Prem Nadi Ke Teera #3

As far as asanas are concerned… no, there is no need for you to do them. In this, many asanas will start happening through you. If you do these processes for fifteen or twenty days, many asanas will begin to happen on their own. In the camp, while doing it, someone even went into a headstand. Because when one lets the body go completely, if the body begins to do a headstand, what is one to do? And all these asanas evolved in just this way; no one deliberately devised them. In such a state the body starts taking many forms, making many mudras, many asanas.

There was a woman in this camp just now… (inaudible.) Almost all mudras happen through her hands—practically all of them. As many mudras as are discussed in the scriptures, they all manifested in her. Haven’t the photos come to you from there? A movie was also made, and it has been shown in five or ten places in Punjab. It was made right in that camp. So who knows into how many asanas someone may go, what may happen? But the asana that forms by itself is the one beneficial for you. If it is made deliberately, it is not directly yours. When it arises on its own, the work is done on its own.

it will happen on its own. So whatever the body needs should be left to the body's own wisdom. It will fulfill whatever is needed. Do not obstruct it. All those asanas have evolved in just this way.

The body knows what it needs. If moving the hand will help, it moves the hand. It knows where its tensions and complexes are; it does its own work. You don’t know—you’re doing a headstand. A person whose body has no need for a headstand may do one—and it can cause harm.

The body has its own wisdom; man has lost the body’s wisdom. Animals haven’t. Leave a buffalo in a field where twenty-five kinds of grasses grow. It will pick what it needs and leave the rest. It isn’t “choosing” the way you think; it doesn’t know botany. It hasn’t read any book about which species to eat and which not. It lives by the body; the body itself knows. It selects what it needs and leaves the rest.

A dog—if there’s heaviness in its stomach—will vomit at once. It doesn’t know yogic mudras, it doesn’t take an emetic. No—its body works. If it eats something that doesn’t suit it, it will immediately vomit. If any animal falls ill, you cannot make it eat. Only a human can be forced to eat. Why? Because man has lost the wisdom of the body. Otherwise, to eat when you are sick is to feed the sickness. No animal will eat; it will flatly refuse food. The body has its own wisdom. We have lost awareness of it because we live by the intellect.

The intellect interferes with the body’s immediate understanding. Such a mess has been created in the human body by the intellect that it defies measure. In this process, when we leave the body completely outside the intellect, it regains its basic instinct. Then it does what it needs to do; it does what is necessary for it. In that state, whatever postures arise, whatever mudras arise, they arise on their own.

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It will remove it; it will remove it—absolutely it will remove it.

That’s why it’s a striking fact: if someone is ill, he doesn’t get healed while awake; he heals in sleep. And if sleep itself doesn’t come, curing the illness becomes difficult. The reason is that while awake he doesn’t let the body’s wisdom work; in sleep the body does its work. Therefore, for every illness, sleep is essential for healing. If a patient can’t sleep and is ill, first restore his sleep; only then will the illness be healed—otherwise not. Because he’s awake twenty-four hours, he doesn’t let the body do anything. At night, where his hand falls, where his foot falls—when awake he won’t let them fall. Even if something drools from his mouth at night—when awake he won’t let it. You don’t let the body work. The intellect has become dominant over it. Then there will be great trouble.

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There are two very good times. One is in the morning, after waking from sleep. The other is at night, just before going to bed. Sunrise itself isn’t the main point—but if you can get up then, very good, very good. The best is to be with the sunrise, not before it: as the sun is rising there and your process is going on here, it works more effectively. Or else, at night before sleep. These two times are very good. In truth, any time is good—midnight too can be excellent. Any time is good; it’s just that external disturbances are fewer then, much fewer.

No, no, no. I never use anything traditional—never. By “Paramatman” I mean only this: that ultimate experience in the depths of our life; I call that Paramatman. However deep we can descend into life, that which is ultimate at the center of life—the very center—that is what I call Paramatman. It would do even if we did not call it Paramatman. Give it some other name—any name. A word is only a word; associations gather around it. So by Paramatman I simply mean the ultimate source of life—from where life comes and where it abides. We can call it the ultimate source of life; there is no harm.

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I was just telling you: the first experience will be of light—and there is a reason. Our lifelong perception is of darkness. Nothing is seen; nothing is understood. Nothing is known—where have we come from? Where are we going? Why are we? This is all the feeling of darkness, as if we are surrounded by a darkness in which neither the front is known nor the back, neither the neighbor nor oneself. The breaking of that dark boundary.

So the first blow of meditation falls upon this darkness. After the first blow, the first experience begins, and it is of a light behind a veil. All around, there will appear nothing but light. There is a fundamental difference between that light and this light. This light has warmth; that light has no warmth—it is cool light. This light has a source; that is without a source. If there is a lamp, it comes from there; if there is a sun, it comes from there. In meditation the light that is experienced is light without any source. Therefore the sense of light that begins to grow is like the light when the night has ended but the sun has not yet risen.

