Prabhaker

I am not against money -- I am against money-mindedness! I am not against possessions, I am against possessiveness. And these are two totally different dimensions, diametrically opposite to each other. To be against money is stupid. Money is a beautiful means -- a means of exchange. Without money there cannot be an evolved culture, society or civilization. I can understand the need for money, an apartment, monetary independence but 'chick who looks like an angel' is beyond comprehension. Money is love of things, not of persons. The most comfortable love is of things because things are dead, you can possess them easily. You can possess a big house but you cannot possess even an ugly chick, in fact nobody can. The more money you have, the more things you can possess; and the more things you can possess, the more you can forget about persons. Then only 'chick who looks like an angel' will try to possess you ...but you can't start with wasting your time and money for so called love. You want money , contentment and love simultaneously, I think it's not practical.

I will tell you one of the deepest laws of life. You may not have thought about it at all. You have heard – the whole of science depends on it – that cause and effect is the base. You create the cause and the effect follows. Religion knows about a second law which is still deeper than this. But the second law which is deeper than this will look absurd if you don’t know it and don’t experiment with it. Religion says: Produce the effect and the cause follows. This is absolutely absurd in scientific terms. There is a situation in which you feel happy. A friend has come, a beloved has called. A situation is the cause – you feel happy. Happiness is the effect. The coming of the beloved is the cause. Religion says: Be happy and the beloved comes. Create the effect and the cause follows. Jesus says the same thing in different words: Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, then all else will follow. But the Kingdom of God is the end, the effect. Seek ye first the end – the end means the effect, the result – and the cause will follow. This is as it should be. I tell you, it is easier to create the effect because the effect depends totally upon you; the cause may not be so dependent on you.

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Concentration is like a torch, focused, and consciousness is like a lamp, unfocused. You can work mechanically like a robot , you can work with concentration, focused on work, not aware of anything else, forget whole world. When you work consciously , you become a witness , your body and mind works and you watch with awareness. Watching is meditation. What you watch is irrelevant.

It doesn't make any sense, what it has to do with kundalini energy ? People here ask practical questions, from their own experience of life. They are not here for trolling, fun and curiosity.

The mind is a chattering box. You cannot stop it. The very effort to stop it gives it more nourishment to go on. Millions of people, for centuries have been trying to stop it, and they have all failed, for the simple reason that the desire to stop it is also part of it. It is not beyond it. One side of the mind is desiring the other side of the mind to become silent. This is not possible. The only way few people have been able to stop it without making an effort to stop it, are the people who have disidentified themselves with the mind. There is not even a desire to stop it or to continue it, because all desires belong to it. One simply watches it. Let it chatter. You simply become a watcher. Let the traffic of thoughts move. There is nothing to be worried. It is going to harm nobody. These thoughts are only soap bubbles. Don’t take them seriously. Don’t become tense while watching them. Be relaxed. It is one of the secrets of inner life, that as your watcher becomes more and more strong, the thoughts become less and less. It is exactly in proportion. When there are hundred percent thoughts in the mind, you have zero watcher. When you have ten percent consciousness involved in watching, ten percent of your thoughts will disappear — because it is the same energy that creates thoughts, that creates the watcher. The mind can stop, but not by your effort but by your effortless witnessing. That is the whole meaning of meditation. Relax. Don’t force, and just watch. Let the mind do its things. It will take a little patience, but it has always happened. It is almost a scientific law, without exception, that if you can manage a little patience you will come to a point where the watcher is nourished and the mind becomes unnourished, and the thoughts start disappearing. When the whole energy of your consciousness moves into watching, you will find there is no mind at all. And to know a state of no-mind is the greatest experience in life a man is capable of. It is ecstasy. It is superconsciousness. It is self-realization. There is nothing higher than that.

