memory. There is a possibility, so this has happened, and the human destiny is very strange. Humans are contributing to ignorance. Something strange is happening here in this world in this era that humans are augmenting ignorance. They are not clearing it. Your society is going to turn you into an ignorant, idiot, miserable person like them. What we do is we offer a cure. That cure is called knowledge. It is another set of concepts. It is another trick, another set of experiences that are given to you in a very logical way, in a very systematic way, that remove the old concepts. They remove the ignorance. It is like cleaning the dirt.

You are perfect as you are. You are whole and complete. You don't need to know anything. Actually, there is nothing to know here. How much are you going to know about the illusion? Everything is possible here. Can you know everything? Is there capacity in the memory to know everything? No. You can be everything, which you already are. That is what you need to know. So we offer you a medicine here, which cures this illness of ignorance, and then you are left pure and clean.

Now your experiences are all pure. Your life is pure. It is not encumbered. The resulting life is full of bliss. It is blissful freedom. There is freedom and happiness. Everybody wants that, we want freedom and happiness. So this is a technique to reach there. You will never gain anything on the path of knowledge. You will lose everything there. What will you lose? That which you have accumulated as ignorance. You will lose all the impurities. Most of the things that you have are actually impure. This whole human life is an impurity. Why is it there? Because the causal body has this impurity, that I need to take more experiences. It actually manages to forget every time. I don't know how this happens. There is a reason for it. Everything is remembered but as it is going through the experience, it blocks the memories of the past. The side effect is that we repeat the same mistakes. We repeat the same ignorance.

So this causal body is actually trapped in this loop. I call it the repetitive existence. There is no problem in the causal body. It is perfect, it's beautiful. There is no problem in human births. There is no problem in the illusory worlds and all these things, areas, and whatnot. They are all perfect. The whole existence is perfect. Where is the problem? Ignorance is the problem.

We are not trying to get rid of the illusion. We are not trying to get rid of births, or the forms, or the causal bodies. No. Humans are not capable of doing that. We are a product. We are not the owners. What is the problem here? Only the ignorance, that you are trapped in the ignorance, and then it is repeating. This is causing suffering. It is unnecessary. Although it is not going to last forever. The system ensures that everybody crosses it. But a seeker is not so patient. I don't want to go through all these lessons and ignorance and suffering. I want everything now. Everything is one. Everything is non-dual. Your true nature is this. Give it to me, and then I am done with the repetitive existence. There is no suffering now. I don't need to go through it because it is unnecessary. Evolution can fix it in sometime. Don't worry about it. It can happen more systematically, more intelligently, and we can learn and play at the same time. Infotainment. No need to do it through pleasure and pain and reward and punishment. Although it is built in the fabric of this world, this area functions like this. We don't need to do that. This is the biggest discovery actually, in the human world: That we can bypass evolution, we can quicken it, we can accelerate it, and that is possible by knowledge.

The difference is like a bullock cart and a jet plane. Before a bullock cart—although it is not a bad experience, you will like it—but you will need to go through all the trouble. Many days will pass if you choose the bullock cart to go from one village to another. After knowledge, like a jet plane, you are already there. The path of knowledge is very, very fast. We have discovered this thing, and that's all we get. We use the mind. Yes, it's a creation. It's an illusion. We use it to our advantage to get out of the illusion, to get out of the ignorance. Remember, you will gain nothing. Like he is asking, “How is it all helpful?” No, it is not helpful. It's not going to help you in any way. It will get rid of this need to be helped. You want everything to be helpful. You want everything to be profitable, and this is because of your ignorance, and you will get rid of this thing. You will get rid of this tendency to want. What do you want? You have everything. Not only that, you are everything. Do you want more than that? Do you want twice the everything? Is it even possible? Do you want hundreds of everythings? The human mind is like this, never satisfied.

We get past all these tendencies which we see as imperfections in ourselves. We get rid of the imperfections. That's all. No, “I want to become this. I want to become that.” Don't worry. You already are this and that and everything else in between. “I want to become great, and I want to become greater.” You are that also. You are the lower, and you are the lowest, and you are the lowliest. It is all there. We get the full package. “No. I want only this big portion which is good, not the rest of it. I don't want it.” Don't worry. You can make it as good as you want. You can make it as bad as you want. The good and bad are relative.

I will give you an example of it. Why do you want the good portions of it? Let us say you have a glass jar, and you fill it up with water, clear water, and then you drop, let us say, copper sulphate or something like that, a dye in it which does not immediately dissolve. This is the important part. It should not dissolve immediately; it goes and settles in the bottom, and the water remains clear, and after one day or two days, you will find that the dye is now diffusing in the water. It is trying to make the whole water colored. Let us say the color is blue; after one day, there is a gradient of color there. The bottom part is more blue, and the top part is clear.

Now you can say, “I want the clear part.” You divide the jar into two, like you cover the bottom part with a paper, a black paper. “I don't want this. I don't want to see this. I want to see only the clear part.” Now, notice that in two days, the clear part is going to resemble the whole of the jar. The clear part will have a bottom portion which will be more blue or dirty, you can say, and the top part will be clear. And you say, “No, it is not working. I need to cover more of it.” And you go on doing this. There is no limit. Imagine the jar is very big. It is infinitely tall. How much can you fix? Won't you get tired of it? And is there real satisfaction here? Because it is relative. Blue and clear is relative. There is no absolute blue, and there is no absolute clear part in your jar. It is all relatively clear, relatively blue.

This is the story of this whole existence. It is like this. There is nothing absolute here. And you go and stay in the good part, and you will start finding that it has its own problems. It happens to many people. The real solution is acceptance. We call it surrender. You need to come in the state of surrender—whatever is, is the most beautiful. Whatever is, is perfect. I accept it. And then we will get rid of this tendency to always get the better part. There is no such thing. There is no better part in the existence. There is no better life. There is life. That's all. You accept it, and it becomes a better life. There is nothing wrong now. You are earning a million, and you are still eating the burger. You earn a little bit less, and you are eating the burger. Acceptance. You accept this. Now there is no need to get more and more, a different kind of experience. No. It is all the same experience. It is all the same illusion. So we say that I have a detachment to everything. Everything appears the same to me, whether it is happiness, whether it is sadness, it is all the same, states of the mind.

For a gyani, for a wise person, everything is the same. This is called detachment. So we do not travel on the path to become better, to get more, to leave that which is not wholesome. It is not like this. We travel on the path to get rid of these biases, to get rid of this duality that we carry all the time, and the duality is always unsatisfactory. You can ask this question: what is the most satisfactory thing in this whole existence? And the answer is very simple: acceptance. Nothing is satisfactory from the point of view of this human ego. Nothing at all. Surrender. Acceptance. Detachment. These things give complete satisfaction. Like they say on the products, complete satisfaction is guaranteed after-sales service is free. Same thing on the path of knowledge. Complete satisfaction is guaranteed, and you don't need any service after that. No one is left to be served there. Nobody is left to get anything. What are you going to get? Nobody is there to be helped, and that which is my real nature, does not need any help. Why do you need help?

The mind is powerful. Sometimes it creates situations in the so-called physical world where you think nothing can be changed without acting. But the mind can change it. Remember it is not my mind. It is not your mind. It is the universal mind. It is its dream. So it can change it. Sometimes it generates situations which take it away from the knowledge. It does not want to confront its own ignorance. That's what I call resistance. So it will cook up situations. It can create anything, very odd situations can be created sometimes. Usually it is like: “I am not feeling well. I am not in the mood”. Very subtle things. “Whatever you say is all garbage. I have heard it a lot many times now. I don't want to listen to it again”. Probably many of you will encounter this thing called resistance. And there will be such thoughts in your mind regarding your spiritual practice, regarding satsang, regarding the program, regarding everything. Why? It does not want to face reality, it's in a very comfortable zone of ignorance. It has stayed in that ignorance since who knows, thousands of years. Now it does not want to leave its home. Actually its home has become ignorance. So if I am destroying it, will you like it? No. Nobody likes their illusions to be destroyed. Nobody likes their dream to be shattered. This is the resistance of the ego, or I can say, the ego-mind, the lower mind. It is very powerful. Never underestimate it.

It will create such thoughts in your mind: “He is not a good guru. He knows nothing. He just copies from here and there. He is telling me this thing and that”, and you will believe it. And that gives some more time to the ego. That gives some more time for the ignorance to survive. It is going to create doubts in your mind: “He is partial. He favors the other seekers more and not me. Probably I will just leave and go to other gurus. This path is not good. It is not answering my questions. I asked about rebirth, and he said no rebirth. Its useless lecture”. It is going to create all these things. Instead of exploring things, it will cause you to doubt, and then you leave it, obviously. It is successful most of the time.

One thought is enough for you: “The other person is fooling you. Spiritual knowledge is just garbage”. This much is enough. “The other person is using you. The other person does not love me now. The other person is evil”, anything to save its ignorance. It will do anything at all. And it happened to me. It will happen to all of you. This is guaranteed. What I am interested in is the rest of the time where your willpower becomes so strong that you overcome these negative thoughts. You are so aware now. You have an awareness, a little bit that you can see these functions of your own mind. Don't call it my own. What can it do when you are so aware? A little bit of awareness. All these thoughts keep coming. It is my resistance. I will just ignore it, and I will continue on my path. I will do that which is necessary to get rid of my ignorance. This is maturity. This is wisdom. Very few people have it. Most of them won't have it and they just fall prey to their own minds.

What if you defeat this ego mind? What if you break through the resistance? Something interesting will happen. I am pretty sure this happens. Something supernatural will happen which you have never thought about. Things will happen in those ways because the mind is running out of its usual weapons. It is empty now. Now it needs more weapons. So it will invent something. Sometimes it does a mistake. Now that cannot be hidden. Something odd will happen that you will call it a miracle. They are beyond normal probability. You will recognize it. This is not the end. Here the real miracles will happen. I am just giving you an example of satsang. It can be anything important like a meeting is destined with your guru, or you are about to get a good book which is going to open your mind and is going to enlighten you, and all that. And now these things happen. Suddenly a miracle disease will appear in your body. You are healthy. You have no bad habits. Just when this important event is going to take place, it appears. You have decided your plan. You have purchased a ticket and all. Something will go wrong in your body.

The mind can affect the world, but the body is the easiest target for it. It is close to the body. Actually, it is not a real harm. It looks like a disease. It is so severe. It is so bad. There will be physical symptoms in you. The doctors will be puzzled. And the right time passes. The day is over. And you will find that the next day you get up and you are fine. The whole disease has disappeared. This has happened to many people. Now usually, the miracles are of a mental kind. Suddenly the mental scene changes. Suddenly, the delusions appear in your mind. You start seeing things. The person becomes almost mad. The person cannot recognize his family or friends. It is an extreme form of resistance. This thing is trying to delay the removal of ignorance.

You need to be careful now. As you advance in your study, as you advance on the path of knowledge, your mind will become your enemy. It is going to cook up many delusions. This is what I call obstacles.

It will produce manifestations. It will produce events. It will bypass the rules sometimes. No physical laws for the mind. So it is an amazing thing, and we need to be very careful. If you fail the first time, do not assume that it is a resistance. Probably it is a natural event. But if it keeps happening to you, whenever I try to do something good in my spiritual path something goes wrong, somebody dies, some important meetings come up, I lose my job, and so on - that means it is your own mind. Now here you won't be able to do much. You will need the help of an experienced person whom you call your guru. It can take many years to calm down all these unusual events, and we should not force because force never works here.

That's why you must have seen that if I encounter resistance, I just let go. I let the person go and enjoy the worldly life for a while. Don't come here. Don't take the program. Your mind has distorted your worldview so much that no amount of progress is possible now. You need to relax. Let the resistance be over because it takes a lot of energy to keep up this resistance which is very unnatural. If it is breaking all the laws, if it is bypassing all the rules - well, it takes a lot of energy. It is doing something which it normally does not do so it cannot do it forever. You just let it stay like this for a while. It gets tired of it and then again seduce it. Do not force it. Seduce it very nicely, calmly. I drip feed such a person. We do that if we encounter resistance, and we do encounter it many times. I have always seen many cases of resistance, and when I was on this path, I have seen my own resistances. I know a few of them because sometimes they are so tiny. Sometimes they are invisible. You won't even come to know that it was a resistance. Only after many years will you come to know that there was a resistance there. I could have achieved the same thing in two months which took years because of the resistance.

Maintain your awareness. Do not force it and let it go by itself. It cannot keep it up. It takes a lot of energy to resist. It then sees the benefit in knowledge. The mind is not dumb. It is very intelligent. Once a rational idea is dropped in the mind, it will do its best to leave its ignorance. You will find there is a struggle in the mind. It wants to know but is afraid of knowing. Why is that? The part afraid of knowing is the resistance part. The part that wants to know is the curious part. It is the more evolved aspect of your intellect that wants to know. That which is resisting, deluding itself, and throwing all these resistances like a child, is the less evolved part of the intellect. Sometimes the less evolved aspect is more powerful, especially when taking a spiritual path for the first time in all your lives. In the lifetime of the causal body, probably the first or second time you have heard a guru, you will see a tremendous amount of resistance.

A worldly person simply laughs at whatever a spiritual person says or does. “The world is an illusion”. Everybody is laughing in the room. “He does not know that it is real. The guru is deluded. He has no proof that it is an illusion”. After one day, two days, “Yes it is. There is something wrong in my thinking”. Now the laughter becomes anger. “He is insulting my religion. He is insulting me. I will kill him”. After the fourth or fifth day, “I was wrong. Whatever I thought was wrong. But yes, he is still wrong. This other philosophy is great. I will go there. I will join the scientists. They know everything”. So on, it goes on and on and the person dies. The seed of knowledge never goes away. That which is false can come and go as you already know. That which changes is false. That which is true will remain. It cannot change now. If it changed it is not true. So the idea in the mind, if it is true, nobody will be able to change it. It is the foundation now. And it grows. Like I say, the seed grows into a plant, then plant into a tree, and the tree becomes a jungle, and so on. This is the natural way.

What happens when you identify your resistance? You will see a quantum leap. There will be a tremendous leap in your evolution. A tremendous leap in your understanding and your knowledge, if you understand your resistance, because now you can consciously work on it, you know all its tricks.

Sometimes the mind is so powerful that it knows in advance that somebody is going to tell this fellow about the resistances. “I better get out of here. And no, I am not going to listen to the recording also. It is evil. Pure evil”. Something like this. Or it will cut your internet connection. It can do anything. So yes, this can happen.

There is no time in the mind. So it already knows what is going to happen. And it makes arrangements in advance. It is trying to borrow a little bit of time. It is simply trying to survive for a while. That is why I say - all I need to do is to plant the seed. Seed of truth, which, no matter what you do, remains. “I am the one who is always wrong” - That is the sign of truth. No matter what I do, how much I resist, how much I ridicule, how much I threaten that person, I kill that person, the truth remains in one form or the other. This is the characteristic of it. And that's why all I need to do is show you once. That is what I call planting the seed. I need to show you your ignorance, and then self-correcting mechanisms start. Now totally depends on how much resistance you are offering. By you, I mean the mind. The more resistance, the more time it takes.

Knowledge does not take time. The truth is right in front of you, right now. Because of this very peculiar, very strange mechanism in the mind, it takes time. We are very patient. We know you have many lifetimes now. Don't worry. You missed the satsang, no problem. You missed the whole program, no problem. Your train got derailed a hundred times. No problem. There will be many lifetimes. The seed is not going to go away. Resistance is a good sign, actually. Why? Something important is going to happen in one of your lifetimes. I am not promising that it will happen tomorrow. No, it's not like this. The miracle is not a miracle. It's just mind. It's a sign that you are in a place which is very important for your evolution. You have reached a place where something great will happen. That is why there is great resistance. I am never unhappy about this. I know I feel a little bit bad that somebody could have benefited a lot, but he or she has relapsed into resistance. You feel bad, but it is not bad news. There is some good news also here that there is this huge resistance because something important is arriving.

Initially, there was resistance, but after relaxation, I did my duty. I did my job. I did what was important. You will also see this. When you are resisting, it will be a bad feeling. You know somewhere in your heart, in your most interior part, there is a resistance. “It is not good, I don't feel nice here, making excuses, insulting people and ignoring knowledge. So many things are open to me. I am simply closing my doors and windows. I don't feel good”. But as soon as you have done what is necessary, you will feel relaxed. There will be a fountain of happiness in you. “I wanted to do all these things. I came to know all these things, true or false or whatever. I feel like a burden has been taken away from my mind”. This is the sign that you have overcome the resistance. The mind rewards itself like this. It produces pleasure. It produces bliss in you. That is why many people get addicted to the satsangs, meditation or even the yogic exercises. Why? Because the mind is pushing, "Don't do it, don't do it. Don't do yoga today. It is useless. Eat whatever you want and be happy." This will be the mental noise in you. But as soon as you overcome it, you do it. It feels so good, it feels so nice. The reward is produced in your mind, not only in your mind, a reward is produced in the body in the form of beneficial chemicals, whatever you call it, hormones or whatever it is called, the endocrine system. Because it is happy, survival has been taken care of. More reproduction, let's have it. More health, more vigor, more enthusiasm.

And many people who meditate and do the yogic exercises and attain the satsangs and are on a spiritual path, they have a purpose and a meaning in their life. They get their energy from here. What is happening is, each time they do what they call spiritual work, a little bit of resistance is broken and the energy is released in the form of extreme bliss. “I did something good”. Enthusiasm, positivity. And yes, it is possible to get addicted to these things. And when I tell them you don't need to meditate, you don't need to do any yoga or any exercise, and they say - How am I going to benefit? Because it is their past experience that they benefited from all these so-called spiritual activities. So I can understand that. That itself becomes an obstacle. “He is talking rubbish. Path of knowledge is garbage. There is no yoga there. There is no meditation there. There is no worship of deities. How am I going to get good things? How am I going to progress? Let's leave this path of knowledge. Go back to my old path. That was the best one. At least I had colourful experiences of all kinds and I felt the blissful things and all. I had a purpose and here he says there is no purpose in anything”.

There are levels of resistances. I don't want to bore you more with this mind stuff. There is something called material resistance which happens completely for the materialistic people and there is something called spiritual resistance. It happens to spiritual people. It is more difficult to get rid of. Many lifetimes will pass. Not to worry, you are timeless. The resistance is also an illusion.

Session 82

Nowhere is it said that dreams are not a valid source of knowledge. Remember that experience is a valid source of knowledge, and dreams are experiences. Now, if that is the case, there is no reason to exclude dreams from the knowledge-gaining process. The dream state is just another state, just like your waking state, subtle state, or sleep state. There is a confusion among people that the dreams are coming from the memory, hence it is not a valid state to gain knowledge, and you discard it. But in my view, your waking state is also a dream. Don't forget that. All your other states—after death, before birth, and all the disembodied states that you are going to be in future—are just dreams. At least in “pure experiences” setup we regard dreams as a valid source.

What knowledge do you get from dreams? It is as good as any other state of the mind, it is all negative knowledge. Not real, memory-created, vibrations, qualities, and the dream-person is fake. All this knowledge comes from the dream also. This world, the waking state, is also a dreaming state. And the same knowledge is obtained here. Your subtle states, which I call the projected states, will be as real as the waking state, and they are also a source of knowledge.

Why do people consider dreams not a source of knowledge? Because the knowledge that you gain in the dream about the dream reality is not applicable in the waking state. None of the objects in the dream work in the waking state. You eat in the dreaming state, but you are hungry in the waking state. And therefore, this notion has formed in the minds of even very smart people that the dreams are not real, only the waking is real. But when we use our logic, which is another means of getting knowledge, we see that the objects of the waking state do not work in the dreaming state. Same thing. You eat in the waking state, but you are still searching for food in the dreaming state. The cause and effect, they do not transfer from one state to another. Why is there a bias here? There is no difference between waking and dreaming when you analyze it. You said that there is no consistency in the dreaming state. There are laws in the dreaming state. And I leave it to you as homework to find them out. I have discussed them recently in the Hindi Satsang, if you are interested. There is organization. There are objects. There is a pattern in the dreaming state. Otherwise, there was no possibility of any experience, like in the deep sleep. If we enable our awareness there—yes, you can find a little bit of experience in sleep also. But for practical purposes, we say, no organization is seen.

Dreams can be very vivid. Especially the lucid dream where awareness is on, is as good as the waking state in terms of organization, laws, consistency. Yes, it will be a weird experience. Like trains will be flying, and the planes will be on tracks—something like this. But you get the knowledge. All the knowledge will be negative knowledge, just like the knowledge that you get from the waking state. We do not get any positive knowledge from the waking state. Anyhow, knowledge is not dependent on the state of the mind. If it were dependent on the state of the mind, or which I simply call states, because we have dropped the word mind also here, you can say, the state of the memory, the knowledge is not dependent on them. Why? Because the truth cannot change. That which changes is false. That which does not change is true. And therefore, if it changed with the states, then we won't call it knowledge. We won't call it truth. It will be useless. It will be knowledge of the state. There is no harm in getting the knowledge of the state. Like, we are using the knowledge of the waking state, physical world for our benefit. But it is not called knowledge. So, I suggest that everybody should change their viewpoints now. Think freely. Do not be influenced by your conditioning. Drop the conditioning now. Direct experience and logic. Forget about everything else that you were told.

The intellect is a process in the memory. Therefore, it will always be limited. Secondly, the intellect grows with experience. It experiences something, and then it is put together, which is the logical ability, the rational ability. It is based on the experience. All of the experience is false. So, intellect is based on falsity. It is based on illusion. The intellect is also an illusion. And therefore, it has an inherent limit.

Intellect does not give you knowledge. Then how is it even possible to know anything? We use intellect to negate knowledge. We use intellect to get the negative knowledge. It is not like this, it is not like that. I am not this. I am not that. It will always be a negative statement. When all the knowledge is negative, what are we left with? We are left with no knowledge. In this non-dual existence, there is no knowledge. It is its nature. It is knowledgeless. There is nothing to know here. It is all empty. So whatever was gathered was just ignorance. We use intellect to cut down this ignorance. It is a very special invention of humans, at least you can say. I do not find this thing anywhere.

People are full of ignorance. Why? Because they think that knowledge is real. Knowledge is positive. So that is why they remain in ignorance. There is nothing to know. I am the being. I am not something which can be known. I am unknowable. Like you said, probably nothing is knowable because there is nothing to know. And so you need to drop all your knowledge. And when you do that you rise above the intellect. There is no possibility of becoming a Buddha if you do not let go of the buddhi. Buddhi is intellect. Buddha is above intellect. There is no possibility of leaving the ignorance behind. Understand the limits of intellect and you are Buddha already. It is very important.

There are laws of nature. That is because the patterns have a tendency to organize. And only the organized patterns are seen. And these organized patterns are what we call the memory or the mind. So why are there laws? Because only that is experienced which is lawful. There are no random experiences. And again you need to think about it. If something is totally random-totally lawless-there won't be any experience.

You can say no, I see many things that are random. Like leaves are falling randomly. But they are leaves. They have a position in space. They have a position in time. They have a color. They have a structure. It is not random. Random is something which cannot be experienced at all. And there is no such experience. You cannot even say that there is something like this. We say that there are all possibilities. So there will be all patterns-including random patterns. But our minds respond only to the organized patterns. Mind is the law. There is no such thing like a mind and then somebody made the laws and now you must obey these laws. No it is not like this. Mind is the law. There are laws because it is impossible to experience anything which is not organized.

Is it possible to accidentally attain Sahaj Samadhi and lose it? And regain it with any practice?

Well you will need to tell me your definition of Sahaj Samadhi.

Is it possible to accidentally attain a thoughtless state?

Yes, All things that are happening in our mental atmosphere are mostly accidental. There is hardly anything that is planned. "Oh, I want to have this state?" No, it is not possible. There is no doer, especially of the states of the mind. I am giving you pointers to see your own experience. I do not teach you anything. I will show you your own experience. Which you have neglected so far. Because of the influence of the poison. What is this poison? The ignorance or the wrong knowledge that is stuffed in our minds by ignorant people. You need to clean your slate. Forget about Sahaja Samadhi / thoughtless state. There is nothing like this. There is no state which is thoughtless. Start from the beginning. That is the job of a seeker. We clean the slate. That is the whole purpose of meetings. And you will not gain much if you don't clean your slate first.

Now there will be instant resistance from your ego here. No, no he is telling me to stop thinking. And all my whole knowledge that I got from my life experiences. He is telling me to drop it. It is very cultish, isn't it? The cult leader says don't believe anybody just believe me. But here we are not telling you to believe anything. Don't even believe me. Don't believe the lessons. And about your past knowledge, about your knowledge of the Samadhi or knowledge of this or that, as soon as the program is over pick it back up. It will be useful for you, who knows? What I am guaranteeing is that as soon as you finish your program, there will be no need of any knowledge. You will be beyond words. There will be no need for you to explain or say anything. Plus all the answers will be in front of you. The whole knowledge of the whole existence will be on your feet.

Now what are you going to do with your past stuff that you gathered from here and there? What is the use of that? I am not saying that whatever I tell is your knowledge. I only help you to see. Look here. That's what I say all the time. Look here. And you look. That is your knowledge. Why can't you get the knowledge now? You are not ready to look. You are blinded by the past, the conditioning. You are not like a baby. If you observe babies you tell them - look at this. You point the finger. And they are all receptive. What is my mother telling me? Let me look at it. There is no past conditioning. No, no, no I will not look at it unless you give me proof of it. Which book says this thing that you are telling.

Look at this horse you will say. The baby is all receptive. He is not going to say that - “no, first tell me in which book it is written that this is the horse. Probably it is a cow. You are lying. The other guru told me that the animals with four legs and a tail are cows. You are lying to me”. The baby never says this. That is why it is possible to train babies. That is why they learn something. They will learn whatever you teach them. They are totally blank. The only difference between a seeker and a child is that the seeker has intelligence. And the child is still growing. They are not mature enough. The seeker can detect what is being pointed to and if it is really his experience or not.

I repeat it again and again because we forget. There are only two ways: your experience and your logic. Nothing is mine here. I don't actually have any knowledge. There is no knowledge here. Whatever it is will be a cutting down of whatever you know. All negative. It is like I said probably in the second or third video that all knowledge is negative. It is a subtractive process. It is a gradual cutting off of whatever you know. That is what we call knowledge. On the path of knowledge, you don't get any knowledge. By that, I mean positive knowledge. Nothing is gained. There is nothing to know. And the egos cannot handle this.

At least initially, so what we do, we tell the newcomer, the new seeker, you will know everything. You are going to know everything. And then finally when this process is over, we ask what do you know? And if you do not answer in negatives, you still need to know more. If all your answers are positive, something is wrong, isn't it? The conditioning is the same. Nothing has been purified. So probably you got the answer there.

In my dictionary, the word 'sahaj samadhi' means your current state, the state that you are in right now, right here. What is this state? It is a state of oneness. Why can't you see it? Ignorance. How to see it? Remove the ignorance. How to remove ignorance? Look at your experience. I don't see my experience. Well, that is why the Guru is here. That is why the program is here. That is why the lectures and videos are here. They help you to see. That's all. And you will see that you are in sahaj samadhi all the time. You are eternally in sahaj samadhi. There is no other state that is possible.

'Sahaj' means natural, 'Samadhi' means balanced observation. So I have given it a name. It is called Experiencing. It looks like a verb, but it is a state. It is not an act of experiencing. Because most of the people don't understand what this is. So we dropped it. Right now, right here, there is experiencing. There is no possibility of any other state. It is not a thoughtless state. There is no state which is thoughtless. There are always thoughts. It is not possible to stop the mind. Impossible. Yes, the thoughts will change their nature. From the gross thoughts, they can become really tiny, as good as invisible. But if you observe very carefully, it never goes away completely. It is in the seed form all the time. The activity is eternal. The activity never stops. It can go below the threshold of perception. Right now, your perception is not trained, all your perception is physical in nature. You don't even know what my thoughts are. There is no state where there is no activity. Not even sleep. Everything is activity here. What we call a thoughtless state is just probably stopping the random stuff that goes on in the mind. It is all happening accidentally, isn't it? Do you have any control over what I am going to think next? No. There is no doer of thoughts, and there is no stopper of thoughts. Nobody stops them. Nobody starts them. "I am doing it" is a thought. There is no "I am" there. You will know all these things. Yes, they will be pointed out. You need to see it.

What is the proper way to proceed on the path of knowledge? Take the lesson first. Listen. Then meditate on the lesson. It involves writing it down because we are not trained to meditate like this. The mind will go everywhere. Like it is going right now, isn't it? Samadhi was not taught to you, but the mind wants to think about it. Practices were not given to you, but you want to know about practice. This is what I call an undisciplined mind. There is no discipline there. It learns nothing. So what we do, we discipline it. We make a rule that you were told these and these things. Think about only these things. Discipline your mind. Discipline your intellect. Don't let it run wild. And yes, once you have seen the truth of the teaching, or probably they are false – who knows? I don't claim that I am teaching you the truth. That is your discretion. Write it down. That is what writing is about. It will be the second step, which is meditating. I call it introspection. Because the words meditation, contemplation, are all corrupt words these days. People don't know the meaning of the word meditation. So I just dropped it. I call it introspection, which means seeing within. See within. Whether that is your experience or not. Write it down.

And then the third phase is verification. Just now we did a little bit of verification. Actually you will have to do it yourself. I cannot do verification for you. What I can do is I can check your verification.

That is what I did right now. I check whether the person has verified the teachings or not. And since most people won't be able to verify everything they feel, I have kept a very lenient view here and I allow the person to go forward even if it is incorrect. Why am I allowing ignorance? No, they will know it. Because the seed is here. They learned the trick now. How to know things and then they will do it on their own. Their minds will correct them, hopefully.

How much time can it take? Well, it totally depends on your interest. If you are a real hardcore seeker you will do only this day and night. Like a passionate artist or a passionate scientist you will do only this if you are very, very interested. And then it takes no time. You will go through all the non-dualism and all the philosophies within days. Very simple. What happens is most of interest lies in the world. In worldly matters, in family, in the job, in the news. And yes there is this daily struggle also which we cannot deny. We need to pay attention there also. We won't survive otherwise. Once you have done all these things, the remaining time you devote it to introspection, writing and listening and verification and so on. And then you will find that it happens in a few months. I think six months are more than enough for anybody who is well settled in their lives, who is not going through any kind of major troubles in their lives. Why do we take more than that? Because we get distracted.

No, no, no. He is not telling me the truth. I need to go to the other teacher to see the truth. You can do all that after the program. Whole of your life will be free. Not only your life there will be many lives. You will be going through all these things eternally. You think there is progress? No. There is a cycle only. You will know all these things. We go through the cycles of ignorance and knowledge also. I know it once and then it's done. No. There is continuous refinement. If you take the disciplined approach, six months are more than enough to clear all your doubts. And the only thing you should remember is to follow the instructions. Otherwise, what will happen? I am not saying that you won't learn anything. It will just take more time. Follow the instructions, and the time will be reduced to nothing. Why do I want to reduce the time? I want to clear up the ignorance as soon as possible. That is the intention. Otherwise, the program is designed like this so that you can do it forever. There is no time limit.

I have seen that the seekers are eager to know. And those seekers are helped more. You will be helped as and when it is needed. You are going through the lessons at a very fast pace. Then you will have more questions, more doubts, and more interaction. And then I will increase the frequency of the meetings. Now twice a month is not enough. Well then once a week. Once a week is not enough. He is going very fast. Twice a week. That is also not enough. Daily. There was a time when I was instructing a group of people online only. And there was daily satsang for two hours. Because that group was kind of hungry for knowledge. I am also learning as you are learning. I am also learning what problems people face when they are given this knowledge. How to effectively deliver the knowledge. How to solve the problems of students.

If you stick to the lesson and if you stick to the questions on the topic which you have already heard, it will be a very fast progress. I am not saying you write everything. Write the important stuff. It should be clear enough so that I understand what you write. It should cover the main point. What is the definition? What is the conclusion? Is it according to my experience or not? That you should consider before writing. Once you have written it down, then your ego is not going to let go of it. Understand this. The ego owns everything. Especially when you write it down, it owns the knowledge. It says "oh it is my knowledge now." No, it is not your knowledge. Simply owning it is like a belief trap. You get trapped in that thing which you have written. That is why we have the verification. Because I know you are very brilliant. Everybody is very smart here. They can understand what I am saying. They can write it down beautifully. Some of the articles are so beautiful. I mean I cannot write it like this even if I try. But I need to check. I am not very sure about your knowledge. That is why there is verification. It is very easy.

Use the means of knowledge. Use logic. See what you have written. Is it true? Is it true according to your criteria of truth? It is very fast actually. Most of the material there is kind of in front of your eyes.

And there is something which you will never be able to verify. There are some things there. That is why there is now the fourth stage. The stage where I tell you to experiment. So once you do that, you will see the fruits. You don't see the fruits? That means there are impurities. That is why we have the next stage. Where you deal with the impurities. I tried to list all the impurities under the sky. It was kind of a very difficult thing for me. I was resisting it. I never wanted to record all those lectures. Because probably there are impurities here. The ego does not want to listen to all these things. But I went ahead. It was kind of a very laborious process to record all those things. To list all the impurities under the sky. I could not list all of them. And the major ones are there. So if you are not progressing even after verification, there are impurities, go through it.

And then we have dissemination. And there also it is recommended that you give that which you have taken. At least you do a little bit of effort. I check for at least three months. Three months is my set time. I check whether you are doing something to give it back or not. At least symbolic effort. And if you do that, yes, it is over. The program is over now. Very simple, isn't it?

It is one consciousness that means in a rebirth, the individuality, or the ego, doesn't get birthed? Just consciousness takes another birth?

I never mentioned consciousness. In the whole program, the word consciousness does not appear. So again, it is coming from your past knowledge. Throw it away. There is no rebirth. There is no consciousness. There is no individuality. So can you define the word consciousness? It is not mentioned in the lesson one. No rebirth is mentioned in the lesson one, that is what I mean by intellect that is running wild. There is nothing actually. The lesson one gives you nothing at all. What is lesson one? It is a filter. Those who already know they should not waste their time. That is why there is this lesson one where I tell you the final conclusion. This is probably a very good thing about the path of knowledge that the conclusions are told first so that if you know it already, there is no need to go through the whole of it. It is like the executive summary because the executives are like big people. They don't have time. So the first few lines are for them. And then the whole stuff that comes later is optional. Just like you must have read the scientific papers, the conclusion is first. It is called the abstract of the paper. And any experienced person simply needs to read the abstract and he can immediately decide whether it is worth reading, whether the whole paper pages of pure scientific distilled stuff is worth reading or not. And the first lesson is like this. It gives you the abstract of the whole path and there is nothing to question there because nothing is taught.

Like I say in the end, only those who do not understand what I said need to go through the other parts now. They should continue. Those who understand, they are familiar with what I am saying, don't waste your time. Don't go through the series. No program for you. It is useless. You understand the basics and then don't worry about the details. You don't need to be in the program to know the details.

Even if you get a few details wrong here and there, who cares? The fundamentals are important. You get the fundamentals, leave the program. No, I need to verify. No, you go and verify yourself. You don't need any teacher to verify really. I am not discouraging people from coming here. Most welcome. But I want to make it clear that it is optional. Your time will not be wasted here. You will be given exit paths here and there. Leave it here. Go home from here. Nothing to learn for you.

Why do I do that? Because first it saves my time and trouble. And the second is the student is not going to feel that I was led through all this when there was no need. He told me nothing new. I already know it. Yes, don't torture yourself. It repeats, there is nothing else in the program. But yes, it should be disciplined. If there is nothing to write about it, don't write. If there is nothing to ask there, don't ask. But yes, pay attention to the fundamentals.

We go systematically. We set up a protocol. This thing is going to mean like this. That word will mean like this. And now you are not free to use any other word. Do not use other words, it will be a waste of time. I will keep asking you what do you mean by that? All the terms must be defined precisely. The definition should not be interdependent. They should not be circular. You cannot avoid it sometimes. But one should understand what you are talking about. It should be your direct experience. Otherwise, do not form a word about it.

These are the laws of transmission of knowledge. And you must have seen that nobody knows these things. Only an experienced philosopher or probably a lawyer will know all these things. A legal document is very precise. Why? Because they don't want it to be misinterpreted. Misinterpretation means probably a loss of millions or billions. Or somebody will get hanged for committing no crime. So precision is demanded. And I try to be precise. Any philosopher will be precise in their definitions. If you read some of the old texts, they are so precise. There are some texts that are not meant to be precise. And they give no knowledge. But there are some which nobody reads, unfortunately. There, everything is defined. There, they will tell you, "What do I mean by waking state?" and then many pages only on waking state. It is this, and it is not that. This is the characteristic of waking. That is not the characteristic. And then there will be a long debate. Charvak said this about the waking state. Now I want to refute it. They are wrong. Or the Dvaitins, they said this about the waking state. They are also wrong. Now, Gautama Buddha said this about the waking state. He is also wrong. And yes, the Jains said something which I agree with. They are right. So, more pages. This is how precise they are.

Are we doing that? No. Actually, I take a shortcut here. I define it. Then I leave it to you to verify it. I can also do that. And I have done that for some important things. Like I go on and on and on about something which is very obvious. It is obvious to a blind person also. But why do I do that? There is a reason. If I am describing it in a lot of detail, it means that it is important. Like you have used the word "existence" and all this with no definition at all. I don't know, actually, what you mean by that. When I use existence, there is a whole one-hour talk on it. What is it? Why is it? Where is it? Why can't it be that which you think it is? Why is it timeless? And then there is a complete understanding of the word existence. Now, in the next lesson, when I use the word existence, you are crystal clear about it. Now for your whole life, you will never confuse this word with anything else. Why? Because it was treated well. The treatment of the term was very well done. Logical. I did not use any song or poetry.

Look, the existence is like horns of the cow, and there are two of the horns. And then the cow says, "Moo." What did you get from here? Beautiful poetry, isn't it? Cow is divine, so my poetry is also divine. But it is like bullshit to anybody else, other philosophers. Encrypted language, mindless poetry, songs, music—useless things, waste of time. Never do that. If you use a word, you need to come online, turn on your mic, and give me a lecture for at least 15 minutes on that word. Then there will be some effective communication. Do we have time to do that? No. And that is why it is a one-way thing. Things are already defined for you. Use them. See if they point to the truth. See if they are useful for you. If they are useful, take it. And that is the end. So, this is my recommendation.

That is why everything is recorded. And that is why I recommend all of you to listen to those recordings. Because probably most of your questions are answered there. And you listen to those recordings without going through the fundamentals. The first episodes, first videos. You will gain nothing. Because I go on talking about something you will not know what I am talking about. How do I know all these things? I have taken the trouble. I don't want you to take the trouble. I am giving it to you like it's precooked. Ready made. Yes, you can take the trouble. I am not saying don't do it. What is the trouble here? You will need to read at least 20 books. By different authors. Different philosophies. How do they treat the subject? How do they approach the subject? Where it causes confusion. Where it gives you the knowledge. This fellow is defining awareness like this. And that fellow is defining awareness like that. You must have seen this happen. In the Boudh or Buddhism, the word consciousness is called Vigyan. That is totally confusing, isn't it? Because Vigyan in Sanskrit means science. The knowledge of the illusion is Vigyan. Now how are you going to talk to such a fellow who thinks consciousness is science? How?

In materialism, consciousness is defined as activity of the brain. No communication is possible between an idealist and materialist at all. We never define consciousness like this. So you will need to go through all this literature. And probably you won't be able to go through it. Because you will need a PhD or a bunch of teachers to tell you what they are writing. What they are saying. And when you grasp it, it's already too late. Half of your life is over. You have been struggling to write two sentences in the program for one month. Imagine doing this hard work. Imagine memorizing the whole library on philosophy. You can take this trouble, yes.

