The identity of consciousness with a particular situation is the solution for that problem. You should not consider anything as totally outside you. The world is not outside you; this has to be remembered always. You are involved in the world. As you are involved in the world, you are involved with everything in the world, whatever it be - that which you like and that which you dislike. The power of meditation is so intense and capable of achieving such miracles that the problems vanish when you yourself become the problem.

The doctrine of the tantra is: that by which ordinarily you fall down - that very thing, when it is handled in a different way, becomes the cause of your rise. There is a poetic sentence, beautiful, worth remembering: "Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall." Misplaced virtue can lead to your fall. Properly understood situations which other people consider as sin, may cause the rising of your personality. There is no sin and no virtue because they are, again, evaluations from your point of view about a thing which looks like this or that. Who asked you to evaluate from your own point of view? The view must be from the other point of view, the thing which you are visualising as being outside. What does God experience in this world?

Previously I mentioned the Virat-consciousness. The Universal Being visualises everything. Does it also see what you see with your eyes - all the dirt and the ugliness, corruption, stupidity and so on? Does the Virat-swarupa perceive it? It is itself that, so there is no question of perceiving it. The evaluation of things ceases when the things themselves become the person who evaluates it. The teeth may bite the tongue, but you do not file a case in the court against the teeth because they have cut a part of the tongue. If somebody bites your tongue, you will file a case against him. But if you bite, it is all right. So, you are the criterion. The identity of consciousness with any situation is the solution for that object. Actually, meditation is nothing but the identity of consciousness with a situation. The point is that you should not exclude any situation, so that the mind may not run here and there. The distraction of the mind that you feel in meditation is due to the fact that you are isolating other conditions from the condition that you have chosen for the purpose of meditation. This is the tantric doctrine.

You will be terrified. Therefore, nobody tells you that such a thing is possible, because tantra is a way of thinking which is totally different from the human way of thinking. You may call it a redundant way of thinking, a cosmic way of thinking, or whatever you like. But nobody is accustomed to this way of thinking. The heart will break. The brain will stop thinking and you can become crazy if you persist in thinking in this manner. Therefore, the Tantra Shastra is not given to an ordinary individual. It is never taught. It is usually called the great secret practice. Why is it considered secret? This is because it is akin to a formula for manufacturing an atom bomb. You cannot go on telling everybody the formula for making an atom bomb. This is not done because the consequences would be disastrous.

Therefore, various stages of initiation have been prescribed in the learning of this technique of tantra. It starts with ordinary ritual which is acceptable to common sense and to emotion. They call it vedachara - the first stage in tantra sadhana. Vedachara is a ritualistic mode of approach to reality. You gesticulate physically in the worship of a particular object or a condition, and go on accustoming yourself to that object by emotionally identifying yourself with everything that the object is. That is actually what you do in worship.

The next stage is called vaishnavachara. The rituals come down and recede to some extent in vaishnavachara, which is the path of devotion. The path of devotion frees itself from the details of the ritualistic practice of vedachara. The next stage is saivachara, which is supposed to be the path of knowledge without any emotion attached to it - with pure understanding, as it is. There are several more stages, the details of which I am not going into here because I am not initiating you into Tantra Shastra. I am just mentioning to you that there is a total way of adjusting yourself to the circumstances of life.

You will be a great success. To all things you are adjusted perfectly, whether it be a boss or a subordinate, a cook or a driver, or whatever is around you, physically, psychologically, socially, politically, economically - any kind of adjustment that is called for. A dexterous spiritual practitioner is capable of adjusting his personality to every condition. He can go up to the heights of genius or come down to the level of a little child. A great spiritual hero can behave like a child and be very loving to a little, crawling baby. He can be a lover of great learning and professorial knowledge, and he can be a genius in his own personal capacity. He will not stick to one condition. All things are his conditions. All people are the stages of his own development, through which he has passed or through which he has to pass in future. Thus he becomes a lover of all things. To put it in the words of the Bhagavadgita, sarva-bhuta-hite ratah (B.G. 12.4), he becomes a lover of every condition in life. To bring your memory back to what I said previously, think as God thinks. There is no boss, there is no driver, there is no cook, there is no this, there is no that in the Virat vision. They are all blended together into a consciousness of oneness.

This is achieved gradually, stage by stage, through tantra. It has never been understood by anybody. It has been only misunderstood, because of the distance that obtains between the normal way of thinking and this way of thinking. That which is impossible to accept for the common mind becomes an abominable thing, impossible to imagine. Things which are not at all acceptable become non-separate from your own being when those things which you consider as external are evaluated from your own point of view. A Guru is necessary in this practice. No one can independently read a book and go on with this practice, because it is dynamite which will burst in your face if you touch it.

