Verses 6.5–6.9🔗

You are your own friend; you are your own enemy. Evolve yourself through the Self and do not degrade yourself. uddhared ātmanātmānaṁ nātmānaṁ avasāyadet I ātmaiva hy ātmano bandhur ātmaiva ripur ātmanaḥ II 6.5 In my discourses, if I have quoted any Gītā verse more than twice, it is this one. I can say this single verse provides the essence of the whole Gītā. In the last session, we saw how to move from ‘doing’ and ‘having’ to ‘being’. Usually we are stuck in ‘having’. We are constantly focused on Dhyāna Yogaḥ Look In, Be Complete Before Any Conclusion 433 our possessions, our status. It is always ‘I’ and ‘mine’.

Loss of possessions affects our ego and identity deeply. A slightly more intelligent person moves from ‘having’ to ‘doing’, from passivity to activity. Then, from doing we are supposed to move to ‘being’, from activity to active-passivity. This shift to ‘satva’, active passivity, helps us evolve spiritually as we move deeper into completion. In the last chapter we learned the technique from Kṛṣṇa for moving from fear and greed into Divine consciousness and bliss. In this verse, Kṛṣṇa says: ‘One must raise himself with the help of his own being and not degrade himself. The being is the friend of the conditioned soul and his enemy as well.’ You are your own friend and you are your own enemy.

If you know the technique of how to lift yourself by yourself, you will become a friend of your Self. If you let yourself down, you will become an enemy of yourself. A small story: There was a big spiritual organization. A monk was sent to a remote tribal area to perform service. Suddenly the headquarters received a lot of complaint letters about that monk. After reading the complaint letters, the president said, ‘We have posted the right person. Don’t worry.’ The secretary was puzzled and asked him why he thought this despite all the complaints received. The president replied, ‘If we are getting complaints, it means that he has already started working.

At least something is happening.’ When we start anything new, we will always have three phases. The first is resistance. The second is avoidance. We just avoid, neither caring nor resisting. The third is acceptance. This is the way anything starts. Similarly, when we start doing anything inside our system, we start growing in the same way. First, resistance: we will repeatedly fall. We will forget. Our system will resist. We will try to create complications and complaints and all possible arguments. Sometimes, if we can’t follow the teachings of Kṛṣṇa, we start blaming Kṛṣṇa. I have seen many people, when they are unable to follow the teachings of Kṛṣṇa, they will go ahead and start blaming Kṛṣṇa saying, ‘What Kṛṣṇa are you talking about?

He was always flirting. What type of a person was He?’ We can easily escape Kṛṣṇa by criticizing Kṛṣṇa. When we can’t practice these teachings, we start justifying ourselves. Since we are unable to follow, we start criticizing Kṛṣṇa. This is the best way to escape and avoid the teachings of Kṛṣṇa. When our being resists, if we allow the resistance to grow, we are our worst enemy. This is what Kṛṣṇa means by saying, ‘May you lift yourself by yourself. May you raise yourself by yourself’ If we don’t, we will be our worst enemy. It is up to us to enrich ourselves as best friend or to hurt ourselves as our worst enemy.

Please listen: Nobody can hurt you unless you allow him or her to. Nobody can help you unless you allow him or her to. May you lift yourself by yourself. May you lift yourself to your Self. Again and again, these Masters stress the same point. If you have fallen, if you have failed while practicing these words, the teachings or the meditation techniques, if you have forgotten, don’t worry. Again and again, lift yourself. Don’t give up on you. Don’t feel depressed and don’t have guilt. Don’t get dejected thinking you will not be able to do it. Don’t doubt your self. Again and again, lift yourself. Here Kṛṣṇa says, ‘May you lift yourself by yourself.

Nobody can do anything unless you lift yourself—uddhared ātmanātmānaṁ nātmānaṁ avasāyadet.’ Don’t give up on you and people! Internalize this important truth— do not give up on yourself and people! Even if people fail a hundred times, continue to work with them. When you are frustrated at other people’s failure, understand that it is nothing but your frustration towards your own failure. If we turn our back on people, we are not living dharma, Dhyāna Yogaḥ Look In, Be Complete Before Any Conclusion 435 because when we give up on others, we have also given up on ourselves! So never give up on you and people! Listen. Nobody really wants Enlightenment!