So in the end, you will come up with the same thing which I am telling you. Do not waste your time. It is time tested. Listen, Introspect, Question, Verify. And then adopt the knowledge in your everyday life also. Nothing else is going to work. This has been tested for years. It's not my method obviously. You are never given this thing in your life. Your schools won't teach you, your colleges, no. You think TV is my source of knowledge? That is how stupid this society is. If you want to verify the method of teachings, you can take the trouble. See how it is set up. See how the philosophy is done properly. And you will note the same thing that I have noted. It should be like this. That this is the shortest possible way. This is the clearest possible way. And years of experience, the essence of it is appearing in this program. Remember, there is no such program in the world right now. This is the only one which tries to teach Advaita in a systematic way. The traditions are all corrupt now. They are all recitations of the books. If you understand the book, good luck.

Session 83

What is the most effective way to transcend the ego, which is a mental act of identification?

The most effective way to stop the identification with the body or any other object is knowledge. There is no other more effective way than knowing that I am NOT these things. What do I mean by an object? On the path of knowledge, there is only one subject, and everything else is the object. As many of you must be knowing, the subject is the experiencer, the empty pure witness, which is an aspect of existence itself. There is no other subject. A human being is not a subject. Your mind is not a subject. Any organs in the body, such as the heart or brain, are not subjects. Your thoughts and feelings are not subjective. All that can be experienced comes in the category of an object. And because the words "subject" and "object" are totally corrupt these days, I dropped them completely. This should be a formula for everybody on the path of knowledge - there is only one subject, the rest of it, whatever it is, however gross or subtle it is, are all objects.

Everybody knows the physical objects , the body is an object. We should not consider the body as something special; it is an object; it is a machine. Anything that goes on in the body are objects, any sensations from the body, objective experiences of the object, your emotions, feelings, thoughts, imaginations, desires are all objects. Why, because they can be seen, there is only one kind of experience that is non-physical, so all the objects are actually non-physical. There is nothing physical in objects, that actually twist everything out of shape which you know, whatever you were taught, whatever you were told, is exactly opposite of what I'm saying, and so it is kind of difficult to accept this thing in the beginning, but you will see what I mean when you discard the terminology totally of objective and subjective.

You assume the new terminology which is the experience and the experiencer. Now you will see all the experiences are of one kind; they are all non-physical experiences. There are no physical objects at all, and whatever you call subjective or non-physical is actually objective. They are “outside” the experiencer in a somewhat approximate language, you can say like this, there is nothing which is inside the experiencer, so there's nothing subjective, it is empty, everything lies outside. This is only an approximate way of saying it and that is that is the most effective way to transcend the ego because the ego wants to identify with objects, wants to identify with the experience part and now it is very easy to disidentify.

The ego will never identify with the experiencer except in the case of a seeker where the self-realization has happened, the answer to “who am I” or “what am I” has been obtained and there the ego is then forced to accept the experiencer as the I or the subject. It will never happen actually because the ego dissolves as soon as there is the real “I”, like the morning the Sun scatters all the fog. After realization of my true nature, the fog of the ego should get scattered automatically. If that did not happen that means ignorance is still there which I commonly call as not touching the hot pan. You need to actually touch the hot pan to know it is hot, do not simply imagine the heat of the pan. That gives you no knowledge.

So that is the most effective way to disidentify. If you want some kind of mantra or some kind of technique or some kind of magical trick then I am very sorry, I don't have anything like this and even if I give you anything, I can cook it up here instantly if you want, but that will be not so effective, that will be like fooling yourself for a while only, knowledge is the cure of identification, the permanent cure. You can keep shifting the ego to more subtle experiences like people do, when they're told that you are not the body they shift it to something else probably, I am my thoughts and my memories then, because if you remove them there is nobody to say I am. That is the justification. It looks logical but it's not logical because I am there even without thoughts and memories actually.

There are only a handful of experiences that are really important for you that you remember, otherwise there is nothing there in your memory which you can identify with, it is all garbage. This is not really logical, it seems logical for some people who are just starting, they need to be told like this, they need to be shown like this, that look they are subtle experiences, they are objects only, nothing is subjective in them. You cannot call an object or an experience as “I” and then they shift the ego to something even more subtle. I am that which is taking birth, I am that which is dying, I am that which resides somewhere up in the sky. In heaven or hell or whatever places they imagine. Again direct experience and logic must be used and this must be falsified. Do you see yourself as hanging in the sky somewhere, or are you present right now, right here? We show it like this and then this identification happens with these so-called metaphysical entities, so-called metaphysical concepts. They are just different kinds of memories. You cannot experience them right now, but that does not make it “you”. This is wrong logic. I cannot see it, that must be me. No, it's not possible. When you will see it, you will see them as experiences, not as an experiencer. The hidden, the occult, the things that are not seen, they are also not me. So when direct experience fails because we as humans have limitations, then we use logic and that is the final cure of the ego. Now nothing remains where the identification can happen.

There is a resistance in the ego, it does not want to identify with the experiencer. Why? Because there is a huge amount of conditioning on it, there are huge amounts of impurities in it. I must be something which I can grasp. This is big ignorance actually. You are not something which you can grasp with the mind. You are something which I call as the unknowable. Remember there are three kinds of knowledge: known, unknown, unknowable. The experiencer falls into the category of the unknowable. Why? Let us go back to the definition of knowledge. Knowledge is organized experience. It is organized in the memory. No experience, no knowledge. This is the proper definition of knowledge as we have adopted it on the path of knowledge. Now the experiencer cannot be experienced. This is the fundamental knowledge. Experiencer is the one that is experiencing. It cannot be grasped by any means of knowledge, which is our perception and even logic. It's not a logical thing. Logic is also based on experiences. So nothing can be logically said about the experiencer except the negative knowledge.

Remember this thing. We are talking a lot about negative knowledge these days. So all the knowledge of the experiencer is negative knowledge. Not this, not that, not here, not there - like this. So the experiencer cannot be known. It falls in the category of unknowable and the mind has trouble accepting this. No, it is me, I must be knowable. No, “I” is not knowable. You are it. You cannot know it. You can be it. This is how existence is. That is the true essence of the existence that it is. There is nothing to know there. What is ignorance? That I am something which can be grasped by the mind and I am knowable. This is fundamental ignorance actually. The ignorance is so deep that it can take many lifetimes to come out of it. Only Gyani can get out of it instantly and don't worry, your ego comes back instantly, the knowledge is instantaneous, but the ignorance is also instantaneous. It comes back, but we don't have any problem with it now because it has come back purified. It is coming back without any impurities now.

Let it identify with anything, it is very much comfortable identifying with the body. Why not? Accept your body. I keep saying no, the body is not you. It is not even yours, that is for those who still have the identification left, who are not purified like this, the ego is not purified like this. The ego gets purified in the fire of the experiencer. You need to put the ego through that fire. All the impurities burn away in the ego, like we say traditionally that now it is a burnt rope. The burnt rope looks like a rope but it cannot tie you and nothing can be tied with it, it will just fly away in ash. There are just particles that look like a rope. So the ego becomes burnt ego when it is burnt in the fire of the experiencer and now there is no harm, now it is as if the poison is taken out of the snake. Now it can bite you, the bite of the snake is very gentle without a poison. So let the ego be there, let it identify. Now you know you're not it, just like an actor playing a role in the movie knows that 'I am not the actor'. For a while, the actor may forget who he is and completely gets into the character and that is why the acting becomes believable. If the actor simply speaks the dialogues while being himself, not being the character, then we call it bad acting. He does not know how to act. And because this is a play, this is an acting, let the ego act and it will say, I am the body today. Go ahead, you are the body today, do whatever the body does and call the body yours, no problem. Similarly, I am the emotions and thoughts and the desires, not a problem at all because whenever you want you can turn on the light then everything is gone. Ego is gone completely, that switch is in your hand.

We call it awareness, awareness is in your hand, awareness controls the ego. You think you control the awareness or the ego controls the awareness, the ego brings in the awareness or lets do something and then the awareness will be there. No, that is another ignorance. I keep saying that when there is awareness there is no identification. Ego tries its best to bring awareness. Can it do that? Remember, the ego is fake, can the fake thing bring something which resembles something real? The knowledge of the experiencer is the most real knowledge, although it is also technically fake. Awareness is also technically an experience. So, in my dictionary, in our terminology, in our vocabulary, it is like this. Please do not confuse it with something which you know already, from somebody else. Familiarize yourself with the vocabulary here before you conclude something. All good philosophers do that. They ask for the meaning of the words.

So, my definition of awareness is, an experience that informs the mind that there is an experiencer. Can you bring it back through an egoic act? Can you bring the experience, the awareness, there? My conclusion is no. Awareness comes first. Then the ego claims that it brought it back by hook or by crook, or by this method or that method. It is exactly the same mechanism, where the ego takes ownership of the other activities that are happening in the layers of the memory. When a desire arrives, the desire is first. Then the ego comes as a thought, "It is my desire. I desired it. Now, I must do it." And the action happens first. And the ego comes as a thought again, "I did this action. I'm so great." Every time something happens, the ego then comes in and then claims it. One of my teachers gave a very good example of the Joker. When the performance is over, after the real actors perform their act, the Joker jumps in on the stage and takes a bow. He bows down to the audience as if he has done something great. And he jokes around on the stage, and pushes the real actress behind him. "Let me go there first and take a bow because I did a great job."

Ego is like a Joker. When mother nature has done her thing, the ego pops up as an after effect and claims, "I did it." You will believe this Joker if you are ignorant. And that is the cause of your suffering, your bondage, ignorance and all the evil in this universe because you believe this Joker. Don't believe the Joker. The performer is Maya. The performer is mother nature. Mother herself is performing everything. No ego, there is no “I”. Or you can say, in an awakened person, the I has taken the position of the experiencer. And now, there is a thought, "I am the experiencer. I am the witness of whatever is happening." Remember, that is also a thought. The experiencer never says that. You need to completely get rid of the I if you want to abide in complete awareness. That is total disidentification. That is the only trick that I know. And I'm sorry there is nothing simpler than this. Actually, this is very simple. But people do want to have something simpler. Please tell me a magic mantra so that the identification goes away. Yes, I can tell you, why not?

There was a beautiful scene in the movie 'Inception'. One of their targets is now captive, and Dom is trying to extract information from him. He asks the secret number to the locker, and he says, "No, I don't know. There's no locker. What kind of locker?" Dom shouts at him, "Tell me the first three numbers that come to your mind." He tells the numbers, and the movie proceeds. I'm not going to tell you the whole story obviously. But those numbers become reality. Now the hotel rooms are of that number. Now his safe has that number, and so on. The beautiful girl writes down her number - only six digits. You must have seen all that in the movie. It became a part of his dream. It is like a magic trick that they perform on him. Something like that can be done. The guru can do something like that. Is it knowledge? Is it a real thing? Many have done that. Actually, they will tell you, "You are the soul, or you are a spark of God, or you are this or that." This is like implanting the numbers in the head of that character. Same thing, and it becomes your reality, and then you're trapped in it for who knows how long. Many of you are like this, in a very pitiable situation.

All that can be experienced is an object. None of the objects is you. What I mean, what can be simpler than this?

There are some people who have this kind of complaint, "I know who I am. I know it, and the self-realization has happened, but no, the ego stays. The ego never leaves. The Joker refuses to leave the stage." I said, "Look, the Joker has the self-realization, not you. That is your problem. Joker is pretending to abide in its true nature." Many people are actually afraid of seeing it. What happens? Ego creates a monster out of its fear because it's going to go, it's going to die. Self-realization means the death of the ego. It is the final death. Actually, the death that you go through every time you take birth is illusory, and then the real death is when the ego finally says goodbye. That is the real death. Guru kills you. Guru takes away everything you had, plus he takes your life completely. He kills you finally. This is the greatness of the Guru. The ego is afraid of this death. It appears as some kind of fear. And it will create an imaginary thing which it calls “myself”. I'm not the ego, it will say. I understand the logic of this scientific stuff, but it is me that is trying to abide, and I don't see any way to get out of this.

Can you wake up a person who is sleeping? Yes, it is possible. Can you wake up a person who is pretending to be asleep? Impossible. He will keep pretending because he has decided "I don't want to wake up." The person who is really asleep has no pretensions. There is no prejudice in that person. He is naturally sleeping, and you simply shake him up and he wakes up. But somebody whose intellect is working too much, too intelligent, they don't want to wake up. The intellect creates a shadow of the ego, starts worshipping that shadow as myself. It is also very difficult for me to find it out. How do I find it out? I need to question this shadow a few times. I need to put a few questions in front of the shadow. If the shadow fails, I can see it now. And the problem is this shadow is going to avoid the guru like illness, like you avoid a sick person. Don't go close to him, social distancing. So the shadow self is doing the act of distancing from the guru, and it is not seen as a physical distance or even not in the behavior. That person will talk to the guru, yes. That person will meet the guru. That person will be in all the satsangs, but he is hiding from the guru, and does not really want to listen.

Such people become a critic of the guru. They become bigger than the guru, and one day the guru recognizes this situation: "Oh, there is a problem here." And there are only now two options: either the guru will wait or will kick him out. I have seen there are some cases where that corrupted student will start corrupting other students. He starts poisoning their mind, and the guru can sense it. The guru is the first one to know this and kicks him out. The shadow being becomes a problem. It becomes a sickness. What is the solution here? It is very difficult actually. You can see now why am I telling you everything? I'm telling you this complicated matter now because you know somehow it came up, and hopefully, the shadow in somebody who is listening to this podcast or the video or whatever in future will be benefited by this thing.

So anyhow the matter of identification is more complex than you think. That is my point here of saying all these things. If you think I'm totally free from ego, think again. It will remain as something for your lifetime. As long as there are human births, there will be ego. Our job is to accept the ego as a process in the memory. Do not call it myself but accept it. Now it has no excuse to form something more complex and corrupted shadowy monster. Otherwise you suppress it. I want to kill it at any cost. I want to be self-realized and so on. Don't make that mistake. Accept the mental processes. No harm, they are very good for survival. Call your body as I fully knowing it is not I. That leaves no room for the ego to become twisted. The ego does not know that you are pretending. There is no “you” who is doing all these tricks. That's why I don't give you all these tricks also because it creates another entity in your head - the real you trying to suppress the shadow ego. I give you only pure knowledge that works.

Touch the hot pan that works perfectly.

Direct experience can be interpreted differently according to the filters when believed in. How can one differentiate a subjective direct experience from the objective direct experiences?

The meaning of direct experience on the path of knowledge is twofold. The first is whatever your senses are telling you. Perception is your direct experience. The second, more advanced meaning of the direct experience, is an experience that is not colored by your indoctrination. An experience that is not colored by your thoughts or beliefs or assumptions or imagination. There are such experiences, and most of the ignorant people are having these experiences. There are various names for these experiences. For example, Patanjali has very beautifully described all the states which are not Pramana.

Pramana means evidence - the direct experience. What is not evidence? An experience colored with your imagination that will be called Vikalp. An experience of a mentally ill person, and everybody is a little bit mentally ill in today's world, he called vikshep. Now I'm giving you all these Sanskrit words because I never took trouble to translate them or invent words in English for them. On the path of knowledge, there is only direct experience and ignorance which is not direct experience.

Patanjali went into a little bit more detail. Which you'll never find in any psychology books in the world. Only it is there only in the yogic literature. An experience colored with your memory is the Smriti. An experience which is similar to sleep, he calls his Nidra, which is not a not an experience really.

What has happened here is, people have their own meaning of direct experience. I am sitting here and I asked that person if it was your direct experience that you are sitting here and the person is totally convinced. I am sitting yes, and I say - describe “I” and he says I have two legs and there is a chair and I'm sitting on it and there is a body. I'm resting my body and then I catch that person, “my body” or “I - body”, my body is sitting or I am sitting? And there is a little bit of opening up and there is a crack in the ignorance. Wait a minute, the body is sitting here and then where are you? So the person was convinced that he is having a direct experience of sitting. It is true but a little bit of investigation shows that it is conditioning, it is not a direct experience. It is filtered by your beliefs.

Who is talking? And you will say I'm talking. Look at your talking, it is a process that is happening in the body-mind. The “I” is witnessing, witnessing is not an action, witnessing is a state. That is the only state it is capable of. Witness or the experiencer is capable of only witnessing. The seer is capable of only seeing. We don't use these words. I'm just giving you those words so that you don't confuse it with anything else. Experiencer is only capable of experiencing, which is not an action. It has no process there.

Direct experience is that which is caught by the experiencer. If it is caught in the net of the mind, it is a corrupt experience. You're experiencing something else actually, either you are experiencing your indoctrination, your imagination, your memory, or you are in a zombie-like state where anything goes.

What is the job of the teacher here on the path of knowledge? I tell you what is your direct experience and what is not. As soon as you utter something from a book that you read somewhere, it is my job to correct it. Whatever the book says is not your direct experience. It is something which is written in the book. You are having a direct experience of reading the book. You don't know anything, so we kick out the books. It is the job of the teacher to kick out all that which you think is your direct experience and then slowly you're trained to look at things as they are. When we look at things as they are, that is the direct experience.

Your interpretations will be corrected by the teacher. There is no other way. You won't be able to do it initially, at least. You will be trained to do it. Once you're trained to see directly, then the knowledge that you gather can be called knowledge. Otherwise, it is all vikshep vikalp viparya smriti nidra. It is all the different kinds of ignorances that you are collecting, and you have been collecting these for who knows how many lifetimes. You don't remember it now. All of your experience is colored. None of your experience is direct. You can say that that is the impurity. Yes, we need to remove this impurity.

Experience is the means of knowledge. Drop everything else. I'll give you an example. You are in a desert, and you see water, it is your direct experience, isn't it? Then you try to approach the water, and find that there is no water, but the water has shifted like 10 kilometers away from you. Again, it is my direct experience. Now, what is wrong with my direct experience here? Why am I thirsty? Why can't I drink that water which is right in front of my eyes? It is a direct experience, isn't it? Your eyes are telling you there is water. That is not your direct experience; because the water is imaginary. The mind is projecting the water out of its previous memorized experiences. There is no real water. You go to the water, and there is no water. This new experience now tells you that the previous experience was not direct. We can call it a process of gradual refinement. Because this will come by your training. I will just give you a start here, and then for whole of your life, you will be doing nothing but purification. You will start seeing more and more directly. That is how a person on the path of knowledge spends his life. Keeps removing stuff that is created by the mind. You try to be of a pure mind. Now you understand the meaning of these words. You try to see things as they are. There is a device that we use to see things as they are. The device is called logic. Logic tells me that if water is always 10 kilometers away probably it's not water. Probably I don't actually need to go and check it every time. Logic is enough to tell me.

We use mind to kill the mind here. I'm using the mind word very loosely here. One part of the mind tells you that it is water. You employ your more advanced part of the mind (your intellect) to cancel the previous ignorance. Mind kills the mind. That is the formula. That is the technique to arrive at the direct experience.

We actually drop the senses also. The senses are also telling something which is not real. We use logic to kill this illusion produced by the sensory experience. Look at this coffee mug. Look at this phone. Look at this table and chair. Isn't that your direct experience? No, that is not your direct experience. You are looking at the output of the senses. Yes, that is my direct experience. Shapes and forms, names and forms, and everything that is accumulated in the memory. I'm experiencing that, not the objects. There are no objects. There's nothing outside there. It is all created in the mind.

Again I'm using words like “mind” here because you don't know all this technical jargon yet, so I need to use everyday words sometimes. Otherwise nothing will go in your memory. You will not be able to understand anyway. So some things you will know as you proceed in the program. Everything will become crystal clear. Always remember direct means really direct, as direct as you can be, remove all that which your logic can identify, and then double check it. And after double checking, you ask your guru. "I have interpreted my experience like this. Please find any problems here." And the guru has done this for probably years now. And the tradition in which the guru is has done this for 1000 years. In India we have this very big force behind you. Don't worry. You're not going to get into ignorance again. When I say direct experience, yes, it is the final nail in the coffin of ignorance. Yes, you will fall a few times, which is natural. You know everybody falls for the first time at least, everybody falls because they believe their mind so much.

That reminds me of another scene from the movie The Matrix. When Neo is asked to jump from one building to the other building, Morpheus does it. Simply jumps, flies in there. Neo tries but his mind tells him that you are in a real world and you are in a very high position you are going to fall. As soon as that happens, you can see it on his face, his acting was good for once. There, you can see it on his face that he has been occupied by the mind. Now his mind has taken over. As soon as that happens, he falls. The dialogue is that everybody falls for the first time. So everybody falls; there is nothing wrong here. The guru will pick you up. Don't worry about it.

Now, he's asking, "How can we differentiate a subjective direct experience from the objective direct experience?" All experiences are subjective. Nobody else knows what I'm experiencing, because there is no differentiation. There is no possibility of differentiating. You have put these words in front of direct experience, like subjective direct experience and objective direct experience. There is no such thing. Experience is only of one kind.

Just now, in the beginning, I said there is only one subject and everything else is an object. Now, this is something which goes against your conditioning, isn't it? Your conditioning says that there are two kinds of experiences which are - subjective, which only I know, and then there are experiences which are objective - everybody knows them. No, that is wrong. All the creatures have their own experience. Why do I have something very similar to what you have? Same structure, same kind of senses, same abilities gives us an illusion that we are seeing the same object. I change a little bit somewhere in your nervous system or the sense, suddenly your world is totally different. You are in another world now. I'm in another world, isn't that amazing? We are all engrossed in our own worlds which we have created. There is no objective world.

Some people will ask now, out of what is this world getting created? Obviously, I'm creating something similar to what you're creating and that means there is a reality out there. The answer is very simple; these things are getting created out of a shared memory. The shared memory is not a material thing. It is non-physical, non-mental. Now, what is a shared memory? You will learn in your program. But I'll tell you for those who are not in the program, shared memory is an area in the universal memory which interacts with senses. Because the interactions are somewhat similar, that gives us an illusion that we are in a real objective world. It is very well made. It is a piece of art. This illusion, this world that we see around us, is so perfectly made, it is very difficult to call it an illusion sometimes. So, we go to another shared experience which is your dream. Who is sharing the dream? All the characters in the dream. From where the dream is coming? It is your local memory, or you can even say it is your causal memory, but you don't know all these words so I'll just say it is coming from a memory which is yours, not the universal memory. This time it is a private memory. But there are many characters there, many people there, they are seeing the buildings, they are seeing the roads and cars, and they are doing whatever people do in the world - eating, sleeping, fighting and killing and so on.

When you wake up, was there anything that was objective there? No, nothing. Everything was created from the memory but when you were in the dream, you did not know this. You asked a fellow in the dream - what do you see? He says - “Oh it is your own house. Are you blind? You cannot see your house?” Hopefully you have a little bit of awareness there and you say no look this is not a house, this is a memory, this is creation of my mind. You try to convince that other dream character, probably a friend or somebody, your brother or sister, and they say - “No you are mad, there is a solid house. Look I can tap on the house, I can tap on the walls, I can show you it is a solid house!”

When you wake up you are amazed that the illusion can be so convincing, especially to those who are not awakened in the dream, more ignorance means more solid is your dream, more convincing is the illusion. Less ignorance means it starts falling away. You are being prepared step by step for this experience. It will all fall away one day. Hopefully your dream will fall away. You will wake up. That is what we call liberation and it can take a little bit of time, it can repeat a few times like your dreams repeat at night a few times and then you gain awareness in the dream. Then probably the dream will stop or the dream will become like a movie for you. You are not sucked in by the dream, it will be seen as a movie. Now this world will become a movie for you, it will be seen as a dream as soon as you realize that it is all an illusion created out of a memory and that is not my memory, there is no such thing as me and mine or my memory or your memory, no, these limitations, these boundaries are also ignorance. Why have we taken up the ignorance? To enable a human experience. If I could experience everybody's pain what will happen to this organism which I am calling I? Dead in no time because of all the pain. So what mother nature has done, she has erected walls around our memories so that we don't get the influences from the other areas in the memory which are going through whatever hell they are going through. Who cares?

But mother nature has opened five windows in this great wall that she has erected around you, the differentiation that has happened in the memory. These five windows are what we call five senses. So, whatever experience you are getting is a very limited experience of a shared memory in a dream. You think it is an objective experience. A little bit of investigation, and it will fall away. Everybody is having their own experience. When the experiences can be shared meaningfully, like I also say that the music and the painting is beautiful, for some other creature maybe it is not really like this because they interpret that kind of memory differently, that kind of perception differently. I need a limited meaningful experience to stay alive in this social structure we call a society, a group of humans. And that is what has been provided, what you call your life, what you call your object to experience your life in this world. Complete illusion, it has been “designed” like this to give us a meaningful experience.

I can break it down now, but you will end up in the madhouse. What is the use of that? Actually, many people in your madhouse are the cases where the wall has broken due to some kind of affliction. It has broken accidentally, something went wrong and the wall is now shattered. Where do they end up? They end up in a mental asylum. They die, poor people. Hopefully, they die because there is no meaning in this kind of life where your boundaries are broken. Now this is very important for those who are doing forceful exercises, like beating the mind with a hammer every day using yogic techniques and occult techniques and whatever techniques they know or they read from somewhere. To those who are doing this kind of forceful work, they should be really careful. You don't know when the wall will go down and then you will end up with a lot of trouble. It is all temporary. The wall builds up again if there is not much damage and then you are isolated again, you can live a normal life. All these things are done for our own benefit, we should not break them. We should not play with Mother Nature.

There is nothing to differentiate because there are no subjective and objective experiences. All experiences are of one kind: non-physical. The source of your experiences is a memory. Now some people are going to ask - why is there a memory? Isn't that the object now? No, the memory is fiction. It is a model that we made up. We cooked it up. We say that the memory is where the vibrations that are in the existence have been stabilized a little bit. Then you will say no, then the vibrations is “matter”. The vibration is the object. And I say no, there is no vibration. There is only possibility there, the possibility appears as vibration. The nature of the vibrations is binary change. It is all very beautiful but it is kind of beyond mind. It is mind-blowing. It is very difficult to accept if I say it like this if you don't go step by step. That vibration is nothing but me. I am appearing to myself. There is only me. You can also say the same thing: there is only me. We are all there as one self as one experiencer.

Vibration is an imaginary word. It is a theory which we invented to explain what is happening. When I say vibration, when I say patterns and memories, it's all false. Remember, all that changes is false. You enjoy the show. There's nothing to learn. Why does this vibration happen in this way and why does that memory happen in that way? It's all garbage. Nothing to know here. It can happen in a million ways. Why? Because it's all fake. Nothing which is absolute.Here in my experience part, that which is not false, that which is absolute, is me. I am absolute. Everybody can say this thing: you are me, I'm you. So that is mind-blowing. And when this ignorance is dropped, you will lose all interest in the vibration and the memory and all that. It is all garbage.

Therefore, I say sometimes that you don't need to listen to these things. And no benefit is there in learning about the science of the mind, the science of the memory. It is a distraction. Then why do I teach it? Why do I say these things? It is like a second attempt. First attempt is the first video where everything is told, as it is, in a few words. Essence of non-dual teaching, is given to you in minutes. Then the first attempt is over. Then the second attempt starts: What are these words? What is the experiencer? What is the existence? What is true? What is false? How to get the knowledge? So, the second attempt starts and then I come to self-realization and then Oneness. And there ends the second attempt. Now, the third attempt starts. Probably, you did not realize your true nature, and you did not realize the oneness even after that. The memory and the vibrations and all that is my third attempt. I show you that this is all false. Whatever I told you is just a mechanism to bring you out of ignorance. I just did that in two or three sentences when I told you everything. Then I said the vibration is me.

We always come back to the truth. We always come back to the knowledge. I don't let you get lost in the science part of it. By science, I mean the knowledge of the illusion. On the path of knowledge, science is not knowledge. Let us assume we don't get it now. The real hard work starts. Where is the impurity? Start doing purification. You do the purification by whatever methods. Now, we are in the method domain. Now, we have entered the system that is all borrowed from somewhere else. Let me tell you, there are no methods on the path of knowledge, in the advaita. There is no practice, no purification, nothing. Why did I borrow all that from yogic paths or occult or some other paths? Because that is my fourth attempt. I want you to get this knowledge by any means in this life. Don't want you to waste this life. I don't give up. I want you to know. The guru field is always at work. They never stop. The gurus will keep appearing in various forms. It will never stop as long as there is ignorance, which is forever actually. There will always be work for the gurufield.

As soon as you know you automatically join the gurufield. Yes it is optional, you can become an active part or you remain the passive part. Simply the presence of an enlightened person on this planet is enough. You are radiating that knowledge through non-physical means. You are not isolated. You were

not isolated before also but there was a ignorance that I am an isolated individual, I cannot affect

anybody, my thoughts are not affecting anybody - that is your ignorance. It is like clear as a day that whatever I do, think and say, affects every particle in this universe. Everything is right here right now. Memory is non-local. It does not take distance or time to affect anything, it is instantaneous. Memory is timeless. Memory creates time. Memory is not in time, time is in memory. As soon as you know this thing, your self-correction should start in your mind. Unfortunately it does not always. That's why it takes so many attempts.

Your presence, this pure presence which you are, is now radiating into the universal memory, which is right now right here. It is just in front of your nose, the whole universe is there. Your presence here actually radiates this knowledge everywhere.

Session 84

Muni's question is on the first lesson: "Can existence know itself without experiencing?"

Can there be any knowledge without there being an experience? And the answer is very simple: All the knowledge comes out of only experience. If there is no experience, there is nothing to know. A related question can be that somehow we cut off the experience part and then whatever remains, can it be known? And I have a surprise for you: Nothing remains that can be known. What remains is the knower and the knower cannot be known. There is nothing in the knower, or we use another word which is more neutral - the experiencer. There is nothing in the experiencer to know. Even if it stays there, it is perfect stillness. Exists as itself, there won't be any knowledge of its existence, because who is going to have the knowledge of what? Who is going to say "I exist"? There are no words there because saying is also experience. Who is going to think - "I am"? Because there is no thinking, as thinking is an experience.

Remember, you have decided to cut off all the experience, this is what you are assuming and this can only be done in imagination. It cannot be done in reality. You can try, I do not discourage people from doing such experiments. You will see that what you call as no experience is actually a subdued experience of another kind. There are techniques, where you quieten your mind, forget the body and so on, and you reach a place where the attention is not focused on any particular experience and there is a silence which says "I am here." But remember that is also an experience. How do you know that it was an experience, not an experienceless state? Because it forms a memory. When you are out of this meditation, out of this state, you come back with a memory that "I did this, there was something like this, it was only me." But it is an experience, it is not your everyday experience, that's all was different. It is an experience which you do not get every day. You artificially induced this state where the daily experiences are ignored, but there is you, yes, there is experiencer, there is no doubt about it. There is also a mind which is being illuminated, which is really quiet now. There is a memory. What do you mean by mind? It is just a memory, and there is everything as usual: existence is there. So the experience can change, but it cannot go away, and there is always knowledge, always something. There is never nothing.

So what is this idea of there being only the experiencer, not the experience? Yes, the experience is the false component of the existence. So it makes sense to say that, there is only experiencer in existence, and it cannot be known, and whatever is known is false, so nothing is known. In existence, nothing is there to know, and everything is there to “be”. Remember we are in the spiritual domain now, so here things are reversed. In the world, there is everything to know and nothing to be. I am nothing in the world, I am not the body. I am not the mind. I am not this. I am not any process. I am not any metaphysical thing - nothing at all. I am not present. But there is a lot to know and experience. Experience is of all kinds.

What is reality? The reality is reversed. There is nothing to know and everything to be. If you try to know what is, you will know only the illusion of what is, and now, and there is nothing to know in truth. This is the fundamental state. No knowledge is a fundamental state. Knowledge is an impurity covering that state, and if you think that I can know something, and it is called ignorance, which is another impurity on the existing impurities, it is an assumption. It may sound mysterious. Yes, it is all mysterious. It is all a mystery. What we do here is, we just cut down the ignorance, and the mystery is now revealed, which is the most beautiful thing that you will ever experience. Mystery is the most beautiful. You think you know everything, and that is beautiful? No. There is nothing better than mystery. The hidden is the most beautiful.

Muni is saying, Does that mean states shift from experiencing to existence and back to experiencing?

In our dictionary here on Pure Experiences, experiencing is equal to existence. This you should note down. Experiencing is not a verb which comes out of experience, like you are experiencing a satsang right now. At least in our framework which we have built up, the word experiencing is used as a synonym of existence. When I say there is no experiencer, there is no experience, there is only experiencing, what I am saying is - there are no components in the existence. The components do not exist independently. You can say that the attention shifts from one experience to another. Instead of calling it experiencing in our terminology, you say it like this: Does that mean that the attention shifts from an experience to another experience, and there is only the shifting? Yes. Then it is right.

It is right to say that experiences change. Existence never goes away. All you are experiencing is existence only. The attention shifts in existence only, nowhere else. There is nothing besides existence. Where else can it shift? It is not possible. There is only one. The states cannot shift from existence to something else because everything is a part of the existence. The attention can shift from, or the states can shift from one part to another of the existence. There is one existence. It can be experienced in parts. When this question is posed - what experienced these changing states? The answer comes in the form of another word, which is the experiencer. And the funny thing is it is another name for the existence itself. Experiencer is the existence itself.

Existence experienced itself, and then one part of the existence called this thing as experiencing, and it also said that, "Oh, there must be an experiencer which is separate from all this business that is going on," and then it says this is changing. Everything that is experienced is changing. So that part is separate. What is the agency that does that? What is the entity that is saying all this? Remember, division is also an experience of some kind. What is it that divides one into many? Yes: Mind.

That experience which does this illusory dividing has a name, and many people call it a mind. It is just another experience, it does not stop there. After all, minds never stop. It goes on and says, "I really believe it. This is what happened." And so the ignorance begins. Ignorance begins by believing the interpretation of illusion by the mind. The belief is also in the mind. We take the steps backward actually. Spirituality is a reverse journey. You do not go anywhere. You need to come back. Come back home. Your home is right now, right here. Whatever is there is right now, right here. You have actually wandered away from it by thinking about these things and accumulated a lot of ignorance by believing whatever appears with the courtesy of mind.

It is an amazing thing, isn't it? Without mind there is no experience, actually. All experiences are of the mind. One of the experiences is that there are divisions and there is a reality there and, there is I and there is you. These thoughts are believed. The problem is not that the mind is saying this, the problem is not that there is illusion. The problem is the belief. It has been taken as truth. We destroy this belief. We return back to a place where there is absolute peace, silence, no believing, no misunderstanding, no blind beliefs, no assumptions. We are trying to see everything as it is, whatever it is. We don't worry about what we are seeing. We don't want to stop it. There is nobody here who can do that. It is all an illusion. We simply return to this direct seeing which is pure. It is a pure experience, not polluted by noise of the mind which is trying to believe something, to know something. It will be called a state of Sahaj Samadhi.

One moves from ignorance to knowledge and back to ignorance. There is no mind already. There is an assumption that there is an entity which is real and we can move to it. It can be experienced and so on. Remember all it is an illusion. What we call the mind is also an illusion. That is the only illusion, actually. So we move from ignorance to knowledge and when we are in knowledge we give it a special name. I called it awareness and when we are in ignorance we call it unawareness. You can say that when there is too much thinking and then it is ignorance. When the mind is silent. It is not cooking something out of whatever is naturally going on in front of it, then it is knowledge. Although you can say it like this but in our philosophy, we do not use this style. Every philosophy has its own way of describing things and we have our own way of describing things. So as long as you are in the program you need to learn how things are described here and you need to keep everything else aside till you complete the program. And then you are free as a bird to do and say whatever you want. After finishing the program, I will encourage you to go and explore other philosophies, read other books, check what other teachers are saying, because then you will be trained, you will be prepared, then you will be in knowledge and you will understand whatever is being said by everybody, and you will see that they are all saying one thing; they use different languages, different words.

Right now you don't understand any book. All the books will be bared before you. The book will speak to you. You will understand all the great masters immediately. All the scriptures, you know simply by looking at them, what they are saying, and even the statues in the temple, they are going to speak to you. He is sitting in this pose, his state of mind is this. He is sitting in that pose, his state of mind is that. You will decode everything that every spiritual master has ever said. That is why I encourage you to explore, but only after you are prepared. That is what we are doing in the path of knowledge program, we are training you to see, we are disciplining you, we are showing you how to think, how to gain knowledge, how to get rid of the ignorance which has been stuffed into your mind by this society, ignorant people. You were born innocent, no knowledge, no ignorance. Then it depends on what kind of surroundings you are in. If you are fortunate and you are born in an enlightened family, you will grow up as an enlightened person. Most of us are born in ignorance, it is so deep that it is actually trying to protect itself. People are not willing to come out of it. This is the condition. So it takes a little bit of discipline to come out of it, and I have my own way of doing that. It is very shocking, and it is very direct because we are on the direct path.

Leyla is saying, can you please discuss Kundalini and out-of-body experiences? I had a strange OBE a month ago where when coming back to the body, I felt an electric shock in my lower spine.

Actually I remember that you mentioned this to me sometime ago, but I don't remember what I told you. You are not under Kundalini, that is confirmed. It matches the Kundalini experience. It is related to all these practices. Just as leaves of a tree are connected through branches and trunk, no tradition or teaching can claim separation from the truth. The path of knowledge does not exclude Kundalini, but names it differently as "activity."

When we avoid specific terminology, it reduces confusion and prevents idolization of concepts. Activity is a translation of the Sanskrit word vritti, which refers to an experience that occurs within memory and involves changes in memory. This change is due to the vibratory nature of memory, a process that we can learn to control through the study of occult sciences. Kundalini is a method of manipulating memory according to our desires. It lies within the occult. In the Kundalini tradition, this is referred to as taming the Devi or receiving her grace. There is significant overlap between the path of knowledge and Kundalini, as both involve changing the mind through delicate adjustments rather than force. I have provided detailed explanations in three episodes of my podcast for those interested in exploring this concept further.

There is no escape from the activity that is happening in the mind. And because you are gaining knowledge, your mind is changing. Your memory is changing. It is getting reconfigured into something else. We can call it a purification of some kind. And now the parallel between Kundalini and a path of knowledge is obvious. In Kundalini, we also say that she is doing purification. If there are more impurities, you will experience more symptoms. It is very strange, out of this world. And not only out of the body, you are going to experience something which is totally out of this world. And that is because that energy, or whatever it is that is trying to clean it up, is trying to uncoil and go straight to the source, source of knowledge, source of being. They use very mysterious language because there is no other way to describe it. We use a scientific language. We think that we know, but no, there is nothing much to know. That is something to experience. You need to experience these things. And we have a framework to know all these things, but it is not really useful. And yes, if you are on the path of knowledge, it will match with Kundalini experience somehow.

You will start waking up at 3 o'clock in the night, you will start getting strange sensations in your body, and your thinking will change, your behavior will change. What is the effect of that? Your life will change. That is also called purification. Your likes and dislikes, preferences are going to change. What happens is, the person is being pulled out of the world, pulled out of the Maya, the illusion, slowly being given doses of knowledge. It has the same effect as the activity of Kundalini. Here we are doing it in a somewhat delicate way, you can say. We operate at the source code, not at UI.

Kundalini people are using force. I will give you an example, like the horse carriage can be driven by hitting the horse. You can hit the horse with a whip and the horse runs, and the carriage moves. Or you can train the horse. You can say a word, "go now," and the horse now executes the command. No need to hit the horse. So Kundalini is like hitting the horse and pulling the chains of the horse, and so on. Even putting food in front of the horse, "you did a good job, take this food." And the path of knowledge is doing the same thing, returning to the source by training the horse - Look, you don't need to go there, go here. When I say run, you need to run. When I say stop, you need to stop. Now our horse does it without actually getting beaten up. Kundalini is a little bit more raw.

