Chapter 11 - Complete Happiness
Day 58
When knowledge is permanent, repeated births are destroyed. Ignorance destroys our knowledge, just like weeds eats up a fence. It is not that people do not understand.
Everyone has a brain, everyone has discrimination and knows that everyone will die one day, and you too will die. But if somebody dies you say, "Oh, poor thing He has died."
Are you not going to die too? Are you going to live forever? You are also going to die. Why do you forget this? You are not aware of knowledge, and you forget that everything is impermanent.
You keep thinking that someone sald this or that. Whatever anybody has said has flown away in the wind. Listen to it with one ear and let it exit through the other. Why should you suffer by storing everything in your head?
Attaching such value to what others say and think is ignorance. It destroys knowledge. You waste your time in useless talk and gossip. In this way and through fights and argument, the little knowledge that you have gets destroyed.
Although you listen to everything that is said in satsang, all the happiness and enthusiasm you feel there can be driven away by negative talk and gossip. All sorts of fears, doubts and problems appear again in the mind.
It does not take effort for bushes and weeds to grow, they shoot up by themselves. You only have to put in effort to grow something useful. Is
it not? Nobody needs to be taught how to worry.
It comes by itself. But one has to be taught how to be happy. If
knowledge stays permanently, then your repeated births get destroyed, and you will not have to take birth again.
We are born due to some ignorance, desire, hatred, fights or worries. It means that you will be established in unshakable truth, the eternal principle, and the mind will not go through restlessness, discontent and sadness again, life becomes meaningful.
The mantras we use for different purposes have limited strength. Only consciousness has unlimited power. The various mantras and rituals you do have limited strength.
Consciousness alone has tremendous power. Your actions and are limited, and the results of those actions are also limited. When you do some good action, its results last for a matter of days, and likewise when some mistake happens, its results remain for a little while.
Understand this clearly and rest, rest in the Self. This has been said again and again. The experience of the fourth state of consciousness pervades the other three states. All the activities you do belongs only to the waking state.
But the experience during meditation is not limited to the waking state, it even seeps into the states of dreaming and sleep. If you go to sleep after you meditate, the quality of your sleep will be different.
You know about the three states of waking, dreaming and sleep. The peace that is experienced in the fourth state will soak into the other three states too. You do not have to do anything. What does it mean?
Even as you speak, part of you is witnessing. While you are asleep, you are aware that you are sleeping. Similarly, many times when you are experiencing a dream, you are aware that you are dreaming.
Many of you will have experienced this. Similarly, when you are doing some activity in the waking state, you are aware that you are doing some action and of the thoughts that appear and disappear in your mind.
Watch all the experiences, thoughts and emotions - whether anger, hatred, etc. - as a witness. Then, consciousness crosses over the three states. One who is absorbed in his mind comes into his peaceful nature.
You keep entering the minds of other people, wondering what they are thinking about you or what they are saying about you. As soon as you wake up, you start wondering about what you should say to someone : "What will they think about me? What reply should I give him?"
75% of the thoughts that appear in your mind are about others. What does it mean to be immersed? You have to get immersed in your own mind, forgetting about what others think or say. When do you get immersed?
You become absorbed only when the mind is happy and in a cheerful state. Look at a child. Give him a lollipop and watch how completely absorbed he is in the lollipop.
You can ask him, "What are you doing?" or "What is your name
?", but the child will not even open his mouth, and even if he does no words come out. You can keep asking him other questions like, "What would you like?" but you will not get a response.
The child will not hear your question because he is so absorbed in enjoying the lollipop. Children are fully immersed in whatever activity they do, and that is why they can have happiness in it.
They are absorbed in their own
mind. Children never worry about what others will say. They are not self-conscious about anything at all. Why? They do not differentiate, they have no sense of the other.
They do whatever they like, and their activities have no goal or purpose. Activities with a purpose or intention are different from those activities without a goal. We call an activity that has no goal behind it, a game, or play.
Whatever children do is play. Similarly, what an enlightened person does is also play. Such a person does not have any goal, but they themselves are the goal.
