Author: ahymsin

The word, Guru, is used in many different contexts in India. The Yoga-sutras of Patanjali, the most important text of yoga philosophy and a bible of the yogis says that God is the Guru of even the most ancient ones of the earliest one. Nowadays anybody who teaches you anything is a Guruji. You hear about all kinds of gurus nowadays. Anybody who can touch his nose to his toes advertises himself as a great Guru, great teacher. Is there some kind of a certification to make you a Guru? Maybe you can have a university degree, or some kind of test or become a paying member of the Guru association! What is all this Guru business anyway? What makes you a Guru? When the Beatles became disappointed with Maharshi Mahesh Yogi they said that in India a person becomes a Guru by the same process by which you become a popular rock band in the West. You develop a following.

So, what is a Guru and what is the test of being a Guru? It’s very difficult to start the discussion on this subject. The word is used in so many different contexts. Sometimes it’s just an expression of respect. We are told in the tradition, in the culture in which I was born that your mother is the first Guru. Your father is the second Guru. Your teacher is the third Guru, and your spiritual Master is the fourth Guru. Then there is a book called The Laws of Manu. The major ancient book of laws for the Indians, for India, which says that one Guru equals ten paid teachers. A hundred gurus equal one father, and hundred fathers equal one mother. So anywhere that you derive wisdom from is Guru. There are also great women figures, great women Masters and sages in the history of India.

The Sanskrit word for a school is Gurukula, the Guru’s family. And a child’s education took place in Gurukula, in the Guru’s family. A child was sent between the ages of five to eight to live with the Guru’s family away from civilization in the forest, in the hermitages. They had special areas preserved and those areas were sacred. Those were places known as ashrams. Those places were so sacred that a king could not enter but in a humble garb. He could not carry the signs and symbols of royalty with him when he entered an ashram. A policeman had to remove his badge. No authority was allowed. No animal could kill another animal in those areas. No hunters, no trespassers. You could go there only with a very, very spiritual outlook. There was no taxation. Some of these ashrams became great universities like Takshashila in the fourth century BCE. It had 20,000 resident students [whose expenses were] paid for by the State. Yet the State had no say in deciding policy. If there is one motto of the civilization in which I have grown up that would be, “knowledge above all”.

Vidyayam amritam ashnute, one gains immortality from wisdom, from knowledge.

Political power or monetary power are nothing. They are there. They are not to be avoided. But the highest caste in India, the brahmins, were the poorest people in the country. They were regarded as the highest caste because of their knowledge, because of the traditions they carried. In that context you have to understand the importance given to someone who is a teacher. These people, the brahmins of India lived on offerings. Their knowledge was free; but they lived in a society little of which remains today. You won’t see it when you land in India. You will have to look for those pockets, but whatever is there is a continuity from a very, very ancient tradition.

They give of themselves free. A student was not charged a fee. You may say, “that’s very convenient,” but then what was it that the student did? He gave his heart and soul. Then he deserved that knowledge, that wisdom. A Guru could place any test on that student. It was not a monetary arrangement. It does not mean it was not an arrangement. It was a spiritual arrangement because knowledge itself cannot be valued in terms of finances. It cannot be valued. It cannot have a price tag. It sounds a contradiction to the practice you may find right here [in USA]. Providing of necessities is completely separate. There is no connection between that and the wisdom that one receives. The two are not connected, cannot be connected. It is not possible for you to weigh so much knowledge for so much money.

So, a child went to the ashram of a Guru. The child lived under the Guru as his own child, and the princes and the paupers both together lived an ascetic life up to the age of 24 or so. The period of study was a period of ascetic life. It was a period of total equality. Then the prince went and ruled over the country, the brahmin went and taught the people, and the traders’ son went back into the business, but the values that were inculcated in that period of life remained.

Now you can view the Guru on two different levels. One is again giving information. We are not talking about study of economics or study of physics, although the same people in ancient India, the very same people who developed yoga science, also developed all other sciences. The texts they wrote on political science also started with the discussion of metaphysics. Why should the society have political stability? Why should people have economic security? Why should you run a country? Why should you run a government? And the answer given in this tradition is so that they have the facility to meditate, so that they can go towards self-realization, so that one person does not go out of his way to interfere with somebody else’s karma. A trader, a businessman should earn so that he supports the student, so that he supports the seeker, so that he gives to the ashram, so that he builds a well in the village. He who earns only for himself earns only sin. It’s a question of the whole value of the society.