I have seen this personally. I meet a lot of people and I get these kinds of reports like Leyla - “when I talked to you, the next day I woke up and there was this strange experience. I could not recognize my face in the mirror and very strangely I did not talk for one week. And there was this sensation, there was that sensation. I lost all interest in eating; I lost all interest in my husband”. Something like this. What are these experiences? Purification. And yes, the purification will show up in the body obviously. But why? The body is a part of this layered structure of the memory. It is the part of the layered structure which is visible through gross senses. That is what you call a body. When the top layers start changing, they are going to send some energy down there and what you experience as electric shock is, obviously, not an electric shock. It is a sensation which is very common among kundalini people.

Because of the knowledge that you are gaining, the boundaries of your memory are falling. There is a boundary around your memory which is for your own protection, it is very useful for human life. Without it, there won't be any human life, and because of the knowledge, they crumble and so whatever you are doing in a total state of darkness, total ignorance, and total unawareness will start now happening in a little bit of light.

The activity changes. When the activity settles in a particular configuration, I call it state. Right now your activity is settled on five senses which we call the gross senses or the lower senses, physical senses, and that state has a name, it is called the waking state. The mind, or the memory, is experiencing a waking state. The attention is focused on the lower layers and the senses there. That's why you are having an experience of being in a body and being in a world. If you move this activity from there, which happens naturally every night, it is a cycle, you will move to other areas in the memory. Right now you are in an area of the memory which we call the greater memory and in common languages, you call it my world, my country, my earth. There is no such thing, it is memory only. You can move the attention either knowingly or it can happen naturally. And when it happens under awareness, there is some light, because of all knowledge.

Now you cannot afford to go back in darkness. You don't like the darkness. Your mind has a tendency to get attracted to the light. There will be some light. By light I don't mean light bulb or sunlight. Please do not misunderstand the metaphors here. The light means the light of the experiencer. That which enables experience is what is called light in the spiritual world. Enlightenment is not a light bulb which appears when you close your eyes, no enlightenment is knowing. That which showers its light on all experience.

If you go in this new state with awareness, you are going to call it out of body experience. It is out of waking state experience. There is nothing extraordinary here. The memory has done nothing extraordinary. The structure has done nothing extraordinary. It does it every night. It has been doing it for millions of years. Can you imagine? You are so old. I don't want to insult anybody by calling them old. When I say you are a million years old, that is not insulting now. You have become a god now. So we are all gods having a human experience. We are very old. You have done this many times, billions of times. Because of the darkness, you don't know it. At least in the waking state you don't know it. The waking state wipes out all the recall of the other memory states, other activities. You have forgotten everything. The reason is unawareness. The reason is the poison of the world. We also call it the poison of the senses. Vishaya. Vish means poison. Vishaya means whatever the senses are sensing. They are sensing the poison. Ancient people knew all these things. This knowledge is as ancient as you are. It has been there since the beginning. Nothing new is happening to you.

Leyla should relax and enjoy, nothing harmful will happen to you. Just keep your awareness on. I am promising you that strangeness will increase even more. There is no end to the strangeness. There is no end to the experiences. You have chosen a small human experience right now because there is some reason, and everybody is free to assign a reason to it. See, we are not bound by one reason. Some people will say I have taken the birth for this and that is why you have taken the birth also. And I say no sorry I have not taken the birth for whatever you have taken the birth for. Everybody has their own mission. Why are we together here in the satsang? We have the same mission. We are all on the same path. We want to know; we want to be free; we want to get out of the ignorance; we want to get out of the darkness; we want to get rid of the suffering that this darkness is causing. That is why we are seen together—birds of the same feather.

Why do you always find me and I find you? In every birth this has happened. Probably since many births, since you took this path. Every time I take birth, you take birth, and we meet. How is this possible? I call it the attractor, a law of the mind. Anybody who is interested in the laws of the mind, please go back to the podcast. The podcast is a treasure. This is a repeat of all that which I have already said. There is a whole series on the laws of the mind. And one of the laws of the mind says that if the tendencies match, if the activities match, they will start seeing each other. It is amazing, isn’t it?

Why does that happen? There is a process which I have mentioned. If anybody wants the technical details, it is all there. We figured it out a long time ago. It is unfortunate that all these traditions died out a little bit because of the dark ages and human stupidity, but it is all known. There is nothing which is not known actually in the spiritual field. Where is the ignorance? In other fields, in society, in the sciences. They don’t know anything. In spirituality—we claim to know everything. Just like there is no end to ignorance, there is no end to knowledge of the illusion also. But we don’t go in that direction. We don’t explore the illusion. We come back from the illusion. That is what we call knowledge. Since it is coming back, it is shedding. And that is why I call it negative knowledge. Path of knowledge is a subtractive path.

Is having the idol of Kali shifting to the Kundalini tradition?

Kali is their main goddess. There are probably eight more. Kali is the most fearsome. She has all these very scary looking weapons in her hands. She is cutting down the heads of demons. She has made a mala out of all those heads. Why is that picture there? Is it there to scare away the newcomers so that they don't trouble the Guru too much? Probably they are trying to tell you something - everything will be cut down. She is cutting the heads off your ignorance. These monsters are troubling you. It is a symbolic way of saying that your ignorance is the cause of your suffering. Kali or Devi is going to cut them down. It is a process of cutting. Whenever I say purification, it is a process of letting go. I don't want this trouble. I don't want bondage. I don't want ignorance.

On a spiritual path, you will be reduced. Reduced to what? Your real nature. What is your real nature? Emptiness. There is nothing there. It is extremely pure, unbounded, eternal. There is no time, no space, no experience also. All that is created. As soon as the experience is there the ignorance starts. It is simple. It has become complex because of all this activity. We have no problem with activity. Remember this always. We don't want to shut it down. Nobody is there to shut it down. It will never shut down. Even if you become a Bodhisattva or whatever it's not going to shut down. Thousands of people have become Bodhisattvas. Nothing has shut down. It is as it is. Probably it has grown a little bit. Expanding.

You should pay attention to the essence, not to the details. That is where our home is. We don't want to shut down the details. We don't even want to know them. Know that they are an illusion. That is the end of the ignorance there. Now you focus on your essential nature where there is nothing to know, nothing to do, nothing to be. You are nothing. Which is a good thing. As soon as you become something, ignorance starts. You cannot stop the illusion from appearing. You cannot stop the activity. But you can stop the ignorance. That is the good news. Stop assuming that it is true. And stop assuming that I am one of these things that appears.

It is perfect. It is complete. It is purna. So there will be everything. What you need to do as a human or as a structure of memory? Do not try to assume things about it. Know what is happening. Twist it to get what you want. Make it happen the way you want. I'll tell you a secret - Desire fulfillment is the most essential process in the entire manifestation. Worshipping Devi is another path, and utilizing the Devi is what we call the left-handed path. But essentially desire is what is driving the whole creation. Desire, nothing else. The desire to manifest, to appear, is just second to emptiness. On the path of knowledge, we do not see the tantra as something bad. At least that is what I could learn after many mind-blowing revelations about what this experience is. We dismiss it as an illusion. It is the desire of existence.

The path of knowledge is not the only way to look at things. We have many ways, and they are equally entertaining. If spirituality is not entertaining for you, then don't come here. If you think that it is a struggle, please don't come here. Look at the scientists. They are sitting on a continent of ice: minus 40 degrees Celsius. Plastic packets in which some sticky stuff is there that is what they eat. There is no communication with the outside world. They drill in the ice using a machine and then use a microscope to see what is in the ice. And they have been doing this for five or six years. Is it fun? For us, it is not. For them, this is the biggest opportunity in their life. This is the biggest fun they are having. This is what excites them. It is not a suffering at all to be in Antarctica for five years in a metal box. It is fun. So that is how spirituality is. If you enjoy it, you will walk the path. If you don't enjoy it, you don't. Spiritual seekers are like this. We enjoy only this. We don't enjoy the worldly stuff. It becomes boring in a few days.

Desire is where the expression starts. There is no harm in saying that it is “my desire”. The whole manifestation is mine. But please keep in mind that is not your nature. Your true nature is desirelessness. You accept whatever there is as my desire because you are all accepting. You are complete. You do not reject things. And that is why those who know, they do not try to meddle in the Maya. They do not try to change whatever is going on. It is all good. It's all perfect already. Those who know a little bit, they try to change it. They also progress somehow through probably slowly, and they fall in some pits also, but they finally get out of it.

Mary is saying, would you please talk about the boundary of the memory more and how it changes?

There is no boundary. What I call boundaries is our ignorance. There is no real boundary in the memory. If there were a boundary, that would be really good news for me because then I could give you a technique to simply shatter that boundary. The problem is I don't have the technique or there is technique but it is kind of indirect. It is through knowledge. That is because there is no real boundary. It is our ignorance. Why have we assumed the boundary? The answer is very simple: Survival. This human creature, the product of the memory, cannot survive if there is nothing to distinguish itself from the other parts of the universal memory. So it erects imaginary boundaries and it says, "I am not going to look beyond this part. I am happy here. I want to be me." This is the birth of individuality. Breaking a boundary is the death of the individual.

How does it change when the truth of the individual comes out in light of your knowledge? In the end, knowing that there is no individual is breaking off the boundary. The experience is continuing because there is nobody to actually shatter the boundary. Even when I know there is no individual, why is there still a human life? Why are there still births and deaths? Remember that which is claiming that "I know" is also an illusion. It is the boundary, isn't it? Individual is saying that "I know that I am not" -- what is that, some kind of joke, isn't it?

It happens on its own and the knowledge that there is no individual happens. That which wants the boundary to disappear is not there. It will disappear on its own. She is asking how it changes. It changes the way everything else changes. Who is changing everything? Nobody. There is nobody. There is only change. There is nobody who changes. So I cannot change it. It will change on its own. And the falling of these bounds is the start of your liberation. And now we have a beautiful theory to explain it. In India we have everything. Everything can be explained. They figured it out already. I usually give an example of a fan. Your fan is spinning fast, but all you need to do is switch off the fan. But does it stop? No, it does not stop. It keeps spinning till its momentum runs out, its energy that you have thrown in the fan runs out. This is only a metaphor. Similarly when you know finally that there is no individual, it is like switching it off and now the energy of the memory keeps running it, maintains the boundaries. It keeps managing it somehow. It manages your life because that is its function. The energy will not die off quickly.

How much time will it take to dissolve completely? We don't know. If you stay with me for one year, two years, if you talk to me I can guess when your fan will stop. I can guess the end of your spinning but it's not perfect. It's not accurate. For some it is one lifetime. For some it is five lifetimes, ten lifetimes, ten, twenty, one thousand, who knows? Depends on what is the content there. What is driving this individual? And we have a name for it. We call it the karmic memory, the karmic storage. And we have very beautiful names in Sanskrit. Probably you may want to know all those things and probably many of you already know them. There are words in Sanskrit for all these memories that are driving the individual, that are keeping the illusory boundaries intact. It takes a little bit of time to totally merge with the universal memory. We can call it dissolution or moksha or nirvana or whatever you want. Names don't matter. The event matters.

Don't worry it will happen, our nature is timeless, isn't it? There is no time. The time is also my creation. You can make as much time as you want and you can delete as much as you want. On the path of knowledge we never worry about when the fan is going to stop. Things are not changing. Let me put some petrol in it. That is the path of kundalini. They are in a hurry. You get the self-knowledge today and even if you want to delay the dissolution you will fail. I told you there is nobody to delay or accelerate. There is only grace. The grace delays. The grace accelerates. You can pray: “Yes please, accelerate my evolution to dissolution”. And hopefully something will happen. It is magic, isn't it? It is a mystery. You can pray that: “I have not fulfilled all my desires. Please stop this. Accidentally I came to know that there is no individual but I have some leftover stuff please don't dissolve me”. And that also is possible.

There is no way to do it from the point of view of the individual. Individual is being done. Individual is an illusion produced by the memory. It does not do anything. It simply claims that I did it. Aham, the ego. There is nobody there. And the one who prays is not the one you think is praying. The prayer also is like a self. The existence is imagining itself praying to be something, to delay this, to accelerate the evolution. It is doing itself. There is only one actor, which is the existence. And there is only one director. There is only one viewer in the audience, which is existence. There is one story which is written by existence. Can you imagine how strange it is? It is very strange, it is all non-dual. It is all one.

That is all that is happening here. Actually it is illusions, where nothing is happening but it appears as happening, it is mysterious in the end. This is how self-realization is like, switching off of the button and then there is a loss of individuality. What will that mean? I will be dead and will not be born again and all. No. That means you still have an ignorance. Look around you. So many dissolved individuals are there. Countless millions, billions. Has anything stopped? Nothing stops. The leela never stops. What are you worried about? No, no, I want to be dissolved. I don't want the play. But there is nobody who wants it. Wants cannot go away. They are the wants of the existence. Nobody is there to will anything else. Whatever happens is the greater will. I call it the energy of the desire, the motive force.

Why is karma equal to desire? There is a relation between all these things. Why is the memory nothing but a desire? The memory is not static, it's moving. It is a vibration. Why is there a vibration? Because of the desire to vibrate. And nobody does it. And nothing really happens when it happens. Nothing changes. You think I am going to get nirvana and everything is going to change, individually is like a speck of dirt here. Nothing happens. Even if you dissolve into the universal memory, a billion others are going to pop out of it. Don't you want it? Yes. Existence wants it. Existence wants the Leela. The Shiv does not want to get rid of the Shakti. The Shiv wants to merge with the Shakti. They want to become one. Remember this illusion does not end. It is the end of the individual which is already nothing really. Is the individual here right now? No. That means it's already dissolved. Is there time? No? Means it already has happened? Will it never happen? No. All possibilities are there. They have already happened. Tell me what are you worried about? Tell me what are you trying to achieve? This is the end of the path. Mukti is here. You are not bound. Liberation has already happened.

The direct path is so beautiful that it starts and it ends instantly. It ends as soon as it starts. That's why everybody loves it. We love the path of knowledge. Today we are going to start on the path of knowledge. Now you think that it's going to take lifetimes? No seconds, and it is done. If you watched the first video in your program, in minutes everything is done. It took minutes because my speed is only this much. If I were Gautam Buddha, I would simply lift a lotus and show you. Look at the lotus and you would go home laughing. It takes only this much time.

Muni is saying, karmic memory has been collected because of identifying with illusion. Isn't the light of knowledge enough to clear it immediately?

Yes, it is enough to clear it immediately. Tell me which memory is yours? Tell me which karma is yours? I'm asking Muni. Looks like she has a background. Tell me about your individual karma. Is there an individual? Can you describe the individual? She is saying yes, there is an individual. Can you describe the individual? What is there? How do you come to this conclusion? Who thinks she is Muni? Is there thinking or is there a person? I'll repeat the question - Is there thinking or is there a person who thinks? Is there a thinker? Look at that. You already know that there is only thinking. There is no thinker. I'm asking you to show me the individual and you're showing me the thinking. There is nothing. No individual karma. If you think I'm the individual and it is my karma then yes it is there. Then yes your thought makes it so. And you think I'm bound by this memory now I have all these boundaries and I'm going to be affected by this and now it's not going to leave you. Now it's going to bite you. Now the snake has poison in it. Now the rope is a very solid nylon rope, a steel rope. Now it is going to bind you. If you think you're bound you're bound. If you think you're free you're free.

How much time did it take for Muni to come out of the illusion? She was asking me, why won't it happen immediately? How immediately do you want it to happen? Tell me. If you are not liberated now, you will never be liberated. I'm not saying this to Muni. I'm saying it to everybody. This is a general formula. If you're not liberated now here and now, you will never get liberated. Why do I say this? All masters have said this. But the ignorance is too much now. All I had to do was ask you - Is there thinking or is there a thinker? And it's gone. All your karmic bondage is gone. Don't worry. It will come back. As soon as the satsang is over, there will be an individual.

What should you do? Kill it? No, I'm joking. Don't do it. You need to accept the individual. It is your play, your leela. Love the individual, don't kick him out. Fully knowing there is no individual, performing the role of individual is what Brahman is doing. Brahman means the whole existence. It knows everything. It is playing a game of forgetting. It has tricked itself. Let the individual be. The individual is not going to harm you. Who can harm the experiencer? Who can cause any problems in the experiencer? Even if you burn down the whole world, if you burn down the whole creation, the experiencer is happy and smiling. The goddess is going to become very furious because you did that. But the experiencer is all love. It is complete acceptance. And you cannot accept one thought in your mind that I am Muni, I am an individual? Aham Brahmasmi. Now accept this petty thing called an individual also. Nothing bad there. And accept whatever it does. It says, I am the body. I need to eat. And yes, why not? Eat whatever you want. I don't have that thing which I want. Go and get what you want. I switched off the button now. I am waiting for the fan to stop. Do whatever you want. This is what we call burning of the karmic memory. The energy there is trying to burn out. Please don't stop it. “I am just going to sit in the cave now.” Once you come out of the cave, karma is going to grab you again.

All the shastras, all the scriptures will tell you how to get to liberation. And nobody tells you what to do after that. Get rid of the individual. “I did that, sir. Now what to do?” Everybody is silent about it. Can anybody here in our meeting tell me why there is so much silence about it? Why do you never find any instructions on what to do after liberation?

Maybe after experiencing the oneness there is no desire left to do anything. It is all only the final freedom - whether to do it or not.

Exactly, yes. Who is there to desire? Who is there to do? Like Ashu is saying, there is doing but there is no doer. I call it surrendering. The individual has finally surrendered. Now it does not think about doing. There is so much freedom now that the freedom is not doing what your desires tell you to do. That is bondage. The freedom is letting it happen. What is bondage? You grab a bird and put it into a cage because it looks so beautiful. And that is bondage. That is the attachment with the bird. Letting the bird fly away and do whatever it wants is freedom. Bird is free, you are free. No need of the prison, no need of the cage.

Similarly, the teachings don't tell you what to do because you will be back to square one. Oh, the teacher told me to do this after finding that there is no doer? What kind of teaching is that which brings back the doer? That is why everybody is silent about this, probably except me because I need to keep everything straight here so that you don't start doing things. It will happen. The individual will come back. It is very natural. Devi is happy to be in an individual form. Keep Devi happy. It's good for you. Don't make her unhappy. Let the individual do what it does. Nobody is there to do it. And enjoy the show because it is not going to last.

You have taken a form. It must be a memory of a dissolved master somewhere. “Let us take this form.” Because this play is eternal. Eternal means timeless. It does not mean a long time. The word eternal means - not happening in time. It does not mean that it has been happening for billions of years. There are no years, there is only “now”. Whatever is appearing now in the form of a person is actually a memory of a great master who has dissolved, who has attained liberation. How beautiful it is! He is also not doing it. It is not that he said let me now achieve the dissolution and I'll appear as many many forms? No; nobody wants that. It is clear but still it is mysterious. This is the paradox. I know what it is but cannot explain it. Why? You are using intellect to explain things which are clearly beyond intellect. Intellect is the product of Maya. Cannot understand what is happening here. Intellect is a gathering in the memory of your limited experiences. What can it understand? Therefore mystery is the final answer. Therefore agnostic is the one who really knows. He says I don't know and that is the final answer. We are not here to know. We are here to get rid of the wrong knowledge, avidya. The name of that kind of knowledge is ignorance. We are here to get rid of ignorance. You think I'll get many things when the ignorance is gone? No, you return home. There is no journey. Don't try to go. Come back.

Parteep is asking, does Brahmagyan have experiential oneness like J Krishnamurti, Sadhguru, Osho etc has mentioned that they feel oneness with objects and can feel them too like we feel?

There is a language limitation. How to describe oneness? Which language should one use for describing oneness? Can anybody tell me? What is the best word to describe oneness or nonduality? Muni has the answer - Silence. If you say one word more than silence it will be wrong. Yes you can say emptiness.

Then how to describe oneness if you must? You will need to be approximate. By approximate I mean just hope for the best. Say something and hope that the other person will understand but remember that the other person will never understand. These things cannot be understood by language. Otherwise I could have simply told you. Never say “experience of oneness”. Never say that word. Remove experience. What is left? Oneness. Never say I experience oneness. Remove I. What is left? Oneness. As soon as you bring these things, which are necessary if you want to talk about it, how are you going to talk about it? You bring in these words because our language is a language of ignorance. You say it hoping that the other person knows what you mean by it, remove the experience and I and focus on oneness. That is what I call Experiencing. Remove the experience which is separate from me. Remove the I which is separate from experience. And that which is left, where there is no experience, there is no experiencer - is oneness.

Can it be felt? No. Cannot be felt because there will be a feeling and there will be a feeler. Why do you use the word feel? You don't have any better word. I know oneness. Why do you use the word “know”, because you don't know what else to use. I “experienced” oneness one day. No, all these sentences are wrong. “There is oneness”. Yes, it is kind of very close to the truth. There is oneness. Can you say there was oneness yesterday? I was in a state of oneness yesterday. Is it true? There is always oneness. You cannot say it was yesterday but today, I can't find it. “What should I do to get that oneness today?” It is there right now, right here.

Your current experience is the experience of oneness. If you want me to say it in language, it will be like this, "Whatever is right here, right now, is oneness".

You cannot divide this thing. You are interested in tomorrow or techniques and feelings and adding a random word in front of it. It will become wrong. All you can say is, right now, right here, whatever there is is oneness. This is the final truth. Some people will say there is oneness appearing as two. The non-dual is appearing as dual. And that is also fine, because it cannot appear as anything else. Oneness is not going to appear to you as oneness. Remember this. It is not an experience that appears. There is no knowledge of oneness. Why? Because knowledge is only of the experienced. There is no memory of oneness. Because only the illusory experiences make an impression on the memory. If it is not here and now, it is not oneness.

All the great masters, whatever they are saying, they are trying to tell you all these things. Where is the proof that this is not two? There is no proof, of course. Proof would require two. Not two is not an idea. The question of proof arises out of the experience that I know. We destroy ignorance by using negative words. I don't say oneness, I mean I say it, but I don't really mean it. A real pandit of Advaita is not going to say the word oneness. He will never even in his sleep say this. It cannot be said. It cannot be known. It cannot be described. So what do we say? We use negative words. Like Ashu is saying non-dual. It is a negative. Everything on the path of knowledge is negative. If you get a positive, be careful. It is a trap. If you encounter a positive statement be sure that it is ignorance. Not two. We stop here.

Parteep is saying, Krishnamurthy in his book about experience has said he can feel the hammer and other objects like himself. What to make of that? Physical oneness being experienced?

You need to read between the words of Krishnamurthy. He is not talking about hammer. He is not talking about the feeling which his hands are producing. And he is not talking about himself. Go beyond the words. You will never know oneness by reading anything. If you know oneness, which is a wrong way of saying it, you have realized it is not two, then the words of masters are going to shine before you. There is no knowledge in the books. Why do you read all these things? I am not saying don't read. Read it after you know it. Now there is real nectar in the words. The nectar is me communicating with myself. That is the real joy that I found one more who is me. You will see this in your life when you encounter a person who is trapped between ignorance and knowledge. That is the most painful thing to watch. You check a person who is ignorant. You don't pay attention. A person who has knowledge is a pleasure to listen to. You encounter somebody who is saying something wrong. “Please don't say it, it is ugly” - This is your reaction.

So those who read the books are like this. They think I know but they don't know. And when they say it there is no nectar in it. Why have I have not recommended any book to you so far? Some of you are with me since many years. I never told you to read any book. Yes, I tell you to go and listen to the masters. There is no book in your program. Do you know where I say tomorrow you need to learn from this book and write it down here? No never. This is the tradition here. We never teach from books. Books are written once you know. Books are not to be read. Books are to be written. The seeker does not read books. Seeker writes books. Have not seen a master who has become a master by reading a book. I have never seen anybody who has become great by reading. And I have seen all the great people. They have realized the truth. They have not read it. That is why I killed the books. It does not appear in the means of knowledge. Only two things appear in my means of knowledge: direct experience and logic. Nothing else. Knowledge is a starting point towards not knowing. It is better if you start very close to not knowing. Your direct experience and your logic is very close to not knowing. But your books and your gurus and whatever you keep hearing is far away.

Ishag is saying, silence, the gap between objects is the glue of oneness.

I don’t know. There is oneness. There are no objects. There is no gap. There is no glue. Not two.

Parteep is saying, Total emptiness results from Brahmagyan.

Emptiness is not a result. It’s a realization. Brahmagyan, which is knowledge of oneness, is going to tell you that all there is, is not two. It is going to tell you only that. There is this realization that there was nothing else but the emptiness. Why is it emptiness? Is it really empty? No, it's not empty. This is how this existence looks to the intellect. When our intellect tries to grasp the existence, it looks empty because the intellect cannot really grasp it. So it says empty. It is not. It is full of infinite potentiality, infinite potential which is empty and not empty at the same time. And now don't try to understand it. It is mysterious. Stop the intellect. The intellect can go up to emptiness. Then you should surrender the intellect.

Shanti is asking, what is Atma? What is reborn?

Atma is probably a short form of Atman, which means the self. Self is the experiencer. What is reborn? Not the Atman. So why do we say that Atma takes forms? It is coming from a different philosophy where the Atman has become Atma, which is probably a distortion of Atman. That is my view. But probably more educated people will be able to tell you how it originated. But I dropped it because it is very confusing now. Don't call it Atma. There is no such thing. There is Atman, which is the self, which is the experiencer. And it is never born so it's never reborn. Nothing became anything. It is an appearance. The becoming is an appearance. Being is the truth.

Parteep is saying, It seems when Brahmagyan understanding flourished, listening to your lectures on it, intellect is trying very hard to question its validity in different ways.

That is very good. You should verify everything and verify it as often as you can. Verification is the essence of the path of knowledge. You need not believe it. And if you realize it once, there is no law here that says that you don't do it again. You check it again and again. This is the characteristic of the truth that it will never change. Remember that which never changes is true. If it changed after your little bit of investigation, there is no oneness. Now it's not true. So let your intellect run. It's very nice that it is functioning. Let it validate all the teachings.

And it does not become true because I said it. It has to be verified by you. Your experience is your truth. Whatever you realized is your truth, not that which I am saying. I never actually say anything. I show you. I am showing you your own experience. It looks like I am teaching but I am not teaching, I am simply showing. That is difficult, teaching is very easy. Your school master can do it. Showing? Now I need to encounter all the egoic stuff in you. Now I need to encounter all the ignorance in you.

Session 85

Rajeev was asking, Shunya or zero, is this like the one used in numerological denomination, or is this nothingness?

When we say Shunya in mathematics, it is zero. There is no doubt about it. It is the quantity that remains when you subtract a number from itself; that is the definition. Does emptiness, beingness, or any other quality of “zero” belong to mathematics? Everybody knows the answer. When I say Shunya in the spiritual field, the subject has changed. Now, its meaning is totally different. Shunya or emptiness means that existence has no substance. That's all.

That is my interpretation of the word Shunya or Shunyata. It comes from the Baudh or Buddhist tradition. In Advaita, we say Nirgun, which means having a total lack of any qualities, good or bad, this or that. That is equal to emptiness because when you do not see anything in the existence, it is equal to emptiness. So, the correct translation of the word Shunya in English, as far as the subject of spirituality in philosophy is concerned, is emptiness, not subtraction of numbers.

Shunyata is not called nothingness; nothingness is called Abhava in Sanskrit. Those who translate Shunyata as nothingness, they are new in philosophy, they are trying to learn. Due to their indoctrination, their conditioning, they have associated the mathematical meaning with the philosophical meaning. And there are many more words like this which people misunderstand; they never pause to ask for the meaning. They simply assume because "I know the meaning, I know the subject." That is not a good way to proceed in any spiritual or philosophical field. Always ask for the meaning, even if it is a small word. Like there is another word in Buddhism which is called Tathata, and it is translated as "is-ness." How many people know the meaning of that? They simply assume the meaning of that. So, that is the problem when you enter a spiritual field; assumptions are our problems. Why do people assume? Because there is no guidance, because there is nobody to guide them, they simply assume. And they sometimes read these things in a book. Now everybody has their own capacity to understand the books, and the books do not answer you back. That is the problem with the book. Whatever is written about the is-ness or Shunyata, there you simply assume something if you don't understand what it means. And then you proceed, and this becomes a belief, a blind belief of some kind, and will remain for the rest of your life if you don't take any guidance.

So, we sometimes add the suffix ta in front of Shunya to make it Shunyata. Which is like the suffix “-ness”, Zero-ness! It is the nature of existence, and emptiness is the right translation. It means that there are no qualities at all; there is no substance, there is no content, as we like to think using our everyday intellect, there is no such thing. The everyday intellect and everyday concepts completely fail when we try to study the existence or the experience or the experiencer, which are two forms of the existence. Now, what is emptiness? How is it even possible that everything is actually empty while still being everything? And that cannot be understood using the intellect; it has to be accepted as being what it is. And sometimes, we say that emptiness has infinite potential to make us feel as if we know.

Muni has asked on the path of knowledge about nature. This was the question: When you say a mature mind may not bother with the illusion anymore because the identification is broken and it understands the true nature of everything, is it still possible for another kind of mind to be interested in illusion after knowing its true nature? You mentioned that by knowing the true nature of forms seeking ends, however, if the mind still drops into illusion, then the goal of the seeker is to know the true nature of existence. Is there a difference in knowing the true nature of forms and the true nature of existence?

Yes, a mature mind is not bothered by the illusion as much as an ignorant mind. Somebody who has knowledge is very stable in all conditions. This is my experience, and I have seen people like this. And it must be your own experience. As you mature, you are unshaken by what is happening, which is the illusion. Whatever is happening is an illusion. It is not true. The mind or the intellect does not really understand the true nature of everything. Please see this. There is no way for the intellect, however great it is, however sharp it is, it cannot understand the true nature of everything. You can be that which is; you cannot know that which is.

There is no concept of knowing or knowledge in the existence. The concept of knowledge and ignorance is a dual concept. Whenever there is knowledge, there is ignorance, and when there is ignorance, there is knowledge. Since it is dual, it is false. All knowledge is false. All ignorance is already false. Then what remains? There is just being, not knowing. This is a little bit advanced, but I am planting the seed here because people come on the path of knowledge to get knowledge. All you will get is a total destruction of ignorance, and then you are left with a state of being, not of knowing. There is nothing to know in your true nature.

It cannot be known, we say that it is unknowable. Those who have completed the first few lessons, will find the definition of knowledge and categories of knowledge. I have told you that there are three kinds of knowledge, but there are more kinds, but for the beginning, three kinds are enough to understand - the known, unknown, and unknowable. Known and unknown are within the grasp of the intellect or the mind. We don't use the word mind so much nowadays, at least in our context, so for the intellect, these are graspable because they are based on experience. You have the experience, you know the things, you use logic to dissect the experience, and you attain clarity. You know the true vs the false, that is the process of knowledge. When you try to do the same thing for the true nature, what happens? You don't experience it, it is unknowable, it is just being, and the being has no concept of knowledge. The real nature of the being is agnostic.

That is why agnosticism is the highest position in philosophy. Yes, there are debates around it, what is the highest position in philosophy? And people have their own views, so I am just telling you my own opinion here. Because in philosophy, there are only opinions, nothing is true, nothing is false. Agnosticism is the highest position because it acknowledges the true nature of everything, it is knowing without knowing. This is unacceptable for those who have a very active intellect. They cannot settle down in their true nature because the intellect is always running like a mad horse. But those who give up the intellect after a thorough investigation of what is presented, are able to settle down in their true nature. Settling is not by knowing, it is by surrender, it is by acceptance of what is the true nature. When you say - the true nature of everything, it is also the true nature of myself. I am everything.

Muni was asking, Is it possible for another kind of mind to be interested in illusion after knowing the true nature? Everything is possible! Why do we see a disinterest in the illusion? Because that is the most common situation that happens, but it is not an attitude that looks like, "It is false, it is an illusion, so it is of no use for me." No, it is not like this, it is more like acceptance that "Oh, finally, I know that it is an illusion." And then acceptance - then what is there to know now? Nothing, and then nobody goes any further. And by nobody, I mean many, but there can be karmic substances that exist in some people, they know the true nature, however, due to past impressions, they are pushed to know more. In the true nature, there is nothing to know. Hence they travel in the direction of illusion, known as science or vigyan, in Sanskrit. The illusion has infinite potential and appears in infinite ways. Studying the illusion while knowing it is an illusion is not problematic. The problem arises when people believe the illusion is true. My suggestion is not to discard the illusion. It is fantastic and beautiful, as it reflects the perfection inherent in existence. Once you know its true nature, the illusion becomes beautiful. Like a movie, when you realize it is not real, it becomes a work of art, and you can appreciate it for its creativity and entertainment value. The illusion is the biggest movie in existence, a work of art that should be approached with curiosity, not exploited.

You should study it to know it, never exploit it. Exploitation means there is a lot of ignorance there. That means the person has no clue what he is doing. He knows a few things and then everything goes to drain from that point onwards. Mother nature is a thing which you should know. It should not be used. You should not use the mother. That is why we have formed the images of Devi or the mother in various forms and we have cultivated a sense of respect and worship for Devi. Unfortunately, that is totally lost. It has become superstition nowadays and people worship nature or Prakriti or Devi or Shakti, whatever you call it, for gains of different kinds. They are trying to exploit it. No, mother nature is to be loved and known. Just know it. Everything that is necessary for the life of a human is provided by mother nature. There is nothing which is not provided. What has happened is, because of the ignorance and this exploitation tendency that I want more & more, there is misuse of nature, there is misuse of illusion. People in the occult field are doing the same thing. If they are on the left-handed path they try to exploit the illusion because in the illusion you can create anything. If it were real there was no possibility of that, but because it is an illusion, you can do whatever you want. You can shoot any kind of movie you want because it's a movie. But you cannot shoot any kind of documentary. It is real now, cannot be created as per your wish.

There is this difference of ignorance and knowledge. We should go from the path of knowledge towards the illusion, not from the path of ignorance. And then it's all ok, there is no problem if the goal of the seeker is to know the true nature of existence and still wants to go in the illusion, we won't call it a fall. We would call it adventure simply as the path continues for that person. It does not end. If somebody goes into the illusion without knowing their true nature, without knowing the truth of all of it then you can call it fall.

Then she's asking, is there a difference in knowing the true nature of forms and true nature of existence. There is a difference and there is no difference. There are two ways to look at it. Forms are false. The nature of forms is emptiness, and what is the true nature of existence? Yes, same thing. The true nature of existence is also emptiness. The emptiness is form. So it is one and the same thing in the end. But in the beginning it looks like the study of forms is a separate category and the study of my nature is another. This is the case for somebody who has not realized the oneness, advaita, non-dual nature, if they have not realized this they will think that there is a difference between forms and the knower of the forms. It depends on the ignorance of the person. The difference appears due to ignorance, once the ignorance is shed, it's all one, non-dual.

An ignorant person is likely to ascribe the same signs to a knower, both think they know who is

ignorant, what is the difference?

Actually there is no difference, if somebody who knows, says that this person is ignorant, the one who is saying himself is ignorant, “person” is still real for that person. The idea of a person is an illusion, it is not really there, so whom can I call ignorant? Nobody.

There is ignorance but there is no ignorant, like we say love the ignorant, hate the ignorance. It is written in the Bible also that love the sinner and hate the sin, and sin means error, error is another name for ignorance, in this old language it will be called sin. You may hate the sin, not the sinner, there is nobody, there is no sinner. Let the ignorant person think that you know nothing, because that's what they think. An ignorant person has this belief that I know everything and everybody else is stupid, this is the sign of ignorance. A person who has knowledge simply knows that there is an impurity there and that impurity will go away sooner or later. Because of the timeless nature of the existence and the timeless nature of the illusion, it has already happened, everything has already happened, everything that can possibly happen has happened.

Is there ignorance now from a bigger perspective? No. Ignorance is also an illusion, it appears in the illusion and then it disappears in the illusion. It is not permanent. Our lifetimes are so tiny that we think that people are going to remain in that state forever. No. First of all, there are no people. Nobody exists. There is no person. There is no individuality. The individual never gets ignorance. It is a phenomenon that appears for a while and then goes away. It is a step in the ladder of evolution. That's all. Can you call animals ignorant? No. They're perfect. They know exactly what to do for their survival. They are not ignorant. They never assume things. You must have seen the dogs and other animals. They have no assumptions about anything. They might get confused about things sometimes and they quickly learn how to get their food and how to protect themselves.

Humans have this peculiar thing called ignorance because of the overgrown intellect. The intellect has the capacity to imagine and assume and refer to the memory for knowledge. That is the problem. And then when that is distorted, this capability is distorted, it gives rise to ignorance. And as we grow from human to even beyond human, para-human, we transcend this defect that arises because of the newfound power of intelligence. Intelligence going in the wrong direction is ignorance. An innocent person is not ignorant. Animals are innocent, even if the animal kills another animal, we do not say that it's a crime. A tiger is killing a lot of small animals, but do we hang the tiger? Do we put the tiger in jail? No. That's not ignorance. So mother nature is not ignorant. Humans are ignorant. We have distanced ourselves from what is and that is the real cause of ignorance.

Animals and children are pure. Whatever they do, it does not matter. It's not the doing, it's the believing that is the problem. When we remove the false beliefs, we are left with knowledge. We are back to our true nature. We are back to purity. Now we see things as they are. Now all these words become clear. Now once you understand the difference between ignorance and knowledge, every teaching will become clear to you.

A question by Rupa: How to differentiate consciousness from awareness?

Now, I don't know how far you are in your journey. I don't know what practices you are doing, which path you are following, and who is your teacher etc. You are new in our group. So do let us know a little bit. But you need to know one thing very, very clearly: words do not have meanings. The meaning is given to the word based on the knowledge of the person holding the words. The meaning is given to the words based on our experience, we are free to assign any meaning to any word. And because we need to talk to other people, we try to keep the same meanings which the others have. But that is not usually true in philosophy or spirituality. This is very true in your day-to-day life. I call the car 'car' and you understand it completely. But when I say “Consciousness, Awareness”, no, you won’t understand it. In that case, you need to ask the person who is speaking that word. Never let go of a single word without asking the meaning. When you are in spirituality, philosophy, science, mathematics, and even arts, you need to be precise. When you learn music, don’t you try to understand all the words that are spoken in the music? The teachers tell you, “Sing this raga.” Now, what is raga? That should be your first question.

So, you need to know all the words that are being used in a certain philosophy. And who is going to tell you their meanings? The teacher, the guru. And one more thing that is very important that we should know is - everybody has their own meanings. So if one teacher uses “Consciousness” to mean your true nature, the other teacher is going to use “Consciousness” to mean the ability to perceive. When a teacher uses “Awareness” to mean knowledge, because in the common everyday we say, “I am aware of the situation in the world.” “I am aware that there is a pandemic in the world.” What does that mean? Knowledge, isn’t it? I am seeing this, that is the meaning of awareness. But that may not be the meaning in other philosophies where awareness becomes the ultimate element in the existence, where awareness becomes the nature of the existence. It is possible. People use and reuse these words all the time. And they redefine it in every philosophy.

How to differentiate consciousness from awareness? Your guru will tell you under whom you are studying. He will define those words precisely. If you want to know my use of these words, how do I use these words in my teachings? I have completely dropped the word “Consciousness.” I never use this word because it causes a lot of confusion, because of the same reason that people assume the meaning. “Oh, he said Consciousness, that means it must mean that which is written in the dictionary or which is said by somebody else.” No, never happens. That means you are very new in the field of philosophy. Now the “Will” defined by one philosopher is actually not the “Will” defined by the other philosopher. And now you study the two philosophers and you don’t know what is “Will”. More study, more confusion, isn’t it? So, what do we do? We stick to one path. After you explore a few people, you stick to one and then adopt those definitions, and then you are done with the words. Finally, throw away the words. I have thrown away consciousness, and I have adopted awareness. Your true nature is called the experiencer, not consciousness. That is simply a translation of the word atman from Sanskrit. There is nothing in Advaita that corresponds to consciousness. In Buddhism the word vijnanam is used for consciousness.

