Inner Vision and Tapas

People suffer because they have all kinds of unreasonable desires and they pine to fulfil them and they fail. They attach too much value to the objective world. It is only when attachment increases that you suffer pain and grief. If you look upon Nature and all created objects with the insight derived from the Inner Vision, then attachment will slide away, though effort will remain; you will also see everything much clearer and with a glow suffused with Divinity and splendor. Close your external eyes and open your inner eyes - What a grand picture of essential unity you get? Attachment to Nature has limits, but the attachment you develop to the Lord when your inner eye opens, has no limit. Enjoy that reality, not this false picture.
(thought for the day)

How do Baba devotees read Baba's words?

People suffer because they have all kinds of unreasonable desires and they pine to fulfil them and they fail. They attach too much value to the objective world. It is only when attachment increases that you suffer pain and grief.

When he tells us that people suffer of all kinds of unreasonable desires, what are for you unreasonable desires? We have to think it over. If we don't know, are you doing it like me before thinking, not now, one day I will know?

But that will not change if we do not enquire and that 'day' will just not come, because we do not the work required to get there. So what is not understood by devotees avoiding listening to Baba's words, they don't know that we have to see it in our own life first. Only if we see it in our own life we get the meaning of Baba's words.

The principle of Tapas (spiritual work) is first discrimination, second seeing it in our own life, third going on no matter what obstacles are there. That is spiritual work. How do we get into that spiritual work? We have to discriminate, see it in our own life and go on no matter what obstacles are there.  

Why people do not hear that?

It is not enough to read Baba's words and to read that we suffer because there are all kinds of unreasonable desires and that others pine to fulfill them and ail, it is not enough to think I will understand it 'tomorrow', whenever I will be understood. That doesn't work, because if we do not Tapas, spiritual work today, we will also not understand it tomorrow.

Most of devotees sing Bhajans and even after many years of Bhajan singing they still don't understand what Tapas means. If so far we have understood the first sentence, we see that there is the reason for failure, what is an important word in the US and also that they pine to fulfill unreasonable desires, it means not normal or reasonable desires and it is the reason that they are suffering.

There is a lot of information in that one sentence of Baba. Now we get to the second sentence.

They attach too much value to the objective world. It is only when attachment increases that you suffer pain and grief.

Here is the reason why they have unreasonable desires, they attach too much value to the objective world. We again have to ask what we can do about it and we can understand it. We have to see it in our own life. Do we know an example of someone who had such unreasonable desires and is too attached to the values of the objective world? And Baba tells us why it is not good to be attached to the values of the objective world. Why it is not good? When attachment increases we suffer pain and grief.

If we are in pain and someone tells us you should be less attached to the word, we might think, what that person is talking about. It means we are not aware of our attachment in the mind. We think it is normal to be attached on the objective world, because we see that objective world of nature as real. So the point is, we are attached and not aware of our own attachment, because we think it is real.

If you look upon Nature and all created objects with the insight derived from the Inner Vision, then attachment will slide away, though effort will remain; you will also see everything much clearer and with a glow suffused with Divinity and splendor.

We go to the next sentence of Baba. Nature is beautiful and if we look at nature and all created objects, that is all what we see and hear with our senses, sense-perception and all that happens in our mind. Looking at the beauty of nature is sense-perception and therefore, it is the mind.

How do we get to that insight derived from the inner vision? There is a relationship between Tapas, spiritual work and 'insight'. Baba tells us that he is the man who comes in our dreams to awake us. A dream reality we cannot understand with the mind, that are our thoughts and the way we usually think, we have to understand it differently. How do we understand the man who is in our dream to awake us. We find it with Tapas, we listen to his words and we see it in our own life and by doing that, we get the meaning in the insight, what is inner Vision.

What he tells us in that sentence therefore is, if we look upon nature and all the created objects not with the senses as we do usually, but with the insight derived from the Inner Vision, then attachment will slide away. So how are we able to understand it if we have no idea how to get to that inner vision and we never listened to Baba's words and we don't even know that Tapas, spiritual work on that level doesn't only exist, but is required of us?

