In the Solar System the Earth is a miniscule entity. Asia is small in comparison to the Earth. Within Asia, India is just one country and within India, the district of Anantapur is still smaller; and Prasanthi Nilayam within Anantapur is tinier in comparison. Within Prasanthi Nilayam, you perhaps stay in one room. Then, why should you have an ego that is bigger than the Universe in its totality? This is totally an act of delusion, arising from ignorance. In fact, a great scholar, devotee and role model on the path of spirituality from ancient yore, Bhartruhari stated, "Out of ignorance I behaved like an elephant in rut thinking that there is no one superior to me. Because of the Divine Vision of sages and their teachings, I learnt the truth. Just as a disease can be cured by taking appropriate medicine, the fickle mind can be subdued by the Darshan and the teachings of sages and scholars."
A spiritual master leads us to the right conclusion and that can be tricky sometimes as it seems. In my experience we got everywhere, but to get to the right conclusion is not that easy.
I had been in a relationship with someone who behaved just like that like an elephant thinking that there is no superior of him, just like that. We were in a relationship even and that was not funny.
I was just meditating and always constantly in my meditation, that means I went never far away enough to start all over again. In that time I didn't talk much to others, I guess that is why one day in the interview room he asked questions. When it was about meditation we always knew the answer, but when it was about that wisdom, we had to begin to ask the right questions. Above all it was about, who am I? Where do we come from? Where do we go and how long are we going to be here?
He asked in the interview room another lady I had to translate for her, who I was? My translation was about my own self and that felt all strange somehow. And he went on asking, what is your relationship? But that was not all of it he and he went on and asked, to whom does she belong?
Maybe I was in a constant state of meditation and kept the inside contact and never got out of it. Coming back to my country felt strange, but it also had to do with TM and the lost relationship levels. I knew everything was fine and I was at the right place, but it didn't feel okay when coming back and that was really troublesome.
So I had to ask question. In Kodai in the mountains, we went to the mountains during the hot Indian Summer, we were all mixed accommodated in houses around the lake and hotels and I happened to be in a house on the lake and there were lots of people, some Italian guys who liked to cook and we had often Italian food and pasta and that is when I began to talk about that interview I had with Baba about fourteen days before and it was still all new and exciting also, I tried to understand why it was that important to talk about it and to get answers.
It was a Baba interview and automatically I thought it was understood, because it was his doing, but about that I was totally wrong.
Your reality is the Atma, a wave of the Paramatma. The main objective of this human existence is to visualise that Reality, that Atma, that relationship between the wave and the sea. All other activities are trivial; you share them with birds and beasts; but this is the unique privilege of man. He has climbed through all the levels of animality, all the steps in the ladder of evolution in order to inherit this high destiny. If all the years between birth and death are frittered away in seeking food and shelter, comfort and pleasure, as animals do, man is condemning himself to a further life-sentence.
There was a guy from New York and he said that I belonged to him. Now that I didn't expect and I didn't know if it was true or if it was not true. It seemed kind of nice though at least in the beginning. At least he seized the opportunity and said, I belonged to him.
It was that kind of straightforward answer which seemed to get all obstacles out of way, no question, everything fine, just go ahead and he made it look perfect. I had the impression that he must no know than I did or at least I hoped that would be the case. That is how it began, it was made by Baba who had asked the questions and I had repeated those questions, it was all his doing, I was just the instrument or the translator. And that is how we got together, because he said he knew and I knew that I didn't know at least it was not the right thing.
He lived in the room of his best friend as he called it, what was in itself an amazing story, because he was known in the ashram. From my state of constant meditation into ashram policy it felt like a big step and it was also interesting, we had to open the eyes and not just meditate.
I hoped to be able with him, as he said I had not to worry he had money and in the ashram it was possible to live with very little money, that I would not have to return to my country as I did constantly and get a new visa and work for six months at the time to stay again for six months with Baba. I always went back and forth.
But it didn't take long his attitude changed. He wanted to be helped and taken care of, he said that he needed help and now I was the person who had to take care of him, but that was not my focus, I had to get answers. The first time I said something that it probably will not work out like that, there was such an explosion, it scared the shit out of me, it ended with him hitting with a metal pot on my head and I thought he would kill me. That I had not expected. In no time all was upside down and Baba was in my dream, with him I went down an escalator and on the way down he transformed himself in a prince, I got married with and on the end was a big check. I got on a completely different level with him. But I was sure he would take care and I would meet that prince again, when in reality I went from the present state of meditation, living in the present with that guy in the mind and the prince was no more presence but future.
As it didn't work like he would have liked, he began to find faults and the hitting with the pot we had survived, but it was not the only level of abuse, he got even better on the verbal level.
One day he said that with an American woman he never could have done that and I knew it didn't make sense, but I had to get answers, that was not the right answer.
When we met Baba he had been in his dream and he said, that he warned him that he will not get the right answer in that room. We both didn't understand it. But later it made sense, after we came back to Prasanthi and Baba said in his dream that I had to go and make peace with him, he was in my dream and it felt kind of like an answer to the first dream, he said, ' you didn't listen, you have to get a divorce'. We didn't listen, we didn't know how to listen. And afterwards I began to do everything to find out how to listen.
It seems he had forgotten that he had done nothing at all really. It was not his room, but the room of his former boss, he called his best friend and it was not my doing, but it had been Baba who had asked the questions and I had repeated it, nothing of it was out of my own self and it was not about the self, but about understanding it and getting answers. In his arguing he had totally forgotten that we are not the doer and that we should get aware of that.
