Buddha*, an enlightened master, used the word tathata – seeing what is as it IS. It is seeing what is there as it is, without any judgment.

But most of the time we see things only through our worry. When we see everything as it is, there is only joy, and when there is joy, no thoughts get recorded in you. There are only empty spaces. That is why when you are joyful you feel light, because nothing gets recorded. When you see everything through worry, more thoughts get recorded in you and you feel heavy.

There is a common saying, ‘We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.’ If you feel there is something wrong with what you are seeing, then you should look back in at yourself because what you see outside is only a reflection of what is inside you. If you feel pure love inside, then you see only pure love outside. It always has to do with you, not with what you are seeing.

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Buddha – Enlightened master and founder of the religion of Buddhism.

In a classroom, the teacher found that one boy was sitting with a very sad face.
She asked him, ‘What happened? Why do you look so worried?’
The boy said, ‘It’s my parents. My dad works all day to provide good clothes and an excellent education for me. He buys me anything I want. My mother cooks the best food for me and takes care of me from morning until I go to bed.’
The teacher asked, ‘Then what is your problem? Why are you worried?’
The boy replied, ‘I am afraid they may run away.’

The mind has a clear identity only with pain, never with joy! That is why recalling even joyful moments becomes painful.

Joy never gets recorded as thoughts, but pain does. That’s why our internal recordings are always negative thoughts. Joy is like a blank recording! For example, if your entire life is like a time shaft, on that shaft the joyful moments are simply empty spaces! There won’t be any recording corresponding to it. But the moments of worry and suffering will be clearly recorded as black impressions.

On a beautiful white wall if there is a small black dot, and I ask you what you are able to see, what will you say? You will say you only see the black dot. You will not see the big white space surrounding it! That is how you conclude that your time shaft is only made up of worry and suffering.

It is like this: there is a continuous current of chatter happening in you twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. From this current a few spikes rise. These spikes are what you feel and express as worries. Worries are nothing but spikes in the current of thoughts constantly moving within you.

These thoughts are mostly negative. That’s the problem. If I ask you to write your life story in a few pages, you will write a few incidents highlighting how and when you struggled. You will not highlight the many joyful incidents that happened in between. The mind is trained to record only negative things. Even when something joyful happens, you remember only the moment when it ended, never the moments when you felt joy. Because even when you are at the peak of joy, you are always worrying about when the joy will end! The mind is trained from a very young age to think that life moves from one worry to the other or from one pain to another, never from one joy to another.

Nithyanandam,

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In Nithyananda.

Worry takes root from your own thoughts or words. There are two things that continuously happen in you. The first is dialogue, and the second is monologue or what I call ‘inner chatter’. You either talk to people outside or you continuously chatter within you. In any case, words and thoughts are the ‘building blocks’ that make up worry.

When you speak to others, what you say is strictly governed by societal rules. You automatically don’t use prohibited or ‘politically incorrect’ words. But what you say inside yourself, no one except you knows. The thoughts that you generate inside constitute your real worries.

Khalil Gibran*, a Lebanese poet of the eighteenth century, beautifully says, ‘You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts!’ and ‘Our very verbalization is because we are not able to handle ourselves peacefully within us.’

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Khalil Gibran – Lebanese American poet best known for his ‘The Prophet’.

What is meant by ‘worry’? Worry arises whenever things are not happening as you want them to happen. It is the discrepancy between your expectations and reality. For example, you feel your son should stay at home with you, whereas he feels he should be by himself, away from you. You feel your salary should be a few thousand dollars more. Your boss feels otherwise. You want to finish your project by a certain time. But things are happening too slowly and it seems an impossible task. These are all causes for worry. What you want and expect does not match what others want and expect.

You continuously expect things to happen in a certain way. Whether it is as big as your career or as small as what time your husband should come home for a meal, you continuously impose your will upon what is happening and worry about it.

We talked of love so far. Love is about our relationship with others. Love is also about our relationship with us. Without loving ourselves we cannot love others. What prevents us from loving our own self is the constant worry or irritation that we generate within us. Whether things go right or wrong we worry. There is nothing more corrosive to our self-esteem than worry. What is this worry?

