…And Now Yoga — What it means to be Enlightened?
Perhaps one of the most frequent queries that consumes a seeker’s mind are the questions “What is enlightenment? Can spiritual practices enlighten me?”
When you realize you don’t know, the longing, the seeking, and the possibility of knowing arise and you become a seeker.
Enlightenment, is not an achievement, but a homecoming. If you stop your distortions and come back to your original nature, that is enlightenment.
In India, enlightened beings have been referred to as Dwijas. Dwija means twice-born. Once, you were born out of your mother’s womb; it happened unconsciously. You did not make it happen — nature did it for you. When you were born, you came with a certain innocence and blissfulness. A child is innocent and blissful by himself. But since this blissfulness did not happen consciously, anybody can corrupt it in no time. In no time, they will take it away… For some of you, it was taken away by the time you were 12 or 13 years of age; for many it was already taken away when they were 5 to 6. Children are becoming tense at 5 to 6 years of age today because their innocence gets corrupted in no time, depending upon the volume of influence that people around have on them.
Now, if you have to be born once again, you must die first. If you are not willing to die, the question of being reborn doesn’t arise. This does not mean dying physically. If you leave this body, some other nonsense will be waiting for you. But if you die the way you are, if you destroy everything that you called “myself,” then you are born once again. This kind of birth happens 100% consciously. Once again you become blissful and innocent, but fully aware. Now, this blissfulness cannot be taken away by anybody. So, what you call “enlightenment” means a conscious self-annihilation.
So if Enlightenment happens , how do we know it has happened.Suppose ,we are hallucinating to be enlightened. If such a thing happens, it will be clearer than daylight.Its not something that you can miss.Its not that kind of an event that you could miss it.There is no such thing,even if you are blind you still know the sun has come up because nobody can miss it.It is not a small event that anybody can miss.It is just that if you cultivate the system your body, mind emotion and energy to its peak possibility, then an absolutely wonderful flower blossoms within you. Not something that you did, you just waited with the right kind of conditions and it happened.
Right now, most people are not thinking of enlightenment. They are just trying to live a little better. They want to live a little more peacefully, joyfully, more efficiently, more effectively. We can use yoga for that also. It is a poor way of making use of yoga because yoga is capable of delivering you to another dimension of life; but it’s okay. If people are not satisfied with what they are seeking in their lives, they will never seek anything higher. If you talk about enlightenment to somebody who is hungry right now, he only thinks of food. Whatever people feel is missing right now in their life needs to be taken care of to some extent. Otherwise they will not seek anything higher.
There’s nobody in the world who doesn’t want to reach enlightenment, or at least experience the benefits. Unfortunately, though they want to be there, they don’t want to walk the path. Only because people are off and on.
When we say “you have to walk the path” ,Is it so far away ? , Is it so hard that you have to get there with great difficulty? No , because for what is within , where is a path ? — It’s right here.
What is working against you ,is just things that work for your well-being actually -your own mind , your own body.This is what turns against you when you seek something beyond it.From inside they’ll turn against you in so many ways.
So is it difficult ? is it easy? It is not…its just a priority:”How important is it?”
If you become like that : “without knowing this I cannot live.”
If that is how important it becomes ,then it’s not difficult,It’s very close.Because people are off and on , off and on , off and on so it seems to be a long way.Suppose…Let’s say you have to cook something…let’s say you want to bake a cake or you want to cook some rice.You turn on the stove,you
turn off the stove…turn on the stove,turn off the stove then it’s a long process.And of course they know it won’t happen, so this is the story of majority of the spiritual seekers.They are off and on ,and off and on and off and on .Oh does it mean to say “I must be only here ,there…”. That’s not it.The priority should not shift.The priority is set , slowly everything within you organize itself in that direction because the priority is shifting and this life does not know which way to go…it’s just confused.Every two minutes if you change the destination on the GPS for sure it does not know where to go.So this is what is happening to the most people.This is why spiritual path seems to be long ,impossible and unattainable.
Seeking physical well-being is one thing. Seeking enlightenment is something else. To enhance physical well-being, you need to learn different techniques of self-preservation. Enlightenment means a conscious annihilation of yourself. For most people, it will take a certain amount of time and maturing to understand that whatever you make yourself to be, in the end, it is frustrating and not enough. However wonderful you make yourself, still it is not enough. Only when you disappear, everything becomes wonderful.
So, if right now all someone wants is to be peaceful and happy, and do better in the activities they are doing — let’s have that, it’s okay. That doesn’t mean enlightenment is ruled out, but such a longing has not come yet. Still, the basic longing is to live better. You are not yet finished with life — you want to live well. When you have lived enough and you know that living better is not going to get you anywhere, then you want to go beyond life.
Enlightenment means you have broken the barriers of the physical
He just understood humanity inside out — not as people but as a total mechanism of the human body, mind, consciousness.
Creating A Distance From Body And Mind
If we can distance ourselves from these two things, then only we will see things just the way it is ,without any prejudice or predefined mind set and realization is not far away.You will have mastery over the mechanics of your body.
Your morality will not evolve you. Right now, you are being good with great difficulty. You are holding on to your ethics, because you have no consciousness. You picked up ethics from outside - your society, your religion or your profession. If you begin to recognize life and respond to life, you would find that you do not need morals. You would just know how to be. You would simply be incapable of doing anything harmful. You would not hold back or control yourself just because somebody told you this is the way you must be. The very way you are, there would be no question of harm. It wouldn’t exist in you. Effortlessly, you could be good.
