RISING TO THE SUPERCONSCIOUS LEVEL, YOU BURN ALL THE SEEDS OF KARMA
In many organizations, spiritual practices deal solely with the mind. This is good, but then there is one danger. You might be shifting energies from one sector of the mind to another sector of the same mind. But have you dissipated them? You cannot annihilate them. You can throw them off. And yet, if you are still amidst this chaos, the law of cause and effect will be in force. But there is a way where you can go beyond cause and effect, and all these practices we do are widening our awareness; they are methods that would remove the cause and the impact and reach the state of causelessness. And when the cause is gone, the effect cannot be there. You see the great hope the human has.
I do not know how many humans we have here, but I assume there are some. Ninety-nine percent of people are ruled by the animal instincts from which they have just passed through. Children in Form 6 will always be influenced by the teachings found in Form 5. But this all has to be discarded, not discarded violently, for the more you try to discard, the more suppression occurs. Inhibitions take place, and they multiply forever.
Like many institutions in America, people say that you have to live through all this. You have created specific causes, and you are subjected to the effects thereof. This is very true on a relative level, but you can rise above that, and by rising above that to the superconscious level, you burn all the seeds of karma. All the seeds of karma can be burned up instantaneously. The law of cause and effect is also a law of opposites, and once one goes beyond the law of opposites, once one transcends the “Three Gunas” and then performs an action, that action is non-binding.
MAKE YOUR SUFFERING AN OFFERING TO YOURSELF BY ACCEPTING IT
So, the question is, what are we going to dwell on? Are we going to think of the chaos in the world all the time? Are we going to wallow in self-pity of the chaos within us? When thinking of turmoil, chaos, chaos, you bring unto yourself all the chaotic forces of the universe. You become a magnet of chaos, drawing to you all the chaotic filings, iron filings, and chaos in the world.
So “arise, awake, and stop until the goal is reached.” Vivekananda has said this. So, what is the solution? What is the solution to escape this whirlpool of chaos you are enmeshed in? Like the silkworm weaving, weaving, weaving, and getting entangled in the silk it has woven. You do not need to go through lifetimes upon lifetimes to reap what you have sown. You do not need to go through lifetimes to suffer the effects of the causes. Once you, through spiritual practices, find the secret of going beyond cause and effect, you are going beyond time and space, for cause and effect has validity only in time and space. When you, through spiritual practices, enter the realms of timelessness, then cause and effect vanish. As long as you are enmeshed in the chaos, cause and effect will be a reality, and you will have to suffer the consequences.
Why not make that suffering into an offering? For there lies the secret that you offer yourself. To what? To whom do you offer yourself? Forget the God. None of you know who God is. It is beyond all analysis. You can only talk about it. You do not know it, and how can you offer that to someone you do not know everything about?
So, let the offering be to yourself. Offer the suffering to yourself, meaning that you are accepting it. During this week, I said there is no suffering at this very moment. No one is suffering now. You are using the instances and incidences of the past, which are gone, and it is the memory you have of the pains and pleasures that give you pains and pleasures now. Otherwise, the projection of the past into the future, filled with expectations, makes you suffer. And yet, at this very moment, children of God, you are not suffering. You, children of Divinity, are suffering memories; memories make you suffer. So, in the stillness of meditation and spiritual practice, you are in the present, not in the past, and not in the past projecting itself into the future.
CHAOS IS SELF-CREATED BY YOUR CONSCIOUS MIND AND YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND
This can be done through developing awareness. What is awareness? You are aware, only very limitedly, because what you have activated is only the conscious level of the mind, which is only 5 percent of your mind. Twenty-five percent is the repository of all the samskaras, all the impressions you have gained, and 70 percent is the area of the superconscious level of the mind. Like the iceberg, nine-tenths of it is below the water, and you only see a little above it. That is where we dwell.
Through meditation and spiritual practices, you dive deeper within. You bypass the conditioning of the conscious mind; you bypass the memory box or the repository of the events of the entire universe since beginless time. You bypass that and reach an area where neither good nor bad exists. At the finest relative level, the superconscious level, which I have said before, the personal God, which is so clear and near the Absoluteness of existence, makes itself an instrument to reflect that energy without attributes. It reflects through the clarity of the superconscious level to overcome all the samskaras, impressions, causes, and effects that your conscious mind perceives and finds the world and yourself chaotic. You see chaos where chaos does not exist. There is no chaos—your interpretation, your conscious mind that is the chaos, and no one else.
