Prabhaker

Hindus believe in God and the soul. Jainas don't believe in God at all but only in the soul. And Buddhists don't believe in the soul or God either. But about reincarnation all three agree — even Buddhists agree, who don't believe in the soul. A very strange thing…then who reincarnates? It is easy to understand that there is a soul and when you die the body is left on the earth and the soul enters into another body, into another womb; it is a simple, logical, mathematical thing. But Buddha says there is no soul but only a continuum. It is like when you kindle a candle in the evening and in the morning when you are blowing it out a question can be asked of you: Are you blowing out the same light that you started in the evening? No, it is not the same light, and yet a continuity is there. In the night when you lit the candle… that flame is no more there, that flame is continuously disappearing; it is being replaced by another flame. The replacement is so quick that you can't see the gaps. Buddha says that just as the candle flame is not the same — it is changing constantly, although in another sense it is the same because it is the same continuum — exactly like that, there is no soul entity in you like a thing but one like a flame. It is continuously changing, it is a river. He has come closest to the truth; at least in his expression he is the most profound. This continuum comes to an end when you become a buddha.

In the night you dream. While dreaming you start believing in the dream, that it is true. Your senses are reporting the dream - your eyes are seeing it, your ears are hearing it, you may be touching it. Your senses are reporting to you; that?s why you fall under the illusion that it is real. Every dream is true while you dream. You cannot rely on the senses. In the dream they deceive you. If you take a drug, LSD or something, your senses start deceiving you; you start seeing things which are not there. Even without drugs we have illusions. You are passing through a dark street, and suddenly you get scared - a snake is there. You start running, and later on you come to know that there was no snake, just a rope was Lying there. But when you felt that there was a snake, there was a snake. Your eyes were reporting that the snake is there and you behaved accordingly-you escaped from the place. Senses cannot be believed. The inner experience is immediate, Once you are rooted in that inner experience then many things will start happening to you. It will not be possible to understand them right now. One is rooted in his center, in his inner being, one has come to feel it as a direct experience, then senses cannot deceive him. He is awakened.

Direct experience means a face- to-face encounter without any mediator, without any medium, without any agent. Your eyes can wrongly report to you; your ears can wrongly report. No one should be believed; no mediator should be believed, because you cannot rely on the mediator. If your eyes are ill, they will report differently; if your eyes are drugged, they will report differently; if your eyes are filled with memory, they will report differently. If you are in love, then you see something else. If you are not in love then you can never see that. An ordinary woman can become the most beautiful person in the world if you see through love. When your eyes are filled with love, then they report something else. And the same person can appear the ugliest if your eyes are filled with hate. They are not reliable. You hear through the ears. Ears are just instruments, they can function wrongly; they can hear something which has not been said; they can miss something which was being said. Senses cannot be reliable; senses are just mechanical devices. Direct experience can only be when there is no mediator, not even senses. Only in deep meditation you transcend senses. Then direct experience becomes possible.

These are just fragments of your mind; they have no value at all. And if you go on following them you will go crazy – because one part will pull you to the north, another part to the south. You will start falling apart. Remember, this is neurosis – you have to learn to watch all these voices. Don’t trust any. Only trust silence. Don’t trust any voice, because all voices are from the mind. Intuition has no voice except silence. He never says anything. There is nothing to say; there is no verbal communication. But that silence, that utter silence, gives you clarity, gives you light, makes you capable of moving rightly. Not that it gives any directions, not that it gives you any maps, not that it supplies you any guides – nothing of the sort. It simply gives you eyes to see. Ordinarily you are moving blind. A blind man needs guides, a blind man needs voices. A man who has eyes needs nothing.

Guarding can be very very useful—it can become a great meditation if you do it rightly, because all that is needed for the meditation is a requirement for being a good guard. For example you have to be alert, very alert, you have to be watchful about who is passing and what is happening all around…if anybody passes by you have to look without any purpose, without any judgement; you have just to see, and that's what meditation is! There is a hassidic parable…. A hassidic rabbi could not sleep one night, so in the middle of the night he came out of his house and walked on the road. There he met another man who was guarding a rich man's house, so they walked together, and the rabbi asked him, 'What kind of work do you do?' And he said, 'I am a watchman.' The watchman asked, 'What kind of work do you do?' And the rabbi laughed—he said, 'I am also a watchman but not as good as you! I fall asleep many times. My alertness is not perfect—I miss. There are gaps in my watchfulness.