Suppose for one moment, you actually experienced within yourself that all the people around you are actually a part of you. Not in thought, but an actual experience, just like you experience the ten fingers of your hands. If this happens, then there is no need to teach you morality and ethics and no need to tell you not to harm this person, or not to rob that person.
Yoga is just that. The word yoga comes from the word union. Where you see everything as one in your experience. The whole process of yoga is to evolve beyond the sense perception, so that you can experience the existence as one. If you experienced all people as a part of you, no one would have to teach you ethics. You would joyfully go and do what is needed.You will not do what you like , you will do what the world needs.Doing what you like is not freedom.Likes and dislikes are compulsive.That’s all we should do. Just do what’s needed. Nothing more, nothing less.
If your body and mind do only what you want them to do, you will live a wonderful life.
If whatever I say about Enlightenment you tend to misunderstand ,whatever I say you’re bound to misunderstand but let’s see how to create minimum amount of misunderstanding.This is the reason why most enlightened beings never spoke because the moment you speak you’re bound to be misunderstood but when you get there you will know.
Everything that we understand, we always understand it only from what we already know ,that’s the basis of our understanding.That understanding is of no consequence when we’re talking about a completely different dimension of life.
Now, what enlightenment means for you would be , suppose you’re here right now, you’re in the body ,but you don’t belong to the body.You have a mind ,but you don’t belong to the mind. you have a family, you don’t belong to the family .You’re in the world ,but you don’t belong to the world. But at the same time, everything is a part of you. To live here without belonging to anything, but still involved with everything takes a lot.
You’re not in conflict with anything.So in terms of your experience how would it be,suppose you spent a lifetime without ever knowing what is fear,what is anger, what’s jealousy ,what’s hatred ,what’s anxiety ,you are blissful all the time, you’re intoxicated all the time but at the same time you fully alert.
So enlightenment means you have broken the barriers of the physical.The limitations the physical has imposed upon you,you’ve broken that.Now, don’t seek enlightenment right now because for most people or for over 90% of the people who reach that stage ,the moment of enlightenment and moment of leaving the body are same. Once your energies reach such a peak ,you can’t hold on to the body and you’ll drop the body anyway . So,moment of enlightenment and moment of leaving the body are same for most people.Only somebody who knows the tricks of the body, who understands the mechanics of the body can hold onto it. Otherwise ,they have to employ something else to hold onto it because most people who attained have not gone into that kind of Sadhana. They are only learning to drive the car,they’re not learning how to build the car so they cannot retain the body.They will have to play various dramas to hold on to the system.
For example ,if you have heard of Ramakrishna Paramahansa. Ramakrishna ,is an uneducated man that’s the advantage he had.He is like a village bumpkin ,but a crystallized consciousness.So he’s very simple and also very significant for United States because Swami Vivekananda (disciple of Ramakrishna,who landed up Chicago in 1893 ) and Paramahansa Yogananda (the yogi who really made some impact in the country was a disciple of Ramakrishna’s disciple). So,both of them have the same lineage of Ramakrishna Paramahansa and both of them came to United States.
So Ramakrishna was God-like ,people saw him God-like, they worshiped him as God.Very simple man like a villager.He has no education ,no sophistication-simple.People could not miss his divinity but he was mad about food ,crazy about food . He is talking to a group of people ,his disciples, half way says “please wait, I will come and he will run into the kitchen and ask his wife ,what’s cooking today ?”
Sharada his wife was ashamed of this,”How can you be like this?” People see you God-like and you’re mad about food.Even I am not bothered about food ,”why are you bothered about food?” and Ramakrishna would say,”That’s okay but what’s cooking?”
One day ,she really got angry with him and she said ,I am ashamed.I am just ashamed of you the way you are. People are worshiping you like God and you are mad about food. That day he told her , ”One day when you bring the Thali (plate of food) to me , if i look away, if I don’t show any interest in the food, you must know there are only three more days left. This happened seven years after this incident , one day she brought the Thali and he looked away then she immediately knew.She broke down and cried. He said,”No. No point crying.Time is up.” He just used a conscious desire for the food as a hold or way to hold on to his body.He doesn’t know any other systems of yoga to hold on.So a simple method, he created a conscious desire for the food all the time.Everything else has been lost because without desire you cannot exist in the body.Everything else has been gone ,now there is a conscious desire.
Every day, consciously he’s thinking about food all the time just to keep himself in the system.This kind of conscious desire ,you can drop it any time when you feel it’s done you can just drop it.So moment of enlightenment and moment of leaving will be same so that’s why yogi’s work people up to a certain point and peg them down there on the last step,so that they serve that natural courses life in a very beautiful way and when the time comes, they know how to be released from that.It will be nice to send such people right now but it’ll be nice to have evolved people on the planet.
This, is a living cosmos. Everybody’s free to capture as much as they want. If you capture a substantial amount of life, your very presence will become a significant life. Otherwise, you will become a mediocre life. This is the important thing. It’s not the knowledge you gather in your head. It’s not the muscle that you gather in your body. It’s the life.
The content of our life will not change our life. It is the context of our life which changes our life.
Only when your attention and involvement is indiscriminate does the universe open up to you.
