Thursday, February 28, 2008

Anapanasati Yoga - OSHO


OSHO

Buddha invented a method, one of the most powerful methods, for creating an Inner Sun of Awareness. The method that Buddha used is known as Anapanasati Yoga. The Yoga of 'In-coming' and 'Out-going' Breath Awareness.
We are breathing, but it is unconscious breathing. Breath is Prana, Breath is the elan vital , the Vitality, the very life and yet it is unconscious; you are not aware of it.
Buddha used Breath as a vehicle to do two things simultaneously; one to create Consciousness, and another to allow that Consciousness to penetrate to the very cells of the body. He said, Breathe Consciously. That does not mean to do 'Pranayam'-'Yogic Breathing'; it is just to make Breath an object of awareness, without changing it.
There is no need to 'change' your Breath! Leave as it is, natural; do not change it. But when you breathe in, Breath Consciously; let your consciousness move with the In-going Breath. And when the Breath goes out, let your concsciousness move out with it.
Move with the breath! Let your attention be with the breath; flow with it.
One hour is enough! It looks like such a small amount of time, but it is not. When you are trying to be Aware, an hour can seem like millennium, because ordinarily you cannot be aware for more than five or six seconds.
To be conscious of the Breath means that no thoughts can be allowed, because thoughts will distract your attention.
Automatically, thinking will stop; you cannot both think and breath consciously! When a thought comes into your mind, your attention is withdrawn from the breathing. A single thought, and you have become unconscious of the Breathing Process.
The more you try to do it, the more your endeavor to do it, the more conscious you will become. It is arduous, it is difficult, but once you can do it, you will have become a different person, a different being, a different world!
Buddha says,... Move consciously with the breath and you will create a Center of Awareness within you... Then your whole body becomes the Universe.
Only after practicing Breath Awareness for a long time - when you are finally able to remain with the breath, to be Aware of the breath - will you become Aware of the Gap when there is no movement of Breath; Breath is neither Coming In nor Going Out. In the Subtle Gap between Breaths, you are at your center.

Deepak Chopra Interview with Powells

Deepak Chopra

Deepak, elbows on the conference table, hunched over a microphone, talking about God. "Christ wasn't a Christian and Mohammed wasn't a Mohammedan," he explains, obviously not for the first time. "Buddha wasn't a Buddhist. These are dogmas and ideologies. The fight is about semantics."

The author of twenty-six books (translated into thirty-five languages) describes How to Know God as "a scientific approach to understanding the divine."

Everything that we experience as material reality is born in an invisible realm beyond space and time, a realm revealed by science to consist of energy and information. This invisible source of all that exists is not an empty void but the womb of creation itself.

Our brains, Chopra explains, are hardwired to know God; seven biological responses, each one evident in the literature of every organized religion, correspond to the seven levels of divine experience. Each of us, the author insists, can experience God, but "we need a model that is both part of religion and not bounded by it."
We talked for a half-hour or so on a rainy winter afternoon.


Dave:
In How to Know God, you cite Vedanta as an influence for much of your thinking on the subject. I thought we could start by providing some background for people who haven't read the book.


Deepak Chopra:

In this book I explain God as infinite intelligence, the source of all information: energy, matter, and of course, also space and time, the structure and the fabric of the universe. Then I show how through biological responses humans are capable of experiencing first bits and pieces of this infinite intelligence and, ultimately, the infinite unbounded intelligence, directly.
I've drawn on Vedanta because it is a wisdom tradition that talks about unity consciousness and the one reality from where everything comes. There's a level of existence where space, time, matter, and energy all resolve into pure potentiality. In physics, that's called a singularity. And, in fact, all the latest theories of physics seem to say that space, time, matter, energy, and information are really nothing other than different frequencies of vibration of the same field of pure potential.
The seven biological responses - fight/flight response, reactive response, restful awareness response, intuitive response, creative response, visionary response, and sacred response - are progressively more expanded states of awareness. In Eastern traditions, they are frequently expressed as metaphors. The seven chakras, for example: the first chakra is about survival, which is fight/flight response; the second chakra is about the ability to react, control, and be empowered, in other words, the reactive response. And so on.
This is a scientific approach to understanding the divine, and in many ways it reinforces equally valid, more traditional approaches: love, prayer, meditation, going within, karmically appropriate actions...

