Inner Engineering

(Yoga transforms the body and wakes it before the mind decides)

But three months after starting yoga, my body started coming awake at three forty every morning, without any external prompting, as it does even today. After I woke, my practices would simply happen, no matter where I was and in what situation, without a single day’s break.

People think spirituality is about looking for God or truth or the ultimate. The problem is you have already defined what you are looking for. It is not the object of your search that is important; it is the faculty of looking. The ability to simply look without motive is missing in the world today. Everybody is a psychological creature, wanting to assign meaning to everything. Seeking is not about looking for something. It is about enhancing your perception, your very faculty of seeing.

People would look at me and burst into tears. Many claimed that they were relieved of conditions of physical and mental suffering just by looking at me. I found myself healed in a matter of hours of conditions that would have taken me months to get out of through normal medical care. However, I gave all of this little importance. This ability to transform my external and internal reality quite dramatically has continued within me and around me to this very day. It is not something I have ever tried consciously to achieve. It is just that once one is in touch with this deeper dimension of intelligence, which is the very basis of our existence here, life turns quite naturally miraculous. In about six to eight weeks, this incredible experience became a living reality. During this time, everything about me changed dramatically. My physical appearance—the shape of my eyes, my gait, my voice, the very alignment of my body—began changing so drastically that people around me started to notice as well.

Until this time, I had completely refused to accept anything in my life that did not fit into a rational and logical framework. Slowly, I began to realize that it is life that is the ultimate intelligence. Human intellect is mere smartness that ensures survival. But true intelligence is just life and life—and that which is the source of life. Nothing else.

I also began to experience a heightened sensitivity to the feelings of others. Sometimes just the sight of an unknown person on the street in a state of grief could make me weep. I could not believe the states of misery that human beings were capable of enduring when here I was, simply bursting with ecstasy for no reason at all.

(The longing for infinity — joy as the real goal)

Human nature is such that we always yearn to be something more than what we are right now. No matter how much we achieve, we still want to be something more. If we just looked at this closely, we would realize that this longing is not for more; this longing is for all. We are all seeking to become infinite. The only problem is that we are seeking it in installments.

Whether you sought a career, started a business, made money, or built a family, it was always because you wanted just one simple thing: joy.

Most people think peace and joy are the goals of the spiritual life. This is a fallacy. Peace and joy are the basic requirements for a life of well-being. If you want to enjoy your dinner tonight, you must be peaceful and happy.

(Responsibility as freedom, reactivity as enslavement)

Taking responsibility is not accepting blame instead of assigning it. It simply means consciously responding to the situation. Once you take responsibility, you will invariably start exploring ways to address the situation. You will look for solutions.

Reactivity is enslavement. Responsibility is freedom.

That was when she made a life-changing decision: “It doesn’t matter who I meet, I will never speak to them in a manner that I regret later, because this meeting could be my last.” She could have spent her life in defeat and remorse, but she made this simple decision, which transformed her life phenomenally. She went on to live a rich and fulfilled life.

Later, without even uttering the sentence aloud, take the simple idea—“My responsibility is limitless; if I am willing, I can respond to everything”—into the entire day. Be conscious of it until the last moment before you fall asleep and remind yourself of it the first thing when you wake up.

(Yoga as science of inner alignment)

The science of yoga is, quite simply, the science of being in perfect alignment, in absolute harmony, in complete sync with existence.

But yoga is the science of creating inner situations exactly the way you want them. When you fine-tune yourself to such a point where everything functions beautifully within you, naturally the best of your abilities will flow out of you. You have surely noticed that when you are happy, you always function better. You seem to have an endless supply of energy. You can go on and on, even without eating or sleeping. Just a little happiness liberates you from your normal limitations of energy and capability.

you, they invariably feign a headache!) But with the practice of yoga, your body and mind can be maintained at the highest possible level of capability and efficiency. And yet, yoga is not just a self-help tool for greater mental and physical efficiency—and freedom from headaches. It is all that and much more.

When your energy body is in full vibrancy and proper balance, chronic diseases cannot exist in the body. I could introduce you to thousands of people who have gotten rid of their physical and psychological ailments just by doing certain simple yogic practices. These practices are not aimed at the disease. They are just aimed at bringing a certain harmony and vitality to the energy body.

It is now time to plunge into the adventure of self-alignment, into the remarkable empirical system that is yoga—one that enables you to be both alchemist and experiment, subject and object at the same time.

(Five bodies — grounding the subtle in the tangible)

The yogic sciences, as explained above, do not speak of the mind or the soul. Everything is just a body—whether it is a food body, a mind body, an energy body, an etheric body, or a bliss body. There is a deep wisdom in this approach. It does not allow us to escape into deluded psychological states or into flights of metaphysical abstraction. It grounds us firmly in the tangible, even as it leads us into subtler realms of physicality and, gradually, into the beyond.

These two longings—to preserve and to expand—are not opposing forces, though they may seem to be. They are related to two different aspects of your life. One force helps you root yourself well on this planet; the other takes you beyond. Self-preservation needs to be limited to the physical body. If you have the necessary awareness to separate the two, there is no conflict. But if you are identified with the physical, then instead of working in collaboration, these two fundamental forces become a source of tension.

Yoga talks only about the barriers that you have set up, because this resistance is all that needs to be attended to. The Creator is not looking for your attention. The ropes that bind you and the walls that block you—these are one hundred percent of your making. And these are all you need to unknot and dismantle. You have no work with existence. You only have work with the existence that you have created.

When you are available to grace, suddenly, you seem to function like magic. Suppose you were the only one who could ride a bicycle, you would begin to seem magical to everyone else! It is the same with grace. Others might think you are magic, but you know you are just beginning to become receptive to a new dimension of life. This possibility is available to everybody.

The expansion of your sense perception beyond its present boundaries can achieve phenomenal results, bringing a completely new and seemingly magical dimension to your life. The common questions are: “Is it very difficult to enhance my perception? Do I have to withdraw to a Himalayan cave to turn inward?”

Start by paying attention to everything you think of as yourself just before you fall asleep: your thoughts, your emotions, your hair, your skin, your clothes, your makeup. Know that none of this is you. There is no need to make any conclusion about what “you” are or what “truth” is. Truth is not a conclusion. If you keep the false conclusions at bay, truth will dawn. It is like your experience of the night: the sun has not gone; it is just that the planet is looking the other way. You’re thinking, reading, talking about the self, because you’re too busy looking the other way! You haven’t paid enough attention to know what the self really is. What is needed is not a conclusion, but a turnaround. If you manage to enter sleep with this awareness, it will be significant. Since there is no external interference in sleep, this will grow into a powerful experience. Over time, you will enter a dimension beyond all accumulations.

(Hatha yoga — posture, breath, and the geometry of existence)

That is often the way it is, isn’t it? So, hatha yoga is a way of working with the body, a way of disciplining, purifying, and preparing it for higher levels of energy and for greater possibilities.

The converse of this is the science of asanas. If you consciously get your body into different postures, you can elevate your consciousness.

Once you are flexible, you are willing to listen. It is not about hearing someone talk; you are willing to listen to life. Learning to listen is the essence of intelligent living.

Simple compulsions, whether of hunger or lust, can rule you so strongly that they will not allow you to look beyond the physical. It is easy to forget that the physical body is only a part of you; it is important that it does not become the whole of you. Asanas help level the physical body down to its natural place.

Hatha yoga ensures that the body takes the upsurge of energy smoothly and joyfully.

But you are looking at yoga as a means of transforming yourself into a receptive possibility beyond the five senses, the hatha yoga needs to be approached in its classical form.

you sit for just a few hours a day with your spine erect, you will see that it will have an unmistakable effect on your life. You will now begin to understand what I mean by the geometry of your existence. Just the way you hold your body determines almost everything about you. Another way of listening to life is paying attention to it experientially, not intellectually or emotionally. Choose any one thing about yourself: your breath, your heartbeat, your pulse, your little finger. Just pay attention to it for eleven minutes at a time. Do this at least three times a day. Keep your attention on any sensation, but feel free to continue doing whatever you are doing. If you lose attention, it doesn’t matter. Simply refocus your attention. This practice will allow you to move from mental alertness to awareness. You will find the quality of your life experience will begin to change.

