अरा इव रथनाभौ संहता यत्र नाड्यः स एषोऽन्तश्चरते बहुधा जायमानः । ओमित्येवं ध्यायथ आत्मानं स्वस्ति वः पाराय तमसः परस्तात् ॥
arā iva rathanābhau saṃhatā yatra nāḍyaḥ sa eṣo'ntaścarate bahudhā jāyamānaḥ omityevaṃ dhyāyatha ātmānaṃ svasti vaḥ pārāya tamasaḥ parastāt
Where the nerves are brought close together like the spokes in the nave of a chariot wheel, this is He that moves within, there is He manifoldly born. Meditate on the Self as AUM and happy be your passage to the other shore beyond the darkness.
~ Verse 2.2.6
✥ ✥ ✥
Acharya Prashant: “Where the nerves are brought close together like the spokes in the nave of a chariot wheel, this is He that moves within.”
The nerves, the nāḍis are being referred to. So, what do these nerves indicate here? They indicate the separation that is present in the bodily, embodied person. The nerves that are being talked of here are not really the nerves that modern science, modern medicine refers to and deals with; these are invisible nāḍi that have been talked of classically in India. But what is it that they are pointing to in an Upanishadic context?
Just as nerves rush to your brain from all your limbs, from all your organs to carry messages, and the presence of the nerves denotes the presence of the limbs themselves—and what are the limbs? The limbs are separations, divisions. And the nerves remain separate. What happens to your leg doesn’t happen to your hand. What your left ear experiences, the right one does not. You get hit in the shoulder, it is not your knee that swells up.
Similarly, everything about the existence of the person is fragmented, and each fragment refers only to itself; each fragment has a desire for its own well-being. You put your right hand on fire, it is not your left hand that jerks away, right? The right hand fends for itself, takes care of its own interest. That is the division in the body, in the existence of the person. Though the fact is that if something really injurious happens to your right hand, it is probably going to affect your left hand as well in a while. A venomous snake bites your right hand—would your left hand be left alive?
So, though they are integrated, yet they function and behave almost as if they are independent of each other. This is at the physical level. Exactly the same is the person at the mental level as well. There are divisions in the mind, which incidentally is the center of all nervous system, and each division works to maximize its own welfare—whatever it perceives as welfare in its limited way—and the result is chaos, the result is conflict. One part of your being wants one thing, the other part of your being wants another thing.
Yet, the Upanishad is pointing towards something very, very integrated and profound. The Upanishad is saying, one part of you, one nerve of you apparently wants one thing, another nerve of you wants another thing—and the number of nerves that you have is unbelievably large, whether in classical spirituality or in modern science—yet all these various and distinct nerves and divisions are probably wanting one common thing.
You have a million divisions within you. Nerves from each of these divisions rush to your imagined center, which is the center of the brain, and want to do their bidding. All of them are carrying information to and fro. “This is happening, that is happening; it is hot, it is cold; I am hungry, I am hurt, I am elated; let’s go this way, let’s stop; let’s sleep now, let’s eat now.” This is what is happening continuously in the nervous system. “Somebody touched, there is strong wind, there is dim light”—this is what the nervous system is continuously doing. “A lot of pressure, I am not feeling good”—this is the kind of information exchange that is happening.
So, even though it appears that each of them is apparently busy caring for its own little interest, yet, deeply, every single part of our being wants just one thing. And that one thing, the Rishi says, is That. That one common thing is That.
Your left arm may not ostensibly want what your right arm does, yet both of them share a common heart. If you scratch beneath the surface and see what lies just beneath that, you will find that there is a unity beneath the divisions. It’s just that the unity is beneath the divisions, which means it is at a deeper level. But if you only look at surface level, what do you perceive? Only divisions.
The Upanishad is saying, when you go deeper you find that every nerve, every instinct, every thought—that’s what you associate with nerves, right? thinking, feeling—every action that happens in your consciousness, love, hatred, desire, disgust, it’s all ultimately pointing towards That. And this indication has been put forward by the Upanishad in these words: “Where the nerves are brought together like the spokes of a chariot wheel…”
So, visualize. You have a wheel and the wheel has a lot of spokes, and apparently the spokes are all getting progressively distanced from each other, are they not? From the center they all radiate radially outwards along the radius, and as they radiate outwards, what happens to the separation between them? It keeps increasing. That’s the existence of the person. The more distanced the person is from his center, the bigger is the distance between the parts of the person.
