Questionnaire: Having been a devotee of some
wonderful masters who actually passed on, some spiritual experiences occurred and some
fire within happened. I’m coming now to find some form of practice
to help settle things down. It just feels like something energetically
happened that’s very different and I don’t know what it is and I’m just
trying to find someone like you who would know and could advice me. There are any number of people who have come
to spiritual experiences by different means, either by being in touch with a certain person
or even just going to certain places, being exposed to certain situations or just
accidentally out of their own life situations. For some reason, let's…
let's understand the science of what's happening fundamentally. What is it that we are calling as spirituality? The way the creation is right now,
from what you call as, let's say a rock which is gross solidity,
to what you call as plant or animal or human or what you refer to as divine, what is this? In every possible way, every system in the
world has been trying to insist that it’s the same thing, isn't it? Though you don’t believe any of them, at
least now whatever the scientist says you believe. Scientists are also saying the same thing. Recently it was very amusing for me to meet
a very top level scientist in United States and as I was… We were just talking and everything that I
say he says, ‘That’s right. That’s what the science is also trying to
get there but we are not clear about it. What you are saying is right.’ I said, ‘It has to be. If science says something else, science is
wrong.’ So what is happening to this is from gross
to subtle, it is the same thing. This happened to me many years ago – as
I said yesterday, I… At one time, just after my university I set
up a farm and I did this farm almost completely on my
own. A lot of it I physically worked and built
the whole thing. And I had to paint the farm. So [Laughs] I am… In the family I am an outcast because I am
doing something that they are not very happy about. So I am running on a real bad budget. So I want to paint it. Paint is expensive in the shop, so I went
and bought ordinance paint, you know, the military paint. It's bad quality but it's available in large
quantities [laughs]. So I got myself ordinance paint. The only color that they had was farm blue. That’s not the color I wanted to paint my
farm but that’s the only color they had and I
had to paint it. Before the bank people came for the inspection
it had to be painted. So I said okay, let me paint it farm blue,
tomorrow when we have the money we will paint it something else. So I am the painter and it's a long surface
to paint. If I go like this, like this it’ll take
too much time. I don’t have that kind of time, so I devised
my own way. Put it and just walk along the wall, from
this end to that end, that end to this end, dip it and walk and walk holding the brush
to the wall. I just took the first stroke and just walked
– here it came out thick, as it went it became,
you know, lighter and lighter and lighter. I just looked at this and burst into tears
and I just sat there for many hours, I didn’t paint
because for me the whole creation was right there in my experience. This is all the whole creation is - just like
a paint smear from gross to subtle, that's all it is. What you call as a rock, what you call as
the ultimate divinity is the same thing, but subtle; this is gross. So this human being has broken away from one
level of existence and not yet reached the other;
he’s here. Out of his fear and out of his longing to
survive and preserve himself he tends to make himself like a rock. But the moment he becomes like that, there
is something within him which doesn’t like it,
it wants to go somewhere else to the subtle. This is the struggle that the human being
is going through. So spiritual process means consciously taking
yourself to the subtle. So this subtlety can happen within you either
because you came in touch with somebody or something or you consciously built it up
within yourself or simply because of a certain usually strife
or dangerous situations for people. When danger arises or extreme strife arises
in one’s life, a certain intensity can come to life within
you and suddenly what was gross can become very
subtle. Just being faced with death can do this to
people. Many years ago I was in Bangalore and I went
to a vegetable market. I have a kind of fancy for vegetable markets
– wherever we go, we go into the vegetable market
just for the fun of it. Indian vegetable markets are fun – you go
there, you simply bargain, you know, they say ten rupees, you say ‘No, one rupee’,
then you say ‘Okay, three rupees,’ then you say, ‘Two rupees ‘and… Simply for the fun of it. If you don’t bargain they won't respect
you [laughs]. So we have a kind of fascination for vegetable
markets. So I went to a vegetable market, and there
I was just walking through, looking and talking to people and there I
saw a man, a vegetable vendor who is a shining being. I just looked at him and I can't believe a
man like this is selling vegetable. Then I looked at him and he looked at me,
our eyes locked up and then I burst out laughing. He also laughed. Then I went to him. Then I asked ‘How come here? Why vegetables?’ He said, ‘Come, sit down.’ So I went and sat in his shop and we’re
just talking, I said, ‘How come?’ He said, ‘I was just a vegetable vendor
and one day I fell ill.’ And he fell ill, he had nobody. Somehow he went to a general hospital, which
is just like a preparatory for hell and there he was; every day he thought he’s
going to die. His condition was just there, every day he
thought he will die, every day he thought he will die, but he didn’t
die. They don’t let you die. Four months he was in the hospital, completely
bedridden and after four months he recovered and in
these four months constantly facing death, he realized himself and now he is sitting
there like a Buddha in the vegetable shop. So he said, ‘Everybody who comes to me,
every customer who comes to me, I just bless them with a long illness.’ [laughs]
I said, ‘What a blessing!’ [laughs]
Because for him this illness is such a blessing. This illness has delivered him to a completely
different dimension of life. So you know, you should know where to buy
vegetables. [laughs]
So it can happen in so many different ways but the thing is for most of the people who
come in touch with spiritual experiences through contact or through something else,
they’re unable to sustain it; they go up there and they collapse. When they collapse, if everything is worse
than before, if you had not seen the up there then this
was quite okay but now you have seen up there and now you
collapse, now it's very bad. You didn’t know anything better, you are
okay. Now you have known something better, now when
you come back here it feels terrible. So they become miserable, many of them become
broken in their minds, depressed. So many people like this keep coming all the
time because somehow they burst into some big experience,
not able to sustain it – that becomes their curse. Nothing wrong has happened to them, it's just
that they saw a different level of life and they have fallen, now it's very painful. Suppose you are just living an ordinary, I
mean, a very meager kind of life – suddenly you got a lottery, hundred million
dollars. One year you lived like that and then you
lost it, now it's bad, isn't it? If you had not gotten that, you were just
fine the way you were but suddenly this thing up there and down
here, you are not able to take it; that’s what has happened to these people. So it's always best that you don’t jump
into big experiences, it's better you build a staircase and slowly
climb so that there’s no falling down. So when we create a proper structure, a proper
practice, this is what it means – everyday you keep doing the Kriya, it will
slowly build you up. No sudden fire-works but slowly it builds
you up to a certain point where no question of falling down because
you’ve gone up on the staircase, you didn’t… you didn’t just jump from somewhere. So the practice, the Shambhavi Mahamudra will
create that situation within you. It doesn’t matter whatever has happened
in the past, it was good for you at one moment, now the only thing is you are unable to stay
there, you are unable to keep it up. And the system is not ready for that kind
of energy. Without preparing your body, if you take this
into very high levels of energy, something can easily break. Very easily it can happen to people. So it's always best that the system is prepared
before big energies happen to people. That is the whole fundamentals of… The physicality of yoga is just that, to prepare
the body so that when really big time energy happens,
you can take it well.
