Listen to Your Soul, Not the Mind

If you listen to your soul, everything will be fine, but you listen to the mind

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQKm4H6yZdY]

Like mind, intellect also keeps changing. So when the body is lying dead, we call it Mohan’s body. Who was Mohan? The soul connected to the body is called Mohan, and when the soul leaves the body, it becomes a dead body. Thus, the soul element is the God element and this is exactly what we need to know and also connect to.
Who is closest to you and who is your personal Guru? Other than your own soul, no one else can be your personal Guru. The soul guides you and if you listen to the soul, everything is fine. However, we listen to the mind, we listen to our habits. We listen to our micro existence. Hence at times you do not get the required satisfaction. So, who is God? You are God!

Question: What about reincarnation?
Your desires, your pending shopping list, brings you back. When you started the journey, you brought sufficient money to complete the journey. The path was fully decided from birth until death. This is what we call destiny. Destiny has been chosen, or Prarabda Karma, i.e. the karma from birth till death has been chosen, and you do not have much choice in terms of detours or deviation. So where is free will during this journey? There is very limited free will. The journey does not allow free will. Perhaps the free will I have in this second is to lift either this hand or that hand! Once that second passes by, the free will is also gone! It is that limited! You actually do not have much free will!!

However, there is a Dharma aspect parallel to the karma aspect. The first and primary Dharma is to your own family, your immediate family. You are supposed to take care of them. This is called Putr Dharma, Pitr Dharma – the Dharma or duty of the parent towards the child, the child towards the parents and husband to wife. These Dharmas run parallel. If you do not fulfill these Dharmas, you leave behind a debt. The second dharma is dharma towards society; you should be doing something for others. This way you are paying your debt to Earth.

So firstly, you pay the debt of your existence, to your parents and to your children. Secondly you pay your debt towards the Earth because you are using the Earth for expressing and experiencing. Hence this is important, very important.
That is why most religions suggest doing something for the world, by way of selfless service. People escape to the Himalayas or other places where they meditate, shed and become liberated, but often they come back because they haven’t taken care of their debt to the Earth. They come back to fulfill this. So even if you leave as “JeevanMukta” and give up your body, you come back because you have something to clear here, just like a rented a house. You rented a house, stayed there and left without paying the rent. So someone reaches out to collect the rent. In this case, Earth catches you and brings you back. In contrast, say you paid the rent while living, and I am not talking about elaborate selfless services, paying millions for services. It could be the simple act of buying a meal for a poor man. Do what you can afford. When someone is hungry offer food or buy water, perform spontaneous acts. It does not have to be that you will do “Annadaan” for a hundred people. You could if you desire to, but that is not asked for. Do what you can for the world, according to your capacity. This will keep you liberated. It is also part of Karma yoga.
So, you cannot control your destiny, because you chose it. You chose the whole path, the entire journey and brought the petrol to complete the journey. However, during the journey, you find other things that interest you and this was not part of the original agenda. This is like if you went out to buy a Maruti car. Then en route you see a Mercedes and decide that’s what I want, not this Maruti! Since you didn’t bring sufficient money, what do you think happens? You come back, with more money! This is how we expand our plans and keep coming back. What can change this and how can we change this? Only one thing can help, and that is awareness! Awareness of who we are. Being aware that we are God, that we are a part of God.
This is a role play and in the next one hundred years, even a child born today will not be living on Earth. There will be a completely different set of people walking here. So what are we holding on to? What can we hold on to? Nothing! Again quoting Krishna, “There are hundreds of sense objects in the world, these are there for you to enjoy or for you to use. To understand these hundreds of objects, you have been given five senses, eyes, ears, nose etc. At a given point in time, if your mind is not with these senses, you cannot understand them”.
If the mind is not with the tongue, you will not enjoy the food. If you are watching TV and you are eating, you are eating unconsciously. Either your mind is on the TV show or on the food; it cannot be in two places at the same time. There is nothing called multi-tasking. It’s like we are mechanically trying to do many things together and probably messing it up! You could probably increase your speed, but if the mind is not held constant on an activity you will not enjoy it. You are looking at a beautiful landscape, your eyes are looking at it, but the mind is elsewhere, you don’t enjoy it. Beautiful music is playing, ears are hearing it, mind is elsewhere. Will you enjoy the music? Hence, in order to enjoy something, you have one mind. Five senses and one mind. So one hundred became five, and five becomes one! At a given point in time, you only enjoy one thing! Our conscious, waking state capacity is so limited.
We do have high potential, but how do you increase the capacity? Shift from the senses to the third eye, to the higher. That is why we keep saying, shift to the spine. When you shift to the spine, you are operating from the spine. Usually our operating level is 120 degrees, in other words the level at which our head can turn, but the remaining 240 degrees is missing. When we go to the spine, we also start accessing the remaining 240 degrees. Thus it becomes 360 degrees. Your awareness shifts, the way you look at the world changes. When awareness shifts, your whole outlook changes. Many things that you think are essential for existence may not be important anymore. Thus I always say that in this world, there is only one thing worth investing in, awareness! This is because you take it further when you go. When the soul leaves the body, it takes the desires, and it also takes the awareness. So, you start from where you stopped. Understand that spirituality doesn’t end here. All your material wealth, all your relationships stop here when you die, but awareness is brought forward. It goes along with your desires; it becomes part of your character. You will then take birth in a location such that you will be able to continue your journey. So awareness is like a progressive graph. It does not stop anywhere.

