The Tendency of the Mind

From a satsang by Gautam Baiji ~

By the grace of God, we are able to get satsang in our lives.

Sometimes we might think, "Why is it necessary?"

Especially if we have knowledge, why do we need satsang again and again?

One devotee asked this very question of his guru.

The guru said, "I will answer in a moment, but first, would you clean my pot please?" The guru handed him the aluminum pot he drinks from.

"Guru, you give me this pot to clean every day, and it's never that dirty. Why is it necessary to clean it every day? Why not wait until it's very dirty?"

The guru said, "The pot's made of aluminum. If you don't clean it regularly, you will see stains everywhere. It will look so dirty, you have to use lemon and salt and a lot of effort to clean it.

"But if you clean the pot every day, then you don't need to work hard to keep it clean.

"It's the same with satsang. We live in this world and know that mind has the tendency to collect negativity quickly. But regular satsang will keep it positive." 

Garbage Attracts More Garbage

From a Gautam Baiji satsang:

"When the positive thoughts come into your mind, respect them.

When the negative thoughts come into your mind, don't keep them for long. Don't give them space.

Because once we give bad thoughts space, then other people will start dumping bad things there as well.

You can test this anywhere: go somewhere and throw some trash on the ground. Just some tissues or paper napkins.

You will see, after one hour, everyone will start throwing more trash there.

Why? Because people follow what others do, and what they see.

Someone in India bought the vacant lot next to their house. It didn't look nice for a long time, so neighbors threw their trash there. After a year the pile of garbage was almost as high as the house?

So what did they do to stop everyone from dumping garbage there?

They built a small temple, only about a foot tall, and placed it there.

People saw it and had reverence, and they stopped leaving garbage."

Aspire to purity. 

Open Hearts: Happy Diwali, Happy New Year, Seasons Greetings!

It seems people's hearts open more readily during the holidays.

Many say they wish people would act this way all year long, and that is an excellent goal.

We just weren't taught to come from our heart first.

The message of all the movies we watch give us this message: come from your heart! But we don't listen to that very well.

It's reflected in how we treat the least of us. When we solve world hunger and extreme poverty, then maybe we can claim victory of the mind.


So until then, keep sharing your flame!

We Are Not Our Body

Gautam Baiji did a satsang about not letting others' negative (or positive) words affect our inner peace:

"In our life, sometimes we are happy, sometimes sad. How does this happen?

Regardless of what happens, we should always be steady. Don't get depressed, and don't get too happy.

How can we maintain that?

If people say something bad about us, we feel bad. If they say something good, we feel good.

Try to practice being your true self. Know who you are.

Why do we feel sadness and happiness?

Because we think we are this body.

We don't know our real form. We should know we are just using this body as a vehicle.

The vehicle and the driver are not one. They are two. You will never say "I am the car." You will say, "Me and my car."

The car is mine; I am not it.
The body is mine; I am not it."

Who is Working Overtime to Separate Us From God?

There are many names for God: the Supreme, the Creator, Spirit, Krishna, Christ, Allah, Love, Shiva, the All, Om, etc. We tend to favor one or two that empower us to live the most spiritual life possible.

In fact, just thinking of the (nameless) Holy Name can instantly connect us to God and our own divinity (as do blessings like "Namaste - the Divine within me honors the Divine within you").

But what about the names for things that separate us from God? Isn't it just ego, or are there more? Can spiritual seekers avoid their traps?

Here are their most popular names:

Mind/Ego/I/Identity/Me*/self

These "God-separators" each show a different aspect how duality (us/them, feminine/masculine, follower/leader) keeps are distance from God. 

In reality there is no "split," but this illusion is so convincing, we allow it to occur many times a day (despite the fact that it's the cause of all suffering!). 

Take "Mind" (please!). Its distracting thoughts pop up frequently and tell us what reality supposedly is.  

Most of us weren't taught that we can control not only our thoughts but also our responses to them. Until we learn this, we just get pelted by these thoughts like a car in a hail storm, which leave large dents in our psyche as well. 

What kind of thoughts? Usually worries of imagined events in the future, or fears that painful events from the past will revisit us. Not healthy at all.

The problems can really pile up without a spiritual practice in place that includes yoga and meditation, both of which help us to stay out of the past and the future, right here in the present.

Being present it our truest state, but the Mind fights that by constantly trying to get us to forget who we truly are (Divine) so we will only take care of it (the Mind), usually through the senses. 

It's consistently successful at getting this kind of care because most of us don't know we are not our thoughts. (We are the ones noticing the thoughts.)