The second perception is of peace—supreme peace. Supreme peace is very condensed. And the third perception is of bliss. You could say bliss is the experience of condensed peace: when peace becomes very dense, it becomes bliss.

No—you won’t feel like opening your eyes, not in the least. And I want to speak of that densely condensed state of bliss. There is nothing beyond it—because it has no “beyond.” It has no end; hence, there is nothing ahead of it. In peace you will continually know, “I am peaceful.” In bliss, you will not know like that. Peace will seem separate from you, and you from it. In bliss, you will feel, “I have become bliss.” It won’t appear separate; it will feel identified—“I have become bliss.” And when you take bliss to its farthest reach, even the “I” does not reach there. There, it will not even be known that “I have become the Divine”; there, only the Divine is.

So on three planes—here, in peace, I will remain and peace will be all around. In bliss, I and bliss will become one. And in the Divine, I do not remain at all. This is why people could bring back news up to bliss; beyond that, no news could be brought. Because those who bring the news are themselves lost there. Therefore, news reaches only up to bliss. Thus sat-chit-ananda is the last news—up to where man has brought news: there is sat, there is chit, there is ananda—existence, consciousness, bliss. This is the last news, the last milestone—after which a person dissolves. Because after that, there is no news. Yet the real thing is beyond even this. This is the last stretch where the mile-stones are set. Beyond that is the wilderness, where the road ends—and where we end.

Therefore the last, the deepest report that could be brought is sat-chit-ananda. But the truth lies beyond that too. Hence sat-chit-ananda is not a definition of Brahman; it is the definition of man’s last station—beyond which man does not go, and so no news comes. It is not a report of the destination itself. It is the last, the final stone we could set—the border-stone. But it stands on this side of the border; on the other side, no stone can be set.

That is why I do not say sat-chit-ananda is Brahman’s definition. It is the last possible definition on the way to Brahman. Beyond this, the realm of the undefined—of no-definition—begins. There is Brahman. So if someone asks me, “Is sat-chit-ananda Brahman?” I do not say yes. I say: Brahman is beyond sat-chit-ananda. Then there is neither sat, nor chit, nor ananda—nor anyone to know them. Yet, for practical purposes, it is acceptable to say this can serve as a definition of Brahman.

Controversy is perfectly natural. It is not their fault; the fault is mine. Because whatever I am saying goes against many things. In this I am opposed to tradition. And I maintain that religion has no tradition; it cannot have one. The experience of religion is always new; it can never be old. Whenever it comes to someone, it is fresh and new. And we cannot build a tradition upon the experience of religion; the very act of making it into a tradition turns it stale and borrowed. In fact, the moment the experience of religion is given words—written or spoken—it dies.

A living religion has no tradition; only dead religions have tradition. All religions are dead religions. And yet religion can never die. Religion is a living experience. Whatever happened to Nanak is alive, but what a Sikh clings to is dead—the words Nanak spoke. The experience that happened to Buddha is alive, but the follower clings to Buddha’s words; that is dead.

Religion is one, but dead religions are many. Every time people have experienced the living truth, once it is put into words and turned into scripture, it dies. There are some three hundred religions in this world. And in my understanding, it is precisely because of these three hundred dead religions that the experience of living religion becomes very difficult—because they seize us from all sides.

Where Nanak reached, where Buddha reached, where Mohammed reached—we do not reach, because we stop, clutching the words of Nanak, Buddha, and Krishna.

Therefore I am also anti-scripture.

I hold that religion has no scripture—there is no such thing as a “religious scripture.” All scriptures are written by religious people, but none of them is a scripture through which religion can be attained. Religion has to be attained through experience. Yes, a scripture can bear witness that what you experienced also happened to Nanak, also to Buddha.

So at most it can serve as testimony; it cannot give the experience. Naturally, when I speak against tradition, when I say that scripture will not give you religion, and when I say regarding truth that it can never be borrowed, never obtained on loan—it is not transferable, such that if I realize truth I could hand it to you—

Therefore I say that in the realm of religion there can be no gurus, only disciples. And to be a disciple means an attitude of discipleship: a readiness to learn. A person of feeling can have this attitude; he learns, he can learn from everywhere, from anywhere. But there is no guru—no one who can say, “I will give it to you.” Because upon entering the world of religion, the “I” does not remain; the giver does not remain. So there can be no claimant there. Yes, seekers can learn from any source—but there are only disciples, no gurus.

And in my understanding, it is because of the very idea of gurus that sects and denominations have arisen. If our emphasis were on the learner, there would be no need for sects and denominations. One could learn from anywhere. Then the whole world becomes a place of learning, and the whole world becomes the guru.