Each spoke connects the center to a particular, specific, distinct point on the rim of the wheel, you could say, the circumference. The larger is the radius, the more distanced the circumference is from the center, the bigger will be the distance between two spokes, assuming the number of spokes remain the same. That’s how we are internally fragmented. But if the whole circumference starts shrinking towards the center, what happens to the distance between the nerves, the spokes? It decreases. This is what the Upanishad is saying.
So, there are all these spokes, nerves that are connecting different parts of your physical self, your mental self to your center, and you must remember that He or That sits at the center. But if you are an insect who just loves to navigate on the circumference, all you get is a perception of differences.
Think of a fly, and the fly is moving on the rim of the chariot wheel and saying, “Here I am at the end of one particular spoke, spoke number 1. And now, when I move and move and move, I reach spoke number 2. And then I move further along the circumference, and I reach spoke number 3.” What is the fly perceiving? Distance, not unity.
If you live on the circumference of life, things will always be fragmented for you. Not that things are actually fragmented; it’s just that what you experience is decided by your location. That’s why I love to continuously ask, are you all experiencing the same thing here? Not possible.
This experiment used to be my favorite. There would be large audiences, hundred, two hundred of them, and I would be speaking. And I could see that several of them are smug in the confidence that they are getting what I am saying. So, I would say, “Pull out a piece of paper and summarize the session in five or ten points, do that.” And the people would gladly do that.
Then I would say, “Now exchange your sheet with your neighbor,” and then there would be commotion, because what you think I have said is not at all what even your neighbor thinks I have said. Not a distanced person—even your neighbor thinks that I have been saying something totally different from what you think I have been saying, and you have no idea what your neighbor believes I am saying.
Sometimes people would be almost shell-struck. “What? But sir never said this! What have you written?” And the neighbor would be equally insistent. “He said exactly this! What have you written, rather?”
Each of us is very confident of our experiences. “It happened because I experienced it. It is true because I know it. It is a fact because I saw it.” Not true, sir. What you are saying could be true but only at the center of the wheel. You don’t exist there. Had you existed at the center of the wheel, you could have trusted your perceptions completely. But where do you exist? You exist somewhere along the radius, the nerve that connects the center to the periphery.
And it’s a very, very long nerve, extremely long nerve. They say the cumulative length of the nerves in the human body is probably sufficient to cover the distance between the earth and the sun, or something like that; don’t quote me on this. Because the nerves are extremely delicate, they can cover long distances and there can be a lot of them in a small cross-section. They are so delicate.
So, many people say, “But I experienced it! But I perceived it!” Doesn’t matter. To you it might be the truth, but it is not the truth. You felt it as the truth, but it is not the truth.
And that is what separates a high consciousness from a low consciousness. The standard mark of the low consciousness is: it lives in its own world—which is, by the way, also a classical sign of insanity: you live in your own personal world, you have your thoughts, feelings. The higher consciousness is marked by a disbelief, an indifference in perceptions. And when you are not prepared to trust your perceptions or experiences, something very wonderful happens: your perception and experiences become trustworthy.
When you are prepared to trust your thoughts, feelings, experiences, they keep becoming more and more untrustworthy, and the more you are skeptical towards them—which means essentially being skeptical towards oneself—the more skeptical you are towards your entire body of beliefs, even the thing that you just saw or heard, even the stuff you have been deeply believing in since the last twenty years, the more skeptical you are towards it, something magical happens. What? When you don’t rely on them, they become reliable. When you don’t trust them so much, they become trustworthy. As if they have a life of their own; as if they know that “our bluff will be called out, so no point bluffing”.
You are known to be someone who won’t take crap lying down; that’s how you are known in your circles. Now, how would people approach you? With all their nonsense? Would they lie to you to your face? Your brand is known for being skeptical and straightforward, very resistant towards lies. Now, how would be your experiences with people? Would people come to you and lie to you to your face? They won’t. You will find that now more and more truth is coming to you. Why? Because first of all you were unprepared to accept the false. You said, “I don’t want to take crap, full stop.” Now crap doesn’t come to you.
