Student Notebook

The Real
Sat Chit Ananda [absolute Existence, Awareness, Bliss] is an ancient name for God, and a triputi of Supreme ramifications.  In fact, It had an even more ancient version called Asti Bhati Priya – It is Existence, It is Light, and It is the most dear.

Faster than the speed of sound is the speed of light.  Faster than the speed of light is the speed of thought.  Faster than the speed of thought is Atman.  It "outstrips all that run."  It is free of thought.  It does not vibrate like thought does, so it doesn't run the risk of having positive and negative thoughts.

Where is Brahman?  In you, of course.  No one has seen It outside.  Brahman perceives the manifest universe through your senses – so purify them and you, too, will be flooded with Light, like the seers.

Vedanta teachers tell the students to concentrate on the Truth of "Brahman is Real; the world is unreal."  But they exclaim, "Woe is me!  The world is unreal."  So the teachers say, "Didn't you hear me say that Brahman is Real? Concentrate on That."

Suffering
The real tragedy is forgetting your real Nature, this profound Awareness and Bliss.  Suffering is a secondary tragedy, the result of not knowing your real Nature.  Then your mantra becomes "why me" instead of "I am."

If you are suffering, then your mind must not be right.  The illumined do not suffer.  Suffering of the mind is unnecessary.  If the mind is kept healthy by sadhana, then whatever pain comes does not cause suffering.

Suffering is unreal.  Suffering comes only to the body, and to the mind that has lost its balance.

People who are suffering from all sorts of trauma, yet are hiding amongst various sanghas and devotees, have not really entered into yogic practice yet.  For those who have, the Yamas and Niyamas have already solved one's emotional problems.

Sadhana/Spiritual Practices
People think that they have overcome their bad habits merely by avoiding them, but they have not eliminated them at their roots.  A person I know had a drinking problem.  She did the AA program and was sober for eight years.  Then she fell to drinking at a party.  Why?  Because the desire was still there in her mind.  The guru wants you to look into the mind, find the root of that desire, and extirpate it.  So, stay in the teachings; keep company with guru, dharma, and sangha, and the teachings will finally dissolve those desires at the root.

People think sadhana has a goal.  I never thought so.  My thinking is that one just does sadhana; just do the work and the goal will come.

There are many food faddists frequenting spiritual groups these days.  They will soon find out that the superior diet of the spiritual aspirant is guru anushashana, vidya shastra, and aparokshanubhuti.  What does this mean?  It means digestion of the teachings coming from guru and scripture, assimilation of that rejuvenating nourishment, resulting in the supreme spiritual health of realization.  The body then simply follows suit and retains ongoing health.

Shifting about from asana to asana develops asana-vasana – a desire of the mind for shifting about all the time.  The Father of Yoga relates this to chanchala-vritti, a bothersome vibration of the mind that causes the student to want to move and leave the meditation seat.  Adopting a balanced asana of the mind destroys such vasanas.  So get into one physical posture, ekasana, suited for still meditation, and place the mind into the asana of perfect concentration.

Liladhyan, meditation on the Divine Sport of the Lord, is excellent.  As long as you are focused on the Ideal, you are beyond distraction.

Do not run away from your true Nature, always run towards It.  The hound of heaven is after you anyway, and will catch up sooner or later.  The sooner, the better, as they say.....

Seers like Patanjali and Vedavyasa said: Samskaras of worldliness get replaced by meditation; samskaras of meditation get replaced by Samadhi; samskaras of Samadhi get dissolved by Nirvikalpa.

Q: How is one to find the middle path?  That is, between East and West, monk and householder?
Babaji: I would not call Advaita the middle path, or dualism either.  Yoga is the middle path.  Yoga is anything one does to transform the mind, and best accomplished in the knowledge that the Soul is already perfect.

Until Viveka and Vairagya — discrimination between the Essential and the nonessential, and renunciation of the nonessential — are in place, one's spiritual life has not really begun.

Knowledge & Ignorance // Freedom & Bondage
Ignorance is the first sin.  But it is not a permanent black mark on your Soul; it is an overlay over your unawakened mind.

You can always recognize the nondual scriptures because they are only concerned with the following topics: Brahman, jivatman (embodied soul), sadhana (spiritual discipline), and maya (happenings in the phenomenal universe).

