Day 12 - Sep 15, Mon

Chapter 12 - Love is your very life

Only after giving the Spiritual Experience, Krishna gives His teaching on Love. Only a person who has had the Experience of the Being, of feeling one with every other Being, of being a part of the Cosmic Consciousness, can know what love is, can radiate love. We think we know what love is. Some people act as if they love. Never can you love by acting. Love has to flow naturally from the Experience of the Cosmic Consciousness. After the experience of this, so much gratitude and love overflows in your Being that you cannot help but radiate love.

In the West, it is believed that you should do social service and then you have love in you. But love cannot be organized in an institutional way; it just flows. The moment you try to organize it, it has a different quality, color and purpose. In the East, it is understood that first you need to have the Experience and then the love spontaneously follows. Only when it flows naturally is it a solid experience.

Even the small things an Enlightened Being executes are great. Buddha taught the Vipasana technique to watch your breath. Just uttering these few simple words of Truth, has led to thousands becoming Enlightened. Even if an unenlightened person does something great, it is not as effective as the smallest gesture of an Enlightened Being. The results of any action, either good or bad, depend on the Being, not the doing.

The theory of relativity because it was applied by unenlightened beings led to such destruction when the atom bomb was created. It is now known that there is enough atomic weaponry to destroy the earth seven hundred times over.

Arjuna asks whether it is better to be established in the Consciousness and stay inside the Experience or to radiate love and gratitude and express that Consciousness through devotion, bhakti. Our very Being is love and once we experience our Being, we radiate love. Krishna’s answer is: “They are both one and the same.” Both are the Ultimate.

I want to introduce a new concept: Virtuous circle. The Consciousness leads to the Expression or bhakti, and the Expression leads to the Consciousness. Usually we are caught in a ‘vicious circle’ of fear leading to greed and greed leading to fear. The ‘virtuous circle’ leads to higher and higher Consciousness and experiences.

Krishna states: “Those who are established in devotion or bhakti are always engaged in Me”. They experience Krishna and understand the teachings. Those who have not Experienced cannot grasp the Truth. It is like listening to an audio recording of the teaching without the diagram that is being shown in the lecture; you miss a whole dimension of the teaching. Actually, it is like reading a transcription of the teaching and not being able to grasp the significance of a teaching that can be explained through a visual representation only. It is hard enough to grasp the teaching even if you are present in the lecture and seeing the visual representation. Experience is essential. This is why Vivekananda says not to read anything that has been written by anyone who has not experienced.

How is bhakti achieved? If you have not loved those close to you, you cannot understand the concept of love. If you do not know what love is, it is hard to know God. Ramanuja asks one disciple, “Have you loved anyone in your life?” The disciple was shaken. “I am a pure brahmachari,” he replies. Ramanuja says, “First go and love someone and see how you feel, then I will teach you about God.”

Unless you can love those who you see everyday, your fellow human beings, how can you love God who you have never seen?! We should understand that unless we radiate love to those we live with; we cannot love the whole world. Saying that you love the whole world is easy. First love your spouse. When the Experience is established in your Being, you will naturally radiate. If love is not happening, it just means that the Experience is not happening. The Experience cannot be possessed. It will possess you.

A man goes to a Zen Master. He asks, “Will an enlightened man speak.” “No”, the Master replies. “So will he keep quiet?” the man asks. “No”, the Master replies. The man is naturally confused. The Master explains, “Neither will he speak, nor keep quiet. He will sing.”

Whatever you express will be a song. Your very walking will be a dance, your body language will be pure grace; your actions will be the ultimate service.

The Gita is a song, not prose. Great Truths can never be explained through logic, they can be explained only through poetry.

Bhakta, a great devotee of Krishna would bathe in the Ganges every morning, read the Gita and meditate on Krishna. All day he is radiating Krishna Bhakti. One day a beggar comes and asks for some food as he hasn’t eaten for days. Bhakta has only one possession, his Gita book. He tells him to take it into the city, to tell the people there that it is his, for he is respected in the city, that he can auction it and buy food with the money. The next morning Bhakta says to Krishna, “Oh Krishna, I have given away your words to keep your words.”

Now Krishna comes to the technique. You need to understand that love is not a mood. It is your very existence. If it is a mood, it comes and goes. There are two kinds of love: Horizontal and Vertical. Horizontal love is flat and is related to time. Anything that starts naturally has to end. It may take months, years even, but you can be sure that it will end. This is the love where we use our frame of our expectations of how people should be so we can love them. As long as people fit into our frame, we love them. When they stop fitting, we stop loving them. There is some need, or condition in our 'love'. It may be economical benefit where we love as long as they provide for us, or psychological benefit where we love as long as there is psychological support, or simply attention-need where we love as long as we are getting the right attention that makes us feel we are doing a good job in relation to that person.