And even if we do, we want it as one more item in our showcase. We are not ready to risk anything for Enlightenment. Whenever people come to our houses, we can say, ‘This is from Delhi, this is from New York, this statue is from Japan.’ Just like that, we can say, ‘Oh... this enlightenment... do you know that Master, Nithyānanda? He gave it to me. He was giving a Bhagavad Gītā discourse that I attended and he just gave it to us. How does it look?’ Just as one more showpiece, we are ready to accept it, but we are not ready to commit or risk anything for it.

We are not ready to take up the responsibility for it. Here, Kṛṣṇa says, ‘May you liberate yourself by yourself. Unless you liberate yourself, nobody else can liberate you; uddhared ātmanātmānaṁ nātmānaṁ avasāyadet. If you help yourself, you will be the greatest friend for yourself. If you don’t, you will be your worst enemy—ātmaiva hy ātmano bandhur ātmaiva ripur ātmanaḥ’ This is an important verse. This has to be understood well. Let us see the next two verses to get the complete context and then we will enter into the meaning of the verses. Conquer Your Senses, The Self is Already Achieved A small story: There was a great enlightened Master.

He was always in ecstasy, always in joy. One of his disciples asked him, ‘Master, how are you so blissful? I have never seen you suffering. You are always joyful. How is this possible?’ Master replied, ‘Every morning when I get up from bed I ask myself, what do you want today? Do you want to be blissful or do you want suffering today? Naturally what will the mind choose? It will choose to be blissful. Then, immediately, I tell the mind: alright, be blissful. That’s all!’ We may think, ‘How can it be so simple?’ Be very clear, we know our twenty-four hour routine. Just try this tomorrow morning.

Just decide whether you want to face your normal routine with bliss or with suffering, with joy or with the usual long face. Decide for yourself. You have the choice. And whether you go with a long face or with a smiling face, the routine is going to be the same. I always tell people, ‘Pain is inevitable; suffering is a choice.’ We have one thing that we can choose—and that is our inner space. Do we want our inner space to be incomplete like the Kauravas filled with hay or do we want our inner space to be fulfilled with completion like the Pāṇḍavas, radiating the light and fragrance of bliss?

We have complete freedom to create our inner space. That is purely our own decision with no one to blame. Pain is independent of suffering. Pain is an external thing, suffering is an internal choice. Hell or heaven is our conscious choice. People always have another question, ‘What do I do if my mind says, I want to suffer?’ Then suffer, that’s all. What is there in it? When our mind wants to enjoy suffering, then even suffering becomes an enjoyment for us. So when you get up every morning, ask your mind, ‘What do you want today?’ If your mind chooses bliss, just tell your mind, ‘Be blissful. That’s all!’

This single conscious decision can change the quality of your life. But don’t make a commitment to do this for three days or one week. You will forget. Decide every day for just that 24 hours. People will immediately think, ‘Let me decide for my whole life today itself.’ No! You will forget. You will be back with the same face again tomorrow. No, don’t decide for your whole life. Decide only for one day. Only then will you be able to maintain it. Dhyāna Yogaḥ Look In, Be Complete Before Any Conclusion 437 A small story about this natural face: The head of a monastery, was teaching the young novices to preach.

He was giving them tips on how to speak in public. He said, ‘When we speak, our whole body should express what we are saying. Our face should express the idea that we are talking about. When we speak about heaven our eyes should sparkle and our whole body should show the bliss, we should express the joys of heaven clearly. Our face should shine.’ He continued, ‘When we speak about hell, we can just remain as we are. People will understand!’ At least in our life, let us not maintain the long face as our natural face. When we conquer the mind, happiness and distress are both one and the same and we are not touched by it.

Now, Kṛṣṇa has an important point here. He says, ‘For one who has conquered his Self, has already attained the supreme bliss, jitātmanaḥ praśāntasya paramātmā samāhitaḥ, for him happiness and distress, heat and cold, honor and dishonor are all the same, śītoṣṇa-sukha-duḥkheṣu tathā mānāpamānayoḥ (6.7).’ Throughout this chapter Kṛṣṇa emphasizes this one idea—senses. Kṛṣṇa speaks about the senses. How can happiness and distress, heat and cold, honor and dishonor be the same for a man? How is it possible? The first thing is that when our senses do the work, we decide ‘yes’ or ‘no’ only based on our past experiences, the experiences with which we have grown or the words with which we have conditioned our mind and memory.