The body never lies. So in yoga, we learn to trust the body. We transform the physical body from a series of compulsions of flesh, blood, and hormones into a conscious process, a powerful instrument of perception and knowing. If you know how to read the body, it can tell you your potential, your limitations, even your past, present, and future. That is why the fundamental yoga starts with the physical body.

(Slowing the breath — from meteorology to the source of creation)

Sadhana Sit in any comfortable posture, with your spine erect, and if necessary, supported. Remain still. Allow your attention to slowly grow still as well. Do this for five to seven minutes a day. You will notice that your breath will slow down. What is the significance of slowing down the human breath? Is it just some respiratory yogic acrobatics? No, it is not. A human being breathes twelve to fifteen times per minute, normally. If your breath settles down to twelve, you will know the ways of the earth’s atmosphere (i.e., you will become meteorologically sensitive). If it reduces to nine, you will know the language of the other creatures on this planet. If it reduces to six, you will know the very language of the earth. If it reduces to three, you will know the language of the source of creation. This is not about increasing your aerobic capacity. Nor is it about forcefully depriving yourself of breath. A combination of hatha yoga and an advanced yogic practice called the kriya, will gradually increase your lung capacity, but above all, will help you achieve a certain alignment, a certain ease, so that your system evolves to a state of stability where there is no static, no crackle; it just perceives everything.   INTENSITY OF INACTIVITY

When you reach the peak of effort, you become effortless. Only a person who knows what it is to work understands rest. Paradoxically, those who are always resting know no rest; they only sink into dullness and lethargy. This is the way of life.

When someone is constantly giving a hundred percent, a point comes when one surpasses all limits and reaches total effortlessness. Effortlessness does not mean becoming a couch potato. It means transcending the need for physical action. Only when you are able to stretch to your utmost and sustain the peak of effort do you reach this. There are some people nowadays, who declare that they would like to opt for Zen as a spiritual path because they think it means doing nothing! In fact, Zen involves tremendous activity because it is not divorced from life in any way. For example, a Zen monk may take weeks to simply arrange pebbles in a Zen garden. In performing such activity, you reach a state of non-doing, where you transcend the experience of being a doer. It is in such states that you have a taste of the beyond.

If you achieve such states through intense activity, as Nijinsky and many others have, those moments will always be cherished as magical. But if you arrive at the same state through the intensity of inactivity, then it is a yogic posture, and it is a state that can be sustained longer. The very essence of dhyana, or meditativeness, is that you push yourself to the highest possible intensity where, after some time, there is no effort. Now meditation will not be an act, but a natural consequence of the intensity that has been achieved. You can simply be. It is in these absolutely non-compulsive states of existence that the necessary atmosphere is set for the blossoming of an individual into a cosmic possibility.

(Diet, digestion, and the body as ecology)

the fact that we view the ingredients which constitute our body, like earth, water, air, and food, as commodities and not as an organic part of the life process.

Or if you have turned all your trees into furniture, collect some fresh soil and cover your feet and hands with it. Stay that way for twenty to thirty minutes. This could help your recovery significantly.

The surya namaskar is a familiar sequence of postures to many who have practiced or know something of yoga. Generally, people understand the surya namaskar as a physical exercise.

As I mentioned before, when I was young, I had to be forcibly awakened every morning by my mother. But once I began yoga, my system came awake effortlessly at a certain hour every day. Life began to happen with that much more ease and equanimity.

If you are compulsive, you will see that situations, experiences, thoughts, and emotions in your life will be in cycles. They keep coming back to you once every six or eighteen months, three years, or six years, depending on your degree of compulsiveness. If you just look back on your life, you will notice this. If they come once every twelve years, that means your system is in a high state of receptivity and balance.

basic process that is known as surya shakti. Through practice, if one attains a certain level of stability and mastery over the system, one could be introduced to a more powerful and spiritually significant process called the surya kriya.

He was known to do 1,008 surya namaskars a day. Later, after he was ninety years of age, he brought the number down to 108 (not because he wasn’t capable, but because there was no time). That was his spiritual practice.

Creation is just like that, hugely magnified. Those who have looked within themselves closely and attentively realized there was no need to look at the macro version. The entire cosmos is just a magnified projection of a little occurrence happening within you—the play of five elements. This is all it takes to make a throbbing full-fledged human being! Maybe your desire is individual or maybe it is universal. But whether you want to realize the full potential of this human mechanism or merge with the larger cosmic mechanism, you need a certain measure of mastery over these five elements. Without this you know neither the pleasure of being an individual nor the bliss of uniting with the cosmic.

Life is a bit like that. It is a complex web, but there is one simple pin. And that is your identity. The play of five elements is highly evolved and complicated, but the key to freedom is your limited persona. If you pull the plug, it just falls apart and you are free. If you know how to pull yourself out, life’s complexity collapses and everything settles. The simplicity of perfect alignment with existence is suddenly yours.

Sadhana It is important not to keep eating through the day. If you are below thirty years of age, three meals every day will fit well into your life. If you are over thirty years of age, it is best to reduce it to two meals per day. Our body and brain work at their best only when the stomach is empty. So be conscious of eating in such a way that within two and a half hours, your food moves out of the stomach, and within twelve to eighteen hours completely out of the system. With this simple awareness you will experience much more energy, agility, and alertness. These are the ingredients of a successful life, irrespective of what you choose to do with it.

If you eat certain foods, the body becomes happy. If you eat certain other foods, the body turns dull and lethargic, and your sleep quota increases. If you sleep for eight hours a day, and you live a hundred years, you have spent one third of your life sleeping! Another thirty to forty percent is spent on food, toilet, and other ablutions. There is very little time left for life! You eat food for energy, but if you eat a big meal, do you feel energetic or lethargic? Depending upon the quality of the food that you eat, you first feel lethargy, and then slowly you start feeling energetic. Why is this so?

Sadhana

You can experiment: arrange the best possible meal for yourself, get angry with something, curse the whole world, and then eat it. You will see that day how food behaves within you. At the next meal, approach your food with the reverence that the life-making material deserves and eat it. You will now see how it will behave within you. (Of course, if you’re sensible, you’ll ignore the first and only do the second!)

This compatibility depends on various ends. If being big is your highest aspiration, then certain types of foods have to be consumed. If you want a body that supports a particular level of intelligence, or if you want a body with a certain level of alertness, awareness, and agility, other types of foods must be consumed. If you are not someone who will settle just for health and the pleasures of life, but want a body perceptive enough to download the cosmos, you will need to eat in a very different way. Depending on your aspiration, you will accordingly have to manage your diet. Or if your aspirations involve all these dimensions, you will have to find a suitable balance.

Suppose you take a bit of uncooked rice and place it in your mouth for a minute or more, you will notice that it turns sweet. This sweetness is happening because right there in your mouth carbohydrates are getting converted into sugar (an essential part of the digestive process) by an enzyme called “ptyalin,” which is in your saliva. Ptyalin is present in the saliva of all herbivores, but not in carnivores. So carnivores just have to cut their food into smaller pieces and swallow it, while herbivores have to chew their food. Mastication involves grinding and then thoroughly mixing the food with the saliva; hence the design modification in the jaw.

If you eat raw meat, it takes between seventy to seventy-two hours to pass through your system; cooked meat takes fifty to fifty-two hours; cooked vegetables twenty-four to thirty hours; uncooked vegetables twelve to fifteen hours; fruits one and a half to three hours.

If you visit a friend who is sick in the hospital, you would surely not take him a pizza or a steak. You are most likely to take him fruit. If you happen to be in the wild, what would be the first thing you would eat? Definitely fruit. (You remember even Adam ate an apple, although we know what trouble that got him into!) Then would come roots, the killing of an animal, cooking, and raising crops. Fruit is the most easily digestible food and all human beings know this instinctively.

