It Takes Willingness

Weekend Programme ’Return to Yourself’, Serbia, 3-4 Oct, 2015 (Day 2, part 1)

Your willingness to go back to your original state

M: There is a room deep within. Various impressions are on the way. There are various doors to reach this room, various doors which are preventing you from entering this room. Some are collected from society, some are already inside you. Whatever is natural is good for you, even if it is your ego. Natural ego is minimum ego. What do you use this ego for? For identification. If I ask you who you are, you will tell me who you are. This is identification which is maintained by your ego aspect. Mind in the minimal stage is beautiful. How does that help you? To experience the world. How do you experience the world? Using your senses – eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin. This is how you experience the world. Thus everything in its natural form is good for you. How can ego or mind become bad for you? When the mind starts to store things, keep things and accumulate things, and when you feel that all this together is you. Then there is a problem. When the ego starts projecting larger than your actual form, such as, “I’m so and so, I’m Mohanji, I’m a guru, people respect me, or people disrespect me“, all these projections keep the ego high. It is important to understand that everything in its natural form is good for you, while everything which has grown bigger is not good for you. It’s like a tissue growth, a cancer. All these processes therefore aim to remove this cancer and make you natural and original. What is the minimum requirement for that? The minimum requirement is your willingness. Your willingness to be you. Not the pretentious you, I am so and so and I have this knowledge, I have this money, I have this position. Forget about all that. What you are beyond all this position, power, money, that is the natural you. It takes courage to go back to your natural you, because all the time you are projecting the pretentious you in society. Thus there is a saying, “Diagnosis is more difficult than treatment.“ If the diagnosis is perfect, the treatment is easy. It’s important to understand that this willingness should happen from inside, by saying, “I must get back to myself. I must go back to my original state.“ Your original state is 100% freedom. Freedom means zero dependency. If there is any dependency, there is no freedom. Freedom means you are not concerned if a person, a place, a time, an event or a material is available in your life or not. You are still the same. You are peaceful by nature. Freedom is zero dependency. Once you are clear about that, then the only thing, the only mantra which will go on in your brain is liberation. Every meeting, every parting, every incident, every accident, everything is one more step towards liberation. Nothing is coincidental. So where is the resistance happening? In the mind. Mind always resists because mind likes repetition. Mind likes to repeat events, repeat patterns. When you were “speaking Chinese” yesterday did you feel silly?
Audience: Yes.
M: But what happened inside? There was some other dimension working. You wouldn’t talk Chinese with your family members, would you? However something was working inside, some new dimension was opening up. There is a potential, a possibility, a new door. And when you were talking to somebody imaginary, you wouldn’t do that on a normal basis, would you?
Audience: No. But we liked it.
M: There is a saying that whenever you talk, somebody is listening. There is an old story I read as a child, and there is meaning in it. A man had a deep urge to speak to somebody, but nobody was listening to him. So he went to the forest and shouted. The air carried that sound and it reached the king. The king then took action. Somebody listens all the time. The point I am making is that, at every place you visit, with every activity you do, something opens up. However, what does the mind normally like? Beaten tracks, predictable journeys. The mind likes what you are used to on a daily basis and it will give you enough reasons to continue with that. All this means if you repeat one thing every day, then the risk is very small. No risk, no growth. Understand, it’s just like that room where you have stored everything and where there are all these doors before you reach inside – the ego, the mind, the concepts, the fears. Everything creates one door after the other, and you have to cross everything until you reach the place where you have stored all these collected items.
Now I’ll take your questions.

