सत्येन लभ्यस्तपसा ह्येष आत्मा सम्यग्ज्ञानेन ब्रह्मचर्येण नित्यम् । अन्तःशरीरे ज्योतिर्मयो हि शुभ्रो यं पश्यन्ति यतयः क्षीणदोषाः ॥
satyena labhyastapasā hyeṣa ātmā samyagjñānena brahmacaryeṇa nityam antaḥśarīre jyotirmayo hi śubhro yaṃ paśyanti yatayaḥ kṣīṇadoṣāḥ
The Self can always be won by truth, by self-discipline, by integral knowledge, by a life of purity; this Self that is in the inner body, radiant, made all of light, whom by the perishing of their blemishes the doers of askesis behold.
~ Verse 3.1.5, Mundaka Upanishad
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Acharya Prashant (AP): Verse five.
“The Self can always be won by truth, by self-discipline, by integral knowledge, by a life of purity; this Self that is in the inner body, radiant, made all of light, whom by the perishing of their blemishes the doers of askesis behold.”
The Self, the Truth, Ātman , is to be attained by devotion to the Truth; by self-discipline, ātmā sayam ; by integral knowledge, by total knowledge, saṃpūrṇa jñāna ; by a life of purity, brahmacarya .
“This Self that is in the inner body”—this Self that is at the heart of existence—“radiant, made all of light, whom by the perishing of their blemishes, the doers of askesis behold.”
This Self is winnable, attainable by devotion to the Truth. If you are devoted to the Truth… We have to come back to love again and again. If you love the Self, you get the Self. The Self is for those who love it; there is no other way to reach it. Love is the way. Unless love pulsates in your being, no chance.
The Self is not for those who want knowledge of the Self. The Self is for those who want nothing but the Self. Do you get the difference? It has to be a fierce love, a fierce yearning, and an equally fierce resistance: “I don’t like to be colonized.”
What is the Self? The Self is your own pure existence. That is the Self—“the one that I really am. I do not like to be inwardly corrupted, so I fight away all the pollution, the conditioning, the corruption. I like purity, I love purity, and therefore I attain purity.” Attainment of purity is synonymous with rejection of corruption, influences, conditioning and all that.
Spirituality is not for the timid, the lukewarm, the ones who live life in a diplomatic way, the ones who like to keep all ends secured and covered. You have to be unreasonably, outrageously in love. And the other things that are mentioned here, believe me, are just various names for that love. Ātmā sayam , tap , self-discipline—what else is that? It is just a shadow of love. After all, we are lovers of joy. Why would somebody deliberately inflict suffering on himself? Only when that suffering leads to deeper joy.
When you love something, then for the sake of that thing you are prepared to make sacrifices, and there is no self-pity in that. You don’t even call it a sacrifice; you have lost nothing. It is a great bargain to lose a little and get a lot. Who would say it is a sacrifice? Is it a sacrifice to lose a little and gain a lot?
You have to be in love with that lot-ness, with that immensity, and then you can easily reject all the petty things, and you won’t feel bad. The word ‘sacrifice’ won’t even occur to you. And that’s the hallmark of the ones making great sacrifices: they are able to make great sacrifices because those deeds do not appear like sacrifices to them at all. You are watching from a distance, and you might say, “Oh, this fellow is sacrificing so much.” He says, “I am enjoying so much!” To you it is sacrifice, to him it is enjoyment.
Think of the gymnasium. A fellow with great muscles is exercising, a fellow with straws as limbs is watching. And the watcher says, “Oh my God, the one who is exercising is suffering so much. He is pulling 200 pounds and pressing 400 pounds!” And our straw man is so worried and sad for him. He says, “He is suffering so much—200 pounds!” Is he suffering? No, he is enjoying, he is loving it. Because he is loving it, therefore he has all those inches, all the bulk.
So, sacrifice is sacrifice only to the one who knows nothing about the sacrifice, who has never made a sacrifice. The ones who sacrifice in love, love the sacrifice.