Dave:
You draw on various traditions, both Eastern and Western. Often you'll cite passages from the Old or New Testament to support your examples. At the same time, you acknowledge that many of your ideas would be considered blasphemous to strict followers of Christianity.

Chopra:
If you're a fundamentalist, it doesn't matter what religion you are, Hindu or Buddhist or Christian or Muslim, you're tied to a literal interpretation of the scripture. So yes, some of these ideas would be considered blasphemous if you get stuck with just one aspect.
But you'll find all seven responses in biblical literature. An example of the fight/flight response is Jehovah when he gets upset. The reactive response is Moses when he gets upset with the Pharaoh and the Egyptians. The restful awareness response is Psalm 44: Be still and know that I am God. It's also Jesus Christ: the peace that passes understanding. The intuitive response is, again, Christ, when he says, "Ask and you shall receive; seek and you shall find; knock and it shall be open unto you." The creative response is the Book of Genesis. The visionary response is the thirty-five miracles in the New Testament. And the sacred response is when Moses asks God, "What's your name?" and God says, "I am that I am." Or when Christ says, "Before Abraham was I am."
Biblical literature contains the various stages of understanding God, as does Vedanta and every other religion. The fact is that Christ wasn't a Christian and Mohammed wasn't a Mohammedan; Buddha wasn't a Buddhist. These are dogmas and ideologies. The fight is about semantics.

Dave:
Is there a trait or a feeling readers of this book would share? Maybe a frustration with organized religion?

Chopra:
In many cases, it's the simple fact that science and technology have dismantled our traditional beliefs. If we are aware what science has shown us, we can no longer think of God as a dead white male in the sky. We can no longer squeeze God into the volume of a body and the span of a lifetime. That limits God.
This is a huge universe. Planet Earth is a speck of dust in an unbounded expanse, an ocean of space-time. We're part of a little galaxy on the outskirts of infinity. A simplistic notion of God is no longer tenable.
Yet we still have the same questions: Where did I come from? What am I doing here? Is there any meaning to my existence? What happens to me after I die? Who's the real me? Do I have a soul? Does God exist? If God does exist, why should He or She or it care about me? After all, I'm just a little microbe on a piece of cheese in the junkyard of infinity.
The questions remain. The anxiety has only increased. Nobody wants to die. Nobody wants to lose their identity. I think we need to look at the whole issue from a deeper level of questioning. The fact is though that when we do that our science begins to validate the idea of an underlying intelligence. Science begins to validate that within each of us there is at least something that is not subject to mortality.

Dave:
You make the distinction between the brain and the mind, and you use the metaphor of the brain as a radio, receiving waves or broadcasts. Essentially what a person "hears" depends on how open those lines of communication are. Is he or she accepting what's being broadcast? And listening?
To explain, you go into detail about the physiology of neurons and synapses, how the brain works. Does what you're saying speak to people who might not be as familiar with those concepts, people who might not have backgrounds in science?

Chopra:
It might or it might not. I can't help that. I must express what I think our current science suggests. The more you look at it and speak to eminent neuroscientists and physicists, the more apparent it becomes that consciousness is independent of brain, that if anything the brain edits the consciousness, taking bits and pieces to reinforce a prevailing worldview.
Amongst the sages and psychotics and geniuses you find access to domains of consciousness that you don't find under the hypnosis of social conditioning. What we call everyday reality is actually the psychopathology of the average edit.
These ideas may not speak to everyone. On the other hand, I find people who perhaps do not have the background to understand it but by diligent examination of what's written in the book and by their own studies begin to open up. When you write a book, you don't necessarily try to please everyone. You have to tell it the way you see it.

Dave:
You speak of detaching from the material reality of self. You use an analogy of personality traits and ideas of self as birds roosting on branches; the birds can fly off at any moment; the birds and the branch are not one and the same.
As far as progressing from stage to stage, you mention in the book that many people are comfortable at Stage Two and see no reason to seek a closer relationship with God. Is there a particular hurdle that people tend to fear more than others? Is it detachment from materialism?