No, don't be a masochist be playful about it, otherwise it will turn it into another ego trip; it will make you very serious. That's what has happened to thousands of so-called saints, moralists, puritans: they are just playing ego games, subtle ego games. Life as such has to be taken as a cosmic joke – and then suddenly you relax because there is nothing to be tense about. And in that very relaxation, something starts changing in you – a radical change, a transformation. Only when the mind recoils from a fact or reality, is there pain. You are recoiling from the facts of cowardice, fear, anger and sadness. Psychological pain is part and parcel of the process of escape and resistance. Pain is not inherent in any feeling, but arises only after the intent to reject it arises. The moment you decide to reject something, pain arises. It is not really sadness that gives you pain. It is the interpretation that sadness is wrong that gives you pain, and that becomes a psychological problem. Don't invite pain, a posture should be such that you can forget your body. The posture should be steady and should be very, very blissful, comfortable, and never try to achieve postures which are uncomfortable.

It is like this: You have a well in your house and I have another well in my house. Obviously, the two wells seem to be separate from each other. But the underground stream from which these two wells draw their supply of water is the same. And this underground stream, in its turn, is connected with the distant ocean. If you follow the course of the stream which is the source of your well's water, you will not only come across my well and all other wells, you will ultimately come upon the great ocean itself. In the same way, in the context of the kundalini the individual is there only at the beginning of the journey-as the journey comes to its end the individual too, comes to his end. Then there is only the all, the whole, the absolute, the one, or whatsoever you call it. So at the starting point of the journey you are separate and I am separate, but at the destination, the ultimate point, there is neither you nor I. We are just fragments or parts of that which is there at the journey's end. So when the kundalini manifests itself in you, it will seem at first to belong to you-the individual. It will be yours. Naturally, you will find yourself standing at the edge of your well. But as the kundalini will ascend and expand, you will by and by find that your well is connected with all other wells also. And the more the experience deepens the more and more your individual well will disappear, and in its place the ocean will come into being. And it is in the ultimate experiencing that you will be able to say that this belongs to all. It is one cosmic pool of energy.

Start living moment to moment totally and intensely, joyfully and playfully — and you will see that nothing goes out of control; that your intelligence becomes sharper; that you become younger; that your love becomes deeper. And when you go out into the world, wherever you go, spread life, playfulness, joy, as far away as possible — to every nook and corner of the earth. Do whatever you are doing -- walking on the street, running, taking a bath, eating, going to sleep, lying on the bed, relaxing -- and remain with the activity totally. With no past, no future, remain in the present. It will be difficult in the beginning -- very difficult and very arduous -- but by and by you will get the feel of it and then a new door will open, a new realm. If you want to live a more fulfilled life, first you will want to know your potential, who you really are.Meditation is the route to that knowing. It is the methodology of the science of awareness. All the methods are basically different ways of witnessing. First, watch your actions of the body. Second, watch your actions of the mind: thoughts, imaginations. Third, watch your actions of the heart: feelings, love, hate, moods, sadness, happiness. And if you can succeed in watching all these three, and as your witnessing grows deeper and deeper, a moment comes that there is only witnessing but nothing to witness. The mind is empty, the heart is empty, the body is relaxed. In that moment happens something like a quantum leap.

Meditation is not a technique, technique may help in growing to a state of meditation, but meditation is an attitude. so whatever you do can become meditative. Do whatever you are doing -- walking on the street, running, taking a bath, eating, going to sleep, lying on the bed, relaxing -- and remain with the activity totally. With no past, no future, remain in the present. It will be difficult in the beginning -- very difficult and very arduous -- but by and by you will get the feel of it and then a new door will open, a new realm. Live in the present. Live in the meditative quality of the present is more important than technique.

Chasing happiness / fulfilment in external objects is pointless & attachment is the root of all suffering, but it not your experience, don't believe it unless it becomes your own experience. First live consciously, so that you can learn from life. Buddha's experience is not going to help you. Buddha cannot laugh, cannot dance, cannot sing, cannot love. Now what kind of life will it be? Hollow! Buddha had chosen: he had chosen to escape from the world, he had chosen to leave his wife and child and old father, he had chosen to run away instead of encountering the world and facing the reality. It was a clear-cut choice against the world, against the material, in favor of the spiritual. A man of totality has nothing to choose. His life is a life of choicelessness. Nothing to choose, nothing to discard; they are two sides of the same coin. If you choose something, you will have to discard something. If you have a little inteligence, sooner or later the question is bound to arise: What is the point of it all? Why? It is impossible to avoid the question for long. And if you are very intelligent, it is always there, persistently there, hammering on your heart for the answer: Give me the answer! – Why? Only a very mediocre mind can go on being happy with it.