Question: Reincarnation?
Mohanji: Reincarnation happens based on unfulfilled desires. When you go to the astral plane, there are Masters equal to what we have here. However we have two types of Masters here…

Who is actually a Master?

One who has mastered the mind, one who is beyond the Gunas, i.e. the Sattva, Rajas and Tamas Gunas, one who operates on a perpetual plane, and one who enjoys perpetual bliss is a Master. His mind has dissolved into his soul. He does not have a separate mind that drags him, and he is operating in 360 degrees all the time. His awareness is complete. He is beyond the Gunas which means there is no high or low. He is operating on a perpetual plane, he is a real Master. However, what has happened is that Acharyas or teachers are called Masters because we give titles like Swami and we blur between these two. Acharyas are basically exponents of knowledge. Like college professors, they know certain things and they transfer it to people, but they are not connected to the Higher. Those who are connected to the Higher may not be literate. What was the qualification of Jesus Christ? He was a carpenter, but he was sufficient to teach great scholars of religion. Where did the knowledge come from? From the Source! ”My Father and I are one”. This means, the limited consciousness and the infinite consciousness have merged together, we have become one. When you actually become one, there is no difference. I do not exist. I dissolve into the Higher Consciousness. Likewise when our consciousness dissolves into the consciousness of the whole Universe then everything is within you. And the whole knowledge is yours. So that is why we say, the state of Shiva is something which you should understand, you should be in it. To know Shiva, be Shiva.

Anxieties and fears

Question: Life at this moment looks difficult; there are fears that cloud the moment and the mind. How can one overcome the fears, the anxieties of the future?
Mohanji: Well this is everyone’s problem. Where are the fears coming from? They come from lack of understanding or ignorance. Primarily, fear arises because we feel we are doing acts. Do you realize we have no control of over 80 percent of our vital functions? Who is controlling our heart beat, digestion or circulation? Thus most of the activities which keep us alive are not in our control. So, we first of all understand that there is a large subconscious that is running the show. Our conscious mind has very big limitations. As I said earlier, hundreds of sense objects, five senses and one mind to operate it all. So at a given time you can only experience one aspect of something. We should have the understanding that we are limited in our capacity.
Secondly, we believe we could have done better, but please understand that you have chosen the destiny, from one point to the other, from birth until death. You have chosen the destiny in such a way, that it gave you the time, space, intellect, awareness and the surroundings, to operate in it, to experience or express. So within that space and time, you have to do (acts), you cannot be at another location, or in another space, because it is not part of your plan. I can only start walking from here. I cannot start walking from another position because I am sitting here. This is the truth of the day. So acceptance of who you are, as you are, is important. We never do that. We do not agree that we are fine. We always feel we are insufficient, because we keep comparing. As I said earlier, your original agenda was to buy a Maruti car, but then you decided that’s not what you wanted. So you keep changing the goal post and as a result what happens is that you feel you are insufficient, that there is something wrong with you. This is not true, we are absolutely fine, we have been created in perfection, and we are operating in perfection. This is exactly what we have to understand, and the path is through the spine. If you establish yourself in your spine, you see the whole perspective. If I said I knew you, it would be a lie. How do I know you? I am trying to judge a person based on how he or she looks and what he or she says. We do not know, because each individual, within 24 hours, goes through 3 phases of life, waking state, dream state and deep sleep state. Thus if I know the person in all these states, in 24 hours, I can say I know you. But do we? It’s impossible! Else you should reach that kind of awareness! So fears are coming out of insecurities, insecurities are coming out of non-understanding. If a person is fully conscious of whom he is and operates in that level, there will be no insecurity. There will be no competition.

Transcribed by Vidya Rajagopalan
Proof-read by Caroline Moscato