Visualise yourself within and rewind the image of your current age
slowly but steadily, till you reach the baby you.
The subject of love has been misinterpreted for centuries. European poets talked about love in the sense of romance and the relationship between a man and woman. Even in India the general interpretation of love has always been romantic. The love of Shah Jahan for his wife Mumtaz Mahal led to the making of the Taj Mahal.
Another classical interpretation of love, was love for one’s parents or children. And then came the saints who spoke about love for your fellow men, for all human beings, animals, elements, the love of abundance.
I believe that love is devoid of emotion and therefore cannot be a positive feeling. I remember a poem that I studied in school. It was Shakespeare’s sonnet, ‘love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove’.
Love is also not a quid pro quo or return present. Love is not something that you direct towards a specific person or a specific set of people. It is an attitude that you have which can be directed to one, many and as many people you come into contact with. It needs to be an underlying theme, where you believe that you need to love all forms of Supreme Consciousness outside you, so that you can love that same spark of Supreme Consciousness inside you.
Love needs to be a reflection from the inside to the outside. Your love for yourself can never be true, unless it is available for you to share with the outside world too.
The water in the coffee may have the ability to love the water of other cups of coffee, even though the other cups may have different shapes, sizes, and colours. That will come naturally, but the challenge is that the water in the cup of coffee should be able to love the liquidity in a glass of mango juice, in a cup of tea, and in all other forms of liquid as well.
The Lowest Common Denominator (LCM) of all liquids is water. So why should water only know how to love itself in the pure form. The ability to feel the oneness with itself in a cup of coffee or a bottle of tomato ketchup shows the ability to love.
We get bound by concentric circles. We are proud to be Indians, we are proud to be Punjabis, we are proud to be Khannas, we are proud to be from the same village and the same caste, and even better, the same family. To top it up, we are also proud to be practicing the same religion, and for the microscopically advanced, we are happy to be from the same sub-sect. And we love people from our own fraternity within all these circles. This love that we have just spoken about stems from acceptable norms or homogeneity. This is not love without an agenda, this is not love for the sake of love itself; this is love of cult.
The very phrase ‘your loved ones’ has within its brackets an element of selfish love. Love for family or extended family is still love with an emotional tint. The lesson that I learned from Gurudev and put to practice gave me a completely different definition of love.
He wanted us to do away with attachments and so I practiced not being attached to anyone and it worked for me. I wondered whether at the end of this I had become a careless father, a loveless husband, an indifferent son, and a non-indulgent brother! The emotion had gone out of most of these relationships. But the sense of duty had not, and besides this, there was a superimposition of role play. I knew the 17 things I needed to do, to qualify as a good brother, the 14 ingredients of playing the role of a responsible son etc. A good father and a great husband are two relationships that have still eluded me. Hopefully my newly adopted Sindhi philosophy will help me get there (Sindhis are a community who are probably one of the best in the world in the art of diplomacy and negotiation).
My children could sense the change of attitude and wondered whether my advent into spiritualism had made me distant. And, of course, whose wife does not think that he’s not caring enough?
However something new has happened. I have suddenly started looking at other people’s children as much closer to myself than I would earlier. I found an underlying connectivity to most human beings known or unknown, Indian or foreign, rich or poor, surprisingly the good guys and even the bad guys. The kind of love that I had entertained earlier, had an emotional tint, and was replaced by a sort of indifferent caring for a much larger audience.
Let me once again throw Patanjali into the frey. I feel it is easier to believe someone in history than to believe another in geography. I quote “Human love is the highest emotion most of us know. It frees us to some extent from our egotism in our relation to one or more individuals. But human love is still possessive and exclusive. Love for the Atman is neither. What people “really are” is the atman, nothing less. To love the atman in ourselves is to love it everywhere. And to love the atman everywhere is to go beyond any manifestation of nature to the reality within nature. Such a love is too vast to be understood by ordinary minds, and yet it is simply an infinite deepening and expansion of the little limited love we all experience.”
I can sort of feel what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes. Though this might be a cliché, it has become an important aspect of my life. I realise that I will never be a popular friend or family man, nor will I be a social success, but I am happy to have seen this emotional love charged with agenda, replaced by a not-so-warm (intense) connectivity to others (unfortunately, that is not the description for a cool dude!).
I do not feel thrilled when a younger friend has a baby, I just feel nice for them and when I hear of someone losing their parent or family member, I do not feel distressed either. I find it difficult to mourn for anybody’s loss. In fact when people lose their adult parents of over 65 or 70 years, I tell them, I feel happy that they went without suffering and hopefully, having lived a good life.