It also causes what we refer to as tamas, or inertia, in the energy system, which over a period of time will alter the very quality of who you are and impair the quality of who you could be. Traditionally, in southern India, people took care never to mix certain foods. But today, food is no more about the well-being of the body, but a social affair. People eat out at buffets and the variety and number of dishes served is considered more important than nourishing the health and life of the body.

Sadhana The consumption of a spoonful of clarified butter (ghee in India) on a daily basis a few minutes before a meal does wonders for the digestive system. If you eat clarified butter with sugar, as in sweets, it is digested and turns into fat. But clarified butter without sugar can cleanse, heal, and lubricate the alimentary canal. Additionally, the cleansing of the colon will immediately manifest as a certain glow and aliveness in your skin. Even those who prefer not to consume dairy products could experiment with this because clarified butter passes through the system largely without getting digested.

Additionally, large animals, particularly cows, are aware of their impending slaughter well before it happens. Consequently, they experience high stress levels, which generate a tremendous amount of acidic content in their systems. This, in turn, has its own adverse impact on those who later consume the meat.

Gautama the Buddha went to the extent of saying, “When you are badly in need of food, if you give away your food to somebody else, you will become stronger.” I am not going that far with you; I am only saying, just wait a few minutes! It will definitely leave you stronger. If you are very compulsive about food, it is good to miss one meal consciously. Try doing this: on a day when you are particularly hungry and some of your favorite dishes are being cooked, try skipping a meal. This is not to torture yourself; this is just to become free from the torture chamber that your body can very easily become.

(Sleep, stress, and maintaining the body’s eagerness for life)

What is making the difference is the level of relaxation that sleep brings. If you could remain relaxed while performing all the activity of the day, you would be about the same in the evening, in terms of energy and enthusiasm, as you were in the morning.

Stress is not because of work—this is important to remember. Everybody thinks their job is stressful. No job is stressful. There are many jobs that could present challenging situations. There could be nasty bosses, insecure colleagues, emergency rooms, impossible deadlines—or you might even find yourself in the middle of a war zone! But these are not inherently stressful. It is our compulsive reaction to the situations in which we are placed that causes stress. Stress is a certain level of internal friction. One can easily lubricate the inner mechanism with some amount of inner work and awareness. So, it is your inability to handle your own system that is stressing you out. On some level, you do not know how to handle your body, mind, and emotions; that is the problem.

If your work and taking a walk or exercising are also relaxation for you, your sleep quota will drop even further. Right now, people want to do everything the hard way. I see people walking in the park in a state of tension. Whether you walk or jog, why can’t it be done easily, joyfully? This exercise may be causing more harm to you than well-being because you are going at it as if you’re going into battle! Don’t battle with life. You are not anti-life; you are life.

If the body is at a certain level of alertness and awareness you will see that once it is well rested, it will awaken—that is, if it is eager to come to life. If it is somehow trying to use the bed as a grave, then it is a problem. Keep the body in such a way that it is not longing to avoid or escape life. Maintain it in such a way that it is longing to come awake.

you sleep without a pillow or with a very low pillow, which doesn’t allow the spine to get pinched, the neuronal regeneration of the brain and the cellular regeneration of the neurological system will be much better. If you sleep

(Duality, sex, and the longing to become one)

Existence is a dance between the unmanifest and the manifest. The moment there is a manifestation, there is duality: light and darkness, male and female, birth and death, and so on. Though unity is the basic fabric of creation, duality brings texture, design, and color to life.

Once there are two, the game of life begins. Once duality begins, sex begins. What we call sex is just two parts of this duality striving to become one.

This longing to become one finds expression in many ways. When you are young and your intelligence is hijacked by your hormones, sex will be the way. When you are middle-aged and your intelligence is hijacked by your emotions, love is the way. When you are old and bereft of hormonal mischief, prayer is the way. But irrespective of age, when you transcend all this and seek the same union on a much higher level of awareness, then yoga is the way. If you are seeking oneness with the body, you need to remember that physical bodies will always remain two, no matter what you do. For a few moments, a sense of unity will happen, and then people fall apart. If divorce does not do it, death will. It is bound to happen.

You may not be consciously aware, but the life within you is longing to break these boundaries. When you want to break your mental boundaries you may long to have a serious conversation or read a book, drink alcohol, take a drug, or do something freaky. To break your physical boundaries you may want to pierce yourself, get a tattoo, dye your hair, or go the old-fashioned way of sex. The intention of sex is great, but the method is hopeless. Pleasure is involved, so it drives two people toward each other, but oneness comes only momentarily.

If you look at modern societies, I would say probably ninety percent of human energy is being spent either pursuing or avoiding sex. Sex is just nature’s trick to reproduce. If this attraction of opposites did not exist, the species would become extinct.

Every breath, every step, every simple act, thought, and emotion can acquire the stance of the sacred if conducted recognizing the sanctity of the other involved—whether a person or a foodstuff or an object that you use.

So, the simplest way to experience a state of union is to try this simple namaskar yoga. Put your hands together, and pay loving attention to any object you use or consume, or any form of life that you encounter. When you bring this sense of awareness into every simple act, your experience of life will never be the same again. There is even a possibility that if you put your hands together, you could unite the world!

It is not a crime to want to be limited, but you will live an unfulfilled life. Let us say tomorrow I grant you a boon and all the women or men in the world are lusting after you. You will find that you are still not satisfied. A little bit of pleasure and pain will happen, but you will only live within the sphere of the body. The body knows only survival and procreation. And it is walking straight to the grave every moment, nowhere else.

This is because the way of the physical is circumscribed. The body has only so much of a role to play in your life. If you try to stretch it to all of your life, you will suffer because you are trying to create a falsehood. Life has a million ingenious ways to bend you, break you, knead you, and grind you. Nothing wrong with your hormones, but once you live a compulsive life, you are living the life of a slave. Everything may be going on fine with your life—your business, family, relationships—but slowly, as different kinds of compulsions take over, you grow more and more miserable. There is something within you that is unwilling to be a slave. For many, the pursuit of wealth and physical well-being drives them to increasingly desperate actions.

If you tell yourself you don’t want to think a certain thought, that is precisely the first thing your mind will produce! That is the nature of the human mind.

It can actually be damaging to an individual to see everything as one, intellectually. People often profess all kinds of fancy philosophical theories about becoming one with the cosmos, about loving the entire world, until life teaches them a good lesson. When it comes to money, the boundary between self and other is abundantly clear. At such times, there is no question of you and me being one!

An intellectual understanding that is not backed by experiential knowledge can lead to mind games and deceptive states. But if oneness becomes an experiential reality, it will not produce an immature action. It will produce a tremendous experience of life that will leave you transformed forever.

Sadhana Remind yourself at least once an hour that everything you’re carrying—your handbag, your money, your relationships, the heaviness in your heart and body—are things that you’ve accumulated over a period of time. If you become more and more conscious of this fundamental fact even as a process of dis-identification grows within you—balanced by a deep sense of involvement in everything around you—you will move from the misery and madness of the human mind toward meditativeness.

(Identity, intellect, and the freedom of dis-identification)

You can “be,” and still choose to think or not think. The most beautiful moments in your life—what you might consider moments of bliss, joy, ecstasy, or utter peace—were moments when you were not thinking about anything at all. You were just being. Even without your thoughts, existence is.

They seldom have the eyes to look at a flower, a sunset, a child, or a smiling face. And if it is an unsmiling face, they have no inclination to make it smile; they have no such small duties or minor cares in the world! They are too busy cracking the great puzzles of existence.

The other man stood up and said, “I am trying to empty the ocean into this hole with a tablespoon. You are telling me it is madness. But what are you trying to do? Do you know how vast this existence is? It can contain a billion oceans like this and more, and you are trying to empty it into the small hole of your head—and with what? With tablespoons called thoughts! Please give it up. It’s utterly ridiculous.” The other man was Heraclitus, the other great Greek philosopher. In a flash, he showed Aristotle what a crippled existence he was leading by attempting to extend his logic to every aspect of life.