Our intelligence decides based on our root thought patterns which are the incompletions of our mind and memory. Please be very clear: something that is tasty for us may be like poison to our neighbour. Why even go as far as our neighbour... Take your spouses for instance. You might like something, but she or he might hate it. Whenever our mind is caught in dualities, again and again we fall back to our dilemma, to our nature, to our suffering, to our instinct level. Here Kṛṣṇa says the person who has achieved bliss is not affected by heat or cold and joy or sorrow—śītoṣṇa-sukha-duḥkheṣu. How do we reach that state?

First, understand that when I say conquering the senses, I don’t mean controlling the senses or destroying the senses. If we try to control or destroy the senses, we will only struggle and suffer more and more. If we try to control our body, that is not going to work either. Kṛṣṇa says beautifully, ‘For one who has conquered the self, jitātmanaḥ.’ When He says self, He means the whole cognition where the decision-making happens. Mind-Intelligence-Ego is the spot where the decision-making is happening. When we just try to conquer the senses, we will fail again and again. If we fail two or three times we will lose the confidence to try again.

If we fail in a fight with our senses, we will automatically start thinking that it is impossible, and we will lose confidence. We need intelligence to progress in this path. We need to learn the science of creating the space of completion to conquer the senses. If we try to work from the wrong side out of incompletion, from the side of the senses, we will never be able to succeed. If we try to create more pressure on the cooker we will not be able to open the cooker lid. First, we need to put out the fire, the energy supply. Putting out the fire is doing completion with our root patterns.

The ego or root patterns or the intelligence, the place from where we make decisions, is continuously supplying energy to our senses. So all we need to do is to work at the level of the mind and not at the level of the senses to become jitātmanaḥ. If we try to work at the level of the senses, we will create only more and more perverted desires, leading to more and more incompletions. For example, normally, if we fast for one day, that night in our dreams we will be feasting! Our body has got its own balance, its own intelligence. If we avoid something, it has to supply and rejuvenate itself.

If we are hungry, we can’t sleep. In order to sleep, our bio-memory itself should be made to believe that we are not hungry. For this, we need to do completion with our patterns of food not suppression of the desire of food. So, the unconscious energy creates a dream as if we are feasting. Dhyāna Yogaḥ Look In, Be Complete Before Any Conclusion 439 Whenever we deprive ourselves, our unconscious energy will satisfy itself in the dream state. This is because in the dream state, there is noone to control us; all our incompletions simply come out in the dream. We just project our world and enjoy it. See, I initiate thousands of people into a powerful spiritual process called Nirāhara Saṁyama, liberating them from their food patterns.

Listen. It is awakening, rekindling the power of your bio-memory to produce energy and food directly from air, water and space. It is not fasting. An important rule in this process is the moment one feels hungry or tired, one has to start eating. One cannot use his or her willpower. Understand, if you fast, in the dream you will be dreaming as if you are feasting, eating! But, not a single one of my Nirāhara Saṁyama participants has a dream of eating food and feasting! Why? Because they are initiated into the most practical method of completing with all the root patterns. They don’t suppress their hunger, they just go beyond it, they go beyond their senses!

Understand, if we suppress something, it will automatically express itself in our dreams. Dreams are nothing but expressions of our suppressed desires and fears. Not only that, it expresses itself in a perverted way. If we do completion with our root patterns and out of completion when we enjoy with the senses, we will never become tired. But when we suppress our senses, our being suffers in our dreams. Now there is a new concept called ‘fear stroke’. These are imaginary fears, such as imagining ghosts lurking in dark corners, or the sudden ringing of the telephone, etc. We also get these fear strokes in dreams. Please listen. If we are suffering with incompletions at the dream level, there is something seriously wrong at the mind-intelligence level.

We are trying to control the senses instead of conquering the mind. Instead of removing the fire, we are trying to create more pressure in the cooker. All we need to do is to work on the mind, do completion to remove the fire, to stop the supply of fuel to the senses. Completion! Again and again complete! Understand, if you have dreams, whatever type of dreams they may be, whether they are good or bad, you are not worthy of sannyās yoga or karma yoga. Sannyāsi is a person who should be in that level of completion where no dreams happen in him. The day you start sleeping without dreams, you have become a real sannyāsi, a real karma yogi.

