SEMINAR: ESSENCE OF THE GITA
[The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita was Babaji’s topic for the summer seminar held at the Portland ashram in July. He selected five verses that together epitomized Vedanta sadhana, and created a shorthand verse of their instrinsic meaning:
Devotion to knowledge (14:2), leading to worship with Love (10:10), resulting in acquisition of discrimination (13:34) to find the distinction between the Real and the unreal (2:16), which establishes oneself in Brahman (5:19).
Throughout the two full days of teachings, Babaji unwrapped each complete verse and instructed us to memorize them as we coursed along “Deep in the Dharma,” as he described our time together. ]
Each of these verses are all in line with the need to engage in spiritual discrimination in order to know what to love, how to love, and what not to love. Only that love that is pure, and very intense, can bring illumination.
It is when the ego is diminished that the teachings of the dharma can stick. That is why, when one receives those ignoble blows of pain from the world, he/she should immediately sit for meditation and see that Light that was covered previously due to the ego’s claim on surface happiness.
Death is unreal, but you are afraid of it. This is double jeopardy according to the fathers of both Yoga and Vedanta.
Work on knowing that Brahman is not a form, but is Formless. Do not mistake the Formless Brahman for formless prakriti either. If you do, you are falling victim to the old problem of taking the unreal for the real, only now at the cosmic level.
That especial knowledge that removes spiritual poverty is the highest compassion. That understanding was the gift of Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother, in recent times.
If anger comes, be angry at all that stands in the way of your God-realization. If lust appears, lust after Enlightenment. If jealousy presents itself, be jealous that others have realized God, but you have not. This is the Tantric way of sublimation of human passions.
Mother exists in us as memory. Find Her there and remember your past births.
Shankara informs us that the loss of one’s deeper memory is caused by the mind’s constant acts of misidentifying the Self with the non-Self. This is also the main gist of Patanjali’s yama, called aparigraha. By the constant giving of gifts (lands, wealth, objects), people drift away from thinking about Divine Reality, and thus forget all that they gathered in previous existences.
If you see through the third eye, you see Brahman; if you see only through the two eyes, you see all the constantly fluctuating dualities. This is the basic definition of a spiritual life, as contrasted to a worldly life.
Develop the subtle senses and the causal state of mind via meditation before death so you can easily locate Reality when you get free of the body.
All phenomena happens in Nature, not in the Soul/Atman.
The reason to work is not for pleasure, food, or family, but for gathering knowledge.