Which option do you want to exercise? The planet is spinning on time: not a small event. All the galaxies are managing fine; the whole cosmos is doing great. But you have one nasty little thought crawling through your head, and it is a bad day! The problem is you are living in a psychological space that bears no connection with reality. And you are insecure, because it can collapse at any moment.

You could try this simple practice. Set your tap in such a way that only five to ten drops fall per minute. See if you can observe each drop—how it forms, how it falls, how it splashes on the ground. Do this for fifteen to twenty minutes a day. You will gradually become conscious of many things around and within you that you are completely unaware of right now. This simple exercise can initiate a process of sensitization and clarity and accomplish much more than you can possibly imagine. In this simple process, you are actually exploring one limb of yoga referred to as dharana, which means “that which flows.” It is not the water we are referring to here. It is your attention, and, in turn, your consciousness. The attempt is to make your attention flow and connect with its object—in this case, water. This is not an exercise in observation or appreciation. It is an exercise in attention—in turning what is sporadic and intermittent into a flow. (In the larger scheme of things, the water and you are already one. Your individuality is only your idea.) The Grime of Identity The intellect is like a scalpel. Its

Right now suppose you identify yourself as a man, all your thoughts and emotions flow from that identification. If you identify yourself with your nationality or religion, they will flow from those identifications. Whatever your thoughts and emotions, these identifications are a certain level of prejudice.

Or in other words, it is your identity that manages and determines your intellect. When you use a knife, it is important not just to have a sharp blade, but a stable hand to hold it. Without a stable hand you can end up cutting yourself in a million different ways. Most of the suffering human beings undergo is not because of external situations. What is inflicted on them from the outside is minimal; the rest is all self-help!

But if you are able to disentangle yourself from everything that you are not—if you dis-identify, as it were—you will see that the mind turns just blank and empty. When you want to use it, you can; at other times, it will simply be empty, devoid of all psychological clutter. That is how it should be. But right now, you are identified with so many labels, and at the same time you are trying to stop your mind: this will simply not work.

When you want to use it, you can; at other times, it will simply be empty, devoid of all psychological clutter.

Irrespective of what you think you are, when death confronts you, every identification falls away. If human beings learned to drop these voluntarily, life would be blissful. If you do not encumber your intellect with any identifications—body, gender, family, qualifications, society, race, caste, creed, community, nation, even species—you travel naturally toward your ultimate nature. If not, death will demolish it all anyway. You need have no doubt about that!

They have read all these things in a book. This is not gnana yoga. Any information you have about that which is not a living experience for you, is irrelevance. Maybe it is very holy irrelevance, but it does not liberate you; it only entangles you!

Moral of the story: when you are so full of bull you should not open your mouth. Very few people have the necessary intellect to pursue gnana yoga one hundred percent. Most need a huge amount of preparation. There is an entire yogic process to make your intellect so razor-sharp that it does not stick to anything.

There is an entire yogic process to make your intellect so razor-sharp that it does not stick to anything. But it is very time-consuming because the mind is a tricky customer; it is capable of creating a million illusions. Gnana yoga as a part of your spiritual pursuit is a workable proposition; as an exclusive path, it is only for a very rare few.

Sadhana Just sit alone for an hour. No reading, no television, no phone, no communication, nothing. Just see in the course of this hour what thoughts dominate your mind—whether it is food, sex, your car, your furniture, your jewelry, or anything else. If you find yourself thinking recurrently about people or things, your identification is essentially with your body. If your thoughts are about what you would like to do in the world, your identification is essentially with your mind. Everything else is just a complex set of offshoots of these two aspects. This is not a value judgment. It is just a way of knowing what stage of life you’re at. How quickly you want to evolve depends on your own choices.

Just sit alone for an hour. No reading, no television, no phone, no communication, nothing. Just see in the course of this hour what thoughts dominate your mind—whether it is food, sex, your car, your furniture, your jewelry, or anything else. If you find yourself thinking recurrently about people or things, your identification is essentially with your body. If your thoughts are about what you would like to do in the world, your identification is essentially with your mind. Everything else is just a complex set of offshoots of these two aspects. This is not a value judgment. It is just a way of knowing what stage of life you’re at. How quickly you want to evolve depends on your own choices.

The accumulative part of the mind is, to put it simply, just society’s garbage bin. It is merely a heap of impressions you have gathered from outside. Anybody you encounter stuffs something into your head and moves on: your parents, teachers, friends, enemies, preachers, the news anchor on TV, just about everyone. You have no choice about who to receive from and who not to receive from. The moment you say “I don’t like this person,” you often end up receiving much more from him or her than anybody else! You have the ability to process the information you receive, but that is all. Your ability to merely recycle the garbage you have picked up is what the mighty intellect has been reduced to.

Human perception through the sense organs is always piecemeal. It can give you an illusion of completeness but can never comprehend the whole. When you keep your intellect dipped in this limited, fragmented, accumulative dimension of your mind, you draw conclusions about life that are completely distorted. The more people become engrossed in thought, the more joyless they become.

profane. Instead, all it means is learning to discern the real from the illusory, what is existentially true from what is psychologically true.

Bring precision into every movement, every gesture. This is one way of dipping your intellect in awareness.

(Awareness, akash, and the etheric dimension of intelligence)

Sleep, wakefulness, death—these are all just different levels of awareness. Suppose you were dozing and somebody shook you awake. Boom! The whole world comes back in a single moment! That is not a small thing. You re-created the whole of existence instantly. The world, which was obliterated in your experience, pops back. Not in seven days—in just a moment.

Worlds that nobody had imagined in their wildest possible dreams become a living reality for you.

An awakened person sleeps too, but has managed so much awareness that some part of him or her does not sleep. The sense organs shut down, the body rests a bit, but everything else is on. This is because awareness has been notched up to another level. Awareness is a process of inclusiveness, a way of embracing this entire existence. You cannot do it, but you can set the right conditions so that it happens. Don’t try to be aware. It will not work. If you keep your body, thought, emotion, and energies properly aligned, awareness will blossom. You will become far more alive than you are right now.

It is ether that we refer to as “akash” in yogic terminology, and each human being has a certain dimension of this fifth element around him or her. While the other elements are within the body, the akashic, or etheric, dimension envelops the physical body—usually up to a distance of eighteen to twenty-one inches. Because this element is still physical, it carries information. Anything that happens at a certain level of intensity or profundity in your life is written into this field of akash around you.

Without any of the instruments of modern technology, the ancients in India and some other parts of the world amassed a remarkable amount of knowledge about the cosmos. All this was gleaned through the dimension of chidakash, or the akashic dimension of our intelligence. Once you are in touch with your awareness, you don’t have to try to accomplish anything. You don’t even have to wish or dream, because the best possible thing that can happen to you will happen. In the yogic lore, it is said that when you learn to access this dimension, you have enslaved the divine!

This is the intelligence of existence itself, in which life always happens exactly the way it should, with absolute and unfaltering ease.

Of course, you cannot use an alarm to go to sleep! But the fact of the matter is that unless you completely dis-identify from your body, it is not easy to move consciously from wakefulness to sleep. The first possible moment that you come awake, see if you can become consciously aware of something—your breath or your body, for instance. This will help you later when you want to go to bed. If you achieve waking with awareness and moving from wakefulness to sleep in awareness, you are deathless. This means that when it comes to shedding the body, you will do it in full awareness. Even getting close to that moment will change the way your body and mind function, and will alter the quality of your life quite phenomenally.

I make a distinction between knowledge and knowing. Knowledge is essentially accumulated information. All information is only related to the physical nature of existence. Knowing, on the other hand, is a living intelligence. With or without you, it still is. You are either in it or you are not: that is the only choice you have.

Nothing has ever been out of place in this existence. Things have only been out of place in human societies. Between this piece of life and that piece of life, there can be a comparison.

And the pursuit of yoga is just this: moving from this small headful of information to a cosmos of intelligence. What a tragic choice people so often end up making—choosing the finiteness of the human brain over a universe of infinite knowing.