Dreams are nothing but the incompletions expressing in your inner space when you are unconscious. Understand, I am defining what is dreaming and thinking. Incompletions expressing when you are unconscious are dreams. Incompletions expressing when you are conscious is thinking. Incompletions expressing when you are unconscious is dreaming. Arjuna is called Gudākeśa by Kṛṣṇa, the one who has not just conquered dreams but who has conquered sleep itself. While addressing Arjuna as Gudākeśa, one who is in the light, having conquered sleep, Kṛṣṇa readies Arjuna for liberation. Here Kṛṣṇa says, ‘For one who has conquered the mind, jitātmanaḥ.’ He means that this applies to one whose mind has learned the right cognition of completion.

If our intelligence and memory are filled with past incomplete memories, we cannot make correct decisions. Don’t think the mind makes decisions in a logical manner. For example: when you see me, if you have had any problems with any other person who was wearing this same color robe in the past, suddenly that memory will be awakened. Then, the intelligence is not even ready to sit and listen. Immediately, our ego gives the order to leave. This is what we call prejudice. A man whose senses are complete, meaning one who is not driven by his senses, has the ability to make decisions with clarity from the pure space of completion.

Such a being is jitātmanaḥ—the conqueror of the mind and the self. Fountain of Bliss is within you We can never achieve bliss by controlling the senses. We can only Dhyāna Yogaḥ Look In, Be Complete Before Any Conclusion 441 achieve bliss by controlling the mind by completing with our root thought patterns, which give birth to the mind. By changing the servants, we can’t change the leader. But by changing the leader we can change the servants. The mind is the leader or the master who is making decisions and leading the senses. So all we need to do is work on completing with the mind, not the senses.

Kṛṣṇa says, ‘One who has conquered the mind achieves the Paramātman (divine Self), jitātmanaḥ praśāntasya paramātmā samāhitaḥ (6.7).’ We don’t need to achieve bliss. It is always there within us. If it has to be achieved, there is every possibility it can be lost. If it can be lost, what is the guarantee it will be there forever? Anything, if it has to be specially achieved, is not worth achieving. But if it is our very nature, then it becomes easy. Kṛṣṇa says that all we need to do is conquer our mind. We don’t need to achieve anything. The fountain of bliss is continuously happening in us. Our very life energy is bliss.

Unless we have the bliss energy in us, we cannot inhale and exhale. But we are stopping the bliss fountain again and again. All we need to do is stop the stopping process. That’s all. We don’t even need to create anything or achieve anything. Kṛṣṇa says that we just have to conquer the mind because the Self has been already achieved and we are with it. All we need is completion with our Self. Here is a small story to explain how happiness and sorrow are in no way related to the outer world but to the inner world. An old man went to a nearby city for some work.

When he was coming back to his village, from a distance he suddenly noticed that his house was on fire. He started shouting, screaming and rolling on the ground and weeping. His son came to him and said, ‘Dad, don’t worry. Don’t you remember, we sold that house just yesterday?’ Immediately, the old man sat up and wiped his tears. The sorrow just disappeared. In ten minutes, his other son came to him and said, ‘Dad, yes, we have sold it, but we are yet to get the money.’ Again the man started rolling on the ground and weeping, ‘Oh, I don’t know what I will do now. I don’t know how to save myself.’

Some ten minutes later, his wife came on the scene and said, ‘Don’t worry, just this morning I saw that the money was deposited in our bank account.’ Again the man got up and wiped his tears and became perfectly normal! If you notice, it is the same situation and the same person. But when he thinks the house is his, he is suffering, and when he thinks it is not his, he is liberated. So what gives us suffering? It is just this single thing: thinking that something is ‘mine’. The habit of thinking, ‘mine’, ‘mine’. In the same way, there are people who can’t enjoy something unless it is theirs.