Many of my wife’s family members have appreciated my letters, sharing not my sorrow, but my satisfaction as their elders died true to their destiny. I wished their spirits would do well in the after-life. I find this cold, dispassionate feeling of wanting others lives to improve, a much more productive form of love than I have known for the first 50 years of my life. I know that when I’m dead and gone my family members will give examples to others of their father’s love of balance and dependability.
An excerpt of a few lines from the words by Adi Shankaracharya, add ‘tadka’ (spice) to the above sentences. ‘I have no separation from my true self, no doubt about my existence, nor have I discrimination on the basis of birth. I have no father or mother, nor did I have a birth. I am not the relative, nor the friend, nor the guru, nor the disciple, I am indeed, That eternal knowing and bliss, Shiva, love and pure consciousness.’
The reason I share these thoughts with you, is because I know that once you put the strategies of this text into action, you will reach a similar position on the dartboard. A recipe if made exactly as in the book, tastes almost the same every time.
Learn to love yourself without emotion. Do love yourself mathematically, if I can put it in jest!
Karmamukta (Non-Doership)
The word mukta means ‘freedom from’. Freedom from karma and its obligations is what you achieve if you can become karmamukta or free from bearing the fruits of karma.
As we have seen in different parts of this book. Karma is the fructification of stored samskaras in your hard disk that are brought into your citta by an energy called vasna. They become trends that lead you to action or karma. They are like seeds that sprout at a time that is relevant to their sprouting. Neither before, nor later. Their relevance is to the period of destiny that is running concurrently. Good karmas will fructify during a good planetary period and vice-versa. So far so good, but the problem is, as we are not aware of this knowledge, and we believe that we are the doers of everything that happens through us, we take responsibility of this karma. If we had realised that these actions were predetermined, because they were fructifications of past stored up engrams or samskaras and been able to view these actions not as doers, but as observers, then there would not be any emotion or doer-ship attached. Then these actions would have passed and not be re-stored in our hard disks or karmashayas, as new samskaras.
We would, therefore, not be responsible for this action a second time round and the cycle would not go on. This would lighten the burden of our karmashaya and we would need to take fewer births to exhaust our samskaras.
Thinking and believing this can make someone karmamukta, free from the fruit of future karma. However, this belief has to be as deep as the conscious, subconscious and unconscious levels of the mind. I found this concept easy to understand but very difficult to practice. The ‘I’ was a habitual part of me. It wasn’t as bad as “who do you think you talking to?” but we are so used to relating all our actions to ourselves that it is difficult to suddenly distance yourself and not feel a part of them.
I found a short cut, as I normally do, to most complicated problems. I decided that if I could practice not being a doer, for even one minute, for a particular time period, and feel it sincerely, I could connect to the next time I felt this by saying “from the last time to this time and from this time to the next time, I have not been a doer of any actions nor take any responsibility for any of my thoughts.”
I saw logic in this. I had nullified my misunderstandings of the past and predicted my misunderstandings of the future. In order to make me feel deeply sincere I used the concept of ‘arpan or surrender’ at the sthan (I am not trying to compete with Lord Ganapati, but then I do not believe that he has the monopoly for outwitting situations. I am referring to his competition with his elder brother for going round the universe. While his elder brother Lord Kartikeya actually went round the universe, Lord Ganapati circled his parents in a few seconds and said that was symbolic to going around the universe. So if Lord Shiva could accept the logic of his son, why would he not accept ours?).
Watch yourself do this at your place of worship and you will find it sink deeper, quicker.
The fact that you will learn to love yourself and worship yourself, will show that you definitely do not wish to live on endlessly, life after-life and death after death. It’s not a cakewalk to achieve this, and in weaker moments you may lose conviction and become unsteady in your belief. Therefore the resolve, I am not the doer has to be repeated several thousand times in a hypnotic way, to have faith in it.
(Sometimes you may feel this is a mere theoretical exercise and therefore nice to read and bury in a bookshelf, but please remember hundreds of us have tested these theories and live to tell the tale).
Spend five minutes a day saying this to yourself when you are free from stress. Make it a prayer by you to yourself. Insha’Allah! It will work. The complication herein is this. We find it easy not to take debit for our actions, but credit we do. We acknowledge the fact that we have helped others, been charitable, supported people and a host of other positive deeds. The Jews would call them ‘Mitsvah’, Indians – ‘Punya’, Sikhs – ‘Karseva’ and so on.
