Darshan of Swami Krishnananda in 1998

by Swami Krishnananda

44. A Kind of Analytical Meditation

(Darshan given on November 21st, 1998)

Swamiji: They thought they will protect themselves by possessing, because if you possess something more than you, you become bigger. This is what the egos are imagining: I want more land, more this, more this, more that, more that. If two people sit together, they feel they are more safe than only one person sitting. But that person who is sitting nearby is another person. The anotherness of the person defeats the purpose. One man cannot protect another man. Only a superman can protect.

Now, what is superman? Something more than a man – who absorbs the world into himself. He doesn't become merely a friend of people; he himself is the people. This is called yoga samadhi. I am not seeing you; I myself am that. Then the externality of yours is merged into the subjectivity of myself. And then you apply this method to everything in the world, so that the whole world of objects becomes yourself only. This kind of experience is called Viratsvarupa. The whole world is merged into one subjectivity. That is God-experience.

Very severe tapasya of the mind is necessary. Tapasya does not mean fasting, not sleeping, and eating little food. These are all foolish ideas. Sitting on a thorn – mahatmas sit on a thorn, or they keep fire everywhere. Nothing will work. The ego will not bend like that. You give milk to a lion, milk to a snake, and pour honey on its head. The lion will be lion only; it won't become honey. So any amount of things we are doing finally are meaningless.

“I am doing everything,” Bhagavan Sri Krishna says in the Gita. “You be only an instrument.” We are like fountain pens. A fountain pen does not write anything. There is somebody else behind it. If a fountain pen has an ego, it can say: I am Kalidasa, I am Shakespeare. The people who wrote the books are not the fountain pens, but another thing which wields the fountain pen. But if the egoism of the fountain pen increases in its capacity and asserts itself too much, it won't believe that somebody is holding the pen. In the same way, we don't believe that we are existing by the cooperation of factors which are above everything. We cannot create the sun, we cannot create water, we cannot create fire, we cannot create anything. We are dependent entirely on factors outside, but yet the egoism says: It is my property. How it became yours? Even before you were born, the land was there, and after you go away also it will be there. How suddenly in the middle it became your property?

Only that which you have brought with you from the mother's womb, that is your property; and that which you will take with you when you go, that is your property. Neither you brought anything, nor you will take anything. How you became so rich in the middle? It is a balloon, like this. The balloon has no content inside. Artificial arrangements make a person believe that he is more than himself.

We create United Nations and other things. What is United Nations? Only people like us. If one thousand people like us sit, it becomes the United Nations, but we are all thinking in the same way as we are thinking now. One thousand people are sitting in the Council of United Nations, but they are not Godmen. They are the same persons, only elected by some method. Raise the hand, he becomes a United Nations member. Merely because he raised the hand, he doesn't become a superman. He will think in the same way as he is thinking in the house. So all governmental systems fail. They never succeeded. Everywhere there is shaking, like this. Democracy fails, monarchy fails, autocracy fails, every kind of system of government fails because government is nothing but a cooperation of people who are basically fools, so it will never work. Always there will be war; you cannot prevent it. But to prevent the war, you always have the wolves. Police wolves are there, and they won't allow you to do anything.

Everything is an artificial arrangement. The whole world is an artificial arrangement. It does not exist, basically. That is why the philosophers say the world is an illusion. It is something that you have created, as you create things in dream world. When you wake up, you will not find any empire. The whole thing is gone. In the same way, when you wake up from this waking world you will see the Supreme Being alone sitting and laughing at the dream of this creation as if something happened, but nothing happened really.