@Kevin Dunlop @Emerald Wilkins @Infinite Intuition is the highest rung of the ladder, the ladder of consciousness. It can be divided into three divisions: the lowest and the first is instinct; the second, the middle one, is intellect; and the third, the highest one, is intuition. Instinct is the world of the animals -- everything is instinct. Even if sometimes you see indications of other things, it is your projection. For example, you can see love in animals -- the mother looking after her kids very lovingly, caringly -- and you can think that it is not just instinct, it is something higher, not just biological. But it is not higher, it is simply biological. The mother is doing it like a robot in the hands of nature. The second rung, intellect, gives you something which is higher than biology, chemistry, the animal nature. Intellect is also inborn, just as intuition is, just as instinct is. There is no way to increase your intelligence; all that can be done is to make your whole potential actual, which will look as if your intelligence has grown. When your intelligence becomes a little powerful it starts interfering with your instinct. A competition, a struggle for power starts. The intellect tries to dominate, and because it has logic on its side -- reason, argument, a thousand and one proofs -- it can manage, as far as your conscious mind is concerned, to convince you that the instinct is something evil. ... but If you split your instinct completely from satisfaction, it can become so powerful -- almost like a drug -- that it can intoxicate you, it can make you hallucinate. The monks and nuns have been more in the power of the instinct. Once your unconscious is completely free of repression, your instinct has a different quality to it. When there is nothing repressed in the unconscious your whole energy is available for the higher. Slowly the energy goes on hitting and makes its way to the center of the superconsciousness. You reach the center a new faculty starts functioning in you which is intuition. Intuition can give you answers for ultimate questions -- not verbally but existentially. You need not ask: "What is truth?" Instinct won't hear, it is deaf. Intellect will hear but it can only philosophize; it is blind, it can't see. Intuition is a seer, it has eyes. It sees the truth -- there is no question of thinking about it. Intuition functions in a quantum leap. It has no methodological procedure, it simply sees things. It has eyes to see. It sees things which you have never even thought of as things -- for example, love. You have never thought of it as a thing. But a man of intuition can see whether there is love in you or not, whether there is trust in you or not, whether there is doubt in you or not. He can see them as if these are things. Love is not a thing, truth is not a thing, trust is not a thing, but they are realities -- much more real than your things. But they are realities only for intuition, they are existential. An unclean unconscious is hindering you. Clean it; Then the energy goes on rising and opens the doors of intuition. Then you can see things which are not visible to your physical eyes, things which are not even things.

First learn how to be alone. Meditation is a way of being alone. If you can be happy when you are alone, you have learned the secret of being happy. Now you can be happy together. If you are happy, then you have something to share, to give. And when you give you get; it is not the other way. Then a need arises to love somebody. Ordinarily the need is to be loved by somebody. It is a wrong need. It is a childish need; you are not mature. It is a child’s attitude. Love first has to happen in the deepest core of your being. It is the quality of being alone, happily alone, joyously alone. It is the quality of being a no-mind, of being silent. Love relates, certainly, but never becomes a relationship. Love is a moment-to-moment process. Remember it. Love is a state of your being, not a relationship. There are loving people and there are unloving people. Unloving people pretend to be loving through the relationship. Loving people need not have any relationship – love is enough. Be a loving person rather than in a love relationship – because relationships happen one day and disappear another day.

The mind is always searching for novelty, for something new. You can feel effects in 3 months, what more do you want ? If you can sit, not doing anything, this is the ultimate in meditations. There is no need for any other thing. If that is possible just sit, do nothing – everything settles by itself, everything simply flows by itself. You are not needed to do anything. But the problem is: can you sit doing nothing?

