Category: Notes

1. Relaxation does not mean to do nothing. The Hindi word for rest or relaxation is ‘aaram’. Aa-Ram. In Gujarati, the word for play is ‘Ram’. So relaxation means to be at play. To not be in fear, in anger. Play with the mind but don’t believe it. Know that it’s all an illusion. To play is to be a master. If you’re afraid or angry in a situation, you’ve become a slave.
2. All inner disturbance is only because we do not want to see our true intentions. Instead, we constantly throw it out on the other person.
3. In every communication, there are two people – the one who communicates and the one communicated to. But the true purpose of communication is to make the two one. To make duality non-dual. The very essence of duality is communication. And using communication, one can fuse duality and become one.

   This communication does not move externally to the person outside, but moves inwards towards the source. In our world, communication goes outwards – we don’t know where it comes from but we see the target outside. However, the source of right & wrong, good & bad, the mechanism that’s working to create it is something we can’t see.

4. As long as you believe you have a right to something, you will never open up, never been in awe, never have wonder, never feel gratitude. And because rights are never fulfilled, we are always in desire and always fixated on the other to feel secure.

   In reality, we have only one right – the right to go back home.

5. We are not meant to relax on the surface. We have to be in constant tension until we reach the deepest relaxation. Be watchful inside of both sides – the one who wants to relax and the other who wants to hold on. Pay attention to both. Attention is the point, literally.
6. When energy is dispersed, there is creation of time and space. When attention is held on the singular, space disappears. And when there is no space to traverse, there is no time. When there is no time, there is no you. So, how do we hold onto the singular? Stare naked. At everything. More on this later.
7. To be certain, one has to stand alone. There can be no certainty in a crowd.
8. Growing Up means to finally become real. To destroy the pretty pictures we have painted about ourselves. And no one can grow up without destroying the lies that one has created about oneself.
9. If we have no certainty of life & death, how can we be certain of anything in between?
10. The concept or image that a teacher should be a socially correct person always comes between the student and the teaching. That image has to be destroyed. Otherwise, we shoot the messenger.
11. Fear/Doubt is our guiding light home. And anger is our fuel. To learn how to start using the two, practise in your daily life.

    E.g. You go to a shop and are told that a product costs a certain amount. You doubt that this can be the cheapest price you can get. You think you could get it for cheaper somewhere else. So, you fear paying more for it.

    What should you do? Buy the product anyway and now, start doubting this doubt. Ask yourself what does ‘cheaper’ really mean. Or the concept of luxury. Start doubting your own mind. And when you do find out that that product was really cheaper somewhere else, observe the anger. Observe how you feel cheated. And after this, look at the many people inside you whom you must now answer to for the extra money paid. Observe whether you really were trying to save money or being subservient to a collective within you. Observe your hidden agenda, your hidden motives. Observe whether you were really angry or was the anger being used to hide the fear behind?

    Do the above and whatever else possible to begin doubting and observing your own mind. Begin getting angry at your own mind. Look at the fear governing all our patterns. Do this in daily life.

12. Why do fasts not last? Because the same personality that we’re supposed to be fasting from is supposedly committing to the fast. How can this ever work? Do you understand this?

    It is said – ‘Any fool can fast but it takes a wise man to end his fast well.’ What does this actually mean? A fast cannot be broken. Only after a complete transformation takes place – when the one who began the fast is no longer present, when he has been completely obliterated and no traces of him remain in the universe – only then is the fast broken. Only when the fool becomes the wise man is the fast broken.

    Fasting is not about not eating food or taking an oath not to talk. Fasting is a cessation of the personality. Fasting is not a new activity. It’s a cessation of the old. If you don’t understand this, you’ll keep trying to do something new.

13.  The stronger the environment for our trait to flourish, the greater the desire not to break away from that particular pattern.
14. We feel safe practising what we’ve grown up with. Without it, we feel extremely threatened.
15. Observation can happen only when there is separation between you and the conflict.

    So, pause for a few moments. Do the Gayatri Mantra to the 3SRB rhythm for 20 minutes daily.

    The things closest to you get distorted the most.

    Take a daily inventory. Every night, before sleeping, hold your attention on the day’s events. Don’t think about the events. Simply see them in your mind without the usual justifications and the rationalizations. Observe what feelings they actually evoke without the justifications. Feel these feelings. There will always be an automatic justification and rationalization happening. Keep feeling the feelings and being impartial, keep watching the event and also the efforts of the system to distort the event in some way. Observe the various ways in which the system wants to remember or register a difference in the event than what had actually happened. Observe how it wants to blame and not take responsibility. If it takes responsibility, observe the pleasure or sadness it feels in doing so.

