She was the daughter of a prominent scholar, and so well-educated that she was pretty much deemed unmarriable. This didn’t bother her, because she had such a mind of her own that she didn’t even want to get married. She did marry though, albeit later in life, and she had quite a career in court serving with the Empress. Despite the prestige, she found the lifestyle superficial and stifling, and once her daughter was old enough to be well-settled in court, Murasaki chose to live a spiritual life near a monastery.

I found this account so touching that I felt as though I were there. The details of daily life were portrayed with the utmost attention; the colors of fabrics and flowers played a prominent role in the book. I suppose I have come to view melancholy as a purely modern affliction, but it’s obvious through her poems that, even in the 11th century, Murasaki experienced profound sadness. That time period must have also been the height of Buddhism’s spread in Japan, and turning to spiritual life was common, if not the norm. Yet it is no coincidence that Buddhism is seeing a resurgence now. People are becoming ever increasingly disillusioned with the world, and seeking answers to the pesky questions that our culture cannot seem to answer with to any satisfaction.

PBS has released a new documentary about the Buddha’s life, complete with celebrity narration (by Richard Gere). It’s fascinating to me how people can be so intrigued by him, yet could completely miss him if he were here today…

An article in the Huffington Post inquires “What Does The Buddha Have To Do With Jesus?” Seems like a redundant question–duh, they were both enlightened. Rather than favoring brevity,  the author takes ages to preach about interreligious dialogue.

But we are terribly short of thinkers and practitioners, clergy and lay, who can think these two traditions together.

Once again, spiritual experience being reduced to religious philosophy. Sad.

Or… See what Sadhguru has said about enlightenment/grace in the bible.

“The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” (Matthew 6:22)

‘If thine eye be single’ means that you are no more discriminatory. You are seeing everything as one; you are seeing everything as the same. If you become like this, your body shall be filled with light, and that is Grace.

Thanks, Ganesh for the video link!

[youtube y6R5bVgUkTo]

The Making of a Mystic

I am generally referred to as a mystic. What is that supposed
to mean? If there is something here that you do not know
and you are unable to understand, that becomes mysterious
to you. If there is someone here who seems to know and
understand a lot of things that a lot of people do not seem to
know and understand, that person becomes a mystic. [Laughs]

On a certain day, two cows were grazing on the English
meadow… English cows. [Laughter] One cow asked the other,
“What is your opinion about the mad cow disease?” The
other cow said, “I don’t care a hoot. I’m anyway a helicopter.”
[Laughter] Being a mystic, being a realized being, is just
like this – a cow realizing that it is a cow; and it becomes
a celebrated cow. Holy cow, isn’t it? [Laughter] “Is it that
simplistic?” Let me tell you my story.

As a child, one thing that I realized was that I was utterly, absolutely ignorant, and everybody around me seemed to know just about everything. I did not know anything at all. So, because I did not know anything, I had to pay enormous attention towards everything. My sense of attention became like this – if I saw a leaf, I could just sit there, looking at this leaf for hours. If I sat up in my bed, just staring at the darkness, I could do this
for the whole night.

This attention brought a completely different level of involvement and interaction with just about anything and everything around me, animate and inanimate. But everybody else, because they seemed to know everything, could go about their life happily without paying attention to anything. Then I realized that even they did not know anything. It was just that they had their assumptions and belief systems that they were happy with; either their own ones, or what was handed down to them by someone else.

And they not only knew about what is here, they also knew about other worlds, about gods, about heavens and things like that – and here I was struggling to figure out what is what. This so intrigued me that I started planting myself outside a major temple in Mysore1, because I wanted to really see how people would be after having a meeting with God. So I stood there, intensely observing every face that was walking out of the temple. Generally, I heard local gossip. Sometimes in Indian temples, your footwear walks away with someone else, and when that happened, I heard people cursing the creation and the Creator. [Laughter] I found that people walking out of restaurants always had more joyful faces than people walking out of temples. [Laughter] Divine versus dosa – dosa seems to win. [Laughter & Clapping] I could not come to terms with this. I slowly became more and more skeptical about everybody and everything around me. Skeptical about social structures, political systems, religious beliefs, even scientific theories –because none of them matched with my experience of life…