A small story:

A man walked into a bar looking worried and upset.
The bartender asked him, ‘What’s the matter? You look very worried about something.’
The man said, ‘My wife and I had a fight and she told me that she wouldn’t talk to me for a month.’
The bartender consoled him ‘It’s okay. One month isn’t that long.’
The man said, ‘I know. The month is up today!’

Everyone has his or her own set of worries! If I ask you what you worry about, you will tell me, ‘I don’t have a job, that’s my worry.’ Your neighbor will say, ‘My job is my main worry!’ Someone else will say, ‘My children are my worry.’ Another person will say, ‘I don’t have children, that’s my worry!’ One person’s dream is another person’s worry! You will not find any logic in it at all.

Sit down comfortably by yourself and close your eyes.

Focus on your heart region. Exclude everything else. Focus only on the heart.

Visualize your heart as an endless reservoir from where blessings can flow.

Feel every heartbeat deeply. Let every beat resound throughout you.

Between the heartbeats, feel the energy of love happening.

In the deepest parts of your body, mind and soul, the love energy is waiting to be acknowledged.

Invite the love energy of the heart to flow and fill these deepest parts of your body, mind and soul.

Slowly open your eyes.

When a person passes away, you grieve only because you regret not having loved him completely. You can love him completely only when your love itself is complete. It doesn’t have anything to do with the other person. It doesn’t matter what kind of person he is. That is the beauty of real love. It loves for the sake of love, not for the sake of the other person.

If you are grieving for the loss of a person, be very clear, you are grieving because you missed loving him in totality. If you had loved him in totality, you would say goodbye to him with complete restfulness, not with grief. You grieve only because you missed something somewhere. Even if it is your own father or husband or wife, it is the same. If you had radiated your causeless love to them when they were alive, then when they left there would not be any regret. But if you had loved them with rationalizations, then when they left, the incompleteness of your love towards them would create a hangover, and that hangover is what you feel as grief.

One of the ashramites* asked me one day, ‘Swamiji, everyday you see all of us, all our mistakes and confusions. It is the same thing for you every day. Are you not bored by us?’ It was a very honest question! I told them, ‘For enlightened beings, just because of their very love, they feel everybody is unique. They do not look at people as mere numbers. They see each one as unique.’

That is why, with so much patience, masters continue to work with everybody. If it were just a matter of numbers, it would be very different. When you have this love, your inner space is such that there is no logical reason behind your actions. You will just feel connected and you will radiate love, that’s all!

Not only that, causeless overflowing love is always total in its expression. It doesn’t carry the usual dilutions of greed or fear. So any person whom you love, you will love totally without any reservations. Irrespective of the way he is, you will love him. When you love this way, even if the person leaves your life, you will not grieve.

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Ashramites – Residents of ashram.

These days I see people gifting each other with so many things to show their love. Gifting has become an expression of love. If the gifting happens as causeless overflowing, it is okay. But if it is a condition to be fulfilled, it becomes a problem! Then it becomes a poor substitute for real love.

As long as real love is there, no relationship can become boring. Understand, as long as love is there, every object or person is unique. For example, if the coworker in your office dies, nothing will really stop you in your life. Along with the others, you will console his family members and continue with life, that’s all. But what happens if you are in love with the same coworker who passed away? Life will never be the same again, am I right? Whenever you are in love with some object or person, or somebody is in love with you, the whole relationship becomes unique. Love makes things unique.

With real love, there will be no fear or insecurity either. In normal love, physical distance between two people causes a lot of insecurity and a lack of trust.

A small story:

A young soldier went to his senior officer and said, ‘Sir, my friend is not yet back from the battlefield. I request permission to go out and get him.’

The officer said, ‘Permission refused. Your friend is most probably dead. I don’t want you to risk your life going there.’

The young solider went all the same and came back mortally wounded and carrying the corpse of his friend.

The officer was furious. He shouted, ‘I told you he was dead. Now I have lost both of you. Tell me, was it worth going out there to bring a corpse?’

On the verge of dying, the soldier replied, ‘It was, Sir. When I got there he was still alive. He said to me, I was sure you would come.’

Real love doesn’t look for utility. It operates on sheer trust and is also beyond space and time.

In real life, we always look to express our love towards others in some tangible way. Only if love is demonstrated in tangible form, it is considered to be love nowadays.