Chopra:
If you look at Vedantic tradition, there are only five reasons why people suffer: they don't know who they are; they're attached to that which is impermanent and insubstantial; they are afraid of that which is impermanent and insubstantial; they have a false sense of identity through their ego; and they're afraid of death. Period. Those are the five causes of suffering.
The Vedanta also goes on to say that all these causes of suffering are contained in the first one: people don't realize who they are. If they did, they'd be free. They wouldn't have these other problems, including the fear of death. So while it is a fact that people find it difficult to detach, what is death if not the big detachment? Entering into the unknown. If you're going to have to do it anyway, why not start now? If you open yourself to the unknown, you'll find a part of yourself that indeed is free.

Dave:
In Creating Affluence, you explain that detachment doesn't necessarily mean living the life of a monk on a mountaintop. You can be part of the world; you can live an affluent life.

Chopra:
Detachment is not a physical thing; it's a mental phenomenon. Attachment could be said to be the same thing as fear and insecurity. Detachment is the same thing as being comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, which are facts of life.
There's a classic Zen story about two celibate monks who are walking on a pilgrimage. They come across a girl who is very lovely and beautiful and sexual, and she wants to cross the river. The young monk is attracted to her, and he says, "I'll take you on my shoulders and carry you across the river and drop you off on the other side." He does that, and the two monks continue on their pilgrimage until after a while the old monk starts to have a frown on his face. He's upset. Six hours, seven hours go by, and finally he looks at the young one and says, "I can't believe you did that." "Did what?" the young monk asks. "You carried that woman on your shoulders." "I dropped her off six hours ago," the young monk says. And the old monk responds, "But you're still carrying her."
Attachment is a mental state, not a physical one.

Dave: Has the response to the book been different in the U.S. than other parts of the world?

Chopra:
Actually, I'm really surprised by the response in the United States. The book made it to the New York Times Bestseller list as a hardcover. It's getting good reviews. I've been invited to speak at Harvard Divinity School and many other academic institutions as a result of it. The book is doing well in Asia and India and Singapore and Europe. The U.S. response is as good as anywhere else.

Dave:
You've written that technology is a neutral force, as good or as bad as people make it. What positive changes do you think technology will bring in the near future?

Chopra:
For one thing, the Internet. If you really think about it, the Internet is cloning our soul. The genome project is cloning our bodies; the Internet is cloning our collective psyche. If you want to know what is happening in world consciousness, go to the Internet.
I think this technology can bring a true spirituality to the world and create a critical mass of awareness. Possibly in the future I see the elimination of poverty, economic freedom, the repair of the ecosystem, the elimination of war...all possibilities. In biotechnology, in the near future, you'll be able to replace your body organs with your own cells. That will be a great boon to those who are blind, to those with terminal heart disease, to those who are paralyzed. It's amazing what can happen in the near future if you focus on the positive aspects.
On the other hand, the technology is powerful enough that we could use it to cause our extinction as a species. Again, it has nothing to do with the technology.
The way I see it, creativity directed outward is science and technology. Creativity directed inward is spiritual evolution. Most of our creativity has been directed outward so our spiritual evolution has not kept pace. We need to bring that back. Once you do that, technology is the most wonderful thing.

Dave:
The Internet connects people in a way that people haven't been connected before. Some evidence suggests that many of the ills we've developed in the West will become common everywhere - not just because of the Internet, of course, but also with the spread of capitalism, economic imperialism at large.

Chopra:
It's all a question of how you are prepared to deal with the world. I find I can use technology to my advantage. I don't allow it to dominate me. No matter how hectic the schedule, I'm fine.
It's not necessary to get caught up in the melodrama; it's a matter of training yourself properly. You'll find highly stressed people in rural areas. I've been to remote areas of the world where there's not a soul to talk to, where people live a very laid back life, and still they have addictive problems and divorce and misery. It has nothing to do with the outside environment.
The outside environment is an excuse. The real existence is inside, but you have to train for it. It's like training for anything - you have to learn to ride a bike, you have to learn how to deal with people and circumstances around you and not be victimized by them.

Dave:
Any competitive athlete knows about a "zone," a state in which you're no longer conscious of what you're doing; you simply are. In the book, you use the example of a marathon runner, but I think any sport would apply. For example, the basketball player who sinks ten difficult shots in a row, after the game, will say, "I was feeling it. I was in the zone."
One doesn't tend to think of athletics as the home of spiritual matters, but there's definitely a state athletes reach where they're no longer conscious of what they're doing.