I give this example many times. You go and read Buddhist texts, especially those that are translated in English, and the vijnanam got translated into consciousness everywhere I see. Those who know only English— don't know Pali or Sanskrit or Prakrit—are going to assume a meaning of their own: "Oh, Buddha said this thing about consciousness, and what did he say about that? It is a state of the mind. Now it is kind of very confusing because you then jump into Advaita and you say, "No, Consciousness is my true nature. It's not a state of the mind." And that causes a problem.

You say the same thing about awareness. People have defined their own awarenesses. I have defined my own awareness, and it means knowledge of my true nature. Remember, my true nature and knowledge of my true nature—they are different. So knowledge of my true nature is memory; it can come and go, which must be happening to all of you. Most of you are troubled by this thing: "Oh, my awareness is lost." That means the awareness comes and goes, which means I am not able to settle in my true nature. Mind takes over. So that means it comes and goes, and that which comes and goes—that which is not stable—is not my true nature. I never come and go; yes, forgetting can happen, but that's not a big deal. Awareness as I have defined is a direct translation of the Sanskrit chetna, which means to be aware of what is. Who am I? This knowledge can come and go—it's not a big deal. Your true nature, which is the experiencer, never goes away; it is eternal.

So that is my definition. I don't think anybody will have any problem if they are studying under the path of knowledge program, because I make it loud and clear. That is my habit now, because I've suffered a lot because of bad meanings of words. There was a lot of confusion and noodle soup in my mind because I simply assumed the meanings of words. After getting bitten and burnt many, many times, I finally decided I will never say any word without defining it. So sometimes you will say that there is an obsession with words, but it is not an obsession. It is a result of my experience.

I'm obsessed with definition. You utter a single sentence and I start asking, "Define this and define that." What has this done? Result of this madness for definition is that I never fall into ignorance. Anybody can say anything, and I know the meaning of it. This is the result of obsession with the definition. And I would suggest you become like this. Get obsessed with the meanings. Never assume the meaning. If you don't know the meaning, simply ask. You know what disaster has happened because you never asked? Your mother told you to worship this god. He has made the world and that god will give you everything. Did you bother to ask your mother what this god thing is? What is the meaning of worship? Why do I need anything at all because I have everything, and you give me everything whenever I cry. You never asked this and you grew up with this superstition. Now your life is hell because you know god is doing bad things to you. This is called indoctrination. It happens through words, and the mechanism is not knowing the meaning of the words. Always ask your guru.

Muni is saying, we hear of yogis who have been meditating for hundreds of thousands of years. Is that what they are doing? After knowing the true nature, they are studying the illusion.

I don't know what they are doing. One thing is clear that when you achieve this kind of ability that you can meditate for a thousand years, you are not a human. Please understand, they have crossed the human stage. They have evolved beyond humans now. A human cannot understand anything which is bigger than a human. A dog does not understand what humans are doing. He can see what they are doing. Yes, the dog knows a little bit what the humans are doing but nothing more than that. If I say that I know what these advanced creatures are doing, I'll be surely wrong. I'll be able to tell you if I do that, and then you won't understand a single thing because you have not taken that experience. So on the safer side, I say that we should not try to guess these things.

What are these gods doing in their own areas in the memory or you can say the lokas or their own universes they have created? It is like a dog trying to guess what the engineers are doing in a big factory. There's nothing that the dog is able to know. So we say that you don't try to guess what the advanced seekers are doing. You try to be a yogi. If I tell you a story, you don't have any evidence for it. Do you have any evidence of what I might tell you about these yogis? No, just now I told you that they are beyond human but that also you don't know, you don't have any evidence of that. If I tell you a story, it will increase your ignorance. However, I still tell you the stories, why? Because they are very entertaining, they are very encouraging. And then I assume that you are mature enough not to believe them blindly. Everything is possible in the illusion. So a person meditating for a thousand years - peanuts for the maya, like it does not even see it, it is such a tiny event from her perspective. Whatever they are doing, they are enjoying it immensely; otherwise, it's difficult to sit for a thousand years, you can imagine.

Rupa is asking - are we referring to the illusion or reflection of self?

What do you mean by reflection of the self? I know you are talking to me for the first time so there will be a little bit of clarification needed.

Illusion is the reflection of the self.

Very good, yes, we are referring to the same thing. Hopefully, I am able to understand you and you got the answer. And if you did not understand it, you will need to write it down in better words because those who are new, will need to connect to these teachings first then you adopt the terminology. And then there is a meaningful transmission; otherwise, we keep asking what do you mean by that and what do I mean by this? Usually what I do is, when I am talking to a teacher I adopt the teacher's terminology because I know the teacher is not going to adopt my terminology.

Teachers do that in the beginning; they give a concession to the student because it is very easy for the newcomer to get confused by all the words that are being used by the teaching in the tradition or whatever. What I suggest is if you are attending the satsang after listening to the videos then get into that mode of terminology that is used by me then there will be less misunderstanding. And if you don't know what I say about things then yes still you can ask something but I am going to ask you for clarifications.

Mary has a question, based on what you said about ignorance right now, I would like to know more about the concept of willpower and destiny, which has always been a question to me about humanity. So how much a person is responsible for his or her action in this world of illusion, because even if you chose to destroy the ignorance in this path is a decision by itself, isn't it?

Very good question. What we do in this case when we want to study the human angle, we descend down into the illusion and assume that it is true. There is a word for it, we call it the relative truth or transactional truth, if you don't know you can note it down. Here we have descended into the illusion a little bit and we say that the person is true, the world is true, whatever the person does is true and so on, and then at this level we try to understand what is happening. At this level there is a will and we simply say that it is the will of the person or the individual. Individual will. There is a will and there is a destiny also, which is fixed for that individual. And then, whatever the individual does or the person does is because of his or her will.

She has given the example that the person chooses to destroy the ignorance and takes a spiritual path, isn't it the will? If it is his will then how is it possible that there is no individual will? This will be a paradoxical thing for many people because I am willing to come in the spiritual path, I am willing to go to the guru and the guru says, you have no will. Now it becomes very difficult for the student. How did that happen if I did not will?

What is happening here is mixing of the levels of the teaching. Never mix the levels of the teachings. That which is true at one level may not be true at another level. The words “will/destiny”, they all belong to different levels of teachings, and “true nature, existence and the experiencer" belong to a totally different level. There are lower levels than the transactional reality, which is the physical level where the matter is true. Many people assume that the world is true and the matter is true. They are trying to survive because your survival depends on the world. Your survival depends on the food, hence at that level these things are true. If I am hungry I cannot be satisfied by the philosophy that everything is an illusion. I need food, even though it is totally false. When you are in a dream and a tiger is chasing you, no amount of telling that this is a dream is going to help you. You need to run away. You can think about what happened in the dream after waking up, not when the tiger is chasing you.

So when you have to make a decision, go with the will. Use your willpower like it's true. Do not think that I don't have a will. I don't need to decide. That will be called ignorance. That is not the correct understanding of the teaching. When you are acting in the world, use your willpower. Nobody's stopping you. When you have done the decision-making, surrender your will. You don't have any control over the consequences of your action. Yes, you have a little bit of control over your actions, which arise out of your willpower. What kind of statement is that? If I willed it, I must be in control. No, you are not in control. You think that I willed it, after willing happened, after a decision already happened. Surrender your will, it is not yours.

Destiny comes in the picture. You have done whatever you have done assuming that I have done it using my will. After surrendering, whatever happens is destiny. It is destined to happen. You don't have any control over it. From the level of destiny where destiny is the truth, not the will, you can draw a drawing like this. You can make a box and there are levels in that box like a building which has a ground floor and the first floor and the top floor like this. Assume that the will comes at the ground floor and the destiny or the karma comes at the first floor and the existence comes at the third floor which is the top floor where there is nothing but emptiness. Nothing has happened on the top floor. But on the second floor, the scene is different. Here are the laws of the mind. At this level, on the second floor, there is no will. It is simply law, law of the mind. We can give it many names: destiny, karma and memory. I use the word memory because it is very modern and very clear. It is not burdened by all that kind of garbage that people have thrown on the words like karma and destiny and whatever. The word “memory” is very pure. Still, I don't know what will happen to it. The memory decides.

You can say poetically it is the will of the memory. The same thing appears in the religious text like "God's will, not my will." Then what should I do? Should I not make the decision? Yes, make the decisions, do your duty, and that is all you can do. And the consequences will be according to the laws of the mind, laws of the memory. And they will be precise and perfect. That is another property. The second floor is very precise and perfect. Nothing ever happens wrongly there. Now you can connect all the dots of all the religious teachings, “God never makes a mistake”. They are talking about this universal memory here of which many people are totally unaware. They don't know what it is. And at the ground level, what is happening is the chaos of the relative existence, the transactional existence, your world where everybody is blaming each other for their actions. No, you should not blame another person for their actions. They don't know what they are doing. You simply forgive them because whatever they did is already destined from the point of view of the second floor.

I have given you only a three-floor model but this building is very tall, let me tell you. These levels of reality are uncountable. As soon as you venture into the other layers of the memory, you will find there are different properties. Let us say, you venture into a layer of the universal memory which is not rule bound, you will see one thing very clearly: whatever you will, whatever you wish, whatever you desire, is the reality. It is manifested in a millisecond. Whatever you thought, whatever you will appear there instantly. Now initially, you will be excited - oh this is a great place to satisfy all my desires. Now I can fulfill everything - you want to eat something, it is there. You want your long-lost girlfriend? Oh she is there, not only one, there are five or six of them.

I'll take a pause and I'll remind you of a very good science fiction movie. It is called 'Solaris'. For those who want to see it, here is the plot: The spaceship and the crew, and the people in the spaceship, reach a planet which has a power to grant all their wishes. It is a very good movie, a very philosophical movie. Go and watch the Russian version which is the original. But there is a Hollywood version as well. So those who are of a lower nature, those who are afraid, those who have an animal nature, their life becomes hell. Because they imagine murdering someone and that fellow is found dead. They imagine a big monster in the sea and that is what happens. And those who are somewhat more stable, their wish is also granted. A man’s wife appears every day. He tries to kill his wife every day. I don't know whether I am talking about this movie or probably I'm mixing names or plots of movies. Those who know the movie can correct me. And he tries to kill his wife fully knowing that she is not real. And his wife appears again and again, not one of them. Now there are many.

So you will find that there are areas in the universal memory where this will happen. And what happens there? If you are not mature you will manifest your demons, you will manifest your fears. And those who are mature, those who have evolved and progressed in their spiritual path, will simply become detached by it. “Oh it's an illusion, I don't want copies of my girlfriend. Even one is difficult to handle”. So you just get out of there saying I don't want illusions. When you say that, it is Nirvana. You will think that what is this business of getting into the different dimensions or layers of the memory and areas of the universal memory. It will also lead you to Nirvana. Many people don't understand this thing. They say that you are playing with the Maya. You are playing with the illusion. Don't go there, go to your true nature. There is a majority of the population here who cannot go to their true nature simply by telling them. They need to be taken to Nirvana through different paths. I see no problem in that.

The building is very tall. There are many floors in this building, there are many mansions here. Explore it. Every level has its own reality, its own laws, its own will, destiny. You are stuck in this tiny physical world, you think that whatever I will is true, I have the will power, that is your ignorance. There is nothing like this, the picture of Maya is very complicated. Go step by step. And it is always best to start from the foundation. The foundation is your true nature. The foundation is who you are. That is why I am stressing only the basics. If you understand the fundamentals, you can handle the illusion very well. You can say delusions about the illusions. Illusion will fall away, know the multi-layered structure, know the relative truth, absolute truth and the truth in between. Never mix the levels of teachings. One thing that is true at one level will not be so at the other level. At some level teachers tell you that the world is an illusion. Now you take it literally and you stand in front of a running train. Is this useful, is this the correct understanding of the teaching? No. I have also struggled with this thing. I mix the teachings.

Something at one level is completely useless at another level. When you need to take care of your family, your relations, your children, your job and money, the teaching about emptiness is useless. Nothing is happening in emptiness. There is timelessness. It's not going to be useful. What will be useful? Your survival skills. Do you know anything useful that people are going to pay money for? No. Then forget the great teachings. Forget spirituality or philosophy. Enter into the world with full force. Full commitment. Do your work. Do your duties. Perform your responsibilities. Do whatever is needed in the world, assuming that it is true. Assume that there is a truth in science and do your experiments, do not say that there is nothing here to experiment. It is all vibration and then what is there to experiment now? No. You go and experiment as if the chemicals are true. As if the materials are true and the machines are true. Your instrument is telling you the truth in science. Otherwise you will not progress in science. What is the instrument telling you? All garbage, isn't it? But that is not at the level of science. It is at the level of the mind or the philosophy or whatever you call it.

In Advaita, we have divided existence into only two levels - Absolute and Transactional. That is enough for many people. But not enough for those who are exploring other realities and those who are scientists and doctors. They need to tackle many levels of understanding. Like a scientist is concerned about the matter where everything is simple and lawful. But a doctor is confronting a body and you know the body is half-mind. You think about something and the effects appear in the body, which no medicine can cure. Now the doctor gives you a placebo. "Look, this is the most powerful medicine in the world and it will cure it." And it is only a sugar pill and it cures you. Next day you are fine, fit, and running. So the doctors handle a different level of reality than a physicist.

And then you encounter the yogi. The yogi is above a doctor because he handles so many things at the same time. And then you encounter the gyani who is a person on the path of knowledge, the wise. And he probably knows much more than the yogi. He is tackling so many realities at the same time. Can you imagine how much maturity, how much intelligence it will take to not mix all these things? Handle your physical existence, your mental existence, your relations, plus the emptiness, plus your true nature, plus the awareness, plus the paranormal that will appear in your life sooner or later - the gods and goddesses, the gurus and whoever. How are we juggling all these things? How will you do it if you have so much confusion about what is true, what is not? If you listen to the lessons that I have recorded, you will find at least five or six layers of truth. Then I tell you that the non-dual teaching is not multi-tiered. Why do we drop into different tiers or levels or the floors in the building? It is because the student is unable to understand sometimes, so we drop down. That does not make it true. That makes it relatively true.

So when you are beginning, the teacher is going to tell you, "You have the will. Come tomorrow in the satsang. Don't think that I am not able to will anything, I won't do anything. That is stupidity. You use your will when you are not in the satsang. Throw away the will. You have reached your destination. Now you are in the satsang. You are sitting here now. Don't think about the will now. You don't have any will now. Check the other levels of truth. What is there now?" He will introduce you to the mind or the memory or the layers of the memory and so on. Now you get the knowledge. Get back in the world. Do something using your will. You need to juggle these things now.

Other day you go to satsang and the teacher tells you that "Look, nothing is happening, it is all empty."

“But Sir, you told me the laws of the mind and all this, the karmic laws and the laws of interconnectivity - what about them?” “They are all false, there is nothing like this, there is no vibration.”- He will say now. How are you going to handle all these things? By having a very logical mind? Otherwise, you are going to go mad. Sometimes you will think that there is nothing, nothing is happening, so I better not go to satsang, there is no guru, the guru is me. Now you'll fall into this mad house of realities. I spent a lot of time like this, many of you will do that. I am pretty sure even after telling you, you will do that. You will need to understand the truth at various levels and accept this is how it is. Accept it now.

“I want to do everything from the point of view of the physical world”. This is the condition of an ignorant person, a materialist person, and they never progress beyond matter because they are discarding all these other levels. “Everything is my free will”, and they will never progress. Not only is the illusion complicated and difficult to understand, it has many many layers in it, you need to understand all of them and I am telling you, you are capable of doing that. If I can do it, you are more intelligent, you are smarter than me, you have more time and you are more able, you will go further then I have gone, the coming generation will explore everything in more detail than the past. It is always like this, don't worry, it then goes down - law of polarity.

Snehalatha is saying, there is lots of debate going on about consciousness and many leading philosophers have no clue about it.

No, they don't know anything. The situation is especially bad in the western philosophy. They have no clue about it. They don't want to learn either.

Snehalatha is saying, I only get the answers of unsolvable questions about existence and consciousness here.

Yes, we figured it out many thousand years ago and nothing has changed. If the knowledge changes, that means it's not knowledge. Knowledge does not change. There is a kind of knowledge which changes and it will be transactional. It will be of relative kind. It's called science.

We have only two means of coming to the truth: direct experience and logic. My experience is my truth, but sometimes experience is not true. For example, you are lost in the desert and you see water and you go to the water and no, it's not water, it's hot air. In the light of the new experience, you must conclude that there is no water there. That is the logical ability, the intellect. Experience refined by logic and the intellect is the means of knowledge on the path of knowledge. That is all we have. We use these two things to know everything. Believe me, you can know everything, you can know all kinds of truth using just these two means. These are the highest.

There are lower means. For example, a guru has sometimes gone through all these things. Statements of the guru, there is more probability that they will be true, but you know it is possible to be a fake guru. It is possible to fake knowledge that I know all these things simply by reading from somewhere, knowing some words and repeating those words, or probably the person is ignorant and thinks that I know, and then he says I will teach you. So a guru is not reliable.

Similarly, the shastras or the scriptures or the books are another means of knowledge. There is a possibility that you will learn something. You read a book on mathematics and some theorem is proved there, yes probably it is true. You read something about the properties of elements, e.g. hydrogen is like this and its atomic weight is like this and so on. Chlorine reacts with this thing and produces something. And there is a good chance that it will be right. There is a good chance you read a book on history and it will be all wrong. It is written by a politician. The historians know nothing. So it totally depends on who is writing the book and what it is about. So books are also not reliable. In our system, we have rejected the guru and the books. We have kept only two means of knowledge which are - direct experience and logic.

Experience is something very personal. Can experience have a logic to it?

Experience is not logical and not illogical. Experience, when analyzed by the intellect becomes logical or illogical. Experience is what it is.

Let us take the same example of a tiger chasing you in a dream. Is this experience logical? No it is what it is. There is a tiger, there is chasing and there is fear. You wake up in the morning and you say - how stupid, how illogical! There was no tiger, why was I running? It is the intellect waking up now.

You need to take the experience as it is first. We call it the direct experience. Do not assume anything about it. Do not assume that the silver thing in the desert is water. No, it can be anything. And then investigate, use your intellect to investigate your experience. And when you form meaningful relations among experiences it becomes your knowledge. If you form illogical connections between your experiences it becomes your ignorance.

Now let us take another example, this time of a superstition. You wear a red shirt one day, it is your favorite shirt, you go out and something bad happens that day, you meet your enemies that day, your bike slips, and that day somebody robs your money, your girlfriend dumps you. The whole day happened like this while you're wearing the red shirt. Next day you're not going to touch that shirt. Why? This is not a lucky shirt! Unlucky shirt. You're not going to touch it again.

Is it logical? Anybody will say, no, it is not logical. What has happened here is - a very wrong kind of connection was drawn between your experience and the shirt. The shirt has no hand in all these but people do that. Why do we call these people stupid? Because they are unable to form a correct interpretation of the experience. Now you jump into spirituality and you will find all kinds of people here, who do the same thing but at a spiritual level and they call it knowledge. So experience coupled with correct knowing, pure knowing is going to give you knowledge. Nothing else.

The way you choose to differentiate between true and false totally depends on the criteria that you use to differentiate true and false. So not only we set up the means of knowledge that these and these and these things are going to give me knowledge, we also set up the criteria for truth. How do I define true and false? It is a classification of the experience. You experience something and then you decide to call it true or false. How do we do that? We set up a criteria. And every philosophy, every guru will have their own criteria. What is the criterion on the path of knowledge? That which changes is false, that which remains unchanged is true.

So you go to any state of mind, you go to any lokas, you go to any world, and if it is changing you just stamp it as false. Why have we adopted this criterion? There is a long story behind it, there is justification behind it. And I am not going to burden you with that today. I don't know what experience to stamp as true, why is there this confusion? Because you were not told about how to classify true and false, how to know the truth, you were not told about this. And again, it will be totally dependent on the path you take. In one path, the truth will be said to be like this. In the other path, the truth will be told to be like that. Now, which one is the right path? That is your preference. It is subjective. Travel on that path. Adopt the teaching which is most useful for you, which you like most. Do not worry about which path is correct. Worry about what you like, what you want. And then your problem will be solved.

As you progress in the spiritual field, you will not only know what is true and what is false. You will also know which path to take. You will also discard a tradition or a path which is not giving you satisfaction. You drop it. If you feel that "my guru is not telling me the truth," you drop the guru. Don't even look in that direction again. Don't go to that ashram again. Find somebody who is satisfactory for you, who satisfies your questions.

So, what is my advice? Do not worry at all about what is experience, what is truth, and what is knowledge. Because they keep changing in different paths in different traditions. Worry about what you want. And then choose a path, a guru, who can give you that. You say, "I want liberation. I want mukti. I want nirvana." And then choose something which gives you that. And don't worry about what is true and what is false because you got your goal. Don't worry about what knowledge is. I want happiness and peace of mind. You must go to that path where happiness and peace of mind is served through any means possible. Now there are some things that will be true. Look, do this mantra and you will get the peace of mind. Then if it happens for you, if you get the peace of mind using that mantra, then that is true. That is the truth for you. So my advice for Bhuvan or anybody who is dipping their toes in this madness called spirituality is - go step by step. As you progress, you will gain more experience. You will know all these things.

If you want to go on the path of knowledge, for example, if knowledge is your goal, not peace of mind, you don't worry about it. You have a lot of it, not the material benefits. You have a lot of money and a lot of gold, not paranormal experiences. You have seen it all. Everything is seen by you, studied by you. You want knowledge, pure knowledge. You come to the path of knowledge, especially the one that is being given by me, because I have accumulated it. It is not mine, it is all tradition. I have just changed it for the modern time so you adopt it. How do I teach it? I will make you go through an online course. I'll ask you to go in a disciplined way. You take this step, you take that step, and so on. So there are stages and then you will be trained there. There you need to drop all your beliefs about the truth, knowledge, and anything. Your goal is knowledge, and then you get the knowledge that is given there. You finish it. It may take six months or one year. It depends on you because everybody is different. It depends on me because I decide when you do the next step.

If you're not satisfied there, you drop that path completely, you drop the guru completely. Take that which is useful, drop it, and then proceed to the next one. That is why we call it seeking, isn't it? We don't call it buying. You go to the shop and buy your toilet paper. We don't call it I'm seeking the toilet paper; no, it is there, it does the job, and you buy it. This is not true for spirituality. You cannot buy it. Nothing is fixed here; you need to explore it, you need to seek it. We are always seekers. I'm still a seeker. I do not write the initials and the guru of this and that. No, when I introduce myself, I say I'm a seeker on the path of knowledge. And that is my whole introduction. You don't need to know more than that. Why do you need to know more than that? There's nothing else here. So I advise everybody to do the same: fix a goal for yourself, and seek that goal. Whatever is knowledge in that path is knowledge. Whatever is true in that path is the truth. Get your goal, and then you can think about what did I gain here? Do I want more? Do I need to seek more? If yes, go ahead, join another ashram, join another guru, join another philosophy, read another book, and so on. Seek, do not settle. You settle, you'll stagnate and rot. Keep moving.

Then you'll say then what is the use of spirituality if I do not settle? The goal is to become goalless. The aim is to become aimless. And now you will not understand what I'm saying, because it's so mysterious stuff, isn't it? The spiritual mumbo jumbo. You are in that territory. If my aim was to become aimless, my aim was to become agnostic, not know anything, why did I take this trouble? I can do it right now. Yes, you can do it. Such people are called devotees. Such people are called surrendered, bhakta, who have already surrendered everything. I don't want to know the truth, I don't want to do anything, see. But if you're not that kind, then you will need to go through the jungle of knowledge to know nothing and you will need to go through the jungle of seeking to become aimless. So pick one thing and then seek it, that is all, that is my advice. If you want to come on the path of knowledge, you join the path of knowledge program.

What is the significance of the guru mantra on the path of knowledge?

There is no mantra, there is no guru mantra, there is no chanting, nothing. But in other paths, other traditions, there is a guru mantra that is given and the guru has his intention behind it. That intention is not your normal intention which you make every day, for example, I want to become the richest man in the world. I intend to drink tea now. No, not that. The proper word is sankalp in Sanskrit. It is a magical intention, you can say in English. I don't know, probably there is no word for it in English. So this intention, this force is behind it. Why is this powerful? Because guru is not a human now. Just like I said, his memory area of the individuality is extended into the universal memory a lot. Whatever he says comes true. Whatever he intends happens. The sankalp is a desire that is probably a million times stronger than your everyday desires. What is the effect of this intention behind the mantra? The guru becomes responsible for your progress.

Whenever you say the mantra the sankalp is downloaded in you. You can say you connect to that guru when you sit down for meditation. You say the guru mantra which is given by the guru. There is a connection between the guru and you, although it is always there, as soon as you decide to join a guru, well, the connection is formed. If you don't know it, no problem, the guru knows it. Guru knows everything. How does he remember? He is the universal mind. Incarnation of the universal memory or probably the guru is a smaller form of UM but he knows anything which is necessary to know.

So if you are fortunate that you get that kind of guru, never leave that guru. If the guru recognizes you, never leave that guru. If you recognize the guru, never leave that guru. And there is some mystery angle here which I should not try to explain. It is beautiful as it is. Explanation will ruin it. It is like dissecting the rose trying to find what makes it beautiful. Simply smell the rose and continue. So don't worry about how the guru mantra works. If you are attracted to a guru who is initiating you using a guru mantra, go and get it. You will know one day. Knowing is by being, not by words. Through words, you will know nothing. You will cook up a noodle soup in your mind. It is all practical. Spirituality is not words. It comes by doing. Like you want to ride a bicycle. You read a book, see all the diagrams in the book of the bicycle. Do you know how to ride the bicycle now? No. Throw away the book, get the bike, start pedaling it. You will fall a few times, scratch your knees, but finally you will learn how to ride the bike. By doing it, not by reading about it. Can you go to a guru and ask what a bike is? Tell me how it was made, what is the history of it and what are the technical names of parts of the bike? No, you will never know how to ride the bike. Get on it, start doing it, it is practical.

If it is not doing anything for you, leave the path. It is useless for you. If you like it, if you are surrendered enough, you want to experiment, you want to practice, you want to see the truth of it. It is an experiment. You go and take it. You do it. How will you know whether it worked or not? Only if it worked. If it did not work, nothing can be said about it. Probably it worked for somebody else. So the assumption people have is: "Oh, the mantra works. I will take it." No, it may not work. It depends on the impurities you have, your mental makeup, and all. If the guru is not a famous celebrity guru, he will sit down with you. He will do what I call evaluation. That is needed. He needs to evaluate what is your karmic makeup, what is there in your memory, in modern words. And then he prescribes a mantra or he simply says, "Don't come here. This is not your place." If the guru is not doing that, he is simply experimenting. He is saying, "Let us see what happens. Take this mantra. Do this ritual. Come back after three years." This is normal in India. That they do some ritual. They will touch your forehead. “Go and do these things. Then come back after five years”. And people say, "No, five years? I want the result today." “It's impossible. You will get the results after many lifetimes”. The touching happened today. The fruit can happen after lifetimes. Spirituality is a work of many lifetimes, not one day. One who thinks that it is a work of one day is an ignorant person. It's true in every field, isn't it? People go to software and they think that, "I will learn a language and tomorrow I'll become a millionaire because everybody is just waiting to pay their money to me and they write their program, it never runs, and they write it again. After years, they earn a little bit. Why? They had no clue about this field! So it happens in every field. The same thing happens in spirituality.

There is no instant gratification. The fastest path is the path of knowledge. Can you imagine? I'm telling you that you are going to know everything in six months. Not six lifetimes, not six yugas! You're going to know everything in six months. Do you want it faster? Like you want it in six minutes? That is also possible if you have certain qualities. If those qualities have flowered in you, then sitting for six minutes with me is enough. There are some cases like this and the only reaction they have is - they start crying. There are no words. There are cases like this. I encountered them and some went on and on, directionless, for many years.

Rajiv is asking, How do one find a guru? Or rather when found by guru until then what should one do to progress?

No, you will never progress if you don't find a guru. It is like asking, "I want to write a novel and I don't know ABCD and what should I do till I find a person who knows, who can teach me ABCD, who can teach me alphabet and grammar?" No, you first take admission in the school, go to the KG classes, go to the pre-nursery, learn the letters, learn counting. You need a guru, things start rolling when there is a guru. How do you find a guru? Again, your aim comes here. What do you want? Tell me what you want and then I'll tell you whether I can do that or not. Which guru is a good guru for you? The one who gives you your spiritual goal. This question is so common that I recorded it once and then it is now given to everybody. And those who want to listen to me the latest thing in Hindi go to my Hindi channel and listen to the Gyan Sutra videos.

As without guru one cannot attain any knowledge then does that mean that whatever one does till the time is fruitless?

Yes, you're absolutely right. It is fruitless if you don't have a teacher, you won't be able to take even first step. I'm saying it sitting here on the path of knowledge, where the teacher is not important. I told you only direct experience and logic but it takes a teacher to tell you that these are the means of knowledge. It takes a teacher to tell you that don't rely on the teacher. The teacher only points to what you are seeing. You need to see that this pointing is the essence. If you don't get this kind of service then you will be lost completely for many lifetimes. Teacher is placed above God. There is a reason for it.

Jaydeep is asking, logic is just the play of intellect? How can it cut down ignorance and help us in understanding our true self?

Very good question. Logic is not going to tell you the truth. Logic is going to tell you what is false. That is all you need to know.

How do you reach your true self? Can you create your true self out of nothing, from thin air? Where is it? Where do you need to go to find the true self? Everything is here and now. If it is true it must be true here and now. Why can't I see it? Where is my true self? Because it is covered up by ignorance. And the job of logic and direct experience is to cut down this ignorance. You will never get any knowledge of it. I said it in the beginning; it is unknowable. You can only remove your ignorance. You think I am the body. And you investigate using direct experience and logic and then throw away this belief that I am the body. And you go on doing it like this: neti neti (not this, not that), till you reach the true essence, which you cannot remove. I have called it the progressive elimination method.

You progress to the true self by eliminating that which you are not. This elimination is done by the intellect. After that you drop the logic, because now you have reached that which cannot be known by logic. The means of knowledge - direct experience and logic - are like a thorn and ignorance is like another thorn which is now gotten into your hand. The thorn is in your hand and it is causing a lot of pain. So you take another thorn which is the logic and remove that thorn which is in your hand. And then do you keep the thorns with you? No, you throw them away because the work is done. Logic is important as far as removing ignorance is the goal. Otherwise you don't need it. To be what you are you don't need to be logical. Otherwise there was no future for other paths where the logic is not the way, the intellect is completely discarded in other paths. There was no way to reach your true self but that is not true. You reach the true self by other paths and the path of knowledge is simply for those people who have an evolved intellect, who have very sharp intelligence. They get it simply when you say it. So depending on the constitution of the memory or the mental make up apath is prescribed. Who should use the intellect? Not everybody, only those who are capable of it.

Jaydeep is saying, Can you please elaborate more about the path of knowledge?

Yes, but we ran out of time. So I'm going to give you a link. If you want to know what is the path of knowledge, you will need to walk on it a little bit. At least you will need to be formally introduced to what it is and then you can proceed. Otherwise, you can get a little bit of idea about the path of knowledge. What is the goal here? The goal of the path of knowledge is knowledge. And then there are side effects like self-realization, realization of oneness, destruction of ignorance, destruction of suffering. The suffering will never touch you: liberation, mukti, nirvana, moksha, whatever you want to call it, dissolution, salvation, love, and peace and even material benefits: good body, good mind, healthy mind, sharp intellect, social position, and so on. And you will also know the metaphysical, paranormal, the greater mind, the universal memory, the illusion.

I teach illusion also. I never say no to illusion. I love the illusion, in a good sense. Not trying to get lost in it but studying it and you know everything. So this is the goal on the path of knowledge and the fruits are infinite. Knowledge will keep bringing the fruits. There is nothing which you will not achieve on the path of knowledge. Remember, I took this path for a reason. Every other path will take you a little distance. Path of knowledge will take you to the ultimate. There is nothing more direct, more precise and more complete than the Gyanmarg, the path of knowledge. Everything else is a cheap copy.

Session 86

Muni asks, "Are we now saying that Existence, Experiencer, Experience, Ignorance, Knowledge, Change, and Energy are all one?"

Yes, that is the central thing in non-dualism: everything is one. In this list of words, there are some words that are very basic. The experience and the experiencer are basic. Plus, you have added some illusory things like ignorance, knowledge, and change, and then you have added something which is purely imaginary and theoretical like energy. Yes, it is all contained in One. These are various forms of existence only. Now, how do we know that these things are one? It is possible because we have a system to arrive at this conclusion. And the way we do it is called the Path of Knowledge. It's very simple. We pick the topic and we go to the depth of it using our means of knowledge. There is a logical process to arrive at the essence of everything.

Sometimes we analyze, sometimes we divide things up to understand them. Sometimes we form theories also so that we understand what is going on, and we apply the criteria of truth. And then, in a systematic way, step by step, we arrive at the oneness. So those who are in the program are going through this kind of process which we call the Path of Knowledge. You are going to study all these components and then you will finally find that it is all one. Simply saying that it is all one does nothing. It is meaningless to simply believe that everything is one. We need to show that everything is one, and we need to prove it.

We remove that which is false and then we analyze that which is true and we see that there is only one truth. There cannot be many truths. That is all we mean by oneness. It does not mean that there is a mass of substance there and there is only one of it. No, there is nothing like this. Or it does not mean that there is a mysterious experience somewhere which will provide you with the oneness. No, it is not also like this. And there is nothing metaphysical in oneness. There is nothing hidden. It is our current experience right now, right here, it is that of oneness. That is what we show.

Next question, why do we need to study the experiencer in such detail? Most of these questions about its location, process, causation, etc., do not even come to mind. Is it necessary to be curious about each of these aspects to continue on this path?

There are two or three kinds of seekers. First kind, they simply grasp it. Their intuition is very strong that you are pointing to the experiencer. "I already know what it is and I do not need to ask about its location, processes, and all those things." There will be other seekers who will want to do a surgery on the experiencer. "You were talking about the experiencer. Can you tell me its location? Where can I find the experiencer?" And then for these people, you need to provide an answer. And then there will be somebody who will ask, “Tell me the process of creation of the experiencer, What can I do to create it? What components do I need from the hardware store to create the experiencer?” And then there are some people who will ask - what is the cause of it and when did it start and so on. All the possible questions that we can ask are answered. We listed seven basic questions. We need to put the experiencer through this seven-fold process. That is why there is detail. And I want the program to be complete. I want the knowledge to be complete. I don't want any gaps in your knowledge because you probably know all these things already. But if somebody else comes and asks you that you are very superstitious, you believe so many things about yourself, and now you will need to show that person in the same way. Look this is the truth, this is the logic, this is the direct experience. Do you find the experiencer in a location or is there only a witnessing of the location? That is how we conclude these things, you know from direct experience, I cannot find it in any location and then we apply the logic also. Let us put it in the location and see what happens and we find that now it becomes an experience. And we say no, the experiencer is no more now because it's an experience in some location, it has become an object and is not a subject anymore.

Each and every question is dealt in two ways: We use the experience, our direct knowledge, our direct observation. And we use logic which is an ability in the intellect. And we arrive at all the answers there. There is no other satisfactory way to answer these things. And you will find that you need only these two means, you don't need anything else. If you try to utilize something else to prove these claims about the experiencer or anything that we study, you will find that it's not satisfactory. Like, you cannot say that look this is written in this book, it is non-local, no it's not going to be satisfactory because nobody believes books these days. And you cannot say that it was told by my guru, it was told by such a great person and it's not satisfactory. Nobody believes “great” people these days. What do we believe? Our own eyes, our own experience, it has to be our own knowledge. And so we go through this process. This is what the path of knowledge is about. There will be an extreme amount of detail in everything. So for those who “just know” everything, well, it's fine then.

Next question, in normal language bliss is associated with immense satisfaction or peaceful joy which is a positive state to have, but you described it as neither positive nor negative state. Is that right?

Yes. See, the word bliss in the philosophical terms is a direct translation of the Sanskrit Anand. Probably there is no word for Anand in English. So we borrowed “bliss” and we redefined it. So it is an absence of both happiness and suffering. This is the state of the mind which is totally empty. There is nothing but pure awareness there, there is awareness of being, that's all. There is this positive thing about it that it is sweet, knowing that “I am” produces a little bit of a sweet feeling. And that is why the word bliss is useful here because bliss is also a sweet feeling. The issue is that bliss can be associated with the body, but this bliss, which is the spiritual bliss (you can add a word in front of it like spiritual bliss, Atmanand), is associated with the experiencer. It is my nature, bliss is my nature. As there is nothing that troubles the experiencer. Poetically we say, it is not engaged in happiness or suffering and all those activities; whatever is the ground state, is the bliss, it never goes away. How can you remove the ground state? How can you remove the nature of the experiencer from the experiencer? It's not possible.

Muni is saying, you mentioned that a circle is perfect, so equilateral triangle and square, is that the reason they are part of the sacred yantras, symbols of perfection?

Just like I wrote in my review, that you are on the path of knowledge, there are no yantras, there is no tantra, no mantra here. Please do not get distracted, do not let your intellect wander into other areas which are not really important here. We can have all the knowledge in this whole creation, without the use of the symbols and whatever. And since you have asked, no, the answer is no. These triangles and squares, they are not symbols of perfection. Circle is a symbol of perfection, yes, everybody knows, not other figures. Probably they are in some way mathematically perfect, but nothing to do with spiritual things.

So, what are yantras? They are mental machines, remember this word, “mental” or non-physical machines. In Sanskrit, the meaning of the word yantra is a machine. How do we communicate the structure of this mental machine, non-physical machine, to somebody else? Symbolically. There is no other way. Either you write it down in the form of words, which becomes a mantra or you draw a drawing, machine drawing, a blueprint of it and each symbol is then a representation of something in the mind.

As far as I know this art is completely lost. It is still there in the occult field a little bit. We have combined two things which are the yantras and the non-physical entities that are behind the idols. Idol worship comes under the tantric path or the occult path. So you will find the yantras inscribed on the idols sometimes. That is the origin of the yantras and then people started drawing them on who knows what, paper or something. It should not be done. It is a part of a bigger machine behind the idol where in the non-physical domain, the whole living being is created by the tantric, by the occult practitioner. What do you call it? You call it a god or goddess or a deity. Remember all these gods and goddesses deities are creations of humans. We had progressed so much in this field of occult science that we could create entire living things, and the idols were simply physical representations of whatever was created in the non-physical. How did this non-physical thing operate and interface with humans who are still in physical form? A tantric or the practitioner does not need to use the physical form to connect with these things, but an ordinary person, a worshipper of these idols, or ordinary practitioner needs to interface with these entities, which are created for whatever reason, mostly desire fulfilment, mostly something related to worldly things, or sometimes spiritual things also, like knowledge and powers. They need a yantra and that is why it is always inscribed on the idol somewhere. E.g. Ganesha, on his stomach, you will find there is a yantra or on his forehead, there will be some triangles and some things like this. Good examples are Sri Yantra and similar.

What has happened is, only the drawing has remained and the real art of non-physical creation of these machines is totally lost, but you can revive it; you can make your own yantras in the non-physical domain. Close your eyes, go into your mind, imagine a mechanism in your mind that does something. Let us say, you get angry very quickly; now, install a mechanism there which will remind you that you are in an angry state. It is an “anger yantra”. And let us say this yantra does something whenever you are angered, and it produces the sound of a bell in your mind. Remember, it is all non-physical, whatever we see in the physical form is only for communication and transmission of knowledge. So that I don't forget what my yantra was in my mind, I can write it down or I can make symbols on the paper so that I can reinstall it if I forget it; it is like installing software. Now, you have installed this yantra in your mind, and whenever you are angry, it is going to work; it will produce a bell sound. Why? Because it is all illusion, it is all imaginary; it has to work if it is repeated many times; it becomes a process in your mind, as simple as that. Just like a physical machine, you have successfully installed a mental machine that is your yantra.