Corollary: you take crap and only crap comes to you in larger portions. Now, don’t wonder why life keeps dishing you crap, because first of all you made it known to everybody that you will tolerate crap. You tolerate crap, and all you get is crap.
In an analogous way here, you have to start rejecting that which is subjective, which essentially means you have to start rejecting that which your system wants you to believe in. You will say, “But what else do I have to believe in?” Don’t believe in anything; then that which is believable comes to you on its own.
When I say, “Don’t believe in anything,” the first step is: don’t believe in yourself. Kindly don’t skip step one, it would be very dishonest. Mostly, we want to skip step one and go to step two. Step two is: don’t believe in others. When I say, “Don’t believe in stuff,” you will say, “Fine, that means don’t believe in stuff but believe more and more in yourself. So, keep believing in yourself. I am right! I will debate!”
Nothing purifies you more rigorously than the continuous remembrance that you are born impure. Nothing purifies you more than this, and nothing is more difficult to remember and accept than this. It is a very strange method, but this is the only method. All other methods are just humbug.
What is the method towards purity? Always know how impure you are. Never let your mind hoodwink you into a feeling of its honesty or cleanliness. We are born unclean, dishonest, impure.
At any moment this is the method: ask yourself, “Am I in my personal world? Am I in any world?”—because any world you are in is bound to be your personal world. You could phrase this question in many ways depending on your own inner stuff. ”Is something happening in my consciousness right now?” If something is happening in your consciousness right now, you are in a trap.
This is what simplicity means: to have a still consciousness in which nothing at all is happening. And when nothing at all is happening in the consciousness, then all that which needs to happen just happens.
You must develop, with practice, some kind of an allergy to certain words. ‘I felt’, ‘I thought’, ‘this is the way I am’, ‘this is how I do it’—the moment you utter these words or phrases or they come in your thoughts, you should immediately just reject; an alarm should go off, a resistance should be triggered, “Something bad just happened.” With practice you must allow this to be deeply memorized.
You see, when somebody shouts, “Fire!” do you take time to react? You have let the word sink deep into your memory. The moment you hear that word, you know something improper is happening. Somebody just shouted, “Fire!” You cannot say, “I am so tolerant of the word that when the word came to me, I said fine, I will consider it fifteen minutes later.”
Similarly, the moment you hear ‘I felt’ there must be an inner resistance, just as you resist ‘fire’ or ‘snake’. Somebody shouts, “Snake!”—somebody doesn’t even have to shout ‘snake’; somebody just whispers ’snake’. In fact, a whisper is even more scary, right? And you know it is an emergency. Similarly, the moment your thoughts say, ”But I am feeling like this” or you feel like defending yourself arguing to somebody else, ”But I think…” Snake!
This is something that you have to linguistically train in. It is a thing of language, so it might not be very difficult to do. Develop a linguistic allergy to certain words and phrases. Just the word should mean danger. ‘Feeling’: danger.
Now, what does this do? Does this make you dead and insensitive to feeling? That’s how it sounds. No, that does not happen; something else happens. Now your feelings are not worth throwing away.
When feelings start meaning danger to you, then what you feel starts having a certain purity. It’s as if feelings were not a danger on their own. It’s as if the feelings were carrying a pathogen on their back, and when you started distrusting your feelings, it’s the pathogen that got blocked. It’s as if the vehicle is not evil in itself, but the vehicle was being used to carry a lot of mischief makers. But what do you do? How do you stop the mischief makers? The mischief makers are all coming to you in a vehicle—how do you stop them? You stop the damn vehicle.
Thoughts and feelings and your personal self and experiences and perceptions are the vehicle that carry the mischief makers. Stop the vehicle.
Think of this. You have these barricades on the road. Are the barricades meant to stop vehicles or people? Actually they want to stop people. But the thing is, no barricade can stop a person. You know how a barricade is. If you were just walking, would the barricade be able to stop you? It is a strange thing. You very well know that the person has no power to travel so far without the vehicle, so if the person is to be stopped, the vehicle is to be stopped. So, you make an arrangement that stops the vehicle.