Buddha said 'APPO DEEPO BHAVA' -- 'Be a light unto yourself. Let everybody learn from his mistakes. Every person is unique, there can't be any ready made path. There is no definite direction that one can follow. It is as if you are lost in a forest. What do you do? You have no map and there is no way leading anywhere -- trees and trees and trees all around, and you are lost. What do you do? You start walking, searching, seeking. By your very walk, by your very search, a path is created. Life is wild, and it is good that it is wild. It is not so cheap, to reach to the ultimate realization of truth. You will have to create the path by walking yourself; the path is not ready-made, lying there and waiting for you.

@YoungSeeker It is a very strange situation every intelligent man has to face: he is rooted in the earth and he wants wings to fly in the sky. He cannot be uprooted because the earth is his nourishment, his food. And he cannot stop dreaming of wings, because that is his spirit, that is his very soul, that is what makes him a human being. -OSHO (It is one of the 10 top books loved by Osho) "Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight--how to get from shore to food and back again," writes author Richard Bach in this allegory about a unique bird named Jonathan Livingston Seagull. "For most gulls it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight." Flight is indeed the metaphor that makes the story soar. Ultimately this is a fable about the importance of seeking a higher purpose in life, even if your flock, tribe, or neighborhood finds your ambition threatening. (At one point our beloved gull is even banished from his flock.) By not compromising his higher vision, Jonathan gets the ultimate payoff: transcendence. Ultimately, he learns the meaning of love and kindness.

@Rashid When we watch thought without judging it with awareness, not even asking it to move. we get rid of it. In this way we can discard all the thoughts which are borrowed. Then you can create your own thought, it has power of its own.

Every person is unique, you have to find your own routine. A meditator should live moment to moment spontaneously, not according to some stiff routine, out of his awareness. You can learn meditation for twenty minutes or forty minutes – learning is one thing – but then you have to carry whatever you have learned day in, day out. You will have to work, earn, do your job and a thousand and one things. Just remain alert whether meditation it is still there inside or it has disappeared. Live meditatively, completely relaxed but alert, aware.

The moment love becomes a relationship, it becomes a bondage, because there are expectations and there are demands and there are frustrations, and an effort from both sides to dominate. It becomes a struggle for power. There is no relationship really, it is just mutual exploitation. As the relationship settles, love disappears. Once the relationship is fixed, instead of love, something else takes place: possessiveness. They still go on calling it love, but you cannot deceive existence. Don't leave your partner, leave possessiveness. Stand aloof as the pillars of a temple stand aloof, but support the same roof. Don’t destroy the individuality of the other, enhance it if you can; otherwise, at least leave it as it is, uninterfered with. Freedom is not to be destroyed in the name of love. Freedom is a far higher value than your so-called love.

All your thoughts, in the first place, are not yours. You have gathered them like dust particles. They are moving in you and out of you. From one head they enter another, and they go on. They have their own life. A thought is a thing; it has its own existence. When a person dies, all his mad thoughts are released immediately and they start finding shelter somewhere or other. Immediately those who are around they enter. They are like germs: they have their own life. Even when you are alive, you go on dispersing your thoughts all around you. When you talk, then, of course, you throw your thoughts into others. But when you are silent, then also you are throwing thoughts all around. They are not yours, the first thing. A man of positive reasoning will discard all thoughts that are not his own. Each thought has its own life. It moves. And it has much power, and you are so unaware, so you are moved by thoughts. Your whole life consists of such accidents. You meet people, and your whole life pattern changes. Something enters in you. Then you become possessed, and you forget where you were going. You change your direction; you follow this thought.