There was an elaborate science to do that, and those drawings are a part of that. Now it is all lost. So we ventured into something more interesting than the path of knowledge because we never see these things on the path of knowledge. Very interesting thing, the path of the occult. It is possible to do a lot of things using yantras and murtis. Murtis means the idols; you can create whole creatures, and yantras can extend and create a whole universe also. You will find these yantra symbols spinning behind the deity when the deity is pictured. Sometimes a picture is made of the deity; you will find these geometrical symbols spinning behind the head of the deity, or they are standing in the center of the symbols. Sometimes the planets have geometrical figures around them. What does that mean? The whole creation is a yantra. That's what it means. Human beings are yantras; it is a non-physical machine. When you dig into these things, you will find that humans progressed to a height which you cannot even imagine now. That was in the distant past, not a few years ago or not a few hundred years ago. No, many, many thousand years ago, it was a different kind of time.

Muni is asking: "Is that what Sadhguru has done for Shiva Lingam at his Isha Ashram?"

Yes, Lingam is a yantra. You will find there are symbols etched on the Lingam. There are different kinds of Lingams. It is an art so old that this whole continent was full of Shiva Lingams. There was a time when starting from Iran to the Philippines, the whole continent was dotted with lingams. You can still find the remains of those in South India and Cambodia; everywhere else, people have totally destroyed them. There were lingams as big as a hundred feet tall or fifty feet tall. Now, what do we do? We waste milk on these things. They don't know what it is. Sadhguru claims to know all these things. There are videos that he is building lingams out of solidified mercury, and gold, and whatever. Yes, it is a great art. Those who want to learn, join the occult path.

In the kinds of interrelations section, I could not understand the difference between the actor section and subject-object. “Who prepared this food” - will fall under which category? This has an actor-action, and this is also a “who” question.

This is asked by Riddhi in the path of knowledge, knowledge lesson. So yes, you are right. One example represents two interrelations among experiences: who prepared the food? So yes, there is an actor, there is an action, and it is also a who-question. There can be many such examples. And usually, our knowledge is very complex; the kind of interrelations that I have given there is only very basic. Usually, the knowledge is a combination of all these interrelations. It is a combination of all the relations. It is possible that there can be complex interrelations among the experiences. The list that I have given is broken down into the basic interrelations. So your observation is very nice, that knowledge is not simply a single relation. Knowledge can have a complex web of relations. It is possible. So I will leave it to you to find out these interrelations and other pieces of knowledge.

Question by Muni, It is difficult to comprehend that experience has no cause. If experience is acausal, then am I here attending this course without any cause or reason?

Very nice question. Are you here? Can you tell me? Is there a Muni here who is attending? Where are you? Are you in the satsang? Think again. Is there a Muni, or is there an experiencer that is everywhere? Which one is true? Which one comes and goes?

You have gone through the basics. Now you should know which one is true. There is no Muni who is attending. Now if there is no Muni who is attending the satsang, is it meaningful to give it a cause? If it is not there, is it meaningful to provide a cause for it? Tell me if any of your experiences are true. Which of your experiences is true? So yes, no experience is true. This is the grand conclusion. That is why when the existence appears as experience and the experiencer, we simply throw away the experience and we say it's all one, it's all me, the experiencer. That is a direct way to arrive at oneness. There are other ways, obviously. This is the most direct. Know that the existence is appearing as two, and one aspect of it is false; the other aspect is truth. What is false? The experience. What is true? The experiencer. When we discard the experience as false, we are left with one essence, which is the non-dual experiencer. Whatever appears in front of it is, simply saying, is not there. It's an illusion. It is the One only who is witnessing the illusion. It is not even comprehensible. We cannot comprehend what it is, we simply say it is an illusion. The intellect cannot grasp it.

So if all your experiences are illusions, can we say that they have a cause? You can actually cook up a cause, but that will be false. The cause of the false is also false. The cause of the illusion is also illusory.

You can return to the snake in the rope and you can ask what is the cause of the snake? How did the snake get there in the rope? Who put the snake in the rope? Now you will find it's meaningless. There is no snake there, no snake at all. Now why are you trying to find the cause of it? But you can drop down one or two levels in this illusion. Remember the teachings can be divided into many levels of explanation. We can explain everything on many levels. So at the highest level, there is non-duality. Nothing is there, really. Nothing makes sense. It cannot be grasped by intellect, it's the highest level. Below that is the duality, where I am and I am not any experience. Below that is the illusion where we forget the experiencer also, and then we can try to find an explanation of the experience. We say that the cause of the illusion is a memory. Memory is the cause in the terminology of our philosophy. Is it really true? No, it's not true because you are going to ask me the cause of the memory now. No, there is no cause of the memory. The memory is derived out of experience. It is not the reverse. There is no experience being produced by the memory. The memory is a theoretical explanation of the experience.

I will give you another example. You know the equation for gravity, right? G x M x m divided by R squared. Those who don't know, this is Newton's equation of gravity. Can we say that the gravity on earth is because of the equation? I write down the equation on paper and I say look, this is the cause of the gravity. No, we cannot. The equation, our theory cannot be the cause of the real thing, which is gravity. We have derived the equation out of a real observation of gravity. You do the experiments and plot the graph and all these numbers and you get the equation. Similarly, memory is a theory. It cannot be a cause of the illusion.

Masses behave like this: the more the distance, the less is the gravitational force. And so we explain gravity like this but the equation is not causing the gravity; it is only an explanation of the gravity. Similarly, there is no cause of the experience, but we can explain it very nicely. So what I have done is I have borrowed everything from Sankhya philosophy. Sankhya is a dualistic philosophy, but it is very beautiful. All our sciences and mathematics is based on Sankhya; there is no other science other than Sankhya; it is the foundation of science. So I simply stole everything from there which the Advait never explains. Advait says there is no snake, and then you can peacefully go home and sleep; there is nothing to do after that. But our minds are very curious; we want to know many things, so it can be borrowed from the Sankhya. And I borrowed the concept of vibration, memory and the layers of the memory and mechanisms of perceptions. It is also beautiful; it explains the experience very nicely. And if you take it to the level of technology, you arrive in the field of occult. You can now manipulate the experience using your model. You made the models, now you manipulate the experience; that is where we enter the occult. So very smoothly we glide from the non-duality to I am, we go down and we enter the illusion, where we are not only witnessing it, we are creating it, we are manipulating it, we are doing whatever we want with it. So humans are capable of all these things; can you imagine? We are capable of many things, from the highest to ground levels, basement to top floor. We are able to grasp, manipulate, and use all the levels of reality. What we cannot grasp is what is beyond us, beyond existence itself. All the knowledge of what is beyond is negative. It is not this, not that, non-causal, non-local, non-temporal, non-non. Everything is non, so that is a mystery. Mystery is the final answer.

Hopefully it is clear, you should not try to find a cause for anything. I have given you a short answer here, but there are long answers, which you will find in the lesson. I have tried to explain there, using our means of knowledge, why there cannot be any cause or reason.

Shimona is asking, what is Kundalini energy?

That which is making all the life appear, all the activity appear, all the motion appear in this creation, that which is creating everything, is called the Kundalini energy. You can see that it is a concept, but it is describing an experience. It is not the path of knowledge as Kundalini comes from the Shaiv tradition. It is also called the Shakti, which is half part of the Shiv—you can call it Prakriti if you go to the Sankhya tradition, you can call it Devi, Mother, Maya, Mary, Maryam—there are different names in different traditions. It is the same thing: the creator, the creative energy. And not only is it creating, it is also maintaining and destroying. So as you change the traditions, as you change the philosophies, the names of these forces are going to change.

Kundalini is all in one. It is the mother of everything, mother of all the energies, and she is our mother also, because humans are created by this energy. Since we are created by this energy, and this energy is causing evolution in all the creatures, it is possible to manipulate this energy once we know the key. There are two ways to manipulate the Kundalini energy: One is by worship, you simply surrender to Kundalini and pray - “Please do something to fix my evolution. I am not evolving fast enough. Please do something. Or I am stuck somewhere. My karmic baggage is so much that I am not going past human life or animal life or whatever life”. And if the Kundalini listens to you, if she is pleased with you, she will do something, and you will be out of that situation. This is one way, it is called worship. And that has become a path of worship of the Devi in nine forms—you can make more if you want.

And there is another path, which is more occult kind, where people are not happy simply worshipping things, they use technology to manipulate this Energy and that has become the Kundalini yoga. Kundalini yoga involves manipulation of the Kundalini energy, which is already active in everybody. Otherwise, you won't be alive. We simply give it a boost and we accelerate the evolution. So that you don't have to spend a lot of time in this boring physical world, in the boring body called the human body. You are launched into orbit by the Kundalini energy. How is that possible? That is a totally different path. So those who want to take Kundalini, they should do it only under guidance. If you simply worship the Devi, you don't need any guidance. Do whatever you want. But there are actually very systematic ways to worship the Devi or Mother. Join a tradition and whatever they say, you do it mechanically. It happens if you are lucky.

But if you want to join the yoga path, where the energy is actually manipulated by breathing practices and poses, and also by concentrating on the different memory layers which are called chakras in the tradition, which is a totally different system. You should not do it alone. You need a very experienced master or a guru who has already done that. You cannot activate this energy. You cannot turn on the key. You cannot turn on the ignition by yourself. It's not possible. Only a guru can do that. And that process is called the Shaktipat.

So what is the process on the path of Kundalini yoga? You go to a guru. You express your wish that, "I want to surrender to Kundalini now. I want to take up this tradition." And he will do the ignition by Shaktipat and he will prescribe a practice. There will be a lot of things involved in the practice so it is a life-long practice, goes on for many lifetimes, and once the Kundalini has cleared all the layers, she puts you on the final one. As you progress, you will evolve; you will get whatever the Kundalini gives you and most people are after the powers that come, because as you evolve you break the limits of your body and mind. This is a short version of Kundalini. Those who want to know what Kundalini is, they should go and listen to the podcast on Kundalini. For Shimona, I will give you the links.

Satya is asking, “Does Kriya yoga come under Kundalini yoga?”

Yes, it is also a path of energy/Shakti.

Parteep is asking, "I am not the doer. Please comment on it from Brahma Gyan's daily life point of view."

Not only am I not the doer, there is no doer. There is nobody who is doing an action. We never find anything which is called a doer, if you investigate this is from the point of view of the ultimate reality, the Brahman. Because nothing is being caused, nobody is doing it. The essence of the doer is the cause behind an action. Don't try to find a cause because there is none. So there is no cause of any action and so there is no doer of any action.

Sometimes we say that I am not the doer, I am only a witness. The body is the doer. But, you cannot call the body a doer. Actions are happening - That's all we can say. It appears that some actions are happening through the agency of the body. As soon as I say the word “agency”, again the doer appears. Agent is a doer, isn't it? But there is a limit to our language also. What can we say? Because the doer is totally permeating our language. Even when something is happening through the agency of the body, we immediately say you are the doer. Why? Because the idea of the doership cannot be shaken off. It is not only the idea of doership, it is also the idea of the ownership of the action. If you say you are not the doer, it means you don't own the action. So then you are escaping from the responsibility. You can say - I did it but it was not my intention it was somebody else's intention. So doership is not only about the doership of an action, it is also about taking the total responsibility for an action. If you are a doer then you are responsible for the action. You can't escape it. But if you say I am not the doer, that means I am not responsible for the action. It was somebody else who did it. If you take the extreme you can say that God has done it, you are not responsible.

So doership is very closely related to responsibility and ownership. You are running away from the responsibility and the ownership of the action. That's a very convenient thing to do. That gives you a lot of freedom. But it also creates a lot of confusion. Because if you say I am not the doer, then who is the doer? This is a very serious question. It is not just a matter of semantics. It is a matter of understanding the very nature of reality. Who is the doer? Nobody is the doer. Nothing is the doer. There is no doer. That is the ultimate truth. The doer is an illusion.

We say that the machine is doing it, or simply, there are movements in the machine and things are happening on their own. When you investigate like this, you use your pure sight ,you use your direct experience, you will find that there are illusory movements, that's all. Illusory actions. Then the mind comes in the picture and assigns a doer to it. The robot is doing, the robot is walking, the robot is producing the goods in the factory. No nothing like this is happening. The robot is not the doer. It is a machine. Sometimes we say - the computer is doing it. The computer is playing the movie or something. We project the doer on everything. Why? Because we are taught like this since childhood, we assign a doer to everything, and the child will say that the doll is doing it or the toy is doing it. Toy is making noises and the child will beat up the toy or beat up the doll, and also punish the toy for doing something. And we grow up with this ignorance actually. The grown up people are not very different from this kind of child. When somebody else does something we punish that person. We assign a doer to other bodies. Why do we do that? The same ignorance.

We do not see that there are only actions and there is no actor. You cannot point to an actor and say look here is the actor. No, you will always find actions. The actor breaks down into actions. That's all, So this is from the point of view of direct observation ,You will never find it, you will never witness it. The doer is not an experience. Also, it is a complete fabrication. Objects around you, they are at least representing something in the memory. They are representing something in the vibrational field, whatever it is, a field of possibilities. But the doer is a complete fake. I call it the double Maya, sometimes I call it the double illusion. Another good example of a double illusion is time. Why? Because there is no time, there is only change. And then there is no change, there is only memory. Without memory, no change and without change, no time. So time is doubly removed from actuality. And actually, there is no memory, there is only potential. So, one more step away from the reality and the memory, and whatever is actually not there. So it is complete fabrication. The ignorance has many layers on it, on top of each other. So, the same way, the doer is actually the third or fourth layer on what is happening. Remember, nothing is happening. That is the first level. Something happens and we assign an agency to it—energy, memory, karmas, whatever, and kundalini, yes. And then we say, that's not true. It is the second level. We can drop down even more. And then we imagine the doer.

Parteep is saying, in understanding brahmagyan, silence seems the only answer. Intellect subsides and silence prevails. No food for the mind here at all.

Brahmagyan is not only beyond mind, it is beyond the Experiencer also. What you are calling brahmagyan is properly called Experiencing. So again, I want to remind everybody, please do not mix the terminologies here because others are not going to understand. When it is really necessary, we do sometimes use Sanskrit words, but not often. So experiencing has no experiencer. What happens to the intellect? Well, it is not there also. No sign of it. As soon as you arrive at the experience, the intellect is already gone. There is only witnessing. The intellect is seen as an experience. The mind is gone as soon as you are in pure awareness. And if there is some activity there, that also stops. It is amazing, isn't it? When you are in the Experiencing state, which can be called a samadhi state, the Experiencer is also gone. Because what is an Experiencer? It is only the mind in a very, very subtle form. The division between experience and the experiencer is being done by the mind only. That is why, in Buddhism, there is no experiencer. They will say, "mind only". That is true, isn't it? In Advaita, we adopted the duality of the experience and the experiencer because it is very easy and it answers the question of who am I? The answer is, I am the experiencer. It is very nice here. Till you encounter the oneness, we need to drop it now, finally. There is no experiencer. It is just the mind in disguise. I usually do not say it like this. I say that the experiencer is dissolved in the experience in the state of experiencing. Right now, right here, you are in that state. What is happening is, your attention is totally on the duality or multiplicity. Actually, your attention is totally outward, extroverted. You don't even see the duality, or you don't even see the experiencer. You are not even aware.

We go step by step. We bring our attention into the body. You can call it a yogic practice if you want. Then we shift our attention inside the body. Then we shift it into the actions of the body like breathing and all. Even finer. Then we shift it into feelings and emotions and thoughts and then imaginations. Finer till nothing is left. You can call it Samadhi. That is the path of meditation. Everybody knows that. I think people are doing it without knowing what they are doing. No knowledge, only blank actions. It's not meditation. You need knowledge. You need to be aware of what you are doing. Otherwise there is no point in doing that kind of meditation. So when all the traces of the mind are gone, you are left with the experiencer. When that is also gone you are left with Samadhi. So there is a process there to arrive in that state of oneness. And that is how the Ashtanga yoga is described by Patanjali. The 8 steps. You need to reach there. And where do you start? Yes you start from the body by sitting in a proper posture. Then breathing. Then withdrawing your senses because it's too extroverted. And in the eighth step you reach Experiencing. You are already there actually, right now also, but you are lost. So Patanjali brought you back.

How do we do this thing on the path of knowledge? Through knowledge. We simply see that this is what is happening. My state is of oneness right now right here. I am the existence witnessing myself. Done. It takes two seconds. Yes but in the case of a common seeker: in the next two seconds, you are back in the world. You cannot stay there. And that is why we have practices. And I have told you many times that Samadhi is a useless state. What are you going to do there? Look, you are already in Samadhi right now. Now what are you doing there, sitting with closed eyes for many hours? What is the use of that? So we come down in the duality, fully knowing that it is unity. We are in yoga, fully knowing it. And then we continue with what is. We accept what is. We are not forcing some other state on that which is only natural. This is called awareness in daily life. There is no need to force things on the mind. It is not required. It is already in Samadhi. I mean, the experiencer is in the eternal Samadhi.

Satya asks, is that Sahaj Samadhi?

Yes, that is what I call Sahaj Samadhi. Now this word can get a different meaning in different traditions, but here we have adopted this word because Sahaj means natural. Right now, right here, are you not naturally in Samadhi?

Many of you who have not completed the program or who have never seen my videos will not understand this. And those who have taken training directly from me or have gone through the videos have done a lot of introspection on this. Our senior students will quickly grasp this. Yes, this is the most natural way to be. What is unnatural? As soon as ignorance catches you, it is unnatural now. You live like an ordinary human in the Sahaj Samadhi. No problem at all. You don't need to be exotic. Live an ordinary life in full awareness of what is happening. And then it's not a problem. As soon as you are lost, the world is real. I am real and my needs are the highest priority in this whole existence. And now you are in this domain of suffering. That means suffering. All is one, is you. That is the truth. Know it. Come back into your ordinary world. There's no point in staying there because you are eternally there. The world and the body, this life are like a blink of the eye in front of the eternity that you are. Enjoy this thing which is momentary.

Anil is saying, why does the illusion seem probabilistic in nature?

It is a very good question actually. All there is is probability. That is why it is probabilistic. All there is, is the potential to manifest. There is no manifestation actually. Nothing actually is manifested. Always remains virtual. So there is no other way than to be probabilistic. In philosophical language we say that this is the necessity. Illusion is probabilistic due to necessity. It cannot be anything else. Why? Because its foundation is in potentiality. Now I'll tell you something very funny: that when it approaches the probability of 1, we call it certainty. Or in the language of philosophy we call it deterministic. When things are happening in a similar way, again and again, we call it deterministic. And when the probability is almost 0 or very close to 0, we call it random. It was a random chance, you say. It never happens. Something very interesting is that from probability 1 you go to probability 0 and you can explain all the phenomena in this creation. Everything. Determinism forms a tiny subset of existence. It is not the whole of it. So what the determinists are doing, they are fooling themselves by ignoring the reality. When you want to survive you are looking for certainty not probability. And that is why materialism is married to determinism. Without determinism there cannot be materialism. And the problem is science is based on determinism and materialism but what they have found is actually probability at the root. Everything that we observe is probabilistic. So that is the funny thing here.

As you go from the gross to subtle you will find that it becomes more and more probabilistic. The gross things cannot be changed. They are vibrating very slowly, we say it in spiritual terms. And the subtle things they are always changing. Like in a split second the mind changes. Why? Because there is a lot of probability of change there. It is almost random sometimes. There is change beyond mind which cannot be grasped by any kind of senses. And we call it the remaining energy, unmanifested. Out of the unmanifest there are some things which are highly certain, close to 1. And that is what appears to us. Nothing else appears which is too fast and too random. Our minds never register it. Our senses do not register it. Our senses have a lower limit also. If something changes very slowly that also is not registered. Like you can take an example of your ear. It registers the frequencies from 20Hz to 20kHz only. Below 20Hz, it is too small a change, it is useless. And above 20kHz, well, beyond the ability of the brain to process. Too fast. It does not mean that there are no sounds beyond it. There are ultrasonic and even higher sounds, but useless for us, they change very fast. So we actually perceive a tiny slice of the probabilistic nature. And that slice is only that much which is useful for survival of the organism. That's all. And some people consider this very limited experience as the only truth. That is what I call total foolishness. It is the stupidity of humanity. I don't know why it happened because we were not like this. We were advanced, we were so evolved that we could see all this, the full range from 0 to 1 probability in nature. We could do that. Right now also, you can do that. There is a limit on the senses but there is probably no limit on our ability. We can perceive everything.

Parteep is asking, can we maintain experiencing while doing our daily work? Trying to do that, I am becoming desire free and unable to do daily work like before.

Look, the definition of experiencing is that it never goes away. As you progress in your program you will know that there is no need to maintain experiencing. There is no such thing. It is always there. If it is always there, can you bring it? No. So what do we maintain in our daily life? We maintain a knowledge of it which is what I am calling awareness. So your question will be answered at that time – how to do that. There are techniques. All are mentioned in the program. So just start from lesson one, continue. There is no need to maintain anything right now. Because you have not gone step by step, there will be such confusions like how can I do the experiencing? You cannot “do” the experiencing. There is nobody to do it. And you are not only asking the doer question, you are saying “we”. There is no “we”. The I is also not there. How can there be “we”? So there are many, many mistakes in your question. I am not saying don't ask, but I will tell you the right answer: That you need to go step by step. Then the question will become meaningful. Right now, It is totally meaningless.

You are becoming desire free, unable to do daily work like before. If it is not causing suffering, then no problem. Then don't do any work. If it is causing suffering, then you will get up and do the work. It is all automated already. What has happened is you are in a delusion of some kind that I want to do something else, not my daily work. Because doing my daily work will take me away from experiencing, or Samadhi or whatever you are trying to do. I don't know what you are doing. So drop it completely. First get the knowledge. Then if the Guru tells you to do something, only then you should do something. If you do it using your ignorance. You will end up wasting your time. It is useless, isn't it? Are you achieving something by doing that? Not doing your daily work and doing the experiencing? It is totally based on ignorance. It is a total waste of time. Nobody should do these things. Those who are just joining the spiritual field should never do these practices. Understand first. Try to understand what these things are. “I watched your last video and I am doing it”. No, that's not the proper way.

Does true randomness really exist?

What do you mean by true randomness? Is there a false randomness also?

There is potentiality. There is a possibility of randomness. That's all we know. If you want to call it false randomness/true randomness, no problem. If there is an order in the randomness it is no more randomness. Just like the probability of one is impossible, the probability of zero is impossible also. We can argue about this. There is always a potential for it, it is always there. So I never really argue about this. Can we go in the reverse? Like I have defined randomness. Now can I go and find the randomness? No. That is putting the cart before the horse. How did we come to randomness? We observe the experience. We experience something and then we form these concepts. Whatever you experience can be explained like this in terms of probabilities. Do you experience true randomness? Then yes, you can explain it. You cannot go in reverse.

Anil is saying, the mind does not perceive randomness, so there is no way to answer.

Yes, we do not even perceive certainty. Totally deterministic experiences are not perceived. We never see them. There is always uncertainty in everything. So our perception is very limited. Then we draw up this theoretical stuff. If we perceive it, we say yes, very close to randomness. And if everything is very, very certain, like death and similar things, we say - yes, very close to 1. Can they deviate? Yes, anytime. There is always potential.

Parteep is saying, surrendering inner things and consequences of it in outside functioning. That is involvement in the outside world and surrender. Any thoughts? Please share.

If you are in awareness, then this state can automatically be achieved, you surrender. Your ego says that "I'll get out of the way and let things happen." This is the surrendered way. On the path of knowledge, what we function in a most natural way. So, even if you find that I'm not surrendered, no problem. I'm not surrendered then. This is what is happening now. This is called awareness. "Oh, I'm trying too hard to achieve my goals. I'm running after my desires." Sit down and watch. Yes, that is what is happening now. There is "I"; there is running; there is desire. This is the scene right now. This is how it is. And this shall also pass. Something else will happen. I call it the true surrender. Not forcing the ego into some kind of inactivity. No, the ego cannot function without action. So, this is what we call awareness. You live an ordinary life. You run after desires. No problem. You fulfill your desires. No problem. You cry; you laugh; you become angry; you become violent. No problem at all. Only thing is that you do it with complete detachment and awareness. "I am not this." There should be this awareness. "This is happening." There is no need to drop any of the natural things. As soon as you struggle with manipulating whatever is naturally happening, that is the ego. Understand this.

Parteep is actually submerged in words. Probably that is your past training. So if you want to come on the path of knowledge, clean your slate now. Clean it up and start from the beginning. If you want to continue on your old path - not a problem at all - then there is no need to ask the questions. Because your old path is going to answer everything. There is no point in finding an answer in some other path. Probably you have gone through the devotional path or whatever path, but on the path of knowledge things are very, very different. It is totally intellectual. We like to ask “why”. You say I want to be involved in the outside world, and I want to be surrendered to God. And the intellect will jump up here, and anybody on the path of knowledge and the intellect will ask "Why? What is wrong with ordinary life? Tell me. Is there awareness?" And you say "Yes, I know what is happening here. I know who the doer is. There is no doer. That's what you know. And you know that I am the witness." Yes, that's what you are. And isn't that enough? The intellect is going to jump and ask like this. And then, what is the point of this circus? Isn't that surrendering already? Knowledge is surrender.

The ego is acting. And what is wrong in the ego? It is also false like other things. Are you trying to stop other things in nature? Are you trying to stop the sun , moon , clouds and rain? “No, I am not”. Then why are you trying to stop the ego? That means the ego is still there, trying to stop the ego. So on the path of knowledge, the intellect is so sharp that it can grasp these things. The intellect can catch the ego doing these “spiritual” things. And we kick it out again. Don't do spiritual things. Don't do practices. Remember, there is no practice on the path of knowledge. If you think being aware is a practice, no, it's not a practice. That is what you are when you gain knowledge. It is withdrawing from ignorance. Cleaning up ignorance. That is awareness. It is a negative thing. To abide in knowledge is a negative thing. Do not gain awareness. You lose the dirt which is occluding the awareness. Awareness is knowing your true nature, isn't it? You know that I am experiencer. That's what you call true nature. Do we need to do anything to be what we are? No. Then how can we call it a practice?

Actually, it's my fault that I called it a practice. I called the state of awareness as a practice of awareness because you will never understand what it means. When I say be aware, please give me some practice to be aware. I am not aware. Do something. That is why if you borrowed this word, you say now on the fourth step you are going to practice awareness in the waking, dreaming, sleep, and whatever you are in. So that is my fault. Sometimes we need to build a bridge to bring back the seeker on the path of knowledge. We build a bridge like this. You want to come from the land of practice to the land of non-practice. Here is the bridge of practice which is not really practice. It is confusing, but that is all we can do sometimes. Never practice on the path of knowledge. The practice happens. If it is happening forcefully, then you don't know. There is still ignorance. Consult your teacher.

Mary has a question, There is always a line between surrendering things and trying to achieve. How to understand when to let things go and stop trying? What I mean by trying is putting effort to achieve your goal in life.

A very good question. When I say surrender, that does not mean non-action. It means you do the action fully knowing that it is not my action. First thing. Second, even if you do the action not knowing that it is not your action, you do it from the ego point of view. No problem at all. Once the action is done, you come back in awareness. The action happened without awareness. That is also not a big problem, it was not yours, know this, remember this. Then you should see that no goal is your goal. It is not your goal to achieve something. These desires are imposed on the creature. Actually, the creature does it but unknowingly. By creature, I mean the individual that is manifesting here as a human. It is not my goal. These desires are not my desires. Now whatever is happening, whether it is pushed or without any awareness, is totally under surrender already.

This is the power of knowledge. The knowledge acts beyond time. Spend your whole day achieving your goals. No problem at all. Use the ego to get the goals, no problem at all. Live your life as if you are an ordinary person. In the evening, you can wipe out all that karmic stuff that you accumulated in the daytime. Simply by saying - , "Oh, it happened today like this." That's all you need to say. Rewind your day and say that this is what happened. Do you need to say anything more than that? “I did that and I was not aware. I did something very bad, and I was not surrendered”. No, you don't need to say all that. All you need to say is, "That is what happened."

I call it “rewind and playback the movie”. It is a trick that is especially useful when you lose your awareness in the daily struggle of your life. Like somebody insults you, or sends a very bad email to you. Now, instead of simply typing an equally bad reply, which you know most of us do, actually, it is very tempting to insult others, especially when you are attacked. What do we do? We use our usual tricks, like we delay the action, we think about it, we bring in the awareness, we do the breathing, we go to the kitchen and eat something, then we become normal. Now what do I need to do? This fellow is troubling me. If you simply impulsively did something which you shouldn't have done, then don't worry. In the end, after one or two days, you replay that event as if it is happening in front of your eyes like a movie. You enter into that situation again in your mind, and this time do the same thing with full awareness. You won't believe me probably, but the mind does not know the difference. The mind has no way to tell the difference between what has happened in the world and what has happened in the mind, in imagination. The layers in the memory have no way to differentiate that, and so they purify. It is the karmic substance that is cleared from there. That means the impressions are gone.

Even after you have committed this action without any awareness, it is possible to wash it off simply by repeating it in your mind with full awareness.

This is very useful when you are beginning and you lose awareness often. You act in the old habitual way, in the impulsive way. Then you are repenting: "I was not aware, I was not mindful, I did not delay the action, I was not compassionate, I was not loving and I did not ignore the things that caused suffering, I fell in suffering." Now instead of kicking yourself endlessly like this, you replay it and let it happen in full awareness. Exactly the same thing; you don't need to change it. You will find there is a stability and peace in your mind because now the impressions are gone. They are not going to trouble the mind again. Now there is peace again because the mind does not know the difference between reality and imagination. Why? It does not know because everything is actually an imagination. There is no difference between the real world and imagination.

There is no difference at all. Only the memories are different. The world is an imagination of some other memory. It is all created in the memory. So why should one action be different from the other action? And here you will find the origin of the magic or occult. You put an intention that is so strong that it has an effect on the greater memory. It appears in the world. It crosses the boundaries of your individual memory. So this is an occult technique to wash off your karmic stuff. Initially you will fail. So if you are trying to achieve something just go ahead. Do it fully. Obviously not unethically or something which will be difficult to wash off. Do it via normal means and do not even think about surrender. That is surrender. Doing your work beautifully with full involvement is already surrender.

Why are you worried about awareness and things like that when you are doing something? You are at the level of the doer. Now utilize the doer completely. Do it beautifully. Achieve whatever the desire tells you to achieve and your job is done. In the evening you surrender everything. “Nothing was done by me”. That is all you need to say. That is what happened today.

Anil is saying, you said the mind cannot perceive determinism. Can you elaborate more? Perception of forms does seem deterministic in nature. For example color blue is always how color blue looks to me.

That is not true. All you need to do is shine a red light on the blue object and the color blue will seem black to you. So you can always find exceptions in determinism. There is no doubt as far as survival is concerned, yes, blue will always look like the same blue, because if the mind changed the illusion of colors every time, then it would be useless for survival. Let’s say, a human becomes a monkey, the monkey becomes a cow, and the cow becomes a flying elephant. This happens in dreams because the memory is so non-deterministic. Can you survive in that kind of environment where everybody is becoming something else? No. So, what has happened is, the mind has lowered itself down, where things change so slowly that the mind can do its business, whatever it wants to do, and it calls it determinism. It is simply less random. The probability is close to 1, you can say, and there will be exceptions. You need to study physics if you want all these answers. The whole determinism will crash down.

We cannot perceive determinism. Actually, we create determinism. We do not perceive it. Whatever is perceived, stability, and repeatability is created out of it later on, if needed. So determinism is a tiny branch of idealism. Now, if you think like this, this is going to anger a lot of people, but that is what was found in physics. Determinism is an attempt of survival processes. Only if you have no constraints of survival, your mind simply gives up this “certainty” business. It is no more obsessed by certainty, and then it is free to roam in the world of actual probability. That is what we call the projected states in the non-rule-bound areas in the universal memory. Now, if it sounds Chinese to you, that means you have not gone through the videos.

Amit is saying, we crave for certainty.

Yes, and a lot of suffering happens because of that. Let go of certainty and flow with whatever is happening and you will be happy. But if you do too much of it, allow too much randomness in your life, then the ego is not happy and it will create suffering for you. Acceptance when it happens, acceptance if it does not happen. We are obsessed with certainty because we want to control everything. We want to control our lives so we arrange everything, so that everything happens as per our wish. But when it does not happen as you want, you simply accept that it is an artificial arrangement made for survival. The real nature of the illusion is uncertainty, not certainty. And when you accept that, life will become happier. “This also happens, yes, why not? This is how it should happen”. But if you let it happen too randomly, then the life processes in you are going to cause trouble. The ego will especially not like it and it will demand a little bit of stability. So you do that which is necessary and you continue. If it happened you accept it, if it did not happen you accept it.

Session 87

Parteep has asked a question, It is noted that awareness or consciousness is present as an element in all that is, whatever is seen and perceived because they are existing as knowing to not only the experiencer. The consequence of experiencing is that - there seems to be a connection with everything out there. There is some sense of intimacy, familiarity and everything. Is it love because of a similar connection of awareness in objects? Can love be called consciousness? The more time I spend in experiencing this feeling of so-called unconditional love is increasing.

Yes, my definition of love is - knowledge that we are all one. That is the definition of love. Actually, there is no need to bring in any of these words that you are using: Awareness, consciousness, experience, experiencer, objects. That is fluffy, meaning, that is an add-on to the purity which is love. Love is very simple, very pure. Oneness, we are all one. Everything is just one. The substance of everything is love, which means everything is one. That simply means there is nobody else except love, except that oneness. Rest of the words, you can drop them. There is no need for those words. That is very intellectual, and oneness has nothing to do with intellectual stuff.

Rajit is saying, Is the experiencer the same as what we call 'I'?

Why not? Yes, you can call the experiencer "I." If the body can be "I," if the mind can be "I," if anything that is metaphysical or “spiritual” can be "I," why can't the experiencer be "I"? "I" is a shifty word. It can shift from any place to any place. It keeps shifting as per our convenience, as per the convenience of the "I." The actual meaning of "I" is the ego, which is the individual. The illusion of the individual is the "I." But yes, when the illusion is dropped, the "I" can be shifted to the experiencer. And you can drop that "I" and the experiencer theory or the concept also and remain as what you are without calling anything as "I", because "I" is another thought. Experiencer never says that "I am the experiencer." It is the mind that says that "I am the experiencer" after the knowledge arrives there. So, the experiencer, since it never says "I," is not the "I," but it can be given this title of "I" once the knowledge is present. If the knowledge is not there, the same "I" points to the individual or the ego or the person, which is an illusion. That is why we use this word only in a relative way. We use the word "I" in our day-to-day conversation at the lower levels of truth. As you go higher, we go on distilling the "I." Now, it becomes purer and purer, and then it is finally dropped. It is nothing which is "I."

Parteep has another question on the qualities of the seeker, does mind specified here include imagination too?

Yes, it includes imagination, thoughts, emotions, everything. And we use “mind” very loosely. We have dropped the mind completely actually. Mind is just a jumble, a group of many, many activities of the memory. It includes everything. There is no experience which is not mind. It excludes nothing.

Another question: Concept of limitedness needs to be understood in more detail. What exactly is the limitedness of experience? More detail on how experience is eternally present.

In order to understand anything, in order to experience anything, the existence needs to be limited. If it does not limit itself, all of the possibilities will be present at the same time, all at once. Which means it will not be a meaningful experience. To make the experience meaningful, it must be limited. How to make the experience meaningful? There are many possibilities. And out of all these infinite possibilities, the possibility is chosen which appears to be meaningful. This happens automatically. That is what we call the individual. When the boundaries are drawn around the experience, the individual is born. And now suddenly everything is meaningful. Because not everything is present. We can analyze or we can experience small things one at a time. And now there is some meaning there. We find a meaning. And that is why the experience is limited. It cannot be made unlimited. Why? Because it's already unlimited. Its original nature is unlimited. Experience is unlimited. Infinite possibilities is the experience. Its artificial nature is that it gets limited. It cannot become unlimited. It is already unlimited.

Now a more detail on how experience is eternally present. You will see that time is an experience. So the experience cannot be in time. Time is in the experience. And therefore the experience is outside time. If it is outside time, it is called eternal. Anything that is outside time is called eternal. Since experience is existence itself, and existence is outside time, we also call it timeless or non-temporal. Which means experience, which is a form taken by the empty existence, will be eternal. There is no other possibility.

Another question is, how is emptiness, the essence manifested in existence/experiencer?

All that is present is emptiness. All that is manifested is the illusion. So illusion is a manifestation of emptiness. There is nothing specific that represents emptiness in this existence. Why? Because everything represents emptiness. There is no specific thing to which you can point and say that look, this is emptiness and the rest of it is not emptiness. No. Everything points to only emptiness. And can you say it is manifested? You can say that but it is not so accurate. The emptiness is pervaded in everything. That is what we say. Not manifested. That which is manifested is already empty. So we say, just like the air pervades all of the rooms in your house, the same way emptiness pervades everything, seen, unseen everything.

Monica is asking, how and why good health and financial independency required for the path of knowledge? As I am financially dependent on my husband.

It is not a big thing. It is not that your path of knowledge will stop because you are dependent. It is desirable, that's what I say. Probably this question is coming from the lesson on the qualities of the seeker, where I mention that it is desirable that the seeker should be financially independent. What will happen if you are financially dependent or if you don't have any kind of financial support? You will spend most of your time struggling for it. You will spend most of your time running after your bread and butter and shelter, clothes and basic needs. When are you going to study? When are you going to listen? When are you going to join Satsang? Those who are well-to-do like we say their Muladhara is settled or is nicely balanced, not too much not too little, are in a good situation for the path of knowledge.

Too much wealth or too much struggle for material things is a problem and too little is a problem. If it is exactly balanced, they are perfectly situated for the path of knowledge. As long as your husband is supporting you, you can easily walk on any spiritual path. No problem. In the unlikely event if that does not happen, you will then need to become independent. You will then need to stand on your own feet. Once you do that, once you settle in your material life the spiritual can start. Remember that the spiritual is standing on material. Material is not to be discarded. Our material lives are important. Yes, they need to be minimized. That is why I say minimalism is another quality in the seeker.

There are some people who go to the extreme and discard everything. They have only a pair of clothes and just one bowl and one stick. That's all. They beg on the streets. They live on the streets. They live under the open sky and are almost naked. These people have taken this step for some specific reason. But there is no need to go to that extreme. Minimize. Because that will happen automatically. The body will be dropped one day. That is the minimum possible material life. But we are not in a hurry. We want to live a comfortable life so that we can transcend the material life. And that is why we need a source of income for ourselves. That is called financial independence. Otherwise there is always an anxiety about, "Will I get the food tomorrow? This thing is broken. That thing is broken. There is no fuel in the car. Where is the money for that?" That anxiety will eat up your intellect. Your intellect will not be freed to contemplate on finer things. The gross things need to be taken care of. That is why it is highly recommended: fulfill your desires, fulfill your basic needs. And then your mind will be freed for exploring. Otherwise, it is trapped. You can see people are helplessly trapped in their material lives. Why? Because of inadequacy. There is no abundance there. Abundance makes you free.

Everybody should become rich and then drop the richness, then drop that pursuit, and become rich in the field of knowledge. Where do you draw the line that depends on the current socio-economic situation. In your country, in your community etc. For me, it is just a good house and food. That's all I need, a bit of comfort which is given by a comfortable house. And I need very nice food. That's all. And the rest of the time is now devoted to only spiritual matters, nothing else. There are no more needs. You can minimize your needs also like this. And financial independence is not a very big thing, it can be done easily.

