Death
DEATH
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Part one: Life and death in one breath
Seeking immortality
Mukti and mahasamadhi
Part 2: The gracefulness of death
Preparing for a good death
How to Deal with the Fear of Death
How To Live One's Old Age
When you were a child, everything was beautiful, but you were eager to grow up because you wanted to experience life. When you became youthful, your intelligence got hijacked by your hormones. Whatever you did, knowingly or unknowingly, it just pushed you in that direction. Very few people are capable of raising their intelligence beyond the hormonal hijack and looking at life with clarity. All others are trapped in it. During youth, when the body is vibrant, it is very difficult to make yourself aware because you are so identified with your body that you don't see anything beyond that.
When death is definitely going to happen in the next week or two, it is so much easier to become aware. There are certain things that can be done to become more aware at that time. One should just lie down. Now, if you do not know anything else, if there is no help from outside, the best thing is to just simply see what you are not because even if you are unable to see what you are, you can easily see what you are not. Now, the vibrancy of the body has dropped so much but the life is still on. So you can see within yourself the disparity between what is you and what is the body. It is better that you spend time just seeing the distinction between what is you and what is your body. You will pass quite effortlessly.
Even on a daily basis, one can make this awareness a part of one's life. When you are hungry and want to eat, just postpone it by ten minutes. Be conscious of your hunger, do not get busy with some other activity. Consciously postpone your meal and wait. Even when you normally sit for a meal, just be conscious of your hunger while looking at the food. Do this for just two minutes. Such simple methods can slowly establish the distinction between the experience of oneself from the physical body. There are, of course, more sophisticated ways of conducting this. Being hungry is a time when it is much more obvious that your body is an accumulation. Hence, there has been such significance attached to fasting in all traditions.
In India, they always said you should not die among your family. People used to go to the forest to die, a practice called Vanaprastha Ashrama. When the time comes, the best place to die is always under the open sky, not the hospital. If you want to go into the mountains and sit there by yourself and die, that is fine.
the idea of Vanaprastha Ashrama was to withdraw from a place that has four walls. You don't want to live in four walls, because it creates a certain illusion, a sense of immortality. Maybe because you are already in a box, you are already in a coffin, it feels like you are forever! The four walls of your home create a false sense of immortality. But you will see, if you just sleep outdoors, you will feel so vulnerable. Even if you don't understand this, your very body will understand this very clearly when you sleep outdoors. Maybe most of you don't experience anything because you are sitting in your room with your music turned on or glued to your phones, but if you are out in the jungle, just one storm---with all the lightning, thunder, rain and the wind and you will see how vulnerable the human body is. Even in just one night, if you stay out, suddenly, a certain wisdom will arise within you.
So Vanaprastha Ashrama meant being in communion with the vana, or forest. The fundamental idea is that after living in a home all your life, now, as the end nears, you move closer to Nature and be aware of this vulnerability.
Just because people go to Vanaprastha Ashrama, it does not mean they are going there to die. It means they have become conscious that they have to die. Vanaprastha Ashrama is to bring a deep sense of mortality home to this body. Once this body is completely conscious it is mortal, it will arrange itself properly. Suddenly, you will view everything property, money, relationships and all that---from a distance.
In the Indian way of life, we say, you have three choices for living You can live as a bhogi or a rogi or a yogi, but you can die only as a yogi or a rogi. A bhogi is one who is lost in material or sensual pleasure. A rogi is one whose life is contained by the disease he is suffering from. A yogi is someone who has achieved union or harmony with the Existence. You can live in any of the three states, but for dying, there are only two choices: you can either die as a rogi or as a yogi. There is no choice of dying as a bhogi.
In the past, people handled it differently in this culture. Let us say, you did not know any Yoga, and you were over eighty years of age and were still okay. You would probably last another ten to fifteen years at the most. But knowing that the body is becoming infirm, let us say, you took a call, "This is the time for me to run it down consciously.'' Anyway, you were going to run it down; you just decided to run it down consciously. So from two meals a day, you brought it down to one meal for a few years. Then from one meal, you make it half a meal, and so on. This can greatly enhance one's lifespan, or bring it down, depending upon one's karmic and energy situations. But it will definitely ensure freedom from prolonged suffering. In the past, when people went to Vanaprastha Ashrama, they usually went from fruit to fresh leaf, fresh leaf to dry leaf, and dry leaf to just water, and then they stopped the water too. After that, in three to five days, they exited because they did not want to die as a rogi.
Is this suicide? Definitely not. Suicide happens out of frustration, out of anger, out of fear, or out of an inability to bear suffering. This is neither suicide nor euthanasia. This is about being so aware that you know when life has completed its cycle and you walk out of it. This is about developing sufficient awareness to separate yourself from the physicality that you have gathered. In that level of awareness, one can leave. If you do not attain such a level of awareness, then the least you should do is make the last moment very graceful, pleasant, joyful and blissful for yourself. This can be done if you manage certain things beforehand. If none of this is possible, then at least one can take the decision not to choose excessive medical intervention. This will be good for you and good for the planet.
In ancient times, there was a lot of community support for people to consciously take this step of running the body down and leaving gracefully when the time came. In the Jain community, for example, they had a practice called Sallekhana, or Santara. The Hindus have something similar called prayopavesa. In this tradition, when someone felt they had approached the stage of leaving,. if they were so conscious, they could decide for themselves-it was perfectly acceptable. If someone was not aware, then they consulted all the people around, including the family, the elders of the community and their spiritual head. People then discussed and debated this.
When the entire society is conscious that death is an inevitable part of our life, we can sit down, negotiate, guide each other, arrive at something and decide that this is the best way to do it. This is just like fixing an arranged marriage in India. Let us say, your daughter has come of age, so when to get her married? The family sits down and discusses and debates about it. They ask the girl her views. They listen to what she has to say, look at the overall situation and see what is best and finally arrive at a date, isn't it? Similarly, death is also another part of your life; you should handle it so.
The Significance Of Dying In Kashi
Shiva takes the form of Kalabhairava in Kashi. Kalabhairava means the dark one, one who represents limitless time and space. Kala means both time and space. It is a deadly form of Shiva. As Kalabhairava, he is supposed to be in a destructive mode. He is not destroying this or that but destroying time. All physical realities exist within the ambit of time. If your time is destroyed, everything is over for you. Kalabhairava does just that.
In Kashi, Shiva, in the form of Kalabhairava, is supposed to personally bestow Liberation by imparting the Taraka mantra to all who die there. They say, Yama, the God of death, has no jurisdiction within the perimeter of Kashi. Neither he nor his agents, the yamadootas, can enter the city. Once a person loses their physical body, Kalabhairava gives them a yatana sharira, a special subtle energy body, for them to work out their karma, They say the suffering in this yatana sharira is forty-two times more intense than normal suffering. Because it is so intense, it is over almost instantaneously. All this is a very beautiful way of saying that the normal processes that take place after death are not applicable and something else that is super intense happens.
Traditionally, this is called Bhairavi Yatana. Yatana means ultimate suffering. It is something that can happen to you beyond the body, but Kalabhairava will make it happen to you here. So at the moment of death, your many, many lifetimes play out in a few moments with great intensity. Whatever pleasures, sufferings and pains that need to happen to you---spread over many lifetimes---will now happen to you in a microsecond. This happens with the kind of intensity that you cannot hold. If suffering has to end quickly, we must make it super intense, only then it will end quickly. This is about putting your karmic warehouse on fast forward. If it is mild, it will go on and on forever. So Kalabhairava creates such phenomenal pain, which you have not imagined possible, so that after that nothing of the past remains in you. He makes it as brief as possible.
I have been saying this in many ways: essentially, spirituality means putting your life on fast forward. You may suffer much more because everything happens at a fast pace. What you would have stretched for ten years happens, let us say, in one month. So the intensity of the suffering that you go through is extremely acute. There may be moments of ecstasy and joy, but there is so much suffering also happening rapidly within you.
Ch.7
Assistance For The Dying
The Importance of the Last Moments of Life
Why is the moment of transition from an embodied state to disembodied state so important? Let give you an analogy. Right now, when you are in the body, you are like a river, going in one direction. When you become disembodied, it is like you evaporated and became like a cloud. Whichever way the wind blows, you will go that way. You have no direction any more. At least the river is clearly going towards the ocean, but we don't know where the hell the cloud is going. Whichever way the wind blows, it will go that way. Leaving the body and losing the discretionary mind is like that. If you had a discretionary mind, you could go either this way or that. But once you die, you are just fluff, floating around according to your karmic tendencies.