Similarly, all rubbish comes to you in forms of your personal impulses of consciousness. “This is me, this is my life, this is this, this is that…” Stop it. Barricade it. What is written on the barricade? S-T-O-P. And you have a guard patrolling it, preferably with a gun; it is needed. Some dude might just decide to blast away the barricade, so then you require something to puncture his tires.
This same vehicle can carry something extremely pious, very holy. Bhāva can be the purest thing in the world. You understand bhāva ? Feeling. But not the bhāva that you experience.
Somebody would come and say, “Her feelings are holy, but my feelings are to be shot at? That’s what you just said, sir! If Meera sings a song for Krishna, then she is to be respected; the song becomes a holy composition. And when I am expressing my feelings, then you are saying there has to be a guard, and the guard has to have a gun, and you have to puncture the tire, and all kinds of violence you are talking of. What is this?” This is life. This is the fact of consciousness. Some deserve to be worshiped, the others deserve to be shot at. The equality that you talk of is just a juvenile concept.
The good news is, even if right now you are someone whose personal self deserves to be just shredded apart, yet you can grow up into someone whose personal self becomes so pure that he or she need not reject himself or herself. Now life can become a song of self-expression—but only now, not before that.
People talk of being expressive as a great virtue. They say, “But I want to express myself.” But then, what do you have to express? The gutter says, “I want to express myself”—so that we die of stink? But the gutters of the world are the ones most eager to express themselves. Have you noticed? “I want to speak, I want to sing. I want to say this, I want to say that. I am so vocal about everything.” Stink, stink, and stink. Ever seen a bottle of perfume? How big is it? And what is the size of the gutter? That’s what. The media, news, they are all full of gutters expressing themselves. Editorial pages, opinion pieces—gutters. And somewhere in the corner, the bottle of perfume is lying all closed. And even if it were to express itself, the fragrance would be lost in the stink.
Reject, deny, negate. And then you come to a point when you do not need to reject, deny, and negate, because you do not now exist to reject, deny, or negate. Because, in the first place, what is it that you needed to reject, deny, and negate? Yourself. When you are no more, that’s only when you really are. Now, who is there to reject and what is there to be rejected?
But before you are gone, do not behave and believe as if you are gone. Until you are not gone, your being is a big stink. And when you stink, you are a trouble to yourself and a torture to others, are you not? In fact, to yourself you are a lesser trouble because you become so conditioned to, so used to your stink that you do not even realize that you are one big manhole. It is the others that suffer; the entire world suffers because of you. Of course, you too do that.
All the pathogens are having a gala picnic on your existence; bacteria, fungi—where else is the stink coming from? And what are you busy doing? “You know, I am writing a new song. It expresses my health. It is a song of good health.” Of course, all the pathogens are in good health; all the bacteria on your body, on your existence, are overweight. Imagine—fat fungus!
It is the worst thing to behold a man terribly confident of his nonsense. This is Maya : to believe in that which is not. Otherwise, facts are really available for all to see; there would have been no Maya . We deny facts.
Even our memory becomes selective: the conversation involved eight dialogues; we will remember seven and forget the eighth and the crucial one. Disgusting. Has it not happened? The memory becomes infected; the seven pieces that you remember are distorted pieces. The eighth one you have conveniently chosen to forget, and the seven that you remember are distorted.
Be at the center. The wheel moves, but it is the center that holds it.
“This is He that moves within, there is He manifoldly born.”
All the movement inside proceeds into Him. All the movement inside proceeds from Him. He manifests Himself as the entire movement, and the entire movement exists to proceed and disappear into him.
What is this line meant for? This line is meant to remind you that you do not exist for your own sake; you exist to disappear into Him. Also, your appearance is not because of material or carnal reasons; your appearance cannot be explained in a cause-effect framework. You really come from Him, though that is not what you believe in; you believe that you come from here and there, that your existence, your identity is due to this and that, all worldly reasons. This alone is Maya .