    Go to the next layer of every feeling, of every observation. Do not take in anything at face value. (With others, always take everything at face value). Keep practising daily for the rest of your life. Increase duration of practise from nightly to every few hours and then to every hour and then to after every few minutes. Soon, you will come to living.

16. Wherever we are threatened, feel attacked; know that we are in the animal state. Wherever there’s a blame, we’re animals.
17. Before the conscience can start pointing inwards, we start blaming outside. Take a pause. This pause is NOT about thinking, of reflecting or understanding, of knowing, of feeling, of doing. It really is a PAUSE in and of all that is happening. It is the cessation of all inner chatter and within this brief stoppage, more is revealed. Take a pause.

     

In any gathering of people (such as a meeting or any conversation), keep the following (not in any particular order) in mind:

a) Know your pattern. Showing off is the biggest pattern we have. (What do you think taking birth is all about? Changing form from the subtle to the gross, becoming visible.) Don’t deny this, don’t plead ignorance – struggle with it and work hard to break this pattern. Open your mouth only if it is to say something that contributes to the conversation.

b) Everyone, literally everyone, actually believes that their idea will benefit everyone else and serve the greater good. Check this before you think that what you had to say is actually a real contribution.

c) Keep the purpose of the meeting in your mind’s eye. Stay focused on the agenda of the moment, what purpose has to be fulfilled. Don’t go on tangents. Come prepared – know what your pattern is.

d) Be precise and concise. The more words you use, the more you blow your trumpet. Verbalize your stuff in your mind first. Keep repeating the same sentence at least 10 times in your mind before you utter it externally. (There’s just one letter missing between utter and gutter.) If, after repeating it 10 times internally, in all honesty, if it still feels (listen to the feeling) that you should go ahead and say it, then say it.

e) Be inclusive. Have an open mind. Take everyone into consideration. Watch yourself falling for the usual stuff of following the leader in the pack and putting down the weaker ones. Go against the powerful and stand up for the underdog. This is not being stated here because it’s very noble to do so, it’s just that you will learn to face your fears and you will discover more about yourself. And the journey back home is through discovery of the real self. And of course, Home is the Real Self. Is there anything more noble than this journey and the destination?

f) When you meet someone, focus on what you try to hide. Therefore, begin to show all sides of yourself. Also, when you don’t show, you forget it yourself. (It will take more work later so better do it now.) We see only a small part of others and ourselves because of limited vision. And the condemnation that comes from us when we see a person’s other sides is what makes us hide ourselves as well because of the fear of that same condemnation.

g) We can’t relate to the other because we can’t relate to ourselves. We eat each other’s energy instead. We see only a part of a person and then, when we see another side, we act surprised and feel the other person was hiding it from us. But it is always us who don’t see the other facets of a person because they don’t fit into our pattern of thinking. Ask yourself – How is it even possible for humans to be different from each other? How can anyone be ‘special’? And isn’t the want to be special the most common? Isn’t it hilarious?

h) Our understanding of the other is based on our understanding of oneself. Understand this – it is our picture projected onto others. It cannot be otherwise. We can’t relate to the other because we focus on the content. We listen to their content so that when it’s our turn, we can talk to our unfulfilled heart’s content. And contentment never happens.

i) In the conversation, make your statements without your usual patterns of voice modulation, facial gestures, eye, hand and body movements. If you feel you will suffocate without these, then make new patterns.

j) Being childish means denying our patterns. Growing up means to become real, to become responsible, to not hide. Every moment, we seek validation for the belief that ‘I am right’. As if you actually created this idea that you hold on to so dearly. As if you can actually create anything. Anything. Be it your own body, your voice, an action, an attitude, the sky, water, the earth, a tree, a thought, a feeling, an animal, a toy, a painting, music, the whole universe – anything. So, grow up.

Get out of yourself and try to find the One who can show you how not to hide, how not to lie. It may take the rest of your life to find that One, but there is no nobler cause and no other way.

