What is it that you are longing for? Stories of this kind, analyses of this nature, will tell you that again here is a contradiction in your life. Your opinion about people and the world, and sometimes about your own predicament, contradicts the endless longing that you maintain within yourself for anything and everything. Death is a terror. Nothing can be worse than that, because it is the end of your existence. You will tolerate the end of anything that you possess, but you cannot tolerate the end of your being.

So, your affection enterized itself later on into a pin-pointed existence of your own location: "I must be; I do not want anything else. Let the world go, let all things leave me, but may I live long, may I persist, may I exist for ever and ever."

Who generates this feeling of endless longing, if not that which is your real nature? What kind of longing is this? In the beginning it is very nebulous and not clear to your mind. That is why you cannot answer the question of why you want to live long. There is no why for it; it is there, and it has to be accepted. For the final issue, there is no why. Whatever be your situation in this world, you would like to live for any number of years. Even if you are granted a blessing of ten thousand years of living, that cannot satisfy you because when you are completing the tenure of 9,999 years, the fear will strike you that only one year is left - as powerful as the fear of death would be if you were to pass away earlier. So, length in life is not the solution, because how long will that length of life continue? It will end one day.

When the great seeker Nachiketas was offered longest life and all the glories of the world by the great master Yama, Nachiketas' reply was: api sarvam jivitam alpameva, tavaiva vahas tava nrityagite: "The longest life is short when it comes to an end." There is no such thing as long life because when it ends, it is short. So, what do you mean by saying that you want to live long?

Here again is a psychological contradiction before us. Actually, what insists on our continuing for a long time is not this body calling for a persistent existence, because the mind is clever enough to know that the body cannot last long. But, it wants to accumulate certain features that will give it the satisfaction of living long.

The central feature of this longing is the longing to have our own selves. "Know thyself and be free." Though we hear these admonitions a hundred times, we will make the common mistake of identifying the Self with this so-called person seated here: "Let me know my Atman." You will say "my Atman," as if you are going to possess it as a property. If the Atman is to be possessed by you, it stands outside you, like an object, like any other thing in the world. If you are going to possess the Atman, then who are you? Other than the Atman is the anatman. Anatman is non-existence. Is non-existence trying to possess existence? Here is again a contradiction in our thinking.

Great discrimination, vairagya, is called for. Easily do we mistake the principle of vairagya. So many sadhus are there, so many vairagis are there. They have all renounced everything. You may ask a vairagi: You have renounced everything; what are the things that you have renounced?

The immediate, quick reply may be: "I possess nothing. I have left everything that I had earlier. I have left the world; therefore, I have completed my renunciation."

If you have abandoned the world, where are you standing now? Are you sitting in the sky? Standing on the ground that is the earth, you are saying that you have renounced it. The world blows a breeze of various types on your personality every moment, saying that you cannot renounce the world, unless you renounce yourself first. The renouncer has to renounce himself, so that the renunciation may become complete.

But where is the meaning in renouncing one's own self? If the self is renounced, what remains? This difficulty will suddenly take possession of our own selves. There is really no such thing as renunciation of anything, because nothing in the world really belongs to you. How can you renounce a thing which has not actually become your property? Are you renouncing somebody else's belongings? The world is not under your control; therefore, how will you renounce it?

Here, renunciation has to be understood in the spirit that is within it. Renunciation is not an abandonment in the literal sense of the word, but a spirit that is maintained within - a spirit of not belonging to anything, and a spirit of nothing actually belonging to one's own self. In this process of the determination of the spirit, the world stands united with you because of the fact that you are made of the same substance as the world of nature.

All humanity is inside you, with you, within you, and has taken possession of you. The principle of every individual in the world is inside you also, so that on different occasions you can manifest the character of any person in this world. Anything is inside you; only the proper button has to be pushed. All humanity is potentially present inside you. The world is potentially present inside you, inside in the sense of that personality of yours which is clubbed with the whole nature at the same time, and not this Mr. So-and-so personality.

Here is the difficulty that the mind will encounter every day. We cannot think in this manner because our education is purely empirical, outwardly motivated, and physically conditioned. But you stand a master of all things by renunciation, in the sense of belonging to the whole world - the world belonging to you, and you yourself belonging to the world. The world stands, including all personalities and all individuals, all human beings, every created being, including yourself. The world stands renounced within itself. You become a world individual.

Such renunciates are world masters, because they are self masters. When the taste for things ceases, you have conquered the world; when the taste is conquered, the world is conquered. Taste of the tongue, taste of the eyes, taste of the ears, taste of the nostrils, taste of touch - all these are tastes of one kind or the other. They persist till our death almost, because of the fact that we never succeeded in living as world individuals. We have never succeeded in maintaining the position of a world personality.

Can any one of you feel convinced within yourself that you are a world individual? "I do not merely belong to the world; it is not that the world belongs to me. I will stand as a meeting point of the world and the individuality of everybody." Unthinkable is this situation. A master-mind we call such people; a super-man, an incarnation, an avatara - all sorts of names and nomenclatures are attributed to such achievements in a person who ceases to be a person and is at the same time a super-person.

Such renunciation precedes the understanding that is required to practise Yoga, which is real sadhana. The essence of this situation is that you cannot entertain little petty desires and then sit for meditation.

When you are seated in meditation, a kind of infinitude enters into you, as is suggested in the sutra of Patanjali: prayatna shaithilya ananta samapattibhyam: Steadiness in posture is possible by a comprehension of the infinitude that this world is. Relaxation and the concept of the Infinite will enable you to occupy a desired posture. Relaxation - the nerves are tense, the muscles are tense, the mind is tense, the body is tense; they have to be released in a fashion akin to yoganidra. It is not nidra; it is so called because of its resemblance to non-perception of anything outside, similar to nidra, the condition of sleep.

