Difference between Experiments and Experience

People are engaged in exploring space but do not make the slightest effort to explore the Divine within. Of what use are experiments in space when there is no genuine cultivation of human qualities and the practice of basic virtues such as acting in reverence with the mother, the father and the preceptor? People today are living in human form but are filled with beastly qualities! Scriptures declare that people can attain immortality only by renunciation (tyaga) and not through actions, wealth or progeny. What must be renounced? Renounce your bad qualities. To manifest your inherent divine nature, cultivate love for God and fear of sin and adherence to right conduct (sangha niti). When you fear sin and love God, you cannot indulge in immoral acts, automatically ensuring morality in society. God can be known only by experience and not by experiments. Hence follow your chosen spiritual practices diligently and sincerely.

Baba (thought for the day)

If we tell that people are into science and exploring the outer space, but they don’t do any effort to explore the divine, we will for sure find some arguing about it, because they think they are right and that we are fools.

Baba said once, in the West they foolishly think that we are fools.  

If we think it over Swami’s words and we don’t want to get into argumentation with anybody by that, we have to find the reason why he is telling that.

I have not the slightest intention to go into argumentation. During the Christmas festival the man who comes in our dreams to awake us was there and said, ‘it is passion, stay alone’ and I wondered how many times before it had been already passion, but like that he was telling me, stay out of it, stay alone when it is about argumentations and discussion and don’t go if it is not possible to stay alone. 

We can also stay alone in the midst of people, but some are that imposing when it is about passion or Rajas, there is no way we can stay alone and that is why we had to get into distance.

If we listen to his words and think it over to be able to absorb the wisdom, it is out of question that there will ever be an issue of argumentation about it.

But we can try to find the reason why we don’t go into that.

People are engaged in exploring space but do not make the slightest effort to explore the Divine within. Of what use are experiments in space when there is no genuine cultivation of human qualities and the practice of basic virtues such as acting in reverence with the mother, the father and the preceptor?

What is he telling us with the second sentence?

We don’t know about the cultivation of human qualities, human values and he calls them virtues and he explains that those virtues are present if we revere the mother, the father and the preceptor. 

Mother is love, father is truth, I guess preceptor is right action. If we have truth, right action and peace, we can experience pure love. 

That are human qualities, human values. He is telling us we don’t cultivate human qualities, but we experiment in space. It means the mind is going farer away really from the source exploring the space, ignoring the thing that really matters. 

That is why it is not an issue of argumentation, it is about truth. 

Love is my form, truth is my breath, bliss is my food. (Baba)

He is the mother, he is the father, he is the teacher. Love is the mother, truth is the father and right action is the teacher.

The first sentence could be a challenge for all those who believe in modern science and that we can explain everything by science and that is the reason why our meditation technique was like that. It was trendsetting and by that it was adapted to the thinking of our modern societies and the basic believe was science, it was even seen as quantum physics as the new religion, only that doesn’t work, as divinity is missing. The divine is not only a principle, what we also find in quantum physics, but it is also oneness. It is about 'I am I' and that we don't find in physics. 

People today are living in human form but are filled with beastly qualities!

We in the West don’t think that we are filled with beastly qualities, we think we are modern people living in a modern society and we have to deal with all those problems a modern society has and devotees look just old fashioned and out of time. 

They believe in a divinity the West has problems to accept even the existence of it as science cannot explain the existence of the divine and that is what was explained by our meditation pracitce, it was seen in every discipline and explained with science that level of non-conceptual being and pure being in our ever day life and how to make the experience of it with meditation.

If we look at Swami’s explanation of the sheaths and the human body has five sheaths and all other species have only three sheaths, we know there is body, energy and mind, which are the three first sheaths. If we live a human life only on those three levels we are filled with beastly qualities indeed. We don’t develop the human values, we live in ignorance and we don’t know how to develop the human qualities even. 

Most of people who seem to have no believe at all think that it has to be like that and that it is life and that we have to go for it in such a manner only and they resign to it. In their minds and understanding are only the first three sheaths and as nobody was able to tell them how to develop human values and why and science is exploring only on the mind level, most of the religious values got lost and most of churches are nearly empty, only the bells are ringing as they always did.

Scriptures declare that people can attain immortality only by renunciation (tyaga) and not through actions, wealth or progeny.

The scriptures is the timeless value of truth, sat-chit-ananda, the Atmic principle and Swami is that Atmic principle as he explained yesterday in telling us that it is the Atmic principle by which we will get the experience of bliss.  

What must be renounced? Renounce your bad qualities.

It needs discrimination to know the difference. It is not only what we think it ‘bad’, but it is all that what is not beneficial for truth and realizing our true nature and if we would meet with some people thinking that they live a modern life and that they are right and we are fools as I mentioned it before, they would think that their qualities are good and that ours are bad. 

They think that it is a virtue to believe in science and to have a modern thinking and they think that it is bad to follow a believe we cannot prove. That is upside down, we know and because it is upside down we call it Tamas or it is ignorance. We live in the age of ignorance.

To manifest your inherent divine nature, cultivate love for God and fear of sin and adherence to right conduct (sangha niti). When you fear sin and love God, you cannot indulge in immoral acts, automatically ensuring morality in society. God can be known only by experience and not by experiments. Hence follow your chosen spiritual practices diligently and sincerely.