Chopra:
It's true. I just saw a program the other day about these football players who said, in the middle of all that screaming, a deafening noise from the stands, they don't hear a thing; their minds are totally silent.

Dave:
To look back on the day when you were practicing medicine...Do you still think of yourself as a doctor?

Chopra:
Healing, health, holy, wholeness...it's the same word. I was trained as a technician, not a doctor. Modern training of a physician is to make him or her a superb technician who knows everything about the human body but a lousy doctor because you know nothing about the human soul.

Dave:
Do you see that changing? Improving?

Chopra:
It is. I speak at Harvard once a year. I've spoken at UCLA, Johns Hopkins, Yale, and the world is changing.

Dave:
What kind of advice do you give young doctors?
Chopra:
I don't. I just explain the bigger picture of what healing could be. There's a new generation of doctors who are very interested in the broader perspective of what healing really is.
Dave:
Are there books or authors that you fall back on, books you go back to?
Chopra: I think there's a lot of good research and data. I don't follow authors as much as I watch the research.
Dave: In journals?
Chopra: Yes, in journals. There's some really good research at Duke and at Harvard, and of course all literature in the field of physics. There's some fascinating stuff happening.
Dave: Many of the examples you cite to bring your arguments together are from prominent scientists, for instance Einstein, Schrodinger, and Stephen Hawking, to name a few.
I didn't grow up in a particularly religious atmosphere, but even so I was taught that science was somewhat anti-God. Do you find that ironic?

Chopra: Science will be responsible for the climactic overthrow of the superstition of materialism.

Dave: This book comes recommended by the Dalai Lama himself. Is there a particular experience or anecdote you'd share about the time you've spent him?

Chopra: The Dalai Lama is the most innocent, childlike person I've met, full of wonder and amazing wisdom that has nothing to do with book knowledge. It's all from experience.

Dave: Does it feel different, being around him?
Chopra: Definitely. It feels different around him; it feels different around Mother Theresa and Nelson Mandela. You feel the power of spirit.

Dave: You mention Mandela. Where does politics fit into all this?
Chopra: Politics is part of the fight/flight and the reactive response at the moment, as is business. It has a long way to go.

Dave: In another interview, you noted a certain concern about the man who recently was elected President and his lack of...
Chopra: ...awareness.
Dave: Awareness of the world at large, let's say.
Chopra: Well, he's learning to delegate appropriately, so maybe we'll survive.

Spirituality in a Material World

Awareness isn't something you achieve, says Deepak Chopra. It's what happens when you stop trying so hard.

Interview by Lisa Schneider

Called "the poet-prophet of alternative medicine" by Time magazine, Deepak Chopra, M.D., is the founder and CEO of the Chopra Center for Well Being in Carlsbad, California. Dr. Chopra was born and raised in India and came to the United States in 1970 to train and then practice internal medicine and endocrinology. He has since developed his own philosophy of wellness that combines Ayurvedic healing with Western medicine and focuses on a balance between mind, body, and spirit. Dr. Chopra is the author of more than 30 books on a variety of topics ranging from herbal medicine, aging, and meditation, to quantum mechanics, golf, and the poems of Rumi. He spoke with us about his latest work, "The Book of Secrets."

I was surprised by what you wrote about spiritual seeking. You say, "Seeking is doomed because it is a chase that takes you outside yourself." But it seems that some of your biggest fans are spiritual seekers.

You know, we all go through those phases at a certain point. The seeker will realize that what they're seeking is the one who's doing the seeking.
Seeking can become stressful when you apply the same laws that you apply in the material world—hard work, exacting plans, driving ambition, and attachment to outcome. Ultimately spiritual awareness unfolds when you're flexible, when you're spontaneous, when you're detached, when you're easy on yourself and easy on others.(Read an excerpt about spiritual seeking from Deepak Chopra's book.)

Are there practical steps that people can take to increase their awareness?

Yeah, in the Eastern traditions, those steps have been referred to as the different kinds of yoga. Yoga literally means union, so the yoga of knowledge, which is a scientific understanding of how the universe operates—the yoga of love, which is paying attention to the impulse of love, which is, after all, the impulse toward unity. The yoga of stillness or contemplation or meditation. And also, the yoga of action, the attitude you have when you perform action, when you do yoga in the spiritual worship or when you have the inner conviction that everything you do comes from God, belongs to God and that every breath of yours and every movement of yours is a divine movement of the eternal being, then those are the steps that bring you closer to the supreme intelligence that orchestrates the universe.