Of the four main Yogas of life granted by Mother India to us, Jnana Yoga (path of Knowledge) is the focus on the path of liberation.  It is a qualifier and a purifier.  As Sri Krishna states in the Gita, "Na hi jnanena sadrsham pavitram iha vidyate.  Verily, there is no purifier like knowledge."

Sri Ramakrishna did not wear his detachment like a crown of thorns, but like a robe.  Indeed, He was not like us; he was telling us to be like Him.  He is God in human form.  We have forgotten what that is like.  People let children, pets, and money rule their lives.  They are bound, and they teach their children to be bound.  If I am free I can help others to be free.  If I am bound, I teach others to be bound.  What else?

Voidism should be avoided.  Nihilism should be annihilated.  This can be done by asking "Who is it that gave nihilism a name?  Who is it that became aware of the existence of the void?"  As my guru, Swami Aseshananda used to say: "One can go on denying everything for a time, but soon one learns that one can never deny the existence of the one who is doing the denying.....”

Certainly, there is a form of God in a heaven somewhere, but God, the formless, is in me, and in you – and you, and you too!  You are not the individual; you are the Indivisible.  What does indivisible mean?  It means that you never split off and went to a heaven somewhere.

The expression "Born free" is a contradiction in terms.  No one is born free; they are born bound – that is what birth is.  Even the great souls come into the body with their consciousness veiled.  It is as if Mother has covered awareness on purpose so we can say "Wow! Look at that!" as the most current Avatar breaks all bondages, once every age, before the collective eyes of humanity.

From Dreams Awake
Dreaming is selfish.  Wake up and then help others wake up.  Do not just dream your life away in selfish pursuits that are ultimately empty and meaningless.  Wake up from this hazy dream of desire and begin to seek and search inside.  This search is going to bring you into an encounter with the tendency towards taking form that hides in your own mind.  Find it and get over it.  If you are unsure of how to do that, then ask your teacher who will give you an austerity, a practice to do around that particular problem.  Austerity, tapas, was among the first of the yogic principles you should have learned.

We have to be a willing participant in our own spiritual awakening   Anything you created in maya, in consciousness, in samsara, you will have to undo yourself; the teacher will tell you how to remove them, but you must do the work yourself.  That is the best way, most of the time.  Otherwise, your attainments will not mean anything.  Even when asking help of a savior, this rule applies.  A savior is not a doormat; he is a doorway.

The expression, "Born free," is a contradiction.  If you are born, you are not free, obviously.  Try to attain to birthlessness.  Then death will never be a concern.

People ask: Does God have a meaning for my life?  No, of course not.  There is no meaning to life.  There is no aim in maya.  God is not a dreamer, a competitor, or a moralist, what to speak of a judge.  The seeking, the attaining, and even the utilizing are all a part of the dream.  Waking up from all dreams, then, is the only real "meaning."  As the Upanisads state, "From dreams awake, from bonds be free....."

Mother has two Hands: Projection and Withdrawal.  In Her Hands is a little tempest in a teapot called creation, preservation, and destruction.  People who like tea and tempests rotate continually around this mental "Bermuda triangle," but those who find out that the entire manifestation is a projection can learn to withdraw it at will.

If you take your dream to a guru, the guru will tell you to meditate on it.  You must render it in terms of Reality.  That is, see it from the standpoint of Consciousness and make the appropriate connections.

I was never a paramecium, then a lizard, or a monkey – what nonsense.  I have always been the nondual Brahman, only witnessing such processes and occasionally participating in them due to lack of control over my own mind, i.e., letting the fourfold mind go wherever it will, projecting indiscriminately.  Thus, thousands of dream monkeys pass, as do dream bodies of all sorts.  The Atman remains the same.  

Mind and its Powers
Have you ever meditated on Consciousness as Consciousness, Awareness as Awareness, Intelligence as Intelligence?  This cuts to the chase.  "The powers of the mind should be turned inward." (Swami Vivekananda)

Once you live in the eternal moment, you see how the mind projects the universe.

Holy Mother gave us the teaching "mind is everything."  Indian philosophical schools are "mind-only" schools.  This means that the mind is rather your cosmic puppy.  You have to house train it or it will defile the worlds — all of them — and it will do it again and again if left untrained.  This lifetime is a good one to accomplish that task in.

If intelligence is in the mind, then so are objects.  And if objects are in the mind, then so are all the worlds, since they are just various types of objects as well.