Baba tells us how to manifest our inherent divine nature if we cultivate love for God and fear of sin what needs again discrimination. If we don’t believe in it we will have difficulties to cultivate that love, because we have to first get over the doubts of the mind and our society and education has planted the doubts and not the believe as everybody is convinced that science is good. It doesn’t mean it is bad, but we have to know the difference between experimenting and experience, between the intellect and the heart. The intellect is the forth sheath and the heart is the fifth sheath. If we have that picture of the sheaths in front of us it does make sense and we see the difference between being in the mind or going for intellectual values only or if we go for the heart, which is in the core of it.

The problem is the West is convinced that the real values are in science and on the level of reason and rationalization of life, we live life on a business level, it has to be effective and there have to be results and we have to be able to live successfully in the pace of a modern society. If we grow up in such a way and everybody around us is holding up high those values while nobody wants believe anymore in all that what seems to be that dark in the Middle Ages and we look at the time of the inquisition and how many innocent people had been burnt alive and executed as witches. That is a dark chapter and doesn’t make our story of our religious values any better. It is not the same as in the scriptures Swami is talking about when we find the eternal message of Sanatana Dharma, as Swami calls it.

Sanātana Dharma (Devanagari: meaning "eternal dharma" or "eternal order") has been proposed as an alternative, "native" name for Hinduism (Hindi Hindu Dharm) "Hindu religion"   

Wiki

Why we have to follow our chosen spiritual practice diligently and sincerely?

As Swami tells us always again the aim of all spiritual practice is to merge and to become one with the divine, there is no other meaning for a spiritual practice.

It helps us to see it right if we are aware that the scriptures talk about four different stages of consciousness and we know them from our own experience.  We live in the waking stage, during sleep we have the dream stage and the deep sleep stage and there is a fourth stage and that is Turiya what we know as transcendental consciousness or non-changing, non-conceptual being. If we are in that stage, we are constantly inside awake, enlightenment is also often described as 360° inner awakening and it is what we call divine.

The waking stage we know and we project everything on that level only if we don’t use right discrimination and don’t listen to Swami's precious words. 

But even if we listen, as long as we try to give an answer in our own mind, we are in the mind and we think we are the doer.

The waking stage is the mind and we know it on the level of affirmations and positive thinking and results.

The dream stage is the reflection of the divine. We cannot understand it with the mind, we have to take the mind out of it totally and look at it as a different stage of consciousness, it can only be understood on the ‘reflection’ level, 

Atman reacts, reflects and resounds (Baba).

If the mind looks for an answer, we have to see it as ‘not that’, it is not the mind. Whenever the mind gets to an answer it is conceptualized and not anymore the level of direct experience only and reflection. How do we get aware of the reflection? Is it by meditation? No it is not.

Meditation calms down the mind and goes beyond the mind, it purifies the mind, but it is not getting aware of the reflection. We get aware of the reflection by listening to the divine words, in his words that reflection is mirrored and by looking in that mirror we get aware of the reflection in our own dreams, but that is not done by the mind, but only by him, he is the one who gives the answer, he is the knower, he is the doer and we get there not by meditation, but with contemplation and self-enquiry.

That is what Swami said not long ago, without self-enquiry there is no detachment possible.

You said that everybody has to get detached. Right, so everybody should be in self-enquiry.

How do we get into self-enquiry? We have to listen, think it over and absorb. 

To manifest your inherent divine nature, cultivate love for God and fear of sin and adherence to right conduct (sangha niti). When you fear sin and love God, you cannot indulge in immoral acts, automatically ensuring morality in society.

That is the direct experience of the divine and that direct experience we get in thinking it over, it cannot be right on the waking stage level, if it is a spiritual practice it is about merging with the sleep stage and making that merging a permanent experience. We can get the experience with meditation, but we cannot get there without self-enquiry.

God can be known only by experience and not by experiments. Hence follow your chosen spiritual practices diligently and sincerely.

If it is only about meditation and even the modern way technique, it is different from self-enquiry. And the mind level was projected into infinity, letting us believe whenever there is infinity, there is divinity. 

But it is not about infinity, it is about bliss, where bliss is there is God, Swami said to us in the interview room. 

If it is only about transcendence and infinity, it is not about bliss, there is no bliss, just no notion in the mind of any experience and therefore, there is no concept, but it is not bliss.

The mind was projected into infinity and pure unmanifested consciousness and the sutras which are divine qualities like flying was projected on the body level. It seems it is the same as Baba’s miracles; it is also on a miracle level if the body would lift up in the air.

Baba said in the insight, ‘I wanted to fly’. 

He was in the flying sutra, it is the level of miracle and the feeling of going beyond limitations of the mind what attracted us to it.

When it is about love and the presence of divine love it is also a miracle, because it takes all problems away. If you watch a Baba Darshan, whatever was on the mind of people before, after Darshan it is gone. I have met several people who came to Baba in the ashram and said, ‘I have to talk to Swami and I know I will get an interview’ and they never had an interview. It was just in their minds.

The miracle with Baba is that it is ‘the same’, we cannot explain it that it is the same and that if we get projected into that omnipresent divinity level an experience we had made forty years ago can be present today again just because it is the same. 

We will never understand that, because it doesn’t make any sense to the mind. For the mind and the body are always differences and there is time and space and it is impossible that it can be the same as it has been forty years ago. But for the Atma level that is the only level that is real, that is omnipresence and omniscience.

That is the meaning of making the experience of the divine and if we have that experience we have to listen to his words, because otherwise, it could be confusing and we don’t realize why it is the same.

It is possible to have our meditation experience we had thirty or more years ago present as the same today, nothing got lost, it is the same. 

That is the meaning when he said to me already thirty years ago that it is the same and it feels like magic when we get aware of it.

So on that level there is no difference between the sutra and the experience of the divine, it is the same.