Storage vs. Letting go

Q: We were talking about letting go, and when it happens it becomes ridiculous. However before that moment it is hard. How do we do it?
A: The opposite of letting go is storage, right? How does storage happen? When do we store things? When do we store things at home? We store things when we think we will need them for next time. How do we store things in the mind? When we do not have completion of activity. When an activity is incomplete, it goes into storage. When I say incomplete, it means that fulfilment did not happen with the activity. Thus, repetition happens when fulfilment is less. It keeps storing, adding things and becomes heavier and heavier. This storage is especially high when your mind is oscillating between the past and the future i.e. the sadness of the past and anxiety over the future. When the mind is moving like that, more and more things in the present are stored because you are not able to fulfil them. See, you are sitting here and your mind is elsewhere. Then later you think, “What did Mohanji actually say? Was it this or that? “That means the mind could not collect the data and process it at the right time. If this happens consistently, it creates more and more heaviness, guilt, and indigestion in that level. What is the best method to solve this matter? When you are doing something, make sure you are 100% there. No mechanical activity. Nothing which happens by default i.e. habitual activity. Habitual activity is more or less unconscious activity. If you are consistently in the mode of being with the activity 100% and you are not going into your past or the future, that means there is no storage. I told you on the first day, when you are having food be aware of the food, be aware of the quantity you are eating. If you are fully aware of your eating, without talking, and you are just concentrating on your food, then you will only consume one third of your stomach capacity. Guaranteed. When our activity is full and complete, there is no repetition. When there is no repetition, there is no storage. Always understand, whenever there is an incomplete activity, there is a postponement. When you are not satisfied with any activity, whether it is a relationship, food, or any activity which you experience in the world, if you are dissatisfied, guaranteed there will be another activity of the same nature. This is what we call a pattern. The pattern is collected like this. We create our pattern. And this pattern does not stop in one lifetime. It goes over to another lifetime also. That is why many people experience patterns in relationship in each lifetime. When a pattern happens it is difficult to reverse it, but we can prevent a pattern from happening. Let me give you a small example. A person cannot decide upon his relationship all the time. Many relationships happen during his life, but he is always not deciding upon it. What happens then? All those people coming to him cannot decide upon him either. That means we have created a constitution of rejection of a relationship. The same thing gets repeated like a mirror onto you.
So how does the letting go happen? Letting go happens when you are here, now. When you are present with all your activities. Every time it’s complete, and then it’s gone. Thus at every point in time, decide that you are fully with an activity, fully with an emotion, fully with the thought, and fully with the word. If you continuously do that, you will be finishing it all the time. Everything is completion. Completion means letting go. It’s not in meditation and it’s not in acquiring something from the outside. It’s an internal thing, and you will feel light and free every day. When your stomach is full with food, how do you feel? Heavy, sleepy. When the stomach is sufficiently filled, how do you feel? Light and happy. The same goes for storage. When you have stored a lot of things and you have ego associated with it, you will always feel heavy. When you have sufficient material which you can digest and use in daily life, you are free.

Thus whatever you eat – food, knowledge…, eat only as much as you can digest. This is because everything is consumption. You are consuming knowledge, food, emotion, everything. We are consumers. When you consume things moderately, you feel nice, fresh, and healthy. If you consume too much stuff, you feel heavy.

Needs and requirements

Q: What about our needs, like the need for growth and becoming conscious, are they also a part of ego and mind or a part of our being?
A: These are your birth rights. Peace happens when the mind is still. Otherwise it’s only artificial peace. When the mind is absolutely calm, that means you are neither anxious about your future, nor are you carrying the weight of your past. You are in the present and you are absolutely calm. That is when peace happens in you. Becoming conscious is something which you can cultivate. You can nurture it in you. That is what I have just explained. Be conscious of your thoughts, words and actions. Awareness means being conscious of your consciousness. You are sitting here, you are aware of it, you are feeling it, you are nurturing it, and then it becomes you. This is a full-time job. Whenever you are awake, be aware. When you are awake and aware, you will also become aware when you sleep. Feel yourself, feel the world, feel everything. If you keep feeling, you keep evolving.

Needs of a physical nature aren’t from the mind. The needs of the body for water and food, are from the consciousness of the body. Emotions are from the mind. The need for knowledge is from the intellect. Put together this is the structure between the body and the mind.

The soul has no needs. The soul is always full and complete. The soul is like the petrol of your car. It just allows your journey. If the soul leaves the body, it’s called a dead body. The soul has no interest in the body. However, this constitution which is called you has an interest in the body for experiencing the world, so the soul says,“Ok, I’ll come with you.“ Thus it’s a contract, and this contract goes through lifetimes. However, the soul has no sense of time. It is not bound by time. The body is bound by time. The soul flows continuously over time through various bodies, it keeps moving. Thousands of births, thousands of deaths, again birth, again death, it keeps going on and on. However, the soul is not connected to the body, nor to time in the absolute sense. The soul is active only when the body is, otherwise you would not even know there was a soul. There could be various souls in this area, but can we see them? Only when the soul has the body is it visible. We call it a person. However souls can wander around.