Though full of sankalpa, human beings are not good at sankalpa.  They do not know where they are going or where they have been, or what they are doing.  Their choices, made in a causal or subtle state, before embodiment took place, were not good ones, and so we see so many suffering beings here on earth.  The human mind is a great projector.  But if there is dust and dirt on the lens of a projector, the picture comes out distorted.

You think you came out of Nature, but this perception is ass backwards.  Nature came out of you.  The Kingdoms of Heaven are within.

As soon as you make the mind one-pointed, everything becomes Brahman, but let the mind have its own way, and it is all confusion again.

As soon as the mind becomes schooled by the provisional guru, then the archetypical Soul, the inner Guru, comes forward.  In the end, one's own mind is that selfsame Guru.

It is not that the yogis do healthy things, like hatha yoga, and get healthy thereby.  Rather, it is because they made healthy choices of the mind in their previous lifetime.

The Unchanging & the Changing
Vedanta is a finishing school.  The teachings start at the level of the heart chakra and go up.  Vedanta starts with nondual Truth.  It wants you to focus on Truth, not on the changing, or the seemingly true.  It teaches a resist-not-evil type of perspective: water the flowers, not the weeds.

Spiritual life begins with viveka, discrimination between the Unchanging and the changing.  Those who know and attain this are the true aspirants.  Before then, one is a pseudo, or pretend spiritual person.  We see so many of these latter these days, and too few of the former.

For those who think in terms of positive change, I ask you: How are you going to make real changes in an ever-changing world of unreal phenomena?  It would be a far better philosophy to change your mind from the changing to the Unchanging. Then you will have what the seers have named samadhi, satori, nirvana, kaivalya, nirvikalpa, asamprajnata, and on and on.....

Change may bring you excitement, joy; change may bring you happiness; but non-change brings you bliss.  Joy has an opposite; it turns to grief.  Happiness has an opposite; it turns to sorrow.  Bliss has no opposite. Once you have it, you have it for all times.  It is your true Nature – Ananda.

Tracing Origins
It is not enough to focus on klishta vrittis (thoughts that bind) and become healthy and good.  You have to trace the origins of the cosmic principles and processes.

If you do not know the workings of the universe, you cannot get free of it.

Name, form, time, space and causation — these, left unmeditated, create karma for the soul.

If you do not realize the interconnectedness of all things you will remain a bound soul.  If you do realize the interconnectedness of all things, yet do not seek to get free of it, you remain just a knower of the interconnectedness of all things who is still bound.

There is no mysticism in earth, air, fire, etc.  They hold no secret for you here unless you perceive their symbology in different vibrational spheres.  When you come to know that the billions of suns shining eternally in the night sky are only representations of the billions of intelligent particles resting in the vast, inward mental space of your own mind, then you will know the real secret of the macrocosm and the microcosm.

You can worship Brahma the Creator and Vishnu the Preserver but do not forget to worship Siva, the Destroyer, who takes apart all the worlds.  In other words, if you can dissolve objects and worlds in your meditation, then you can dissolve any problems you encounter with those objects in those worlds.

Enlightenment is a matter of digesting particles — an inward ascension through realms of subtler and subtler particles — from atomic particles, to particles of life force, to particles of thought, and particles of intelligence.  The atomic, then, is rather dull.  The Atmic is the "point."

Science, unbeknownst or not, has taken us from the external appearance of the object to the internal nature of the object (i.e. swirling particles).  But what we want from there is to go from the internal object to the true nature of our own consciousness.

Pithy Points to Ponder
In deep sleep one has the opportunity to see where all souls go at their so-called death.

The only time you are not distracted is when you know that God is eternal.

People argue about whether God exists or not.  But God is Existence.

A falling hailstone saw the ocean and cried out, "Oh my God!" Then it entered the ocean and said, "I am God."

A mahavakya* should impact you when you hear it.  It is not something you repeat like a mantra.  You have to be qualified to hear a mahavakya. [*one of several "great statements" of nondual import found in the Upanisads].

Three men walked into a Jnanakasha, a realm of Wisdom. They were Patanjali, the father of Yoga, Vedavyas, the father of Vedanta, and Lord Buddha.  There, they met Lord Kapila, whose great Sankhya philosophy had graced their own philosophical systems over the millennia.  Bowing with hands folded in "Namaste" they all said, "Sankhya very much."  That's an original!