by Gurani Anjali
Open your eyes now and look around. Before you can go within, you must see what is around. Look. Look so that you may see. It’s called bahir anga – (the external). Look outside, look everywhere. Everything is becoming, and you are becoming too. We must go beyond our human condition and enter into the divine condition. For that we have to look everywhere. Look at everything that is beautiful and everything that repulses you. There is a message everywhere, in everything, and so you have to look. According to your understanding, according to your intelligence, according to your desire, you will find what you are looking for. So you must churn the ocean of desire all the time. Do not stir it just once, thinking, ”Forget it, it will continue to stir on its own.” No, you have to keep moving it, keep blending in the senses, keep going, keep looking.
Become a little child again. You’ve forgotten how to do that. Therefore, you look bored, even boring. So we must become little children and look with great excitement at everything. Look everywhere; look at a piece of dust. You haven’t seen any lately because you’ve been scooping them up into the vacuum, pushing them out the door, putting them into the garbage, getting rid of them. There’s a message there. There is a message in everything.
ya devi sarvabhuteshu
shakti rupena samsthitah
namastasyai, namastasyai, namastasyai
namo, namah
Mother, Who resides in all beings
In the form of the power of manifestation.
I bow to you, I bow to you, I bow to you.
Everywhere, look at everything. So many forms, so many colors, so many expressions. Then why are we bored? Every face I see is a bored face. Then when I see a little child in front of me, oh, I’m thrilled; a little devi so full of life and exuberance. No wonder people cannot get into relationships. No wonder people cannot have friends. It is so boring. I cannot help but say it. Look at a face and it says “Wind me up, come on, wind me up.” That face in front of you is bored. How can you wind up a face that is down? Where do you tickle it? You can go to a little baby and tickle it and the baby will smile and laugh and kick its feet. Even with a little girl or boy, you don’t have to say anything, and they will smile at you. But grown-ups are boring. They don’t loosen up until they have a few drinks in them. They’re bored because they cannot stand themselves. Most people are bored because they don’t like themselves.
This is what it is all about. In order not to be bored, you have to really like yourself. Now how can you like yourself if you have been told all your life, “You’ve got to be like this”? “You have to do the right thing,” “You have to walk like this.” “You have to talk like this.” “You have to do the right thing.” “Now watch out!” So in trying to do the right thing and always trying to be perfect, one becomes bored. Because we’re so busy hunting for the right thing to do, we feel a stiffness. The average adult is very ready to be active, to do. He or she is always waiting for someone to tell them to do the right thing. So what you can do is, go home, look at the mirror and say, “Gosh, you are boring. Ah, how can anyone stand that face? You are really boring.”
In order to get self-realized, we have to do a lot of unwinding. A radical change has to occur, beginning with your desire to be free. A radical change has to occur and it has to occur from within you. It deals with your desire. The desire to be free. Free of what? Freedom from suffering, from not being able to relax, from not being able to just be. You need freedom from ignorance. To know the real from the unreal. To really see the great “I am that I am.” But to see God one has to purify oneself, sanctify oneself and not be boring. In order to be purified, one has to give up being stingy, being selfish, being nasty. “Oh, I’m not nasty. I’m not stingy.” Say that- you can say that. “No, I’m not that way.” That is true; ultimately, you are not that way. Yet you act that way. You cannot help it, because there are many years of conditioning locked in the joints of your body, in the marrow of your bones, running in the blood.
So truly, you never were a selfish person, a mean, arrogant person. You know when you are sitting in silence and in meditation how wonderful you are. You are quiet, you are calm. If a bug started to bite you, you’d just shoo it away – you won’t kill it. That’s your natural state, to be pure, spotless and divine. But when you’re walking and talking and you’re dealing in society, you have full armor on, ready for battle. You’re ready with all kinds of language, thoughts and physical behavior to combat anyone who is going to challenge you. Why? Because you’ve been ready for years. You’ve been trained to be that way. You cannot help it. If someone says something mean and nasty to you, right away you can shoot them with a bodily gesture, you can run them into the sands of the Sahara. It doesn’t take much. It has become a natural way of being. But it is not natural, it is conditioned. You just have the embodiment of being nasty. But you’re really very pure.
Vasyata (mastery of the senses) is very important. It is mastery. The word itself means to be a master of indriyanam (the senses). Once we master the senses, and we understand them, we won’t be dragged around by the senses, but we will use the senses. Use them so that you may worship them. The average individual is carried here and there by the senses. Hearing, smelling, seeing, touching, tasting—the senses. They are very important for the continuity of life.
Don’t get carried away by the senses. Like eating, for instance; food tastes very good. The sense of taste is so wonderful. You can eat a whole big pot of food. But what will happen after that? The stomach will go uh, uh, ump, ump, a big fight will ensue. You’ll say “I ate too much.” So the senses have to be controlled. Because the more you put in that mouth, the more it can take. You just take and take and take till you begin to feel the pain of the taking. So that’s why it is sensible to take only a little and offer it up to the sense of taste. Even a teaspoonful will be very satisfying. You don’t have to eat a whole plateful. Because the only one who eats is the sense of taste. You cannot eat. How can you eat? The sense of taste eats. You, of course, will feed it.
The same thing goes with all the other senses. Seeing, touching, smelling. Go to a perfume shop in any store. All the perfumes are there, and you can smell them. “Oh, this one is nice, this perfume is great.” You can carry on smelling the perfumes until you get drunk. You can get intoxicated by just smelling them. The sense of smell won’t stop until you begin to feel like you can’t take it anymore. Then the mind comes in, that very important faculty, and it will say “Now, that’s enough!” But until then, you’ll carry on with the smelling.
The same thing with the sense of touch. The sense of touch is very important because you have to hold onto form, you have to touch it. The form has to be held, so the sense of touch is very intimate and it makes you want to hold. Even the sense of touch has to be stopped. What will happen if I keep touching an apricot? It will become mush in my hands. So l have to hold it, touch it and then put it away. Every sense has to be respected or else it will destroy the seeker of truth. In the beginning, it allows the seeker to get close, to touch, to taste, to smell, to see, to hear. It allows entrance into the divine chambers of life. We enter to realize the sacredness of life and to be ever-worshipful. It is not for gratification. It is not to use the senses and afterwards say, “Oh that was great.” In this human condition, we must sing the praises of entering into the sacredness, the internal chambers of divine consciousness.
tatah parama vasyata indriyanam
Then arises utmost command of the senses.
Yoga Sutra lI.55
Don’t let the senses drive you crazy. Use them for purification, for knowledge, for understanding. Use them so that you may enter into the sacredness of life and be worshipful. Don’t use them for greed, gluttony, or lust. Don’t use the senses in that manner. It is harmful.
Once you have honored, respected and learned how to use the senses, you have taken responsibility for them. Only then are you ready for antaryam anga (the inner journey). You have to praise the senses, thank them, allow them to be of great service in seeking the truth. Every time you touch something, know that you are gaining entrance into the nature of that which you are touching. Tread gently and carefully. Whenever you look at something, you enter into the sacredness of life. Look with an earnest yearning to enter. Whenever you hear any sound, no matter how loud it is, or how soft it is, know that you are entering the sacredness of life. It’s the same thing with smelling. There is a reason and purpose for everything in life. Liberation is something that the jiva, the seeker of truth is treading upon – liberation from greed, liberation from everything that causes pain. To be able to embrace the sanctity of life is of utmost concern to the seeker of truth. Om shanti.