A certain silence immediately comes to you if you stand quietly. Try it in the corner of your room: just in the corner stand silently, not doing anything— suddenly the energy also stands inside you. Sitting, you will feel many disturbances in the mind, because sitting is a posture of a thinker. Standing, the energy flows like a pillar and is distributed equally all over the body. Standing is beautiful. Try it because some of you will find it very, very beautiful. If you can stand for one hour, it is just wonderful. Just by standing and not doing anything, not moving, you will find that something settles within you, becomes silent. A centering happens, and you will feel yourself like a pillar of energy; the body disappears. Mahavir , last Jain Tirthankara (Teaching God) always meditated standing. Try any technique, but stick to it for a few days so that you can feel whether it is working or not.

If you watch, you will never come across any entity like mind. It is not a thing, it is just a process; it is not a thing, it is like a crowd. Individual thoughts exist, but they move so fast that you cannot see the gaps in between. The intervals cannot be seen because you are not very aware and alert, you need a deeper insight. When your eyes can look deep, you will suddenly see one thought, another thought, another thought -- but no mind. Thoughts together, millions of thoughts, give you the illusion as if mind exists. It is just like a crowd, millions of people standing in a crowd: is there anything like a crowd? Can you find the crowd other than the individuals standing there? But they are standing together, their togetherness gives you the feeling as if something like a crowd exists -- only individuals exist. Mind doesn't exist as an entity -- the is the first thing. Only thoughts exist. The second thing: the thoughts exist separate from you, they are not one with your nature, they come and go -- you remain, you persist. You are like the sky: it never comes, it never goes, it is always there. Clouds come and go, they are momentary phenomena, they are not eternal. Even if you try to cling to a thought, you cannot retain it for long; it has to go, it has its own birth and death. Thoughts are not yours, they don't belong to you. They come as visitors, guests, but they are not the host. If you get identified, you become the mind. If you get identified, you become the body.

We hear the term ‘awakening’ thrown about today like rag dolls. And as is the case with almost all spiritual terminology, there seems to be levels and levels of meaning for the word ‘awakening.’ It is important to first recognize that we are not necessarily using a common language. The word ‘awakening’ is being used to point at, from the plethora of spiritual teachers that exists today, it is evident that it is being used to denote many different things. And it is not just the spiritual teachers who use ‘awakening’ with different meanings; you can find references from the Enlightened Masters as well. There are times it is referring to ‘awakening’ as the final enlightenment. Some of us have lived a life centered in meditation from a young age and some of us have stumbled upon it much later in life perhaps after some major crisis that turned our world upside down. Many may describe this realization as an awakening and indeed it is. This awakening would demark the beginning of the journey. It would denote a tremendously important change of direction and priorities in one’s life. Having changed direction in life, we embark on searching out information, knowledge, understanding. Next we come to what seems to me to be more worthy of such a moniker as ‘awakening.’ This is when one realizes oneself to be out of the mind’s conditioning. Here one is being out of the mind and is able to see the mind clearly as an object of perception. It is not that the mind has disappeared, no, but one is not living within the mind. And it is here that witnessing really emerges. The mind is still present but one is not captive to its many grips. One is also able to see the horizon. One knows what needs to happen.

@Elton To study higher states of consciousness nobody is going to pay you. The lower states, where a person becomes insane, are paying. Now, it is the business aspect of psychology that is preventing it from studying higher states. At the level of superconscious mind, all thoughts, all feelings disappear; you start living in an absolute silence. But this silence is a little bit empty. It is beautiful; just to be silent, utterly silent, has a beauty of its own. But when you reach to the collective superconscious you become aware that silence can remain and yet it can become full; it need not be empty. It can become full of joy, it can become full of love, it can become full of creativity. But there is still one higher stage: the cosmic superconsciousness, where your individuality disappears like a dewdrop falling into the ocean. Suddenly you become the whole ocean. At the stage of cosmic superconsciousness you start experiencing the ultimate truth of life, the meaning of existence, your unity with the whole. Things are no longer outside you, you are no longer outside of things: all divisions have disappeared. In some strange way the sunrise is within you, and the stars are within you, and the flowers are within you. You have become spread over the whole cosmos.

Man can be understood as a seven-story building: three stories are underground, three stories are above ground. One story, the middle one, is half underground and half above ground. This fourth story is where we are. Sigmund Freud calls it conscious mind. When Freud started working with sick people, he became aware that there is something underneath the conscious mind. He called it the unconscious mind. Carl Gustav Jung worked even harder, went deeper into the psyche of man, and found another story underneath the unconscious. He called it the collective unconscious mind. But in the East, below the collective unconscious mind, we have discovered the last story -- the cosmic unconscious mind.The reason is clear...because the search in the East and in the West differed fundamentally. The Western psychologists were concerned with sick people, insane people; naturally, they have to go below the conscious mind to the unconscious. But if there was somebody who was even more insane, they had to go to the collective unconscious. But it is very rare to find a man who is so mad that he has reached the cosmic unconscious mind. If somebody goes that mad, he will be almost a rock. That's why they have not been able to discover the cosmic unconscious mind. But, in the East, the search was totally different. They started looking into the minds of meditators, not madmen. As they worked, they found that above the conscious mind there is a superconscious mind. And many religions have stopped there, thinking they have arrived -- it is so beautiful, so peaceful. But a few seekers continued to fly higher and higher, and found another story on top of the superconscious mind: the collective superconscious mind. Most of the seekers stopped there; the joy is too much, uncontainable. It is unbelievable that there can be anything more. But only a few have gone to the very end, to the highest peak -- and they have found the cosmic conscious mind. The cosmic conscious mind is called the state of enlightenment, the state of buddhahood.