When you lose the body, your ability to discriminate is gone. All the memory and other mind-stuff are still there; only the discriminatory process is lost. At that moment, if you create even a little bit of unpleasantness, then the unpleasantness will multiply a millionfold. If you create a little pleasantness, the pleasantness will multiply a millionfold. Why is this so? Let us say, today, you get a little angry; you can use your discriminatory mind and control it. But if you did not have this discriminatory mind, the little anger would flare up into madness. The moment of death is a significant factor because whatever is the content of one's mind at that moment --- pleasantness or unpleasantness --- it could multiply manifold because of the lack of discriminatory mind. This is why, it does not matter which part of the world you come from, which culture you come from, every culture holds that when a person is dying you must allow them to die peacefully.
During this phase of disembodiment, if your pleasantness multiplies, we say you are in heaven. If your unpleasantness multiplies, we say you are in hell. Hell and heaven do not exist as geographical places but as human experience. You don't have to be disembodied to be in hell or heaven; even when you are alive, they can exist for you.
In Indian culture, great importance was given to how a person who is dying should be treated. They said a person must die in the right space, in the right atmosphere, with the right kind of emotion and with the right kind of thought. When someone is dying, they said you are never supposed to say, ''Aiyyo, Amma!" You are supposed to say 'Rama' or ''Krishna'' or ''Shiva" or something like that. The idea is to generate some thought to think beyond oneself. It is a phenomenally scientific process. It is not an emotional process, because this last dimension of thought and emotion that you create becomes the major tendency in that being. They said, ''Even if it is your enemy who is dying right now, you must create an appropriate atmosphere and see how he can die peacefully. Don't do ugly things.''
if a person truly dies well, then there is no next time for them. That life moves into the nature of limitless freedom. But all this cannot be done with one's emotions or good intentions. Just because you wish someone should go to heaven, they will not go to heaven. If you want to do such things, then you need to have a different level of understanding, awareness and mastery over life. Otherwise, those things are out of the question.
I would like to see a day where people come to Kayantha Sthanam(crematoriums run by Isha) and say, ''I think it is my time. Is there a place here where I can stay and die and go? No one needs to carry me up here.'' That would be a good day. Go there, sit happily, don't eat or drink anything, just die. No funeral, just cremation. That would be an Enlightened world. Well, that is a faraway thing, that will not happen right now, but at least you must create spaces where people can die peacefully with a certain focus.
Even when someone is medically dead, they are not existentially dead because death happens slowly. So there are certain preparations that can be made to reduce the choppiness of the moment and assist the withdrawal of life during that time. If you are dying at home, it is best you withdraw into a clean, white room with mild-blue light. No photographs, nothing. If there is a tinge of blue around you, this will help you to die well. Another simple thing you can do to help is to have a lamp burning twenty- four hours of the day, next to that person. A ghee lamp is preferable, but you can also use butter. This creates a certain aura so that the choppy nature of withdrawal can be regulated to some extent.
Next, you can have a chant or something with the right kind of sounds going on. These should be the kind of sounds that will touch the fundamentals of who you are. It would be even better if they are consecrated sounds or chants or mantras. The dying person may not be able to do the chanting themselves. At the moment of death, it takes something for a person to be aware enough to say what they want to say. Most people die in unawareness. So in this culture, if someone is dying, people around always start a'chant like 'Ram, Ram' or 'Aum Namah Shivaya', or whatever they know because they want the dying one also to utter a consecrated sound that creates awareness. So when someone is dying at home or elsewhere, you can set up a chant of one of these mantras at a very mild volume. If they have already chosen their chant themselves or internalized it, that can be used. If they had not chosen one, Brahmananda Swarupa could be played for everyone. This will make sure that a choppy withdrawal of life can be avoided.
Now, when the moment of death is approaching, it is best to move the dying person out of the house into an open courtyard or open space. There you must keep them, preferably on cloth upon open soil in a north-south alignment, with the head to the north. This is to be done when death is certain and you want it to happen with ease. If the body is still in the house, inside constructed atmospheres, the being does not leave the body with ease.
Why put the head towards the north? Traditionally, in India, they tell you not to sleep with your head to the north. This is valid only when you are in the northern hemisphere. If you go to the southern hemisphere, say Australia, you should not put your head towards the south. Mostly, this body is designed in such a way that if you remain vertical, it is ideal. Now your heart is located three- fourths of the way up because pumping the blood up is difficult, pumping it down is easy, and all the arteries and veins that go above the heart are very thin. Blood vessels going down are much thicker. As they go towards the brain, they become almost hairlike. So when you lie down, the blood can be pumped into the upper portion of the body much more easily. The heart also makes some adjustments once you lie down. But despite that there is a certain effect.
Now, iron is an important constituent of your blood. If you are anaemic, your doctor prescribes you iron supplements. As you know, the North Pole has a very strong magnetic pull on the rest of the Earth. Now, if you lie down with your head towards the north, it will pull your blood in that direction, so there will be increased blood flow to your brain. This is not too much, but enough to impact the system. This is why, when you sleep with your head towards the north, you will have disturbed sleep. You can also have nightmares because of disturbed sleep. Old people may even die in their sleep if they put their head to the north. Or they can have a haemorrhage or stroke and things like that. So when you live in the northern hemisphere, you should not put your head towards the north.
However, when a person is dying, you should place the head towards the north because it eases and aids the disentanglement process of the being from the body. During last moments, even though the physical body has lost its vibrancy, life still tries to stay there and do things, not knowing what to do. But the moment you place it outside in north-south alignment, it just knows it is over. So it will leave the body effortlessly. It also aids in maintaining a conscious state during the transition. These are some simple but effective things you can do to assist someone who is dying.
Rituals From Death To The Disposal Of Body.
The Laying Out of the Body
Even after death has happened, it is good to place the body in a north-south alignment, with the head to the north. As we said earlier, as far as the dead person is concerned, all their life they lived thinking they are the body, experiencing that they are the body. Suddenly, they popped out and they are confused. Confused existentially, not psychologically. They do not have a discriminatory mind to think. They do not realize that it is over. They linger around because the body is still there. They tend to make attempts to get back into the body, which is unfit to sustain life. This can lead to a certain energy in that place which is neither good for the person nor for the people living around that space.
When you place the body in a north-south alignment, with the head towards the north, the being will be pulled away from the body. Once you do this, certain changes happen more quickly in the physiology of the body that has been discarded. The being realizes that it is futile to hang around that particular body because it cannot access it any more. A certain distance arises between the being and the body, which is very conducive for what has to happen next for the being.
Tying the Big Toes Together
The next thing to do after death is to tie the big toes together. This is because when you are alive, life energies are deeply infused into every cell of your body. When death happens, these energies recede slowly. Functionally, it may be dead, but it does not die totally; it dies slowly because all the cells in the body are not dead yet, and they are still making an effort to live. They will try to draw energy from outside. When they try to draw energy, certain forces may enter the body. In order to prevent these things, people tie the two big toes together in such a way that the outer surface of the big toes are touching each other.
Washing and Clothing the Body
In certain communities in India, where they are still aware of these things, the first thing they do when someone dies is strip the body naked. The next thing to do is wash the body with water. One reason is that the person may have been injured and ill during the last moments, so you want to clean that up. But it is not just for hygiene purposes that you give them a wash. See, even when you are alive, if someone tries to give you a bath and they pour water on your face, you will feel like you are being waterboarded. It feels like you are drowning. If there is even any little activity happening in the body, it will all cease. The idea is not to just clean the body, but to facilitate the complete withdrawal of life from the body as running water has the ability to clear many aspects off the body.
Now, once again, you lay the body in north-south alignment in an open space. The body is kept naked, with just a white cloth covering it. This cloth is also for the people's sake, not for the dead body's sake. There is nothing to cover, there is nothing to expose for a dead body, but the living people have issues. So one white cloth, just a sheet, is used to cover the body. Why a white cloth? The colour white reflects all light and most of the heat---two factors that can hasten the decomposition of the cells. This hastening of decomposition is not advisable at this stage, as certain aspects of prana are still partially functional in the body. Black or coloured cloth will absorb both light and heat, and should be avoided.
Things Not to Do around a Dead Body
There are many customs and rituals for the dead in various cultures, but there are some things that you should definitely not do around a dead body. One thing is that you should not sleep near a body. This is so because, in sleep, everyone is far more susceptible to everything than in wakefulness. We already saw that death is a process and it is still on for quite some time. If you have kept the body for six, twelve or twenty-four hours or whatever, the process is still on, and life is still exiting. So people who are sleeping near the body become available to such things, which is not good for them.
Another thing is that one should not cook or eat near a dead body. The very nature of food will draw that energy in that direction. So if you are cooking or eating near a dead body where the life energies are still exiting, you will be eating your own relative in some way. This may sound very extreme, but it is so because food will draw these energies. This is why, traditionally, people don't cook in the house where death has occurred for a period of fourteen days. People bring food from outside, for the people here. But it is not good to eat there either.
