Allergic to Spirituality

It is very important that the spiritual dimension of life is brought into everybody’s lives. Why many people have developed an allergy to spirituality is because somebody always told them, ‘spirituality means leaving everything and going to the mountains.’ Even if you want to go, there is not enough space for all of you there. You had better learn how to be spiritual in your office, in your home, on the streets, wherever you are. You had better learn that because spirituality is about your interiority, not what you do outside. Spirituality is an inner science to create a conductive inner atmosphere because the quality of your life is dependent on how you are within yourself. That quality this moment depends on how joyous, how peaceful you are. This dimension you have completely neglected. Unless you do something to the inner, you will not know what it is to be peaceful, to be joyous, you will not know how to go beyond the limitations of being just a physical body and mind.

See, your body is simply accumulations of what you have gathered from the Earth – when you leave you can’t take an atom of this body. So this body is not really yours. Your mind is not yours too. It is also just an accumulation – what you have gathered from the backgrounds in which you were brought up in life. So there is something else which needs to be looked at beyond these dimensions.Even if I erase all your memory, still you will be here. Yes? Your family will disappear, your status will disappear, your business will disappear, everything that you own in the world will disappear. But still you are here. So beyond all the things that you identify yourself with, still there is something called as you. That you is not subject to what you accumulate from outside. But unfortunately that you has been so much covered, so much crowded with other things that you never allowed yourself to look at that. You always thought that what you are identified with is much more important than who you really are. Now if your focus shifts, then the other dimension can start opening up for you.

The whole process of spiritual science, yoga in particular, is to somehow elevate you to an experience that is beyond the five sense organs. When you transcend the limited experience of what you know as yourself, your experience of life is naturally in a different dimension. Then you begin to experience that which is not physical, the spiritual, the Divinity of your true nature. If you are ready and willing to experience life in a deeper dimension, to be truly happy, I have methods. Then you can begin to experience the joy, the blissfulness of knowing who you really are.

True Happiness

First we need to know that the basis of our misery is that we have established ourselves in untruth. We are deeply identified with that which we are not. Somewhere along the way we have gotten identified with things around us. We have got identified with our body and mind. That is the source of suffering.

Whatever you have known right now, your experience is only limited to your five sense organs. Whatever you have known either of the world or yourself has come to you only by seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting. If these five senses go to sleep, you will neither know the world nor yourself. They feel everything only in comparison. So this is not a genuine experience.All yogic practices are fundamentally aimed at giving you an experience beyond the five sense perceptions. This is not in terms of physical reality, it is in a totally different dimension. That dimension, if you want to call it God, or if you want to call it my Self, it does not matter. Whatever your idea of God is, it is simply coming from the limited experience of who you are right now. It is not coming from any true experience. The only thing that you can experience is that which is within you. And that which is within you, you have never really looked at in real depth.

The whole experience of transcending your limitations must happen within you. If you want to transcend, only if you are truly willing, it can happen. Otherwise no power on earth or in heaven can move you.Spirituality is simply the process of dis-identifying with what we are not, to shed the layers of conditioning so that we know what we are NOT. When that is completed, we arrive at something that cannot be discounted. This discovery will be the recognition of divinity, and we will see that there is no reason for misery in the world.

The whole process of yoga is to make your interiority absolutely in your control. It is a possibility to move from a state of external enslavement to inner completeness, which is the state of unbounded ness. If your inner nature is unbounded, your life is also unbounded. You can either sit with your eyes closed or you can perform different action – both ways your life can be complete.When a man has reached this state within himself, where his actions are only to the extent required for outer life situations, then he is a complete person. If within you, your inner nature has attained fulfillment regardless of the external situation, we can say that you have become unbounded. This is a state of true happiness

Experiencing Life Fully

All teachings of self-knowledge will only deceive you. When you come to a living experience that, ‘this body is not me,’ then there is a different kind of wisdom in you. There is a different kind of understanding in you. When you intellectually understand, it leads only to deceptive states. When you experientially know, it is very different. Why you are saying, “It is not me,” is because you don’t want it to be you, isn’t it? A philosophy like that will just give you some semblance of balance in your life, but it does not liberate you from the deeper karma, because you are only trying to avoid it, and in that avoidance you find a little balance in day-to-day life. But slowly, if a person applies this philosophy, you will see, slowly they will become joyless. They will become reasonably balanced and stable, at the same time they will slowly become lifeless.

If you bring lifelessness into you, that itself is a very negative karma because you are just suppressing life. That is karma.

The most beautiful thing that has been said about this is when Krishna said: “Hesitation is the worst sin,” because with hesitation you kill life. Anything that suppresses life is the worst sin. Suppression does not mean, “Okay, now I want to eat, I do not eat.” This is not suppression. People always think, “If I don’t do what I want to do,” it is suppression. No! It is just that you are not allowing yourself to experience it totally. Whether hunger or food, if you sit here and experience hunger totally, it is wonderful, it is releasing; or if you experience food totally, it is releasing. But you neither experience hunger fully, nor food fully; this is karma. It is saying, “this is not me.” This ‘not me, not me’, the nethi process is a very different process. Denying what is happening within you is self-denial. If you deprive yourself of any experience, whether it is pain, suffering, joy or whatever it is, if you avoid it, that is big karma. If you go through it, it is not so much of a karma.

Today, in the name of civilization or whatever – etiquette or education – educated people are not able to experience any of their emotions fully. They cannot cry fully, they cannot laugh loudly. For everything, they have got etiquette. With this you will see, slowly they will become joyless. A deep sense of frustration will establish itself. You will see simple people who laugh and cry as it comes, they are so much more free. They have not accumulated heaps on them yet; but people with practiced etiquette accumulate heaps on their head. The very process of life is dissolution of karma. Every living moment of your life, if you live it totally, you dissolve enormous amounts of karma. Living totally does not mean just having fun. Anything and everything that comes, you just experience it fully, intensely.