All these material facilities are provided in the society only for one purpose and that purpose is those who are seekers may seek without interference. And so that you may fulfil your karma, your present duty at a certain point you should do it to the fullest of your ability and use it for the benefit of others in such a way that a person who is teaching in an ashram, a person who is studying in an ashram, which were vast institutions away in the forest, continue their life; that you should have the facility in your society that people can follow the inner seeking and if you claim anything beyond that to be yours then you are a thief.

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Editor’s Note

This is an extract from Guru Disciple Relationship, Volume-I by Swami Veda Bharati, pages 1-4.

The title today is what is pranayama? What really is pranayama? First of all, I’d request that everyone who practices any form of yoga should at least have some familiarity with the Sanskrit alphabet because it’s being mercilessly butchered. The Sanskrit language carries power in the very sound of words and that is the first principle of the mantra science. So, it’s my request please be kind to us from the 21st century B.C. What is pra-na-ya-ma? It is a combination of two words but four parts. Prana and ayama. Pranayama. The word prana is prefix pra, and verb root an. That is the verb root that comes in the words like anima and animal, animate, animation. The prefix pra means forth, breathe forth, but it more correctly means perfectly. Perfect breathing, perfect breath, perfect breath not in the sense of the breath in the nostrils but the sense in which an anima animates and animal. An animal like a human being. An animal like the human being is perfectly animated by the force. That force is called prana, the animating force.

So, prana and all the other sub-pranas are the same way. Now, ayama means expansion. Expansion of the animating force is pranayama. The force that animates you, that makes you an animal. Animal means animated being who has, if you want to use Jungian terminology, who has anima, the spirit. The spiritual force, very much like the Greek concept of pneuma, from which now days you get pneumatic pressure, originally the animating force within a human being. This is the force of the breath. So, expansion of the animating force is called pranayama. In yoga, this means the expansion bringing the animating force to pra, perfection, so that it is a perfectly animating force. Right now, it is only partially animating us. The rest of us is dead. We walk about half dead, not fully animated. That force, expanding that force, bringing it to a state of perfection, is pranayama.

All of these terms have many, many definitions. In my commentary on the second chapter of the Yoga Sutras in appendix two, three and four I have given some detailed explanations and I have referred in the first appendix to sixty-eight Sanskrit texts. There are as few angas of yoga as one or two and there as many as fifteen. The definitions of these angas of yoga differ from school to school not in contradiction to each other but in complementary sense, in a complementary manner.

For example, if you take the great sage Shankacharya, the founder of our order of monks, and you take Tejobindu Upanishad, upanishad of the drop of light. We have these three or four Upanishads: Tejobindu, upanishad of the drop of light; Nadabindu, upanishad of the drop of sound; and Brahmabindu, upanishad of the drop of Brahman. [In] Tejobindu Upanishad, the upanishad of the drop of light and in the work of Shankacharya for example, these terms, the angas, are defined completely differently.

Rechaka, puraka, kumbhaka, the three parts of pranayama. Normally people say rechaka, breathing out; puraka, breathing in; kumbhaka, holding as inside a vessel. Kumbhaka, holding it as inside a vessel, the same word occurs in the word like kumbha mela. Shankacharya defines it differently. Rechaka, what you call exhalation process, he says emptying oneself of all thought and cognition except that I am Brahman. That is Shankacharya’s definition of rechaka. Puraka, filling oneself with the cognition awareness that I am Brahman and kumbhaka, holding that cognition.

So, there is that end of the spectrum of pranayama and then there are all these different pranayamas that are taught by masters of hatha yoga, teachers of hatha yoga. Yesterday I spoke to you on the meaning of the word hatha yoga because the physical end of the spectrum of hatha yoga is so well known I do not touch it. My task from the Masters, from the acharyas, from the rishis, is to bring you that which is not popularly taught. Even if my audience diminishes by the day.

Nowadays pranayama is taught as exercise of physical breath. Many different exercises, they are an essential preparation, as the body preparations are essential for sitting correctly and going into meditation but there are subtler, deeper aspects.

My interest in pranayama is as part of the meditation system. Tomorrow I’m speaking on divergences and convergences among the various meditation systems. There is one part on which all the meditation systems converge. There is one rule that is common to all meditation systems. It applies to the Sufis and the Hesychasm with which you may not be familiar even though some of you are Christian. It applies to the Taoist with which you may not be familiar even though many of you are Chinese. Unfortunately, so many of you don’t study your own traditions. All these systems of meditation, of the Tibetan Masters and the Zen Masters and the Himalayan yogis have one thing in common in teaching meditation and that is breath awareness. In the dhyana yoga, in the tradition of the yoga of mediation, we use that as the word for pranayama. We use that as the meaning of pranayama, expansion of breath.

