WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT ?
The most difficult thing about enlightenment is that it is too simple. ~(Sadguru)
The content of your mind also you accumulated, just by your exposure and the impressions of what enters you through the five agencies. These five agencies that you are using to collect the impressions of life around you are not reliable at all. One thing is, people have always told you that seeing is believing. Seeing is not believing. You know very well, everybody sees what they want to see. Everybody does not see what is there. Going more fundamentally into the very process of vision itself, even that is not reliable.
The sense organs were open only to serve survival. They are sufficient instruments of survival but not if you are seeking something beyond survival. You are talking about enlightenment , which is not a survival process. Once you are looking at something beyond survival, sense organs are no good. You have to have another dimension of perception. So the whole process of spirituality is just about enhancing your perception. The only way to know is by enhancing your perception. Everything else is just belief.
What you believe is immaterial because if someone works hard enough on you, they can make you believe any damn thing - even the weirdest of things in the world - if they work upon you right from your childhood. So what you believe, whatever it may be, is of no existential value.
It may have social value but when you talk about enlightenment, you are not talking about social or personal dimensions of life. You are talking about an existential dimension of life. If you have to be open, if you have to know life in an existential way, the only way is to enhance your perception - not by thinking it up, not by philosophising, not by discussion, not by believing. You can receive and know life only with enhanced perception. There is no other way to know life.
So enlightenment means a heightened level of perception in an ultimate way. If your perception is full on, you receive everything that can be received and know life in its totality. We would call that enlightenment.
The source of all suffering that any human being may know is his body and mind. If you have a little distance from this body and mind, you have a clear experience that you are free from suffering.
Right now, every step that you take is half a step because there is a fear of ‘what will happen to me.’ If you carefully observe your life, I would say for a majority of the population, at least ninety percent of their life is dedicated to their security. The steps that they take in their life are not being taken in search of joy or love or freedom or anything. It is always in search of security. When you are constantly in pursuit of security, you are in pursuit of death, because life is never secure.
As long as your life and the experience of life is limited only to the physical and the mental, living with fear and being constantly security-oriented is unavoidable. It is inevitable, that's the only way you can live.
If your experience of life transcends the limitations of the physical, now the physical and mental is still there in your life, but you are never a part of it. You can use it, you can enjoy it, but you never become that.
If this freedom is attained, you will live an Unbridled life. You can play with life any way you want, but life cannot leave a single scratch upon you. Is that a good description of enlightenment? Is it worthwhile?
‘If you are a vested interest, you shouldn’t talk about enlightenment.’ ~(Sadguru)
If you are free from suffering, if you are free from the fear of suffering, would you hesitate to involve yourself in life or would you throw yourself into life?
Right now you are hesitating. Fundamentally you are afraid: ‘Tomorrow it may hurt me, tomorrow something else may happen to me out of this.’ You are constantly hesitating to involve yourself with life simply because of the fear of suffering. If the fear of suffering is taken away, you would give yourself absolutely to everything around you.
Today, science is beginning to realise that the logical way of approaching things is limiting. It cannot take you beyond a certain point. It is a good realisation. But they have made so much investment in logic, they are afraid to turn around and do something else because then all that they have worked on may become meaningless. Like you are saying – it may become ‘maya.’ [Maya: Delusion, the veil of illusion which conceals one's true nature, or concealer reality.]
If you are a vested interest, you shouldn’t talk about enlightenment. If you are a seeker, wanting to know what is true, only then you should talk about it.
If you were to tell me, ‘even if this person is just a bubble of air, I would like to think he is made of gold,’ then I am fine with you. I am fine with you as a friend, but I won't talk about enlightenment to you because you have no intention like that. You have no intention of seeing life just the way it is.
You are just a piece of creation. So whatever you are imagining about life, the way creation is must be far more beautiful than the way you are imagining it. Because you are just a tiny speck of creation.
Only the fundamentals of life were created by whatever you refer to as the Creator. The rest of it is your creation. If you have a demented mind, that is definitely your creation. You already told me, ‘No matter what information gets into me, I still have a choice of processing it the way I want.’
Even a single atom, is well beyond your perception and understanding and intelligence right now. Such a magnificent creation that you cannot even understand a tiny bit of it properly.
This right and wrong is your idea. The only right thing to do is to be in tune with the existence and the creation. Right now, you are not living in the world - you are not a living being - because ninety-five percent of the time, you are only thinking about life. You are not living life. Unfortunately, you are beginning to believe that whatever you are thinking is life. What you think, is not life. What you think, has nothing to do with life. You can think whatever you wish to, but it has nothing to do with life as such.