The very process of eating itself makes a person vulnerable to influences. The moments of eating and sexuality are the times when a human being becomes far more vulnerable than other times because, essentially, human structure has to open up in some way to take it in. This is the reason why you must bring down the number of times you eat so that you retain the integrity of the system. You can clearly observe this: those who eat all the time, even if they eat less, will not have integrity of system. Sexuality, food and even constantly sipping water opens up the body to various influences that will not always work positively for people. It is in this context that a yogi opens his or her body only when absolutely needed and that too in a structured and disciplined manner. Constant ingestion loosens the general integrity of the subtler dimensions of the body. You will see that the people who keep munching on something all the time will become loose in the head. It is not that they become fat, that is not the point. They become loose in every way, there is nothing of strength or vibrancy or capability simply because they are opening their system all the time.
One should also avoid unnecessary touching of the dead body. Whatever touching you need to do should be to clean or bathe or move the body, but one should avoid unnecessarily holding the body, hugging, and all that. That is not good for you or that life which is exiting. One more thing is that you do not leave the dead body alone. In India, if someone close to you dies, you are supposed to keep a ghee, butter or sesame-oil lamp burning near the body. People are supposed to sit and watch--no one leaves a dead body alone. The lamp's flame has a purificatory effect and is like Klesha Nashana Kriya. If it is a regular death, the lamp is to be placed at the feet. If it is an elevated exit, then the lamp is to be placed at the head to have a purificatory impact upon the exiting energy. If there is qualified help, then they may choose to light the lamp over a specific part of the body. The lamp can be lit even up to fourteen days after the body is cremated or buried.
Paying Respect to the Dead
In India, a dead person is generally treated as a Divine being and one bows down to them. It does not matter who they were when they were alive. When they were alive, maybe they did not deserve any kind of respect, but now that they are dead, people bow down to them. This is not out of joy that the person is gone. They bow down to him or her because he or she is no more that person. Now, what is left and what is hovering around is of a different nature. This is life. This is the basis of life, and with that you don't argue. You don't question its wisdom. You just bow down because it is way beyond you.
To Burn or Bury
The idea of burning is that no trace of you should remain. Once you are gone, you are clean gone. Nothing of you should remain. But if someone exits their body consciously, or even if not consciously, they at least left gently or seeped out of the system, ,then you can bury them. But if they were jolted out of the system, you must burn the body. So I would say if someone dies when they are still young and vibrantly alive, it is better to cremate them. Only if someone dies of old age, you can bury them.
Tonsuring the Head after Cremation
A common after-death Hindu ritual is tonsuring of the head of the male relatives of the deceased. This shaving of the head came into practice when people generally kept a lot of hair on their head. Today, they are anyway cutting it every month or so, so whether you shave or not may not make much difference. But normally people used to have long hair, and hair is one thing that can easily gather a certain amount of aura. You know that hair gathers static. People who have a lot of hair have static-it will be crackling sometimes in certain weather. Hair has this capability. Similarly, if you have been in the house where death has occurred or you are related to that person, you gather an aura of death, particularly in your hair. It hangs around you.
Spreading the Ashes
After cremation, if you keep the ash in one place, there is a tendency for the being to look for that. So they are put in a river where they get really spread out. That way they cannot be found. The effort is to do everything possible to make the being understand that it is over. This is also for the living to understand that it is all over. Otherwise you will keep the ash in a pot in your house and you will become unnecessarily emotional about it.
Ch.8
Assistance for the Disembodied
Runanubandha--The Web of Debt
If you want to understand how dead people can affect our lives, you should first understand what runanubandha is. It is like this: it takes many things to make an individual human being who he or she is. Of these, the aspect of bonding is one of great significance. However, modern societies have grossly neglected it. With everything that our five sense organs come in touch with, in some way, knowingly or unknowingly, consciously or unconsciously, we establish a certain bond with it. This is not just with the people around us but also with the very land that we walk upon, the air that we breathe and just about everything that we see, hear, smell, taste and touch. This is because none of these things happen without investing a certain amount of energy in it. You cannot see something unless you invest some energy in it. You cannot really listen to something unless you invest some energy in it. You cannot taste or touch anything unless something of you is invested. this investment comes a bonding. In traditional terms, this is called runanubandha.
Runanubandha exists because the body has its own memory. It is a certain kind of physical memory that you carry within you. One common way is through physical contact. The body remembers any kind of intimacy you have with any physical substance. This is the reason why, traditionally, in India, people greet each other with folded hands because they do not want to acquire that extra runanubandha that can create bondage and impede their Liberation process. Contact with certain types of substances also has more of an impact than others.
Another way you develop runanubandha is through relationships. Even if you just as much as hold someone's hand, you develop runanubandha. Of all the relationships, sexual relationships have maximum impact in terms of the amount of memory that they leave upon you, compared to any other kind of substance you come in touch with. Since Indian culture is essentially oriented towards Liberation, people took enormous pains to ensure that they kept their runanubandha only to the extent that is absolutely necessary when they were alive. When they were physically present here, because people had a variety of relationships --blood, sexual or transactional-a certain physical sameness happened. So there was a runanubandha with the person. When the person died, efforts were made to obliterate the runanubandha with this person as much as possible. That is how conscious the culture has been.
If there are too many puddles of strong memory, it will also trouble the dead. Close relatives, particularly if they had very loving relationships with them, will bother the dead. That is why, in this culture, when someone wanted to die, they went away to a place where they were not among family. You don't want to be with your family when you die because, till the last moment, these attachments will go on. You want to be away, alone, clearly understanding that all the relationships we have made in this world are essentially of memory. Once these memories are wiped out, no relationship exists. It is now easy to establish that dimension within us, to become conscious of that dimension which is beyond memory, which is life itself. So for the departed one, we want to shave off as much memory as possible so that their process of Liberation becomes smoother, easier, not tangled up here and there.
In some cultures, women have been traditionally prohibited from entering the cremation grounds or performing these rituals because they could be susceptible to certain undesirable influences. But if what you are doing is just a ritual in name, then women can also do it. If it is a process where genuinely something is happening where you are handling a disembodied life, then involving women in it is a little bit of an issue. There are various reasons for this. One reason was in those times a woman would be pregnant at least eight to twelve times in her lifespan. So most of the time, she would be either pregnant or breastfeeding. At such times, she should not be in such situations. Particularly when she is pregnant. Even today, this is followed-if death rituals are being performed, they don't allow pregnant women to be present there. Even if a woman is free from pregnancy and breastfeeding, she may still have her menstrual cycles, which again makes her vulnerable. This is the reason why women were kept away from cremation grounds. But if she is free from all of these situations, then there is no issue in her doing these rituals.
The Importance of Death Anniversaries
(Recognizing the needs of human beings during their lifetimes, ancient sages created a set of samskaras-rituals to purify and refine a person in order to assist one's passage through life. There are about sixty-four samskaras, but the most important of these are sixteen in number and are known as sodasa-samskaras. These samskaras start from the time of one's conception, which is to be performed by one's parents and end with post-death rites to be performed by one's descendants.)
Some of these rituals are purely for sentimental reasons, to remember the dead, acknowledge their contribution to our lives, and so on. The other is to genetically distance yourself from the ancestors or to dissolve your runanubandha with them.
One important aspect of spiritual development is that you must distance yourself from your Genetic Memory and Evolutionary Memory. If you do not distance yourself, the same things will repeat themselves. What happened in your grandfather's life may recur in your life. Maybe you are in a different time, so you look different but actually the exact same things may be happening. Maybe there is a difference in the environment they lived in and you live in. The activity they pursued and you now pursue may be different. So, on the surface, people think everything is different. But, experientially, the same thing may be happening because it will repeat itself. You will become a cyclical process. You will not be a fresh life. When you are not a fresh life, there is no question of release. There is no question of going beyond, there is no question of exploring something else. So the most important reason these anniversary rituals are done in India is not for remembrance but to distance yourself from your ancestors. You want to distance yourself from the dead.
Of Heaven and Hell
There is a beautiful story in Yogic lore: There was a yogi who was over eighty-four years old and he started going about declaring to other yogis around him, 'You know, I am going to die and go to heaven shortly.' This whole thing amused the other yogis. One day, they stopped him and asked, 'How do you know that you are going to heaven? Do you know what is on God's mind?' So the yogi replied, 'I don't care what is on God's mind; I know what is on my mind.' Yoga gives you the technology to make yourself pleasant whatever the ambience may be. That is all he was trying to say. Both hell and heaven are still part of the duality. What we refer to as Liberation is total dissolution. You neither go here nor there. You don't go anywhere because you just dissolve. This is why, for a spiritual seeker, neither God nor heaven is the mukti or Liberation is.