All the requirements are related to the mind, and mind means not just the mind, but the whole constitution. When you have a requirement for a particular material, that means the desire is already there. Desire becomes karma, karma becomes inclination (inclination means you like to have something), then it becomes a thought, then a word and an action. For example, say you have the desire for a pizza. The desire for pizza created that inclination, ’Oh, Pizza Hut, very good.“ Then a thought comes, “It’s good to have pizza.“ Then you tell somebody, “Let’s have pizza.“ Finally you eat pizza. At that time if you are thinking about a football match, you will not enjoy the pizza, and so you will again go to Pizza Hut. This is because you did not get fulfilment. It was not completed. This is how life gets repeated. We keep eating pizza.
(Laughter)

Multi-tasking

Q: In our everyday life we have to multi-task and I am not prepared to be conscious of mechanical activities, so it drags us in like a whirlpool. How to get out of it?
A: This is an everyday question…
I was travelling with a group in the Himalayas. We had a bit of calamity and couldn’t go any further. We were staying in one place. I said, “Use this time to feel the Himalayas and meditate.“ One of the guys said, “Mohanji, I went into a state where it was beautiful and I was not here.“ Amazing, HA HA.
(Laughter)
I said, “So you went home, you went to various places, you thought of how you would travel back, whether this problem would be happening continuously, all these thoughts have been in you?…And after some time you were lost in another world, but not Earth? This is called absent-mindedness.“ Sometimes we feel that the loss of mind from our body is bliss. This is not true. This means we are completely absent from reality.
Multi-tasking fundamentally, is using a learned skill at a fast pace. Imagine you have not learned how to drive. You cannot do multi-tasking, can you? Driving a car is multi-tasking. Just a small example for everybody’s understanding. I start looking at the road, the clutch and things are happening, the hands are moving, the gears, steering, and you are navigating. While you are driving, you are probably listening to music or also talking to somebody so your ears, eyes, legs and hands are occupied. This is only possible if you know the skill. Just imagine you can’t drive, then everything is difficult. How do you know where to look and use the clutch, break… So multi-tasking is doing things that have been learned, and reproducing them at a particular speed. Multi-tasking does not involve presence of mind most of the time. It’s mechanical. This is not really conducive for evolution. This is clearly defined in the Bhagavad Gita, where Lord Krishna talks about this. He says there are millions of things to experience in the world. To experience them you have five senses i.e. eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin. What are you experiencing from all this? Either pleasure or pain. Only these two things. Happiness or sorrow. I am bringing it down to the core. At one point in time you cannot experience both happiness and pain. I am talking about when the mind is present. To experience it 100% you have only one mind. Look at the millions of things around us. To know them there are five senses, one mind, and one experience at one point in time. If you understand that in this mode, then you can understand multi-tasking. So what are you doing? Learn a skill, and multi-task, unconsciously. This is multi-tasking. When you are talking on the phone and typing, you cannot be present in both places. Your presence is partial. This is actually accenting the restlessness of the mind.
I was working until 2012. Four companies were reporting to me. I was a General Manager of the company. The four companies had different activities. Somebody asked me, “How do you manage this?“, because that’s quite a large workload every day. I said one thing, “When I am with one subject, I am 100% there. When that’s moved, then another one. Everything is 100%. I don’t go back and repeat it. Once I have read a message or stamped, it’s gone. Finished. And I would tell my managers, “Make sure you cannot handle this subject. Exhaust all your capacities on any problem and only then, if you cannot handle it, bring it to me and put it on my table. Then go away. Don’t look back.“ So I filter it before it comes here. Once it’s on my desk, I have to do it, I do 100%, move it, next 100%, move it… Thus at each point in time if you are 100%, it’s complete. When you look at this whole scenario from above, you see the full picture. Then it is easy to work on. If you know the full picture, you don’t really have to understand more because you are aware of it. I developed the speed of three email messages per minute. This was my average speed. By 9am or maximum 10am I had finished all my emails.

Q: But multi-tasking is not good for us.
A: This is what corporates ask you to do. Or eight months I worked as a country head of five countries and was handling huge oil tankers (3 million barrels, etc.). Their main problem was different time zones. I was based in Dubai but travelling constantly, always in airports and hotels. I had to keep moving, again, productivity has to be maintained. These are the times when they really test you whether you are up there, and at that time there were no Android or smart phones. Only emails. It was not easy. This is where you have to be really efficient, concentrate on one thing, and complete it, because you cannot make a mistake. A mistake would cost maybe $25,000. So at each point in time if your awareness is laser sharp, you have no stress, no strain.

Transcribed by Biljana Vozarevic
Proof-read by Caroline Moscato