One day I was going for a walk on the beach. One of our devotees started saying, ‘Swamiji, I think we should have a cottage here. It would be very nice. We can come out and enjoy the breeze.’ I asked him, ‘Are we not enjoying ourselves now? Why do you need a cottage here to enjoy? Just enjoy yourself now!’ But the mind never enjoys unless we are sure it is ours. Unless we possess something, we don’t enjoy it. By the time we own the cottage we start worrying, ‘I think I should have this kind of furniture, that type of arrangement.’ Or we have already started thinking about another cottage in some other place.

Ramaṇa Mahaṛṣi was a great devotee of Arunachala, the sacred hillock in Tiruvannamalai, Śiva’s own form, my birthplace. Someone who visited Him for the first time said, ‘Master, what a beautiful place this is! The Arunachala Dhyāna Yogaḥ Look In, Be Complete Before Any Conclusion 443 hill is so beautiful!’ Ramaṇa Mahaṛṣi said, ‘Just be here for three days, all these ideas will disappear!’ In three days, we take things for granted. Something will be beautiful only for three days. The person who enjoys only by possessing will never enjoy. The person who enjoys will not bother about possessing. It is just our mind. Sometimes, the mind will not allow us to enjoy something unless we know for sure that it is ours.

And at other times when we know it is ours it creates suffering. Suffering or joy is created only by that one link, the mind. There is no other difference between an enlightened person and us other than this mind, which continuously thinks, ‘What is in it for me? In what way am I connected?’ We always complain about the senses. No, we are corrupting them. Don’t put the responsibility on the senses. Just look into your life. It might be late at night, even two a.m., but we will still watch our baseball or cricket game on television. Our eyes are begging for some rest, but we continue to watch the game.

We abuse our eyes, our senses because we want to enjoy ourselves. Please listen, it is this pattern: ‘What is there for me?’ This ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’ is where we start abusing the senses. All we need to do is control the mind, not the senses. Understand, our thoughts create our senses. Don’t think we are living with what we have. We create what we want to have. Our thoughts are so powerful that they can just change the whole body. For example, just think of one thought that creates disturbance inside you. Or think of a person who took money from you and has not returned it. Immediately, we experience the change happening in our system.

Our blood boils, our blood pressure rises, our heart rate and pulse rate rise. A single thought can change the whole body chemistry. Our body is created only by our thoughts. In India there is a great science called sāmudrikā lakṣaṇa. Just by seeing the body-language—the face, the body, the way of standing, sitting and walking, the trained sage can tell everything about the person’s mind. This is because he knows the secret that the mind creates the body. The body is the outer expression of the mind. The mind is the inner experience of the body. If our mind changes, our body can be changed and our whole system can be changed.

A man whose mind is clearly reprogrammed according to spiritual ideas can completely change his senses. As of now, our mind is programmed for misery. It is looking outward. If we can reprogram our mind to look inward, towards bliss, our entire sense experience can be changed. All we need to do is to reprogram our mind to look-in and be complete. This is the gist of this whole chapter. Kṛṣṇa says one more important thing about heat and cold. Let me tell you very clearly: I lived in the Himalayas and I used to sleep on the snow with this same cotton dress. It may be very difficult to believe but it is the truth.

All we need to do is stop resisting. Just try this experiment: the moment you feel the cool breeze, don’t create the idea, ‘It is cold, I may catch a cold, I may have wheezing or sinus problem.’ Just don’t create such words. The words you give to yourself can be nectar or poison. The words you constantly repeat to yourself, have to be enriching you, exciting you and enlightening you. The words you give to you are āhara (food), what you consume to create life in you. The words you give to yourself are more important than the words you give to others. Because the flow of your life–the level of contentment that you feel in your life and the experience of fulfillment that you feel in your life, everything depends on the words that you have given to you.

Whenever we repeat something, we create that quality in us. Hereisasimpleexperimentyoucando:Closeyoureyesandrepeatten times: ‘Śānti, Śānti, Śānti,’ you will have peace inside (Śānti means peace in Saṃskrit). Just by repeating the word ‘Śānti’, the quality of peace will start happening in you. In the same way, if you repeat the names of diseases, you will start creating those diseases in you. Whatever we think, we express. We need to do only one thing: Work Dhyāna Yogaḥ Look In, Be Complete Before Any Conclusion 445 to bring completion to the mind. Do completion with your thought patterns. Just liberate the mind with completion. Then our whole system will be purified. Our senses will be reconstructed.