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Editor’s Note

This passage has been taken from a lecture given by Swami Veda on the 3^rd of June 2007 in Hong Kong.

Regina, Saskatchewan, June 1st, [1982], 2:30 a.m., after my night’s meditation.

I would like to share these thoughts with you. Just as Spirit is formless yet takes on many forms in its journey, so yoga, the science of the spirit, has no one definite form, yet takes on many forms to fulfill many needs, to serve many people, to heal many illnesses (physical, mental and spiritual). Though some of the methods remain constant, they are adoptable [adaptable?]. The way yoga was taught at the time of the Upanishads is not exactly the way it is taught today. That is, the language is different; the approach is different. How it was taught to the Ancient Greeks was different from the way it was taught to the Chinese. And the way it was taught to the Chinese was different from the way it was later taught to the Japanese. And it is very different in form today, here, in America. Even here in America the language in which Swami Vivekananda spoke was not the same language in which later Swami Rama Tirtha spoke, which is not the same language in which Paramahansa Yogananda spoke. It is not the same language, again, in which Swami Rama speaks, or I speak. And I’m told by Swamiji that the language and the method of teaching that we are adopting today to serve the needs of the communities, at this particular time of the development of this civilization, will not be exactly the same as when my son, Angiris is going to be teaching. His language and his approach is going to be very different than mine.

This applies also: this constant flexibility, this constant resilience of mind required of teachers, implies also the same resilience of mind on the part of the students aspiring to be teachers, aspiring to be kalyana mitras (“noble friends”), buddies, if you will, to help others, to direct others, to advise others. If we understand what it is that is crucial to the yoga science, then we can adopt it and let the inspiration speak from within ourselves. No one statement is going to be universal. No one statement of the aims, goals or content of yoga, or of a yoga center, will be complete, will be complete, will be perfect, will be permanent. It changes from person to person, the one who is speaking about it, and the one to whom he is speaking.

Bearing this is mind, we can adopt – and adopt any phraseology, any paragraphs, write them, cancel them, rewrite them, publish them, withdraw them, retract them, rewrite again, knowing that each time we are going to come up with a new form with new sentences. And in a committee of three or thirty, three or thirty statements, made respectively, are all correct – each one applicable to some situation, applicable to someone’s need. It is bearing this in mind that we should proceed with drafting any statement. And I have no doubt, whatever statement you will arrive at, will be a correct one, but it will not be THE correct one. And I’ll go along with it, because in some ways, you understand the needs of the society. But I understand [the] human mind. But go ahead, of course, and I look forward to observing this process. No, no, not the process of your drafting a statement about yoga or the Center. No, the process of your self-development as you going along with this drafting. This self-observation of what yoga has meant to you, and how you have progressed in your understanding of it, how you first say it when you first took a physical yoga class or you first took a meditation class, and how you see it now. Your first understanding was not an incorrect one, and your current understanding is not a perfect one, nor is it so in my case.

Confused enough? No, I don’t think you are! From year to year it will change.

Now to the current situation. We receive at the Center people of many different backgrounds. We have set up many different experiments to help them. Someone who comes with a thimble goes away with a thimbleful. Someone who comes with a pail goes away with a pailful. Someone with a thimbleful who went away will come back sometime with another thimble, or maybe with another pail. One never knows? We are only responsible for the best that we, each one of us can do, according to our capacity. And that is all: the best we can do according to our capacity. And there is no warrantee that there is any one approach that will keep everybody who comes to the Center’s classes or who comes to take initiation. We have initiated 2,200 people in this center so far. We have about 500 on our Initiate Mailing List. But these seeds that was [were] dropped . . . with the other 1,700 also, someplace, somewhere, like a seed lies underground waiting for the timely rain. So, according to our capacity, the best of our capacity we serve.

The people who come to the Center go through many different avenues: classes, Thursday nights, groups of “noble friends,” and so forth. None of those systems is working perfectly. Until every human being in a society is perfect, the society will not be perfect. And when it is not perfect, there is a certain discontent, which is simply a call to greater and greater perfection. Discontent is simply a call to greater and greater perfection — in ourselves. Not in the Center, in ourselves! As our capacities increase our approach becomes more and more perfect. Each one of us is a teacher, in his own right in his own place, in his own way. He may not be teaching classes. The best teachers do not teach classes; they teach people.