Your book suggests our body chemistry can tell us about our consciousness. How so?

Look at the cells and how they function, you see that each cell has higher awareness. It is doing what it does to maintain the welfare of the rest of the body. The stomach cell's not saying, why should I digest food for the heart and the brain? And the brain doesn't say, why should I regulate the activity of the stomach? So they are inseparably interdependent. They have higher awareness.

Each cell has creativity because every time there is a challenge to the body, the body has to come up with a creative solution. Each cell knows how to commune with other cells instantly, both locally and non-locally, each cell is bonded to every other cell, each cell practices what it does with maximum efficiency—it never hoards anything. Each cell obeys the laws of giving and receiving, each cell has awareness of what's happening in the body, and each cell knows the secret of immortality, because even as it dies, it passes on everything it knows to the next generation of cells.
So if you want to look at the human body as an example of consciousness, it's a direct reflection. Consciousness conceives, governs, constructs, and becomes the activity of the body. And in every human body, or for that matter, in every biological organism, there is an inner intelligence that reflects the wisdom of the universe and is, in fact, the ultimate and supreme genius.

You say that our bodies are always experiencing dying–that "Cells are constantly dying and being replaced" and then ask the rhetorical question, so what are we so afraid of? Why do you think the fear of death seems to be built into us?

The fear of death comes from limited awareness. As long as you think of your real self as the person you are, then of course you're going to be fearful of death. But what is a person? A person is a pattern of behavior, of a larger awareness. You know, the two-year-old dies before the three-year-old shows up, the three-year-old dies before the teenager shows up.

So the real you is neither the perceiver, nor the object of perception, but the real you is that formless spirit that is constantly evolving and sometimes even taking quantum leaps of evolution and expressing itself as both the perceiver and the object of perception. And if you can shift your internal reference point from your skin-encapsulated ego to that larger domain of awareness, then you will find that it's your ticket to freedom—that you do not need to fear death because you're already dying every moment to the past.

The fear of death is the fear of the unknown, and yet, the fact is, we live and breathe and move in the unknown all the time. The unknown is from this moment onwards—you're already living there. You have the pretend game that you're living in the known, but the known doesn't exist anymore, it's already gone. Everything you know is about the past. So you have to both intellectually and experientially be willing to embrace uncertainly, ambiguity, and step into the unknown. The known is a prison of past conditioning. The unknown is always a fresh field of possibilities.

Would you equate this constant evolving and recycling with reincarnation?

You can say that, but you know, there's only one "I" in the end pretending to be all these different "I"s so I really don't even believe there's such a thing as a person; there's only the infinite pretending to be a person, as a temporary pattern of behavior. So what does reincarnate is the wisps of memory and threads of desire, born of past experience.

You write that unity, as opposed to duality, is "the purpose of evolution." What do you mean?

The fact that we experience separation is really a perceptual artifact. There's only a single reality that differentiates into both mind and body and then from body and environment. So our perceptual experience of the environment is different than the body, the body is different from the mind, and the mind is different from the soul.
There are two types of ignorance that we come to in this world, one is innate ignorance, which is this perceptual artifact of separation and the other is cultural ignorance.
Just like, your DNA, for example, differentiates into the different cells of your body, your heart cells and your brain cells, and your kidney cells are different in appearance, but not different in their essence. They came from the same double strand of DNA and if I wanted to isolate the DNA in every cell of your body, even though these belong to different organs, I'd get the same information. So the appearance of the expression of the different organs in the body is different, but it's still the same essence. So, too, every observer is a differentiated aspect of a single observer and every object of perception is a differentiated expression of the same observer, because the observer and the observed, the seer and the scenery, the knower and the known are differentiated aspects of a single consciousness. The goal of all spiritual seeking is to realize that experientially and intellectually—but more importantly experientially.
Cultural ignorance is when we take these ideas of duality and then we create institutions around them—so religious and cultural and social indoctrination perpetuates the ignorance.

Do you believe humanity as a whole is evolving toward unity, toward a "New Age," a new level of consciousness on a global scale?