On a certain day, I went to Chamundi Hill. There is a tradition
in Mysore [City in Karnataka, India where Sadhguru was born and brought up]– if you have something to do, you go to Chamundi Hill. If you have nothing to do, you go to Chamundi Hill. [Laughter] If you fall in love, you go to Chamundi Hill.
[Laughter] If you fall out, you go to Chamundi Hill. [Laughter]
I had just fallen out and I had nothing to do, so I started
moving towards Chamundi Hill. [Laughter] I went up and sat
on a rock. Till that moment in my life, I had always thought,
this was me, and that was somebody else or something else.
But there, for the first time, I did not know which was me and
which was not me. Suddenly, what was me was just all over the
place. The rock on which I was sitting, the air that I breathed,
the very atmosphere around me – I had just exploded into
everything. That sounds like utter insanity… This, I thought,
lasted for 10 to 15 minutes, but when I came back to my
normal consciousness, I had been sitting there for about four-and-a-half hours – fully conscious, eyes open, but time had
just flipped in my experience. For the first time in my adult life,
tears were flowing. I had always been peaceful and happy, that
was not an issue, but there I was drenched in a completely
different kind of blissfulness, every cell in my body bursting
with ecstasy. When I shook my head, trying to get some logical
explanation for what was happening to me, the only thing that
my very smart mind could say was, “Maybe I’m just going off
my rocker.” [Laughter]

As this experience deepened and started repeating itself,
if I just sat there, what were moments for me, seemed to
be hours for others. On a certain day, I happened to sit in a
certain place. I actually thought it was about 25-30 minutes,
but when I came to my normal senses, 13 days had gone by,
just sitting there. India being what it is, a whole crowd had
gathered; garlands around my neck, people touching my
feet, somebody wanted to know what would happen to his
business, somebody else wanted to know when his daughter
would get married. [Laughter] All the things that I hated were
just happening around me, and I had to move away from this
place, just to avoid this crowd around me. One thing I realized
was, everything that I had believed was me suddenly was not
me. This body had always been me, and suddenly I found
this was just an accumulation of food that I had eaten. What I
accumulate can be mine, but can never be me. This mind was
just a huge heap of impressions. A distance arose between me
and my body, between me and my mind. This also facilitated
a certain experience within me, that the equation of time and
space was suddenly not applicable for me anymore. I was
seeing that what is here is there, what is there is here. Past,
present and future got mixed up. It was one majestic chaos,
but utterly beautiful.

So my skeptical mind, not able to come to terms with it, started
conducting experiments. These experiments were too weird
to talk about and the results too fairytale-ish for anybody to
believe, but one thing that I arrived at was that existence is not
human-centric, and all human experience is self-made. Most
people believe that their experience is molded by situations
in which they exist, but actually, all human experience is 100%
self-created from within. Today, science is beginning to agree
with that. And having realized this, if all experience is created
from within, if the basis of your experience is within you, as it
is, what kind of experience of life would you want to have? I am
sure you want it to be utmost pleasantness, whatever you may
be doing. What you want for your neighbor may be debatable,
but for yourself, definitely you want utmost pleasantness.

As I realized the basis of my experience is within me, I shifted
from staring at things to sitting with my eyes closed. This was
a dimensional shift in my life. I got so fascinated with this
human mechanism; I would not want to open my eyes. For
days on end, I was just keeping my eyes closed, wanting to see
everything about myself. What I realized was, if I take a piece of
bread and put it into this system, this piece of bread becomes
my body in a few hours and I begin to experience it as myself.
As I became more and more aware of this amazing process, I
saw the very source of creation, the very maker of this body, is
within. Once I saw this, and I could see that I could re-wire my
brains completely in 24 hours, changing myself beyond social
upbringing, family situations, even genetic qualities in me, I
could see that I could change everything about myself. In 24
hours, I was a different person. In another 24 hours, I was yet a
different person. I was like a conscious schizophrenic trying out
different things.

On a certain day, in a field hockey game, I fractured my left
ankle, and I went and sat down in a place. I was in excruciating
pain and by then, I had also become a chronic asthmatic and I
had a very severe bout of asthma. This pain and this inability to
breathe together, they were quite something. At that moment
it occurred to me, if the maker of this body is inside, why is it
that I cannot mend this from inside? I sat down with a certain
resolve – if this is true, I must be able to allow it to mend itself;
otherwise, I must be completely on a wrong track. I sat down
with my eyes closed for little more than an hour. When I came
out, my asthma had left me, never to come back again. And
above all, my fractured leg was perfectly okay in little more
than an hour’s time. This intelligence and this competence,
which is not just about thought process, exists in every human
being, but unfortunately remains untapped.