Many people who do go to the Center’s classes do have a place to go to. Some come to Thursday mornings; some come to Thursday night; some take another hatha class, come go into vegetarian cooking classes, and so forth. Now, since our approach requires reducing people’s resistances, we cannot herd everybody through one-and-the-same system. Nor can we give one-and-the-same statement to everyone. Nor can we give one one-and-the-same statement to anyone at all of the times of his development. A person who walks in there with high blood pressure, if you say to him, “Sit here. Contemplate ‘Who am I?’ ‘What am I?’ ‘Why am I here?’ he is more likely to develop high blood pressure. No, that’s not going to work. Give him what fits him thimble, what fills his thimble. Later, when he has a pail, we will put a pailful of something else in there.

One of the Ten Perfections required of a Bodhisattva, a potential Buddha, before he would become a Buddha, the Enlightened One, one of those Ten Perfections is upaya kaushala, “expertise in the means and methods of liberating others.” It is like coaxing a child. And each one of us has to cultivate that method.

Now, to this group I address the problem, only of [a] certain other group, because you are capable of handling that group. There are others who are capable of handling other things. Since my own time has become so limited here at this center, a way needs to be found so that that time is used to optimum effect. Okay. People who come to our annual countryside retreat are one category of people. And their needs are being served. Those who prefer to come to a more comfortable surrounding – the October Retreat – their needs are not yet being served – because of their age group of teachers and a number of other factors. Those people prefer to be taught by their own kind, prefer to be reassured by their own kind, by their own age group, by their own professional peers, if you will. Okay. We must bear this in mind. We are not trying to draw them to the Center. That is a by-product, just as the Center is a support system for the teaching. The teaching remains crucial. Some of these people come in, take a yoga class, and don’t know where they fit into the scheme of things – and so many programs, and so on and so forth. Someone needs to talk with them. Someone needs to befriend them, someone with whom they can feel at home. Someone is home; they can come have breakfast on a business day, or lunch. And then they can be advised: “Okay, you have taken a physical yoga class? You have taken a basic relaxation class? You might want to study with Dr. Arya. How would you like to attend a weekend retreat with him? In this way, I can serve them.

You see, one of the functions I perform is to bring a select number of people to my master. I draw them to his attention. If he feels that he wants to pay attention to them, he does. If he feels he doesn’t want to pay attention to them, he doesn’t. Sometime he pays attention, and they don’t even know what he has done for them. Things begin to happen in their lives without him actually sitting down and talking to them. Similarly, if you want to make the best use of my time while I am here, bring people into contact with me. Some of these people are already there, just waiting for someone to tell there where to go, what to do. They will come to one retreat. They will be advised. Draw my attention to anyone’s particular need as Rolf, Mary Gail, Michael Smith do: “I have such-and-such person in my class.” “I have such-and-such person with whom I have had lunch,” you might say. “This is his background. This is his problem.” And I can be helpful. So in this way you are helping with my teaching. And whatever I can do for them, I will do for them.

At present, Thursday nights and the weekend retreats seems to be the only times . . . . Well, there is one more, and that is an opportunity to have a personal meditation. Sometimes a personal meditation alone is insufficient. One needs to hear something more. Again, in each case the method will be a flexible one, will be a different one. Some things will appeal to one. Some things will not appeal to the same one. And so on.

And, this is for this year. Next year I might have a place for these people to come and study with me in Rishikesh if they want to take two months off. The approach will change. You will never sit in one place.

So, bearing this overall view in mind, then whatever you decide, please go ahead, and whatever you advise me, I would like to, of course, listen and accept a major part of it, unless I have some strong objection – which I have never have any strong objection to anything you do. This is one principle of my personal life. One principle of my personal life is never to have a strong objection.

So I look forward to the results of this meeting. I would, however, suggest that while you are perfecting the approach – which will become perfect only when each one of you becomes a Buddha – while you are perfecting the phraseology of a statement, which will be perfected only when you have learned to write sutras and have become, each one [of you] a Patanjali, while you are perfecting it — people who are present sitting on the periphery, some are being served; some are being directed; some are not being served, I would suggest to get in touch with them and help them develop a program of study: which retreats they might attend, which lectures they might attend, which group they might join, or in what other way they might progress. And these names should be fed toi your committee. And gradually, you should not just be three persons; you should become thirty, three-hundred.