Identity is also a strong God-separator by creating a convincing (phony) beingness that makes being separate from God a plausible reality. With such vivid colors, no less, like painful (or pleasurable) memories of past experiences; the temptation to dwell in the emotional meaning we give those experiences (which affects how we react to life moving forward); our societal conditioning; the story of Me, and who I think I am. 

Identity appears as a consistent phenomenon, and that sameness gives us a comfort we're unwilling to give up, at least without great motivation. 

It's very popular to refer to all of this as Ego because it feels detached; scientific even. Here, it's handy to use what Gautam Baiji teaches, that the ego is a tool which can only be dangerous when handled improperly, much like how fire is very useful for cooking, but you wouldn't want to turn your back on it for long. 

Finally, when one refers to their self, they may wish to pause and ask, "Am I addressing the little self who lives inside me, or the Self?" It's easy to see that we default to our ego-mind-self. We can reverse by entering into an inquiry every now and then to re-member Who We Are again and put the Self back in control (which causes the little self to disappear). 

That is, until we're distracted again. But the back-and-forth is part of our spiritual journey.

*They all have capitals because they are always straining for importance or significance. This is their attempt to replicate the true Self to attempt to fool us, but in the end they are all imposters. 

**One of the mind's greatest distractions (for people on a spiritual path) is the desire to accumulate more spiritual information at the expense of simply experiencing our True Self, or having self-realization. Sri Mooji says, "It cannot be learned, it can only be recognized in ourselves," and yet we frequently find ourselves pursuing more information for "answers." This is one of the mind's final tricks to delay our re-membering/oneness. (Another mind diversion: telling us we are "too tired" or sleepy as we start to meditate, causing us to stop.) 

***Which is ironically like focussing on the dot in the middle of the blank page, while ignoring the vastness of the white paper and who we really are.

Don't Be a Slave to Your Mind and Maya

Satsang by Gautam Baiji

Once we get knowledge, why do we still need spiritual instruction (satsang)?

When you see a farmer sow the seeds, we know his work is not finished.

He goes over and over his crops. He keeps an eye on them.

When weeds come up, he uproots them. Why? To protect the plants.

Satsang means the company of truth. How can we get that?

First we have to know what is truth and what is not truth.

Our saints say, "Truth is permanent." We cannot change it. Truth in invincible; it cannot be destroyed.

So we look at the world and ask, "What is permanent and invincible?"

Our body is always changing. Our house is always changing. Our mind and thoughts change. Everything in the world changes.

Except soul. Spirit.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says you cannot destroy the soul. You cannot burn it, it cannot get wet, it's invincible.

How can we realize that?

That's why great souls came into this world, to tell us: "Know thyself."

We have to learn who we are and understand why we came here.

What is the goal of our life?

The human body is the crown of creation. Why?

Because we have great potential.

To earn lots of money? Retire when we get older? Then what?

To get peace. Salvation. Liberation from... what?

What is binding us? Who is holding us?

Our saints say we won't get moksha until we get liberation.

Then maya, the illusion, is binding us, we say.

Once a guru saw a man walking while holding a rope attached to a cow. He said to his disciple, "Look at this. Who is bound to whom?"


The disciple said, "Simple. The cow is in bondage to the man. That's why he's attached to the rope."

"No," the guru said, "The person is in bondage to the cow. Why? Because if the person drops the rope, the cow will run away. Then the man will run after the cow. The cow doesn't need the person, but the person needs the cow."

The same thing with maya. Sometimes we say, "Maya is the bondage, Maya is binding us." Maya is not binding our mind, it's binding us.

That's why Krishna told Arjuna, "I don't need anything from you. Just give me your mind. If your mind is here, everything is here. If it's not, not matter how much I scream my discourse, you will go home and not remember anything. "I was there, but my mind was not there."

Our mind binds us. The mind is our friend and our enemy. 

How?

The mind is like a ladder. It can help us go up, or it can help us go down.

If you go upstairs, you can see far. If you go down, you can only see the basement. The walls, nothing else.

When is the mind our enemy? When it goes with worldly things. "Oh, that person is like this, that thing is like that, etc." All negative thoughts come. Our mind's tendency is to go downward, like water.

When is the mind our friend? When we allow satsang to elevate us.

Our parents and society taught us how to behave, but not how to think. Satsang teaches us that.

If You Skip Meditation, You Skip Your Deepest Self - Satsang by Gautum Baiji

A few weeks ago, Gautum Baiji spoke about how we won't get the realization benefits in meditation if we don't commit to the practice in the first place:

"We all know God is within us, but when a problem comes, we never go inward.

Where do we go? We try to get help from outside.

Meditation is there, but where is the trust? If trust is not there, meditation is not going to help you.

So what do we have to do? How can we get that trust? We can't buy it from a store.

Sometimes we do meditation, but if we are not 'realizing' then we cannot get that kind of trust.