Rajit is asking, Isn't logic, rationality, skepticism dependent on the existing knowledge of that person? And this may vary from person to person. And what's logical for some may be completely illogical to others?

Yes, obviously. Rajit is right. Everybody has a different amount of intelligence. And their abilities are different. Some people can think only a little. And some people are brilliant, they can cut through all the ignorance. One day is enough for them. That's why we have different paths for spiritual evolution. Otherwise, there was no need for different paths. The highest is the path of knowledge. It is meant for those whose logical ability, rationality and intellect have crossed a line, developed to a certain degree. I am not saying they need to be highly brilliant, no. There is a minimum. If they can understand a few things that the teacher is telling them, the path of knowledge opens up for these people. And as you progress on the path of knowledge, these qualities will arise naturally. You can copy the teacher. How the teacher thinks, what kind of logic the teacher is using, where he is skeptic, where he is a little bit loose and allows theories and all.

If you copy the teacher, you will find your logical ability also starts increasing. Copying is simply a learning mechanism. Yes, it is different from person to person. If that is not possible, then other paths are prescribed, which do not depend so much on logic. Because this existence is everything. It provides a lot of routes to reach its ultimate goal, which is being your true nature. That does not require logic. Actually, you will need to drop all your logic and rationality after that. Why do we use logic and intellect? To cut down our ignorance, so that we get there very quickly. What is keeping you from reaching your true nature? Ignorance. There are many ways, but the fastest will be to cut down the ignorance. Logic is needed there. The logic will not turn you into Satchidanand that you already are. That is your nature. Nothing can make you that. What can it do? It can dissolve away, it can clean up the dirt which makes you think you are something else. That's all. That much is needed. A little bit of common sense is needed. It is possible. Yes, if you have a good logical ability, then your progress will be very fast. Because you will understand each and every word of the teacher, without getting lost.

And if it is completely illogical to others, it is the least of our concern. What others think, what others do, it does not matter. If you say, “I lack logical ability.” Then that is a big concern. Usually, the teacher will point out: yes, you are using too much imagination and too little logic. That is the job of the teacher. And the teacher will go on correcting you. Remember that the logic is based on language. So the first thing we do is we purify the language. If I see problems in your language, I am going to point that out. Pure language is needed for sound logic. If your language is corrupt, you won't be able to think correctly. It won't be logical at all. If your vocabulary is lacking, it is not possible to think also. So we teach all that. We give you all the vocabulary. We give you the correct language. “Say this, do not say that”. That will be my feedback most of the time. You will find that I point out the spelling mistakes. What does that mean? Do I like spellings a lot? Is the path of knowledge about spelling? No. It means you are not paying attention. It means your intellect has wandered away so much that you cannot see the spelling also. You cannot see what you are writing also. And then it is the job of the teacher to notice it. If language is bad, logic will be bad. Logic, which is the means of knowledge, if it is bad, knowledge will be lacking. It is all dependent. Whatever I say, whatever I do, has always a deep spiritual reason. Do not ignore anything.

Ranjan is saying: Is it possible for the experiencer to exist, but there are no experiences?

Well, it is not only possible, it is necessary. Remember, all experiences are false. Which means whatever you are experiencing is not there. What remains? Only the experiencer. The truth.

It is the truth because it remains that which it is. When things have appeared and disappeared, what remains? What actually exists? Experiencer. I am all there is. Experiences are not. It is necessary that experiencer only remains. Nothing else remains. You will say - but there is a constant stream of experiences. Remember, there is no stream. It is all possibility only. The mind converts it into events in time and space. That is what you call a stream of experiences. But it is not there. That is an illusion. That is why we sometimes say that the essence of the existence comes out to be the experiencer. And the experiences are just like waves on the surface of the sea. Waves are water.

Ranjan is asking, does the act of existence trying to know itself invariably creates experiences and experiencer?

No. Existence is not trying to know itself. This is only an imagination. Look at the existence. It is trying to know itself? It is not doing it. It has no such will. It is not trying anything. It is being. It does nothing. It is our imagination that we try to assign a reason or a cause or some explanation to what is happening. The mind creates the experiences and it does not create it because it is trying to do something. There is no such need.

Do enlightened beings also go through the duality of experience and the experiencer?

Yes. There is no harm in being in duality. If you consider duality as truth, that is harmful. It will always be seen as duality. There is no other way. The oneness will never appear as one. There is no experience of oneness. As soon as I say experience of oneness, it is simply a duality. Experience and experiencer. Oneness is. It is not experienced as one. It is one. So yes, enlightened beings, whatever they are, they are ordinary. Just like you and me.

Parteep is asking, when we say that mind is limited, what is the criteria?

What we see as mind/memory and its processes is only an illusion. It is a product. The product cannot know the source. That is how it is limited. It will never know anything. It is not possible to know anything simply by using the mind. That is the limitation of the mind. Secondly, the mind has windows which are called senses. There is nothing in the mind which is not coming from senses. The content in the mind is purely sensory, including imagination and dreams. And that is its limitation because senses are very limited. Everybody knows that. Senses are required for survival of the organism. Senses do not provide truth. Thus the thing which is totally based on sensory mechanism will be limited.

How to surpass this limitation of the mind? We use the mind itself. The mind is limited but it has extraordinary abilities like intelligence. We can use intelligence to overcome some of its limitations. And intelligence is needed only to drop what it has accumulated. Intelligence will not give you any new knowledge. It will simply clear your blind beliefs. And then we reach the position of not knowing, which is the highest the mind can rise to. Not knowing is the highest position. That is called the agnostic position.

The next question: why do we say the mind encounters emptiness? It should be that when the mind is not there, emptiness remains because of the absence of mind. Emptiness is the basic because it is found when we subtracted the mind from our experience.

No, this is wrong because emptiness is ever-present. Just like in the cinema, the screen is ever-present. We do not say that there is a screen when we remove the picture. No, the screen is always there. Mind is simply pictures on the screen of emptiness. How does the mind encounter emptiness? Not by stopping itself, there is no way to see the emptiness. That which is present when you are using the mind is also emptiness.

Ranjan is saying, How does the mind get purified while following this path of knowledge? What exactly causes the purification? How trying to abide in existence purifies the mind? What is the reason?

It is very easy. The mind has accumulated ignorance, which we call impurity, because there is an absence of awareness. Why is there an absence of awareness? Because of the absence of knowledge of your true nature. As soon as you get knowledge, awareness arises, and the impurities are thrown out. Very easy. You can go to the example of the hot pan again. We touch the hot pan because we are ignorant. We do not know that it is hot, we touch it. What happens? A lesson is learned, and then we never touch it. That means now our action is purified. Now, we are not going to do that wrong action again. Very simple. What causes the purification? Awareness, knowledge.

How trying to abide purifies the mind? If you don't, it will again accumulate impurities. You stop being aware; it will go back to its old habits. You can try that. That is why our only practice is abidance; our only practice is maintaining awareness. What is a pure mind? A mind in which the light of awareness is always on. The sun of awareness is always shining. That is the pure mind. Experiencer is always present. The experiencer is the background of the pure mind. And the experiencer is the background of the impure mind. It is witnessing impurity as silently as it is witnessing purity. What is awareness? The knowledge that I am the experiencer. And that knowledge is like rain that washes away the dirt. It is the light that clears all the darkness.

If that is not happening with people who are on the path of knowledge for a long time, then there is no other reason except that the knowledge is not proper. That means their knowledge is incomplete. That means there are assumptions and beliefs in them. That is also called impurity. That is why we have a full section only on purification.

Rajit is saying, if we presuppose that the senses are bringing in the same information in various minds, then how does it create a different knowledge for everyone? Is there a predisposition for knowledge?

Yes. The second thing is, there is an assumption that the senses are bringing in the same information. No. The senses have differences. A colorblind person is not getting all the information. A person whose ears are old, he is years old, is not getting all the information that we are getting. So yes, you are presupposing, which is a good word, that you are adding the word “presuppose”. They are almost the same but not really the same because it is necessary that they will be different, they are different structures. Some people have acute senses. I always give this example of arts, music and painting. Some people can perceive the notes in the song. Like they know what notes are being played, F sharp or E or whatever. They know all these things. How is that possible? Because I cannot. I am kind of tone-deaf. I cannot perceive the notes accurately. What is the difference here? Mind. The internal structures are a little bit different. They are born with talent somehow. Some people can perceive the beauty of color combinations. And for some people, all the ugly combinations are also beautiful. It's amazing, isn't it? An artist knows what is beautiful much more than an ordinary person knows. And that is why, even if he draws a line, it is amazing. It is always beautiful. An ordinary person, even if tries to draw a masterpiece. It is ugly. It's a waste of paint. Why is that? Everybody is different. The mental structure, the layered structure, is different for everybody. And this is applicable for knowledge also. Everybody knows a little bit differently.

There is a challenge on the path of knowledge. How to transfer the knowledge? How to transmit the knowledge to this garden variety of students? And that is the struggle for a teacher. One trick does not work for everybody. And that is why the tradition is always - teacher and student. Teacher and student, one-on-one. The book is written for the general public, as general information. Because there are differences in the intellect. Everybody is going to grasp it differently. The same book, somebody is going to throw it away in the garbage. “What kind of garbage is it? All false”. And the same book will be an eye-opener for somebody else. Everybody has grown to a different level. And sensory knowledge is also interpreted differently by everybody. Everybody lives in their own world. Everybody creates their own world. That's why you talk to people about the weather. “It is cloudy today”. Why are you saying the obvious? You start your conversation like this. Why? Because as soon as you go deeper there will be differences. People are not able to communicate after a certain depth. Why is that? They do not understand each other. And there are more gaps. If the gap is too much, in the education or culture etc., you will find their talk is only superficial. “What did you eat today? What did you do today? This city is good. That city is good. Yes, this movie is good”. They always try to find what is common and what can be understood. And that is the end of the conversation. It is very difficult to find somebody who can understand you completely. Why? This is the reason. They are not the same as you. And we accept it on the path of knowledge. We completely accept this variety. Nobody is equal. “Everybody is equal”. No, that is political garbage.

Ranjan is saying: What is the difference between the seeker who has questions, ignorance, and the experiencer? Is the experiencer mentioned in lesson one the seeker? If not, what is the difference?

It is very easy. Experiencer is the witness of seeking. Experiencer is not seeking anything. Experiencer is, by definition, a witness, the observer, the watcher, Sakshi. Experiencer is not doing anything. I am not doing anything. I am completely actionless. Who is seeking? The mind is seeking. The individual is seeking. For now, you should simply learn this much. As you progress in the program, you will come to know: there is no seeker, there is no seeking. Nothing is being seeked. And you will find nothing at all in the end. All this seeking was a part of the dream. When the dream is over, the seeking is over and the seeker is gone. That's why only the path of knowledge brings an end to seeking. Absolute end. Nothing will remain to find because nobody remains there to find anything. No other path will do that. That's why it is the highest. That's why we should start with this. That's why very few people come here. They are happy in seeking. I can tell them, "I can end your seeking today." No, I don't want that. Because the ego perpetuates as a seeker. We kill the seeker completely. Terrifying idea, isn't it? Go ahead and continue in our program.

Shilpi is asking: How do I always remain in the non-dual state all the time?

Well, I have very good news for you: that you are already in the non-dual state.

Is it even possible to be something which you are not? Is it possible for the sea to not be water? In spite of the waves, it is always water, it is always one thing. Not sea and waves separately. That is the duality. It's all water. These forms are all one. It is impossible to be in the dual state. There is no other possibility except to be in the non-dual state.

Now, why don't you know this? Why don't I feel that I am nondual? It is your ignorance. The mind is distracted by all that it sees. It is trapped there. Cannot see the non-duality behind it. You cannot be in the non-dual state, it's already there. The wave/sea is already water. All you need to do is drop the ignorance. How do you drop the ignorance? Walk on the path of knowledge. How do you walk on the path of knowledge? Continue in the program.

Shilpi is asking, Even though I know everything is an illusion, but still why do I get carried away in this illusory world?

Again, you do not know the meaning of the word “I” right now. You have taken only the first step on the path of knowledge, don't worry. There is no “I”. The “I” does not know everything. All it knows is ignorance. You think I know everything, this thought is an illusion, that is your ignorance. If this “I” is not known, the illusion will not be known.

Like she is saying “I get carried away in the illusory world”. Really? Is it possible? Right now you probably won't understand. But I will try to explain in one or two lines. There is no 'I' that can get carried away in the illusory world, firstly. And secondly, there is no illusory world. It can be understood directly. I will tell you only a simple example. When you dream in the night, it looks like 'I am a character in the dream.' The situations around you, they are happening to you. You say it is happening to me, and I am lost in the situation in the dream, whatever is happening in the dream. Once you wake up from the dream, was there a world? Did that character get carried away in something? Was there a “you”? After you wake up, you don't even remember. When you are in the dream, do you know that it is an illusion? No, you don't know. If your guru comes in your dream and tells you, "Look Shilpi, this is an illusion." And you will say, "Yes, finally I know this is an illusion. But why is it not ending? Why am I getting carried away?" The sentence that this is an illusion is not knowledge. If you knew that it is an illusion, this question would not arise. So, it is not possible to get carried away in the illusory world. Because illusion means that it is not there.

Why are you not stable in this knowledge? I am not saying that you don't know. Probably you know that this is an illusion. Why are you not stable there in the truth? Why are you still waving like a flag in the illusion? The knowledge is not stable yet. There are some things which need to be cured, and cleared. There is an impurity. Otherwise, you won't come here. Otherwise, you won't ask anything. Proceed. Even after finishing the program, and a few months after it, if you think that I am the one who is influenced by the illusion, then let me know. I know a trick where I can clear it in seconds. And why can't I do it right now? Because you will need to go through it. You will need to be prepared for those seconds. The program is nothing but your preparation, isn't it? Yes, we are studying the illusion in a lot of depth in the program. Why is that? Do I want to make you a pundit or expert on the illusion? No, I want you to come out of the illusion. This is how we do it. We know so much about the illusion that there remains no trap to trap you. Remember, it's a trap. We know all the terrain in the illusion so deeply that now it won't trap you. Not in the dream, not in the waking, not in the sleep, not before birth, or after death. Nothing will trap you. That's why we go through all the details. It's not an intellectual exercise. Remember, if you ignore one important point, one important detail, that can trap you. You will not be freed. But if you know the terrain, all the nooks and corners, you will be free.

Vinay is asking, if the mind is not pure then will someone really be able to walk on the path of knowledge?

Yes, nobody has a mind which is totally pure. My mind is also not completely pure. As long as you have human life there will be some impurity. But we know a way to bypass it. The way is awareness. You become a witness of your impurities. You need a little bit of purity just to understand what the teacher is saying. So that you do not mindlessly discard the teaching. “This teaching is not valid in my country, I am not allowed to listen to this. I am discarding it”. That kind of impurity will stop you from walking on the path of knowledge. There is a heavy ignorance and whatever is said is not even listened to. Then it is impossible. As soon as you listen, you will be in the net of the path of knowledge. It will catch you and then you won't be able to leave it. One word of truth and then your mind attaches to it because it is so hungry for it. So in spite of all the impurities, we can walk on it, and they are shed. The path of knowledge is simply a clean-up. Nothing is given to you. Everything is taken away from you. You become what you are. Some people do it quickly; some people take time.

A purified mind when focused using meditation becomes ready to assimilate the path of knowledge.

Your understanding is very good. You can see all other paths as a preparation for the path of knowledge. Nobody is going to like it, so I don't say it too much. If somebody brings up the topic, only then do I say: All these other paths—devotion, Karma Yoga, even Kundalini, Yoga Dhyana—what are they? They are a preparation so that you reach the Absolute, so that you can finally know. Why do we drop down to other paths? Because the direct way is not working. If you listen to the purification episodes, it is all Karma Yoga. Patanjali and others—it is stolen from here and there because they are absolutely beautiful. They have been working for many thousand years. There is no need to invent anything new. It is given to you in the form of a branch of the path of knowledge.

It looks like it is an advanced step. No. You will notice that the program is in reverse. It is a movie that starts from the end. It is amazing, isn't it? The beginning is in the end. So there are paths which start from the purification. Why? Because that is how wise men saw - everybody is impure. So they say if I tell you about the Rig Veda, if I tell you about the Upanishad, nothing is going to go in your mind. You are like a garbage can, full of garbage. So they start with purification. They say well the situation is very bad, hopeless; let us do purification first. And they spend probably years in purification. And then the non-dual teaching is given. Many paths are like that. We don't take all that purification trouble. We simply tell you. It is like a cyclone which cleans up the streets of the mind. If that fails, then yes, we do the systematic purification. It looks like you are progressing. But no, on the path of knowledge, there is no progress at all. It is direct. That is why the first lesson says - "This is the only knowledge available." As mentioned in the first lesson, those who possess this knowledge should not waste their time, while those who lack it should strive to acquire it. This wisdom has been available for thousands of years, and it follows a path from the bottom up.

Has existence forgotten its true nature and has identified with various experiences?

Existence manifests itself as experience, but it never identifies with experience. You imply that existence forgets its true nature, but this is not the case. Existence is vast and empty, while identification happens within it in something called human beings. Existence and humans are not comparable. Self is not distinct from existence; it is its own nature. Can there be anything beyond existence that makes it forget? No. The experience happens in existence. Forgetting happens in existence. Who remembers and who forgets? There is nobody. Forgetting is also an illusion. It does not last. Identification is an illusion. Ignorance is an illusion. And knowledge is an illusion.

How is forgetting possible? This is simply happening. Some things are beyond our intellect. Why is it happening? Why is there identification? Because existence is absolutely complete and perfect. There is everything here. Including ignorance, forgetting etc. Why are we having this problem? Ignorance. For a gyani, for somebody who is wise, it is not a problem. Identification is as good as disidentification and forgetting as good as remembering. Why are you not there yet? Because you are just starting. Because you probably have not grasped what existence is. You are attaching it with other things. This is a story that is being cooked by your mind. It is imaginary. There is no limitation in existence. It is always experiencing unlimitedness. The limitation is an event in existence which comes and goes. For the existence, limitation is not a bondage. It is a play.

People ask this question: why has it taken this form, limited forms, when it can be unlimited all the time? What forced it to become limited like a human or other creatures? Let me tell you it is always unlimited. Remember this it is only a play. It never becomes limited. Bondage is an illusion. Nothing is bound here. You are playing here. In a game of football, why don't they simply do a treaty and just put the ball in the goal? Why do they need to kick the ball and struggle to get the ball in the goal? Anybody who does not know or play this game will think like this - “These people are idiots. Why don't they just sit together and decide that the ball will be in this goal or that goal? End the struggle!” Remember there is joy in the struggle. That is why we call it a sport. There is no point in keeping the ball anywhere at all. When the play is over the ball is thrown away. It does not matter now. For the existence when the play is over it does not matter what was limited, what was bound, what was unlimited. It is all equal.

Mary is asking, can we say the thing that makes people get into real spirituality, not the fake one, is grace, but why should grace occur only to some people?

Everything is grace. Even those things that you think are bad are grace. Why is that? Let's say you eat street food and you fall sick. Are you going to call it grace? Yes, because it prevents us from eating that garbage again. It is for our good. Not only does grace make us get into spirituality, grace is everywhere. All of our life is an act of grace. Without grace your birth is also not possible.

She is asking why grace should occur only to some people. See, it is happening to everybody. They don't recognize it. They recognize it as suffering. But suffering is also grace. They recognize it as my achievement. No it is not your achievement. There is no doer there. It all happened by grace. Who’s grace? Nobody’s grace. Grace is a standalone word. Don't add a “who” here. Don't add “why” in that. Our intellect will never grasp it. To the intellect it looks like it is already framed. We say it is our destiny. All this kind of mumbo-jumbo is created by people to explain grace. You cannot explain it. Yes, it does look like it is all predestined. It always seems like it was bound to happen. That is our intuition telling us that it is not my doing and it is not bad. “Somebody died in my family. The grace is not here”. No it is all grace. Everything happens because of grace. It is happening to everybody. Yes, you can say that there are only a few people who recognize it, who have the ability to see the grace. The reason is ignorance.

Moon is saying, I am using existence and the experiencer as the same here. Who gets identified then? To whom is this illusion happening?

Illusion is happening. You should not add the phrase - “to whom”. Even if you say existence is the experiencer, which is right, it is not happening to the experiencer. The identification is not happening to the experiencer, it is witnessing the identification. There is a lot of difference between happening to me or happening to the experiencer and witnessing whatever is happening. You should understand this much that it is not happening to the experiencer, it is appearing to the experiencer. It does not mean that it is binding the experiencer or it is getting identified. There is nothing there. What is there in the experiencer? It is all empty. What can get identified? It simply witnesses the identification and then witnesses the disidentification. That is what is happening to the experiencer, nothing more is happening.

To whom the illusion is happening? No. The experiencer never says it is an illusion. This is another of your gaps here. There are gaps in your understanding. So, it is good that you are asking. Experiencer never says it is an illusion, who says it is an illusion? The intellect says it. Experiencer accepts the illusion unconditionally. What is the proof of that? Observe any child whose intellect has not grown that much to distinguish between what is true and false. For the child, the cartoon characters on the screen are real. Does a child not enjoy the cartoon and says it is boring because it is an illusion? No, they will say these things in their teenage years or when they grow up somewhat. But the child is happy. The child is a very pure form of the experiencer, isn't it? We say that children are a form of God. That is old wisdom. Why do we say that? Because this division has not happened for them yet - What is illusion and what is not? They are all accepting. Who is a bad guy for the child? Who is good? Everybody is the same. He looks at everybody with the same curiosity. Which animal is filthy? Which animal is beautiful? All of them are good. The crow is as good as a swan for a curious child.

How is the same purity acquired? Drop this conditioning. Become a child again. You will find that the experiencer is like a child. It never says, "Oh, take away this illusion. I don't want this illusion." The experiencer never says it. Or you can substitute the word "I". "I am happy with the illusion." Is there a problem? No, illusion is not a problem, suffering is the problem. If you are suffering because of the illusion, thinking that it is real, then we need to tell you that look, this is an illusion. If the child is afraid of the monster in the movie, what do we do? We pause the movie. We rewind the movie and then make it go fast forward so that it becomes funny. And now the child is happy. The child starts laughing. The child is shown the illusion. Now he is not afraid. He stops crying. We are doing the same thing to you. I am showing you the illusion so that you stop crying. And when you stop crying, accept the illusion. It is you, isn't it? I am the illusion. I am the truth, I am false.

How do you do that? Recognize that the experiencer has already accepted everything unconditionally as myself. There is a little bit of distortion there which says that " Something is wrong here. I don't want the illusion. I don't want the illusory burger. I want a real burger. Can somebody give me the real burger? Can somebody wake me up from this dream where I get only fake burgers?" Is there anything like this? Is there a real burger? Accept the fake burger, they are all the same.

Ruchika is saying, grace is uniform. It is probably receptivity that is different.

Very nice statement. Sometimes the gurus say that grace is like rain. It depends on your bucket. How big is your bucket? Are you getting all of it? Then your life will become very smooth. You are rejecting it. If you are putting on an umbrella, you will miss it completely.

Ashu is saying, even suffering prompts us to look for this reason and explore the path of knowledge.

Yes, some people ask this question: why do you always say that suffering brings us into the domain of spirituality. And I say no. There is one more reason which is - curiosity. But curiosity is not found in everybody. Suffering is found in many. And that is why I say suffering is the main reason that will propel you into spirituality. I see suffering as an act of grace. Otherwise you will never look into the spiritual lifestyle. The impurity will remain. There are some people who ignore the spiritual life. Because they have a power in them. They can avoid the spiritual life because they have a power in them. What is that power? To keep away the suffering. You can observe this thing around you. They can make the suffering to go away because either they have a lot of money or they are very intelligent. They can keep the spirituality away for a while. But one lifetime, two lifetime, ten lifetimes, after that you encounter it again.

A well-to-do person, a very prosperous and intelligent person, when he finds there is a lack, he does not go to a spiritual guru to ask for the solution. He uses his power, does something more, and starts a new company. “The lack is because I am not doing what I was born to do, which is to set up another company.” This is using his power to avoid facing the truth. Or he starts learning another philosophy, something to keep his intellect distracted, not spirituality. “The answer lies in physics”. So he becomes a researcher. He is using his intellect to avoid spiritual work. Is that going to fill the lack? No. It simply postpones your seeking. That is why I say, and many people say, that those who have this kind of power, whether it's money or whatever, can escape illusion for a while. It's personal power, I am not talking about the political power or gun power, e.g. if you have lots of bombs. No, there is personal power in them and they can tolerate the maya more because of this power. So I say, it is very difficult to teach such person who is not open. Highly educated people are very difficult to teach if they are not open because of this power that they have. We do not disturb them. You do whatever you want to do. One day, through grace only, when the will to explore arise in you then you are most welcome. You can come back here. The doors of the ashram are always open. And that is why we cannot simply drag anybody in spirituality.

There is a reverse side also. Some people are so hopelessly weak that the suffering completely breaks them. You need a little bit of ego to seek, which then gets up and starts finding a solution that is needed. Their ego is so broken that they are either in a hospital or mental institution somewhere. Their condition is totally powerless there. Always crying. Can you bring that person into spirituality? There is so much suffering there. There is nothing to eat. Nobody loves them. They are ugly. They are dirty. They live on the street. Can you preach them - “Look! Everything is an empty illusion!” No. Even if they are ready to receive, they won't receive anything. Why has that happened? Their own actions. This is called the karmic phenomena, karmic law. Solution there is not spirituality. The solution is service. You serve them. Provide them a little bit. When the ego is restored, they are ready. Then you can ask them, "Do you know why these things happened to you? Look at your past two years. You were in the bottom of the pit. Now you are up. Now you can see what happened. Why do you think that happened?" And now that is the point where the spiritual gate is opened. Not before that. Too much suffering. Too much prosperity. Too much happiness. No. They are not ready for knowledge or any kind of teaching. You need a very nice blend.

That is why it is very difficult to find a really good seeker. Guru is searching. “I cannot find that seeker”. The balance is so delicate. I need to say only one wrong word and people leave the satsang. They are never seen again. There is this very fine thing. You need to be very careful what you say to everybody. That is why we talk fluff mostly. When they are ready, we use a hammer. There is a feather pillow initially. Then we remove the pillow and we hit them with the hammer. The hammer is the real spirituality. Nobody likes it really.

Satya is saying, is Satchitananda: experiencing, experiencer, and existence, respectively?

Probably you are asking the meaning of the word Satchitananda. I think Sat means truth. Chit is consciousness. Awareness. Ananda is bliss. They are all names of one. Why are they combined in one? Because it is more beautiful this way. This combination describes everything there is. They are names of the experiencing. They are names of the experiencer and they are names of the existence. So experiencer is sat, it is chit and it is anand. It's everything. Everything is like this.

Parteep is saying, experiencing is also samadhi and sleeping in awareness is also termed samadhi. In both cases, subject and object are dissolved.

Sleep is a state and experiencing is present in all the states, not only in sleep. If your awareness is present in waking, dreaming, sleeping, then it is unbroken samadhi. If it is present only in waking, no problem at all. The state changes do not affect anything at all. Samadhi is a totally blown up word. Whatever is right now is samadhi. Why don't you know it? There is some impurity there. That's why Shilpa is saying is it possible to remove the impurities in one life? Yes, it is possible to remove all the impurities in a few months if you are ready. One life is a very big time. We think that our life is very short. Actually, it is exactly the duration which is required for emancipation or liberation. It is exactly designed like this. I don't know how that happened. It is not too short to get liberation and it is not too long that, oh, I got liberated, now what will I do for the rest of my life? No, it fits exactly. Very few people know this. Your life comes with a timetable. A lot of things are already decided there. And if the timetable says that yes everything will be removed in one life, then your life will fit exactly and your time of death will coincide with your time of liberation. This is how precise it is. But it does not happen most of the time. The timetable is for something else also, sometimes because of the unfulfilled desires, it gets delayed.

Muni is saying, who gets liberated?

The knowledge that I am not bound is true liberation. Liberation is not for the person. The liberation is from the person. The dissolution of personality or individuality is liberation. Are you not liberated right now? Who is here who is not liberated right now? Who is here who thinks that I am a person? Probably many. But if you still have this question - “who gets liberated”, it means the person is still there. That means the liberation has not happened. That means your timetable is kind of Indian Railway style. It is getting delayed. No problem. Continue with the program. If you find someone who is going to get liberated, it will be a mind-blowing discovery. You will get the Nobel Prize for that.

No, the mind is never liberated. That which is bound will remain bound. That which is free is already free. No change will happen in this situation. Mind simply progresses, dissolves and then reappears in a cyclic way. Liberation points to knowledge. It does not point to a state.

Session 88

We will start with Ranjit's question. I would like to hear some examples of the unknowable. As we keep pushing the envelope in all areas, will there still be something that is unknowable in future anytime in human existence?

The path of knowledge claims that you will know everything, but there is a fine print there which says that you will know that which is knowable. This is the correct statement. Traditionally, there are three kinds of knowledge: known, unknown, unknowable. Why did we have to take this trouble to divide it into three? Because the wise men clearly saw that there are some things which cannot be known by any means. And they saw that there are things which can be known. E.g. If you don't know a city, you need to travel to that city, and then you will know it. What is in front of you, you already know it. You can experience it. There are some things which cannot be experienced. It does not matter how much progress happens in the future. This discussion is philosophical; you should not use these words like future and progress. There is no progress and there is no future. There is no time.

Definition of “unknowable” is that no matter what you do, it cannot be experienced and, therefore, will never be known. For example, the last digit of pi. It is infinite and cannot be known. It is amazing that even if you put all the intelligence in the universe together, the last digit of the pi will never be known because you can always calculate another digit. Not only pi, there are many such numbers. Why? And they are in the universe actually. They are right in front of you. E.g. you draw a circle, and the circle is representing pi or its circumference by diameter. It is in front of you but you will never know it. There are more things which cannot be experienced such as the boundary of the universe. Because as soon as you get there, you find that it is a boundary between something else and this universe. That is the definition of “boundary”.

There is a very simple “thing” here which is right in front of us but we cannot know it. That is the experiencer. And the experiencer is that which is experiencing all the objects but it cannot be experienced. It is the subject. And no knowledge of it is possible. Cannot be known. Why? Because all the knowledge comes through experience only. How do we know it is there? All that can be known is that it is there. Nothing else can be known about it. All knowledge will be negative. It is the best example of an unknowable “thing”. And then there is something which is the whole existence. Whole existence is unknowable. It does not matter how much progress is made, it does not matter how intelligent anybody is, it will not be possible to know it. Why? Because knowledge is a function of intellect. There is a layer of intellect in the memory. It does the act of knowing. It accumulates knowledge which is a structure in the memory. It is happening through experience. Experience is happening through senses. Senses, memory, intellect and the processes in the intellect are limited. They are very tiny. So all that is known, all that is collected is illusion, not the truth.

Senses don't tell you what is there. They sense something, and then a distortion of it is created in the mind. An illusion is created there, which is perceived. Memory is collecting vibrations from all around through the gates of the senses. Senses limit what is collected. They are limitations, they are gates, doors. Whatever comes in the intellect is only this much. And it recycles only that much. Therefore, the whole of the existence is unknowable.

Now, there is something amazing which people don't want to believe, but I say it often: Nothing is knowable. All of the knowledge is an illusion. The things that are in front of you, the chairs, tables, your house, trees, rocks, birds, nothing can be known about them. What are they? We will never know that. The whole of our knowledge is knowledge of the illusion. These are illusions, remember. There are no colors, no shapes, no smells, no sounds. In existence, there is nothing. Knowledge is a concept in the mind. There is nothing to know in the existence. This is the language of a philosopher. What is the language of an ordinary person? “Probably humans will progress in the future somewhere and they will know everything that is to be known”. There are so many assumptions in an ordinary person who has absolutely zero knowledge. There is an assumption there is time, that there is a future, there are human beings. Then it is assumed that everything can be known. What is this? Complete darkness. This thought is happening in complete darkness.

So, you want examples of the unknowable? We started with something simple e.g. Pi, and all these things, numbers, experiencer. Finally, I tell you which is mind-blowing, that nothing is knowable. That is why wise men had to divide the knowledge into three parts, and they take us from the known to the unknown and finally to the unknowable. The final state is to not know. On the path of knowledge, the final state is an agnostic state. That state is more pure and closer to the truth than any other state.

Ignorance is like a thorn stuck in your hand, and knowledge is like another thorn which is used to take it out. Then we throw away both thorns. Knowledge is simply absence of ignorance. Ignorance is simply mind created beliefs.

Probably those who are just starting on the path of knowledge in our program, they will find it totally unacceptable. They will find it unbelievable. Oh, he claims to be a teacher, and he says nothing is unknowable. So, why am I wasting time in his program? Remember, the path to unknowing is through knowing. You won’t be able to believe it. You need to see it. That is what we do. We remove the ignorance and then we remove the knowledge. What remains is pure being. The objective is being what you are not knowing what you are. It cannot be known.

Muni is asking, how does an experiencer become irreducible? Like in the example given when it beholds red it becomes red.

It is very difficult to understand. But because when you are asking the “how” question - how does that happen? You are asking for a process, show me the process. “Show me the steps through which the experiencer becomes red”. “On your left is the object. There is experiencer in the middle. After the experience a mechanism happens somewhere. And then, boom!, there is red”. You are expecting this thing. And this is ignorance. Is there a process which is causing things to appear as red? No.

Experiencer does not become something using a process. So why do I say it becomes red? It is red. This statement comes from the non-dual understanding that what is red cannot be reduced to any process, cannot be reduced to any object, cannot be reduced to anything which can be grasped by the intellect. Red is red. Now what else is there? What has become red? Non-dual knowledge says that what is there is red. Because there is a limitation of language we say that the Experiencer has become red. Remember, experiencer becomes nothing. It remains what it is. It remains the observer. So from the point of view of non-duality, what we see is red - that's all. There is seeing, experiencing, which can be described as red. It cannot be reduced to anything else. That is why its name is irreducible. In Sanskrit, tanmatra. Tanmatra means the smallest measure. Why is it called smallest? Because nothing is beyond that, cannot be reduced to anything else. So a rough translation of tanmatra, which is a word invented by me, is “irreducible”. There is no translation of tanmatra in English. Probably “Qualia” is the closest.

There are many tanmatras actually, not only colors. There are many, corresponding to each sense. How many senses are there? Unlimited. And there is no such thing as a physical sense. All of them are non-physical. There is no theoretical limit, no practical limit on senses. There can be infinite kinds of irreducibles. Each creature has its own set of irreducibles. How is it being perceived? Whatever the senses are producing is not anything else other than the existence itself which “becomes” that which is being perceived. There is no better explanation. There is no process there. And the red cannot be described in terms of a process or in terms of something else. There is no content there which is red in the memory. There is no object there which is red. There is no signal/light which is red, nothing. What is red then? It is the existence itself. It becomes red. That is how it appears to itself. And poetically we say that when you see the red color, you have become the red color. This is a poetic way of saying because here the logic breaks down, only poetry remains. So just like I said there is a limit to the intellect. Not everything can be known.

Muni is asking, you shared here that yellow was formed by overlapping red and green. And yellow is a fake color. Yellow, red, and blue are primary colors. Green is formed by mixing blue and yellow. How is yellow a fake color?

See, all the colors are fake colors. They are appearances, not only yellow. I have given that example of yellow just to demonstrate that yellow is not something which is real, which is outside, which is a real experience. It is being faked completely. How? There is a belief that we are seeing the red because the light is red. What do they teach you in school? The light has seven colors or so many colors. And why is something red? Because the light that is reflected is red. The color is actually light. That is what they tell you. And what does physics tell us? The frequency of the light is the color. So red and blue have different frequencies of light and that is why they are red and blue. This kind of garbage is served in your physics books. What happens when you mix the red and blue light? I'm not talking about pigments here. The pigments have a different kind of result. That is chemistry or subtractive blending. Let us say, there is a torch/flashlight which is producing red light and a blue torch producing blue light and you shine those torches together at one place, you will get a yellow light. Now what happens to the frequencies when you combine different frequencies of light? When you combine two frequencies of light, do you get a third frequency of yellow? No, you don't. Both the original frequencies are still there. When you combine two lights, they do not become a third light. The frequency does not change by combination of it. So if there is no yellow frequency in the light, how is there a yellow color?

If the color is due to frequency of light, if the color is in light, it is impossible to get that yellow simply by shining two different lights. We need the yellow frequency there. Otherwise, according to your physics textbooks, it was impossible to see the yellow. What do we see? We see yellow actually on the screen. That is not a special effect. You can experiment. This shows that all colors are fake. The example of yellow is easy to show. Another very good example is magenta color. This color is not found in the spectrum of light. Can you imagine? It is not found in the light. How is it possible? There is no frequency for it. Yellow is found in the spectrum at least, yellow has a frequency. How come there is magenta if it is not even a color? If it is not light, if there is no frequency of it, how is it possible? Because it is made in the mind.

There is only Tanmatra of magenta which is completely fake - illusion. There are more colors like gray and brown and all. They are not in the spectrum. There is no frequency for it. Why do they teach you this in the books? Because they are afraid of mentioning that the colors are illusions. They are totally scared of telling this to little children. Because if the colors are illusions, then it opens up many possibilities. Like sounds are illusions. And the shapes are illusions. All the shapes are illusory. That means the whole world is an illusion. And if you teach this to students, they will become intelligent thinking creatures. Nobody wants that. Your education system does not want you to think, understand and know. They want you to repeat and become a good robot so that you earn money and pay your tax and keep the rich people rich, keep the politicians in power, and you behave like a materialistic person who does nothing but consumes stuff for whole life.

Education system is devised by politicians, not by people who know. A spiritual person, somebody on the path of knowledge, does not write textbooks, never. It is very much known to science that there are no colors. But since materialism dominates in science, it is never mentioned. You can search on Google “Magenta, fake color”, you will get many articles which say exactly that, it is fake. If magenta is fake, every other color is fake. But it is never told to you. There was a series of small articles on my community page on my Hindi channel where, for at least seven or eight articles, I systematically destroyed all the textbooks of physics. Using what? Using physics only. Anybody who is interested, go and check the community page on my Hindi channel. I have posted seven or eight articles there with examples that destroy the whole education system in a few minutes. It is necessary for a seeker to know how the illusion is produced. And it is necessary for any intelligent person to know the miserable state of the education system. Even after knowing, even after accepting that all that which is seen, all the perception is fake, the science books are not saying it. That means there must be something wrong with civilization or society, whatever you call it. And if they cannot say these things openly, they will never say that you are not a person. Nobody will tell you that you are the experiencer. What does that do to our society? They turn the society into zombies. Blind people leading blind people. Absolutely stupid people are ruling you. Whose fault is this? Every year you vote a stupid person on the highest post in your country. And he perpetuates this ignorance. Because nobody comes up and says these things like I am saying openly. Nobody has this courage to say the truth. That is why we have the seventh step in our program, where you are encouraged to say what you know. Those who have the courage they will say. Anyway, we'll go forward because my lecture can continue for many hours.

Muni is asking, how is NDE falling into the category of undesired dreaming state? There are people who have transformed completely after an NDE. Please elaborate.

Well nobody desires NDE. “Please kill me, I want to have a near-death experience”. No. That is why it is in the category of undesired dreaming states. It is a dreaming state which we don't desire but happens accidentally. Sometimes in the coma, sometimes in the anesthesia/surgery, sometimes in accidents or disease, the state of the mind changes. The state of the memory changes in an undesired way. We don't desire it. Anyway it is a dreaming state and it is unusual because those who are familiar only with the waking state, have never done any kind of practice, do not know anything about the states of the memory, like you know now. You know all the states of the memory.