Yeah. I think it would need a critical mass of people to reach a certain level of awareness for humanity as a whole to be affected so I do not know when that would happen. I think the fact that we now have technology, for example, the Internet—Beliefnet, for example—to take information and knowledge and you can rapidly spread it to so many people. That could never have happened say, 2,000 years ago. But today, I personally look at the Internet as the cloning of collective consciousness, our collective soul, it could be much faster than we think it's going to be.

In another interview you said that "religion pulls us apart and spirituality brings us together in love." Do you think that someone who identifies with organized religion can benefit from your books, from this philosophy?

Religious people can only learn from this kind of philosophy if they go to the basic experience of the founder of their religion. And then they'll realize that Christ wasn't a Christian and that Buddha wasn't a Buddhist and Muhammad wasn't Muslim. These people were having the experience of unity consciousnesses and universal consciousness and they spoke of it in words. So if you're a real Christian, you should be listening to what Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount and then you are expressing the universality of spiritual consciousness.
Because if you claim that your religion is exclusive and that your God is exclusive, then how can that God manage the whole universe? We are one speck of dust in probably the junkyard of infinity and there are billions of galaxies with billions of planets and billions of solar systems. We should not diminish the magnificence of God by giving him a sexist male identity, an ethnic background, squeezing him or her into the volume of a body and the span of a lifetime and a regional geography. That's really not paying a pure respect to the magnificence of the Almighty.

You grew up in a Hindu family in India. Do you consider yourself Hindu today?

No. I'm distressed that Hindus can be as violent as anybody else, the only difference is that they're vegetarians.

Would you talk a little bit about your own spiritual practice?

I meditate two hours in the morning and about half an hour in the evening. And I go to the gym for about 1 hour which I consider to be a really spiritual practice as well. And then I have the attitude during the rest of the day that the only step I'm taking that's real is the one I'm taking at the moment, so I try not to anticipate the future or think about the past, but stay grounded in the moment. And those are the mostly, daily practices—meditations, exercise, and staying in the moment. Once every three or four months, I try to take a week of silence in the wilderness and sometimes my family will join me but sometimes I'll do it all by myself.

When I interviewed your son two years ago, he said that two of the qualities that inspired him, of yours were your curiosity and your not taking life too seriously.

[laughs] That's probably true.

Do you think these qualities can serve as spiritual tools?

I think so. I think seriousness is a mask of self-importance and self-importance in turn is a mask for self-pity. So if you're really going to pursue a spiritual way of living in the world, you must be lighthearted and carefree, have humor, be able to tolerate ambiguity and embrace uncertainty, and be forgiving of yourself and everybody else.

START FROM THE CENTER


OSHO

`One thing to be understood is that silence is not part of mind. So whenever we say, "He has a silent mind," it is nonsense. A mind can never be silent. The very being of mind is anti-silence. Mind is sound, not silence. So when we say: "He has a silent mind," it is wrong. If he is really silent, then we must say that he has no mind.'
A "silent mind" is a contradiction in terms. If mind is there. it cannot be silent; and if it is silent, it is no more. That is why Zen monks use the term "no-mind", never "silent mind". No-mind is silence! And the moment there is no-mind you cannot feel your body, because mind is the passage through which body is felt. If there is no-mind, you cannot feel that you are a body; body disappears from consciousness. So in prayer there is neither mind nor body -- only pure Existence. That pure Existence is indicated by silence -- mouna.
How to attain to this prayer, to this silence? How to be in this prayer, in this silence? Whatsoever you can do will be useless; that is the greatest problem. For a religious seeker this is the greatest problem, because whatsoever he can do will lead nowhere -- because doing is not relevant. You can sit in a particular posture: that is your doing. You must have seen Buddha's posture. You can sit in Buddha's posture: that will be a doing. For Buddha himself this posture happened. It was not a cause for his silence; rather, it was a by-product.
When the mind is not, when the being is totally silent, the body follows like a shadow. The body takes a particular posture -- the most relaxed possible, the most passive possible. But you cannot do otherwise. You cannot take a posture first and then make silence follow. Because we see a Buddha sitting in a particular posture, we think that if this posture is followed then the inner silence will follow. This is a wrong sequence. For Buddha the inner phenomenon happened first, and then this posture followed.
Look at it through your own experience: when you get angry, the body takes a particular posture, your eyes become blood-red, your face takes a particular expression. Anger is inside, and then the body follows. Not only outwardly: inwardly also, the whole chemistry of the body changes. Your blood runs fast, you breathe in a different way, you are ready to fight or take flight. But anger happens first, then the body follows.
Start from the other pole: make your eyes red, create fast breathing, do whatsoever you feel is done by the body when anger is there. You can act, but you cannot create anger inside. An actor is doing the same every moment. When he is acting a role of love, he is doing whatsoever is done by the body when love happens inside -- but there is no love. The actor may be doing better than you, but love will not follow. He will be more apparently angry than you in real anger, but it is just false. Nothing is happening inside.
Whenever you start from without, you will create a false state. The real always happens first in the center, and then the waves reach to the periphery. That is why this sutra says that prayer is silence. The innermost center is in prayer. Start from there.