Just as you believe that you come from miscellaneous places, similarly you believe that you live for miscellaneous objectives. Neither do you come from here and there—we believe we come from air, water, food, parents, thoughts, identities; that’s what we think constitutes us. No, you do not come from air, water, food, sun; you do not come from your experiences; you do not come from your parents either. Similarly, you do not exist to fulfill your wishes; you do not exist to fulfill somebody else’s wishes either. At the same time, you do not exist not to fulfill wishes.
If I say one thing, that doesn’t mean that the opposite means what you think it does. That happens in the realm of duality: if A is right, then B has to be wrong. When I say A is wrong, that does not mean B is right. I know A and its dual opposite B to be one. So, if I say A is wrong, it means B too is wrong. But you swell up; you think that I have validated B.
You believe in A, he believes in B. Usually, if A is proven to be false, then B has been proven to be true, assuming that A and B together constitute the universe and are complementary to each other, that B is A complement. Not so, truly. In the world of Truth, all divisions like A and B are just mirror images of each other, which means that if A is false, its dual mirror image B too is false, not true. But this is something that our belief system fails to acknowledge. We live in linearity; we believe in cause-effect, etc. For us, there is life and its dual opposite is death; there is existence and there is non-existence.
So, when, let’s say, a teacher tells you, “Your existence is problematic and diseased, it has to go,” then you translate this statement in your mind to mean that you have to disappear, die, or become non-existent, because in your dualistic mind these are the two divisions that exist. Either you are or you are not; either you exist or you are dead. That’s how you take it in your mind, right?
So, when somebody comes and says, “The way you exist is very, very problematic, not a part of it but the whole of it, and it has to go,” then you become scared and resistant. Why? Because you think that giving up on existence means death and you do not want to die. That’s very infantile.
Giving up on life as we experience it or live it does not mean death; it means higher life. Being skeptical does not mean becoming ultimately a cynic; being skeptical actually means progressing into faith.
But we become so scared. We say, “This chap is teaching us to be skeptical of everything. He wants us to doubt everything and then he wants us to unabashedly reject everything. What will we be left with?” These are the questions that arise. They arise only because we are conditioned to a dualistic frame of experience and thought, in which there is either a thing or its opposite. Something higher than both the thing and its opposite is beyond our construction; either you are happy or you are sad.
So, if I say, “Son, your happiness is false,” immediately a thousand voices shriek from within, and what do they say? “This man is trying to teach us sadness!” No, there is something above both happiness and sadness, and this happiness and sadness that you dwell in are not two different entities, they are mirror images of each other; they are the same person wearing different clothes and duping you.
Now do you see why so many people are aversive or scared of spirituality? Because they feel a lot could be taken away from them. They do not realize that they are being purified, not killed. It is different, is it not? Taking a bath is surely different from being administered poison. And when you take a bath, surely you lose something, assuming you do take a bath and not just use the towel to scratch your behind and rush out of the washroom.
Take a bath, scrub yourself; you are losing a lot. When you lose stuff, it makes you shine, no? And that’s why people say, “Now I am feeling fresh,” after taking a bath. What is this freshness that you experience? That which was not fresh has been scrubbed away. That’s what spirituality does.
What does fresh mean? Original, just born now, just originated right now; that is called fresh. In fact, the right meaning of the word ‘original’ is this freshness. Fresh—not coming from the stream of time, originating just now; it is not coming from the past, it is not stale. That is called fresh.
And how do you meet your own freshness? When you went into the bath, did you apply a lotion that superimposed freshness on your body? Does it happen that way? No, you have freshness within you, but the freshness was badly hidden beneath layers of yourself. Let’s say you have a lot of rubbish on your body. I ask you, “Who are you?” You say, “This (touches his arm) is me.” Now, what have you touched? Your rubbish. And your freshness you have not touched. What do we identify with? The rubbish. You have a lot of rubbish on your face, and I click a pic; what have I actually clicked? Your rubbish. But that rubbish you call as your face.
So, freshness doesn’t come from outside; freshness is when you scrub away, tear away that which never deserved to be on your face in the first place. Your real face is extremely beautiful; it’s just that you have started believing, unfortunately, in a foolish and ugly face. Isn’t it tragic? Firstly, the real thing is beautiful but hidden; secondly, that which you are investing in and identifying with is so damn ugly, and yet all your patronage is going towards it.
