Verses 5.18–5.21🔗

Kṛṣṇa succinctly explains the neutrality and equanimity of Existence. Existence has no favorites. All comparative and hierarchical definitions are manmade. Kṛṣṇa says there is no difference between a human and an animal, and that there is no difference between those we consider to be saints and those we consider to be sinners. A learned scholar, the priest and the brāhmaṇa should be seen as equal to an animal or a person who eats dogs. Even more dramatically, He says that one in full knowledge sees the dog and the dog-eater as the same—śuni caiva śva-pāke ca paṇḍitāḥ sama-darśinaḥ (5.18). Sannyāsa Yogaḥ Live All Your Possibilities 391 This is what Ādī Śaṅkara means when he sings the six verses of his Ātma Śatakam.

‘I am not the enjoyer. I am not the enjoyed. I am not the enjoying. I am beyond all that; I am just the embodiment of Śiva.’ This is one of the most beautiful messages from Śaṅkara. ‘I am not the doer, I am not the deed, I am not the doing,’ he says. ‘I am just the witness, beyond all these.’ When we go beyond all three, the subject, object and verb, all connotations disappear. The eater and the eaten merge. We reach the source. There are no thoughts and there is no mind. There is just you, your being. That is the true you, the Supreme. Existence continuously showers bliss upon each of us.

Only we are not open to receive it. Existence sees everyone as equal. It does not discriminate. Everyone is a part of the same Existence. Similarly, Masters see the whole world as one with their own selves. That is why only they can show compassion to anyone and everyone. Every Atom is Divine External appearances are ephemeral. When we see the eternal, blissful being as the core of each and every one of us, we will realize the inherent divine nature of each of us. This knowledge, gained through the experience of the Self, results automatically in deep compassion towards the whole of Existence. Classifications of lower species and higher species, good and bad are all made by society and by our minds, not by Existence.

Only human beings think they are more intelligent than the rest of Nature! A small story: One night, a thief knocked on the door of a monastery located in the middle of a forest. The master opened the door and allowed the man to spend the night in the monastery. The next morning, the thief thanked his host and asked for his permission to leave. He also confessed to the master that he was a thief and had burgled the palace the previous night. The master was aghast. He started weeping loudly, ‘What a great sin I have committed by allowing a thief to spend a night in my monastery!

I gave him food too. What can I do to make up for my sin?’ At that time, he heard a voice from the sky, weeping even louder than him, ‘You are upset and weeping because you have looked after him for one night. What about me? I have been looking after him everyday for all these years!’ The master had actually become egoistic. He started feeling holier than others because of which he looked down upon the thief as a less holy person. God never differentiates between a sinner and a saint. These are all societal. Every atom on Earth is divine. When we just realize this very life is a divine gift to us, our attitude changes from taking life for granted to one of gratitude to Existence for everything!

Have you worked hard to earn this life? With every breath that you take every moment, the life energy flows into you and keeps you alive. We take for granted the life energy that converts bread into blood. The mind continuously runs behind ‘more and more.’ If we make two lists: one list of what we have, what Existence has showered upon us and a second list of what we really want to have to feel happier, we will quickly realize how much longer the first list is. Have we ever strongly considered what our life would be like if we did not have even a small limb? Can you imagine the limitations we would have without a toe or thumb, not to speak of our eyes or ears?

We take so much for granted. We assume that what we have been given is our rightful due and so we only crave for more. We are here as gifts of Nature. Instead of being grateful to Existence for what we have been showered with, we complain about what we do not have. Remember that when God does not grant us what we seek, He is Sannyāsa Yogaḥ Live All Your Possibilities 393 doing it out of deep compassion and wisdom. He does not grant many of our prayers because He knows that far better than us. We have no wisdom when it comes to asking. The Divine is far wiser and knows what we really need.

There is a huge difference between what we want and what we need. For the next couple of days, just try living with the attitude of gratitude, with love for everyone and everything around you, with a deep completion. Automatically, you will begin to experience every person and every happening as a unique creation of Existence, as a reflection of the Divine. Just decide consciously that you will respond with love, whatever may be the situation. Just the very attitude change will bring tremendous peace and relaxation into you. Kṛṣṇa says, when you look every single thing without differentiation, without fear or favoritism, without attachment, then you are a true renunciate, a true Sannyāsi.