This is a kind of analytical meditation that I am introducing to you. It will humiliate a person. He will be humble before everything. You must be humble before trees also. They produce oxygen. You think trees are nothing, stupid; you consider like that. Trees are not stupid things. They were the firstborn things. When the Earth was created, the first emanations of life were trees, not human beings. Human beings came much later. They are the causes of the atmospheric oxygen, these trees, but we don't believe it. Let the tree be there. Who cares for that? Who cares for them? But we live with their breeze. When the sunlight falls on the green leaves, immediately there is a photosynthesis taking place and energy quantum increases, and everywhere there is oxygen. And when the sun sets, the leaves withdraw this activity. They produce carbon dioxide, so it is said that you should not sleep under a tree in the night. But nobody will understand this science so villagers, grandmothers say, “Bhoot baitha hai. Ped me bhoot baite. Isalie raat ko nahi jaana.” [A ghost is sitting under the tree. Therefore, don't go there at night.]

Religion is born of fear, basically. Religion is a device created by human beings to avoid the fear of existence. Somebody is there to protect us, you must be told every now and then; otherwise, everything is going, they will feel. No, there is something to protect you. That is the God who created the religions of the world. Finally they have no meaning because the ego will defy everything. Even religion, meditation, everything will go phut. The meditation is not conducted by the egotism of man. It is by another superpower on which we are existing and depending.

A visitor: Swamiji, how to get rid of my ego?

Swamiji: You exist by the cooperation of things which are beyond yourself, and therefore, be humble before everything. You say cows are going, let them go, but it is not simply like that. The emanation of odour from their body is highly purifying, they say. Cows are sacred. The smell coming from the cows is holy. Its urine is holy, its dung is holy, its milk is holy, even the hair is... Everything is a divinity. Cows are gods. There is a magnetic power that emanates from cows. It is a scientific fact that they are divinities. Everything connected with a coconut tree and cows is considered as very holy. There is nothing useless in a coconut tree. The trunk is very holy. They make beams for building houses. And the leaves are very sacred; the coconut is sacred. Every part of the coconut, even the fibre outside, even the nut inside, and the shell, everything is holy. They call it kalpavriksha. Kalpavriksha means 'most sacred thing'. Kamadhenu – cow is called kamadhenu. It gives you life. If there is no cow in the world, see what happens. Let us imagine there are no cows in the world, and you can see the consequence, and no leaves in the tree to give us oxygen. We think these are all nothing and we are very important.

Day and night the heart is working. We are sleeping. Why the heart is not sleeping? Who gave it permission to go on working day and night, without leave, without rest? And the breath is not stopping. It works. When everybody is sleeping, why the breath is not sleeping? Who is the cause behind it? This one instance is sufficient to prove the idiocy of man. Man doesn't accept there is something more than he. Let anybody think who is causing the breath. And if the breath says, “I will also go to sleep,” what will happen?

See, every instant there is divinity operating, which we cannot understand. If you analyse a little bit of your situation in this world, you will find humility is the best quality. God, in His infinite kindness, has kept us alive; otherwise, we would have perished in one second. We won't exist. The breath and the heart and the lungs – if they are not functioning, can we exist? And where is the boast of the importance of human beings? “Oh, he is very great,” “I have done so much,” and all that. Your lungs will not permit you to talk like that.

You must sit alone, without talking to anybody, and contemplate on this cosmic wonder of creation and our position in this situation, in this climate of the universe. The ego will melt completely. You are asking me how the ego goes. The ego will not exist before this mystery which reveals the stupidity of ego. Ego doesn't exist at all. It is a kind of illusion. That is why when the ego is illusion, the whole world is illusion only. So there is a point in philosophers saying the world doesn't exist. The ego doesn't exist. It is a kind of concoction of distorted consciousness, like fever arising in consciousness. Fever is not a natural condition of a person, but once it comes, it devastates everything. A twisted, topsy-turvy consciousness, as I mentioned – that is egoism. It doesn't exist, but it looks as if it is existing, like a mirage shining like water in a desert. You run after the water, but there is no water there. Same thing. The ego is a mirage. It doesn't exist. But it's so terribly distorted that... because there is consciousness inside, it knows that it is there, and so it looks like the appearance also is there, the mirage water also is there, I am also there. I am not there, really speaking. The I is nothing but the mirage. What exists is God Almighty, who is the Supreme Being. If you think like this, you will not open your mouth afterwards. Let us not say anything.