So if I refuse to call tradition, scripture, and guru “religion,” controversy arising is entirely natural.

In fact, in fact, you have asked a very good question. As I see it, religion is a negative philosophy of life. Religion simply does not have a positive philosophy. In truth, the religious mind is a negative mind.

What do I mean? Imagine a man in chains who says, “I want to break these chains and be free.” Someone asks him, “What is the positive meaning of your freedom? What do you mean by positive freedom?” He will say, “If my chains are broken—if all the chains fall away—I will be free.” But that is a negative statement. Freedom, in its essence, has no positive content. Freedom means the absence of bondage. And religion is liberation—the search for absolute freedom, where we are utterly free: no limits, no bonds, no obstacles.

So religion is basically negative: wherever there is bondage, break it. I hold that orthodoxy is a bondage; tradition is a bondage; the guru is a bondage; the scriptures are a bondage; doctrines are bondages—these are all chains. Break them. The moment they are broken, whatever remains is the positive—your own lived experience. When all these are cut and what remains cannot be cut any further, call that your true nature, your intrinsic suchness, your ultimate truth, call it God—whatever name you give.

Where all our bonds are broken, what remains is the positive. But the work we have to do is negative: to break every chain. So I have no positive philosophy at all, because I see that a positive philosophy itself becomes a bondage. Only a negative mind can be free; a positive mind is bound—because whatever it posits, to that it becomes bound. Say, “God is like this,” and you are bound to that idea. Say, “Heaven is like that,” and you are bound. Say, “Liberation is such and such,” and you are bound.

One who does not bind himself anywhere and drops all kinds of bondage—when all shackles fall from consciousness within—then freedom is attained. That freedom is our nature, our inherent being. It can be reached only through negativity, through negation. Hence those who have known the ultimate say, “Neti, neti”—not this, not that. Drop this too, drop that too. And we always ask, “Then what should we hold?” The positive always asks, “What should we grasp?” But grasping becomes bondage.

So I say: do not grasp at all—live without holding. Only if you can live without any clinging can you be free. The moment you clutch, you are bound. Therefore do not clutch. That is why I have no positive philosophy—and yes, that is troublesome; it creates controversy. Because whenever someone tells you to let go, you say, “First tell us what to hold.” You are told, “Drop what you have in your fist,” and you ask, “Then what should we clench our fist around?”

I say: drop the fist itself. I am not saying, “Drop what is in the fist.” What difference will that make? The fist will close around something else. If not clay, then a stone; if not a stone, then gold—but the fist will remain clenched. My emphasis is that the fist must be open. So the question is not what you hold; the question is whether you are holding or not holding.

My point is: where all kinds of clinging drop away—a mind without clinging, without any positive clinging. That is freedom.

First, you are saying that awareness, consciousness, should arrive at a place where it can exist without dependence. But it will reach such a place only when it begins to break its dependencies; otherwise it will not arrive. So, to the extent we have dependencies, we must begin to break them—only then do we reach the place where awareness can be independent. Breaking dependence is the path to that place.

Second, I do not call “freedom from want” freedom. Because what we have so far called desires, needs, and wants are necessities of life’s very existence. They are needs.

I understand. I have understood your point. In truth, only when desires are fulfilled do we transcend them. The desire we fulfill is precisely the one we go beyond. Until it is fulfilled, the desire keeps pursuing us, surrounding us from all sides. The old outlook was: suppress desires, and by suppressing them you will be free. I do not agree. Suppression is not freedom; fulfillment is true freedom. Suppression is a very deep kind of slavery—slavery at our own hands. No one else is enslaving us; we enslave ourselves.

So in my view there is no opposition to desires. Whatever passions and desires life has given us should be fulfilled as they arise, in whatever manner they can be fulfilled. We need a society, a set of attitudes, an order in which they can be maximally fulfilled. Therefore I am not in favor of poverty.

And I hold that religion flowers only in an affluent society, not in a poor one. As affluence comes—where desires begin to be fulfilled—only there, for the first time, is a new desire born: how to go beyond all desires. Where desires begin to be fulfilled, there for the first time the question arises: What is the truth of life? What is the divine? What is liberation? When the worldly desires are fulfilled on all sides, then this deeper longing begins to arise. For this deeper longing to begin, the ordinary desires of life must also be fulfilled.

So I am life-affirmative. I wholly accept life—its many forms and all its longings. And only by fulfilling them is there a way to go beyond them. Where they are fulfilled, there we pass beyond. Let desires be fulfilled; let there be no repression, no cutting and mauling of desires. Therefore I am not a partisan of any kind of austerity, renunciation, or asceticism. For, in my view, the renunciation we have praised cripples a human being, makes him lame, breaks him from all sides. Consciousness does not develop through it; it remains stunted.