So, this is self-created by your conscious and subconscious mind, by your conditioned mind, and this conditioning has been brought upon you by yourself. Until you were in the animal kingdom, you were totally in compliance with the laws of nature, and you flowed with the laws of nature; you flowed in a system conducive to your evolution. But when you became a man and started thinking, all the trouble began—the mind, the cunning animal, is where the problem started.
GOOD AND BAD ARE, BUT AN INTERPRETATION OF YOUR MIND
This trouble began because you began to think. You started discriminating. You started calling some things good and some evil – discrimination at a lower level. But then you do evolve where you could take that discrimination to its highest point, and when discrimination is taken to its highest point, all differentiations cease, and all becomes one. Nothing is apart from each other. Good and bad, which are determined by your little mind, then cease to exist because they are interpretations.
What is bad? That which is not conducive to you is bad. When you eat your meal and do not like its taste, you say this is bad. Meanwhile, it could be suitable for those who like that food. So, your discrimination is biased when you differentiate between good and bad, and that bias comes because of your inner patterning created by yourself. Created by yourself and made yourself conducive to the environment where the one-pointedness has been lost.
There is a lovely little parable from Ramakrishna. This little bird was perched on this boat in the middle of the sea and wanted to reach the seashore. So, it flew to the west and got tired and could not come to the shore. So, it flew back. Then it flew to the east, and the shore was so far away it got tired and came back and perched on the mast. Then to the south and the north, until it realized that: instead, let me stick to the ship, for the boat must reach the shore.
BEING THE OBSERVER, YOU FIND THAT YOU ARE NOT THE DOER
I have heard of chaotic meditation, too. I do not know what that means. Meditation cannot be disorganized. It is peaceful, where the mind reaches a state of tranquillity. Meditation does not mean you block off all your thoughts from your mind. You cannot do it. You cannot make your mind a vacuum. But you learn to observe the thoughts so that they do not take root and do not create further karma to which you are bound.
Being the observer, you find that you are not the doer. You are not the thinker, but you are becoming disinvolved in thinking. What is the world or this universe composed of? Nothing but thought. Reaching that stage, you find that thought has no reality because thought is forever changing based on never changing. The sky is still, but the clouds move. The clouds move. The clouds of your mind are forever changing and moving, but through spiritual practices, you do what you perceive as rain. You look up, and the sky is there. Non-changing. Eternal. Without beginning or end. Without any boundary. But our attention is more centered on the moving clouds, and we forget the stillness and the non-movement of the eternal sky, and that eternal sky is the Brahman that is within you, and that is the place one has to reach, and it is not difficult at all.
It is not difficult, for essentially, you are divine. Essentially, you are non-changing, yet all this change occurs constantly. Where is your attention? That is important. And how to train the attention upon the non-changing; that is what spiritual practices are all about. You accept the change. You acknowledge that which changes, and yet, becoming the observer of that which changes, you know that this is temporary. You are just passing by. The clouds just pass by.
YOU ARE JUST BUT PASSING BY, AND I TOO AM PASSING BY
This famous American author was very interested in the works of a Jewish rabbi who had written many philosophical works. He went to Israel, near the village where this rabbi lived. So, he thought, “Let me go and visit this rabbi.” So, he went there, and it is customary in Eastern countries and the Middle East that when you visit a holy man, you take an offering as a mark of respect. It does not need to be anything significant. Even just a petal of a flower. As an offering. Not being used to those customs and only having heard about it afterward, this American said, “I was just passing by, and I have no offering that I could have brought to you.” And then, while they were chatting, he observed the room. It was empty, and he asked the rabbi, “Why is your room so bare?” So, he said, “Just like you. You are passing by, and I, too, am passing by.”
EXPECTATION IS THE MOTHER OF DISAPPOINTMENT
Your mind, conscious mind, and subconscious mind, cluttered with all the patterning formed through so many lifetimes, are also passing by. Lose no courage. Lose no hope. For you are divine. Children of God. You are the fragrance of that eternal flower. You are the manifestation of the Manifestor, and as the scent fades away in the desert air, so will your little mind and your little self fade away but merge and remain pure as that beautiful flower. Do you see how beautiful it is?