Before you sit in a posture for meditation, lie on your back. Stretch your arms aside. Take deep breathing: take in air through the nostrils and breathe out through the mouth, as you do generally, automatically, when you are tired after a long journey or hard work: "Oh God, the day's work is over, let me lie down!" You are not aware of anything at that time except that you want nothing but total relaxation. As the mind is connected to the body intimately, the mind also gets relaxed at that time, together with the relaxation of the nerves and the muscles. For a few minutes you can meditate even in that posture. It is not necessary that you sit up with a rigidity of feeling at the outset.

As long as it is comfortable and possible for you to contemplate your ideal even in that posture of lying on the back, let it be; continue, because the mind will not enable you to concentrate on anything when the body is feeling any kind of pain or discomfort. When you catch hold of the mind, you cannot reject the body. The rider on the ass is connected with the ass, so you cannot displease the ass when you are riding on it.

Body and mind go together, as a psycho-biological individuality. You cannot say you are the body, or are not the body - you are the mind, or you are not the mind. These statements have no meaning, finally. It is a child's definition of what you are. You are an integrated affirmation, wherein are blended both the mental structure and the physical structure. So, a kind of relaxation caused by satisfaction of having achieved an end should follow simultaneously with the effort at meditation.

But it is not an effort, actually speaking, because Patanjali has told you "prayatna shaithilya": loosen your tension of effort. Don't say, "I am doing something," because this consciousness of doing something is again an assertion of individuality and a potential of egoism manifesting itself.

Just be in a state of complete psycho-physical relaxation, either by lying down, or in any other comfortable posture. Really, for the purpose of meditation, there is no particular posture prescribed. As is comfortable, so is the posture. The Yoga Shastra does not say, "Sit only in this posture." Though sometimes for certain reasons a particular seated posture is suggested, every rule has an exception. In a similar manner, this general instruction to be seated with spine erect and neck straight, etc., can be regarded as a very practicable posture, provided that you don't feel any discomfort in that posture. Dissatisfaction of any kind should not precede the effort at meditation. How the Yoga practice commences is stated in this manner in the Yoga texts.

I will repeat once again what I told you yesterday: be clear as to what you are seeking. The object of meditation is the final choice that you make in this world. You have selected it as the ultimate meaning for your life. There are people who cling to a certain thing throughout their lives and consider that particular thing as the be-all and the end-all of their lives. Rightly or wrongly, they have hugged that particular thing through their emotional clamouring. But this is a treacherous attitude of the emotions. It will leave you in the dark at any moment.

Nobody likes a thing continuously throughout one's life. That is the effect of the fickleness of mental activity. In the choice of the object of meditation, no fickleness is possible. You may take months to decide what it is that can give you true satisfaction.

There are devotees who choose the form of a divinity, the ultimate Godhead manifest before them in some form which they regard as final. The reason why they consider that form as final is that they are sure that the infinite longing for salvation is enterized in that particular form of divinity, as the potentiality of the power of the sun is hidden in a single ray of the sun. So, the whole world is one object.

You strike one object to the core; an atomic bomb manifests itself. Strike it further; you will find the treasures of the world coming up from inside the very object that you have struck again and again by the hammering of the mental process. Strike it further; you will find that this mind which meditates is the meeting point of all the levels of creation commingling in one point, like the sea at the meeting point of a river, where the two become one. Even in this initial stage of meditation, you will see that you rise up from meditation as a new individual, as if something has entered you, has been injected into you.

Old habits still persist. A sutra of Patanjali tells us: Never feel satisfied with any experience, because any satisfying experience in meditation - sound, colour, perception of beauty, fragrance - should not attract you because it is as temporary and tantalizing as any other presentation in this physical world.

Actually, what you call heaven is only a rarefied form of earthly enjoyment. A highly potent form of sensory experience is heaven; the gross form of it is the earth. When such presentations are placed before you, don't smile, "Oh they have come. Wonderful!" No, it is a mask put on by a tremendous deceptive force before you.

The world opposes you in the beginning. Vehemently will it oppose you, and it will see that you do not succeed. People will harass you, condemn you, enteriz you, say that you are a crack, and the world will present further difficulties, causing you to tremble in your person, as if you have gone wrong. I have told many a time on earlier occasions, when you churn the mind for the sake of treasures that you seek, the treasure will not come; only poison comes, as illustrated in the story of amritamanthana in the Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana. Wanting nectar, you churn the ocean; deadly poison comes in the beginning.

What is this poison, actually? Wherefrom has it arisen? It is the potentiality of attachment still persisting at the last moment of the death of individuality. When a cobra is about to die, it becomes most poisonous; if it strikes at that time, it is a death strike. Likewise, the last kick that human desire gives you is a poisonous smoke of discomfiture and sorrow, and indecision of every kind. Do you know how many treasures afterwards slowly arose from the churning of the ocean in amritamanthana? Some fourteen gems are described there as the jewels of human love, tempting more and more as the succeeding ones rose up, so that the temptation to possess it rose in greater intensity. Finally, you know what happened to these people who wanted nectar in this enlightening story.

This is a story about our own selves - the gods and the demons, the ocean, the nectar, the treasures, the jewels, the poison. All these are inside us, inside in every sense of the term, outwardly, inwardly, and also in the blend of both sides. Knowing well that such things are possible before us, through the guidance that we have received from our Master, whom we should not desert till the end of our lives - knowing this well, march forward.