..but we can't compare it with masturbation. If you are alert, sex will be impossible. If a man is alert while making love, the more he is alert, the more it will be difficult. He will not be able to get an erection. The same energy will move into alertness. Tantra has used this. It has tried in many ways. A beautiful naked woman will be there just as an object for meditation, and the seeker, the meditator, will sit before the nude woman meditating on her body, her form, her proportions, just waiting for the first sensation in his sex center. The moment the sensation is there, be will close his eyes. He will forget the woman. He will close his eyes, and he will become alert of the sensation. Then sex energy is being transformed into alertness. He is allowed to meditate on the nude woman only up to the point when the sensation is felt. When he has to close his eyes and move to his own sensation and become alert there , the same as is done in sneezing. And why does this flash happen? Because mind is not there. The basic thing is that if the mind is not there and you are alert.

what will you do in the remaining time? Whatever you will gain in twenty minutes…what are you going to do in the remaining twenty-three hours and forty minutes? – something anti-meditative. Naturally your twenty minutes will be defeated. The enemies are too big, and you are giving too much juice and energy to the enemies and just twenty minutes for meditation. You can learn meditation for twenty minutes or forty minutes – learning is one thing – but then you have to carry whatever you have learned day in, day out. Meditation has to become just like your heartbeat. You cannot say, “Is it enough, to breathe for twenty minutes every day?” Twenty minutes time is not meditation, that time is only to refresh yourself – and then again you will have to work, earn, do your job and a thousand and one things. Just remain alert whether it is still there inside or it has disappeared. This continuity then becomes a garland of twenty-four hours. Only then, will you be able to experience divine – not before it.

Man had his first realization of samadhi in the experience of sex. But sex is a costly affair, a very costly affair indeed. And it does not last for more than a moment; after a momentary climax, we return again to our original position. For a second, we reach towards a different plane of existence; for a second, we climb towards a peak of immense satisfaction. The momentum is towards the pinnacle, but we have hardly taken a step when we fall back to first base. A wave aspires to reach the sky, but it has hardly risen noticeably when it already starts to fall. We are the same. It is for that ecstasy, for that joy, for that realization, that we accumulate energy from time to time and again start the ascent. We almost touch that subtler plane, that higher realm, but again we fall back to our original position, minus a considerable amount of power and energy. So long as man’s mind remains immersed in this river of sex he will repeatedly rise and fall again.

You can go into meditation just by sitting, but then be just sitting; do not do anything else. If you can be just sitting, it becomes meditation. Be completely in the sitting; but it is difficult. You can sit very easily when you are doing something else but the moment you are just sitting and doing nothing, it becomes a problem. Every fiber of the body begins to move inside; every vein, every muscle, begins to move. You will begin to feel a subtle trembling; you will be aware of many points in the body of which you have never been aware before. And the more you try to just sit, the more movement you will feel inside you. If you begin with strong determination sitting, you will feel much disturbance inside. The more you try to just sit, the more disturbance will be felt; you will become aware only of your insane mind and nothing else. It will create depression, you will feel frustrated. You will not feel blissful; rather, you will begin to feel that you are insane. And sometimes you may really go insane. If you make a sincere effort to 'just sit,' you may really go insane. Only because people do not really try sincerely does insanity not happen more often. You may not be ready to be aware of all the insanity that is inside you; you must be allowed to get to know certain things gradually. Knowledge is not always good; it must unfold itself slowly as your capacity to absorb it grows.

@RossE Enlightenment (touched by the truth of existence) is the ultimate truth—the seeker disappears but the truth is found. From enlightenment there is no possibility of falling back, because you are no longer there to fall back. As long as you are, there is a possibility. Only your absence is the guarantee that you cannot fall back. if you have a little experience of the no-mind is the transition period, from human to divine. But one can fall back, because it is so new and so fragile and your past is so old and so strong—it can pull you back; it is still there. Awakening is getting very close to your center. And as you get closer to the center, falling back becomes more and more difficult because your new experience is gathering power, strength, experience, and the old is losing. But the old is still there; it has not disappeared. Ordinarily people don’t fall from awakening, but the possibility remains: one can fall. From enlightenment, falling is simply impossible. You are gone forever; not even a shadow or a trace of you is left behind.