Language of Mysticism – A Calm Mind

Lord Shiva has a trishula - trident in His hands which represents the three gunas - Satwa guna, Rajo guna and Tamo guna meaning that all the three gunas are in His hands. He is the master of the gunas and the gunas are not the master of Him.

It is a very big topic that we would be dealing as we go further. Sattva is the one pure quality, Rajo is the quality of activity where ego plays a role, Tamo is darkness, laziness. All three qualities have roles to play but you should not be a victim to any one of them. Whenever you go to sleep, it is reflection of tamo guna; sleep must be part of your routine, but not right now while you are listening to me… therefore you should have control over tamo guna.

Rajo guna is sign of activity, so actively you have to sit for meditation. There is no activity in meditation, so someone goes on scratching his head, there is nothing inside and outside, but he scratches. Again rajo guna has been misplaced here. All these three gunas have roles to play, if you only know how to become the master and not the victim. For that to happen those roles have to be played in the respective places. For some people Sattva guna - purity becomes addiction.

I will narrate an example from the life of Buddha so that you can understand better.

Four people were in a boat. On reaching the shore, they were holding the boat on their heads and started walking. A monk who saw this asked, “Why are you keeping the boat on your heads”? They said, “The boat has helped us to cross the river and we are so grateful to the boat that we are carrying the boat wherever we go”.

After the boat is used, it should be anchored on the shore. These people out of gratitude carried the boat on their heads.

Have you seen some people expressing their gratitude? For them their gratitude itself is a form of bondage. Similarly, the very gratitude became bondage for those four people.

If you have yagnopavitha - sacred thread on you, and when you take sanyas – monk hood, as per the tradition, you have to tear them down. It is very difficult as you have been wearing the yagonopavitha all through your life and chanting the Gayatri Mantra. It is treated as very sacred throughout the life and when you take sanyasa the yagnopavitha has to be torn by our own hands… even that attachment has to be renounced. Even the attachment to good, along the line, should go away.

Buddha said that gratitude is beautiful, but don’t be foolish like the boatmen carrying the boat in the name of gratitude. Then the boat becomes a burden instead of a means of navigation.

Therefore one should be a master of all the three gunas - qualities. You should be able to leave off, that is the meaning of trishula or trident.

What is there on the trishula? A Damaru - a drum tied to it. The whole system of Sanskrit grammar seems to have emerged from the damaru, discovered by the great Saint called Panini. It is said that he wanted to write grammar sutras. He was meditating calmly for this purpose. At that time the intuitive quadrant of his brain opened up very well. He seemed to have tuned to the celestial dance of Lord Shiva during the sandhya - evening time. It is said that Lord Shiva was dancing with his damaru and thus Panini sutras were created.

Panini was a great saint. He was meditating. Why am I naratting this? The fine vibration is there in this world. Akashvani waves is right here, BBC waves, CNN waves, Doordarshan waves are here, but your radio or TV with antenna alone can pick it up. I am giving you a modern example. They will help you to understand an ancient concept, because you are all westernised.

How did Panini get the idea when Lord Shiva was dancing? How is it that you type www.swamisukhabodhananda.org and you get my site? You say, “Oh, It is like that. Isn’t it?” Right here we have BBC, CNN, and Doordarshan waves and if you have the right receiver, you can log on to it, isn’t it?

A study has shown that whatever the great Kishore Kumar has sung, or for that matter whatever great singers have sung, it can never disappear; it is always in existence. And we create an apparatus, and we can log on to it. Energy cannot be destroyed. It exists in some form or the other. We don’t have the apparatus right now to discover them. That is all. Therefore, meditation is an apparatus and in the apparatus are your receptors of intuition, which modern science refers as the “D” quadrant of your brain.

There are four quadrants of brain – “A” quadrant is of logic, “B” quadrant is of planning, “C” quadrant is of kinesthetic and playful while “D” quadrant is of intuition. “D” quadrant of the brain represents intuition.

When you meditate, research has shown that the intuition brain cells opens up, and then you see more than what others can see. That is why Walt Disney looked at the rat and created Mickey Mouse. Somebody looks at waste and creates wealth.

Ego and Patience – Silent Killers

Waiting for others to live up to our expectation is a waste of time.

Reflect on this story.

A family of tortoise went on a picnic. They packed food and set out to a place they had selected… behind the hills. When they reached the spot, they unpacked their picnic basket. They realized they had forgotten to bring salt. Food without salt is tasteless.

They had a conference to decide who should go back and get salt. After a lot of discussion, the youngest tortoise was chosen, as he was faster than the others.

The youngest objected on the ground that before he could come back the others might eat the snacks. But they assured him they would wait for him to come back with salt. Six months passed, but the youngest tortoise did not turn up. So the rest of the family decided to open the basket and eat the snacks. When they opened the snack basket, the little tortoise jumped out of the bushes and screamed, “Look, I knew you would not wait till I came back. For six months I have been hiding in these bushes to make sure you would not eat without me. Now my suspicion has been confirmed, and I am not going to get the salt.”

Some of us are exactly like our suspicious tortoise: we waste our own time waiting for people to live up to our expectations. Instead of doing the right thing ourselves, we wait for others to act in ways we expect them to. We waste our time waiting for others to live according to our expectations. We have not learned to enjoy doing what our intuitive judgement tells us is the right thing.

Is stress related to egoism?

Yes, very much. Egoism implies our conviction that we are more important than others, and our beliefs are the truth. Ego means our point of view is more important than that of others, more important than even truth. So we are trapped within our point of view. Not only are we arrogant about our point of view, we believe in our infallibility. This arrogance creates stress. Being stuck to our point of view creates stress.

Reflect on this.