“Bahu-jana-hitaya, bhau-jana-sukhaya” : For the benefit of the many, for the comfort of the many.”

Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you for everything that you all do.

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Note: “The Buddha on Teaching” by Swami Veda Bharati

In the ancient writings we find the Buddha praising an Almsman who “in his doctrinal discourse was demonstrating to the brethren, making the Law acceptable to them, setting them afire, gladdening them with urbane words, well enunciated without hoarseness, with exposition of the meaning, pertinent and unbiased.”

The same expressions recur in the Dammapada, where the Buddha explains that he adapts his teaching to his audience: (“Whatever may be their sort, I make myself of the like sort, whatever their language, I speak that language” — i.e., becoming as we are that we may be as he is), “But they knew me not when I spoke, and would ask ‘Who may this be that speaks thus, a man or a god?’ Whereupon I demonstrated the Law, made it acceptable to them, set them on fire (samuttejetva), gladdened them, etc.” The argument is always ad hominem: for as Lankavatara Sutra 11.122 expresses it, “Whatever is not adapted to such and such persons as, are to be taught, cannot be called teaching”. It is thus that “He preaches the lovely Law, with its moral and spiritual meanings (dhammam deseti . . . kalyanam sattham savyanjanam, Dammapada 1.250).

CHARATHA BHIKKHAVO CHARIKAM BAHU-JANA-HITAYA,
BHAU-JANA-SUKHAYA.

“Wherever there is suffering, that is your place.
Charatha bhikkavo charikam bahu-jana-hitaya, Bhau-jana-sukhaya.”

When the Buddha sent out his first band of monks, he said,
“Monks, wander, for the benefit of the many, for the comfort of the many.”
“Monks, wander,” he said, “for the benefit of the many, for the comfort of the many.”
“Monks, wander. . . .”
That is the motto: “. . . bahu-jana-hitaya, Bhau-jana-sukhaya.”
“. . . for the benefit of the many, for the comfort of the many.”

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Upaaya-Kaushala: Expertise in the Means of Liberating Oneself and Others by Swami Veda Bharati can be read at http://ahymsin.org/main/swami-veda-bharati/upaaya-kaushala-expertise-in-the-means-of-liberating-oneself-and-others.html

We are born from silence and at the end we re-enter that silence. At the end you re-enter that silence. When three souls unite and the very first globule of the fetus is formed it is silent. Slowly within the womb subtle waves of awareness begin to form. Very subtle images of past lives, memories of the moments of past enlightenments that have been forgotten. Yes, memories of the past enlightenments that have been forgotten. Again the images of the karmic lives and again those moments of absolute silence of divinity.

Slowly the parental noise of the mind penetrates that silence and a coherent silence slowly in the fetus begins to change into the same incoherent noise that the self-forgotten, us adults, constantly generate. Wish that we were not instruments of drowning that silence of the fetus because in the traditions of India and of the Himalayan yogis it is said that a child’s education begins three years before conception and is completed in the nine months within the womb. After that it is all noise and the adults have taken upon themselves the task of de-educating the enlightened ones and disturbing the innocent ones. We call that education.

We are born from that interior silence of the mother’s womb. What mother? Not just this physical mother where three souls unite. The yoga word for the Guru in the most ancient traditions is Hiranyagarbha, the golden womb. It is said that if you can stay in the womb of the Guru three days and three nights you become a brahmarcharin, one who wanders and walks in God like Nachiketa of the Katha Upanishad who knocked at the doors of the death and stayed three days and three nights before being granted enlightenment.

Our journey through the disturbance of noise through life ends again when the noise making instruments of the brain begin to shut down and one enters that total silence which the noisy ones among us fear. Only the noisy ones among us fear that. Others enter that silence, which the majority have named as death. From silence we begin and into silence we merge and re-enter but we never quite forget our origin in silence. Every night we tire of the noise of the day and we enter the silence of sleep involuntarily. One who talks in sleep, everyone laughs at him. The only difference is that the yogi sleeps consciously. You sleep unconsciously.

In the texts of Vedanta there are a great many discussions on the nature of sleep and it is said to be just one step short of the supreme ananda: the bliss of divinity. If it is conscious it is ananda. If it is unconscious, it is just a blurring of awareness. A forced resting of the mind. We long for that silence. We go for excursions in the woods. We sit by flowing streams. When you sit down by that quiet flowing stream and do not wish to get up, it’s so peaceful and quiet here. We forget that it is our inner silence that is calling us. That which is our origin. That which is our end.