If you have to favor one of these two, which one should you choose, your beauty or your ugliness? And both are yours. One is, in fact, more yours than the other. As we said, sadly, most people choose to be ugly rather than fresh or beautiful. Entire spirituality is just the encouragement to correct your choice.
If you have to choose, why choose rubbish? Why not have some faith that even if you scrub something away, even if a layer is peeled off, there is something beautiful within? Have some faith. Why have you become so assured of your littleness and weakness? Why? If you have to be sure of something, why not be sure of power? Why not be sure of Truth? It’s easier and far more rewarding. What’s more, it’s fun.
It is a very, very difficult thing to convince a person that he is really not an idiot but he has made an ass out of himself. It is very difficult. You can easily convince a person that he is a true blue ass, that you can do, and that’s what the entire world is busy doing, in ways direct or indirect. When you are directly convincing someone that he is an ass, it is still a bit difficult. But when you are indirectly convincing someone that he is an ass, it is very easy.
If I tell you, “You are an ass,” you feel offended. But if I tell you, “Kindly bray for me and I will pay you rupees ten,” you will bray for me five times, and I say, “No, you are not an ass, you are just braying.” Then I say, “You walk on all fours and bray. No, you are not an ass; it’s just that you are walking on all fours, you are braying, and your entire existence looks ass-like. But you are not an ass! You are not an ass! And I am paying you rupees fifty now.” And you readily agree. That’s how the world easily makes you believe that you are an ass.
If something looks like an ass, walks like an ass, lives like an ass, talks like an ass, loves a female ass, eats like an ass, shits like an ass, what is the thing in all probability? An angel? I tell you, that person is vice president of marketing of an MNC. Everything that he does is ass-like, but he has been told that he is VP marketing, so he is happy. That’s how the world makes an ass of you.
His entire friend circle consists of asses. Look at his eyes; you see no wisdom, no consciousness; his eyes are extremely ass-like. He does exactly what his master, his slave-driver tells him to do. Have you seen donkeys, how they just keep standing? And often their two front feet are tied to each other so that they don’t run away. It’s a corporate bond, you know. But they are fed regularly: on every thirtieth the cheque arrives.
Ever seen an ass falling in love with even an elephant? So, his entire set of likes and wants becomes very primal: something good to eat, some great place to live in, some excitement. He lives exactly ass-like because he has been told that if he looks ass-like and lives ass-like, only then he will not be called an ass, rather he would be called VP marketing.
“So, we will call you VP marketing, but the condition is: you will have to live exactly like an ass. No, no, no, you won’t become an ass; you will live exactly like an ass. You have to live like an ass, think like an ass, reproduce like an ass, behave like an ass—everything has to be ass-like. But if you do that, we will call you VP marketing.”
It is so easy to convince a person to become an ass, and it is so damn difficult to really pull him out of his fears. It is very ironic. You want to terrorize somebody, it is so easy. You want to dispel somebody’s fears, it is so difficult. You know what that sometimes operationally translates into? That fellow has become so used to being driven by fear that now, even if you have to liberate him of his fear, you have to use fear to liberate him of fear. He understands no other language now; the only language that he knows is fear. It is heartbreaking that to deliver a message of fearlessness sometimes the only method available is of fear. Very tragic, but nothing else works on that fellow. Nothing with dignity works on him, so you have to adopt indignified ways.
“Meditate on Ātman , the Self, as AUM, and joyous be your passage to the other shore beyond the darkness.”
“Meditate on the Self as AUM.” This is the entire process of meditation. What is AUM? To perceive the entire universe of consciousness, the total movement of consciousness, and then relax into a point beyond consciousness. Remember that the relaxation is coming from total perception, not from ignorance. You have seen the entire world within; you have seen how you operate in the waking state, you have seen how your various hidden tendencies occur to you in your dreams, and you have also seen how only the deep tendency to exist remains in dreamless sleep. This is the entire set of your experiences.
When you are awake, then you cannot consciously know of your tendencies; the tendencies remain hidden, though they show up in very subtle ways even in the waking state. In some sense, the waking state is nothing but a manifestation of all your hidden tendencies. But to perceive why you say one thing, why you choose one thing, why you move in one direction, and to be able to trace its origin down to your vṛtti (tendency), is a very subtle and skilled task; not everybody can do that.