1. In any pair of opposites, there is a tension. Picture a line running through the center of a circle. There is a split – positive & negative, male & female etc. But the tension is not in either of those areas, it only seems to be so. The tension is in the split because that division is what holds the two sides together. That split is what creates the two ‘sides’ in the first place. In the world, we call this split guilt and shame.Therefore, where there is division, there is tension. Everything in the universe longs for completion. And the truth is, it is already complete. It only wants to end the lie by removing the layers of falseness that keeps itself infinitely divided.
2. We keep looking to take something from everyone because we haven’t found ourselves.
3. Excitement is actually fear that I won’t get what I want.
4. If you see the similarity in everything, you will see God in everything. But we believe everything we encounter is different – a different day, a different person, a different experience. We don’t want to see the similarity. This is how we deceive ourselves.
5. When we keep lying about something long enough, we begin to believe it is the truth.
6. We take the pattern of feeling ashamed, hiding and lying about somebody else’s faults (e.g. parents) in our childhood and make it ours. We start to believe it’s our pattern. If we dig back into our childhoods and see how we deceived and lied, we will be able to know the entire spectrum of the lie. We will know the lie is not of this moment, but of the past. And yet, we repeat it out of habit. It has nothing to do with our present.
7. We don’t know the truth. Not yet. But we can start eliminating our lies and what is left behind will be the truth.
8. Deception starts with the self. Only if you mislead yourself can you mislead others.
9. We make self-pity, sadness our own, when it is not. We hold on to this sadness because of self-importance, to feel entitled to so-called happiness. Pain and pleasure are tightly connected.
10. We are so deep into the recognition of the familiar, that the unfamiliar is greeted with fear. We don’t want to face the unfamiliar. But if we could go past the fear and dive into the unfamiliar, we would find that this so-called unfamiliar is actually more familiar than what we call familiar now.
11. As long as we identify with the unreal, the transient, we will never be fulfilled. Fulfillment is an attribute of the real, the permanent.
12. What you can change, change. What you can’t change, you will find are boons given to you to understand yourself better.
13. Always look for the third option in a situation. We only have two ways of looking at things – black or white, negative or positive, expression or suppression – and we struggle between the two. To struggle is to control. Control is expression/suppression. Life itself is an expression of suppression.When something is suppressed, it has gathered momentum to express. Likewise, when something is expressed, it gathers momentum to suppress. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And the moment we express/suppress it, we feel happiness, fear, anger, regret, etc. This is excitement. And in excitement, we are always off the mark. Wikipedia states that the word ‘Sin’ in Hebrew originates in archery and means ‘to miss the ‘Gold’ at the centre of a target but hitting the target’. To miss the mark, the core point is Sin

    The third option is to relax. That’s the opposite of expression/suppression. And it doesn’t mean to indulge.

14.  We condemn a certain trait in others until we see it in ourselves. And since we’re incapable of condemning ourselves (not to be confused with guilt or shame or regret), after this point we no longer condemn that trait in others. This is what the world calls acceptance.
15. The biggest high you can get is by being yourself.
16. In order to not be stupid, one has to understand the deeper meaning of words, from the root upwards. Go deeper in the word through sight and sound. Eventually, if your everyday language begins to sound alien to you and you begin to look for the meaning of each and every word you use – literally, each and every word – and familiarise yourself with the look and sound of that word as you are using it in your thoughts or speech or in writing, it means you have made progress.
17. The basic disease is fear. All other diseases are symptoms. Whether we are nice to somebody or rude to somebody, we operate from the same fear.
18. We want to be even all the time. And we are not. (All desire is about completion). If we lose attention somewhere, we want it from somewhere else. There is a feeling of incompleteness. What to do? Simply live with the missing feeling. Don’t try to fix it. Fixing it is not the opposite.If you want to know what to do, see what your tendency is, what the the world is doing and turn around. Do the opposite. And the gap inside, the feeling of incompleteness, will vanish. In every moment, walk into what you fear as death. The opposite.
19.  Every bully is a coward. All anger is fear. The fear is only one – my desire will not be met. And the desire is only one – to control one human being.
20. We are always under the influence of laws. The entire life of a human is about subjugation. In every moment, we are subjugated to someone’s will and in turn, we subjugate someone else under our will. Hence the intense desire for ‘freedom’ – to be free of all laws. The irony is that we want to be free and all the time we have an intense desire to control.The path to freedom begins by not placing someone else under our law, under our control. Wanting freedom is also the same – the desire to control. Why do we have this desire in the first place? The desire is based on the the belief that I am separate from the other. Taking birth is deciding ‘I’m separate’. This is a delusion (avidya). But in this delusion, one of the first things produced are fear and self-pity. And the second thing is we lie to cover up the fear. Lying is how we try to control. Lying is tension. Honesty is the first step towards freedom, towards the ultimate relaxation. That’s how we put the desire to control to right use and move onwards on our journey.
21.  The I is the first lie.
22. Fundamentally, no happiness and no pain can really touch you because they do not belong to you.
23. We don’t know what we are searching for. And because we don’t know, we will keep searching. So if you don’t know what you are searching for…..you need to take a hard look at yourself.It’s obvious that if you knew then you would have gotten it. So, be practical. If you search with a fixed idea in mind, the answer that eludes you will also stay an idea. Never will it become reality. And all the stuff the so-called wise people of the world say about life being a never ending road of discovery obviously haven’t reached the end of that road.

