DO NOT ANALYSE, JUST ENJOY THE SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES
At the beginning of the relationship between a chela and the true guru, certain glimpses are received of how much one is capable of, how far one can go beyond the limitations one is placed in. With these glimpses, there is always a dawning of light, and that light is the hope that shines eternally in the human chest. So, when a person develops this longing and feels at times a total mergence with any object – not necessarily a guru – if one just lets go, one will experience far greater bliss and a far greater one-ness, although to say a far greater one-ness is a contradiction of terms.
We contradict these terms simply because an analysis is taking place here. We are analysing the feeling that one has experienced. Mental analysis of the feeling that one has experienced is always a post-mortem, and such post-mortems can become very, very limiting. Therefore, the next time the feeling wells up again, you are reminded of the post-mortem more than of the experience. If you have enjoyed a certain dish of strawberries and ice cream, fine, you love strawberries and ice cream. When that is served to you as dessert, your mind will immediately associate it with the previous experience of the taste of strawberries and ice cream. In that case, your very experience of the moment of eating the strawberry and ice cream would be limiting, because you are comparing an experience that wells from deep within with the thought processes of your own mind.
If we could live a life where every moment seems new, and it is the first time you are seeing that bowl of strawberries and ice cream, how much enjoyment there would be, because it would be devoid of all association of ideas. The first dish of strawberries you had might have been very sweet. The second lot of strawberries might not be so sweet. So a conflict will arise, and that conflict will hold you back from fully appreciating the value of strawberries. Then you will say that “Oh, strawberries are sometimes sweet and sometimes sour”. If you had not known the sweet strawberries, you would enjoy the sour strawberries now, because you would think that it is the inherent nature of that strawberry to have that bit of sourness in it. There are people who enjoy sourness more than sweetness. It is just a matter of taste!
Likewise, when it comes to spiritual experiences, one should simply enjoy them. Enjoy them and do not analyse them later. By analysing, to repeat, we are limiting them. Under these limitations, expectations are bred, so the next time you have a similar experience, you will expect it to be of equal stature or even greater, and, with his inherent greed, man will want more. Then you feel disappointed, then you feel cut off, then you feel that why can this not be a continuing, permanent experience?
AS SOON AS THE MIND STARTS ANALYISING THE EXPERIENCE, THE VALUE OF THE EXPERIENCE IS LOST
As we have said so many times before, the mind comes between reality and your real self. What has recognised the experience? Has the experience experienced itself? Or has the mind experienced it? That is the question. For any experience to be translated through the mind, you would not get the full impact of the experience, because it is being filtered through the mind, and the mind is not pure or clean enough to give it, or put it through, the total impact of the light that is supposed to shine through it. And this is, of course, the limitation.
When a person experiences something for its own sake, there is no experiencer. There is only the experience. And who enjoys the experience? The experience enjoys itself. This is very difficult to understand with the mind. But it could be very well understood if one has experienced it.
So, to repeat, the limiting factor is the mind, because it tries to analyse. As soon as it starts analysing the experience, most of the value of the experience is lost. It is lost because the mind refuses to surrender to the experience. The mind is nothing but one’s ego self. The totality of one’s mind is the totality of all the impressions gained through various lifetimes. That is the mind, and the mind is the personality of the person, and the personality of the person is his or her ego self.
So here you find the ego self, with the analysis cropping up, forever associating itself with other experiences, forever whirling around within itself. The mind is capable of very few limited things. The one thing it is capable of is whirling thoughts. It just whirls and whirls and whirls.
Everyone here has experienced this: a thought arises in the morning and keeps circling in the mind all day long. What does the mind achieve through this? Nothing at all. It is as though the mind is caught in a whirlpool, and so it continues to spin.
WITHOUT FAIL, THE MIND SUCCEEDS IN ASSOCIATING IDEAS ALL THE TIME
The other thing the mind is capable of doing is the association of ideas, and you will be surprised how it runs away with you, so that you will start thinking of one object and end up somewhere far away. You will start thinking of an apple. From the apple, you start thinking of the colour, then that colour, the redness of the apple, will start making you think of the red dress you bought, and then that red dress you bought will start making you think of the shop assistant who served you. She was nasty. And then that nastiness would be associated with the hurried kiss your husband gave you, and he just ran off to his bus, and then from there you will start thinking of buses. “Why must I travel by bus? My husband should buy me a car.” And once you start thinking of the car, you start thinking, “Now, what kind of car? Look, a Dodge is no good because Mrs Jones next door has a Cadillac.” You see how the mind works? From the apple, you have reached a Cadillac. And that is what the mind succeeds in doing all the time, without fail: wasting time.
USING THE OUTER TO REACH THE INNER
That is what the mind does. So you can see how limited man’s mind is. Man’s mind, or the ego self of man, keeps one away from one’s reality. When one has this experience of being drawn to an object, say to a guru in this case, so deeply drawn, you are not drawing yourself out of yourself, but you are drawing yourself deeper within yourself, by using the outer object. It is like a child who learns addition and has the little addition thing with the marbles on it. What do they call that? Abacus. So it uses an outer object to count, but the counting goes within himself. The abacus is only the outer object. Likewise, when you feel so closely drawn to the object of one’s adoration or love, or whatever the case might be, one is in reality going deep within one’s self, because you can only express that which is within you. You cannot express any more and neither any less. So the love a man feels for his wife, or the love the wife feels for the husband, is just an expression of how much there is within that person himself, and that person uses the wife or the husband as the object to express that which is within oneself.
This applies not only to love but also to hate, and to every positive or negative emotion one has. There, too, one is limited by the mind. There are moments when the husband could feel so tender towards his wife, and yet a thought crops up in the midst of this beautiful tenderness, a thought about something at the office. How discordant it could become. It only shows that the tenderness had been on a very superficial level. There had been some tenderness, yes, but only on a superficial level, because if it were at a far deeper level, all the thoughts of the office, the work, the business, whatever case might be, or the car that has to go for service would never crop up. You would be totally lost in tenderness, not because of the wife, and not because of yourself, but because of tenderness itself. You are not there, the wife is not there, only tenderness remains, only that love remains.
IN THE SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE, FLOW WITH THE CURRENT
Likewise, in the spiritual experience, when the person is so drawn, he should just let go. Let things happen as they would, and stop trying to save oneself from the experience. You are actually missing a wonderful opportunity to experience your real self. Holding on, the horse is running so beautifully, what a lovely run, trotting down the road, and you are pulling the reins so abruptly. That must be avoided. That must be avoided at all costs. Go with the experience, flow with the tide. Flow with the current. And that current is very, very sweet. It is very sweet. And it multiplies. As it flows, greater and greater momentum is gained, until the river merges completely into the ocean.
It is like the example Ramakrishna gives of the salt doll that dives into the ocean and melts away. Where is the doll? It has merged into the waters of the ocean. That is the experience one has to have, and you can only gain that experience if you lose the ego, if you stop clinging to the little self, which seems so important. Why is the little self so important? Why, why? Because you have lived so many lives, and you have identified yourself not with reality but with unreality, and that which is unreal has become real to you. So nobody wants to be devoid of reality. Everybody wants to be real, but what they have taken to be real is unreal. And so the ego, which is just a mass, a concoction of various impressions that have been gained, has become so real to us that we cling to it.
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang UK 1978 – 07