The first step toward moving from the trap of the intellect to the lap of a larger intelligence is to recognize that every aspect of life—from a grain of sand to a mountain, a drop to an ocean, from the atomic to the cosmic—is a manifestation of a far greater intelligence than your minuscule intellect. If you take this one step, life will start speaking to you like never before.

The moment you get strongly identified, you lose your perspective on life! Ideas of good and bad, right and wrong are all your mental constructs. They have nothing to do with life as such. What was considered to be moral a hundred years ago is intolerable today. What you think is very good, your children despise. Your ideas of good and bad are just a certain level of prejudice against life.

you want an element of spirituality to enter your life, the first thing you must do is drop these rigid ideas of virtue and vice, and learn to look at life just the way it is.

Besides, they spend most of their lives trying to avoid what they consider “wrong” or “sinful.” That usually means they are constantly thinking about it. Avoiding something is not freedom from it. Such morality is based on exclusion. Spirituality, on the other hand, is born of inclusion. The essential nature of our humanity has been so suppressed and distorted that the substitute of “morality” has been brought in to bring some order and sanity to our lives. This has happened because we have not done anything to keep our humanity active. If your humanity were active, there would be no need for morality at all.

Morality is worthwhile because it helps ensure social order, but it is capable of wreaking inner havoc. Since nobody can live by the morals prescribed by most religions, most of humanity lives in a state of perpetual guilt, shame, and fear. This is a tragically crippled existence. Humanity will also bring social order, but it requires no external enforcement whatsoever.

If you are born it is a sin; if you menstruate, it is a sin; if you copulate, it is a sin. Forget all this, even if you so much as eat a chocolate, you could commit a sin. Since the very process of life is a sin, you live in perennial guilt and terror.

But when you are naturally joyful, you are naturally pleasant with the world around you. Spirituality does not mean moving away from life; it means becoming alive to the core, in the fullest possible way. With age, physical agility may diminish, but the level of joy and aliveness need not. If your level of joy and aliveness is declining, you are committing suicide in installments.

(Morality, belief, and the collapse into guilt)

The moment you believe something, you bring a certain rigidity into the very life process that you are. This rigidity is not just in attitude; it percolates into every aspect of your life and is the cause of an enormous amount of suffering in the world. Human society reflects the inner experience of human beings.

(The five states of mind — from inert to conscious)

The Wishing Tree Your mind can be in five different states. It could be inert—meaning, it is not activated at all; it is in a rudimentary state. If you energize it, it becomes active but scattered. If you energize it further, it is no longer scattered, but starts oscillating. If you energize it further, it becomes one-pointed. If you energize it still further, it will become conscious. And if your mind is conscious, it is magic; it is a miracle; it is a bridge to the beyond. Inert minds are not a problem. Someone who is very simpleminded and whose intellect is still not effervescent has no trouble. He eats well and sleeps well. It is only people who think too much who cannot eat and sleep properly! Simpleminded people perform all the activities of the body far better than the so-called intellectuals of the world. There is a certain peace in them because you need some intelligence to create disturbance and chaos. An inert mind is closer to animal nature than the human.

Once those who have very scattered minds start spiritual practices, they reach a place where the mind becomes less diffuse. But now it starts oscillating—one day, it moves this way; another day, the other way. This is, however, a huge improvement over being scattered, where the mind moves every moment across ten different places.

But the highest state is when the mind becomes conscious. In terms of instruments, it is not your computer, car, or spacecraft, but the human mind that is the most miraculous—if only you could use it consciously. The reason why success comes so easily and naturally for one person, and is a struggle for someone else, is essentially this: one person has organized his or her mind to think the way he wants, and another thinks against his or her own interests.

Once your thoughts get organized, your emotions will also get organized. Gradually, your energies and body get organized in the same direction as well. However, the order in which you address these dimensions could vary, depending on what you are ready for.

Eventually, once your thoughts, emotions, body, and energy are channeled in one direction, your ability to create and manifest what you want is incredible.

If you generate a powerful thought and let it out, it will always manifest itself. For this to happen, it is important that you do not impede and weaken your thought by creating negative and self-defeating thought patterns.

There is an alternative to faith, which is commitment. If you simply commit yourself to creating what you really care for, now once again your thoughts get organized in such a way that there are no hurdles. Your thoughts flow freely toward what you want, and once this happens, the manifestation of your desire is a natural consequence. To create what you really care for, your desire must first be well manifested in your mind. Is that what you really want? Think this through carefully. How many times in your life have you thought, “This is it.” The moment you got there you realized that was not it at all! So, first explore what it is that you really want. Once that is clear and you are committed to creating it, you generate a continuous process of thought in that direction. When you maintain a steady stream of thought without changing direction, it will manifest as a reality in your life.

Realizing the power of chitta is called chit shakti, a simple and powerful process through which you can access the very source of creation within you.

It is common to hear people say that their head leads them in one direction and their heart in another. In yoga, the fundamental basis we establish is this: you are one person, a single, unified being. There is no separation of head and heart; you are one whole.

largely the thought that leads the emotion, whether you recognize it or not. Emotion is not entirely steady. Your emotion also chatters, goes this way and that, but it is less agile than thought.

Thought and feeling are not different. One is dry. Another is juicy. Enjoy both.

Yogis are not against pleasure. They are unwilling to settle for little pleasures, that’s all! They know if you drink a glass of wine, it just gives you a buzz, but tomorrow morning it gives you a headache and more. Yogis are not willing to settle for that. To enjoy intoxication you must be totally drunk yet fully alert. I have never touched any substance, but if you look into my eyes you will see that I am always stoned. I am totally drunk and fully aware. This is one of the pleasures that the science of yoga offers. The end goal is not just intoxication. This blissful state eliminates the fear of suffering. In this state of nameless ecstasy, there are no concerns about self-preservation. This is what makes a human being capable of being and acting in a way that can sometimes seem superhuman to others.

(Love, devotion, and dissolving resistance to the divine)

If you see this, then there is a possibility that you can grow into love as your natural quality. But you can go on fooling yourself into believing that the relationships you have made for convenience, comfort, and well-being are actually relationships of love. I am not saying there is no experience of love at all in these associations, but it is within certain limitations.

Our actions are always molded by the demands of external situations. But love is an inner state, and how you are within yourself can definitely be unconditional. Acts of love can become tedious and stressful over a period of time. You realize love is not something that you do; love is the way you are.

Sadhana Love is never between two people. It is what happens within you, and your interiority need not be enslaved to someone or something else. Try this for fifteen minutes or so: go sit with something that means nothing to you right now—maybe a tree, a pebble, a worm, or an insect. Do it a few days in a row. After a while, you will find you can look upon it with as much love as you do your wife or husband or mother or child. Maybe the worm does not know this. That doesn’t matter. If you can look at everything lovingly, the whole world becomes beautiful in your experience.

Most people live cautiously, measuring out their love and joy in sparing doses for fear that it will run out. The most generous way to live is to set an example to the rest of the world by living life full-throttle and beyond all limitations.

Love itself is crazy, but there are shreds of sanity attached to it; you can still recover. In devotion, there is no shred of sanity; there is no way to recover. Devotees have the sweetest experience of life. Everybody may think they are idiots, but they are having the best time on the planet. You decide who the idiot is!

It is just that with devotion you have dissolved all the resistance in you so that the divine can transpire as effortlessly as breath. The divine is not an entity sitting up there; it is a living force every moment of your life. Devotion makes you aware of this.

Embracing Mystery It is only a juvenile intelligence that analyzes things and arrives at a conclusion. If your intelligence is sufficiently evolved and mature, you realize that the more you analyze, the further away you are from any conclusion. If you go deeply into any aspect of life, you will move further and further away from any conclusion. Life becomes more mysterious than ever before. The more you delve into life, you see that it is an endless and unfathomable process. You cannot get it because you are it. When you realize experientially that every atom, every grain of sand, every pebble, every piece of life from the smallest to the biggest is unfathomable, you will naturally bow down in utmost devotion to everything. If you simply sit here and breathe, you will know life better than through any deep analysis.