True love is like a communion. It is a resonance between two beings. It can be felt without any expression. It doesn’t need communication because it is already happening as a communion.

If you really love a person, then your very body language will show it. It will be too much to express in words. You will feel that words are inadequate and will only bring down the love that you feel. But if you are using words, then somewhere the love has not really happened. When you have to speak to express love, then somewhere there is a lie in it! You are using the words just to decorate the lie.

Real love liberates because it doesn’t compel you to express it all the time. It just is. Real love also gives you the freedom to freely express what you want to express. You can easily express anything like disapproval or anger and it will not be mistaken for reduced love.

Not only that, with real love, there will be no domination or power play in relationships. Each person will be like a beautiful flower that has blossomed to radiate its unique fragrance, that’s all.

People ask me, ‘Swamiji, how are you able to travel so often and not feel unsettled?’ This question comes mostly from people who travel for business. They say, ‘If we go to one or two places and come back, it takes one week to recover, settle down and get back into our routine and feel comfortable, to feel like ourselves again. How do you travel so continuously?’ The secret is the same thing I told you earlier. I don’t feel attached or connected to any one house, so I feel connected to the whole world! There is a deep feeling of being at home with the whole world. With this feeling, wherever you go, you will experience a deep, relaxed bliss and ecstasy because that bliss doesn’t come from the outer home but from the inner home.

When I travel around the world, people ask me, ‘Did you sleep well last night? It is a new place for you.’ I tell them, ‘Only when you have attachment to a particular house does another house become a new place for you and you struggle. When you don’t have attachment to any house, you feel at home wherever you go!’

I never feel any place is mine or not mine. I feel totally at home anywhere. The comfort is always within us, never outside us. When there is no comfort within us, we look for comfort outside us. Feeling comfortable within us is the result of the causeless love energy. When we don’t feel attached to one home, we feel at home in the entire world. We are totally relaxed anywhere in the world.

You may be attached to your beloved or god or master or friend or whoever. To move from that attachment, to move from the form to the formless, this is the technique. You can take a quantum jump into love with this. With this jump you will see that love happens not as an attachment to a particular object but as an overflowing energy that doesn’t look for any attachment in the outer world. It is just your own overflowing that you share, that’s all. It happens irrespective of whether the object is there or not.

When love happens as causeless overflowing, you simply liberate yourself and the other person from your own attachment and possessiveness, because possessiveness as you know it, binds not only the other person but you as well. It tortures the other person as well as you! Real love simply liberates both of you. It gives freedom to you and the other person.

The big problem is that you never sit in a relaxed way. Either you are driven by greed, meaning you are in a hurry to say or do something, or you don’t know what you are doing and so you are caught with fear. You just try to finish your job and escape! Either you are in greed or you are in fear. But for now, just relax. Be neither in fear nor in greed.

Just sit in the present. Just feel the other person’s presence. Accept the other person as he or she is, as that being is, and feel what happens inside you. Try this for a few days. Suddenly you will see that you will experience a different space that you have never before experienced in your life.

This is a technique from the Shiva Sutras*, a collection of techniques for enlightenment delivered by Shiva*. This technique will take you through a quantum jump from the form to the formless, from possessive love to causeless love.

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Shiva Sutras – A collection of teachings of enlightened master Shiva in epigram form as techniques. Includes Vignana Bhairava Tantra, Guru Gita, Tiru Mandiram etc.

Shiva – enlightened Master from India who delivered the universal Truths in the form of scriptures like Shiva Sutras.

The next time you are with someone, when you are with your friend with whom you are completely open, remember to practice this technique.

Just sit next to him or her. Don’t bother about what you are going to do or what you are going to say. Just sit, that’s all! That is the technique. Actually, speaking is nothing but avoiding the other person. Because you cannot look into the other person’s eyes, you go on speaking. That is the truth. The other person listens so that he can start speaking whenever you take a break! If a person is listening to you, it means that he is either thinking of something else or he is preparing for his turn. He sits there so that he can start once you finish.

Now if you try this technique, it can take you to a different space altogether. When you are with the master or your friend or your beloved, whoever you feel deeply connected with, whoever you are very open with, you can try this technique. It will straightaway lead you to enlightenment. Be very clear, I am not teaching this technique for you to have better relationships or for you to develop your personality. No! I am giving it to you to straightaway experience the pure love that can lead you to enlightenment.