Baba explains that in Veda we have three levels, the first is the level of action and consequence and the second is the level of divine law and the third is the level of ananda, bliss.
He was on the first level, action and reaction, but he didn't get aware of the divine order, in the bad monkey mind anything what arranged him he thought it was Baba.
It was years later and he seemed to have forgotten about everything of the time and how we had met, even if it was kind of obvious that it was all Baba and nothing was him, he thought that he could not have done that with Americans. That was also not the right answer.
Baba had said to him in an interview that he had a bad monkey mind and I had no idea yet how bad it really was. What is bad monkey mind, jumping bumping around like nuts from one tree to the next just as it feels pleasing to him?
I had no idea and probably because I didn't have the experience of it yet, therefore, I was not yet scared of it. Today it would be all different, today it would scare the shit out of me and I would run if he would tell bad monkey mind.
But I talked to him about TM, about meditation and how important it is to meditate regularly and of course, he said yes, he said he did it, he agreed to everything, he was great in jumping and bumping around …, he was initiated into TM, his former boss had paid for the course, that sounded all great, what should there be bad about it? Nothing of course, if he would have done it. He said knew and that in the moment when he got initiated, he knew he would do that all his life and that he said to everybody and everybody got to the conclusion that he was such a serious and committed spiritual guy, only there was thing wrong about it, he didn't practice. He never sat down and meditated actually, he just thought he would do it during his initiation, but he never did it, but he told everybody that he did have that feeling when he got initiated that he will do it all his life and he told everybody, but he never did it.
He told me that one day, I had kind of problems to get it what he said, and I didn't understand it. I said, what? What did you tell? What? I didn't get it.
That was the example of the bad monkey mind, only I didn't understand it yet at that time. He adjusted the Karma and action level to his own mind, whatever pleased him that is how he made it look, whatever served, that is what he said.
If he wanted to do that for his whole life it was just the will counting, not the practice.
And he said it much later, the relationship went ahead and he told me only when it was not anymore possible to act and to change it. It was too late to take consequences and to get aware of it that something was wrong. He let everybody in the believe doing it all his life, he was identified with his will only, not with the action of it. He knew that he would do it his whole life, but he never did it.
Of course it was the same with his former boss, with him it made sense, because the guy didn't wanted to lose the relationship and he wanted to be his best friend out of many reasons …, that is why he had to do it all his life, and he said it, even if he never practiced.
As I was in a personal relationship with him, I got to know it, he told me, what he would probably never have told his boss to keep the impression that they were thinking the same way that was his most used sentence, we are practically the same. And in reality nobody is more different than he and his boss. One is dynamic and always working the other is lazy and lethargic, his boss is rather a work addict and the other goes the path of least effort, it was nuts to think that they were the thinking the same way just because he would have liked it to be like that.
He never sat down and meditated, he just pretended to do it and of course, he knew that I was the woman Baba had in store for him, it was that same level and an awful wake up, because in the meantime we had a daughter and it was a disaster. I had dreams of ruin in the air and I felt like a beggar woman, homeless on the streets of New York and what I thought was a nightmare, was in reality an insight. It was not possible to use discrimination anymore, it was all gone, and it had become some kind of dirty nowhere land I didn't know how I landed in it.
That was the bad mad monkey mind.
After years and years of thinking it over we get some kind of feeling for it.
It felt like impossible to understand what he said, his mind reasoning didn't make sense at all. He lived like in another world and Baba said he lived a dream and that it was his problem not Baba's but bad luck, it had become my problem as well. It was like talking another language, he lived on a shuttle away from the rest of the world in his thoughts and his lonely world of dreams. In his ideas he could do anything only practically nothing worked, whatever he tried, he didn't do it he preferred to dream about it.
He said he had a job, he said he had money, he said that he will be a great husband … it was all only on the dreaming level and it was kind of a shock to realize that it is possible to live on such a dreaming level only in the head. As I got pregnant and I had married him because of the pregnancy and because we couldn't live in the ashram without being married, it felt like a disaster, it was ruin, he was an impostor, nothing what he ever had said was true and he was with a Sai Baba who was teaching about truth, what did he do there, he felt good, so he didn't have to do any effort to change his life. It was like everything turned into the opposite.
That is how we got the taste of the bad, mad, monkey mind.
After it didn't work with his former boss and he was gone, he wanted my parents to take care of him and my mother said, for that guy you will have to work one day.
When Baba was in his dream telling him not me that I had to go and make peace with Baba, he of course could find fault with that, he had no need to go and make peace with Baba only me, so I was the bad guy, that was the kind of superficial reasoning of his. And he said it like who is that stupid and has to go and make peace with a Sai Baba, he didn't know what he was talking about at all, because the spiritual aim is peace and we went to Prasanthi Nilayam the abode of highest peace. I didn't tell him, I didn't want to get to the idea that something was wrong for our own protection. That type of reasoning felt that sick.
And all that happened in the ashram. If Baba would not had asked that question, to whom I belonged, it would never have happened and if he would not have lived in his big boss's room it would also not have been possible, but he got to the conclusion that with an American he could not have done that, because he thought he was the doer, he didn't get the ABC of it and that was getting aware that we are not the doer.
Having been born, man earns and acquires land, riches, materials, grains and articles of comforts and luxury, which he feels will give him happiness and which therefore become the object of his struggle. But, the object of realising God is forgotten. You may ask: why, should any one seek good company, do good deeds and direct his mind towards good thoughts? You are listening to Me and what do you get when you so listen? You agree that I am giving you Anandam. What do you give Me in return ? Give Me the Aacharana of what I am telling you: practice what I teach, that is enough. That is all I ask for.
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