You will never find it in any book. Remember your education system is crap. There is no mention of NDE in any of the medical books, any of the scientific research. Well, there is research, but it is not recognized. While this experience happens to thousands of people. Immediately you can see something is wrong in our society. Either there is too much superstition or there is too much close-mindedness. What we lack is intelligence in people. There are people who got transformed by this accidental, undesired experience. I have seen their miserable state. The transformation has happened from a complete stupid person to a complete delusional person. What happens is they go through this kind of experience and they completely believe it. “Oh! it was real, I saw my body and I heard the doctor and I traveled to this other world and I saw other people - My dead grandmother was there”. They absolutely believe this garbage. Is that knowledge? Can you call it transformation?

Actually I met some people like this. They were kind of crazier than ordinary. I said look you are fortunate, you are blessed with this extraordinary experience. Why don't you take up a spiritual path and study what you experienced? But there was no desire there to take up a spiritual path. “No, I'm afraid of these things. No, I don't want that experience again”. Or - “it was extraordinary, I will never get it again”. So delusion gets them not knowledge. Nobody gets knowledge out of an NDE. Do you think these drug addicts get any knowledge? No. They're absolutely crazy. They're delusional. They're idiots. NDE is just another accidental dreaming state. You get no knowledge there. Where is the knowledge? Right now, right here is the knowledge. Right now, right here in front of you. If this cannot transform you, which is in front of you, which you are, then no amount of NDEs will transform you. Remember, knowledge comes to those whose intellect has been purified by repeated cleaning up attempts of the guru. That is how we get the knowledge.

You will not get knowledge by reading books. You will not get knowledge by drugs. You will not get knowledge by hitting your head with a hammer because it can produce NDE. If you hit your head with a hammer, you will get the NDE, but will you become wise? No, you will become deluded. You will keep hitting your head. That's all you will do. That is why the path of knowledge has totally abolished all the practices, because then these people keep doing the practices, never knowing what is true and what is false. And some people think that whatever random experience happened by messing up with their nervous system and brain, and whatever practices produce, is the truth. So, it has a damaging effect; it is undesired. If you want these states, there is a systematic method, and that is given in the Tantra Bodhi program. If you want to know what these states are, what are the various dreaming states. Remember, your waking state is also a dreaming state. Why do you want to do all this? Why do you need to die to get transformed? No, no, something is wrong. It's not worth dying. Knowledge is very small, two lines. Existence is appearing to itself as illusory experiences. Existence is the experiencer. Do you need more knowledge? No, this much is knowledge.

Ranjan is asking, what is the difference between wisdom and knowledge? Is wisdom a well-structured knowledge only, or is there something more?

Wisdom is a synonym of intelligence, but when we say wisdom, it is a broad kind of knowledge. There is no specialization in wisdom, and the word knowledge is mostly used in places where there is specialized knowledge. If you know most of the things in most subjects, in many fields, starting from the sciences, mathematics, arts, history, archeology, politics, spirituality, occult etc, if you know whatever is needed to know in all these fields, you will be called a wise man. The wisdom comes after a long experience of life. So they will be called old wise men because they have gone through these experiences and know everything about everything. In the ancient days, it was possible because there was very little to know in the world. So every kind of knowledge was given to a student. Like in the Indian universities, everything was taught to the student. He knows economics, he knows mathematics, he knows astrology, he knows astronomy, everything. And then Advaita and Boudh and Sankhya, everything was given to him. It will probably take years, but they had a lot of time in the old days. Now because our lives are very fast, we don't have time for knowledge, nobody becomes wise. They only know a special thing and they know only that much. It is very rare to find somebody who has an all-round knowledge, even if in a general sense. It's useless to know everything; it's not possible. But a wise man is somebody who knows essential things in all the fields. One who has overall knowledge, common sense of everything. You cannot fool a wise man. You can easily fool an expert because they don't know anything outside their field. That is one possible difference between wisdom and knowledge. But otherwise, you can say that they are one and the same thing. How wide is the knowledge - that defines wisdom. How deep is the knowledge - that defines narrow knowledge.

Another question. What arranges, creates inter-linkages between various impressions of experiences in the memory? Is it the ego/intellect? If then can intellect function without memory?

It is not the ego. There is a process in the memory which is forming these relations or connections between the experiences. It connects the impression of one experience with the impression of the other experience. Ideally, it should do that logically. Sometimes there are illogical connections which we call ignorance. So can intellect function without memory? No, nothing will function without memory. Without memory even the experience will not be there because the experience is nothing but experience of memory. So memory is the base on which processes are running. The processes are doing their own things. One of the processes is knowledge collection. Why is there this process? Because it is needed in survival.

Ego is the owning process. It says “mine” or “not-mine” to whatever experience that appears. Why is that necessary for survival? Again everything that is in the memory structure is for survival. It knows nothing else. It does nothing else except survival. We have hacked into this survival mechanism to know something which is not important for survival like arts, philosophy, spirituality and so on.

An infant may not have a lot of knowledge but they are universally seen to respond favorably to melodious music. What causes them to respond in such a way when their memory is not developed properly yet? How do they identify that a music is melodious or musical notes are proper, when their ability to structure and identify previous knowledge is not fully developed? Is there any other aspect other than knowledge which operates here?

Yes, not only music, they are amused by cartoon characters. If you show them the faces of scary animals or monsters they start crying and so on. So there are some built-in mechanisms already in the memory which can be called prior knowledge. Even animals “know” music. There are videos on YouTube where cows, birds and cats like music. Elephants appreciate art. Elephants can paint. So why not humans? Why not babies? There are built-in structures there that can be called knowledge, like how to eat, when to cry and so on. They are already built-in there. They are in the memory structure already. Mother nature put it there. Why? Because it's extremely important for survival. Whatever is important for survival is already there OOB and the rest is gathered in the “wild”. He was asking, is there any other aspect other than knowledge? No, it is knowledge only but hard-coded. You say it is not the RAM, it is the ROM. We say it like this in IT. The person boots up with hard-coded memory, hard-coded knowledge.

Parteep is saying, mystery is unknowable but can be used such as in technology but it cannot be known. It simply goes like this in the intellect that we are not capable of knowing but using it. Please comment.

Knowledge is independent of use. You can use your phone right now. You can use your computer right now but do you know everything about it? How is it working? No. Only engineers know about it. And scientists know even more about it, theories and all. Philosophers know even more. And a spiritual seeker knows everything. So using something does not mean that you know it. You are the user of it. Like, you drive the car but you don't know all the components in the car. If you open up the car you won't know half of the things that are there and what is their function. So it starts like this. Technology is the use of day-to-day phenomena. Primitive people were using fire, how to cook, how to kill, how to do whatever with the fire, melt the rocks and purify the ore and so on. But they had no knowledge of what fire is. People were using magnetic compasses and all. They still don't know what magnetism is. So it is going on like this. It is possible. The use can happen without much knowledge.

Answering a question about senses.

Senses do not collect information. Senses limit the information. Senses limit the change. There is no layer of information on senses. Senses are structures that limit the incoming vibrations. This knowing the nature of experiences is also a process of negation. We assume about experience and then negate that. Isn't it making matters complex rather than simple? If it is making matters complex then you should not do it. That is the thumb rule on the path of knowledge. If it is adding to your concepts or beliefs, that is the wrong way. If it is removing them, then it is right. If you assume something for whatever reason and if it leads to more concepts, more words, more junk, then something is wrong. That will lead to imaginary castles quickly. Always remove. Simplify.

Knowledge is not complicated, ignorance is complicated. It needs to be removed. There are hundreds of layers of ignorance inside you. The path of knowledge is going to remove all that ignorance. This process is complicated. Have I not given you everything already? Isn't the whole knowledge right now right here in front of you? Because if it is not true it should not be here. If it is here then it will be true. The truth is not something which comes and goes. It remains. So if it is not here right now it is not true. And if it is right here why can't you see it? Lots of ignorance, that ignorance needs to be removed. And that is our job in the program. How do we remove it? Through direct experience and logic, using the faculty of intellect, buddhi. And then we drop all this and become buddha. We go above the intellect where you abide as you are. There's no need to know more.

This journey is complicated. And that is directly proportional to your ignorance. If you were blank, I could have done that in two minutes. You are not an experience - That's all I need to say. Will you understand everything by this one sentence? This is not complicated at all. What will happen is - you will not accept it. Even when you understand it, your old ignorance will come back. “He told me about something, but I don't understand what he said and then I forgot about it.” How do I know you have ignorance? Simply by your choice of the words.

You are asking, why should I put any effort now? Is there a doer, who is doing the effort? When there is nobody to do any effort, then how can it take effort? The whole effort is that I am the doer, and I need to do some effort to get the knowledge. And that is why you do the effort. Drop the doer, is there an effort now? Can you drop the doer now? No, it takes a teacher. You can read a thousand books, the darkness will still be there. You will keep reading the books forever. Nothing will stop your seeking. It takes pointing from the guru. That's all it takes.

What this program does is, just explode a nuclear bomb by giving you whole knowledge. And obviously nobody gets it. Then we clear the remains that are there. Then we clear the mess that is there. And we do it repeatedly. Every lesson will tell you only one thing. It needs to be pointed out. I need to hear only one sentence from you and I know how much ignorance is there. Simply by one question, you can get into the mind of the seeker, and you can do the surgery there. Your questions are like an X-ray. The X-ray comes from your mind through your question; it forms an image in my mind. I instantly come to know where that person is.

Muni is saying, A question in the verification process: I know experience and experiencer through means of knowledge, but I do not know if there is any existence apart from myself. I know that I exist and there is only one me, and it feels right that I am the existence myself. But how do I verify that there is only one existence through the means of knowledge?

Have you not gone through that lesson where we go through the seven questions? How many existences did you find there? Is it a theory, or did we arrive there through the means of knowledge? Or did I tell you something from some book, from some Sanskrit shloka? We asked seven questions, right? We went through direct experience and logic to answer all the questions: what, why, how, where, when. Everything about the existence was answered. Now, can you tell me, is it not the means of knowledge which is giving you this knowledge that there is only one existence? We do it like this: Assume more than one. Can you count one, two, three, four, five, six existences? The answer is no. We count only one. What are we doing in the analysis? We are thinking. I'm showing you how to think. If you are not thinking in that way in which it was shown, then you have not absorbed the lesson. That means you are still thinking in the old way, which is fantasizing only, not thinking. All these lessons are just loud thinking. Use the means of knowledge like this. Ask the question like this. Give the answer like this.

They never tell you this method in your school. They never tell you in college. Your mother, father never told you. And that is why and the mind then goes back into the old habit, which is indoctrination. So start thinking like a philosopher. Clean, ask, see, apply logic. It is all here right in front of you.

There is only one existence here. We use logic, what if analysis. What if there were two existences? Now, to know the second existence, we need to perceive something there. As soon as it is perceived, there will be a connection between the two. Whatever kind of connection it is, we don't worry about it. If they are connected, that means they are enclosed in one greater existence. They together form one existence because there is a connection. So we cannot say that they are separate existences. If they are completely separate, it is an imagination, because you're imagining a completely separate existence, without there being any way to know that it is there, which means it's a complete fantasy. This is the logic.

And if you're confused, go and watch it again. The program does not mean that you do it only once. You watch it as many times as you need. Can you imagine how many times I have done this? I have done this for years. Only then, I started seeing what is wrong with me. Every time I get a question I go through it. You won't believe me, I get two or three calls and at least 10 conversations on telegram and four or five emails and comments on YouTube. This is how many times I go through all the knowledge per day. And I've given you this program. You want to do it only once and forget for the rest of your life? Are you a seeker?

Parteep: Can we say that experiencer is everywhere? If not why is it not relevant?

That is also explained in the analysis of the experiencer. We say that the experiencer is non-local. There is no place which is seen without the experiencer. Logically it is impossible to observe or experience without an experiencer. So wherever you go there it is. It is omnipresent.

He's saying, please guide on outer behavior suitable for experiencing state. As this state creates deep silence, it is so relaxing. Please say something.

You don't need a behavior for experiencing. It is always there. It is there in deep silence. It is there in violence. It is relaxing and it is dynamic. If you want to behave in a specific way, something is wrong. It means you have not grasped the experiencing. If it is producing relaxation, no problem at all. You relax there. If it is producing deep silence, no problem. It won't remain. Don't worry. So I'm not going to give you any behavior. I'm not going to give you any practice, I'm going to clear everything. Go and do some purification. Observe your thought process. Observe that it is a complete mess. And then pause your program. Do some introspection. Learn how to understand and write. And only then the program will bring fruit. So, right now, what I'm doing is simply clearing you because I see a little bit of potential there. So, I have not stopped your program. I simply say, "Go ahead" because there is no other way. Because, if I stopped the program, you will remain what you are. And if I continue the program, there is not much lost but you will gain something. So, what is my suggestion here? That you stop your mind from overrunning like this. It is running nowhere. It is running like an engine which is just running. The car is not moving anywhere. So, when you get a question, don't ask the question. You understand what was told to you and write it. That's all you should do. Try to understand... Do I need a behavior for experiencing state? Ask yourself this... Did it say anywhere in the program that you need to behave in a specific way? Or did it say that there is eternal experiencing? And think about it for the whole day... and now the question will disappear. Because this question is illogical. It points to some distortion in the mind. It points to a distortion in the thinking process. It is not coming from a desire to know. It is coming from a delusion. So we'll see for some more time if this goes away. Otherwise we'll stop the program and I'll send you to purification.

KR is saying, as there are many experiences through various minds at the same time so what does experiencer experience at that time?

All experiences at the same time. Remember there is no time. So it is all eternally one. What is the experiencer experiencing? Almost nothing. It's an illusion. Can you say it is experiencing everything? No, it is being everything. The illusion that there is a point of view and there is something happening is the illusion created by limitedness of the memory. Existence is appearing to itself in the form of experience. It happens whenever there is this structured memory. If you try to imagine the point of view of the existence then no there is no point of view of the existence. There is only the point of view of the experiencer and it is in a way which is now. Why will the intellect never understand it? Because the existence is unknowable just like I said. Intellect is a product of processes in the memory. So trying to understand what the existence is doing with all the experiences is impossible.

It is like watching all the movies on the same screen. Remember if all the movies are projected on the same screen there is no experience. I always give this metaphor to tell you that there is a necessity to limit the experience. There is a necessity to limit the amount of vibrations that arrive in the local memory. At least I don't know any other way. Existence is doing the experience part in exactly this way through limitedness. You must have heard this word in the first lesson. There is limitedness. Why? Because this is how it will happen. And no experience is possible if you merge everything like he's asking, all experience at the same time. You can only imagine this thing because this is not happening, really, isn't it? It's not happening. How will we know that there is all experience at the same time? We will never know it. It is our fantasy. What is the reality? Whatever is appearing has been limited and then impresses on the local memory, which we call a Jeev Smriti in Sanskrit. I just translated it as local memory because you cannot call it memory of the organism. There is no such thing. And that is what is being experienced by the experiencer. Is it experiencing all the local memories at the same time? No, there is no time. It is timeless. Will I ever know what the experiencer is actually doing? No, it is unknowable. Intellect has its limits. So how can I get the answer to this question? The answer to this question is like this: it is cooked up by your mind based on some assumptions, drop the assumptions, and you get your answer. What is the answer? This is how it is. Whatever is happening right now, it is like that.

If you add the experiences together to get the point of view of the existence, it is your fantasy. If you assume that all the experiences happen at the same time and there is a time, there is an instant where everything appears, all these are fantasies. So drop all these assumptions, and whatever remains is the answer. Actually, I gave you all the answers in the program. Why do these questions keep coming? I am not saying don't ask, you can ask me, yes. They are coming because the introspection did not go deep enough. Don't worry, I am not expecting you to do this introspection, meditation, contemplation in one day. No, it will take some time. That is why we have this verification process where you try to verify. I give you only one month. Can we do it in one month? No, it will be a lifelong process. But we need to finish the program, I cannot tell you to come after many lifetimes when the whole verification is done. No, we will never finish the program. So, I gave you a taste of verification. How to do the verification. I give you the art of verification, how to look at your direct experience and use it logically to get an answer, to verify that whatever was said was indeed right. That's what I teach you in that one month. And then you are left on your own to do the rest of it. I will test you and ask 10 questions. You need to answer only five. You can proceed even if there are five wrong answers. Isn't that ignorance? Yes, it is ignorance. But I let you do the rest of the program. Else we'll never complete the program. So the seed is sown, and then watered, and then it is left to grow. Then it becomes a plant and a tree and then brings fruits and so on. On its own. I did not invent this process, this is a many thousand-year-old process of education. There is no other way.

Raghav is saying, although spirituality that you have thought has consistency, but there are inconsistencies in your relation of spirituality and science. Can you please arrange a meeting to clarify my doubts?

If you find inconsistency on the path of knowledge, then that is not your path. If you have already found that it is inconsistent and you want to arrange a meeting to tell me that, then it is meaningless. You are not on the path of knowledge. How do we start on the path of knowledge, “Sir? I want to know. I don't know anything”. If a student comes to me like this, then I arrange the meetings. I will call the student and stay with the student in my home if there is a potential. If you want to discuss the inconsistencies, then no, that is not your path. You can go to scientists, and then you arrange the meetings there. That will be more productive for you. Look, in this fellow who was teaching spirituality, there were wrong things. Inconsistencies. And science says something which is right. Probably you believe whatever they say. So it is more productive to discuss it there, not with me. I’m going to only say that which I’ve already said. And if you think that it is inconsistent, simply change your path to something else. What will happen in the meeting? You will say, “I have this doubt.” And I’ll say, “No, this is not right.” And then you will say, “No, I still think there is a doubt.” So it is a waste of time because there is no potential there. Leave the path of knowledge. Take the path of science. It is very good. It is very nice. It provides you with very nice logical answers. Path of knowledge is for those who want to know themselves, what they are. It is about spirituality, which means, “I want to know what is my essence. I don’t want to know what science says.” Actually, it can be shown that science is complete garbage regarding spiritual matters. But those who have already made up their mind, they cannot be shown anything. So I will say that your path is not the path of knowledge. It will be a waste of time.

Muni: In the verification process, does everything need to be verified through both experience and logic, or is one enough?

If you can verify it with both, then it is doubly certain. If you verify it with only experience, then no problem, it's done. If you verify it with logic, no problem. But then you will say, "Oh, I got the answer, but there was no experience of it." So both are always best, but sometimes you need to compromise. Sometimes the experience will be better, and the logic will be loose. Sometimes the logic is strong, and the experience is, "Oh, I don't really know, it is my experience or not." It will be like this, "I'm poor at logic." So this is your opportunity to sharpen it. You don't need the logic of a lawyer, or you don't need the logic of a logician or mathematician to understand simple things like, "I am not the body." Do you need logic there? No, very simple. I look at the table. I say, "Table is not me." And then I use the logic that the table is not looking at me. I am looking at the table. I know the table, the table does not know me, so the table is not me. It's simple. I am the knower of the table. I perceive the table. The table does not perceive me. Or even you go down even more shallow language, "I see the table. The table is not seeing me." So I cannot be this table.

And you use the same thing for thinking. Saying that, I see the body, the body does not see me. And now instantly, you are not the body. This is logic. And now you can use your experience also - the body keeps changing. Which body is me? And then none of the body is you. There is no control over the body, so it is not me. Even if I control it, it's just like somebody controlling a machine. Controlling does not mean that I am the body. So this is how you learn, simple logic. This is your chance to learn everything. If you think that I need to become a master in logic, only then I'll know one word of the advaita, then it's not possible. In this generation, in this time, in this era, it's not possible. You need to learn everything at once. You don't have time for that. You don't have that luxury. The years I'll spend learning the nuts and bolts of logic. After studying at a university, I'll get a master's in logic. And then I'll go and check that I'm not the body. No, it is a waste of time. You get that much logical ability which gives you the knowledge, and then stop. More than that is not needed. Yes, if you are interested, like if you are a scientist, or you are a mathematician, or you are a lawyer, then you can do better than other seekers because they have a very sharp logic.

You can do even better than an average seeker if you learn logic. Like you will be able to answer these questions. For example, why there is no cause of anything. Right now, I simply tell you look, I do not see any cause. And if the cause is a rule, then everything will have its cause. The cause will have a cause too and so on. It will be an infinite chain of causes. But there are better ways to demonstrate the same thing, which we call in the logic - a rigorous way. There is a rigorous way where no doubt is left. What do we call this branch of philosophy? We call it Nyaya. Anybody who is interested, go and study it. Nyaya deals with logical explanations of the Vedic text. And they have taken the logic to the extreme. You will never find any more rigorous logic than Nyaya. Advaita simply copies Nyaya. Whenever Advaita wants to know something through logic, we copy Nyaya. We are not ashamed of doing it because it's got superior logic. It has sound logic. Like Nyaya says, if two experiences appear always simultaneously, and you cannot have one without the other, then it is one thing. We simply use it to show the unity of the experience and the experiencer. I have done that in the chapter of Oneness. So we depend on other philosophies sometimes. Like to explain the experience and the memory structure and all, I have simply borrowed from the Sankhya. The vibration will be called Mahat. And Tanmatra is also from Sankhya, I have borrowed the concept to describe irreducibles, which is the final outcome of the process of vibration. We call it a process now because it has become a model of experience. Otherwise there is nothing like this. These are models. They are scientific models.

It was done many thousand years ago and nobody has found a flaw in it. You need to be rigorous. Those who are rigorous in Advaita, they are called Pundits. They are not called Gurus. Guru is not rigorous. Guru tells you the most essential thing and that is all. Guru removes your ignorance, that is all. The rigor comes in being a Pundit. We don't need to do that. But you have the opportunity to do that. I have learned a little bit of logic myself, simply by observing how other Masters do it. And I try to use it whenever I can. The clarity is in distinguishing what is my experience and what is my imagination. Know this much only and you will become logical. What is my experience and what is my imagination? Know this much only. That is logic.

Mary is saying, if the existence is experiencing itself in the form of the experiencer, doesn't that mean this form is limited?

There is an assumption here that the experiencer has a form and the existence is experiencing the experiencer. Can you tell me, is there a form of the experiencer? Can it be experienced? Is the experiencer an object which somehow the existence is grasping or perceiving? Your question says that the existence is experiencing itself in some form. But it has no form and the existence is not experiencing the experiencer. It is being the experiencer. It is the experiencer. That which is experiencing right now, right here, is the existence. There is no separate experiencer apart from the whole. Wholeness, completeness.

Why don't you know this even after joining the program, since two months? You are not working on this, that's why. Start going through the lessons. This will be cleared. Right now you are on the third lesson. It simply introduces what is the path of knowledge. Who should take the path of knowledge? What will the path of knowledge give you? It will give you nothing. You will go home crying that I don't have anything now. These things are introduced to you. You are trying to ask something which you will know only after you reach the chapter which is about oneness. There everything ends. You will be able to form a question which is meaningful only if you reach up to that chapter. And even if you don't then no don't worry. There is this whole step number three of verification where you will need to go through all that again. And you will need to click that button which says - I have verified it. It looks like a big job isn't it? It's not big. Some of the chapters will take only one minute to verify. Like I say qualities of the seeker. Ok what is there to verify in that? It is clear as day. And then you click it. “Yes, verified”. There will be some lessons there which will take a little bit of effort to verify. And again there will be a lack of knowledge there like here you have a little bit of confusion about what is existence, what is experiencer so on.

Correct sentence should be that the existence is experiencing itself in the form of illusory experiences. That's all you can say without bringing in the experiencer. Because the experiencer is now hidden in the experiencing part. If there is no form of the experiencer, it cannot be limited. You drop the assumption that there is a form. Know that there is no form. And then, this question can be discarded. There are two or three kinds of questions. There are some questions that come from complete assumptions, like you assume something: “Oh, existence is limited in the form of experiencer. And now, I need to ask this question.” This is coming from total ignorance, there is imagination, all kinds of stuff in the mind. What is my answer to these questions? Go and get the knowledge first. I am not going to explain everything. And there is a second kind of question that comes from the understanding of the content: Like, “if I am not the body, what is the utility of this life?” See how much understanding is there. The seeker has understood that I am not the body. There is genuine curiosity: “What is the utility of having a body? You told me I am not the body, but you never tell me what is the use of this body?” Highly intelligent question, well thought. A lot of introspection went into this. There is genuine curiosity there. These questions can be answered. The word soup questions: No, there is no point in answering them.

Session 89

Madhavi is asking, please provide some examples for invalid means of knowledge.

There is a long list of means or the reasons for ignorance in a chapter in the program, and hopefully you have already seen it. I will tell you that which is in my opinion is the biggest problem or the biggest source of ignorance and that is indoctrination. That is what I call a catastrophic source of ignorance where you are brainwashed, you are fed wrong knowledge. Wrong knowledge is ignorance only. Beliefs and imaginary things are stuffed in your mind. And because you were a child, because you had no discretion, no discrimination and no wisdom or intelligence, you accepted everything. They are now solidified, they are stored there forever. So that has become your heritage, that has become your burden now. Otherwise you were born pure without any knowledge and without any ignorance. We are born in the poison of society. Once you get this poison, your whole life becomes poisonous and you become like them, you become ignorant like society.

What is the solution for that? It is very funny because the knowledge is also found in society and we call these people Gurus. There are people who are ignorant in the society, they feed you ignorance and there are people who have knowledge, they clear ignorance. That is a game that is going on. Don't think that you will know something, no, there is nothing to know. You will become a child, you will not become somebody great with lots of degrees and medals after their name. No, the Guru takes away everything. By becoming like a child I mean become pure and innocent. That is the goal here on the path of knowledge, drop everything. Being is important, knowing is only a means to get there.

How do we do that? We use our own mind, we use our own intellect to clear that which was stuffed in it or which was assumed. Your parents, your education system, media, newspapers, books, movies, everything that you find in the society is a source of ignorance. So you get away from the society, mentally and physically, if possible, as far away as you can and go closer to the Guru or to other seekers, who have less ignorance. That is the recommended way and then everything happens on its own. Take refuge with the master and then everything happens. We are not here to get anything. We are here to drop everything. Just like I said, you have accumulated things and now we need to drop them to become what we are. And what do we find? We were always that which we are. Somehow we got lost and the biggest reason in my opinion is other people who are ignorant. Then what should I do after that? After I remove my ignorance the world remains, people remain, and life remains, death remains, nothing changes. You play here. You have become a child now you play the game. The reason is to play the game. It is play, and play is the reason.

“No, there is so much suffering here. You call it entertainment?”. No, the suffering is because of ignorance. Once you drop the ignorance, it is a play. Enjoy. “No, I need to get rid of human life and progress, and evolve beyond human”. That is already happening. There is nobody here to do that. There is no doer. It is happening, and it gets accelerated as soon as the ignorance is cleaned. Everybody must have seen this. You progress, you climb the layers of the mind one by one as the ignorance is cleared. The speed increases. But there is nobody who is doing it. The system of spirituality is very beautiful. It is perfect. It has been there since the beginning. What do you mean by beginning? As far as we can recall, or we can imagine it, the system of spirituality has been there since even before humans appeared. Everything else goes away because it is artificial. All the countries that were there in the past have disappeared. All the religions, all the philosophies, all the science and knowledge disappears. What remains is this system of clearing ignorance. It never goes away for some reason, it is very solid. It will continue like this. There are times when ignorance is very low, and there are times when ignorance is very high. Unfortunately, we are in a time where ignorance is very high. Only a handful of people are interested in dropping their ignorance. The rest, they want to be ignorant, so cannot do anything. The times when ignorance is very low are called the era of truth or the Satyuga.

Madhuri is asking, how were these scriptures passed on from their yugas to the current yuga?

It is very interesting that those who are in the job of dating these stories, they will tell you that they are many thousand years old. But the actual writer of the stories will tell you that they are from another era. They belong to some other time. The earth was different, people were different and there were different kinds of creatures on earth and so on. Languages were different, science and societies were different. Hardly anything remained, but they were much more evolved than the current humans. That is what we come to know from the stories. How is it possible that everything got destroyed, but these epics remained? The answer is very simple. They were stored in the memories of humans. They were written in a poetic form like a song, which is easy to memorize. Because these are stories the mind clings to a story. You must have noticed this, if you read a textbook in your school and you remember nothing of it, not even one line of it. But when you watch a movie, you remember the whole movie, all the lines in the movie, all the scenes in the movie. And if you watch the movie twice or three times, you are not going to forget it. Same for a song because of its tune, it is natural.

There is a specialty in our memory, it is associative which means it is arranged serially, and if there are links that are naturally formed among the contents, the recall is very easy. This is how we hack into memory, and we can remember a lot of things. It is a science of its own and is not told to anybody. It's not taught in your schools. Students are told to memorize by hook or crook, just do it, no technique is given to them. Techniques were there in ancient times. They had the knowledge, and that knowledge was given to the students. What is the technique? Know how memory works in humans and hack it, utilize the qualities of the memory. One of the good qualities of the memory is association. It works on association. Why can't you remember your textbook? Nothing is associative in that. It is a random pile of words, completely disconnected from your daily life, any kind of subject you take in your school. Everything there which connects to your life, connects to your everyday activity, except probably biology. It is my experience that biology is very natural to understand because it is about the body or the creatures around us, plants and living things, and it is connected to our own experience. Now it becomes really easy to understand it. But you study something which is totally unconnected, like history or economics or whatever they teach us, that is total disconnection. So only brilliant people who are of intellectual type can remember it or can grasp it. So what the ancient people did was, they took something which was in our daily lives and they stitched the teachings in that story. It was a story that was relevant to our daily lives, they weaved teachings in story. So when you read that story, you were actually learning something without even realizing it.

Brilliant thing to do. The teachings are now embedded in the story. The story is not true. Don't think that these stories that are told there are true word-by-word. No. You can only say that something like that must have happened. But in Indian culture, they are fond of decorating everything. Nothing is left plain and simple here; nothing. Everything is decorated to the maximum possible. This is the culture here. So they never kept any accurate record of anything. They kept the decorated history which has become the Itihasa. That's all we have. There is no other history here. And the history that you are taught in the school is written by politicians. It is all about kings only. You must have seen it. Who killed how many people? Who ruled the poor peasants for how many years? That's all. It's garbage. So the real history of an ordinary person is not there or it is completely broken. We have a decorated history in which a lot of spice has been added. And obviously there are teachings and they were constructed in such a way, they were written in such a way that it was easy to memorize. You read it once and then it goes in your memory. You read it twice and it becomes forever. They are like a song. The stories are captivating and there are, you can say, creatures and magic, because children like it, it becomes interesting. They are still so popular even after this Kali Yuga. Very effective. Do you think all these stories that you are told in school will remain forever? No! It will be forgotten, totally unimportant things. You learn nothing from the things that are given in school, nothing at all.

When the stories teach us something, they become important. They have been preserved in oral tradition, which means memorized, not written. Because somehow the wise men knew that if I write it down in a book, anybody can destroy the book. If I write it down in a stone, anybody can break the stone. There are things that are written in stone. And they knew that anybody can write anything else there. So they found some ways to preserve it somehow, and the best thing they found was to use human memory. They could not prevent corruption totally. The Mahabharata probably was written in a short form. The coming generations kept on adding stories into it. Like a good example is the Hollywood movies when they make a series. There is an original movie on Batman, and the coming movies go on adding to that story. Superman joins him and so on. They keep adding to the story. It becomes more interesting, that's why we call it epic. It has become so interesting and huge. And some people then added more philosophy into it. So you will find Bhagavad Gita is actually a mixture of all the philosophies, a summary of everything. All the knowledge there is. Somebody added it into that story. And there is mention of Advaita in Ramayan and all Yog-Vashishtha. There are add-ons in Ramayan like Uttar Ramayan, which is the downfall of the Rama and so on. People kept adding it, and that's why we have such a huge story now. If you want to preserve the knowledge, use this trick. That is the lesson. If you want to preserve knowledge, you should spread it. You should use human memory as storage. Tell it to as many people as you can. Spread it. That is the only way. Otherwise, if you keep it secret, if you keep it in the dark, if you only keep it for a few people, it will be destroyed. Unfortunately, science has taken that path that only a PhD can understand what is going on there, and there is a possibility that it will be destroyed completely.

Satya is saying, I was listening to old satsang on power or Shakti in women. In one place you said God is actually feminine, and in another place you said Shakti serves Shiva. I understand that witnessing Shakti refers to Shiva, the ultimate reality. If Shiva is the ultimate reality, how is God feminine? Is this from Kashmir Shaivism? I also understand that the ultimate reality has no gender. Could you explain?

It will be very difficult for me to explain these things. Because it's all metaphorical, it's all poetic. There is no truth in these things that God is feminine and Shiva is masculine. They are made up things. Just like I said, our culture has a tendency to decorate everything, to convert it into a drama. Shaivism has converted the whole philosophy of non-duality into the drama of Shiva and Shakti, the great man and the great woman. Why did I say that God is actually feminine? Because the definition of God in most of the philosophies is creator. That is the first thing you notice about this concept of God. The creator is called God. And can you tell me, is Shiva creating anything? Shiva is the pure consciousness. Shiva is not the creator, he is the destroyer. When Shakti, who is the creator, merges into Shiva, the creation is gone. Everybody must have noticed this. Those who are coming from the Shaiv tradition, when the energy merges with the Shiva, the world is no more, there is no body, there is no person, nothing remains. Shiva appears and whatever was created is destroyed. It is not the destruction really, because the Shakti spins up an illusion only. The truth remains. Truth cannot be destroyed. The illusion is destroyed. What is the illusion? Universes of all kinds, gods and goddesses of all kinds, deities, humans, creatures, everything is dissolved back in Shiva, which is nothingness. It is empty. It is all-perceiving emptiness, which is very close to experiencer in non-duality, the Atman.

Notice that Shaivism is considered a dualistic philosophy, but they talk about the merging, and the merging is as good as non-duality. The merging never happens actually, because it was never unmerged. Shakti never left Shiva actually. Why is that which creates, a female? Because only a female can give birth, only a female can create, and there are more qualities in this illusory thing that match qualities of a woman. She is secretive. What is she doing? She covers everything and shows another face, never showing her real face. That is a feminine quality, and many more actually. It is outdated now, so we don't say it these days because it feels very bad. She deceives and she traps you. She is so attractive that you cannot leave her. It is your own experience, isn't it? Can you leave this world today? No. First answer is that no, I want to make my life better. There is a seed in you which says that I need to leave it, I need to go from here, this is not my home. But the influence of the Shakti is so much that you cannot leave it. That's why I said to make friends with Shakti. Don't try to leave her. She will leave you. When she is done with you, she will leave you. Shiva was without a body. Who has given you the body? Shakti only. Who has produced the world in which you play? Shakti only. She is the mother.

There is an error in Satya's statement about witnessing. Shakti is not witnessing. Shiva is the witness. Probably wanted to write like this: Shiva is the ultimate reality, yes. The emptiness, the nothingness, the black person that is completely black. He is so black that cannot be seen. He is the Shiva unseen which is me. Shivoham, I am that. What is Shakti? It is my part which is manifested, the manifested part with qualities, and that is the play of Shiva. The ultimate reality has no gender. Nobody has a gender. Everybody who has studied a little bit of biology knows that life started without a gender. It is not there in the beginning of things. Can it be? There is a class of creatures that have gender: mammals, reptiles, fish and frogs. There is something interesting about gender. Those with a spinal cord have a gender. Below that, we say the plants have gender, but that is not gender really; that is a method of reproduction. A plant is both, isn't it? The flower has both male and female parts. We call them male and female, but they are not male and female; they are mechanisms to produce seed. The fungus, the bacteria, and all the majority of life has no gender. The majority of stuff—planets, moons, whatever there is—atoms and suns—nothing has gender. Only this tiny fraction of creatures have a function there, which is required for reproduction. So this tiny mechanism—can you slap it on the whole universe, on the ultimate reality? Is it even possible?

Everybody is born a female, all creatures in the known reality, they are female. Why is that? Then the male comes as a transformation of the female. When the baby is in the womb, the Y chromosome, which is like a tiny thread in the cell, activates, and then the transformation of the female starts. Actually, the baby is born a female. She is the Shakti. Shakti is taking forms, so obviously, it will be female. All the creation is of that kind. And if it is only of one kind, there is no gender. So the two kinds are formed as soon as this tiny distortion happens. I am calling it a distortion because it is a mechanism produced by evolution. Babies are transformed into male, and then it takes about 12 years or so from the birth for this transformation to be complete. Otherwise, all the babies are mostly feminine, and that remains for a few more years and then it dies. The whole creation continues in its original form of Shakti.

This was known for many thousand years, many yugas. How is it that God became a male? It is a social phenomenon. Male took over because there was an event that happened which you can call a catastrophe of some kind, and because of this, the male took over. In the business of survival, the strongest creature survives. So because of his strength and violent attitude, the male took over, and now they converted everything into male-dominated things. So wherever the God pictured as a man is a degradation of some kind. It was not like this. This is not the original thought. So do you think this will remain after humans? No. As soon as you cross human birth, there is no more gender again. The devayoni or the light body has no gender. Actually they have an ability to appear as any gender because of the stored memory. These gods and goddesses they can appear in any form they want. Any creature. They get this ability because it's an appearance. It's a dream, you can become whatever you want. If you are familiar with medical science it takes only a few months to convert a man into a woman and a woman into a man . The difference is very tiny. Who makes it so big? Your society. The ignorant people in your society want to keep this difference going. Because they can easily enslave half of the population simply by saying that you are weak, you are stupid, you are a slave. They have done that. Women are kept like this. They are not fed food. They are not given education. They don't have the right to vote, I mean, it was like this recently.

There is a little bit of improvement now, but still there is discrimination. Society keeps it like this. Otherwise they are essentially equal. In ancient India the male and female dressed in the same way. Male had long hair. Nobody told them to cut their hair. Now if you grow your hair, your parents tell you to cut hair, your father maybe. It was very natural. There was no marriage. And even if there was marriage the legal system did not intervene in the marriage. It was a personal matter. Yes, there were laws and all but there were social laws. There were no court cases after marriage. So a lot of freedom and independence was there. But something bad happened. Human culture fell and we are now very artificial and stupid. Anyway, when it comes to Shaivism, it's all poetry. Don't believe it literally. It's a way to decorate the teachings.

Muni is saying, all experiences are experiences of memory. We experience change and change is memory. Change is comparison in memory. I am somehow not getting it. Can you please share an example again?

Can you tell me one of your experiences which does not change? Your body is changing very rapidly actually. Probably your house is not changing that much. As soon as you fall asleep the body starts changing. Your bed is more stable. Your bed has been there for years. Same bed. But the body which is in bed is so dynamic, it's rapidly changing. There is something funny which the mind does, that if it changes slowly so that the mind can grasp the change, the mind can accumulate that change, it says it's the same thing. If you put a baby in the bed and the next day you go there and see an adult person sleeping in the same bed, are you going to believe it? Why? Because the change has happened overnight. You are not going to believe it. You will say somebody is in my bedroom. You will call the police. But he is the same baby. If it takes years, then it's “normal”, because the change has happened incrementally, slowly, and you gave it some time to get accumulated in the memory, to form the association in the memory.

And that is also the reason the world seems real because the memory does this trick. The memory accumulates the change and then it says, oh, it's real, it's the same world. No, it's not the same world. That is the answer to the question why the world is real and dreams are unreal. Because every day the dream changes. Yesterday, the dream that you saw is no more. Because the dream changes so fast, you cannot accumulate it. You cannot accommodate that change to call it real. And in one of my videos, I have given this example that if you fast forward through what you call the physical world, your real world, it will become as good as a dream. So, let us say you go to sleep and if we put the world on fast forward and instead of eight hours, we speed up so much that eight hundred years have passed in eight hours in the physical world. And if you get up, will it be the same? No, it will be completely different. Nobody will be there whom you know. No creatures will be there that are here right now. Eight hundred years ago, no cities, no roads, nothing familiar will be there except you, because you are not on fast forward. You say, "probably something weird is going on today." And you spend your day and you go to sleep. Then we again fast forward eight hundred years and you get up again. Where is the world that was there yesterday? It is gone, completely gone. There is no trace of it. Probably the floods have happened, probably some rock fell from the sky and everything was destroyed. There is new life, there are new kinds of trees, and it is like a dream. Isn't it the same as a dream? It's a matter of speed.