You utter a sentence; people think that you have just said something. No, you have not “just said” something. What you have said is coming from very deep and unexplored regions of your psyche. You do not even know why one person talks in a particular way, why the other person talks in another way, why one person chooses one particular word, and the other one chooses another word. You do not know. You think it is probably random. No, it is not random; it has a very definite reason. The reason lies in the dreaming state; that’s where those reasons open up.
That which doesn’t become very manifest in the waking state expresses itself very abundantly in the dreaming state. Things that you cannot even afford to think of, they come to you and become very real and dance and play and shout and occupy you when you are dreaming. And that’s why dreams are often so shocking: because what comes to you in your dreams is beyond your thoughts. If you try to think or imagine, you will never succeed in capturing the entire expanse of dreams. Dreams can show to you what your imaginations would never succeed in. You can tell yourself, “I am now going to imagine wildly,” yet your dreams are going to be wilder and more unpredictable than your imaginations, because something is hidden there.
And then, in the dreamless state even dreams are not there. What is there? Just the tendency to be. There is just a tendency which is lying dormant; you are not even having dreams. Still, the tendency is there, so when somebody comes and shakes up the body, or shouts in your ears especially calling out your name, you wake up because the tendency had not died. Existence had shrunk to a point, but the point still existed. There was no expanse of existence; you were neither rich nor poor, you were neither young nor old, neither male nor female, nothing. All of that had shrunk or rather concentrated down, boiled down to a point; but that point existed. So, when that point was triggered, what happened? You sprang up; you woke up into the waking state.
So, this is the totality of our existence, of our psychic existence. We have thoughts and emotions, beneath those thoughts and emotions are our primal tendencies that show up in dreams, and beneath those primal tendencies is just the fundamental mother tendency to exist, the ‘I’-tendency, the aham-vṛtti , “I exist, I am. I am not dead, I am not unconscious; I am.” This is the totality of who we are.
To navigate through AUM is to know the totality of who you are, and when you know the totality of who you are, obviously you have to be somebody different from what you are seeing. It is a basic principle. If you are observing something, you are separated from that thing. If you are observing something truly, independently, without being related to that thing, if you are observing the wholeness of something, then you are separated from it. Because if you are seeing something in its totality, then you are seeing the limits of it. If I am seeing something in its totality, then what am I also seeing? The limits of it. And when I am seeing the limits of it, then I am outside its limits.
So, if you can truly observe the play of your consciousness, then you are outside your consciousness, and that is Turiya (the Fourth), that is Self, that is Ātman . That is the purpose of AUM.
But then, you need not remember the purpose; that is not something you have to concentrate on, that is not the objective. The objective is to know the self. Which self? Not the Ātman . The usual everyday self, the ego; that is to be known. And the ego is known through these states:
Know your thoughts and feelings; they come in the conscious domain.
Know your hidden tendencies; they come in the dream domain.
And then, know your fundamental tendency, the ‘I’-tendency, that comes in the dreamless sleep domain.
When you have known all this, then you are beyond all this. That which you have fully known has now been surpassed by you.
If you want to go beyond something, just know it fully. If you find repeatedly that you are unable to surpass something or transcend it, the reason is obvious: you yet do not know it fully. You are living in a foolish confidence that you know something. No, you do not know it. The proof is that you are unable to go beyond it.
And then, “Happy be your passage to the other shore beyond the darkness.”
Come the Rishi’s blessings. Let there be a passage to the other shore beyond the darkness. It is just what the sage wishes—probably this is the only thing he wishes for the disciple. The other shore is the shore of joy. It’s just that joy is not something to be defined. Joy is not something that we know of in our previous experience, so it is very difficult to logically convince someone to pass over to the shore of joy, joyfully pass over. It is very difficult.
It is at this point that one has to have faith or one has to have suffering. Have a lot of faith in the sage, and the faith will enable you to keep holding his finger and keep walking behind him, or pray that you suffer so much that you are left with no option but to follow the sage. Only these two things are there.