TIME YOURSELF INTO TIMELESSNESS


If you just put a watch with a second hand in front of you and keep your eyes on the second hand, you will be surprised: you cannot continue to remember even for one minute completely. Perhaps fifteen seconds, twenty seconds, at the most thirty seconds, and you will forget. You will get lost in some other idea -- and then suddenly you will remember that you were trying to remember.
Even to keep awareness continuous for one minute is difficult, so one has to be aware that it is not child's play. So when you are trying to be aware of the small things of life, you have to remember that many times you will forget. You will go far away into something else. The moment you remember, don't feel guilty -- that is one of the traps.
If you start feeling guilty, then you cannot come back to the awareness that you were practicing. There is no need to feel guilty, it is natural. Don't feel repentance. It is simple, and it happens to every seeker. Accept it as natural; otherwise you will be caught in repentance, in the guilt that you cannot remember even for a few moments and you go on forgetting.
Mahavira is the first man in history who has actually worked out that if a man can remember, be aware for forty-eight minutes continuously, that's enough -- he will become enlightened, nobody can prevent him. Just forty-eight minutes... but it is difficult even for forty-eight seconds -- so many distractions.
No guilt, no repentance -- the moment you remember that you have forgotten what you were doing, simply come back; simply come back and start working again.
My emphasis is: simply come back. Don't cry and weep for the spilled milk, that is stupid.
It will take time, but slowly you will become aware that you are remaining alert more and more, perhaps for a whole minute, perhaps two minutes.
And it is such a joy that you have been aware for two minutes -- but don't get caught in the joy.
Don't think that you have attained something. That will become a barrier. These are patterns where one is lost. Just a little gain and one thinks one has come home. Go on working slowly, patiently. There is no hurry -- you have eternity at your disposal.
Don't try to be speedy. That impatience will not help. Awareness is not like seasonal flowers that grow in six weeks' time and are then gone. Awareness is like the cedars of Lebanon which take hundreds of years to grow; but they remain for thousands of years and rise to one hundred and fifty feet, two hundred feet high in the sky. They are really very proud people.
Awareness grows very slowly, but it grows. One has to just be patient.
As it grows you will start feeling many things which you have never felt before. For example, you will start feeling that you are carrying many tensions in your body of which you have never been aware because they are subtle tensions. Now your awareness is there you can feel those very subtle, very delicate tensions.
So wherever you feel any tension in the body, relax that part. If your whole body is relaxed, your awareness will grow faster because those tensions are hindrances.
As your awareness grows even more, you will be surprised to know that you don't dream only in sleep; there is an undercurrent of dreaming even while you are awake. It goes just underneath your wakefulness -- close your eyes any moment and you can see some dream passing by like a cloud in the sky. But only when you become a little more aware will it be possible to see that your wakefulness in not true awakenedness.
The dream is floating there -- people call it daydream. If they relax in their chair for a moment and close their eyes, immediately the dream takes over. They start thinking that they have become the president of the country, or they are doing great things -- or anything, which they know at the very moment they are dreaming is all nonsense. You are not the president of the country, but still the dream has something in it, that it continues in spite of you.
Awareness will make you aware of layers of dreams in your waking state. And they will start dispersing, just as you bring light into a dark room and the darkness starts dispersing

