Awareness Makes Your Life Complete

From Satsang during the retreat in Serbia, May 2015

Free yourself from yourself

Have you ever wondered why certain patterns stay on and do not leave us? We are suffocated and tired of the baggage, but something within doesn’t allow us to leave it. That is the ego. Ego creates such fear – “If you lose it, what will happen to you?”
Freedom is actually freedom from yourself. Then you are free from the whole situation around you. Spiritual powers are spontaneous and automatic. They happen to you when you are empty. You don’t need to go searching. Similarly for inner peace and emptiness- your only effort is in letting go. Let go. Let go. Let go. Whatever binds you, you must let go. The ego aspect creates a fear that if you let go, you will have a deficiency or abnormality. This creates a kind of distrust. You do not trust yourself that you will be fine without all this baggage. It also creates a distrust against the person who is guiding you (“how does he know?”). These are all aspects of ego.
Have you ever thought of yourself as a very, very powerful being? This is the truth. And why are you not experiencing that power, that full potential? Because of the ignorance that we have created for ourselves. We have decided– “My name is Mohan and this is what I am.” I am a man, so I should behave like a man, or I am a woman, so I should behave like a woman. We have taken on all these concepts and are living them. Actually we are living FOR those concepts. As long as we live for concepts, we can never be ourselves. The yes and the no, the dos and the don’ts- all these things are binding us. Some people are afraid to be rich. Some people are always worried about being poor. Whatever you are doing, you are storing certain impressions which will become your reality at a certain point in time.
Success is an attitude. What is the attitude of success? What gives you that attitude? Flexibility. The more flexible you are, the more successful you are. When you are absolutely flexible, you are absolutely successful. So, if you look at yourself and you understand who you are and you try to get out of this understanding saying “I am well beyond all this” (not a concept, again I am not adding one more concept), you add reality into the system.

Be happy without a reason

You know, happiness is not a relative term. Happiness is a perpetual situation. Usually our happiness depends on another person, situation, or a particular material, state, such as having money or not having money… That is not happiness. We should be happy for no reason. If we are happy for no reason, we are always happy. Why do we keep shifting grounds searching for happiness, when we never find it? Have you wondered- we are always on a journey to somewhere but the destination never arrives. The journey is what interests us, not really the destination, because sometimes we don’t know where we are going.

Journey and the destination: coming home

The journey is a reality and this reality binds us. A small shift: we are in the journey, we are witnessing ourselves in the journey.
Then the journey is an experience, an experience of the moment, but the journey continues. The destination has no value; destination happens to you. Why do you have a confusion about destination? You are looking outside. But when you come home within you or when you feel that you have been seeking yourself all these years, destination and the journey become one. It’s peace. When you get inside yourself, when you come home, you’re at peace. Then what do you see around you? All the people who are at home. Everybody has a home. Some people do not understand, so they search, keep searching. Finally when they are tired of searching, they find the home. That is the point.

Awareness makes your life complete

Q: So when we are searching, we get a taste of that peace but then it also happens that everything becomes meaningless in a way.

M: No way. Everything shines in a different light. For example, if this room is dark, you have limited view and you are touching and feeling things. Suddenly, light enters, you can see everything clearly. Which is better- to experience something with full awareness or partial awareness?
We eat food every day from various places. Here, I saw many people actually experiencing the food much better than normal. Why? Because the environment and situation are different. How would life be if every moment was like this?
Awareness is rich food, not bland. Awareness makes your life complete. Partial awareness, like partial knowledge, is the problem. We have some idea about something and we talk about it. We are very sure what we talk because we have very partial knowledge. Those who really know, never talk. There is no need to express because they are already complete. But those with partial knowledge, you can see on Facebook, like diarrhea, all the time coming. Where is this urge coming from? It’s coming from the urge to prove.
But the moment you are peaceful, you are peaceful with yourself as well as the outside world. You will be purpose bound. So when you arrive at home, you will have no pressure to talk, think or act. You won’t even worry about how you look or behave, or if the society accepts or rejects you, if people are kind or cruel to you, if they consider you as completely sane or completely insane; nothing matters. Nothing can touch the peace inside. Whatever happens outside, it’s outside. Nobody can spoil your inner peace. You are peaceful irrespective of the availability of a thing, material, space, situation etc.

Q: Sometimes I feel that it doesn’t matter what is going on. Sometimes I am peaceful, I am emotionless, without emotions.