‘Yoga, or inner engineering, is just to align your four wheels in such a way that you travel smoothly.’ ~(Sadguru)
The yoga practices we are talking are very simple and physical; nothing spiritual about them. But what you need to understand is, if something larger has to happen, it's very important that you are in complete alignment.
Right now what you consider as ‘myself’ is just these four elements: your physical body, your mind, your emotions and the life energy which makes these things happen. These are the four components which you call ‘myself.’ If you want something bigger to happen, you must put these four things in proper alignment.
All yoga is structured and designed to put these four dimensions in absolute alignment.
These four dimensions of mind, emotions, body and energy means head, heart, hands and energy. Is there anybody here who is only head, not heart, not hands, not energy? You are a combination of these four things.
So you need these four basic yogas. There are only four yogas.
They are known as gnana yoga, bhakti yoga, karma yoga and kriya yoga. (ज्ञान, भक्ति, कर्म, क्रिया योग)
If you employ your intelligence to reach your ultimate nature, it is called gnana yoga. (Head). A gnana yogi, who is employing his intelligence, has great disdain for everybody. He thinks everybody is an utter fool, especially these bhakti people who are looking up and saying, ‘Rama, Rama.’ He cannot stand them at all.
If you employ your emotions to reach your ultimate nature, we call it bhakti yoga. (Heart). Bhakti people have sympathy for everyone - ‘when God is here, instead of just holding his hand and walking, all this hair-splitting nonsense and this yoga is just utter nonsense. Just call for God’s help and it will happen.’
If you employ your body to reach your ultimate nature, or action, we call it karma yoga. (Body). A karma yogi thinks all these idiots are just lazy. To cover up their laziness, they have invented all these stupid yogas.
If you transform your inner energies and reach your ultimate nature, it is called kriya yoga. (Energies). A kriya yogi has absolute disdain for everybody because after all, the whole of life is energy. If you don’t transform the energy, where is the way?
These are the only four ways. You are a combination of all these four, so you can’t choose anyone only. You have to employ them in the right proportion.
In one person, the head may be dominant.
In another person, the heart may be dominant.
In somebody else, the body may be dominant.
In someone, his energies may be dominant.
Accordingly, the right mixture has to be made. Otherwise it won't happen.
A STORY
On a certain day, a gnana yogi, a bhakti yogi, a kriya yogi, and a karma yogi were walking in the forest. Usually, these four people can never be together because they cannot stand each other. These four people can never get along together, but one day they were walking together.
Suddenly a rainstorm broke loose. They started running, looking for shelter. Because the bhakti yogi knows the geography of temples, he said, ‘In this direction in the forest there is an ancient temple. Let's go there and get some shelter.’ They all ran there.
The temple was in a dilapidated condition - just the roof and four columns were there. The walls were all long gone. The storm became more and more severe and started lashing from every direction, so they got closer and closer. In the centre of the temple, there was a linga, or the symbol of Shiva.
They had no other place to sit to escape the storm, so they just hugged the linga and sat - all four of them - not out of any love for God or anything, but just to escape the storm.
Suddenly God appeared. In all their four minds, the immediate question was ‘Why now? So much yoga we did, so much sadhana we did, you did not come. But now, when we were just trying to escape the storm, here you are. Why?’
So God said, ‘At last you four idiots got together. I have been waiting for this moment for a long time.’
This is the biggest problem. If these four dimensions are not in alignment, nothing big can happen.
When you are trying to drive your car, if one wheel points this way and one wheel points that way, you know what a torture it will be?
That is the torture that you see in people right now.
Their mind is this way, their heart is that way, their body is somewhere else, their energy is somewhere else.
How do you expect them to travel smoothly to any destination for that matter?
Yoga is just to align these four wheels in such a way that you travel smoothly.
Right now even if you are in the direction of hell, it doesn’t matter. Once your car is going well, you can just make a U-turn in no time.
But if you have this torture of a vehicle where the four wheels are pointing in four different directions, which way will you go? You cannot go anywhere. You will just get sucked in and pushed around by situations.
Your direction is not decided by you. Your direction is decided by the situations in which you live. That is the life of a slave.
‘If you are suffering your bondage that is fine, but you are suffering your freedom.’
(Courtesy: Sadguru IYC, Coimbatore from the book what is Enlightenment)
COMMENT