Kṛṣṇa gives us a beautiful technique to work on the mind. He says one more important truth, ‘Honor and dishonor will be the same—māna-apamānayoḥ.’ This is very difficult to believe. Cold and heat or hot and sweet can be the same. We can even accept that. But honor and dishonor, how can the two be the same? A single word thrown at us is enough to anger us and hurt our honor. Please listen! A thought pattern is a pre-defined way of responding to any situation based on a powerful past experience like failure, rejection, being punished, being subjected to abuse or witnessing the death of a loved one. During such moments of crisis, you create an idea about yourself and life—like ‘I am weak’ or ‘I am a failure’ or ‘Nobody loves me’ or ‘Life is dangerous, so I have to be very careful.’

Almost all root thought patterns are negative, even the ones which may lead to success in your life, because they are born out of your feeling of powerlessness. You have many thought patterns, but a root thought pattern is one of the few defining thought patterns that are continuously running your life without your knowledge! Align Your Images and Go Beyond Duality Someone asked me, ‘Swamiji, why do we bother so much about others’ opinions?’ We bother about others’ opinions because we don’t have an opinion about ourselves. We know about ourselves only through others’ words and their opinions. Our identity is built based on others’ opinions. We understand and identify ourselves through others.

If everybody says, ‘You are beautiful,’ we get that certificate. If everybody says, ‘You are intelligent,’ we get that certificate. We collect all these certificates and we build our personality with them. Even the conflicts among your identities are nothing but the result of your root thought patterns. If you have a certain idea about yourself inside, but you project a different personality outside, that is inauthenticity. If you look deep, all your problems arise from conflicts among your dentities. When any of your dimensions is out of alignment with the others, it causes disease, suffering and incompletion in your life. In the Inner Awakening Program, the first session is about the understanding of root thought patterns.

It is about why we get depressed, why we are in conflict, why we repeatedly fall into a powerless state. It is because our energy source is others’ certificates. We don’t have any self-respect and self-completion. We constantly live in self-doubt, self-hatred and self-denial. If others’ opinions about us are good, we think we are great. If others’ opinions about us are not good, we immediately lose self-completion and fall into self-denial. If our idea about ourselves is ‘nobody loves me’, then we project the outer personality of ‘I am very loving person’ or ‘I am very friendly person.’ This is inauthenticity. But our root pattern is—we don’t even love ourselves.

That is why there is so much of self-hatred. We don’t have any self-respect, only self-hatred, self-denial. That is the reason for the wars within and around us. Living is a power. If we want to live, we must learn how to stand on our own two feet, learn how to be complete with ourselves, how to raise ourself by ourself without giving up on us and others. This is the science of completion that is taught and transmitted experientially in the Inner Awakening program. As of now, our source of energy is others’ opinions or others’ image about us. If somebody tells us, ‘You are really great,’ we may project an outer image of acting humble and try our best to say, ‘No, no, I am not,’ but what happens inside us?

Our life image, the expectation from others’ and life says, ‘Please tell me a little more!’ And our inner image may feel, ‘I am a failure’ or ‘I am not good enough.’ Outside we feel shy but inside our mind we feel powerless, and that powerlessness makes us want them to go on praising us to fill our incompletion within. Please understand, all these identities you carry are actually thought Dhyāna Yogaḥ Look In, Be Complete Before Any Conclusion 447 patterns that you carry about you. Even others’ image about you is an idea that you have created in them. So you are the creator of all your identities. Understand?

Now,whenoneidentityisfightingwithanotheridentity,howcanyour thinking be focused? All your energy is going to be used in reconciling your fighting identities. When all your identities or ‘images’ are in tune, all your thinking will be aligned in one direction. Your thinking becomes clear and sharp, like a laser beam. You will awaken the power of thinking. With authenticity, there is no more space for unconscious thinking and living, because you will always be aware of the causes and effects that are playing in your life. Winner of Senses is the Self-realized One Kṛṣṇa says, ‘A person whose mind is content because of spiritual knowledge, who has subdued his senses and to whom stone and gold are the same, and who is satisfied with what he has, is said to be established in Self-realization and is called an enlightened being’ jñāna-vijñāna tṛptātmā kūṭa-stho vijitendriyaḥ I yukta ity ucyate yogī sama-loṣṭrāśma-kāñcanaḥ II 6.8 First we should understand why Kṛṣṇa is speaking of all these qualities of a Master.