That which knows how to bend will not break. (That is why you are encouraged to do your hatha yoga every morning—essentially so your body does not break!) That is so with everything within you.

When you experience something as far bigger than yourself, bowing down will naturally occur to you. If you want to become a devotee, at least once an hour in all the waking moments of your life, put your hands together and bow to something. It does not matter who or what. Don’t choose. Whatever you see, just bow your head—whether it is a tree, a mountain, a dog, a cat, or anything. This need not be a physical act; it could be internal action. Just do it throughout the day, once an hour. See if it can become once a minute. When it becomes once a minute, there is no need to use your hands and body; simply do it within yourself. Once that becomes your way of being, you are a devotee.

(Prana, karma, and the direction of life energies)

Following the Pranic Trail At present, human beings identify with the body and the mind in a variety of ways. But fundamentally, what you call “myself” is just a certain amount of energy. Modern science has proved beyond all doubt that all of existence is made up of the same energy, manifesting itself in millions of bewilderingly different ways.

Religions all over the world have been proclaiming the same thing using somewhat different terminology when they assert that “God is everywhere.”

Instead of trying to find the source of our longing, we try to give it expression in the outside world. Due to the nature of our outward-bound senses, we are deceived into believing that outward expression will somehow bring fulfillment. When you misinterpret the expression as the cause, it will only bring entanglement, not freedom. The sole aim of every individual’s life energies is to touch the infinite—the very core of our making. They know no other aim. Your mind may be thinking of money or a new house, your body may be longing for food or sleep, but your life energies are always longing to break the boundaries set by your physical and mental structures. Slowly, in the process of living, many people have stopped following the trajectory of their life energies. The result is that they start believing that they are separate or autonomous entities.

The objectives of the mind are entirely

The various spiritual practices in the yogic sciences are intended to assist this longing on three levels: the physical body, the mental body, and the third sheath, or layer, of the human mechanism, the pranamayakosha, or the energy body. Yoga means to experience the mental and physical process distinctly, not as the basis of yourself, but as that which is caused by you. If you manage these two instruments of body and mind consciously, then your experience of life is one hundred percent of your making. All you need to do is create a distance between you and everything that you accumulated from outside. Everything that you have gathered in this life accompanies you wherever you go. It is deeply attached to you, and you, in turn, are deeply attached to it, on some unconscious level. It becomes an encumbrance because you don’t know when to put it down and when to pick it up. It is like a sack you carry on your shoulders all the time.

The spiritual process means a return to life. It means following the deep intelligence of your life energies. There are many ways of recognizing which way your life energies want to go. If you dis-identify with physiological and psychological processes, you will clearly see this. It is only when you consciously head in the direction of your life energies that you find equanimity and harmony. It is only in such a stable state that you would dare to explore the highest levels of exuberance and venture into the deepest mysteries of life.

(Pain versus suffering — and the cyclical trap of karma)

There was pain. Terrible, unbearable pain. But pain is a natural phenomenon, and it is good. Without it you wouldn’t know if your leg was chopped off. But suffering is another matter altogether. Pain is bad enough; why make it worse with suffering? Suffering is entirely self-created. And every human being has the choice: to suffer or not to suffer. It doesn’t take much intelligence to choose the latter.

If you can joyfully do whatever is needed in a given situation, this is freedom. But limiting yourself to doing only what you like is a horribly compulsive way to live. This compulsiveness is the trick of karma—that ancient word that has been mangled by popular usage across the world.

From the moment you were born, your parents, your family, your education, your friends, where you lived, and where you traveled—all this decided everything about you. Karma is encrypted on every aspect of life. It is imprinted on your mental memory, the fundamentals of your body, your chemistry, your very energy. These are all backup systems. Even if you lose your body or your mind, you still do not lose your karma! The backup systems are so efficient. What you consider to be your personality—the bundle of traits and tendencies that you are—is because of information you have gathered unconsciously. These tendencies have been traditionally described as vasanas. The word “vasana” literally means “smell.” Depending upon what type of garbage is in the bin today, that is the kind of smell that will emanate from it. Depending upon what type of smell you emit, you attract certain kinds of life situations to yourself.

“This is my nature. Can’t I do what I want?” This is not your nature. You are not doing what you want. These tendencies have become compulsive. This is your bondage, a kind of software you are writing for yourself unconsciously. Once your software is fixed, it looks as if there is only one path you can walk in your life. It looks as if your destiny is predetermined. A spiritual process, however, means we have made up our minds to rewrite our software, consciously.

Karma is what gives stability and structure to your life. Every moment, impressions are flooding in torrents into your system through your five sense organs and each of them is being recorded. There is nothing wrong with this stored information. It is very useful for your survival. If you deleted all of it, you would not know how to handle even the simplest aspects of life. The spiritual process does not seek to demolish this storehouse of karmic impressions, but helps you to become more conscious of it, and establish a little space, which allows you to stand outside of it.

Whatever be the nature of your past karma, there is enough awareness in a human being to take complete charge of the karma of the present moment. If you want any kind of transformation, any kind of forward movement in your life, it can only happen if you break the cyclical patterns of karma. Anything that is cyclical suggests constant motion, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. If you are sensitive to life, you realize this early.

your professional life may be flourishing, your capital may be increasing, your family may be thriving, but you are not really getting anywhere. The faster you achieve your success, the faster you realize this. When you are in a certain state of insufficiency, you keep thinking that everything will be okay once your dreams are realized. But if all the things you dreamt of happen very quickly, you suddenly realize that, although everything is happening as you thought it should, life still remains unfulfilled and your longings persist.

At the same time, avoiding karma is not the answer either. Avoidance may give you some balance and stability in day-to-day life, but slowly it saps you of life and joy. This is very negative karma in itself. Denying, suppressing, or avoiding life brings more bondage than freedom. The desire, “I don’t want karma,” is itself a big karma!

you live every moment of your life totally, you dissolve enormous amounts of karma. When you experience everything that comes your way absolutely, when you experience every life breath with utmost intensity, without the distractions of thought and emotion, devoid of any psychological drama, you are liberated from the very process of birth and death. You are not only more alive; you are life itself.

you were alone on this planet, what would you want for yourself? Ask yourself this question and see where it takes you. Try this. Sit alone for five minutes and see what your life would be like if you were absolutely alone in this world. If there were nobody or nothing to compare yourself with, what would you truly long for? What would really matter to you if there were no external appreciation or critique? If you do this every day, you will become aligned with the longings of the life that you are, rather than the accumulated karmic mess that you believe you are.

(Kriya yoga — the long path of mastering energy)

When you have the ability to perform action with the non-physical aspect of your energy, then it is termed a “kriya.” All this may sound somewhat esoteric, but only if you are inducted by someone who has mastery over the realms of energy will it become possible for you to practice a kriya.

Kriya yoga is a very powerful way to walk the spiritual path, but at the same time it is tremendously demanding. For many modern urban people who are unaccustomed to using their body in its full versatility, kriya yoga could seem arduous and inhuman. This is because kriyas are elaborate and involve a great deal of discipline, focus, and exactitude. Most people do not have the body, the attitude, or the stability of emotion for this yoga path, primarily because they are used to living, right from their childhood, in a perpetual state of comfort. Being used to a level of physical comfort is not a problem. But being in constant quest of comfort: this is a great problem. That kind of attitude and emotion is unsuitable for the path of kriya yoga. Also, kriya yoga cannot be done with people who talk “freedom” all the time. It is not for people who keep asking, “Why am I not free to eat my ice cream? Why can’t I wake up whenever I feel like it? Why can’t I eat, drink, or have sex with whatever, whoever, whenever I feel like?” If you take the path of kriya, a certain fundamental discipline has to be brought into all physical, psychological, and emotional processes. If you want to hit the peak of your consciousness, this discipline is essential. You cannot be partying till early morning and attempt to scale Mount Everest tomorrow! The same logic holds true here. When you are given a certain kriya yoga regimen, you have to follow it. You may understand the need for the discipline as you go along, but it can never be fully explained. And if it has to be explained, the essence of the kriya will be lost. This is because kriya is a tool to transcend the framework of logic and experience in order to access those non-physical dimensions that are considered spiritual or mystical.