But this requires one-pointedness. You have to persevere. Vivekananda has said that the spiritual paths are not for cowards. They are for heroes who are prepared to work upon themselves, and how do you work upon yourself? You work for others for the sake of work, work for the sake of work, and not expecting the fruits thereof. Because what clutters your mind more and more and leads you into a chaotic state is the expectation. As I told you before, expectation is the mother of disappointment. Work, work, work. Love, love, love. Analyze, analyze, analyze. And practice, practice, practice. Therein are all your yogas combined. Work, love, practice. Do you see how simple it is?
THE SECRET OF LIFE IS TO FIND THE BALANCE BETWEEN UNREALITY AND REALITY
I have said this to you before. You have a job. You are working for a boss. You are not thinking of your salary check every day of the week. You are doing work, and by doing your job well for the month, your salary check will be there at the end of the month. So, like that, you keep doing what you can and offer the rewards to That, and That does not take it. It gives it back to you tenfold. That is the secret of life. That is how to get away from the chaos. For chaos will forever exist, or this universe will collapse, and when this universe collapses, there is no God, for the relative must exist simultaneously with the Absolute.
Here are some thoughts I want to share with you. Try to work them out. The universe is unreal, but God is real—and God is the universe. Tell me tomorrow what you have worked out.
The universe is unreal. God is real. And God is the universe. So, you have life’s secret when you find the balance between unreality and reality. For them, everything is unreal, and everything is accurate.
So those maya-Vedantists that call all this an illusion, yes, it is an illusion. But from which viewpoint do you call it an illusion? Have you reached the Absolute from where all this seems an illusion? And if you have not reached the Absolute, you have no right to hypnotize your mind by calling all this an illusion. While you are in the relative, all this is real. When you reach the Absolute, you say, “Ahh, that was only a dream.” And yet, while you were in the dream, the dream was absolute. You cannot deny the reality of the dream because you were the dreamer. But then, when you pass the dream and wake up to the Light, you say, “That was a dream.”
LIGHT EXISTS IN DARKNESS, AND DARKNESS EXISTS IN LIGHT
If you sit in a dark room, you say, “It is all darkness, darkness, darkness.” But when you switch on the Light, where is the darkness? Yet the darkness exists within the Light. They are coexistent, but one superimposes itself upon the other. Light, we say, banishes darkness. It does not banish darkness. It only covers up the darkness. Where do you stand? That is the question. What perspectives do you have? That is the question. Where am I now? That is the question. Not who am I? That comes later. Where am I? Where do I start? I start from wherever I am. And yet, when you say, “I am,” it is so beautiful. “I am that I am.” And I am that I am, Yahweh, is all-pervading, for it is only That that exists and nothing else. And that which exists contains all the illusions and all the delusions and all the illumination at the same time. Light exists in darkness, and darkness exists in Light. In this relative existence, good exists in the bad, and evil exists in the good. There is only one way out. It is to transcend and go beyond reality. And yet enjoy existence, for life is joy. Life is bliss.
ACCEPT THE IDEA THAT ALL IS RIGHT, AND YOU WILL BE ALL RIGHT
So, we need to de-hypnotize ourselves. We take so many things for granted. We take pleasures for granted. We take pains for granted. We take everything for granted, and how qualified are we to take everything for granted? Instead, accept what there is instead of taking things for granted. And that does not mean that you are taking things for granted. With acceptance, you better understand what life is all about.
With acceptance, you develop that humility, for humility and acceptance are blood brothers. They cannot exist without each other, and as the scriptures would say, “Be ye as a child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” The Hindu scriptures say that, too, and so do Islam and Buddhism. They all say that you need to find that simplicity within you – to see that innocence – for without innocence, you could never be accepting of life. So, it is up to us to find that innocence within ourselves through meditation and spiritual practices, and then we will see order in all the chaos around us. For, in reality, there is no chaos. Everything is as it should be, for everything is empowered by Divine Grace. Accept that all is right, all is right, and then you are all right.
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang US 1982 – 07