Death, Only A Passage Can you look at death and birth in the same manner? We celebrate birth, we condole death. Why? Both are passages. Neither is a beginning nor an end. The cycle of life is continuous. We move seamlessly from birth through living into death and again into birth. It is just that in this life, we do not remember what happened in the period between our death in our previous birth and our birth this time. That loss of memory is for our own safety. We are perturbed by that loss of memory. What we do not know frightens us. If we understand that death is no different from birth and that life after death may be no different from our current life, there will be no fear.

This can happen when we have the experience of death while we are still alive. This is what we teach in our programs. An important thing: How we look at death reflects a lot of the way we look at life. I can say our perception of death changes our way of life. Death is feared by most of us because it is considered a discontinuity. When we realize that death is just a continuation in some other form, we will not fear death. Then the joy of birth and the sadness at death will both be seen as the same. Our idea of birth and death is direct evidence of how we look at various situations in life.

That is why understanding about birth and death is actually fundamental to leading a life of realization. Understand, one who knows that what he sees is illusion, just a play of mind, he will not fear death. As long as we hold on to this illusion created by the mind that we call reality, we have a feeling of losing it when we think of death. When we see pain and pleasure as the same and are not affected by either of them, we will be free from the fear of death. Because then we realize that nothing is taken away from us when death comes. Enlightened Masters’ experience about death teaches us a lot.

Bhagavān Ramaṇa Mahaṛṣi got his enlightenment through a conscious experience of death. When Bhagavān was a young boy, one day he was just lying on his bed at his Uncle’s house in Madurai, South India. Suddenly he got the feeling that he was going to die! He had two choices: to resist the feeling or to go through it. He chose the second, to go through death as it is, consciously. He became enlightened after he experienced the process of death. Usually people resist, so they pass into a coma and leave the body in a state of unconsciousness. In our second level program, the Nithya Kriya Yoga or Life Bliss Program Level 2, we go into the complete understanding of death, what happens exactly when we die.

We enrich you to experience the process of death and to understand how and what happens, so that there is no mystery and, therefore, there is no fear. At least once if we go through death with deep consciousness, we will lose our fear for death automatically. Bhagavān was courageous enough to choose the second path. He allowed death to happen without any resistance. He saw clearly one by one, the parts of his body dying. Slowly, his whole body was dead, turning into ashes. Suddenly, he realized that something remained even after that, which cannot be destroyed. At that moment, it hit him that he was pure consciousness, beyond the body and mind!

He was simply a witness to Sannyāsa Yogaḥ Live All Your Possibilities 395 the whole thing! That knowledge was tremendous and it never left him. When he came back into his body, he was Bhagavān Ramaṇa Maharṣi, the Enlightened Master! When we conquer the fear of death, we conquer death itself, because death is just one more imagination! When we get over the cycle of greed and fear, we can be in equanimity in all situations in life; then we are situated in the supreme consciousness. It is then we have touched our core, our real Being. Steady Your Intelligence, Go Beyond Opposites Kṛṣṇa goes on to explain the characteristics of one who is Supreme.

He says that one who is of steady intelligence, sthira buddhir asammūḍho; one who does not get caught in the play of opposing emotions or patterns like pleasure and pain, happiness and misery, is truly not deluded and is established in the truth, and in the Supreme, brahma-vid brahmaṇi sthitaḥ (5.20). He is Supreme himself. What do we need to know to get out of the whirlpool of emotions? If we look deeply, we will see that all our emotional incompletions like fear, greed or worry, at the root, are born of an expectation for a certain situation to happen in a certain way. We live in a virtual world of fantasy and when there is a gap between reality and imagination, the trouble starts.

The greater the gap, the more tension and disappointment we experience. We start to like or dislike something based on this gap. The likes and dislikes are a product of the mind, not of the being which is just bliss. Beautifully, Kṛṣṇa says, ‘An object of enjoyment that comes of itself is neither painful nor pleasurable for someone who has eliminated attachment and who is free from the dualism of self and the other and therefore, from desire.’ This is actually a sūtra, a technique that Kṛṣṇa gives. If we put our attention neither on pleasure nor on pain, but between the two, we actually go beyond both and transcend the play of the mind.