But for the kriya to be a live process, to be imprinted in your system in a certain way, it needs a certain discipline, dedication, and receptivity. When you walk a completely new terrain, if there is no trust in the one who guides you, then the journey becomes unnecessarily long and difficult.

If their trust still did not waver, then the guru might consider initiating them into the kriyas. There is a reason for this. Once you empower people in a particular way that makes their system vibrant beyond normal standards, they can cause great damage to…

I spent twenty-one years of my life transforming a powerful kriya, the Shambhavi Mahamudra, in order that it might be taught to large numbers of people in today’s world. Certain aspects that could empower people either to harm themselves or others, or influence the elements around them have been firewalled, so only the physical, psychological, and spiritual benefits remain. For those two decades I deliberately stayed away from all forms of public outreach, because my entire focus was primarily on re-crafting the kriya to ensure that it could be widely imparted without any adverse effects. Kriya yoga as a full-fledged path is important only for those interested in exploring mystical dimensions. If your concern is only well-being or if you are just seeking realization, kriyas can be used in a small way…

What you are seeking on this path is not just well-being, blissfulness, or realization. Instead, you want to know the very mechanics of life-making; you want to know the engineering of life. That is why it is a much longer process. People on the kriya path have a completely different kind of presence about them because of the mastery over their energies. They can dismantle life and put it back together. If you are pursuing the path of gnana, for example, your intellect could become razor-sharp, but there is still very little you can do with your energies. Similarly, on the path of bhakti, or devotion, there is nothing much you can do with your energies. (Nor do you care, because the intense sweetness of your emotions is all that matters; you only want to dissolve into the object of your devotion.) If you are on the path of karma, you…

Sadhana The very way the karmic structure works in every human being is essentially cyclical. If you observe very closely, within a day the same cycles are happening many times over. If you are very observant, you will see that every forty minutes you are going through a physiological cycle. Once you see that, then with the necessary attention and awareness you can ride the cycle and move toward transcendence from the limitations that these cycles set. So, every forty minutes, life presents you with an opportunity—the opportunity to become conscious. Every forty to forty-eight minutes, there is also a shift of dominance in the way the breath is moving through the right and left nostrils. It is dominant in the right nostril for a length of time, and then in the left. Become aware of this so you know at least something about you is changing. This…

(Nadis, chakras, and the 114 energy centers of the body)

Pingala is symbolized as the masculine and ida is symbolized as the feminine. “Masculine” and “feminine” do not refer here to biological differences, but to certain qualities in nature that have been identified as such. These qualities are represented by these two channels. If a person’s pingala is very pronounced, then outgoing, exploratory qualities will be dominant. If the ida is more pronounced, receptive and reflective qualities will be dominant.

A human being is complete only when both the masculine and the feminine function at full force and are in proper balance.

Once energies enter the sushumna, however, your inner way of being becomes independent of the outside, because it is independent of the seventy-two thousand nadis.

Lots of people are “doing” chakras these days. It has become a huge fad, but it can be dangerous. It is time to approach this very subtle subject with care and precision. The nadis do not have a physical manifestation. If you cut the body and look inside, you will not find them. But as you become more aware, you will notice the energy is not moving at random but in established pathways.

There are 114 chakras in the body. Two are outside the body and 112 are within the body. Among these 112, there are 7 major chakras. For most people, 3 of these are active; the remaining are either dormant or mildly active. You do not have to activate all 114 chakras to live a physical life. You can live quite a complete life with just a few of them. If you were to activate all 114 chakras, you would have no sense of body at all. The purpose of yoga is to activate your energy system in such a way that your body consciousness is constantly being lowered, so you can sit here in the body, but are no longer the body.

There are innumerable instances like this in the yogic tradition. When your energies are in a heightened condition, the sense of the physical is so diminished that it is even possible to go without any external nourishment for days on end.

Experiences that happen within you—anger, misery, peace, joy, and ecstasy—are different levels of expression of your life energies. If your energies are dominant in muladhara, then food and sleep will be the most dominant factors in your life.

The man who wants to initiate something in the world has much more intensity than a pleasure-seeker. An artist or a creative person lives his life more intensely compared to these three people.

If you hit your sahasrara, you will explode into unexplained ecstasies. Without any external stimulant or reason, you are simply ecstatic because your energies have touched a certain peak.

If your energies move into the agna chakra, located between your eyebrows, you are intellectually enlightened, but still not experientially liberated. The great mystic philosopher of eighth-century India Adi Shankara walked all across the land, defeating legions of scholars in metaphysical debate. His logic was unbeatable, because the union experienced in agna endows one with an extraordinary level of intellectual insight and perception. The seventh chakra, sahasrara, is actually located just outside the body. For most people, it is dormant. Through spiritual practice or a very intense way of living, you can activate this. If you hit your sahasrara, your experience is no longer intellectual; it is experiential. You now explode into unexplained ecstasies and the deepest mystical realms start opening up. Sometimes you can attain ecstasies that can turn uncontrollable, if there is not sufficient spiritual practice to create the necessary physiological and psychological balance. In the Indian tradition, these ecstatic mystics were termed avadhutas. They were in such altered states of consciousness that they often had to be fed and taken care of by those around them because they were incapable of handling the worldly aspects of life on their own.

This is one of the reasons for the tremendous emphasis on the guru in the Indian spiritual tradition. To make the leap from the agna to the sahasrara takes immense trust. Suppose you were confronted by a bottomless abyss, and someone asked you to plunge into it, you would either have to be utterly crazy, extraordinarily courageous, or absolutely trusting to do it. Almost no one has the kind of courage it takes. Very few are mad enough to live their lives with total abandon; most people live with caution and the overriding need to protect their boundaries. So, for 99.9 percent of the people, what is needed is trust. Without trust, they will never make the leap.

Instead, it signifies a space free of all possibility of hurt and suffering, an entirely new dimension that is flawlessly non-repetitive, a dimension beyond comparison and context that leaves you not as an individual but as all-encompassing infinite nature, in a stillness beyond bliss.

Sadhana By focusing at a point six to nine inches away from the region between your eyebrows for twelve to forty-eight minutes, with your eyes open, you can realize the nature and structure of your individual chakras (depending on the duration and your level of focus). This perception can help in stabilizing the random movement of chakras in the human physiology due to stressful external situations. This is just one aspect of a very sophisticated form of kriya yoga that allows you access to your inner akashic, or etheric, dimension.

When you want to attain yoga or Zen, you have to drop your load, discard everything on the way, remain free, stand upright. It is important. With your load, you may never do it. And what is the goal of yoga? Consciously take on the whole load once again. And now it no longer feels like a load!

Most believe it is mere mumbo jumbo meant to obfuscate the spiritual process and exploit a fearful and gullible majority. It is time to discard this superficial understanding and look deeper.

If you have the necessary technology, you can make the simple space around you into a divine exuberance. You can just take a piece of rock and make it into a god or a goddess. This is the phenomenon of consecration.

There are many advantages, but the problem is human beings have to dedicate a certain amount of time, energy, and focus to maintenance, otherwise it will not work. When people in the world are too distracted and unwilling to make themselves into living temples, building stone temples becomes a necessity.

(Consecrated spaces and the Dhyanalinga as living guru)

you were to try it for yourself, you would discover that it is a tremendous experience. The Dhyanalinga is in the highest level of intensity that any form can be. Even if those who do not know anything about meditation come and sit there, they become meditative by their own nature. That is the kind of remarkable tool it is.

reverberation. It is my dream that someday all of humanity should live in a consecrated environment. Your home should be consecrated; your street should be consecrated; your office should be consecrated. All the places where you spend your time should be consecrated. When you live in such a space, your evolution need not stick to the Darwinian scale; you can simply leapfrog ahead to a state of ultimate well-being and freedom.

This makes the temple an opening in the fabric of the physical. You could fall right through it and go beyond: that is what makes it such a tremendous possibility.