Humans are not simply animals

• MUKUL SHARMA

AS FARas reproductive behaviour and sexuality is concerned, science has a lot to say about the moral and ethical issues apparently involved. In the animal world, for instance, the idea of what is “normal” and what is not is so frequently breached that it makes mockery of human mores. Cloning — as in the many instances of virgin birth where no males are needed — is common among many species of lizards, fish and some amphibians. Gender determination is not fixed from birth either; there are reptiles whose sex is decided only by the incubation temperature. Others can switch from male to female and back again easily during their lifetimes and, often, even depending on behavioural cues coming from their social group. The scientific notion underlying such “unnatural” activity is that animals will do anything to make sure their kind is propagated through progeny into future generations. Genetically speaking, that is the only obvious and overarching consideration and, here, human beings are no exception. A mother’s love for her baby is actually hardwired into her brain’s circuitry and she can, in general, behave in no other way than she does. In fact, researchers have found that the same wiring exists in all adults’ nervous systems too. Imaging scans indicate that when grownups are shown even random pictures of infants who are not related to them, a part of their brain responsible for facial recognition and behavioural reaction, lights up almost instantaneously, leaving no time for thought processes to mediate. It just means there is no conscious control over such instinctive traits, and biologists say the immediacy of this kind of bonding is necessary for lineages to continue. This could very well be the explanation for things like sacrifice, altruism and even love but, unfortunately, where science has consistently failed to derive a material substrate to a huge range of observed behaviour among humans is in their profession of a divine relationship. It’s far more difficult to drum up a survival value for the existence of a spiritual bonding between an individual and his or her perception of a personal God without stretching the bounds of credibility. And that is exactly the reason why a higher grade of ideals and values has managed to develop within most of humanity than can be explained by animal behaviour, innate programming or brain scans.

What Makes You A Leader Is Complete Awareness

Shri Shri Nimishananda

Today, no one is functioning with full potential. That is why we are anonymous. Usually, one notices three patterns in the lives of people. Some lead, others follow, while many quit. Leaders are those who have self-motivation, zeal and dedication. They have the ability to tune in to their inner Self, so they can guide and motivate others. Those who follow must have the enthusiasm to comprehend and implement the mission and vision placed before them. They must also work at transforming their own shortcomings. We see many quitters around us. They have plenty of complaints and grievances; they rarely enjoy life. They flow with worldly currents and lead mechanical lives. What quality prevents life from becoming mechanical? What ingredient ignites zeal and keeps boredom at bay? Awareness. If we are constantly aware, life is always interesting. We enjoy everything for everything inspires us. Awareness is not alertness. Alertness requires effort and has an element of stress and tension. Awareness is alertness without tension. When we are in this relaxed state, zeal and interest are spontaneous. From interest come memory and dedication. We should do nothing mechanically. Even stirring a spoon of sugar into a cup of tea should be done with complete awareness. Then there is always a deep sense of joy and connectivity with Divinity. We should be aware of what we are doing every second. You may feel that this will produce tension. No. We are always aware of our name and family. Does this make us tense? Awareness is a relaxed and expansive state that eliminates tension. If we are constantly aware, we give cravings no scope to take root. Even drinking a cup of tea can be done with complete awareness so that we savour every sip. Then the tea is enjoyed by the body, senses and mind. There is satisfaction and no craving. When we fulfil a desire mechanically, the deeper levels of our being are not satisfied and we develop an obsessive craving for that object. Lack of awareness also generates indifference for others, while awareness creates complete connectivity with Divinity and all beings. Without this connectivity we are not open to divine grace though it is flowing to us constantly. When we are conscious of connectivity, we live in a state of heightened awareness. We often strive to amass property for future generations. Physical property may be lost. It may lead to strife and litigation. The best legacy we can leave behind is awareness and wisdom. Mahatmas are remembered with reverence not for the property they amassed, but for the principles by which they lived. The outer world is constantly changing. The cars that are today’s status symbols will be the bane of tomorrow. All material things lose their value after a while. Divinity never changes. God is ever the same. Divinity transcends time and space. Awareness of Divinity takes us to the only state that is worthwhile — constant bliss that is independent of bodily existence. When we stop imposing conditions on life, we surrender to the divine tempo. Then our life becomes a feast of bliss. We embrace life with open arms. We become natural leaders who inspire and ignite the flame of awareness in every heart.