Vertical love is related to Consciousness. It is Infinite. It neither starts nor ends. With vertical love, we start to experience ourselves through every other Being; we expand. We lose the sense of 'I' and 'Mine'. If you experience that you are living in all bodies, you experience infinite joy and tremendous ecstasy and bliss. This is what all Enlightened Beings enjoy. This is why they have no need of anything in the outer world. Real renunciation is not you renouncing the world. It is the world renouncing you. Never renounce until you have a solid experience of ecstasy in you, then everything will automatically drop.

Here Krishna gives the technique to experience the process of ‘virtuous circle’. If you continuously and consciously put these ideas in your Being, naturally these ideas will radiate from you. If again and again you digest these ideas, they will become a part of you. It is important to imbibe them when you are peaceful, so that when you are in trouble they will come up automatically.

We absorb everything into our Being. Not only the food we take in, but everything that comes into our Being through our five senses. Everything that we are exposed to, goes right into our Being. We need to purify our senses as well as our mind.

Television destroys our Consciousness. If we are traveling at forty miles per hour, then we can see whatever is in the road. If we are traveling at hundred miles per hour, you can’t see as clearly. Normally your eyes and mind can see, process and analyze at 6 frames per second. Television and movie is at 16- 24 frames per second. Information is forced on us. It goes straight into your Being. In this way our Consciousness is exploited. We lose the logical capacity and emotional balance. Even though we know logically outside the experience of viewing the movie that the actress is alive, if we watch her die, we experience sadness. We experience this because the logic is pushed aside and the information is flooded into our system. It goes straight into our unconscious. Never allow negativity into your Consciousness; automatically you will be established in Divine.

When words are from experience, you don't even have to remember them even, you just have to hear them. Words from experience automatically penetrate your Being and they automatically come up in your Consciousness and guide you.

Krishna says: If you can’t fix your Consciousness on Him, let at least your Inner Space be filled with these ideas. Krishna gives more than one option for establishing ourselves in His Consciousness. You can fix your mind on Him or work for Him (bhakti). Many instructions are needed because everyone’s mind is different. Out of their compassion and caring, Enlightened Masters always give every opportunity. We need to have tremendous spontaneity to handle these instructions.

For example: If you are in a low mood and it does not feel natural to meditate, do not fight yourself. Take a walk or give yourself an experience to give the relaxed mood so that meditation becomes easy. Whenever you have spontaneity, you can manage anything. When you don't have a vested interest in the past, you are spontaneous. If you have vested interests in life, you miss out on life. The way you make decisions, depends on how many vested interests you have. An Enlightened Master has no vested interests. Nothing they say is going to add to their life. Respect is given to their life, not their words.

Freedom is the basic condition for any growth. In the East, there is inner freedom. There are many deities to choose from. Tremendous research has been done in the inner world because of this freedom; so many Truths have been brought to the world. Yet there is less social or outer freedom. In the West, there is much social freedom and customer service but no inner freedom. There is only one God. The West has forgotten one important thing in their inner world: to give choice. Krishna gives the spiritual freedom to all of us so we can choose what works best with our mental set-up.

The moment you surrender everything to the Divine, healing immediately happens to you. You experience the inner breeze of the Divine in your Inner Space. As long as you think in terms of 'mine', you will be in trouble. Many people get suspicious though. They think if they drop the ‘I and mine’ the Master may take it away!

A blind man is walking in the Himalayas. He finds a stick in the snow that is really a frozen snake. He begins using it as a stick. An Enlightened Master sees him and tells him to drop the stick. The blind man thinks it is because he wants the stick for himself that he is saying so and refuses to drop it. When the Master tries to take it from him, the blind man beats him with the stick.

We don't believe someone when they say that they love us, because we ourselves are not capable of loving. We begin to calculate what they want from us. We also don't believe we are worthy of love. We suffer from both passive and active ego. Passive ego manifests as inferiority complex, active as superiority complex. With the active ego, at least society keeps it under check. Passive ego can hide itself and through it we hide from life.

Visualize inhaling and exhaling bliss continually. There is a difference between visualization (bhavana) and imagination (kalpana) With visualization, you are visualizing what is there but what you can’t see at this moment. You are seeing something that is there and what you are supposed to fall in tune with. Imagination is to do with what is not there. They are two different things. You will start with visualization and end in realization, because bliss is the very nature of your Being.

When we understand the importance of the state of your Being, when you realize that your Consciousness is ALL you possess, you radiate Bliss.