Armed with this experience, I started creating methods and
systems through which every human being could access
that intelligence and that capability within the system, which
can make a piece of bread into a human being. What I went
about creating are technologies for inner well-being, methods
to engineer your interiority the way you want it. Millions of
people are making use of it, enjoying the benefits of this.
But the essential part of it is that there is such a high level of
intelligence and competence in every millimeter of the body,
every point of the body – not just in the thought process. This
intelligence within the human system is completely untapped
by human societies.

As I went further into this process, I looked at the question,
“What is it that determines what is me and what is not me?”
I am capable of taking a piece of bread and making it into
myself. If I look at this body, it is just a piece of this planet that
I have borrowed – then why is this and that separate? I found
that it is just the boundaries of sensation which determine
what is me and what is not me. Here there is sensation, so this is
me. There, I don’t feel a sensation, so that is not me. As I looked
at these boundaries of sensation very, very closely from within
myself, I realized that they can either be expanded, or even
made smaller than what they are right now. You can sit here
and not feel anything that is happening around you right now
– this happens in sleep to some extent – or you can sit here and
extend the boundaries of your sensation to the whole hall. And
anything that is within the boundaries of your sensation, you
will always experience as yourself. This glass of water here is
not you – that is very clear – but if you drink it, you just include
it into the boundaries of your sensation, and it becomes you.
So, if you expand the boundaries of your sensation, you can sit
here and experience everybody in this hall as yourself. You can
stretch it further, and experience the very cosmic scape like you
experience your own body.

When this sense of inclusiveness came into me, I suddenly
realized that to be loving is not somebody’s teaching, to be
compassionate is not an idea, to be in empathy is not some
esoteric principle; this is the way a human being is made, if
only he does not constipate his consciousness with limited
identifications with things that he is not. If you do not identify
with anything that you have accumulated over a period of
time, including your body and mind, every human being is
capable of this. When it comes to external situations, each
one of us is differently capable, but when it comes to inner
situations, every one of us is equally capable. No human
being is better endowed than the other when it comes to
the inner realm. It is only in the external situations that we
are all differently capable. If this inclusiveness enters human
life, if you can sit here and experience people around you as
yourself, I don’t think I have to teach you to be good; I don’t
think I have to teach you to love; I don’t think I have to teach
you to care. Because caring for yourself is very, very natural –
this is ingrained within the very nature of the existence. This
inclusiveness definitely has to touch humanity. So, this became
my life, my work and my endeavor to develop methods so that
people can experience this inclusiveness.

If this inclusiveness is experienced by humanity, particularly
by the leadership, by people who wield power and different
kinds of responsibility in the world, definitely we could find
solutions for everything. Today for the first time, we as a
generation of people – this is very significant – are capable of
addressing every human problem on this planet. Nourishment,
health, education, ecology – you name it, we can address it all.
We have the necessary resources, capability and technology,
but whether we are going to do it simply depends upon how
inclusive our experience of life is. If you stand here and you
experience this planet as yourself, I don’t think I have to tell you, “Take care of it.” Every human being would do his best. When we do not have this inclusiveness, what we could do, we will not do. In our lives, if we do not do what we cannot do, that is not a problem, but if we do not do what we can do, we are a disaster.

My hope and my work is just to see that we, as a generation of
people, do not become that kind of a disaster; that what we
can do, we will definitely do. And right now, what we can do
compared to what we could do 100 years ago is so incredibly
different, but what is missing is an all-inclusive consciousness,
an all-inclusive experience of life. If only we bring this about in
the leadership, in the people, only then we will seek solutions
that are relevant for all; otherwise we will only be dabbling, and
in the name of creating solutions, we go about creating more
and more problems. If we truly have to create solutions that are
relevant for all, an experience of absolute inclusiveness has to
happen to humanity. And this is possible.

Sadhguru says…

“These two eyes are discriminatory (pointing to his eyes). They tell you what is high, what is low, what is man, what is woman, what is this, what is that. These two eyes are instruments of survival…

‘If thine eye be single’ means that you are no more discriminatory. You are seeing everything as one; you are seeing everything as the same. If you become like this, your body shall be filled with light, and that is Grace.

Grace means that the source of your existence, that which is larger than creation, is no more outside of you; it is within you. You are no more looking for an outside source of light – you have become the source of light. Once you become that, even for a moment, your life will never be the same.

We are doing so many things in Isha (Sadhguru’s meditation programs) to somehow make you experience this at least for a moment. You may not be experiencing it all the time, but if at least for a moment you see that you are filled with light, that means Grace has touched you.”