What do we normally do? If we are in pain, we try to run away from it. If we are in pleasure, we try to cling onto it. Understand that both pleasure and pain are of the mind. They are based on our saṁskāras, root thought patterns from our past. They are not of the being. Instead of trying to hold onto pleasure or running away from pain, just be with it, just witness it. The nature of the mind is to move to the opposites. Using this technique, we can transcend this nature of the mind. For example, if we have a headache, don’t try to resist it. Just witness it.

As the tree is there, as the night is there, so also the headache is there. On the other hand, if we are very happy, don’t try to cling onto it. Whether it is happiness or pain, just be a witness to it. It is like standing in front of the sun and watching it, with no attachment to the sun rising or setting. Be involved but be aware without resistance to life, neither rejecting nor accepting anything. When we are aware and do not resist anything, we can never be unconsciously pulled into it. Then desire cannot overcome us. We are always the Master. When we are not conscious, then we either start resisting or accepting and we get caught in the cycle of guilt and desires.

After the desire gets fulfilled, we go through guilt for having succumbed to the desire. But we did not live the desire fully with completion, so we can’t get out of it either. Next time, the desire happens and again we go through it incompletely and then feel guilty. The only way to get out of this vicious cycle of desire and guilt is to go through the desire with completion without any resistance to it. Normally we either suppress or express our desires. Suppression does not lead to elimination of that desire. It temporarily blocks access, but that desire will rise with renewed vigor again. Expression also does not mean completion.

Again and again, the desire will rise even after repeated expression because we rarely experience anything with completion. In expression of a desire, once we experience a desire with full awareness and declare completion with it, whether related to food, sex or material desires, we will find that the desire is fulfilled and we will not be bothered by it anymore. We will transcend the desire. It is actually that simple. Listen. This is what I term karma. Sannyāsa Yogaḥ Live All Your Possibilities 397 Karma is nothing but unfulfilled desire that makes us repeat the same experience again and again, simply because we do not have the intelligence to enter into that experience with complete awareness.

Once we experience the situation with awareness and complete with it, we will experience what Śaṅkara experienced. We will not be the doer, the deed or the doing. We will transcend all three. We will transcend our karma. We will be supreme. Tune In To Eternal Bliss Kṛṣṇa advises us to turn inwards. Move away from your senses, move into your Source, He says. By nature, by our very being we are tuned inwards. By conditioning, we lose the capability to turn inwards. We will see that most children are blissful, just curious and happy to be what they are. Then unfortunately, they grow up to be adults! They lose that bliss and that natural response to turn inwards.

Society teaches them to trust their senses. One who indulges in sense pleasures is just caught in the push and pull of desires and guilt. He is just under hormonal torture. Again and again, we look outside for solutions that keep us happy. Everything that happens around us gives us sensory pleasures. If we see our list of desires, most of them are not even ours, they are borrowed from others. We will be totally happy with our car until our neighbor gets a new car. We will be totally happy with our job until our colleague gets promoted to a higher post. We constantly update our list of desires by looking at what is going on outside, and we start believing that fulfilling these desires will give us what we define as happiness or pleasure.

So to fulfill these desires, we keep on running the rat race, not knowing what exactly we want. We look for fulfillment and solutions outside. However, the real solution lies inside. We need to be able to connect to our true self. We should realize that our being is blissful by nature. If we realize this, we will always be centered and complete in ourselves. He who is free from being and non-being, who is content, complete, desire-less, and wise, even if in the eyes of the world he does act, does nothing. We must have seen, on the surface, a mad man with tremendous laziness will look very similar to a mystic in deep bliss.

They may seem very similar but inside, they are the complete opposites. A madman is lazy and is lying around with many things occupying his mind. A mystic, however, is sitting completely relaxed because he is centered and complete in his being with no-mind. To us he may seem the same as a madman. But the mind of the mystic is not doing anything. He is complete unto himself. When we are situated in the core of our being, when we are one with the Self, we are not shaken by the emotions that happen on the periphery. It is like a rock that is standing in the ocean. The waves of the emotions are continuously lashing against the rock, but the rock still stands unperturbed, established in completion. The happiness arises from our very being, from our Self. It is unlimited eternal bliss because it cannot be stopped by any external agent, thus says Kṛṣṇa—sukham akṣayam aśnute (5.21). The Path To Self-Realization