What he tells us also in that sentence is that attachment will slide away, telling us that we will not be any more attached to sense-perception and why not, because there insight derived from the Inner Vision and even if that attachment is not there anymore, the effort will remain.

How do we understand that? Why does the effort remain? We look at nature through our senses and it is sense-perception always and not through the insight derived from the inner Vision. There the first point of Tapas comes into being. It needs discrimination between sense-perception and being in the mind and insight and not being in the mind.

If you look upon Nature and all created objects with the insight derived from the Inner Vision, then attachment will slide away, though effort will remain; you will also see everything much clearer and with a glow suffused with Divinity and splendor.

Therefore, the effort will remain, but by constantly discriminating and being aware of that difference between mind and Atma, we begin to see everything much clearer and it begins to make sense and with a glow suffused with Divinity and splendor.

That much information we get from Baba's words. And now we get to the last part of that thought for the day.

Close your external eyes and open your inner eyes - What a grand picture of essential unity you get? Attachment to Nature has limits, but the attachment you develop to the Lord when your inner eye opens, has no limit. Enjoy that reality, not this false picture.

That is why he asks us to close our external eyes, the mind level, the sense-perception and we should open up our inner eyes.

And he asks us what a grand picture of essential unity we get and we have to again see it in our own life and try to find moments and insights with the picture of unity. What picture of unity did we get, like 'insights' of 'I am that' or 'I am the One', or the 'heart of all hearts' or even 'belonging together', it has all to do with unity. Not long ago I had that 'insight' that 'we belong together' and I wondered where that came from, because on the objective world level it is not like that and it needed some time to get aware that it is also part of that picture of essential unity. There was also the insight of soul-mate and once it was twin-soul etc. It is all part of that great picture of unity we get, the insights and that is due to inner vision. And we have to understand it right. If we project it on the mind level, what is in reality part of that picture of 'unity', we don't understand it right and what will result out of it is unreasonable desires. If we understand it wrong, we think that it means 'belonging together' what is the result of a time with divinity. It is not on the mind level and if we understand it right, as we can see, what could result in unreasonable desires. The mind is binding and Atma sets us free and is not binding, even if the insight of unity is 'belonging together' as it has to do with unity, it doesn't mean on the mind level that we should be 'together', but it has to do with that non-changing reality of unity.

Close your external eyes and open your inner eyes - What a grand picture of essential unity you get? Attachment to Nature has limits, but the attachment you develop to the Lord when your inner eye opens, has no limit. Enjoy that reality, not this false picture.

It is the difference between the mind level and our inner eye and the Lord or Atman. Attachment to nature has limits and the attachment we develop with spiritual work, Tapas, and to the Lord when the inner eye opens that has no limits.

Enjoy that reality, not this false picture.

That is a very important sentence, because it tells us that we have to recognize the unlimited reality in the inner vision and that we have to see insights as insight and not as a picture of the mind and we should not project or change the meaning of it in unreasonable desires.

 If someone has an 'insight' that there is a water tap and the water is flowing and it is like announcing that he will go to Baba, because he was working with someone who was a Baba devotee, that was the water flowing, but as it was his boss he thought that he will go on and earn lots of money, so he came with the unreasonable desire to Baba that he will get lots of wealth from that source where the water is coming from and in reality it is a picture of unity and it told him indirectly that he will have the opportunity to be in Baba's presence and the water flowing from the water tap is nothing else but the grace of God and it has nothing to do with money.

It was all misunderstood, it was level confusion and no discrimination. He was holding on to the idea that it should be 'money flowing' like water from the water tap and he didn't realize the mistake and it ended in a perverted relationship.

If we don't listen to Baba's words and see it in our own life and go on no matter what obstacles are there, we tend to not have enough discrimination and to not know the difference between a picture of unity and the mind. If we project it on the mind level, we limit it. And if we see it as that what it really is, a picture of unity, it is not binding, but there is pure love and the feeling of happiness and not suffering. That wisdom and the realization of it makes us inside free and gets us out of suffering and pain.