These qualities are techniques. If we practice them we will reach the same enlightened state. There are three things we need to understand here: First, experience comes out as expression. Second, the quality of experience and the quality of expression, are very closely associated with one another. And third, a very important thing, is that if you concentrate on the expression, you will reach the experience. Here, again and again, Kṛṣṇa speaks about how an enlightened person lives and the qualities that an enlightened person expresses, so that we can meditate on it. When we begin internalizing these ideas in our lives, we can reach the consciousness of an enlightened being.

When we contemplate upon these ideas, we start expressing them naturally and they sink into our being. Kṛṣṇa says repeatedly, ‘Vijitendriyaḥ’—one who has subdued and won his senses. This whole chapter is just about the senses, indriya. Kṛṣṇa gives us a beautiful technique to heal the problem. He gives us a method to complete with the root thought pattern and go beyond. All we have to do is understand the root thought patterns; understand where we are caught and where our incompletions lie. Beyond the ego or root patterns we have the ātman, the Self. Just the presence of the ātman or the light of the ātman radiates and makes our ego work.

The whole trouble is when we doubt, judge for ourselves and start thinking, ‘What is there for me? How am I going to gain or to lose from this?’ Here is where the root problem starts. If the ego and the intelligence are removed from the system, the self starts radiating its energy directly through the senses. That is why enlightened people have sharp senses. Their senses are not contaminated. Whether it is their vision or their listening, it will be sharp and deep because it is not corrupted by the root patterns. Only a person whose being is clear and complete will have pure senses. A man who continuously uses his senses abuses them.

He will not have energy or tejas in his senses. The first thing that happens to a man who has used and abused his senses is the loss of his sense of smell. Then you need to be immediately admitted into the ICU of spirituality. You need Inner Awakening immediately. When our mind is under our control and complete we develop equanimity. We look at everyone the same way. This really happens when we reach enlightenment. When we become enlightened there is nothing to be achieved. Our being will start respecting, loving and enriching everyone automatically. Here the word ‘equal’ is used, but the exact translation of the word ‘sama’ should be ‘unique’.

When we understand that everyone is unique, we respect him or her. Sometimes when we say we treat everyone equally, we start disrespecting everybody equally! We are not all the same. We are all unique. God is an artist not an engineer. That is why He painted each Dhyāna Yogaḥ Look In, Be Complete Before Any Conclusion 449 one of us so differently, so uniquely. If He was an engineer, He would have just ordered ten thousand pieces of Mr. India or one million pieces of Miss Universe so all of us would look the same. When we understand that each one of us is unique, we will start enriching every being.

Understand, even our enemy is necessary for our life. Just like our friends, our enemies also may be playing a role in our life. When we understand that each and every being is unique, we will see everybody with the same mind or in the same way. One more thing that Kṛṣṇa says here is about ‘the pious and the sinners, sādhṣv api ca pāpeṣu’. Be very clear, there is no such thing as sin, except calling human beings ‘sinners’. Kṛṣṇa rightly states that the enlightened being sees only Divine Consciousness in everyone and so can never label anyone as being pious or a sinner. Understand: God accepts each one of us as we are.

The society created the idea of sin and merit. Immediately, the next question will be, ‘Then can we do whatever we want?’ A man who understands this spiritual science will never disturb others. Our sin and merit should not be based on fear or greed. If it is just based on heaven or hell, I don’t think we can claim to be matured beings. Let discipline happen to you as an understanding out of the space of completion, a natural flowering. Let our morality not be based on fear and greed. That is why in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, there is a beautiful word ‘yama’, which means discipline. It also means death.

If we understand that our life is going to end in death, if our consciousness internalizes this truth, we start thinking and meditating upon death. We will automatically be disciplined and will completely restructure our whole thinking and our life. If we start thinking about yama (death), then yama (discipline) will happen in our life. In Saṃskṛit, for both discipline and death, we use the same word. Let our discipline happen only out of the complete cognition of death and not out of incomplete cognitions of fear or greed. Bring Integrity To Control The Senses