We sit around for 15 or 20 minutes and think, 'You told me you can see this or that, and I don't know why I can't realize these things when I meditate.'

We say, 'God is light,' 'God, you are within me...' but as long as we don't know, we won't achieve what we're looking for.

We have to know first.

So how can we know?

We already know about deep breathing, but sometimes when we sit, we have to check where our mind is. We are sitting for meditation, but is our mind there or not? The mind is thinking something else.

Someone was telling me, 'You know, in the early morning, we cannot do meditation.' Why? 'Because when we get up, our minds go immediately to our job. We have to take showers, we have to make breakfast, we have to do this, we have to do that...' The list is there. And you skip meditation.

Did you ever skip anything else? Do you ever skip breakfast? No, you always have breakfast. Did you ever skip your shower? No, because if you go without showering, other people will not sit around you. So you are very careful.

So if you make time for everything else, why not for meditation? For breakfast, for shower, you get up one hour earlier, right? So we can get up 15 minutes (or more) early for meditation.

(Once we cultivate that, we have a place to go when problems happen in our lives.)

If you think this is a very important practice, then you make it a rule. And if you are making a rule, you will carry it forward in your life."

How to Heal Your Self

Satsang: Prana, the Mind, and Meditation

At satsang, Gautum baiji said:

"The mind... is so strong, yet so subtle.

It can bring salvation, or bondage.

We have thousands of thoughts, positive and negative. How can we control them so we can have peace?

The mind is so subtle, and to capture a subtle thing, we need a subtle method.

Suppose I want to tie up an ant. If I use a thick rope - the kind you would tie an elephant with - we can tie all the knots we want but there will still be holes big enough for thousands of ants to pass through.

An ant is very small, so if we want to tie it up we need a very fine thread.

So how do we control the mind?

Once there was a body where the organs were fighting with each other. Each organ thought they were the most important, and that without them, the whole body would perish.

Then the eyes said, "Fine, then I will leave for a month and only then will you realize you can't live without me."

So the eyes left for a month. Upon returning, they were surprised the body was functioning.

"How did you live without me?"

"We lived like a blind person. It was hard, but we managed," said the other organs.

The ears said, "Now it's my turn. I know you won't be able to live without me."

And the ears left. Thirty days later they returned.

"How did you live without me?"

"Like a deaf person. It was hard, but we managed."

Then the mind spoke: "Now you're really going to learn a lesson, because I'm leaving for thirty days and if you're still around when I return, I will listen to your tales of suffering."

Thirty days passed, and the mind returned to the body. "You're still alive? How did you live without me?"

"Like a simple child, but we survived."

Finally prana* spoke. "To show you my importance, I am leaving the body now..."

With the prana/life force gone, sudden changes occurred. The eyes became unable to see. The ears could no longer hear. Every single organ began failing.

It was no contest who was the most important.

Prana is like electricity - without it, no appliance can work.

We never think about the life force. We know the importance of not spending too much money, but not how we spend our life force."

So how do we control the mind? It is no coincidence that a good technique for deep meditation is to count... our breaths, our prana.

Meditate, breathe deeply, self realize.

* Prana - breath, considered as a life-giving force. Not merely the breath, air or oxygen, but also the original life force. Prana is a Sanskrit word constructed of the syllables pra and an. 'An' means movement and 'pra' is a prefix meaning constant. Therefore, prana means constant motion. This constant motion commences in the human being as soon as s/he is conceived in his mother's womb. Prana is therefore a type of energy responsible for the body's life, heat and maintenance.

Don't Disturb Your Mind With Seeking

Thoughts Are Like Passing Clouds

It's worth repeating: "The day you decide that you are more interested in being aware of your thoughts than you are in the thoughts themselves - that is the day you will find your way out."

Or find your way in-side.

It can be disorienting to realize that we don't have to "live our thoughts" as we always have, that thoughts are just things that pop up all the time without permission, usually based on impressions from the past.

Getting control of this process is freeing. Training our mind is key. Yoga and meditation make this possible.

Deepak Chopra shared that when he meditated and thoughts popped up unbidden, he would picture them as clouds floating against a blue sky, which represented his consciousness. It's a way to embrace them but not let them rule us.

"Let it go" was a popular anthem in yoga before a certain Disney movie borrowed it, so I say we borrow it back and remind ourselves that whatever disempowering thoughts we find ourselves mired in, just... let them go.

Get Clear

At first glance, I think this picture looks elegant, graceful...

Then I think I see the words "Ikea Visa"(!!).

Maybe a bit too much consumerism on my mind? I think I need to do some yoga and/or meditation and get clear.

Cheaper that way, too.

(Not that that matters...)

Oooooommmm.