A small story:

An art collector traveled to a village. He saw a cat drinking milk from an old antique saucer outside a small tea shop. The art collector recognized the value of the saucer and wished to buy it.

He approached the shop owner and asked him, ‘Sir, can I buy this cat for two dollars?’ The shop owner refused saying he didn’t want to sell the cat.

The art collector said, ‘I want a cat because my house is haunted by mice. Please sell the cat to me. I am ready to pay ten dollars.

The shop owner said, ‘Fine, sold! Have it!’

Now the art collector said, ‘I will take the cat but can you give me the saucer also? Then I don’t have to buy a new saucer. The cat will be happy since she is already trained for this saucer. Why don’t you give me the saucer too?’

The shop owner said, ‘No! That’s my lucky saucer. Only because of that I have sold sixty eight cats in the last one week!’

The art collector wanted to get the saucer but got only the cat. We too miss what has to be really experienced in life because we go after the object and not the subject.

When you start possessing someone, you bind yourself also. If you are walking holding your dog’s leash, be very clear that you are also bound. Don’t think only the dog is bound. You are also bound. Don’t think that only the dog cannot run away, you too cannot run away! You may be thinking that you are holding the rope and the dog may be thinking that he is holding the rope. Who knows?

We always place our attention in the wrong space and miss the truth. When we place our attention on an object, we miss the inner experience of love that happens. We misunderstand that the excitement and the joy of love happens because of the object. We don’t understand that the excitement or the joy of love happens not because of the object but because of us. It is an energy that happens in us. If it was because of the object, then whenever the object came in contact with us, we would have the same excitement, am I right? But it does not happen that way. Even if the object continues to be there, the temperature of the excitement comes down after some time, which means that the excitement or the energy is not related to the object. It is related to the subject, which is us. It is related to the experience itself, not to the object.

As long as our love happens towards a particular object, even if the object is a person, we will try to reduce that person only to the level of an object. That is exactly what we do when we feel possessive or attached to another person. In the way that we try to possess furniture or a house or any object, we try to possess the person also. We want the person to be just how we want him or her to be, which means we are actually reducing the person to sheer matter.

So understand, whenever our love or our attention is towards something in particular, we will be only materialistic, we will be creating suffering for ourselves and for others. We will only suffocate the object or person. Instead, if we turn our attention towards the experience of love itself, we will be liberating the object and we too will be liberated from the object. That is the beauty of love that happens just as love and not for the sake of any object.

There is another beautiful poem by Jalaluddin Rumi*, the Sufi*mystic. He writes,

One went to the door of the Beloved and knocked.
A voice asked, ‘Who is there?’
He answered, ‘It is I.’
The voice said, ‘There is no room for Me and Thee.’
The door was shut.
After a year of solitude and deprivation he returned and knocked.
A voice from within asked, ‘Who is there?’
The man said, ‘It is Thee.’
The door was opened for him.

In real love, there is no duality. There is just oneness with everyone and everything. That is the ultimate stage of love.

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Jalaluddin Rumi – 13th century Persian Sufi poet.

Sufi – Mystical dimension of Islam.

In Krishna’s* life, the whole happening of Ras Leela* is one of causeless love, the Divine love that permeates the entire universe. Ras Leela* is misinterpreted by many people as Krishna* having a physical relationship with the cowherd women. Understand, Krishna* is a superconscious being and Ras Leela* happened when Krishna was around eight years old! It is in no way related to any physical relationship. It was a pure and causeless spiritual happening.

Radha*, Krishna’s beloved, was attached to Krishna, but she never really experienced pure joy. She had constant mood swings with possessiveness and jealousy. During Ras Leela, Krishna, as a superconscious being, gave her the experience of seeing him simultaneously with every single cowherd girl present there. He wanted to show her that he is in every physical form, not just in his own form. Such is the manifestation of divine loving beings!

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Krishna – Enlightened master from India who delivered the Truths of the Bhagavad Gita.

Ras Leela – The spiritual interaction of enlightened master Krishna with the gopis or cowherd women devotees.

Radha – Chief among the gopis or cowherd women devotees of enlightened master Krishna.