Verses 6.25–6.29🔗

Here Kṛṣṇa says that we need conviction and intelligence to be established in the Self. Why does He talk about conviction? Understand that intelligence cannot happen without a strong conviction, a strong intellectual base Our Vedic seers, Rṣis have created śāstras, the foundations of knowledge that give the intellectual understanding, conviction and commitment to this process. Logically, we will be clear about the questions that naturally arise. ‘What is the path? What is the goal? Why do we need spirituality?’ All these questions are answered logically in the śāstras. The conclusions are given to us. Śāstras are the scriptures that take away all our doubts completely. Saṁśaya rākśasa nāshana astraṁ—it means saṁśaya is a rākśasa—‘doubt is a devil’.

Once a doubt enters our mind, until we clear it, we can’t rest. The śāstras help us get rid of these doubts intellectually. Unless we have complete intellectual clarity, even if we believe, our belief will be a pseudo belief. There are different ways to learn and develop clarity and conviction. We can learn from our experiences as well as from others’ experiences. For example, when we touch the flame of a candle, we learn that it burns. When we touch a burning gas stove, we learn again that fire burns. One by one, we can experience and learn that all fires burn. Or, when we touch the first form of fire, immediately we can learn that all fires will burn!

Coming to a conclusion and a clear understanding that all fires burn, after just one experience, is intelligence! We need a strong conviction for spirituality to flower in our lives. Only then can we stay on the path without faltering. If we do anything with knowledge about the science of the whole action, then the activity becomes a meditation. When the science is lost and only the activity remains, it becomes a ritual. When the juice of wisdom is not in the activity, it becomes a ritual, and we become religious nuts. When we add the juice of wisdom, we become spiritual fruits! We need to add ‘spirit’ to the ‘ritual’.

Then it becomes ‘spirituality’! We can start with simple things. We can try to infuse completion into simple actions in our everyday life like eating, having a bath, driving. Gradually, when the completion extends to more actions of our life, we can see that such awareness of completion results in bliss. Completion is bliss. We need to bring the light of awareness and completion into everything we do. It is a conviction arising out of our innate intelligence and understanding that we must return to our true nature, that is Divinity. Persevere and See Me In Everything Now, Kṛṣṇa is emphasizing an important spiritual quality— Dhyāna Yogaḥ Look In, Be Complete Before Any Conclusion 469 perseverance.

In the previous verse, He spoke about conviction. Now, he talks about persevering with that conviction. What happens most of the time to most of us is that when we realize we need to transform, we try a few times and then we give up on ourselves thinking we cannot do it. We expect the mental setup that we have created and solidified, to be broken and restructured in a few attempts, almost instantly. How is this possible? We need to be more patient and persevere in our efforts for the real change to happen. So what if we fail sometimes? Why don’t we look at the positive side and see that we succeeded a few times?

Why do we want to count the failures and feel depressed? We can also look at the successes and feel inspired. Once the conviction is there, nothing can stop us except our own mind. The mind is like a faithful servant. It reproduces whatever it has been fed. All along, we have been feeding the mind negative memories of failure and we have been storing all the past memories related to failure. What will the mind reproduce? It will recollect and present the same instances of only failure. When we want to measure the strength of a chain, we measure the strength of the weakest link in that chain. But we cannot apply the same logic to measure ourselves.

When we measure our lives based on our weakest moments, our failures and our incompletions, we take a wrong reading of ourselves. We cannot do with our lives what we do with the chain. Why can’t we give credit to ourselves for the strong, successful moments of our lives? We have been conditioned by society to consider ourselves weak beings, that we are not powerful. We have been taught to feel guilty. Does that help us in any way? No! It only creates low energy and powerlessness. Listen. Strength is Life. We should just decide that we will not be trapped in this cycle of guilt and desire. We need to measure ourselves by our strongest moments, our greatest moments of powerfulness, when we have displayed extraordinary awareness, courage, compassion, love and such other divine qualities.

A human being is the sum of his greatest moments of completion. He is not a mechanical device that fails based on its faults. He is a spiritual being who thrives on his strengths. Understand that you attract ‘like’ incidents in your life. ‘Like attracts like.’ The energy of one frequency attracts the similar frequency. When we are angry, the low energy attracts similar low energy. Pain attracts pain. Joy attracts joy. Bliss attracts fortune. If we are joyful, we will create a beautiful community of joyful people around us. It is for us to decide what we want to attract. We must persevere in our efforts to change our space and we will see the results in front of our very eyes.

Failures are merely tests to verify our mettle. Irrespective of how many times we may fail, with complete faith, with integrity and authenticity, we can trust in that inner strength that we all possess. Then we shall succeed. This is what is meant when Kṛṣṇa says the true yogi reaches the state of ultimate happiness, the state of eternal bliss and divine consciousness by his identification with the Absolute. In the next verse, Kṛṣṇa talks about passion and sins. Passion is nothing but a deep attachment to something for the pleasure that it gives. Usually we associate passion, sin and such terms with deeds that we classify as right or wrong.

But here, Kṛṣṇa does not talk about sin in the way society teaches us. It is not morality that He is talking about. I tell you, there is no sin except the sin of connecting thoughts and thinking that we are logical beings. So, the key is to be in the space of completion every moment. The solution is not to condemn ourselves as sinners and expect some external force to bring completion to us. It is we who choose everything in our lives and how we want to live. But since we do not participate in this process consciously, we call it ‘fate’. We are the ones who do the actions, but we don’t want to accept that fact when we get the results.