In the initial stages of wanting to serve others, these feelings will arise and that’s very fair. These feelings are highly motivating and push you forward. It is only at a much later stage when you have evolved enough that this concept should be replaced by the realisation that we may feel that these are our actions, but we have realised through our learning that these are pre-programmed and we need to avoid taking credit or discredit from these thoughts and deeds.
Adi Shankaracharya in his poem Atma Shatakam says, “I have neither virtue (punyam), nor vice (papam). I do not commit sins or good deeds, nor have happiness or sorrow, pain or pleasure, I do not need mantras, holy places, scriptures (vedas), rituals or sacrifices (yagnas). I am none of the triad of the observer or one who experiences the process of observing or experiencing, or any object being observed or experienced. I am indeed, that eternal knowing and bliss, Shiva, love and pure consciousness.”
In the last several thousand years that this cycle of life has been in existence, there must have been thousands of people whose lives and attitudes were exemplary, and so were the results.
As I have been a disciple of Gurudev and observed him closely for several years, and been a student of Guru Vashisht and his teachings, just like his student Rama (during a different time zone and not in person, but a student all the same and a devoted one), I can talk about the attitude of these two people and how they viewed things. I find a lot of similarity in the teachings of Guru Vashisht and Gurudev’s style of living. Almost like one man spoke of how life should be led 12,000 years earlier, another man lived it 12,000 years later!
I have been an atheist all my life and my father never taught me about the concept of God. Though he did teach me about Scotch! He also taught me how to charm women. He took great pains to teach me how to win people over, if you wanted some work done. Bribery and payoffs, in a mild measure, were a part of the curriculum. Suddenly coming into contact with Gurudev and then being introduced to spiritualism was more than just a cultural shock for me (I knew I could not inject coconuts with crème de menthe and offer it to guests at parties, as I used to earlier).
Despite the fact that Gurudev had photographs of various Indian deities in his prayer room which we all called sthan, what was surprising was that he never went there to pray. I used to spend a lot of time with him after dinner, up to the early hours of the morning at times, but I never saw him pray, in the 10 years that I spent with him. I realised much later that he had put up these photographs for the students of high school and college, but being a double PhD he did not need to indulge in practices that made sense to schoolboys and schoolgirls (different people on the path reach different levels and need to be addressed accordingly).
Sometimes, when he was going on a spiritual healing mission which seemed complicated, he would carry a photograph of himself in his front shirt pocket.
Naturally, I asked him why he did that, because it didn’t make sense to me even if I thought of all kinds of possible explanations. What he said made sense 20 years later. He said, ‘I’m carrying this photograph so that I can take myself along for this important mission. I want myself to come and help me complete it.’ He was probably talking about not him the householder or the physical body, but him, the spark of the divine. I therefore concur that he needed to align all the different components of his being to work together in consonance on that particular case.
These are just two lines, but no small lesson this. We hardly ever communicate with all that is us! We find it easier to pray to a perceived God.
Gods and angels live within the circle of maya.
I have seen how bhajans and hymns of different faiths are easier as means of worship rather than self-reverence.
Hinduism (in the words of Guru Vashisht), as I understand it, at some point, believes only in the Consciousness Supreme and believes that everything else that we may worship falls within the circle of maya. At that level of consciousness I guess, one needs to be an atheist. Someone who does not believe in God, in the normal sense of the term, but in the Supreme Consciousness that is all pervading. Which encompasses the world of maya where the concept of God is a reality, and it works……sure it works.
By no means do I believe that temples and other places of worship are devoid of power and capability. Certainly not! We are just looking at the curriculum of different levels of learning. The concept of maya is a post-graduate subject and therefore needs mentioning. We will examine it further in the chapter on Second Thoughts.
Gurudev took us to a few temples but never came inside. He would always stand far away and ask us to go in and pay our respects. These match the teachings of Guru Vashisht to his disciple Ram to whom he says, ‘There is no God, and this world is a world appearance generated by the collective mind and not the creation of the creator.’’ Guru Vashisht explains that everything is the Supreme Consciousness and therefore what is (existence), cannot be created by itself, to be itself. Heavy stuff, I know, but at the end of the lessons Lord Rama summarises the above as per his understanding.
In the words of Rama, ‘The self or the infinite consciousness alone is the reality of all this - the earth, the mountains, etcetera. And the self is like space- formless, and supportless. All these have not been created at all. This notion that arises in consciousness is known as the mind, and it is the mind alone that exists as all this.