Purity of mind - dispassion in a true sense of the term - is necessary before you step onto this path. If you have submerged desires, potential longings which you have brushed aside into the subconscious, they will rise up with tremendous velocity and break your personality. You should not touch this subject unless your mind is pure. What is meant by the mind being pure? A hidden impulse that contradicts your aspiration in a particular direction is the impurity in the mind. The impurity does not necessarily mean what people consider as dirty. An evaluation in the mind which cannot be commensurate with the nature of the explanation you are holding before you - that is the evil you see; that is the impurity.

The psychological adjustment called for on this path is total, to say the least; and, no one knows what total thinking is. When you think, there is an object of thought. Since the subject that thinks and the object that is thought about are not two different things but are only two forces of a single situation, it is necessary for you to consider that particular aspect also, where the subject does not think the object - a situation is thinking both the subject and the object. This is the synthesis of the two contraries of what you call the subject and the object. You cannot do that. Nobody can do that easily, because you are either the subject or the object. The synthesis between the two is unthought-of. You can never imagine that you cannot think an object unless you are involved in it. So the subjectivity is included a little bit in the object also, and the objectivity is also included in the subject. Pure subject and pure object do not exist. Otherwise, they would be severed from each other and no one would know that the object exists.

That there is an element of the female in every man, and every female has an element of the male, is something well known to people. Total femininity and total masculinity do not exist. They attract each other because of the element of each present in the other. People with characteristics that are pure and unmixed with characteristics of the other gender cannot attract each other. If man is only man, and woman is only woman, there is no attraction. There is something connecting them - which is the element of feminine nature in a man, and vice versa, the element of male in a female. This is to say, everything has some connection with everything else. Total isolation is unthinkable. And if you make the mistake of imagining that you can totally disassociate yourself from family, relations, your property, etc., and go to meditate in Uttarkashi, you may be a failure because your mind will harass you by compelling you to cogitate on the conditions that prevailed earlier - at least by memory - and a longing will persist even if the physical contact is absent.

The Bhagavadgita warns us that a person who physically disconnects himself or herself from objects of enjoyment, but mentally conceives them, is a hypocrite, because love is a mental action; it is not merely based on physical contact. Unless the mind operates, action does not take place. There are some beautiful verses near the beginning of the third chapter of the Bhagavadgita: "Do not make mistakes. Do not be hasty. Know yourself first. Do not misjudge yourself. Do not underestimate yourself. Do not overestimate yourself either. Know exactly what you are." Often you cannot know what you are. You are under the pressure of prejudices. This is why the Guru is necessary - to tell you what kind of person you are. Your problems are yourself only. You have created the problems. God has not created them. You cannot even impute these problems to other people, although everyone says that others are the cause of their suffering.

I am giving you the information that there is such a thing as this kind of spiritual practice. It is not that you will be able to understand it, nor will you be able to practise it, since it is a highly advanced method where you have a total vision of all things in the world, and from that point of view only you take a first step. Even the initial step is a total step. It is not a partial, finite step you are taking. They are wholes which operate in every step that you take along the spiritual path. The difference is between the lower whole and the higher whole, but not between two different things. No fraction is allowed in the spiritual practice. It is a whole practice that you are engaged in, though it is an initial whole.

How will you think these things? A Guru's perpetual presence is called for so that you may not slip and fall and break your legs. The tantra sadhana is a great information before you, which is startling; and I am mentioning this to you because I wish to be complete and not give you some fractional information of this side and that side of spiritual practice.

I made reference to purity of mind. You cannot understand what it actually means. Abandoning certain things which you consider as bad may be considered as purity of mind. I have already told you to be careful in judging things. What are the bad things in the world? Can you tell me what the bad things are? Make a list of them. You can never make a list of the bad things in the world. You will be flabbergasted even to think like that. You also cannot make a list of the good things in the world, because a very good thing may be a bad thing in another circumstance, and a bad thing may be a good thing in another circumstance. So total thinking is taking into account both aspects of the situation into the spiritual practice. You move as God Himself moves, as He would move towards His own Self-realisation. This is a completeness that characterises every stage of spiritual practice.

I have told you almost everything concerning devotion to God - bhakti. But I have added some more information so that it may be accentuated by a greater strength, information culled from other ways of thinking - philosophical, even argumentative, physical, psychological, and spiritual. I feel satisfied that I have given you whatever I wanted to give you, and whatever remains afterwards will be an expatiation of the very same things that I have told you in brief. I have gone very fast in my discourses in order to give you brief principles involved in various types of spiritual practice. More elaborate considerations of these brief statements will be called for, to which I shall move by advancing on matters which I have not touched fully, but touched only briefly, so that in the remaining sessions of this course you will have something easier than these hard things that I told you in a strict, logical form, up to this time. From here on I will abandon this process of thinking and teaching, and make it more easy, friendly and pleasant for you. This is what I have to tell to you today.