If this is accepted wholly by the heart of a person, God will enter that person like a flood. He is ready to enter you, but this ego says, “Go away from here! I don't want anything.” If anybody tells a person, “Tomorrow you will go to God”... “Tomorrow? No, no. I have got many commitments. Tomorrow I am going to God? No, no, no. A little afterwards. I have got some commitments. Let some days pass.” Even to go to God is a fear. “I have got so many commitments, and you are saying tomorrow I will go to God?”

There was a woodcutter who was carrying a bundle of wood, and every day he was doing this work, tiring work, and getting some pittance of money. One day he threw the bundle to the ground and said, “Hey Yama, why don't you come and take me from this misery?” Yamaraj he called because he was disgusted with this kind of living.

Yama came immediately. “Why are you calling me?”

“Oh, you are Yama? No, I simply wanted somebody to help me to carry the weight on my head.” He was frightened that Yama suddenly came. “No, no. I didn't say anything like that,” he said. “I want only someone to help me lift the bundle on my head.”

Like that you say, “O God, please come!” but you don't want Him, really speaking. If He comes, He will devastate the whole thing, and you don't want that devastation. He will devastate your existence itself. You will be wiped out completely, and who wants that kind of thing? People are frightened. Even the greatest mystics and philosophers are frightened when they are told that they will not exist when they reach God. “Oh,” they will say, “I am going to be annihilated? No.”

Nobody likes to be drowned. If they say you will be drowned in the ocean of nectar, you will say, “No, even if it is nectar, drowning, no, no.” The word 'drowning' we don't want. So the possibility of getting abolished in one's own personality, even if it is God-experience, one thinks, “No, no, because I will not be there to experience God.” Great philosophers talk like that. “Who will experience God when I myself am not there?” How the ego works, you see. It won't allow it. It says, “I will not allow it, that's all.”

I have given you a long lecture, which I didn't expect to speak. Somehow, something came.

A visitor: We are so grateful to you, Swamiji. This is God's gift.

Swamiji: Deep meditation. Close your eyes and sit. From where have I come? From where this I has come, and from where that I has come? There are so many I's everywhere, which are what you call human beings and other living beings. From where this I has come? Nobody refers to oneself as you – I. You are an I, she is an I. Even a tree would not like to be insulted and cut like that. It resents all these things. Even to a dog you cannot say that. It doesn't like that. It has got its own independence. It is an I. Even an insect, if you go near it, it will wriggle. It doesn't want you to touch it because it is an I, not a you.

If everything in the universe is I, there will be only one I. They will all melt together into one cosmic I. You should not call anything as you, because nobody is a you here. The so-called you also is an I from its own point of view. If I am the subject seeing you as an object, and you are the subject seeing me as an object, now who is the subject, who is the object in this world? And as objects cannot be conceived without subjects, the conclusion is there are only subjects, and that total subject is God. This is also one way of meditation. The universe is a great subject, a total subject, which alone is. So whatever I have been telling you is a meditation. It is not just a speaking or a lecture. The whole mind will get transformed by hearing these things again and again.

If God wants to come, He doesn't take even a second. He doesn't come tomorrow. He has no tomorrow. It is instantaneous. But we have built a wall, in which there is darkness. Why don't you accept that everybody is an I only? If everybody is an I, then a tree is I, an animal is I, water is I, the sun is I, everybody is I, then only I's are there, an ocean of I. That oceanic I is God I. And even this I that we are feeling in ourselves, it is only God speaking. “I am coming,” we say. Who is saying, “I am coming”? The leg is coming, my hands are coming, my brain is coming. When a person says, “I am coming,” what does he mean actually? What is coming? A bundle of limbs, bones and flesh and nerves is coming – is it what they mean, actually? You ask anybody: You say you are coming. Who is coming? The I is coming, not the body, nerves, flesh and bones, and all that. You cannot photograph the I. It is a representative of the universal existence. So there is no I am coming. It has a great mystery behind it, though it looks very simple. Everywhere there is a mystery.

God bless you. Om Namo Narayanaya.