“Integral knowledge”—what is integral knowledge? Oh, I have spoken so many times on it, you should be the ones telling me.
What is integral knowledge? Integral knowledge is when the knower knows the object as well as himself. When the entire process of knowing is known, that is integral knowledge.
What is partial knowledge? Partial knowledge is when you have no eyes to look at yourself and all you are staring at is the world. You are so busy gawking at the world and you have no idea of yourself—that is partial knowledge.
Integral knowledge is to know the entire affair. This whole game, the triad of jñāna (knowledge), jñātā (subject of knowledge), jñeya (object of knowledge), is a thing within Prakriti , and you, as your pure Self, are not within Prakriti . So, this prakritik process is just a thing to be watched. Something came in front of the subject, the subject grew a relationship with that thing, and the whole process was called as knowledge generation. “Something became known, something became the knower, and knowledge was created. I am neither the known thing nor the knower; I was able to see this thing happening. I am not very identified with the knower.” This is integral knowledge, samyak jñāna . The śloka says samyak jñāna .
Then, brahmacarya . What is brahmacarya ? To live in a way that takes you to Brahman . Brahman -centric carya is brahmacarya . ‘*Carya*’ is behavior, way of living; ‘ cara * ’ means movement. So, all your actions, everything that you do comes under * carya .
So, what is brahmacarya ? To move in a way that takes you to Brahman , or alternately, to move in a way that has Brahman at the center. You could say Brahman makes you move; that is brahmacarya . Equally, you could say you are moving for the sake of Brahman ; that is brahmacarya .
When you are living for the sake of Brahman or Truth alone, when you are living the highest kind of life possible, then you go for the highest pleasures as well. Therefore, the lower pleasures are no more very meaningful; therefore, one of the things that drops from your life or becomes less significant is sexual attraction. But this loss of sexual appetite is not at the core of brahmacarya ; at the core of brahmacarya is Brahman . That you are not very sexually furious or desperate now is just a byproduct.
Unfortunately, in popular culture, brahmacarya has become synonymous with celibacy. Brahmacarya is not celibacy. Brahmacarya , celibacy, semen retention—they have nothing in common, or you could say, very little in common. Brahmacarya is an entire way of life, a way that leads to the Truth; that is brahmacarya . Just because you are abstaining from physical union with a man or a woman, you do not become a brahmacārī . Brahmacarya is a much, much higher thing than abstinence or celibacy.
“ Antaḥśarīre * ”—it is at the core of existence, and it is * jyotirmayo , radiant. From the Ātman itself, from the Truth itself comes that which dispels all your mental darkness, and it is seen by those tapasvīs who are now free of blemishes.
When you contain blemishes, when you harbor blemishes, then all that you see is blemishes. To be able to see the Truth, you must first drop your insistence on the false.
Get rid of your false love with the false. The Truth is always available.
Beautiful.
Yes, questions?
Questioner (Q): For the common mind there is suffering, the common suffering, and there is pleasure, which is lower pleasure. Vedanta and the Upanishads exclaim that one has to pass through a higher suffering to enjoy higher pleasure. This seems to be a problem for most people; taking on more suffering scares them.
AP: There is a way out. In your current level of existence, which you might call as a lower level, you have a certain capacity, a certain appetite to take suffering; it is not beyond you. Not a higher suffering but a lower suffering, suffering at your current level, which you may call a lower level.
The thing is: if you exercise even that level of suffering, it will bring to you a disproportionately higher pleasure. Once you taste that pleasure, then you realize that a formula has opened up, and then your willingness to take more discipline upon yourself increases, because now you have tasted the results.
At your particular level, you did the little you could. But the little you could do, the little you did do, was the maximum you could do at your particular level. The good news is that at any level, the maximum you do is sufficient. You are not demanded to do something beyond yourself; just do the maximum that is within your capacity. Good news is: you don’t have to exceed your capacity. The challenge is: you have to do the maximum that is possible within your capacity.
