Articles for Saadhana

Harih Om Tat Sat. Jai Guru.

Values and disciplines are something indispensable in human life. Whenever I speak about values, I used to put it across in this manner. Whenever two or more people are living together, then value and discipline become indispensable. If they are going to live, move and work together without value, you cannot live in this world at all!

If one person is alone, then he is free to do anything. Nobody is there to question him or say “no”. He can be naked, he can cover the whole of his body, he can be on the sun, he can be on the rain, he can swim in water without knowing how to swim and he may get drowned. Nobody is going to say that he did something wrong and he got drowned. Nobody will know about it.

But when one more person is living together with him, then each person will have to see that his life and movements are not interfering with or obstructing the other. Suppose you are walking together. You can come close to each other but not touch each other. Not only that, some space will have to be kept in between the two, so that you may be able to wave your hands and move freely. Suppose you wave your hands, the other also moves and one hits the other, then the walking will not be possible. So discipline and values are necessary.

Whenever there is a value properly explained, instantly the hearer or the reader will find from his mind level an emotional persuasion to accept it, understand it and accept it. Equally so, he will have an intellectual compulsion to follow it. The value should be rightly explained.

See, it is very, very cold, extremely cold. You are not able to expose any part of your body. So you lie, covering yourself with a blanket. Normally we cover ourselves upto the neck. But the face also will get cold. Through the ear, cold may penetrate. What are you going to do? Mouth you can close, ear also you can close, eyes also you can close, but can you close the nose? Just imagine. Suppose you close the nose, then what will happen? If your cloth is not porous, then within a matter of minutes either your system will push it out or you will breathe your last. In Russia and other places where it is pretty cold, I was told that they will have even a cap for the nose but the two holes will be kept free.

I was told that in Lahore it is pretty cold during the winter. In order to have heat, this happened something like 70 or 75 years back, a couple kept a kind of a cold-oven. They lit it and after the smoke was released they kept it in the room. Naturally they had closed the doors and windows. You know what happened? They did not get up the next morning at all. By the time people came to know and opened the door, life was not in any of the bodies. Values are always like that. They are just like nourishment to the body. In the matter of giving nourishment to the body, food should be nourishing to the body. What are the requirements of the body, all of them should be given by our food. So the food should be nourishing. You cannot take poisonous food but healthy food which will not be adverse to the well-being of the body. In the same manner, values are a nourishment to the mind and the intelligence.

In the whole of spirituality I can think only of two values – viveka and vairagya. Viveka means the habit of discriminating between things and be guided by the knowledge you have. You may not have all the knowledge to begin with, so you will have to listen to what others say. When you are capable of thinking yourself, you will understand them and you can add to or delete from the list of values that you have taken up. It is this viveka that enables you to extract God from the world, to experience the soul from the body.

Our body is a living body. It can also become a dead body. The difference between a living body and the dead body is that in the dead body there will be no activity, there will be no sensation, there will be nobody to use the eyes, nose and ears. In the living body, there is something or someone to sense the presence of the body and to use the organs. The difference between the living body and the dead body is that the body is activated and animated by some presence. That presence is different from the body. If that presence is different from the body, whatever happens to the body, nothing will happen to it because it is different from.

Suppose you put on a shirt and the shirt gets torn. Will your body get torn? No. Shirt getting torn does not mean your body getting torn. You are living in a house. One portion of the house becomes discolored, is eaten up by white ants. Are you discoloured and eaten up by white ants? No. The same applies to the living presence which people generally call the soul in the body. So first of all, you understand that the body is inert and it is animated and activated by the living presence and that presence is different from the body, it only animates the body and whatever happens to the body or whatever changes come to the body, they do not affect the soul. This is the cardinal of discrimination.

Similarly God is omnipresent. If he is omnipresent, he is present everywhere in everything. So there is no place or article or particle in the world which is not permeated by God. So I must be able to seek God in everything. It is wrong to go in search of God. It is wrong to find God particularly in an object or an article. If you think of God and find God, look for him as equally present everywhere. This is called viveka.

And what is vairagya? Vairagya is a spontaneous reaction to the truth or fact that everything in this world including your body is subject to decay and death. There is nothing that is lasting in this world including your body and its relations. Everything is fleeting, fleeting, fleeting, fleeting. If things are fleeting, what is the point in having them? Your body is already fleeting, mind is fleeting. Suppose I acquire fleeting objects and fleeting things, by adding to my fleetingness, I am not going to have lastingness. So lastingness is opposed to fleetingness.

So if I want to have lastingness, I have to look for something different from the fleeting things of the world including the body. This is primarily a matter of discrimination – viveka which should be taken up by the intelligence, pursued and intensified. When the viveka starts growing in your system, automatically the mind will be under its grip, the senses will be under the grip of the mind and you will find you will have a different meaning and purpose in life. It is such a natural process.

We are human beings, not animals and birds. Naturally we have an intelligence, it has to be used. Even in object world, you will find it is the intelligence that counts. Who becomes countable in this world? Leaders, managers, creators, engineers, designers, performers. Whether it is in the civil side or criminal side, whether it is in the research side, in the administration side, anywhere and everywhere, it is the portion above the eyebrows that counts.

So intelligence has to always look for viveka on the one hand and disciplines and values on the other. You bring anybody before me. When I explain to him a value properly, he will simply nod his head and accept it.

A set of students from the Jamshedpur Engineering College came to me. Three or four (students). So I said “I am happy that you have come. Are you not students?”

“Yes.”

“Are you not good students?”

“Reasonably so.”

“Why are you going to the college? Is it not for gaining knowledge?”

“Yes.”

“So you believe in knowledge?”

“Yes.”

“Its efficacy?”

“Yes.”

“Its importance?”

“Yes.”

“So if I start talking to you standing firmly on the grounds of knowledge and explain to you something and you accept it, will you act according to it?”

They said, “Yes.”

“When I explain something to you in terms of knowledge, will you listen to it and grasp it?”

They said, “Yes.”

Then I began my conversation. I think knowledge, enlightenment is the greatest persuasion for anybody anytime in this world. Do you think that jailing a person, imprisoning a person is a correction? We are only preventing the prisoners from doing crimes. But if the criminal tendency has to go from their mind, some persuasion in the form of knowledge and inspiration will have to be given which will touch, move and correct their minds, sentiments and intelligence.

So values are something like gold, more important than even gold. The practice of values is to make our life golden, angelish, appreciable even to enemies, not merely to friends. Value is such a coordinate of the human life.

Harih Om Tat Sat. Jai Guru. Jai Guru.