Your dream is a thousand times faster. Your memory that creates the dream is a thousand times faster than the memory that creates your physical world, which is again a dream - slow changing. Fast and slow are relative here because it's all a matter of memories. I've given this analysis in one of my Hindi videos - not in English - this analysis of comparison of a dream and the world. And you'll be surprised, actually they come out to be exactly the same, not even one difference. The waking state and dreaming state are one. Why don't you know this? Nobody told you. They told you the opposite. You can do your own analysis. I encourage people to think and do their own analysis instead of me feeding everything. Go and check the difference between dream and the waking state.

So we go back to Muni's question. Muni is saying, experience of I am is not changing.

Yes, but this is not a memory. What I mean is that we experience and a memory is formed, but here it is said that all experience is experience of memory.

What I experienced for the first time in my life, how is that an experience of the memory?

There are two questions here. Now it's become complicated. So let me take the first. If you cannot find any experience which is not changing, that means that which is changing is your experience. Now, how do we know that something has changed? Suppose you buy a bottle of milk and you drink half the milk. That bottle was full, now it is half empty. How do we know that something has changed? Because we remember that yesterday it was full, that is the memory. Today it is not full, it is half. There is a comparison. That comparison tells us that change has happened. If you remove your memory of yesterday, has any change happened? Is there any change now? No. That is how all that changes is seen. And that is how all that changes is memory, or is because of memory. Now, what comes first - the change or the memory? We assume one thing is happening before the other thing. So you are saying, an experience which happened for the first time in my life, how is that an experience of the memory? We assume that there is a potential for memory there and because of the change, that the change is impressed on that memory, and now it becomes an impression on it. We say it like this, we construct a theory because everything appears at the same time. A baby has very little memory, there is a memory there which we call the genetic memory. It is hard coded in the brain or whatever systems there are. Few layers are active in the baby when the baby is born. Yes, the experience and memory come together. Sometimes we say the experience is of the memory and sometimes we say that the experiences are etched in the memory. They are one and the same thing. The memory and the experience is one. Do you find in your direct experience a memory on the right side and the experience on the other side and the experience comes from the left to right and writes in the memory? Do you find something? No. We find only changing dynamic experience and we find a memory of that. Without memory, we find there is no experience. We construct this theory of change and the smallest change, the vibration and the memory storage, local memory and universal memory. This is cooked up. This is called science. It is all theory. So that is how we tackle this problem. Why is there an experience? We say the experience is because of the memory. Why is there a memory? Because we say there is experience but they are always together and we produce a mechanism to explain what is happening and it works very nicely. The roots of this science are in the philosophy of Sankhya which is the mind only philosophy. It is the only philosophy that I have found that explains everything. So the memory will be called Mahat in Sankhya and then whatever comes out of that memory is your experience of the world and the body.

The mind is happening, while memory is something we assume is always there. It is static, and the vibrations in memory form patterns. This is the creation, it is explained nicely in the program with diagrams. It becomes easy to understand. I'm explaining it quickly here because I cannot explain everything. It's vast, and I can only explain bits and pieces here in the satsang. In the program, I explained the whole thing. If you know this concept, you will gain mastery over Maya. You will be able to control memory, which controls your experience. You will be able to produce any experience you want, which gives rise to the path of tantra. You learn the fundamentals first and then I leave you to explore. No problem if you were not a scientist. You had nothing in the beginning, so it may seem difficult. Do not think that I wrote the book or recorded the videos in one day. The knowledge-gaining process has been going on for a long time, since childhood. Bit by bit, it is accumulated, purified, distilled, and then given to you. It is like a great professor writing a book. He does not simply decide, "Today I want to write about a theory of mathematics." No. There is a 30 years of career behind that book, and that is why people read that book. So how much do I have behind me? At least 20 years of research. Remember, we are in the tradition now. The path of knowledge is a tradition. It is not mine; that is why I do not claim anything because it is not mine. Yes, sometimes I use some unusual means to get knowledge. That is another thing. And I teach you that also. Do not worry. Because not everything is in the books. So do not worry if you do not understand a few things about the technical part in the course. You are not disqualified. You can go forward because I know it will take many years.

Riddhi is saying, senses register the changes but why are senses also called patterns of change?

Because the senses are nothing special. All there is, is the pattern of change in this sea of potentials that we call the manifested part. It is initially unmanifested. It is a sea of potentials, and then the patterns start forming because that is the possibility there. And there is nothing special which we can say that it is a sense organ. There is nothing which distinguishes them from the other patterns that are there in the memory. It is like one pattern interacting with the other patterns. The pattern that influences is called the stimulation; the pattern that is influenced is called the sense. So the sense has three parts, as far as I know, the first part is a transducer. The sense that is on your body is not actually a sense; it is a transducer. It takes in the stimulation, changes it into electricity or another more abstract pattern. The sound you are hearing is actually vibrations in the ear. The ear, which is an organ in your head, converts it into signals. It is the transducer part of the sense. Then there is a memory part in the sense which simply stores whatever is coming from the sense. And the third part is the mysterious part where the perception happens.

If you see from this point of view, it is not so meaningful. So you take the reverse point of view. You start from the perception; there is a perception, and it is persistent. It has not evaporated in milliseconds, so it must be a memory. Then you say that what is in the memory does not look like anything which is in the world, which is only vibrations. So you say it was converted into this format, and the thing that converts is another pattern, which is the transducer part of the sense. So that is why the senses were called the gates. They did not have this kind of word, transducer, in the old days. So they are the gates, and the gates allow only a tiny fraction of the vibrations from the environment, and then it is converted into measurements. It is measured. The senses are measuring what is out there, and that is what we are perceiving. The measurement is perceived. It is formatted into shapes, forms, colors and sounds etc.That is what is finally perceived. You can take the example of a computer. There are only electrical signals in the computer and then some program reads it, formats it, and produces a picture, a movie, or text (words) on your screen. Finally, that is perceived. Same thing. Everything is a kind of information system here. Senses are nothing special. They are also patterns.

Senses are also memory. They just format the changes differently. The changes out there are also memory. So it is all one memory, and you can say there are programs in that memory which take whatever is coming from other parts of the memory and simply change the pattern into something else which can be preserved for a longer duration. That is what I call formatting the change. The change that is out there ,impinges on the senses (the gates or the transducer) and it becomes another change which is more meaningful. Now, since everything is a memory, the whole process happens in a bigger memory. I have given names to those bigger memories: like the world is the greater memory and the individual is the smaller memory, aka local memory. What is perceived is not the world: we perceive the local memory only. That is why your experience is limited. That answers the question: if everything is one memory, why don't I experience everything? No, you cannot and there is a limitation there because if you experience everything it will be an overload (like it's all random patterns there). What the senses are doing, they are extracting information out of this chaos that is out there, only that which is well organized gets through the transducer and only that which corresponds to our previous knowledge is retained. Remember, the memory is associative. If it is not associated with whatever we know already, it is gone - it will be forgotten in a millisecond. Like a foreign language - you hear the foreign language, and can you remember anything that was said? Nothing. But you know English, you remember all my words. Why? Because the language is associated with existing memory - there are associations there. Meanings are already there, there are patterns in your memory, and whatever is coming through the senses are matched, I know what it is, and then it is stored. That is how the experience is formed. As soon as something comes in which has no association with the previous knowledge - gone. Probably it's not even remembered.

We are having a limited experience because of this limitation created by the local memory. It needs to find a meaning in the sea of patterns, and the need to find a meaning arises because we need to survive. If you don't know which is food and which is not food, and which is a predator and which is a mate - not possible to stay alive. That's why the fruits are brightly colored, and that's why all the leaves are green. We don't need to distinguish which leaf is which. Probably a cow can see different kinds of colors in the leaves - this is grass, this is not grass, this is thorny, don't go there, and so on. I know at least dogs can do that. Dogs, their sense of smell is so acute, they know everything simply by smelling. Anyway, we are in a limited form right now because of the need to survive and find a meaning in this sea of patterns.

Does that mean there is nothing out there? No, there is nothing out there. It is all in here, it is all zero-dimensional, so there is no out and there is no in. And the in and out are also created by the memory; it's an illusion. But it is not true that there is nothing out there. Why? Because there is only you. This play is happening as your form. What is changing? You. But that day you said you are not changing, you are the one who does not change. That is at the level of duality. When we break what is there, which we call existence, it is a zero-dimensional field of possibilities, into two, then yes, one part is the unchanging part and the other part is the changing part. But you can combine them at the level of non-duality; it is emptiness, one, which is as good as not being there from the perspective of the mind. But from the perspective of knowledge, there is nothing. Still, something appears. And that is why this that which appears is called illusion. Nothing real appears here. Why do I say there is vibration? Why do I say there are patterns? They are theories. They are theories to explain whatever is appearing. Why does the appearance seem so systematic, well-organized? All that is also an illusion. The local memory is selective. It is not taking in everything. It is taking in only well-formatted, well-organized things out of a variety of things, a variety of patterns. Most of the patterns are meaningless, in technical terms we call them degenerate. They are degenerate patterns. They have no meaning in them, nothing at all, which means they are not useful for survival. They are excluded. And that's why it looks like this world is so ordered and systematic. It is amazing but it is a selective, filtered view of what is in existence.

I know it is difficult for everybody to grasp it, so don't worry. Take it bite by bite, bite a little bit and then proceed. I am not expecting everybody to grasp it instantly, although I know that you must have understood a lot of it, but I just put it there as a seed. Now you need to cultivate this knowledge. How is it even possible? Think about it. Why did he say that? Try to find it in your own experience. Is it like this only that there are infinite possibilities and I am seeing only a tiny fraction? What is the logical reason for that? Why don't I see all the randomness? And the answer is simple now. You can guess that randomness is of no use for this creature. It will die if it stores everything, and that is why this creature is limited.

Why can't I have the experience that the other person is having? Very easy. Right now in the waking state, which is about the local memory which is of the organism, we are limited to this local memory in the waking state and so is everybody else. So even though the experiencer is one, there are boundaries between the memories. There is no boundary in the experiencer. There are boundaries in the memory. Why is there a boundary? That is what is needed for survival. That is how the person is formed. And is it possible to know what is there in the other part of the memory? Of course it is possible. You cannot cross the boundary by going straight in that direction. You will hit the wall of the boundary. You can see it. You can try to do it right now. You are in the waking state, hopefully. You can try to know what is in my mind. Can you do that? It is impossible. You need to rise above. You need to take the air-way. You need to rise above the boundary, a few layers above the local memory. Then you can connect to the other. It is like a flight. You take a flight because there is an ocean between the two countries. You cannot cross it. Rise above a few layers. I teach you to do that also. Don't worry. And then you will know all there is in all the memories, everybody's memory. You will get access to it. Why can't you do it? Ignorance. You were told that you cannot do it. That limitation is taken. It is not natural. Not only you will know what is in the other person's local memory, you will know what is there in the universal memory or the greater memory. That is called remote viewing, and obviously knowing what is in the other person's memory is called mind reading or telepathy.

These are called Siddhis in the tradition. How do you get the Siddhis? On the path of knowledge, way is knowledge here. You know how it is done, and then you do it. There are no practices. It is your natural ability. Why can't you do it now? You have never done it. That's why. You are not trained to do it. You are a baby. You cannot walk. So that reminds me of the movie The Matrix again. See, everything is in this movie, an epic movie. When Neo is pulled out of the Matrix, they are working on his body like acupuncture and whatever. He says, "Why can't I move my body?" And Morpheus says that you have never used it. Same thing. You have never used your abilities because you are so trapped in the illusion. You are so helplessly bound to this physical body which is a trap, which is an illusion, which is just some patterns that got accumulated somehow. So get out of the waking state. Waking state is the trap. Waking state is the dream. Wake up from the waking, and then you will become what you are. You are the universal memory. You are God. And the program teaches you how to do that. Nothing to worry about. Actually, people are so afraid of it. The attachment is so bad here that they don't want to listen to the spiritual teaching also. What do they want to listen to? The world is real. The world is a happy place. The world is my home. Earth is my home. Body is me. Let us do whatever we want with it. They are living a meaningless life, and they try to find a meaning here in these accumulated patterns in the memory. It's a very narrow picture. We try to pull them out. There is a resistance. No, I want to go back there. That resistance is shown in the movie The Matrix again in the bald character, I forgot the name of the character, who wants to go back. Materialistic person. So yes, there is a lot of resistance in people. Even in seekers, they don't want to get out of it. We wait for you. I'm waiting here. The day you are ready, I'll pull you out.

Muni is asking, you have mentioned performing surgery in the memory. Is it what is called psychic surgery?

No, I don't know what psychic surgery is. Why did I use this word “surgery” in the memory? Because we are changing it through words only. The words have power in them. So I call it surgery. Because it goes deep in the layers and changes something there. The words of knowledge, words of wisdom. I'll give you an example - let us say you are in love, you love a girl very much and one day she says that I love somebody else, not you. These are only words. What does it do to your life? Has your life not changed now? Not only your life, your whole mood, whole emotion, even the intellect stops functioning, you start crying and it affects the body also. The body becomes weak and does not want to do anything, and so on. Even your perception, your senses will suffer. When you were in love, the whole world was bright and colorful. Now, one word, that I love somebody else, and all the color is gone. Now, even your food will not taste good. Senses are affected. What is that? Surgery was done; something was broken in the mind of that person. Now, it will remain forever. It is not going to go. And this is what the Guru does. One word, but it is a positive one. I gave you a negative example because that's what you will grasp easily. Something positive is said by the Guru, and then it becomes a seed. Now, it starts changing the whole structure; whole evolution happens very quickly.

I think we can call it psychic surgery. But I never use the word psychic. It's like changing source code in software somewhere. Now the whole interface changes, the whole program changes and so on. It is like this. Sometimes you will not know that some of my words are causing the change. You will see it only after a few years that he said this thing, and that is why I am what I am right now. Otherwise, there was no way for this change to happen. Nobody else does it; only Guru can do it. And the more you stay with me, the more I know where to do the surgery. The more you interact with me, the more I know your mental landscape. And I know exactly where to cut; I know exactly where to stitch. But if you are not serious, I don't get a way into your mind. Long term relation between the Guru and the disciple is the key to long term growth. And in the end, the Guru and the student, they become exactly the same. Now, if the student says something, you will probably mistake him for the Guru. It is like it's a perfect copy of the Guru now. Are we trying to make copies or clones of guru? No, it happens like this. It remains for a while and then the student develops a new personality again. Like a baby who grows up with the father only, there is nobody else to interact with. The baby becomes a copy of the father. Whatever the father does, the baby does. Whatever the father says, the baby copies exactly that. And you can look at the baby and you can say, "oh he is so much like his father." It happens in any relation. So it will happen in this spiritual relation also. I am a mixture of so many.

We all have our own girl in the red dress, that is Maya movements, too deep, too real and too strong to simply intellectually wish them away.

Yes, Morpheus tells him not to pay attention. Same thing Guru will tell you, not to get distracted by the worldly stuff. Same thing is pictured there. Each and every line in that movie is a teaching of some kind. It resembles Buddhism a lot. But it's in every tradition. So don't pay attention to that which is distracting. Only then will you be able to learn something. Otherwise, the Maya will pull you back into the illusion. We dip in and out of the sea of illusion. We dive into it, then we come back. It's like a play. One day we are tired of the play, and then we are above the surface all the time. And the only way to get out of the illusion is to wake up, that's all. You will see in that movie the first message Neo receives is "Wake up, Neo.". That's all you need to hear, nothing more. You need to wake up because there is illusion everywhere. When can you wake up? You can wake up only now. There is no other way, there is no other time.

Parteep is saying, after lesson 20, all information about the model of memory, are these latest findings or part of PoK tradition? Is it explored by you? I find connections even in Ayurveda. It's too amazing.

It's all tradition. Nothing is mine. Yes, I explored it. I usually do the due diligence. I don't say it if I am not comfortable with it. Sometimes I say it, but it does not become a part of the program or anything. It is just for entertainment. But when I really want you to know, it is verified teaching. I don't pass it on without checking first. It was done in the past because there was no other way to preserve knowledge. So the Brahmin community or the priest community or whatever community, the traditions, they simply parroted the teachings because that was the command. Say it, learn it, memorize it, learn to read it. So they did it. I don't see anything wrong in it. There is no other way to preserve knowledge. Human memory is the only way. If you want the knowledge to continue in humanity, store the knowledge in humanity. That is the formula. So you will find a lot of literature that is just mindless copies of the old literature. Why is that? Especially the literature in the yogic field, Kundalini field and the occult field? Sometimes I find that mindless copying in Advaita also. This was told to me that the world is an illusion, and he writes that thing: World is an illusion, get out of here. And when you ask that fellow why, sir, why is it an illusion? What is the meaning of Maya? What is producing the illusion? And there is the silence of death on his face. He knows nothing. And when you ask them why did you do that, if you don't know it? “That is what my tradition does”. They are very dogmatic about it.

I did not like all these things and I refused to take the teaching, but very slowly, I came to know the reason for it. Only after Gurufield told me. This is how it is. Sometimes I also need to simply repeat, look this is going to stop your repeated cycle of death and birth. I don't really know. I don't know that there is a cycle of birth and death. I repeat it, but fortunately that is not the core of the teaching. Death and birth are seen as an illusion. That is the core teaching. Get to the core, get the fundamentals and the rest will reveal itself whenever Devi wants, whenever Shakti wants. She is running the show. We are not.

Session 90

Shilpi has asked, How to transcend survival?

That which you are needs no survival. It is not perishable. It cannot die. It was not born. That which is your true nature. That's all you need to realize. You can say that I have transcended survival. What tries to survive? The illusory structure, the creature, the body-mind machine, is trying to survive. And it is perfect. There is no need to interfere. It's not even possible to interfere because your nature is a witness. It does not interfere. Its nature is to accept, not to control. That is your nature. So whatever is happening in the survival process is perfect. It should be exactly like this. There is no need to cut it down. No need to stop it. And there is an evolution that is happening in this body-mind machine. It will progress to some other level where survival is not that difficult. Right now, you need to accept whatever there is and realize that you have already transcended it. If not, if you are still on the way to self-realization, you are in this program but you have not reached there, or you don't understand what it is, no need to worry, it's coming. As soon as you get that knowledge, you need to be established in that knowledge, and survival will happen as usual. Only that it will happen in the light of knowledge, in the light of awareness. Then it will not be a big problem. It will be natural. And if there is no survival, then that is also natural. Nobody survives here. That which is very natural has become a big problem because of the fear of death or the fear that something will happen to “me”. This is a result of ignorance, because there is no death and nothing can happen to me. Even if I want something to happen, it won't happen because I am the unchanging one. It is forever. Nothing happens to this empty witness. There is nothing there that can be harmed or reduced. So this is how you take care of survival. You let it happen and you realize that you have already transcended it.

Pankaj is asking, is it possible to know or realize or to be aware of the experiencer in deep sleep? We have learned that the experiencer is eternal but it seems that it is not present in deep sleep and it was absent before this body-mind was born. Isn't a body and mind must for an experiencer to exist?

Yes, it is possible to be aware of the experiencer in deep sleep. It is possible by extending your awareness into deep sleep. How to do that? Cultivate the awareness. Make your awareness so strong, intense in the waking state so that it leaks into the dreaming and then make it so strong in the dreaming that it leaks into the sleep. And now there remains no difference between waking, dreaming, projecting and sleeping. This is called the Turiya state. In Turiya state, the experiencer is always shining. There is a memory of it, there is an awareness of it, it is never lost. This is also called the Yogic sleep. It is possible. And if you want to know whether I am still there after the body-mind is gone, you can extend the awareness after death, using the same technique. And then you will come to know. If awareness is extended after death, you will see. If it is not extended, there will be no one to see. Because your absence means there is nobody, so nobody will know. You have only two options: either you cannot know these things (where you are absent), or you will know that I am present. The third option, that I am absent, is impossible. But on the path of knowledge, we do not wait for this to happen. It is a practice that will take a whole lifetime for you. Although I have given you the practice of awareness. I have given you the techniques. But without awareness, the techniques don't work. How to get awareness? You need self-realization. How to get self-realization or the Atma Gyan? You need to walk patiently on the path of knowledge.

If you want to know now, there is a simple technique. It is possible to know by this simple fact that the experiencer does not change. So, in the states of waking, dreaming, sleeping, it remains the same. If there is no memory of it, it is not a big deal. The experiencer is still there. It is possible to know it like this. Before birth, after death, same thing. It does not change. Bodies change. Minds change. Memories change. The witness of these is unchanging. So you can know it like this.

There is a third way. You must have realized that there is no time. Time is a creation of the mind. There is no past, there is no future. To take birth you need a past. The birth should happen in time. If there is no time, nothing is born. It was an illusion that seemed to happen in time. If there is no time, nothing will grow old and nothing will die. That is again an illusion. You must be very sure that the body and minds are illusions. Everything that changes is an illusion. You must have seen in the program the example of the tomato. If you speed up the change in the tomato, the tomato seems to be unreal. It is gone as soon as it appears out of thin air. Because the tomato is made up of air and then it disappears or becomes dirt. It is unreal. So the body-mind is unreal and therefore it has no effect on that which is real. That which is unchanging remains unchanging. It is very easy to know all these things. As soon as you get hold of the basic knowledge, all questions can be answered like this. Nothing will remain unanswered.

Can that which is illusory affect that which is real? No, it cannot. Can the pictures on the screen affect the screen? Can they leave a mark on the screen? If a character on the screen is growing old and dying, will the screen die with it? Think like this. There are more ways. Like, I have given you three or four right now. There are more ways to establish that the only reality there is is the experiencer. I will give you one more. Experiencer is nothing but existence. Existence is the one that has the ability to experience anything, that has the ability to be conscious of the illusion. When you sleep, does the whole existence go away? Is it possible? Will the whole world disappear? Will all bodies and creatures and everybody disappear? Is it possible? No. So existence remains. It is experiencing through other points of view. It is like a watchman. In front of the watchman, there are many CCTV screens. If one of the cameras goes off, that does not mean the watchman is dead. That will not mean that the watchman has disappeared. The watchman is watching through other cameras. He is always alert. He is always aware. That light never goes off.

There can be many, many arguments that show that which is opposite of the common belief. The common belief is a stupid belief. There is not even one argument which is in favor of that belief. It is not possible. I will give you one more because after many years of answering such questions, I have collected a lot of arguments. There is one more argument that in order to witness absence of any kind, it requires an experiencer. This is a very solid argument that if you have an apple in the fridge, next day you open the fridge and see no apple, probably somebody ate it. But you are there to witness the absence of the apple. If you don't witness the absence of the apple, nothing can be said about it. You will think it is there. So in order to witness your absence in sleep, you must be there. Otherwise you will never be able to conclude anything. To witness the absence of the experiencer we need an experiencer. Now isn't that absurd? Isn't that something which is impossible? To witness an absence you need the experiencer. And to witness its own absence you still need the experiencer which is impossible. Because if there is an experiencer witnessing its own absence that means it is still there. It is impossible.

Pankaj is saying, only when I wake up I know that nothing was there.

No problem. The good news is you woke up. That which went to sleep woke up. Which means it was there. It will take an act of magic to make the whole existence and the whole experiencer disappear while the mental state changes, while the mind stops functioning in sleep. If that which went to sleep came up that means it was there. Probably it was in a potential form. Probably it was just resting. It was not interested in being aware or experiencing. It was there. Why do you worry so much? Will it be there after death? Was it there before birth? Who cares? All I know is, I am. I don't know death, I don't know birth. These are social conditionings. Body was born, I am pretty sure. I was not born. I am pretty sure there is no time. Now all of your worries are gone. And if there is a worry it is simply an impurity that is stuffed in your mind by ignorant people. Would you like to believe the stupid people in the society or would you like to believe the logic and your direct experience? Would you like to believe some narrow minded skeptic or would you like to believe those who are saying the same thing since thousands of years that the experiencer is forever. It is eternal. Most intelligent of the intelligent are saying this and you chose to believe the most retarded people in the universe. Why is that?

So you are given the means of knowledge which is direct experience and logic. You are given the criteria of truth which is unchanging is the truth. That is what exists. Nothing else exists, like the body, mind, sleep and whatever. You have accepted these. Now you need to utilize these to get your own answers. And remember if you don't get the answers, the path of knowledge is not for you. This is our criteria for verification. If you don't get the answer here on the path of knowledge immediately you should change your path. Take the path where the experiencer comes and goes that will be more suitable for you. I have done that for a long time. So the only satisfactory answers that I get are on the path of knowledge. If you don't get the answers here, you will get them nowhere in this whole universe. It is the only one in this whole manifestation that gives you the answers. Go to any other guru, go to any other ashram, read any book you want. Nothing gives you answers. Only this path of knowledge program. Can you believe it? It's so ordinary. It's so simple. But it has all the answers. This has happened for the first time in the history of this planet.

Shilpa is asking, if the mind cannot know the unknowable, then how do we know there is existence?

Very nice question. Very intelligent question. Because I have told you that the existence is unknowable. You cannot grasp it as an experience of any object. Because that's what we know. We are capable of knowing only illusory objects. Nothing else. And that which matters most is unknowable. So how can the mind know the unknowable? It is useless in knowing the existence. But remember the definition of existence. It is all that is. You combine everything together. That will be called existence. How do we know it is there? Because we experience something. I am not saying that we experience nothing. Otherwise, there was nothing to say about the existence. And we cannot say that there is no existence. The experiencer of these experiences is appearing here. Without the experiencer, there was no way to tell whether there is existence or not. The presence of the experiencer which is undeniable gives us a hint that there is something. And we see that wherever you go there is always an experience and there is always an experiencer.

The experiencer is a very simple fellow. There is nothing there. It is empty. The experiences are fancy, a lot of smoke and mirrors and lights and a lot of circuses going on there. It will be a strange circus but it will be there. No matter what, wherever we go, no matter how hard we try we find only the experience and the experiencer. There is nothing else. And we know that they are one. So that's what the whole existence is. It's a series of experiences being experienced by the experiencer. There is nothing more than this. It is all there is. That's why it fits the definition of existence. That's all there is. You know the experiencer is infinite, there are no limits and you know that the experience is infinite. It goes on and on. So you know that it must be the existence. It goes on and on, it is infinite, it is eternal. Whatever there is, is in the existence, there is nothing outside it.

Now, why do we say that it is unknowable? Because all we know is the illusion. The mind can grasp only the illusion. The poor mind cannot even grasp the experiencer of the illusion. It says it is empty, which is right actually. That's all that can be said about it. And then it looks at the experience and it says it is false. That's all that can be known about it. So we say existence is unknowable. All that we can say is - it is there. That's all that can be said about the existence. It is there. It is kind of infinite and eternal. It is timeless. And the rest is just cooked up by the mind. We remove that which was accumulated in the mind and then the pure existence is left. And this purity is seen as emptiness by the mind. The emptiness has nothing there which can be known. The good news is - I am that emptiness. I am the existence. So you don't really need to know it. You need to be it. How to be it? You're already it. Just drop your ignorance. Drop your ignorance that I am not the whole. You are the Brahman. Amazing, isn't it?

Jharna is asking, purification brings about a kind of pleasure, a joy. This pleasure is an attribute of the one that opens the way through this. What opens the way through this pleasure?

Actually, you have answered your question already. Purification opens the way. Why is your life miserable? Because of all the impurities. Impurities are accumulated because of ignorance. All of your impurities are imported. You are not born with them. You are born with very little. Then everything is imported from outside. And that hides the bliss that I am. The clouds hide the sun for a while. But that impurity is so brittle that it takes only two minutes to just poke it and it's gone, falls down very easily. It takes only one sentence from the Guru and everything which you collected for the whole of your life or probably many lifetimes, is broken. The Guru points only once and the whole of it is totally shattered. It is very brittle. The bliss is everlasting.

All you need to do is drop the impurity and you will see that you are bliss. Now again I want to tell you that it is not a mind-blowing experience. It can be a mind-blowing experience. No problem. But then you will adapt to this. The adaptation happens. Like you come from a dark room into sunlight or in a brightly lit room and for some time your eyes cannot see anything. Eyes are totally overwhelmed by the light. They close and you hide from the light. But after five minutes they adapt to the light. So since you are bliss, you are eternally bliss and there is no bigger bliss than this, there will be shock for a while and then the mind adapts. It becomes ordinary bliss. There is nothing special about bliss. It looks special because you never had it. Once you get it, it is business as usual.

It is my nature. Enlightenment is an ordinary event. It is our mistake to think that it is extraordinary. The ignorance is extraordinary. How come it happened that I forgot myself? That is a miracle, isn't it? To be the whole, to be the existence is ordinary. It is business as usual. This is how I have been since eternity. There is nothing new in knowing. Ignorance is new. And don't worry if after one week you think that the bliss is gone. No, it's not gone. Adaptation has happened. It was ordinary. There is nothing special about bliss. To be blissful is your nature. It is your ordinary nature. If you are not blissful now, that is extraordinary.

“What happened? Why is the baby crying?” When the baby is laughing and playing, nobody cares. Nobody even looks at him. He starts crying, and everybody runs and checks what happened. Extraordinary event! Your suffering is an extraordinary event. It breaks the bliss. You are blissful, which you are since billions of years, and you are going to stay like this. Timeless bliss. If I claim that it is so simple, why do I need to go through this exercise? The mind is complex. The knowledge is very simple. Whatever I say in the program is just your experience. I am not showing you anything more than what you already know. Yes, there are some tricky things. You will know it. Mind is complex. Whatever I tell you is simple. It's right in front of your eyes. It does not want to remember. So I recommend that you write it. And one more thing, you will remember it. One more thing, I come to know what you are understanding. If you write something wrong, I get a chance to correct you. Usually, after two or three lessons, nobody makes any mistake. This is very amazing. I see that. In the beginning, all kinds of mistakes. After two or three lessons, the writing is so beautiful that sometimes I say, did I really say that? Such a beautiful thing. Somebody has written there. I need to go and check in the video that I have actually said it. So don't worry. Don't worry. Why do I stress so much on beautiful writing? Because that is our goal. You need to enjoy writing and we need to enjoy reading what you are writing. I ask you to use the pure words. I ask you to make it as good as possible. Remember it is the last thing that you are going to do in your seeking. No more writing. No more reading. No more listening. Only if you want to. Otherwise, it is repeat, repeat, repeat. This is the last. It is guaranteed that you will not know anything more than that which is told in the program. And don't worry, I am not claiming that I am the one who did all these things. It has been like this for many thousand years. We are doing it like this. Knowledge is always there.

You don't have the luxury of keeping everything in memory. So, we have used the memory of the computer to do that job. I make you write two or three sentences. That is enough for your intellect to grasp it whatever was said. All you need to do is look at your notes and you will remember everything. Plus those who make mistakes, those who have impurities, little hidden impurities in their understanding, it comes out in the writing. They get amplified in the writing.

Muni is saying, yes, writing is very useful. Initially, I found it a little cumbersome, but now I am writing.

I wrote my blog continuously for one year. Hundred articles. Can you imagine that? They are much bigger than whatever you guys are writing there. So much so that my fingers, they developed carpal tunnel or whatever. I typed so much. Why? Because that is joy. That is fun. Sometimes the writing will write itself, and then you will notice it only after you have written it. Where is it coming from? You will never know. It was always there in you. So that's why I focus on all these things: accuracy of writing and use of the proper words and all. Because on the path of knowledge we depend on intellect so much, and the intellect functions on words, language, logic, accuracy, precision. This is where the intellect shines. If you feed it garbage, you will get garbage. You won't be able to think logically. You will find a lot of confusion because languages are fighting in your head. Because other philosophies are already there. Focus on purification of language if you want to be successful.

I know this through my own experience When I was lazy, when I was not paying attention to accuracy, the intellect was lazy .The intellect could think anything under the sky which was total garbage. As soon as you bring accuracy in the words in the language, there is no chance of getting it wrong. Clarity increases a thousand fold in your mind. How am I able to answer everything? I don't remember the answers. Because of the discipline, the intellect has become like this. You need only a little bit of correction and then you rise up like a rocket.

Shilpa is saying, when I hear it becomes evident but again things seem to change.

Yes, the mind slips back into the habit of old thinking patterns. So what we are going to do is, in the verification step, you will need to verify whatever is there. And once you go through the verification, the intellect will be trained to see everything in this way, whether it is true or not. The first thing it sees is whether whatever is said is true or not. Make it your habit like this. The question is just to put the seed in you: don't believe me, don't believe anybody. It must be verified. You need evidence for it, and then it will never slip. If you make it your habit to verify as soon as you hear it, your intellect will never go back. It will never fall. Initially what I did was I copied my teachers. How do they answer the question? They start with the definition. “Why is existence like that and like this?” They don't answer you directly. They will define existence first - “under my philosophy, existence is defined like this. Now, you are telling me that is like that, but look logically it is like this”. I'm just giving a random example. So, simply copy your teacher, simply copy how they answer, and that will train your intellect. Remember, we learn by copying: there is no other way to learn. You're not born with the ability to learn, you're born with the ability to copy. And when you copy, you learn. Then you make the copy original, like you make it your own. There is no other way. That's why I say, copy me. Copy whatever is said in the program, in the videos, and so on. Copy and see if it is true or not. That's all you have to do.

Don't go back to your old thinking which was just noodle soup of some things, which you don't know what it is. All your actions are coming out of that confused intellect. That is why you're lost. If you train your intellect, discipline your intellect, your life will become simple. It will become simple, easy and weightless. There is nothing much to do in human life. We make it complicated by complicated thinking. A wise man does not think too much. There is nothing much to think here. For a wise man everything is solved already.

I'm very happy that you're calling it information. Because unless you verify it, it is just information. So see everything that I tell you as a source of information, as pointing. It does not become knowledge unless you verify it using your own direct experience and little bit of logic. You don't need to become a logician. Sometimes as I say it, it gets verified. Many people must have noticed this. I say the sentence and it is verified as soon as you hear it. So sometimes it looks like I'm transmitting knowledge, not information. Which is good, isn't it? Sometimes it is just information. Sometimes it will remain information for a long time. So that's why we have experiments.

There are ways to look at the existence. I know it is unknowable, but our little intellect can play with it. And we see that existence must be that which appears. That is our most direct way to know what existence is, look at the appearances. Because you cannot look at the experiencer. And that is why most of the time I introduce existence as a series of experiences. Although when you go deeper you will see that the experiences are false. So what is existence? It is the experiencer actually in its most pure form. You can neglect it. You can say the experiencer is not there actually because it's totally empty. What is there actually? What is my direct experience? Appearances. The Brahmanaad or the vibration. So there are ways to look at the same existence. You can look at it from many angles. And the Sankhya has done that. Sankhya chose to look at the Prakriti first. It has kept the Purush in the margins. “We don't need it. Let's make it an element”. And the whole focus now goes on the experience part which is changing. And they are not shy in saying that it is real. And I find that fascinating because we are so used to calling it an illusion, unreal. There is nothing more real than illusion, isn't it? There is nothing else there except the illusion. Nobody wakes up from illusion. The dream is an infinite dream. Can you say it is false? When all there is, is the dream, can you say it is false?

We have taken a totally extreme point of view. I have decided to call it false. For once and for all, no confusion there. Stick to one criteria of truth. Otherwise, you'll get lost. That is my philosophy. That is my recommendation. Stick to one. It will take you to the highest. It will take you to the ultimate. Forget about that which is both true and false. It will take you nowhere. Why have we chosen this criteria? Who was the crazy fellow who came up with this criteria? “I am going to call everything which is changing as false”. This is crazy, because everything becomes false, except me. Who is this narcissist person who has turned everything into false except myself? There is a reason for that. Because only this criteria will take you to yourself. Otherwise, you'll keep searching for the truth in that which appears and disappears. And your search will take forever. You won't be able to find anything. It is vast. It is infinite. The dream is infinite. If somebody tells you it is true, you are lost there. What is true there? As soon as you say no, it is false. If you don't declare that which appears in the experience part as false, you will keep searching there. You will never turn around and look at yourself. Only when I say that look, everything is false, every experience is false, you are willing to turn inwards. Let us look at this one which is looking. You say after searching through everything that changes, everything that can be thrown away. You finally decide to take a look at the essence.

And then you are shocked that it is empty. Who is shocked? The mind is shocked, not you. You know who you are. You are never surprised by the finding. That's why people who have a little bit of awareness, when they are told what they are, nothing really happens. “You mean I am this? Yes, which is looking. Yes, let's have dinner now”, they react something like this. But those who hold a lot of conditioning, those who have a lot of attachment, their life turns upside down. You mean what? I am not the person? You mean my name is not mine? My body is not mine? There was probably a lot of attachment. And when it is revealed what you are, this destruction happens. Like a bomb went off in your mind. Now who am I really? Because the acceptance of this self which is nothing, which is non-object, cannot be experienced, cannot be grasped by mind, cannot be known, there's a non-acceptance there that I cannot accept what I am because I am used to something else that will be the feeling. And that is a little bit disorientating, like what should I do now? But don't worry, the mind will adapt and it will get on with life. It will say nothing special after a few days.

Sometimes it is like a burden that is dropped and sometimes it is painful. And the question is - what should I do now with my life? And the person becomes depressed because yes, there is nothing to do in your life. You've never done anything in your life. What is there to do? Isn't it just happening on its own? Like the river comes to know its nature and the river says, "How can I flow today?" You are flowing automatically. There is no need to run your life. Who is running your life? Nobody. Life is running itself. Why are you so depressed? Those who come close to self-realization, they have this fear of letting go. Who will run my life if I accept your theory that I am not a person, I am not the body? There is a fear there. Who will take care of my family? Who will earn the money?, and so on. Remember, nobody is doing it right now also. There is nobody to do anything. You are only witnessing. It cannot be called a job. Nothing is lost in self-realization and nothing is gained. That is why it is the biggest joke in this universe.

Ruchika is saying, initially I feared as if I lost everything but then lesson solved it after your lesson.

Survival happens in total falsehood. If you know that it is false nothing changes. It was always false. Yes, nothing matters really. So don't worry, nothing changes after self-realization, only there will be a little bit of smile on your face. It is ordinary.

Jharna's question, she is saying, as we are going through the process of purification, it is relevant to experience sensation in the body. I have this intense sensation on my chest and between my eyebrows.

Yes, it can happen. It is amazing that you have the sensations right on the chakra locations. That is due to your past practices. The vipashyana and all these practices make your body and these chakras so sensitive that whatever little goes on in the mind shows up in the body instantly. A tiny bit of emotion shows up in the whole body. Sensation on the chest corresponds to the heart chakra. The sensation between the eyebrows, you know that it is the ajna. What has happened is your ajna has woken up because of the knowledge and the heart is reacting to the impurities as they are revealed. It is relevant, yes. Don't worry, it is very natural. Ajna has been activated. So all you need to do is relax and let it happen. There is nothing wrong with these sensations.

Even if you leave your path, the kundalini will not leave you. Simply because you have changed the path to the path of knowledge does not mean that whatever happens in the mental layers will not happen. The body is another layer. It is very tightly connected with all other layers – all other chakras or whatever you want to call it – and so this shows up. There is an intense activity going on in the deeper layers which were kind of inactive – not inactive but they were just going very slowly. Now we have shaken it a little bit, we have oiled the machinery a little bit. Now it is running in top gear. Enjoy your experience. And if it becomes uncomfortable, you need to tell me immediately – that's all you need to do. Let it happen. And if it becomes uncomfortable then I will do something, don't worry.

Epilogue

Namaste,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tarun Pradhaan

Pune 2024

tarun.pradhaan@gmail.com