M: That impermanence “sometimes” should become “all times”. For that you need objectivity; that is the path. When you are objective, you watch yourself- “I am beyond emotions now. And at a certain time, I am vulnerable to emotions.” You should look at both these situations objectively.
Suppose you pass through such situations continuously and feel that you are 80% not affected. Suppose the question “why?” stops and you say “ok, that’s happening, no problem, I’ll go through it”. When this happens, understand you are on the right track.
Look around you, those who ask “why, why, why?” all the time; they are completely controlled by the mind, they always need answers and they are never satisfied. They stay only in the question-answer plane; they are not going beyond. “Ok, let the situation happen, let me move on” – that is not happening. It’s good to have inquisitiveness, like a child (why is the sun shining? why is the sun coming up in the morning?). All these questions are good, because they help the evolution. But after some time, when you are in a state of stagnation, and if “why” keeps you stagnant, it is not good for evolution.

Life is constant detours provided by the time

A lot of these things are happening because of time. Have you ever thought that most of your baggage is not yours? See, if we are allowed to carry 30kg in the flight, 33% is yours, 33% comes from the lineage (heredity), the rest 33% is given by the time. And it is situational. The situation is provided by the time and time changes the situations. This confuses the person. You know, something was like this yesterday, but it is different today. Yesterday you were going down this road, but today there is no road, there is another road.
Life is like that, constant detours with time. This is one of the spiritual challenges of our time. How to handle the changes (in body, mind, intellect, environment etc.) that time provides? This is an acid test of our spiritual coefficient.

Compassion

Compassion is a very clarified kind of love. If your level of operation is compassion all the time, you are in a high level of spirituality already. This “me”, “mine” and all those selfish and personal words show that you are operating in the level of ignorance. But when you see yourself in everybody’s eyes, you are already spiritual.

Society gives you sympathy and concepts

Society sympathizes with us, which paralyzes us. Whenever we accept sympathy of other people, we are actually diminishing ourselves. It’s not a positive side of acceptance. Society gives you sympathy, so that you don’t have to think further (“Oh, poor you”). Secondly, it induces self-pity (“Poor me, I am so and so, I am vulnerable, experiencing these bad things”). That becomes a vicious circle.
It’s like in today’s marketing, they pump up all these things in the media, so that you get tempted to do it, buy it and experience it. There is no end to it- you want to buy or upgrade and at the end of the day, you’re exhausted. Likewise, if you’re constantly operate in the level of self-pity and sympathy, you get paralyzed in life. Secondly, the society freely gives concepts about everything- God, gurus, masters, the right practices, religions. Then your individuality is lost.
There is a big difference between showing you the way and making you see. Suppose I tell you- if you go this way, you will reach Novi Sad. Now, whether you go or not is your personal desire or option. But if I say “There is a bridge on river Danube, this is what you should see”, by the time you reach Danube, you are finished. You won’t see Novi Sad, because your mind is focused on one object. So, what would you normally feel? You’d think the river Danube is Novi Sad.
This is the problem with concepts. Concepts bind you to a particular state, material, place, person or an idea. This is how people have manipulated people. “This is the only thing, don’t look anywhere else.” So, what happened, all the options are lost- the option of being yourself, experiencing 100% of your potential and all the options which you possibly could have had are lost. For example, a lot of people have even confused the whole world with this word “kundalini experience”. Each person’s experience of kundalini has to be different, because you are unique. How do we say “This is how it is”? The more you read, the more concept-oriented you become. Ideally, you should read only what is necessary for the moment. That is why they say jnana yogis (those on a knowledge path) take longer to reach God than a bhakti yogi, who is on a devotion path.

Religions vs. interpretations

Religion is basically like a road map, it is not the end. Every religion is formed out of some great teachings of great realized masters who knew what they were talking about and only meant good. But the interpretations degenerated through time and each generation made their own interpretation. Masters have said, “I have seen the light, I have seen God, if you walk this way, you can also see God.” In that mode, it doesn’t matter if you are born into a religion, or if you follow a religion, a particular God or master; go till the end of the road. Go with your full conviction, consistency, discipline and you will achieve.

Your inner change reflects on future and past generations

Usually the whole lineage, including ancestors and the coming generations get the benefit of having a saint born in the family. Usually it’s like 3 generations go up, 3 generations become complacent and then 3 generations fall. Every family can be seen like a wave. When you become more elevated in consciousness, that energy gets transferred to the coming generations and to the past.

Transcribed by Tamara Bobic
Proof-read by Aviral Srivastava