A husband and wife were quarrelling. Each kept screaming at the other. The house was a living hell. Then the husband walked out of the house. The couple’s teenager son, seeing his father walk out, asked his mother, “Is Daddy going to be back?”

“Yes, he will be back in half an hour,” replied the mother.

“Damn,” said the youngster in obvious disappointment, “I thought of eating his dessert.”

When self-interest or ego prevails in our mind, we begin to compete with everyone for everything, no matter what the cost. We do not see beyond our self gratification.

Be playful and flexible. If you need to work long hours in the office, enjoy it, play with it. Convert the work place into a fun place with commitment.

Then you don’t work for joy, work itself becomes joy.

Drop the ‘I’ and ‘mine’ and live in the ‘We’. The universe is one. It is, and has, a unity. Don’t live in the division of the ego. Without the ego, we experience a beautiful connectedness with everything else in the great chain of being: with the birds, the stars, the sky and the trees. You can envision them to be different parts of your body, or yourself to be part of one or more of them. It is this connectedness that is known as ‘Nirvana’. Reality is unity and illusion is division.

What lies at the root of impatience?

One has to cultivate the state of being patient. We have to trust the universe with its own ways of opening and closing windows of opportunity and doors to happiness and prosperity. We have to learn to be patient. A boy loved mangoes. He bought the best of seeds and planted the mango seed. Every morning he would dig the earth to see if it had sprouted. In this process he never allowed the seed to sprout. Our impatience works in the same stupid way.

Impatience is a result of lack of trust. We trust our ego and not the miracle of life. Since we depend on our ego, we take for granted the way nature reveals her mysteries. Our imagination projects a reality and we don’t recognize anything else as real. We are lost in our subjective reality.

Patience is a spiritual quality and discipline. Patience is predicated on the faith that God knows better than we ever can hope to know what is good for us. Impatience, on the other hand, asserts, “God should be clever enough to let me have things my own way because, after all, what I want is paramount.” Patience accepts that God’s will is greater than my will.

Develop Enthusiasm in Life

It is a very important aspect in life. Study the life history of successful people and you would find that one of the ingredients was tremendous enthusiasm or the passion to live life. One should have passion to live life. It is said, Edmond Hilary who climbed Mount Everest, failed thrice earlier. Later at a party hosted in his honour in New Zealand, he looked at the portrait of Mount Everest and humorously remarked, ‘Mt. Everest has a problem. The problem is, it cannot grow more than about 29,000 feet, whereas I have the ability to grow in my ability to climb Mt. Everest.’ What he meant was that he has the ability to grow whereas Mount Everest stood at the height of about 29,000 feet. Look at his passion. In the very next attempt, he scaled Mt. Everest successfully.

In us there is a ‘lower-self’ called Jeevatma and a ‘higher-self’ called Paramatma. One can either operate from the ‘lower self’ or from the ‘higher self.’ When one operates from the ‘lower self,’ one finds his life is not powerful whereas operating from the ‘higher self’ results in the opposite. This is the choice before us.

If one operates from the ‘lower self,’ life opens up as a threat. While operating from the ‘higher self,’ the life opens up as opportunity. Operating from the ‘higher self’ consistently generates enthusiasm.

Any situation viewed as threat is an example of one involving the ‘lower self.’ The ‘lower self’ operates as an interfering thought or an obstructing thought. The ‘higher self’ operates as a supporting thought, not as an obstruction. In any situation in life, if seen as opportunity, it is supportive. If seen as an obstruction, it is like a danger or a threat…. it is a function of the ‘lower self.’

Our bodies have an immune system; if it is weak, the body is prone to disease. So too, we have a psychological immune system. If our psychological immune system is weak … we are upset, hurt, frustrated. Like genes in our bodies, our minds are also products of evolution of many years. When our psychological immune system is weak, we are prone to perceive external situations as dangerous or as obstruction. It only calls for strengthening the psychological immune system so as to be powerful individuals.

How do you make it powerful? Like how we make the physical body powerful by right exercising and dieting, so too, the psychological immune system can be made powerful by not allowing the ‘lower self’ in us to operate... instead we should encourage the higher centre to operate in our daily lives.

In our lives we operate from acquired knowledge, rather than the cosmic intelligence of the cell. Where do we draw our identify from? Most of us draw our identify from our acquired knowledge. Don’t we? Why is it so? Because through acquired knowledge, our ego is established, our identity is established, our address is established. Whereas in cell intelligence that we have not created, but are gifted with, our uniqueness is not established. Ego is established in the ‘I.’ The acquired knowledge is the ‘lower self.’ The knowledge from which we are born – the cell evolution is the ‘higher self.’

Let us draw our identity from this growing cell that is the ‘higher self.’ But alas, we don’t trust this. Instead we trust our acquired knowledge. In life we should eliminate our ‘lower self’ and operate from cosmic intelligence. The acquired knowledge will be supportive in our growth and not obstructive. Understand this distinction.

Acquired knowledge should support the ‘higher self,’ not obstruct it. For example, in a game of tennis, when you see a ball coming from an opponent, your thought should not interfere with it and obstruct your spontaneous effort to hit a ball. But if you think, ‘Oh, I am going to miss it because my history of missed stroke last time’; then acquired knowledge is obstructing. As a player, you cannot succeed.

Suppose, the ‘higher self’ looks at a ball in a different way - “With a focused awareness I allow my being that has evolved to guide me in hitting a ball. In case I miss it, the ‘higher self’ being a learning and evolving being, makes required corrections the next time I face a ball... but whereas acquired self or the ‘lower self’ creates an image that I am not good and I am not lucky. This image makes me look at a ball next time as a threat and acts as an obstruction. The ‘lower self’ is rigid, while the ‘higher self’ is flexible in learning and growing. I will not allow my static conclusions to decide my action instead allow my flow to decide a response.”