Ch.9
Of Grief and Mourning.
The Essential Nature of Grief
You must understand that your grief is not because someone died. One life going away does not mean anything to you. Every day, thousands of people go away. Why the world, even in your own city so many people are dying, so many people are attending funerals, so many people are in grief. And yet that does not affect you. It does not leave a vacuum in you. You are still partying in the same city. The problem is, this particular life going away leaves a vacuum in your life. Essentially, you grieve because someone who in many ways was a part of your life is gone. So one part of your life has become empty and you are not able to handle that emptiness.
Your problem is that this particular death leaves you incomplete. You built your life around someone, you made plans in your mind I am going to get married to this person, I am going to have two children, I am going to make these children do this and that, and so on. But now, when this person vanished from your life, suddenly, all those dreams are shattered. You don't know what to do with yourself. You are disillusioned. If you are disillusioned, that means your illusions have been destroyed. When your illusions are destroyed, the Maya is gone--this is the time to arrive at reality. Unfortunately, most people make this into a very painful and destructive process within themselves.
If you had experienced this life the way it is, then nothing would leave a hole in you because this is a complete life. Then you would not fill this with up your profession or your car or your house or your family or something. This life can interact, relate to, be with and include so many things. But still, by itself, it is a complete life. This is the way it is. If this is the experience and state you are in, then whether you lose your job, your money or someone who is dear to you, you will not grieve.
Does it mean you will have no feeling for the departed ones at all? No, you will have immense love for them. Right now, when they are here, a little bit of a problem always exists between two people. However dear and close they are to you, if you stay too close to them for more than four to six hours, you want to get away for a bit. You just make an excuse and go and sit in the bathroom at least! You need some excuse to get away from them, however close and wonderful they are.
Now you have known many things together, done many intimate things -- many wonderful things have happened between two people. But as long as they were alive, you hold some small point or the other against them and resist. Now, those small points of resistance have evaporated with death. Now, there is no problem; they will not speak, they will not argue with you, they will not disagree with you. You must see only the wonderful side of who they were. They had problems all right; they had a nasty side to them. But all those things are only because they had a mind and body. So if someone passes away, you should be completely overwhelmed with love. But, unfortunately, you become filled with grief. Grief is a crippling force because it leaves a big hole in you. Then you don't know what to do next because you have not experienced life the way it is.
Going beyond Grief
how do we go beyond the grief? When we talk about going beyond something, it is not about forgetting about it. You cannot forget your child. You cannot tell yourself, 'It is all right, it is all natural.' You cannot. It is true that something that is very to you, something that means a lot to you is gone. But the fact of life is that when something slips beyond the realm of what you call as life right now, once it crosses that boundary, it is not yours any more.
You must understand that your connection with people is very physical. Some connections are not physical, but for almost 99.99 per cent of the people, their connections with other people are all physical. Someone is your mother, someone is your father, someone is your husband, someone is your brother, or someone is your wife -- all because of the physical. You may have emotions attached to it, but emotions don't mean anything on an existential plane. If I just wipe your memory out, your emotions will be forgotten. You give it enormous importance but it is very much on the surface. Even your deepest connection is physical.
Now, your brother or friend or child or parent or whoever died, when they were alive, what are the things that you knew about them? Their body was familiar to you. They may have revealed some parts of their mind to you. Even that they would not have revealed completely to you -- don't have such illusions. They would have revealed some aspects of their emotions to you. They did not reveal anything else to you. Now, when they died, they did not carry their body and go. So one major part of familiarity is finished. Whatever the content of their mind, the memory of who you are and who they are was also left behind. Once someone leaves their body, whether you like it or not, they have nothing to do with you any more. You can sit here alive and still think someone is your brother. But for the one who has left the body, there is no brother, sister, father, mother--he or she has gone beyond that. Only when you are embodied, you have a mother, you have a father, you have a brother, you have a sister. After that, there is no such thing.
When someone dies, people think they must forsake their enmity with that person and their friendship should be nurtured. That is stupid. Someone who is dead is neither your friend nor your enemy. It is over. The business is over. You are unwilling to come to terms with it, so grief sets in. As you slowly come to terms with it, grief recedes, isn't it? Anyway, after ten years you will forget them Usually, it does not take ten years but even if it takes ten years, after ten years you will eat well, you will laugh, you will make merry, you will do everything. I am saying maintain eleven days of mourning and after that, you do all that, what is the problem? Somewhere people feel guilty that they are still alive when someone has died. But you will also die. You have to wait. This seems like a very brutal approach, but that is the fact of life.
When death happens, it is time to look back and cherish what has been, and it is time to accept it and look at what you can do with the life that is here. Right now, let us say, your son or daughter or grandson or someone who was very dear to you passed away. Instead of sitting and making a wreck of yourself, why don't you look around you? There are so many other sons and daughters and grandsons who have no one to care for them. There is enough opportunity for you to express this love and care in a million different ways. There is so much life around you which needs this care and you have a need to find expression to this love and care in you, so please do that. If you don't do that, your grief will be forever. It will remain bottled and torture you for all your life. For one son that you lost, you can take up ten as your own and find full expression to your love and parenthood. You will find that it will become a foundation to make your life much more beautiful than it would be with just one son. You could make it like that. You have to take that step. Otherwise, you will simply go on with something that you cannot change.
I want you to remember that what is happening within us -- it does not matter for what reason it is happening -- is being created by us. If we are willing, we can change that too. As long as you are alive, it is important that you see how to contribute to the living because other than doing a few rituals within the stipulated time, there is nothing that you can do about the dead. Moreover, if you believe that the person you are grieving for has enriched your life, show that enrichment in how you live. If you are going to cry for the rest of your life, then it means this person is now the biggest problem in your life, isn't it? Someone entered your life and left--if they have enriched your life, you must live joyfully. Acknowledge them for whatever they have done to you, don't make it look like they poisoned your life and left.
You must understand that whatever situations happen to you in your life, you can come out of it with greater strength or you can be left broken by it. This is a choice that you have. This is a choice every human being has. We do not have a choice all the time about whether this situation should happen or not. We can influence it only to some extent but many situations will happen beyond us. But each time, we have the choice whether to go through these situations gracefully or go through these situations in a broken way. This is a choice we always have.
Articles of the Dead
However dear they were to you, however intimate they might have been with you, the moment they shed their body, their general sense of mind, intellect and emotion, which was the basis of your business with them, is finished. All the things that you knew about them are finished. Some other sap is still on, but you never had any relationship with that sap. Your relationship is with the other aspects. All those aspects were shed when that person died. So the only thing that you do when someone dies is you cherish the beautiful moments that you had with them--that is all. If there was something beautiful, you cherish that, otherwise, forget about them. Don't try to work your guilt and your problems through the dead. It can become very complicated.
When a person died, all the clothes that were closely in touch with that person's body were burned. They were never kept. The clothes that the person occasionally wore were given only to a blood relative, no one else. And even in such an instance, the clothes were not worn for the first year. These things were done because a certain amount of our energy gets into whatever we are in touch with. If you give it a certain kind of opportunity, these clothes will start behaving funnily. Your grandmother need not come, these clothes will start acting funny by themselves. You are familiar with static where clothes gather electric charges by being in contact with certain substances. Similarly, whatever is in close association with your body will get a certain amount of your quality.
There have been instances where things actually moved around. Especially the things that they intimately used they start moving around here and there by themselves. It is not that this person has come and moved things. It is just that the energy that was associated with those objects is sort of withdrawing. In the process of withdrawal, there will be a little bit of extra movement. It is like when you switch off your car engine, when it is just dying down, it makes a little extra shake in the car. It is stopping, so actually it should recede, but that is not what happens. Similarly, when life shifts from one mode to another, there will be a little extra reverberation. That extra shake is mistaken to be ghosts walking all over the place.
Empathetic Death
This happens with some birds, it also happens with animals and human beings: if they were a couple or were very close, when one of them dies, within three to six months, the other will also die. One reason why this happened is because in India, when people were married, their energies were bound together in a certain way. This was at a time in this country when tradition did not allow separation. At that time, people took the liberty of tying them up at the level of the energy because anyway the couple would not separate. These things are not to be done just like that.