Time, and all the rest of it, all the appearance of the consciousness. Even so the mountains are nothing but consciousness. And the elements are consciousness, too. It is consciousness alone that is the essence of the characteristic of the elements - like solidity of the earth, fluidity of water, etcetera. In fact, however, the earth and the other elements do not exist: the infinite consciousness alone exists. It is because of the liquidity of the water that the one ocean is able to give rise to waves and currents; it is because of the infinite potentiality of consciousness that it is similarly able to appear to be diverse. When the notion of solidity and harshness arises in it, it becomes a mountain: even so with all other objects. Consciousness itself does not undergo any changes in all this. The notions of ‘I’, ‘you’, etcetera arise in it without any reason or cause, and they are all non-different from consciousness.
The mind, buddhi, ego sense, the five elements and all this world appearance exists in the infinite consciousness, non-different from it. Nothing has been created, nothing is lost.’
(extract from Supreme Yoga by Venkateshananda)
So! Let it take its time to sink in. Let it be the Titanic of these readings.
Reading this para a few times won’t hurt.
Gurudev lived in perfect balance within the circle of maya, on its line, and beyond the circle.
Every morning he reported to his government job in the agricultural ministry. His seniors felt he did his job conscientiously. He was regarded as one of the most dedicated soil surveyors in the department. He had five children and tried his best to spend some time with them. All have grown up to be mature and caring human beings. He spent a lot of time at the farm, working with his hands. Very often you could see him driving the tractor to plough the field. A unique sight was to see him milking the cows. If there was a calf nearby, he would milk the udder and spout the milk into the mouth of the calf. I wish I had taken a few photographs. When the vegetables in the farm were ripe, you could see him plucking them and putting them into a basket. None of the milk in the farm, nor any vegetable or cereal grown there, was sold. It was all used up at the sthan, where people were fed on a daily basis, gratis. As if this was not an entire day, he would spend a lot of time talking to his disciples, sometimes pulling their leg, sometimes pulling them up.
And of course, he would see at least 50 to 100 people, who would be waiting outside his house, to meet him to discuss their problems, their ailments and other woes.
And then there were us, who were living in his home. We would all try to manipulate our way into his room after dinner and seek an audience with him whenever we could, for as long as we could. After this, he would lie down on what he called paath or a kind of samadhi. Here he would venture out of his body and work on the patients that would be visiting his hundred odd sthans all over the world. During his life he must have dealt with over three to four million people directly, and another two to three million people indirectly.
Guru Vashisht taught me the greatest lesson any man can ever learn from another man. He refused to take moksha even though he was more than qualified to get it, so that he could help other people climb the path towards the same. What can be greater than that, not only in deed, but also in imagination?
Gurudev had over a couple of hundred disciples whom he trained in the art of spiritual healing, handheld them for a part of the journey, and then established them in their own homes to carry out his mission of service. These homes, then became sthans where once a week, and in some cases once a month, on Thursdays, people would come to avail of this service. This is how he grew from a tree to an orchard and accomplished the strategy of self-replacement. He gave them powers to heal others and to walk in his shoes. Most of them are still alive today and practice seva in big cities and hamlets across the country as well as in a few other cities out of the country.
When he passed into the beyond we all felt homeless. Naturally, we were nervous as we had no backup support but Insha’Allah! we have all survived and grown and created downlines of our own. We are now three generations who serve in his name using the power that still prevails.
We work together under the auspices of the Himgiri Charitable Trust based in Gurgaon, and in an outskirt of Delhi called Nasafgarh. There are two active websites which give details of our functioning: Guruji of Gurgaon.com and Guruji of Gurgaon – neelkanth.com
Help is available on both these websites and the names of his disciples along with their addresses, email ids, and phone numbers are given.
If you have any questions or suggestions relating to this book, or subjects herein, you can write to: hingori54@gmail.com. You can follow some of the exercises given in the book and communicate the results to us and if you so require, we would be more than happy to give you our feedback, suggestions, and try and help you along your path. In the process of worshipping yourself, there may be a few thoughts you want to exchange and we would be happy to oblige.
Cosmic Currency
You have spent an entire life earning the currency of your choice. How about spending a little time on the currency of my choice - cosmic currency, which will stand you in good stead and allow you to have a better lifestyle in the after-life.
It’s not about physical effort or mental effort, it’s about intent. Cosmic currency is basically earning energy that can be added to your own. It can be used for astral travel and to attain speed or gati in the after-life. The spirit body needs this energy to exist, travel, protect itself, etc.
Of course it can also attain this energy through deeds done in its name, by itself and others. That is the primary reason we do charity in the name of our ancestors.