    William Quan Judge said “The greatest of all truths lies frequently in plain sight, or veiled in contraries.”
    And further, “You look and wait for some great and astounding occurrence, to show you that you are going to be permitted to enter behind the veil; that you are to be Initiated. It will never come. He only who studies all things and learns from them, as he finds them, will be permitted to enter, and for him there are no flashing lightnings or rolling thunder. He who enters the door, does so as gently and imperceptibly, as the tide rises in the night time.”

24.  If something has an opposite, both are a lie. 

1. Possessiveness – If you talk about holding on, you will begin to think of letting go. If you talk about letting go, you would have started holding on to the idea of letting go. Either way, you’ll be stuck. Holding on and letting go exist simultaneously. Love and hate exist simultaneously. If you say you love, you’ll also hate.The only possessiveness we feel is towards ourselves. We are possessive not of a person or a thing, but of our own personality. It is that to which we cling the most. When we start destroying the personality, possessiveness drops automatically.

2. We compare ourselves with others constantly. Comparison comes from our deepest need to be at all places at all times – as it was originally. It’s the only need – the need for the ultimate expansion (GOD).

3. Logic – Starting where you are and ending up at the only last possible outcome.  Faith – Arriving at the only last possible outcome and making your way back to where you are.

4. If you keep pretending to be something you are not, you will never be who you are.

5. We are limited in both space and time – that’s why we bicker over land, over relationships. All limitations are because of lust. And all lust is for land. Here land means personality, not the physical land of Earth. We are stuck in petty fights over square feet. If you want to transcend, look beyond your persona, look beyond the earth, the planets, even beyond the universes. Stop asking – What’s in it for me? We ask this all the time because our vision is limited. We are scared because we think we have to grab, otherwise it will pass us by and we will miss out. We constantly live in psychological fear. We can’t see more than a few moments away. Time ‘reduces’ as mind expands. Transcending space and time is noting else but expanding ourselves to infinity. Obviously, then we won’t feel the urgency of time. We can observe this happening sometimes. For example, when we go to a temple or church or any really large structure designed in a particular way, then we feel the passage of time and ourselves less so.
   One can do this on a daily basis. If in a crowded train you want to grab a seat that has just been vacated, zoom out and say no to the urgency, of wanting to take possession of that small little space. Every time you say no to grabbing a space or a moment in time, you transcend it.

6. Trying to fix a mistake is also a mistake.

7. Attention is both light and heat. In holding attention, the energy of light gets concentrated and heat is generated. The light will help you see your patterns and the heat will burn them.

The urge to get something from outside is because we feel an emptiness.

As long as we are identified with something unreal, transient, we will never be fulfilled. Fulfillment is an attribute of something permanent. Continue reading Notes – August 2012

1. The body can adjust itself if the concept is strong enough. E.g. women and high heels, or bikers who ride for hours in what looks like uncomfortable positions (Pulsar – Eliminator failed because the brand did not reflect the biker culture that the physical stance represents)

2. We are limited in both space and time – that’s why we bicker over land, over relationships. We are stuck in petty fights over sq. feet. But look at the mountains – they are so huge. One stone that falls off will kill you. If you want to become big, look beyond the earth, even the planets. Then stop asking – What’s in it for me? We ask this all the time because our vision is limited. We are scared because we think we have to grab, otherwise it will pass us by and we will miss out. We constantly live in psychological fear. We can’t see more than a few moments away. If we transcend space and time, we won’t feel the urgency of time. E.g. If in a crowded train you want to grab an empty space, zoom out and say no to the urgency, of wanting to take possession of that small little space. Every time you say no to grabbing a space or a moment in time, you transcend it. Continue reading Notes – May 2013

Learn to separate feeling and concept. The moment a feeling is felt, a concept gets attached to it. That concept comes in the way of the feeling and prevents action or, if the feeling is acted upon, it creates guilt – which is another concept. Either of these will happen. So when a feeling arises in the system, catch the concept that is coming up to resist it. Put the concept/s aside and just feel the feeling. Don’t let there be movement in either the mental, emotional or physical body. Continue reading Methods of Self-observation

1. Just like Superman can’t see through lead, a heavy metal, when you’re heavy in a state, you can’t see things clearly. The symbology of kryptonite is about moving from a heavy planet to a light one. The fortress of solitude is a metaphor for where one retreats to in one’s mind and takes stock of things at the end of the day.

2. People say they want to be get ‘better’/ be ‘just’ or ‘kind’. But you can’t ‘be’ something – your state of being has to transform for real change.

Continue reading Notes 25th July, 2012