You Are the Center of Life!

Swami-ji: The main study for aware people is the thinking process of the human mind.

Generally, people do not turn their awareness to know why they are here on earth. It is not their fault. Human thinking is not normally directed towards enlightenment. Instead, human thinking tends to be that which will lead a person to the graveyard as early as possible. 

Those who study this will find that many human beings think only of their own existence and do not consider the existence of their fellow beings or partners in life.You may call this selfishness.  But it is not a defect to be selfish. It is not wrong.  Human beings cannot exist, cannot survive, unless each  thinks and acts for himself.

Swami-ji: These children: They are like free forms - like deer.

These children will not be able to meditate without a guide. But where does this guide come from? Not from the brain. Not from the body. Not from another. The guide comes from the centre of life which is unseen, unknown, unfigurable.

Soon we will meditate. And as one meditates, one should know who meditates. Since we can think and speak, we know that life is there. But we will not know where the life is.

The children are chirping and we may think that they will be distracting us during our meditation. But when we arrived, they were already here. We are the ones who are distracting them! It is the same with the world. The world was here before you were born from the womb of your mother.

[Swami-ji calls the children over, teaches them to repeat 'Amaram hum Madhuram hum', then leads the group, including the children, into meditation.]

The centre of life is the silent space

Swami-ji: [Leading the group into meditation] Keep watching. Keep hearing. Who is watching? Who is hearing? The centre of life! The centre of life cannot be known. It cannot be recorded with film or with tape recorders. The centre of life is the silent space. Meditate to recognize the centre of life.

[After 10 minutes of silence] See? Ordinary people would be shouting at the children, 'Get out! We are meditating! We are serious people!' But those children who approached us here today: I created my intellect in them.

So what is essential is to be tuned in to that highest awareness. The highest awareness accommodates the body, the eyes, the ears, and the neighbours too.

But lower awareness shuts all this out. With lower awareness, man becomes as an animal and the intellect deteriorates. With the unfoldment of the highest awareness, however, a person is turned into that strength which makes him or her at peace.

A peaceless man's greatest ambition is to get peace. An agitated man's greatest ambition is to remove the agitation. But from childhood, people have been trained only in peacelessness. The elders of society have made human beings good machines -   machines to work as the teacher wants them to. So if an agitated person is doing the teaching, agitation is the result.

To reverse this, whenever you are about to say 'I think', instead say 'I am enlightening.' Then that thought will come in as you initiate any action.

You may not realize that you have the opportunity not to make yourself miserable. But you have the capacity not to make yourself miserable as soon as you know that you do not have to accept those thoughts which are uninvited. Every time you meditate, you have the chance to see that 10, 20 or 100 thoughts have no sway on you. Why? Because you have decided to let each thought come, stay and then go. In this way, you become severed from identification with the thoughts.

Association with the thoughts means that you become the thoughts. When you are attached to your mind, you cannot think that you should be happy when an unhappy thought comes. As children in a three-legged race are tied and have no choice but to move together, you become tied to your thoughts.

In this way, we don't say 'Self alone is everywhere' at first, because you think Self is body - you associate Self with body - so it can't  be everything. The thought of 'I - Self' becomes the thought of 'me - body'. In this way, we get combined. So a human being cannot know that the nature of the 'I' is not the things and forms.

If you know the things and forms but not the life force, then you are only half knowledgeable. Check. Do you call the car Me or the driver Me? Do you call the hands and feet Me or the driver Me? 

Who is the driver? It is the centre of life. It is incomprehensible. You will say that forms 'come out of' the Self, like a child emerges from the mother. But no. You cannot say that. The reality is that the whole world is inside the Self.

Man does not understand that snowflakes are water. So if you teach people without understanding that waters of all kind - cloud, rain and snowflakes - are nothing but water, why would you teach at all?

We need both intellectual growth and the growth of consciousness.

Without the unfoldment of brain power, we still continue to think of intellect as my intellect, and we say things like,  'I with my intellect believe you.' But it is not my intellect. It is intellect pure. So what is to be done? Bring bodh, bring sattwa, bring light to the level of the intellect.

A dark room will remain dark until you shine light into it. A guru cannot teach others if he does not first bring the capacity to see the light. If you are tuned into that highest consciousness you will be enlightened.

So the main work for one year is to transform your intellect. To reach this goal you must be forceful, not accept what the mind says, unfold clarity, and have the sense of the Self as forever free.

At times you  may feel attached or bound. This is natural and should not be condemned.

But we want that which is super-natural. As with the anchor of a ship, the ship above may be rocking in the storm but the anchor remains unmoved, unaffected.