Once you do the maximum within your capacity, you get results, and once you taste the results, your willingness to impose more discipline upon yourself increases. Now you know that a formula has opened up: “The more I exert myself, the better the results will be.” Now you have been convinced with a proof—what is the proof? The results. The results have arrived. “Now I know. Now I am unstoppable. Now I will go further and further and complete the distance.”
The trick is: at your current level, you have to do at least as much as is needed to show some results to you; otherwise you will be disappointed. The worst situation is of those who work but do not work hard enough even to get the minimum kinds of results possible. So, you have worked, you have exerted yourself, you have taken some suffering upon yourself, and yet you have not done enough to get even some kinds of preliminary results, so your score card stands at zero. Neither do you get anything, nor are you left with any motivation to do anything more.
So, if you are doing something, do at least as much as is needed to get some basic results, and those results will then egg you on. I repeat, the good news is: each of us, irrespective of how weak we are, has within his capacity to work as much as is needed to get the basic results, and the basic results will bring some trust in you, some inspiration in you; they will help you experience something that is totally new to you. And its taste will be so convincing that you will be inspired now to move ahead with deeper vigor.
So, there is that initial period when you are working and there will be no results; that is when you require faith and patience. Once the results start arriving, the results will keep spurring you on, and then, as I said, it is so formulaic; now the ball has been set rolling, it will keep gaining momentum.
You don’t have to take up very high kind of suffering; do only as much as you can—but please do as much as you can. On one hand I am saying, do only as much as you can, and in the same breath I am saying, please do as much as you can. But in neither of these cases am I saying, please do more than you can; that is not needed, because that cannot happen. How can you do more than you can?
That is the reason nobody else is to be blamed if you fail: because you are not even required to go beyond your capacity. It was within your capacity to succeed. If you fail, it was only because you didn’t exercise your capacity. But if you scold someone for failing, he will say, “I did my best, and still I am being scolded!” Had you done your best, you would have obtained at least the basic results. If your score card always stands at zero, it is clear proof that you are not doing even half of what you are capable of. That’s why life punishes you.
Q: Sometimes there are moments when the basic results are seen, but we become forgetful of them.
AP: No, if the thing has really shown results, it will captivate you; it won’t allow you to regress. You cannot go back now. It is like gravity: you have started falling. You cannot say, “You know, I fell for a distance and then I stopped falling.” If you fell for a distance, then you will not only keep falling, you will keep falling with increasing velocity. If you find that after a distance your movement stops, then you are not falling; you are just rolling about in some horizontal plane. That’s not called falling.
The algorithm is quite simple. Work hard, let the result come, and let yourself be charmed by the result. Let the result inspire you to work even harder, let a better result come, and let it charm you even more. Work even harder, let the charm become deeper, and so on and so forth.
Q: You just said that if one is not falling with the force of gravity, then one is just rolling around in the horizontal plane. Can it happen that you rise up to a point and then get stuck? Or does that mean you never rose?
AP: You never rose, you just rolled. Now the trick for you is: keep rolling, keep rolling right to the edge of the cliff, and then you will fall. Because if you are told to fall, you won’t fall, so keep rolling. I am not talking about rolling of the wrong kind. You never know what people can make out of your words, so better be specific.
In this real love there is nothing called a breakup; it just keeps getting deeper and deeper. You cannot say, “I was spiritual for a while and then I dropped it.” That’s the thing with the infinite: it inspires infinite love in you. Otherwise, why to needlessly flatter it by calling it infinite?
Infinite love, in infinite ways and infinite times. It is a love affair that renews itself, deepens itself, is born, is reborn. It grows upon you till it finishes you off. It is not a fleeting flirtation; it is not a momentary charm, not some kind of seasonal attraction. It has rained and the butterflies are out because the flowers have opened—not that kind of a thing. It is a one way thing. You are into it, and you are deeply into it, and then you are into it even deeper.
And so he says: Gate, gate, paragate . Gone, and then gone even deeper, and then gone beyond, paragate , and then swaha , finished.
This is the name of this affair: Gate, gate, paragate.
Gone, gone further, gone beyond, then finished, over. This is the nature of this love.