But there is another kind of renunciation, which comes through the experience of things. One renunciation is that of a poor man, who has known nothing of life and leaves things. The other is of a Buddha, who has known everything and now leaves it. I see a difference between the two. The poor man has to renounce; the Buddha’s renunciation is effortless and spontaneous. Things have become futile, meaningless.

So regarding life—its desires and needs—I wholeheartedly accept materialism. I hold that a true religion cannot be anti-materialist; if it is anti-materialist, it will also be anti-life. The entire basis of life is material; matter is the foundation of life. My understanding is that the foundation of religion will be materialist, but its peak will be spiritual. The stones at the base of the temple are materialist; the spire of the temple is spiritual.

I do not consider spirituality and materiality to be in opposition. My understanding is that there is no conflict between body and soul, nor between God and creation. They are not two things; they are two aspects of one. From one side it appears as body; from the other it is experienced as soul. From one side it seems matter; from the other it appears as the divine.

Thus I am not a dualist. I believe dualism has made all religious thinking schizophrenic: man has split himself in two. He was told, “This body is the enemy, and you are the soul; keep fighting it.” Fight the body; fight nature; fight life.

By fighting life, body, and nature, we cannot reach the divine. Rather, by dissolving wholly into them—immersed, enchanted, becoming one with their juice—we can reach the divine. Because we are not separate from them.

Therefore I am not life-negative; I am life-affirmative. But I do take the religious mind to be a negative mind. By “negative mind” I mean that, for the sake of freedom, wherever there is bondage it is eager to break it. Its longing is for absolute freedom. Duality, too, is a bondage. When I divide myself in two, I land in great trouble. It is like setting my left and right hands to fight—neither can win, because both hands are mine. They fight, none wins, but I lose—because both hands, fighting, are exhausted.

So life has not yet attained a truly religious shape because duality has shattered us into fragments. Nonduality, for me, does not mean what it meant for Shankara. For Shankara, nonduality means the world does not exist. To me, that still makes Shankara a dualist: without denying the world he has no way. He must deny the world to preserve nonduality. But whatever we deny is still there; the very need to deny it shows it is. You have to call it maya, illusion—yet it remains.

For me, nonduality means: whatever is, is one. There is nothing in it to be denied, nothing in it to be fought. There is no need to fragment it; it is integrated, one. I accept life in its totality. You could call this my positive element: total acceptability. Everything is acceptable to me; life as it is, wholly accepted.

No—what I am saying is not a tradition, but it isn’t new either. Keep both points in mind. In fact, what I am saying is this: whenever anyone has attained to religion, they have said exactly this. And whenever anyone attains, they will say exactly this. But it never becomes a tradition; those who make traditions are always others. If a Buddha is born or a Jesus is born, a tradition is built on their basis. But the builders are always different—people who have no experience of religion. The tradition-making society is another thing entirely. The original source is what I am pointing to. And if, after me, ten people try to make a tradition, it will be against me.

So it is also my understanding that all religious traditions are, in fact, against those in whose names they were formed. Because the ones who construct them are very different people. They gather from all sides and construct. Those who collect around Nanak and build an organization, a system—they do so without Nanak’s experience. They have only Nanak’s words. And even those words they interpret in their own way—having nothing to do with Nanak.

In my understanding, to understand Nanak’s words one needs the experiential stature of Nanak. There is no other way. It is like this: a one-eyed man sees light, and then the blind gather and build a system around it. Naturally, everything gets muddled. So there is no tradition for what I am saying. But what I am saying is not at all new. It has always been said, and always, around it, an opposite tradition has formed.

And that is the great irony. The great irony is that whenever anyone has a religious realization, what he says is exactly what all who have ever realized have said. But all those standing behind the past tirthankaras, prophets, and gurus become his enemies at once. They do so because tradition inevitably deviates—turns the other way around.

Now, Buddha told people: do not worship anyone, because the one you worship is seated within you. But people began to worship Buddha. And they said: we won’t worship anyone else—neither Ram nor Krishna; but you have given us knowledge, so at least we will worship you. And Buddha kept shouting: do not worship anyone—Buddha included.

Then Buddha said: do not make any image. What is the use of images? People replied: at least we will make your image. Today there are more statues of Buddha on earth than of any other person. And no one opposed image-worship as strongly as Buddha did.

Here is another curious thing. In Persian or Urdu, the word ‘but’—meaning idol—is a corrupted form of ‘Buddha’. So many statues of Buddha were made that “idol” and “Buddha” came to mean the same. When statues first spread across the world, they were statues of Buddha. People asked, “What is this?” They were told, “Buddha.” Idol and Buddha became synonymous. The name of the man most opposed to idols became inseparably linked with idols. Buddha said: go to no one’s refuge. And people began to chant, “Buddham sharanam gachchhami”—we come to your refuge.

So the whole trouble is this: when someone gives a discourse on religion...