If you are empty, your boundaries disappear because emptiness can have no boundaries. Emptiness can only be infinite. Emptiness cannot have any weight, emptiness cannot have any color, emptiness cannot have any name, emptiness cannot have any form. When you are empty, how will you divide yourself from others? – because you don’t have any color, you don’t have any name, you don’t have any form, you don’t have any boundaries. How are you going to make distinctions? When you are empty you are one with all. You have melted into existence, existence has merged with you.

That's not possible. Truth reveal itself, when we are not separate from the existence. When we become existence. Unless we become a Buddha, we can't understand a Buddha.

War is bad, hate is bad; they are the evils on the earth and they must go. Disease is bad, health is good; disease must go, but you must remember that a dead man never falls ill; a dead body can deteriorate but cannot be ill. So if you don’t understand, all your efforts may create a dead world. There will be no disease, no war, no hatred – but no life either. Jesus would not like that type of peace. That type of peace is useless; then this world, with war, would be better. But many have been endeavoring, and their attitude is just negative. They think, ”If war stops, everything will be okay.” It is not so easy. Another type of peace – a totally different dimension of peace – exists when you are vital, alive, but centered in your being: when self-knowledge has happened, when you have become enlightened, when the flame is lit and you are not in darkness. JESUS SAID: MEN POSSIBLY THINK THAT I HAVE COME TO THROW PEACE UPON THE WORLD, AND THEY DO NOT KNOW THAT I HAVE COME TO THROW DIVISIONS UPON THE EARTH – FIRE, SWORD, WAR.

We can't understand the ways of enlightened masters. For raising human consciousness even wars and killings are necessary sometimes. Like Buddha, Jesus has also contributed in raising consciousness of humanity.

Mystics always hide existential truths from persons who are not prepared to encounter it, as it will do more harm than good.

The inner world cannot be expressed literally, but symbolically -- only symbolically. Books like the Vedas, the Geeta, the Bible, the Upanishads -- they are not written by people who are asleep, they are not written as beautiful poetry or prose; they are written by people who know what truth is, who have awakened themselves to truth. Then whatsoever they write is almost like a map. You have to decipher it, you have to decode it, otherwise you will go on missing it. As we become more awakened, more we understand the hidden meaning.

When an fully enlightened master speaks, even if his language is ordinary, it is poetic, it has awe in it — the quality of putting your mind completely at a stop. Bible has awe in it. Otherwise unnecessary reading and collecting more and more knowledge is not good for a meditator.

In India , when we start reading bible, we can get money , clothes, food, medicine, education with a free Bible !

The poetry of The New Testament, the poetry of the whole Bible, is something not of this world. The poetry is tremendously simple, but it has some quality which ordinary poetry cannot have. It has awe; that is, the religious quality. What is awe? Facing some thing or some being, thinking stops. Your mind cannot cope with it. When you come across a Jesus or a Buddha the mind falls flat, it bogs down. Something is too much for it. You cannot think about anything, you are as if in a deep shock — and yet the shock is blissful. That is awe. The Bible has awe in it — the quality of putting your mind completely at a stop — but that you will have to reach directly. The missionary, the priest, the bishop, they destroy because they start interpreting. They put their minds in it and their minds are mediocre. It is as if you are looking at a tremendously beautiful thing from the mind of a very stupid man. Distorted. That is how it has been happening. Throw all the foolish commentaries away. Go direct. Jesus is so simple, you can have a direct contact.