Somehow we choose to do whatever we want to do and then blame everyone else for the consequences! When we infuse completion into our actions, automatically the very completion will ensure that we have the integrity to do the right things. Listen! When you are integrated, so many resources which are present in you as a potential, suddenly becomes a Dhyāna Yogaḥ Look In, Be Complete Before Any Conclusion 471 reality in you! When we are integrated, we don’t need to depend on society and morality to teach us the right things to do. I tell you, live according to your intelligence and awareness. If you depend on others, even after becoming an adult, it means you are not mature.

Anything done out of conscience does not have the conviction of experience to back it. That is why it is never done whole-heartedly, because your energy, your intelligence is not behind the action. Have you seen a child doing anything, like looking at a flower? A child will look at a flower not just with its eyes, but also with its entire body. A child does anything and everything completely. We should try to look at life in a similar way. Many of us have not experienced the joy of enriching someone whole-heartedly. On the other hand, if we are smokers, do we need somebody to convince us to smoke?

No! Smoking has become our experience. When we are in bliss or the highest happiness, we can never commit any sin because we are aware and conscious and we cannot be caught in passion or lethargy. When we are in a ‘no-mind’ state, we are in bliss and we are not caught in the passion or sin that are products of the mind. When the mind drops, the Divine hand that is orchestrating every single event will guide every one of our actions. What does it mean to be freed from all past sinful reactions? Our past reactions are nothing but our root patterns, the past memories along with the associated emotions, deeply inscribed in our unconscious space.

Whenever we hold on to any past incidents or emotions as root patterns, our actions are bound to be impacted by them. But, if our action is not based on the past but arises from a spontaneous decision based on the present situation, then we are ‘responding’ to the event or incident or person. When we are in bliss, our actions will be only a response not a reaction, which is based on these past memories that Kṛṣṇa calls past sinful reactions. Have the courage to complete with your root patterns, to make decisions without referring to these past incidents, because every single incident and moment is a brand new one.

How can we compare what is happening now with what happened before? The situation is different, the person is different and so are we. Every moment, each one of us is dying and being born again; we are changing. Our intelligence is being constantly updated. Then how can we analyze the present situation through the lens of the past? We must complete with all regrets and guilt that we might have about the past, and immerse ourselves in the present moment. We don’t need the past to live beautifully in present space of completion. In fact, we can’t live blissfully in the present if we continue to use the past as a reference point for how to manage our lives.

Realized One Sees the Supreme Everywhere Kṛṣṇa says that the realized person, yoga-yuktātmā, sees the Supreme in everyone and everything. He sees everything situated in the Supreme and all beings situated in the Supreme. The yogi is in touch with the higher Self and is in bliss. sarva-bhūta-stham ātmānaṁ sarva-bhūtāni cātmani I īkṣate yoga-yuktātmā sarvatra sama-darśarsanaḥ II 6.29 When we experience the Truth, we see everything in ourselves and ourselves in everything. In fact, in my first spiritual experience at the age of twelve, this is what I clearly saw. When I was twelve, I was playing with this technique of just watching where thoughts came from, the source of my thoughts.

At that age, I didn’t even realize it was meditation. One day, at the foothills of Arunachala, in my hometown of Tiruvannamalai in South India, I was sitting on a rock, just playing with this technique that I had been practicing for two years. Suddenly, something happened; something opened within me. I felt as if I was being pulled inside. Suddenly, I could see 360 degrees in all directions. My eyes were closed but I could see everything in front of me and behind me. Dhyāna Yogaḥ Look In, Be Complete Before Any Conclusion 473 Not just that, I felt that whatever I was seeing, was all me. I could see myself in everything—in the trees, in the rocks, in the ground, in the hills, everything!

An Enlightened person sees no difference between Himself and the rest of the Universe. He is one with the Universe. His boundary does not end where his physical body ends. In fact, now with Kirlian photography, we can even check the auric body. For ordinary people, the aura just surrounds the physical body but when you are one with the universe, the aura extends infinitely. The Viśvarūpa Darśan, vision of the cosmic form, that Kṛṣṇa gives Arjuna is the glimpse of the same Truth, where Arjuna sees that Kṛṣṇa is one with the Universe. In the ultimate sense, the moment we understand that we are deeply, totally and intensely connected to the whole Universe, not only do we start experiencing bliss, we really start living in the space of completion.

Many dimensions of our being start opening. Right now we are stressed out and disturbed continuously because we think of ourselves as individual egos. If we disappear into this collective consciousness, we will experience so many dimensions and so many possibilities that we simply cannot imagine right now! When we see an Enlightened Master, we understand how all-encompassing he is. He never excludes anything or anyone. He is just pure love, that’s all. And pure love sees no imperfections. When we see every human being as a part of God, then that is real worship. It is easy to worship god in the temple. Real worship is seeing everything as God.

Existence is pure love. Deep inside, society is actually against Existence or god. It is against pure love. The best way not to follow anything is to start worshipping it. Society escapes in the name of worship. Society will never approve of us if we were to let go and love every plant and animal with endless love. It will tell us that we are mad. But I tell you, we must keep on loving with all our hearts, and expand to see Existence in everything. The root of God is love. The root of God lies in seeing Him in everything. People are afraid to go to the roots and so they delude themselves in superficial layers.

Have the courage to go deep inside and love. We will start feeling the common thread of Existence in all that we see. We will understand that all that we see are illusory happenings held together by the real thread that is Existence. Automatically we will start loving everything in the same way without any trouble because we will see only Existence in everyone and everything. Each and every atom in this Earth is unique, is divine, and is an expression of Existence. Controlling the Wavering Mind