There is one more important thing. This is the most important. We accept or we say we accept God. But we do not accept His creation. We start asking, “If there is a God then why in the name of Heaven does He create all this misery, all these pressures? Why should He reward the impious and why should He punish the virtuous? Why should He allow those hapless 220 people to die in the plane crash? He doesn’t know how to make the world!”
We are not accepting His creation for what it is. They say there are three pivots for a stable mind: bhakthi, gnana and vairagya. Bhakthi is devotion, Gnana means knowledge and vairagya means detachment. In my opinion, bhakthi and vairagya are not different from each other. They are one and the same. Being able to accept God’s creation, good or bad, whatever it is, as being perfect, that is surrender to God. We thank God that we receive gifts from Him. We ridicule God when we receive brickbats from Him. We should be able to thank Him both when we are in misery and when we are in pleasure. This equanimity is surrender to God’s will. Not surrendering to God’s will is criticizing it, and saying, “If only I had the power I would create a better world.” What kind of a world will I create? I will create a blank white paper. Well, no color, no contrast, everything is fine…there’s no picture there. God is the picture of this world. God is His creation. God is the earth, He is the sorrow, He is the misery, He is the pleasure, He is the pain. He is everything. So accepting God is accepting God’s creation also. What does this imply that applies to meditation?
Sometimes the meditation goes wonderfully, absolutely no problems, I’m in seventh heaven, walking on the rainbows, with the Mother leading me with Her little finger and showing me different worlds. They are singing for me, they are dancing for me – an aesthetic state of union with God. And sometimes nothing happens. It is just routine. Where does boredom come from? Because you have an expectation that something is going to happen, and when that something does not happen, then you are bored. It’s not helping you, and you lose interest in the meditation. So you have to understand that expectation is the cause for the disappointment. Expectation is the cause of the boredom. So what is it that you have to do? You should have no expectations whatsoever about how the meditation is going to proceed. If you have no expectations, no disappointments. If you have expectations, you will have disappointments.
So, to reach that thoughtless state of the mind, spend about 20 minutes in the morning and in the evening. I am not asking you to do mantra japa. Mantra japa is a thought. That is also an addiction; you are going to get rid of it one day. You may use it for sometime, but then when the mind starts getting cleared, you have to let go of that too. A little tiredness, a little hunger, non-expectation of the results and being a witness to your thoughts. These are the four essential conditions that are necessary for settling the mind down to a quiet state. All that is needed is that your mind settles down to a quiet state and once you have learnt the trick of how to go about doing this, it comes naturally to you. This is the duster which you have got to apply once in the morning and once in the evening. You choose your time. But try to see if you can stick to the same time everyday because it builds up a habit. Try to see if you can create an environment around yourself where not much of external disturbance is present. Try to see that you are not over full or over eaten, try to be comfortable. Take a simple posture where you can forget your body, don’t contort yourself into a position which you cannot hold for any length of time without discomfort. If you are used to yogasanas, that’s a different story. But otherwise what you do is sukhasana: whatever asana, whatever posture is convenient for you, where your body doesn’t keep hurting you and bringing you back to your body consciousness. What you are trying to do is forget the body, forget the mind. But not going to sleep.
So, this is called Sandhyavandhanam. There are several mantras we know…there is pancadashi the 15 letter mantra, shodashi the 28 letter mantra, then there is balatripurasundari shadakshari – aim kleem souh souh kleem aim, and then you have hamsa – soham mantra and the shuddha pranavam AUM. Then there are the mahavakyas. And beyond all these things, there is the silence of the mind. There you don’t have Her to hold on to, the sastras say niralamba margah. There is no support, support less you have got to be. Any kind of support that you try to hang on to does not give you independence. If you are seeking any kind of support, whether it is the guru, whether it is the mantra or whether it is an expectation, nothing, you have got to let go of everything. You have to be yourself, without expectations, and try to remain in that state. All these rituals that we do are to help us to reach a state of mind where it is balanced.
Having practiced this, I have known that it is in that state that clarity of perception comes. It is in that state that universal love springs forth in your heart. It is in that state that you are able to feel the oneness with entire universe. It is in that state that you are at the bottom of the ocean of awareness. There you see the oneness, not the diversity. It is in that state that you start feeling that when you give to somebody, you not giving to somebody else, you are giving to myself. In that state you will know for certain, that when I improve myself, I am improving the world around me. It is in that state you will understand that if I am helping myself, I am helping the world. We have an equation – I am You – that is established in that state of non-localized mode of existence.
We are very much used to the localized mode of existence and we’ve forgotten that we can exist in the other mode. In physics, we have got what is called the quantum phenomenon. There is the particle mode of existence and there is the wave mode of existence. This applies to you. Your mind is a quantum phenomenon. It knows of no distance nor time, it knows of no path, it jumps from this to that without being in the intermediate state of time or space. In the classical model, if I want to go from Rochester to New York, we can put the sentries on the way, at Syracuse, at Troy, Albany and then New York. And you can say, he has just crossed Syracuse, now he has crossed Troy, now he has crossed Albany before getting to New York. In quantum mode of travel, this does not happen. What happens is that you disappear here and you appear there. That’s how the mind functions. The mind being a quantum phenomenon, the classical model of continuous path does not have to apply. The mind being a quantum phenomenon, it can disappear being an individual, become a wave, de-materialize here and materialize there. You’ve got to learn how to be a particle, you’ve got to learn how to be a wave. We have learned how to be a particle throughout our lives, what we have to learn is how to become a wave. So I hope that you will practice this.
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