You may know this: in India, traditionally, women were required to wear toe rings after marriage. In Tamil Nadu, it is called metti. This is because marriage was supposed to be such a huge experience for the woman that there was a possibility that she would leave the body. Usually, they were married off at the age of eight or ten. The husband and wife would live separately and would not see each other till they were fourteen or fifteen. During this period, while the boy was physiologically and psychologically trained and conditioned to protect this person who is dedicated to him, the girl (being more emotionally competent) was emotionally and psychologically conditioned to believe that her husband was her God. This possibility was built up in her mind. Only when she was physically mature, she was brought to the marital home. So when she comes and meets her husband, it would be such a huge experience for her that her life would explode within her. At that time, it was possible that she could slip out of the body. To prevent this, they put some metal on the girl's body, in the form of metti. Wearing metal on the body always prevents such an accident. This is also done when we put people through certain types of sadhana. They are given a metal ring or bracelet or some ornament like that. They are not supposed to remove it without the permission of the Guru. This is to prevent them from accidentally slipping out of the body.
When a woman got married, she wore something called mangalsutra around her neck. Mangal means auspicious, sutra means thread. The mangalsutra is an energy thread which you are supposed to replace every year. Someone who knows what it is gives you a live mangalsutra, which matches the energies of the husband and wife in such a way that they are not just bound in body, mind and emotion, they are bound as two lives as well. It is like, if you have the right kind of sutra, your kite will fly well. Similarly, the mangalsutra was to make your marriage more purposeful and successful. But today people wear thick gold chains which cannot be replaced in place of the mangalsutra. That sutra was to make you fly in marriage, but this gold chain is a symbol of slavery. Unfortunately, this is the shift that has happened.
In those days, people understood that in a marriage, how the bodies, minds and emotions matched was not important. What was important was that two lives were entwined so that there was a kind of bonding. For this, they employed many tools. Many couples would have never spoken to each other before the marriage, but when married in this manner, their marriage created a bonding which was inexplicable because marriage was a scientific process of binding two lives in such a way that there was no question of incompatibility. It did not matter even if you married a devil. You still bonded and felt ecstatic within you, simply because of the union within yourself and not because of what the other person was doing. When you are like this, what your husband or wife did was immaterial. Just the way you were was an explosive experience. As human experience is 100 per cent from within, one could touch the peaks of life irrespective of the quality of one's partner.
Since marriage was done this way, when one person left many times, the other person also left in a short time after that. Today there is statistical evidence of a disproportionate number of spouses dying within six months of each other, but this is more because of the disruption of life than any other reason. Let us say, a couple lives to their old age. When one of them dies, because we have all moved from living as large joint families to nuclear families, often, there is no one left to care for the survivor. Now, because of this disruption in their life, the wish to die becomes very strong in them. While they were both alive, though both were ambling around, they were there for each other. When one person dies, the other person just wants to go because there is usually no other support, unless they are living with the children who are very loving and taking care of them. One life following another in death is not necessarily because of loss of companionship or emotional debacle. Two lives that lived in tandem, that were tied together energetically, tend to dismantle in response. This does not at the level of thought; it is deeper than that.
("Gnanam, Dhyanam, Anandam!" Gnanam is awareness about the truth. Dhyanam is meditativeness. Anandam is blissfulness, which is a consequence of the two. Really, these things are not simply slogans. They can change the world!
In India, if someone died in a certain way, people recognized that there was a benefit in preserving that place and wanted to make the energies they left behind available to people.
There are many more such places in India. Some are maintained with some reverence, but most are anonymous and unkempt. If you want to experience such an energy on a much larger scale, more multidimensional, you must go up to the Seventh Hill of the Velliangiri Mountains. Sadhguru Sri Brahma left his body there through all the seven chakras. So the place is explosive in terms of energy even today. It is something one must experience. It is a tremendous dimension and possibility.)
Pyramids work because of their geometry. Even if you make a paper pyramid whose angles are exactly 51.5 degrees on all the four sides and on the top, it will work. You can place a vegetable inside it and you will see that what would normally rot in about three days will still not have rotted even after three weeks. It would have shrunk, shrivelled out, but not rotted. This is because if you create a pyramidal form, Vyana Vayu gets trapped there naturally. Vyana Vayu is in charge of the preservative function of the body. So something can be preserved for a long time, if you can hold it. This is how mummies were preserved for thousands of years.
Part 3: Life after death
Ch.10
The Life of a Ghost
In a way, everyone is a ghost. Whether you are a ghost with the body or without a body is the only question.
What are ghosts actually? All beings are a combination of time, memory and energy. Of the three, time is not in your hands, but how you live your life will determine how much memory and energy you gather or dissipate. Let us say, with lots of activity and a certain focus you use up a lot of memory---the Prarabdha Karma part of it---very quickly. Now, if you, are unable to open the warehouse of Sanchita Karma, then you may have an untimely death, because the energy is still intense but you have run out of memory. Once you run out of memory, you can either die or become vegetative. But generally you will die, because if memory collapses, there are many things which cannot function. However, if your energy runs out and memory is still there, then too you will die, but you will continue to exist as what we call a ghost.
A ghost has a manifestation but because there is not enough energy to keep the physical body integrated and keep it going, the body is gone. But its memory body is still strong, strong enough to be felt by other people. In a way, you can say, everyone is a ghost. Whether you are a ghost with a body or without a body-- whether you are an embodied ghost or disembodied ghost--is the only question. And all beings, embodied or disembodied, are playing out their lives only as per their karmic structures. The only difference is that when you are embodied, there is more possibility of using your will. That is all.
What you call ghosts are those beings who left their body, usually, in an unnatural way. They had strong Prarabdha Karma left unfinished, but they died either because of an accident, a disease, a suicide or murder. Somehow, the body broke so much that it could not sustain life any more. Such beings will have a denser presence and their tendencies are very strong. They are active in a certain way so you can feel them or even see them more easily. Existence in the form of a ghost or the life of a ghost---if you want to call it that---is considered undesirable because it can unnecessarily extend for a long time. Let us say, this person who has died had some amount of unfinished Prarabdha Karma when they died. If they were in the physical body, maybe their Prarabdha Karma would have lasted for another twenty years. Now that there is no physical body, the dissolution of karma is only by tendency, not by conscious action. As a result, the lifespan may last for 200 or 2000 years instead of lasting for twenty years.
The English word 'ghost' is a crude and generic term that bundles all disembodied beings in the same category. But they are very varied in terms of where they came from, what they are capable of where they are going. There are some who lost their bodies before they ran down their Prarabdha Karma and are hanging around. Then there are yogis without bodies who are wandering, always looking for a possibility for their dissolution. Then there are celestial beings who are on a vacation. Some others are of a completely different dimension and have no relevance to your life. Then there are certain forces which people generally refer to as Divine Forces, which can take on almost any form they wish. So there are actually a variety of things and you cannot bundle them all together.
Just to be able to classify these things, to be able to recognize one from the other is a serious amount of work. Traditionally, different levels of bodiless existence are referred to as bhoota, preta, pisachi, chaudi, yakshas, kinnara, gandharva, deva, and so on. They are at different evolutionary levels, or we can say they are on different types of vacations. Someone is in the first class, someone is in the second class, someone is in another class, while someone else is in a bad condition, which you call hell. Essentially, they are all on some type of but their vacation will end sometime and they will take on another physical body. No one remains a bhoota or a preta or a yaksha or a gandharva or even a deva forever. He or she enjoys or suffers it for a certain time and then takes on a physical form again.
There is such a deep sense of pain in many parts of region, which will play out in human lives whether we are conscious of it or not. If a rock can suffer, a human being for sure will not be spared. Untold suffering will simply happen without any reason. When there are puddles of pain imprinted in the Earth on which you live upon, you will never know what true well-being is in your life. You may build a big house but you will not know a moment of rest in your life. When the Earth that you walk upon is in such a state, if you don't know how to take care of the material which makes you, you will never know even one moment of well-being in your life.
When death knocks on your door, your life will be focused and naturally, you turn inward, because the outward is of no use any more. When people are approaching death, their personality drops and the pretensions that they carry on with the external will become unimportant.
Ch. 11
The Riddle of Reincarnation
Right now, most people are not even able to handle what is happening in this life, so why do they want to dig into their previous lives? They don't know how to handle the thoughts, emotions and relationships of this life. How will they handle the thoughts, emotions and relationships of many lives?
Taking on a New Body
During pregnancy, there are many signs which clearly indicate whether life has entered the womb or not. A mother can easily feel this if we train her a little bit. If life has not entered the womb after forty-eight days of conception, then something a little extraordinary is going to happen with that child, for sure. There is no question about it. You must have heard that someone saw Gautama's mother and said, 'You are going to deliver a phenomenal being.' Such things can be foretold simply because someone may notice that life has not entered the womb after forty- eight days of conception but a little later than that. That is the sign of a phenomenal being arriving. It is because of certain qualities that it guards the womb but does not enter it. It will wait for the body to develop a little more and only then enter.