Kundalini is just a technical term for your whole energy when it is in unity, in movement, in harmony, without any conflict; when it is cooperative, complementary and organic. So first of all, kundalini is not something unique. It is only human energy as such. But ordinarily only a part of it is functioning, a very minute part. Even that part is not functioning harmoniously; it is in conflict. That is the misery, the anguish. If your energy can function harmoniously then you feel bliss, but if it is in conflict – if it is antagonistic to itself – then you feel miserable. All misery means that your energy is in conflict, and all happiness, all bliss, means that your energy is in harmony. There are two distinct ways to awaken the Kundalini. The first is the one where all the danger lies. In this process, a powerful breathing technique (pranayama) is used to strike the Kundalini. The seat of kundalini, the place of its location, is hammered and moved by breathing, deep and fast breathing. The question "Who am I?" does the same thing; but it hammers the centers from another direction. Deep breathing strikes the center physiologically, and the question "Who am I?" does the same job mentally, psychologically. This question hammers the kundalini with mind energy and deep breathing hammers it with body energy. And if both the hammer strokes are strong enough... Ordinarily there are only two ways of hammering the center - one through breathing and the other through asking "Who am I?" The other approach is to treat the Kundalini as a super intelligent friend who always wants to help you. The Kundalini wants to do whatever it can to help you know it better. It is always awake and moving in your life already. This method uses the sexual energy that is in each of us. These methods are outside the cultural norms of society, and are easily mistaken as sexual indulgence. The difference is that sexual indulgence wastes energy and Tantric methods increase the energy. If you move into sex with awareness, it can turn into tantra. If you move into tantra with unawareness, it can fall and become ordinary sex. It has happened in India – because only India has tried it. All Tantra schools in India, sooner or later, were reduced to sex orgies. It is very difficult to keep aware…it is almost impossible to keep aware.

Life as we know it is not life but a long process of slow, gradual dying. Because we are familiar with this gradual dying and not with life, we are always busy trying to save ourselves form it. All our plans and activities are aimed at some sort of security and self-defense. And what are we doing? Those who look upon the body as their being are all still dead. Their real lives are yet to begin. They are in a dream, asleep, in a faint. Without waking from this dream, without waking from this delusion that the body is his being a man will never be able to know his own self, his essence, his mainstay, his life. The world is full of the dead, full of the living dead, and the majority of people die without ever having lived. They are worn out trying to defend themselves against death and they never come to know who is within, immortal, beyond death.

Just watch it - and when you watch you have to remember that while watching, don't judge. If you judge,watching is lost. While watching, don't evaluate it is a defense mechanism of ego or not.

Yes, it is certain that any action is going to bring certain reactions, but the law of karma is hoping for much more. Now, there are many things implied in this. First, What is good? Each society defines good according to itself. What is good to a Jew is not good to a Jaina; what is good to a Christian is not good to a Confucian. Not only that, what is good in one culture is bad in another culture. A law has to be universal. What you observe in life itself is something totally different from the law of karma. A man who is a well-known criminal may succeed and become the president, the prime minister; or vice versa. So in life this strange situation happens: bad people reach good positions, become respectable or honored, not only in their time but throughout history. It is full of their names. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadirshah, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler. Gautam Buddha was a prince, he renounced everything, became a beggar. Jesus was crucified. Socrates was poisoned. Will an unconscious man find them successful ? Every action is bound to have some consequences, but they will not be somewhere else, you will have them here and now. Most probably you will get them almost simultaneously. When you are kind to someone, don’t you feel a certain joy? A certain peace? A certain meaningfulness? Don’t you feel that you are contented with what you have done? There is a kind of deep satisfaction. Have you ever felt that contentment when you are angry, when you are boiling with anger, when you hurt somebody, when you are mad with rage? Have you ever felt a peace, a silence descending in you? No, it is impossible. You will certainly feel something, but it will be a sadness that you again acted like a fool, that again you have done the same stupid thing that you decided again and again not to do. You will feel a tremendous unworthiness in yourself. You will feel that you are not a man but a machine, because you don’t respond, you react. I find that, what you do consciously is good, what you do unconsciously is bad.

Nobody has there been ever who was exactly like you, and nobody is ever going to be there again who will be exactly like you. No single book can teach everyone. The person who follows others becomes false, he becomes pseudo, he becomes mechanical. He can be a great saint in the eyes of others, but deep down, he is simply unintelligent and nothing else. He may have a very respectable character but that is only the surface, it is not even skin-deep. Scratch him a little and you will be surprised that inside he is a totally different person, just the opposite of his outside. By following others you can cultivate a beautiful character, but you cannot have a beautiful consciousness, and unless you have a beautiful consciousness you can never be free. Be a light unto yourself. Do not follow others, do not imitate, because imitation, following, creates stupidity. You are born with a tremendous possibility of intelligence. You are born with a light within you. Listen to the still, small voice within, and that will guide you. But following somebody else, how are you going to become intelligent? You will not give any chance for your intelligence to explode. It needs a challenging life, an adventurous life, a life that knows how to risk and how to go into the unknown, for intelligence to arise.

Each mind is living in its own world, it creates the world. So if everything looks negative and everything looks destructive and everything looks inimical, against you, it is because you do not have the positive center in you... If you feel negativity all around you, it simply shows you are negative within. The world is just a mirror, and you are reflected in it. Be a monk, you will find similar problems, your mind will create similar world again.