If you push energy up to very high levels of intensity, it can hold form only until a certain point. Beyond that, it becomes formless and people are largely incapable of experiencing it. The Dhyanalinga has been consecrated in such a way that the energy has been crystallized at the highest point beyond which there can be no form. It was created so that the intimacy of sitting with a live guru is available to every seeker who longs for it.

But once you are touched on the level of the etheric body, it is forever. Even if you go through many lifetimes, this seed of liberation will wait for the right opportunity to sprout and flower. It took me three and a half years of a very intense process of consecration to complete the Dhyanalinga. Many yogis and adepts have attempted to create such a linga, but for various reasons, all the required ingredients never came together. This was not my will; it was my guru’s. Though my contact with my master was momentary, it has in every way been momentous. It has directed every step of my life, including my very birth. The Dhyanalinga has finally been accomplished, with his grace and with the love, support, and understanding of many people, who gave of themselves, knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously. I am grateful to them all.

Sadhana If you learn how to use the five elements in a certain simple geometric formation, you can create a highly beneficial energy space for yourself. Here’s a simple exercise you can try. Draw a figure like the one below with rice flour or some kind of grain. Place a small ghee, or clarified butter, lamp in a plate full of water at the center. Place a flower in the water. You have now created a geometric form, using water, fire, and air. The flower in the water represents the earth. Akash, or ether, is, of course, always present. Try this simple process every evening. You will find the energy of your room altered in a subtle but powerful way. In this manner, you can uniquely empower your home or office on a daily basis.

Mountains of Grace For most yogis and mystics, the problem has been that they could never share the fruits of their realization with people around them. To find another person capable of receiving what you know is not easy. If you find even one person you are fortunate. So, most spiritual masters downloaded their knowing in remote but not entirely inaccessible places.

(Sacred mountains as storehouses of mystical knowledge)

Mount Kailash (the mountain peak in western Tibet that is regarded as a sacred place of immeasurable power and antiquity) is the place where the maximum amount of knowledge has been stored for a very long time in energy form. Kailash is the greatest mystical library on the planet. Almost all the religions of the East hold it as highly sacred. Among Hindus, it is traditionally regarded as the abode of the great god Shiva and his consort, Parvati.

For example, Kedarnath is just a small temple in the Himalayas. There is no deity there; it is just an outcrop of a rock. But it is one of the most powerful places in the world! If you strive to improve your receptivity and then visit a place like that, it will just blow you away. There are many places like that in the East, but the Himalayas attract the most people.

He fought many battles, trying to transform the world, but when he realized the futility of this, he came to this region. It is here that he washed his sword of its blood for the last time.

But because he was such a warrior, Kartikeya stood up and exited his body, standing.

This kind of work can never be wiped out. Wherever a person does something with his life energies, he creates a certain possibility which cannot be erased by any event. The work and presence of anybody who experimented even a little bit with the inner dimensions can never be destroyed.

If you ask me, “Which is the greatest mountain on the planet?” I will always reply, “Velliangiri.” I was born with an imprint of these mountains in my eyes and they have haunted me ever since.

(Samadhi — heightened experience, not the ultimate freedom)

There are various types of samadhis, which for the sake of understanding, have been classified into eight types. Among these eight there are two broad categories: savikalpa (samadhis with attributes or qualities that are very pleasant, blissful, and ecstatic); and nirvikalpa (samadhis that are beyond pleasant and unpleasant, without attributes or qualities). In the case of nirvikalpa samadhi, there is only a single-pointed contact with the body. The rest of the energy is loose and uninvolved with the physical. These states are maintained for certain periods to help practitioners establish the distinction between themselves and their bodies. Samadhi is a significant step in one’s spiritual evolution, but it is still not the ultimate.

have been broken to some extent. But this is only temporary. The moment they come out of this state, all the bodily needs and mental habits return once again.

you go into these states, a new dimension does open up for you. But the crucial thing is that it does not leave you permanently transformed. You have not moved into another reality. Your level of experience has deepened, but you have not become free, in an ultimate sense.

But Gautama himself never did this because he must have seen it was not necessary for him. He practiced and experienced all the eight kinds of samadhis before his enlightenment, and he discarded them. He said, “This is not it.”

Samadhi is just a heightened level of experience, a kind of inner LSD without any external input, which causes altered levels of perception. The risk is that you could get caught up with it, because it is far more beautiful than the current reality, but even the most beautiful experiences, as we know, can become a drag with time.

If you have made realization the top priority in your life, then anything that does not take you one step closer toward your ultimate freedom is meaningless. Let us say you are climbing Mount Everest: you will not take one step sideways because every iota of energy is needed to reach the peak. Now if you have to reach the peak of your consciousness, you need every iota of energy you can muster. And still it is not enough! Now, you would not want to perform any action that would distract you from the main purpose.

Similarly, the more profound your understanding of the human mechanism is, the more magical your life will be. In every culture, there have been a few people who performed certain actions that made others believe in miracles. All these actions that are known as miracles are just born of a more profound access to life that some have enjoyed. That access, as I have said time and again, is available to everyone who cares to look deeper.

(Tantra — left-hand and right-hand paths distinguished)

Tantra: A Technology for Transformation Today, there are many practices associated with the occult sciences masquerading as spiritual processes.

I make this flower suddenly land in your lap, this is occult. There is nothing spiritual about it; it is just another way of handling the physical dimension of life. In India, we have many sophisticated occult processes. There are people who can just look at a photograph and make or break a person’s life.

Matsyendranath said, “I sent you away for fourteen years, because you were beginning to become occult-oriented. You were losing sight of the spiritual process and beginning to enjoy the power that it gave you. When you come back, the first thing that you do is use occult to open up your brother disciple’s mind. Another fourteen years for you.” And so he sent him away again. There are many stories about Gorakhnath making forays into this forbidden realm, and Matsyendranath punishing him again and again. At the same time, Gorakhnath evolved finally into the greatest disciple that Matsyendranath ever produced.

It was practiced only by certain types of people obsessed with power or money. At the same time, occult is not always a negative thing. It has earned this reputation through misuse. Occult is essentially a technology.

Too many people misused it for personal benefit. So, generally on the spiritual path, occult is shunned. What is often referred to as occult is broadly what we know as tantra.

Left-hand tantra involves various rituals which may seem weirder than weird to many. The left hand is very external; you need materials and elaborate arrangements to make it happen. Occult practices, generally referred to as left-hand tantra, gave people powers to communicate across distances, to appear in two different places at the same time, and use energies to their own benefit and to the detriment of others. Right-hand tantra is more internal; it is about enabling you to use your energies to make things happen. You use all the simple aspects of life as a subjective science to turn inward and do something with yourself. The left-hand tantra is a rudimentary technology and more available to the uninitiated, while the right-hand tantra is highly refined and only available through powerful initiations.

(Kundalini as latent serpent power)

SERPENT POWER The word kundalini literally means “energy.” It refers to a certain type of energy within every human being which is largely latent and unmanifest. The kundalini has always been symbolized in the yogic tradition as a coiled cobra.

So kundalini is referred to as a coiled cobra because this tremendous energy exists within each and every human being, but until it moves, you never realize it is there.

If your energies become still, the snake is naturally drawn to you.

Traditional images of Adiyogi, or Shiva, depict a snake with him to indicate that his perception is at its peak.

(Joy as the natural background of a fully alive life)

Joy is a rare visitor in most people’s lives. The intention of this book has been to make it your lifelong companion. Joy is not some elusive spiritual goal. It is simply the background milieu that is needed for any aspect of your life to unfold magically and wonderfully. If joy is not the ambience of your life, even life’s most pleasurable activities become burdensome.

After that, life is a journey of endlessly unfolding celebration and discovery.

Some are suffering their failure, but ironically, many are suffering the consequences of their success. Some are suffering their limitations, but many are suffering their freedom.

My life’s work has been dedicated to empowering human beings to take charge of their own destinies and bringing them to a state of joyful inclusiveness so that the possibility that we are does not pass us by as a generation. Your joy, your misery, your love, your agony, your bliss, lie in your hands.