This sort of situation can leave a mother in a certain state of distress or a fundamental level of discomfort. This is not a physical lack of comfort but a sort of existential anxiety. Between forty-five to sixty-five days into the pregnancy, if you notice tears welling up for no particular reason beyond normal maternal emotions or see flashes of bright-blue colour off and on or dreams of snakes in a very benign way, this means a sage or a sorcerer or a great conqueror is on the way. When such signs are noticed, various processes to transform the yet-to-be-born are done. A sage or sorcerer or conqueror means a certain level of competence or capability. The difference is only of intent. Towards what purpose one will use their competence makes all the difference. This is why many efforts are made to establish an all-inclusive intent the moment pregnancy has occurred, as it is definitely our responsibility as to what sort of life we bring into the world and what level of consciousness we release when that life departs this world.
Once it has found that body, it is the vibrancy of the prana of that being which enhances the quality of the physical body. From this point onwards, it is not just the mother who is making the baby. This is why, there are millions of instances where probably the mother is weak, undernourished, on the street and yet she delivers a very healthy baby. But there may be someone else who is in a family where everything is taken care of and everyone is very well-fed, but the mother may give birth to a very fragile child. This the pranic substance, the pranic vibrancy of the being acting upon that particular body. Accordingly, the new life takes a new physical body.
The chakras also start developing gradually in the womb. Somewhere around the twelfth week, only one chakra is formed, which is the Muladhara Chakra. Within the first twenty-eight to thirty weeks, depending upon. the developmental quality of the foetus, the first five chakras up to Vishuddhi Chakra are fully established. The other two--Agna Chakra and Sahasrara chakra do not establish to the same extent in every human being, I would say, in nearly 30-35 per cent of newborn infants, the Agna Chakra may not be developed. If you observe the way their eyeballs move, you will know whether an infant's Agna Chakra is established or not. This is why the moment a child is born, the first thing they do in this culture after washing the baby is to put a little bit of vibhuti between the eyebrows. In Tamil Nadu, they make a large coin-sized spot by applying the resin of a particular tree in between the eyebrows. As it dries, this resin draws the skin around it and creates a strong sensation towards the spot in the middle of the eyebrows. This is just in case the Agna Chakra is not yet developed, we want the child to start focusing in that direction.
Traditionally, by just looking at the eyeball movement, people could say if the infant would become a sage. A sage need not necessarily mean someone who will go and sit in the jungle or a cave. A sage of a seer is someone who sees things that others do not see. It could also be a visionary business person or a visionary leader --- someone who sees things more clearly than others. This does not mean that those whose Agna Chakra is not developed at birth cannot develop it in their lifetime they can if they work on it. But they will need to do a little more work than others.
The Sahasrara Chakra generally is not developed for most at the time of birth. That slowly evolves thereafter. As mentioned before, on the top of the head, there is a spot known as brahmarandhra. Randhra is a Sanskrit word; it means a passage, like a small hole or a tunnel. This is the space in the body through which life descends into the foetus. When a child is born, there is a tender spot where the bone does not form until the child grows to a certain age. This is because the life process has the awareness to keep its options open about whether this body is capable of sustaining it or not. So it keeps that trapdoor open for a certain period, so that just in case it finds the body unsuitable for its existence, it can leave. It does not want to leave from any other passage in the body; it wants to leave the way it came, just as a good guest always arrives through the front door and goes out of the front door. Even when you leave one day, if you leave consciously through whichever part of the body, it is fine. But if you can leave through the brahmarandhra, it is the best way to leave.
The Arithmetic of Reincarnation
One of the first questions people have about reincarnation is that if the world population is increasing, are more animals becoming human? Is this the reason that animal populations in the world have come down in the recent past? Is the population of the world---animal and human put together--a fixed number? These questions come from the ignorance of believing and thinking of Existence numerically. When you talk about life energy, it is not in terms of numbers, You cannot think in terms of, 'Okay, only one person died, but how are ten people born today?' It is not in terms of numbers like that. Numbers are only for bodies. Life does not happen in numbers. When you talk about the unbounded, there is no such arithmetic.
When you are talking of life, you are probably thinking there is a being. But what if there is no being? That is why Gautama went on saying you are anatma. This was total sacrilege for the Hindus. He said this because if it is atma, there could be any number of them. But if it is anatma, how many can there be? How many non- beings can you create? How many 'emptinesses' can you create? The question now sounds absurd. You always think in terms of numbers because it comes from the dimension of your experience, which is very limited.
In reality, if you go on producing bodies, they will get occupied anyway. Life will happen. So where will the karma come from for them? Where is the karmic substance for them? There is plenty of this substance in the Existence. In reality, if you want, this person who is sitting here right now as one person can take on a million bodies with the same karmic content that he or she has now. It is possible. There are many situations where yogis have taken up two bodies. With the same karmic substance, they took on two bodies. So the question about numbers is not a relevant question. It is a logical, mathematical, arithmetic question. But life does not happen like that.
Life is just one. Numbers are only in your mind. There is no such thing in Existence. Let us say, there is a pond full of water and you dip your bucket and take out water in it. Can you say that I have taken this particular water? It is just some water. Once again if you dip the bucket into the pond, you will get some more water. But there is no such thing as this water or that water. It is similar, with life. The fundamental life force is not in terms of numbers. Just one is enough. One can populate the whole population. What we are referring to as the being is beyond the physical. Once there is no physical, there is no boundary. For that which has no boundary, there is no one or two or ten or million. So that is not the way to think at all.
Science has been successful in cloning plant life for several decades, in recent years, It has been able to clone animals like sheep and dogs. Of late, multiple streams of research are afoot to clone the human being as well and the widespread belief is that it is just a matter of time before they succeed. How does cloning relate to the theory of karma? Where will the software for the cloned life come from?
You must understand that by cloning, all that you are doing is just producing a human body. If it is hospitable enough, if all the ingredients are there, life will occupy it. It does not matter how you produced it. But when there are so many women who are perfectly able to bear children, I don't see why billions of dollars are being wasted to do it in a laboratory. When there is a pleasurable way of creating children, you don't have to make it so obscene and ugly with all those test tubes and other things from which the baby comes out. Above all, a woman does not just give body to the child; she moulds the child when it is in her womb. Depending on how she is during the pregnancy, a whole lot of things develop for the child when it is still in the womb. Elaborate care used to be taken in this country about this, once a woman conceived. Every step of what she should do, what she should not do, how she should do it, whose face she should see, whose face she should not see--all this was regulated because everything has an influence upon the unborn child. This is because she is not only giving it a body but also moulding the consciousness of the person who is to be born. You must understand that you are manufacturing the next generation of people. How the world will be tomorrow is determined right now in your body. It is a tremendous responsibility. It needs to be handled that way.
Now, just because with technology we know how to do a few fanciful things with the outside world, we don't have to do everything we can do. This is very juvenile. This is the source of destruction on this planet. As a race, we humans have not matured mentally. We must be able to take a decision as to what to do and what not to do, based on what is needed, not on what we can do.
Exploring Past Lives
People say life is complicated. What is it that is complicated? Life by itself is not complicated. Only if you want to push the world in a certain direction, it could be a little complicated. But if you are not trying to push the world in any way, if you are just fine with whatever you are eating and drinking, where is it complicated? It is only your memory which complicates everything. Just see, there are people who are so stressed, distressed and freaked out and everything. But let us say, they get Alzheimer's disease. Now, you will see suddenly they become so simple and sweet. Life is just happening by itself.
Now, if three lifetimes or ten lifetimes of memory descend upon you, most probably, the firmament of your mind will not be able to hold, it will crack up and collapse. Even with me, the level of memory that came to me almost threw me off completely. It is that hard to handle. It is not within the capacity of the mind to absorb that kind of experiential memory. If I did not have the necessary mental fortitude, it would have broken me. So unless you have prepared for it in a certain way, you handling it is out of the question. This is why we say sadhana, sadhana and sadhana. Sadhana is not to download memories but to be able to hold the memory of this life at least in such a way that you can pick what you want and the rest of the time it does not touch you. Data is useful only when you are able to pick what you want. If it is all the time blowing in your face, how is it useful?
Right now, most people are not even able to handle what is happening in this life and the memories of this life, so why do they want to dig into their previous lives? Let us say, you realized that your neighbour's dog was your husband in your previous life, then I don't know whether you will go and kiss him or throw stones at him! Both ways, it is dangerous because he does not remember. Moreover, by throwing stones at him, you will get into trouble with your neighbour. If you kiss him, you will get into trouble with the dog. So, both ways, it is not safe for you. If the past opens up, so many emotions of love, hate, resentment and affection may happen.
When you are in a condition where you suffer even what happened ten years ago, if you remember everything that happened in the past ten lifetimes, it will drive you nuts! Why only the past ten lifetimes, if you remember everything just from this lifetime- your thoughts, emotions, experiences, what someone said when you were ten, what your friend did, what your teacher did--if all this plays in your head right now, you cannot live a normal life. If all the love, hate, resentment, affection from those lives pour into your present life, you will go insane.
Moreover, of these four things I just mentioned--love, hate, resentment, affection-you are counting two things--love and affection-as positive. Actually, all of them are negative, because all of them are happening compulsively. If I have a deep sense of resentment towards you--'I hate you, I hate you, I hate you"--you understand this is not good. But if I unnecessarily have affection towards you -- I love you, I love you, I love you'-this also is not good. Suppose we are just two people walking on the street. You don't know me, I don't know you, but I have enormous affection for you, will you like it? If I have a lot of resentment for you, you don't care. "Okay, man, you burn with your resentment. What is my problem?" But if I have too much affection for you, you will not like it.
So it is not the question of affection or resentment. This love or hate is compulsive and that is the problem. This compulsive sense of love, affection, resentment, hatred are all equally bothersome and equally entangling in nature. You should learn to respond consciously, to bring yourself to a level where your response is unbridled and seamless. You should be such that in any direction you can respond. You have no such thing as, 'to this I can respond, to that I cannot respond." You can respond to anything. Until it becomes like that, the past is a problem and the future is a problem. Both should not open up. If they open up, it will only become troublesome. What you find in the past may look like some kind of explanation for what is happening right now. But it will only entangle you deeper in terms of moving towards mukti or your Liberation.
Let us understand this. This mukti that we are talking of is not an invention of the Hindus. Mukti is the aspiration of this creature. This creature wants to become the Creation. This is mukti. Instead of being a creature of the Creation, it wants to become Creation itself. It wants to merge. This is not a Hindu idea or an Indian idea. This is the way life is. We want life to progress with a very minimal number of impediments; in that context, both compulsive love and compulsive hate are problems.
There is another way to look at it. Instead of calling it past lives and present life, look at it as different compartments of memory. That is all they are. Only because it is in your memory, it is coming out. It is not hanging out there in the sky. It is all there in the system. Suppose these compartments are breached and suddenly your Evolutionary Memory opened up-it would create havoc in your life. No need to go that far. Suppose you woke up in the morning and, let us say, the memory of the last three lifetimes opened up in you and it all become one. Right now, what happened ten years ago is in one compartment, what happened yesterday is in another compartment. So you have a short-term memory, long- term memory and all this stuff. In normal life, what happened a lifetime ago is screened. Suppose the screen broke, what happened a lifetime ago feels like it happened yesterday. Now, let us say, in your last life you were something else. Let us say, you were a woman then and now you are a man. Then when you wake up in the morning, you go to the wrong bathroom, to start with! Trouble, isn't it? Many things like this will open up and it will lead to huge levels of confusion and struggle within the human being because it is too much to handle.
What is the purpose of all this pursuit of past lives? The question is whether you want to find the cause of it, or you want to find a solution. All my lamentations are because you are looking for solutions in past lives when we are teaching you a simple process called Inner Engineering. The solution is in this. IF YOU PAY ENOUGH ATTENTION TO IT, IT HANDLES ALL OF IT. Let this one thing sink into you---JUST SEEING THAT I AM 100 PERCENT, ABSOLUTELY, ABSOLUTELY RESPONSIBLE---IT WILL HANDLE YOUR PAST, PRESENT and FUTURE. Once your ability to respond is seamless, you will know how to respond to any situation, whatever may be the cause. In fact, both the past and the future will open up in your experience. Now, if you are in such a seamless state of response, even if the past opens up, even if ten lifetimes open up, it is no problem. Even if the future opens up, it is no problem. But if you are in a selective state of response or a discriminatory state of response, then if the past opens up, it will cause one kind of problem, and if the future opens up, another kind of problem.
I know a lot of absolutely bizarre things are going on in the world about exploring one's past lives. They are just ridiculous psychological exercises. If you really want to see something of the past, you must be able to raise yourself into very heightened levels of awareness where it will cut through the memory lines. Whatever you call 'past life' is just unconscious layers of the mind in terms of memory. If you bring yourself to heightened levels of awareness, these unconscious layers of the mind, which are ruling you from within, could be broken down, could be dissolved.
We were doing something like this in Samyama. Let us say, you are sitting and meditating, after some time you are fully conscious but suddenly you find your body is beginning to slither around like a snake. You know it is happening, you want to stop it, but the body is just slithering like a snake. When you come out of meditation, you are perfectly normal. You sit for meditation, once again the body crawls. Then maybe it hops around like a bird, maybe it goes around like a dog, or a tiger or something--it may take many forms. These days we have put a nail on its head largely; only once in a way someone breaks through and goes into such firewall breach. These things happen because we open up the Evolutionary Memory. It was all working out in the form of the body. Some of the people became conscious of this memory and we had to do things to take it off from them. Suppose someone became conscious that they were a chimpanzee somewhere or fox or a hyena; if this memory comes unknowingly, you will wake up in the morning and start making all kinds of noises! Can you deal with that?
Why this is happening is because, in the unconscious layers of the mind, there are so many dimensions which you are unable to access, but which are influencing everything that you do. So if you go through a process where, with heightened levels of awareness, you bring unconscious layers of the mind into conscious states---not in terms of memory but in terms of energy and experience---you can work these things out and leave yourself completely free in a big way within yourself. In that context, it is relevant, but remembering something memory-wise is not of any consequence. It will only complicate and mess up your life.
You will have the capability to handle it only if your ability to respond is non-discriminatory and seamless. If your response is selective, then you will only multiply the karma. Suppose you realize that ten lifetimes ago I was very dear to you, then you respond to me in one way. Suppose you realize that lifetimes ago 1 will was your enemy, you will start responding differently to me. You cannot just take it away, because your ability to respond is limited. Once your ability to respond is limited, your memory is a bother and the more you open up, the more troublesome it gets. Now, if you have no such things and you will respond as is necessary right now, then even if you remember that ten lifetimes ago you knew me, it will not matter, because you will be the same way anyway. Otherwise, you will only multiply your karma if the past opens up for you.
Baby Hitler
In your society, a tyrant may be evil and a saint may be great, but existentially it could be the reverse. I am not saying it is so, but it is possible. It could be the reverse because we don't know how tortured they were within themselves. It is very much possible that a man who tortured everyone else lived well within himself, and a man who tried to do good to everyone tortured himself. But it shows how different life could be existentially from what you or the society perceives.
Now, is it possible that someone who is a human could be reborn as an animal? People have certain urges and desires. It is desire that becomes the karma. It is the volition, attitude towards life. Fundamentally, you can say it is desire. Right now, let us say, you have certain desires which are not fulfilled. Let us say, your desire was to collect a billion dollars. But you neither have the brains to earn it nor the courage or capability to rob a bank to get it. You are not made like that. So if you get ten dollars, you will save five. You will starve yourself, you will go through all kinds of difficulties to save, save and save. With this process of collecting, let us say, by the time you die, you have saved only a few million.
Now, there is a big urge within you to collect more, but you die before that with the same lust of wanting to collect. Your karma does not know what you want to collect, whether it is money or stones. What rubbish it wants to collect, it does not matter. It only knows it has to collect. It does not have the discriminatory power. It is almost like your genes. It is a subtler gene, not a physical gene. It only knows that you like to collect. So the next time, this gene may decide, 'Oh! All my Master wants is to collect. Which will be the right form for me to collect? Maybe I will become an ant or maybe I will become a bee.' You may become that, we don't know. You collect the honey, someone else eats it.
Depending on your tendencies, whatever is unfulfilled within you, you get the kind of body that is best suited to fulfil those tendencies. It need not necessarily be an animal form; it may choose that kind of human form in that kind of situation and in that kind of surroundings where it can be fulfilled. But it could be any which way.
The moment you focus your whole attention on yourself, you will see you are the source of everything that is happening here. The moment this awareness comes into you, you cannot build any more karma; it is finished. Now, you have to handle only what is stored up. It is very simple. Otherwise, you will go on emptying from one side and filling from the other side. There is no end to it. So to maintain focus on your goal and create that longing which is beyond all these limitations is the best way to ensure that Nature does not know what to do with you.
When Nature does not know what to do with you, it is good for you because you can work your things out very effortlessly. When Nature knows what to do with you, you will get put in this chamber or that chamber--the male chamber or the female chamber or the pig chamber or the cockroach chamber or some other chamber. A body is just a chamber. So if you maintain that longing which is not for this or that, Nature will not know what to do with you. It cannot push you this way or that way. It cannot make a decision on you. It gives you an advantage. That is the significance of equanimity.
Couples for Lifetimes.
Today, people want to know whether they were together in previous life because they want some special reason to hold on to. If the only way you can hold on to someone is by believing that you have been stuck together for many lifetimes, it is a horrible way to live. Don't create such horrors in your life. I am with you now because I want to be with you---this is a beautiful way to be with someone.
What happened yesterday is of no consequence, but now you are trying to create a consequence for what might have happened. This memory is crippling you. It is not allowing you to use your mind as an instrument of penetration, as an instrument to open up dimensions of life. If that is the only way you can relate to your husband or wife, what a pathetic way to relate to people! You should find value in the human being who is sitting in front of you for what he or she is now, not for what they were somewhere.
What you are right now, what you have made out of your life right now is the most significant thing. So don't waste your time and life digging into the past. Unless needed for spiritual reasons or to perform a task that would not be possible without the involvement of certain people with past associations, this dimension should not be opened up at all. Most people are unable to handle the memories, thoughts and emotions of one lifetime. So opening many will not bring well-being. For most people, their moment of Enlightenment and their moment of leaving the body is the same. When their energies reach a certer pitch, they leave the body. That moment of leaving the body is also Enlightenment for them. So unless they have a certain mastery over the mechanics of the body, and they manage to retain their body because they have some specific work to do, the question of coming back does not arise. If your objective is just Liberation, then Enlightenment and leaving the body will always be together. If you have other objectives of wanting to do something else with what freedom you have found within yourself, then there is something more to be done.
Today you may think something is the right thing to do. But tomorrow if you just start thinking in the opposite direction, at the end of that day, you can clearly come to a conclusion that this is not the best thing to do. This is the nature of thought. With thought, you can always make a mistake as it functions with very limited data. And most of the thoughts are just a mistake.
Ch 12
Final Round
We can make this life the last one for you but we cannot make this the most wonderful one. That only you have to do. For that, you must do sadhana. You must promise me that.
One Drop Spirituality
People may believe they are living well, but they are not. They live in good homes, drive good cars, wear good clothes, but they think they are living well because they look at other people who don't have the same things and feel happy about it. This is not living well. This is a sick life. They feel happy by comparing themselves with someone who is not doing as well as them. This is all the joy most people have in their life. So I don't call that as living well.
For me, living well is if you are able to sit here in such a way that nothing matters; whether you have something or not, even whether there is food to eat or not, it does not matter to you. You are just fine. It is not that you are incapable of earning your food and other things, but that does not decide who you are right now. What kind of garment you are wearing does not decide who you are right now. What kind of house you are living in does not decide who you are right now. How someone else treats you does not decide who you are right now. What someone says to you does not decide who you are right now. How you are looked up to or looked down upon does not decide who are right now. If you are like this, you are living well for sure. Wherever you sit, your experience of life will be beautiful.
I felt we should impart at least a simple spiritual process which can be imparted in a few minutes so that people can handle at least one moment of their life sensibly, wonderfully. My dream is still that people should live blissfully--it is possible. But, you know, many of them have given up, many of them are diehard miserable people. Do what you want, they are determined; they want to invest in their miseries. So now I am beginning to think, 'Okay, if we cannot teach everyone how to live blissfully, at least they must be able to die well.' It is a horrible compromise,
I thought I would never do this in my life, but you know I am getting practical. I am coming to terms with this reality because between possibility and reality there is a distance that not everyone is willing to walk. And unless someone is willing, there is no way you are going to do this.
The spiritual process is about helping people to die well, not only to help people to live well. Helping people to die well does not mean assisting them to die as euthanasia supporters advocate. Helping people to die means helping people to manage the moment of passing from physicality to beyond, from being embodied to being disembodied, in utmost awareness and grace. If one wants to exercise this choice by oneself, a certain amount of preparation is needed. There are many methods to cultivate this awareness in life so that when the moment of death comes, it will carry you through in grace. But otherwise we can create that moment for every human being if that human being is willing to cooperate and willing to pay some attention to themselves now.
This is how most of the initiations were done in the past. A yogi would sit in one place and initiate people like this. What happened? Nothing. Someone may argue, 'Nothing happened in my life. It does not matter. When that moment of passing approached, it would come into play. It is not that we have also not done this. We have, but not actively so. Now we want to do it actively on a massive scale so that there will be something in everyone's life. If it does not play up right now, at least when that moment approaches, it will play up, for sure.
Is it possible that they will be liberated? Someone being liberated for good is possible only when someone has run the full course of prarabdha. Now when everything is over, they are in a certain space where there is a karmic break. There are many people who die of old age; they may have lived as utter fools, but in the final few days, suddenly, there is a new sense of wisdom within them, a new sense of awareness about them because their karma allotment has finished,' Just the minor things are left and the next quota of karma has not come in yet, so that is a blessed period. Even for a person who lived an ignorant life, you will see that suddenly they know, 'In the next three days I will die.' Such people can be dissolved very easily because they have come to that blessed state where there is no karmic burden. There is a stock somewhere else, but here there is a little space of no karma. We can help them die consciously rather than in an unconscious state. If there is a conducive atmosphere, dissolution is possible. They can be liberated. But when they die of disease before the Prarabdha Karma is complete, if one tries to dissolve them, it is not going to work. Nor will I do such a thing. All we can do for them is help them to die with awareness; then they will have a little enhanced life somewhere else.
Once You Made a Mistake of...
When death comes knocking, you will be hopeless. When death comes knocking, all of a sudden, you will find this body does not mean anything. All your qualifications will not mean anything. Your husband, wife and children will not mean anything. Your fancy clothes will not mean anything. You will be hopeless. Like a vulture, I will wait for that moment, because, then, you will become willing. But if you are intelligent, if you have any sense in you, you will create that willingness right now.
Those who have given themselves totally to me, even for a single moment, they do not have to worry about their Liberation. Liberation is assured. To live gracefully or not, that is not assured. That is that you have to earn, but Liberation is assured. So how does this work? One common word which has always been prevalent in the spiritual arena of the East is the word Maya. We don't use it, but it is a fantastic word. It says exactly what we want to say, but it has been so horribly abused over time that we generally refuse to use it. Maya means that the way you are existing right now, your perception and understanding of life, is illusory. The most essential part of this illusion is your idea of you as a being or an individual. It is illusory. Now, if I asked you, 'Are you connected to the Earth?' you say, 'Yes.' It is not true. It is true, but not true in your experience. It is true, not because you are plugged into the Earth, but because you are a piece of the Earth. But because of your inability to drop the illusory idea that you are only connected to the Earth and not a piece of the Earth itself --- you exist as an individual.
At the Isha Yoga Center, the reason why all the brahmacharis are with heads shaved, all wearing the same clothes is because if they turn around, they should not know whether this is them or that is them. But even in the little things, like the way they apply the vibhuti on their foreheads, they want to do it in their own style, even though everything else is the same. In the process of living in the world, everyone is constantly trying to strengthen their fences, strengthen their boundaries. Brahmacharya means you are on the path of the Divine. What is the way of the Divine? The way of the Divine is that there is no individuality. It is a universal process. So if you sit here even for a moment, without strengthening your boundaries, it would be fantastic. You cannot do that with a tree. But you could easily do that with me, for various reasons. Nothing is wrong with a tree, but because neither the tree nor you are conscious, and two unconscious entities cannot come together, they will always remain two separate bubbles of their own, even though the atmospheric transfer between the two is happening.
So this illusion that you are a separate entity is a big problem. The idea of sitting with a Guru is that you sit without boundaries. If you simply sit, it will happen. So I said if you sit with me for even one moment, if you can be with me totally, then it is done. It could have happened in the form of an initiation or it could have just happened because of a look. It can happen even when they have never ever seen me but they just heard about me. There are many people like that. They have not even seen me physically. By just seeing a picture, they opened up. Any number of people have experienced this.
The whole process of being with something means just this, that you did not fix your boundaries for a moment. If you can do it for a day that you did not fix any boundaries, you are simply here we will worship you because that which does not have boundaries is Divine. So not a whole day, if you have experienced this state without boundaries for even one moment, there will be no more rebirth for you.
I avoid saying certain things because I am afraid that you may turn lazy tomorrow morning. But if you have for one moment- not for hours and days---just for one moment if you have really been with me, this is your last life. But with this assurance, I don't want you to turn lazy. Your last life should also be the most wonderful one. We can make this life the last one for you, but we cannot make this the most wonderful one. That only you have to do. For that, you must do sadhana. You must promise me that.
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