You need to re-interpret the meaning of life not in terms of words but in terms of silence and the terminologies of silence. You need to learn to measure your capacities and qualifications in terms of that silence. How deep are we in that silence? That is the height of our qualification. How shallow we are in that silence, to that level we are beginners in the discovery of our potencies, capabilities, creativities and powers.

If you are a journalist or a photographer, before touching the pen to the paper or putting your hand on the key of the computer, before clicking your camera, go into silence for a moment, the kind of silence that you experience during meditation. Let it descend into you just for a moment, for five seconds and your hand will move by itself. Your fingers will write by themselves and the photograph that you are taking will be a masterpiece.

The yogis sit hours upon hours in silence. Some have become so tired of life after life of noise making and noise pollution that they have taken to life-long vows of silence. Among certain orders of the Catholic monks, in the Sufi orders, in the orders of the Buddhist monks, among the yogis I know personally monks who have not spoken a word for more than twenty years.

Practice of silence is a very refined art. Practice of silence is a very intricate science. It is not simply closing your mouth and not wagging your gossiping, back biting tongue. In the traditions of yoga there is a word, tapas. It is used very commonly. An intense endeavor, ascetic endeavor till you sweat. Not necessarily from the pores of your body but your mind sweats and frees itself of all its impurities. We are all afraid of this tapas. We are all afraid of intense endeavor. We’re afraid of long term commitments but if you make a long term commitment to discover the secrets of the depths of silence there is nothing else that is left to achieve. I assure you of that.

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Editor’s Note

This passage has been taken from a transcription of a lecture given by Swami Veda Bharati in 2007 to a group in Hong Kong.

Question: “There is only one hour and a half in a class for eight sessions. What should students have accomplished?”

Well, the content of the courses is designed in such a way that, I think, that a teacher who has confidently built his own ability is able to cover those contents, but I know that that is not what you are talking about. We can say: some understanding of the general background of what yoga is all about, where it leads to.

I think there should be two results of a student having completed the course: One is a desire to practice whatever little he has learned, a desire to practice. That you have inspired in him or her the desire that he wants to practice and master it and refine it and perfect it – whatever has been the content of the course, whatever he has learned. And secondly, there should remain in him a desire to advance, to come back for the next step. That there should remain in him a desire to know – where does yoga really lead? – that it is not something in isolation from the rest of one’s life and the rest of one’s philosophy, that it leads to changes in other areas. But this second point – actually it is the third point: that he knows that it leads to changes in other areas, should be imparted in such a way that it is not frightening, but is inspiring. So I can just think of three things that the teacher accomplishes through the class:

(1) the students desire to continue practicing, refining, further mastering what is already learned,
(2) the desire to advance, to come back for more, ask for more in him. There should arise this desire to ask for more, and
(3) the understanding that what he has learned is not in isolation, something separate from life, that it leads to changes in life and to his entire philosophy and his approach to everything he is related to. And this third part, not in such a way that it is frightening to him, but rather that it is inspiring to him.

These are the three thoughts that I consider, my own class to be successful when people have gone away with these three particular attitudes.

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Question: “Why do we teach?”

We have answered this question many times. We teach out of compassion. There is suffering in the world, and our vow is to reduce the suffering in the world. The cause of suffering, in the Yoga-sutras, is ignorance. Our teaching reduces, somewhat, the level of that ignorance. Our desire to teach arises directly our of our compassion for anyone who walks in here. He walks in here because he is seeking for some kind of help – and we are helpers.

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Question: “How do we deal with a very strong emotional response in a class?”

Very, very simple. Equanimity in your own emotion. Throw something negative at me. Come on.

[“I don’t like this class!”] Yes, that is understood. If you don’t like, can you tell me exactly what it is that you don’t like? [“You are not telling me anything new!”] All right. Actually there is nothing new. You already know the answer to the question. You only need to be aware that you know the answer.

See? It is your emotional tone, you see. That is the response. And very soon, you see, the emotion of the other party is reduced. It becomes . . . . You see, equanimity takes its place. But if you yourself cultivate the same kind of emotions outside your class with which other people are walking into your class, then you are not going to help them. Then it becomes a contest, a competition. It is not a helping, see? So that is why we speak of a personal philosophy of life for a teacher. What emotions he maintains. What rigidities he has. How flexible he or she is, see. And how you respond to any intensely positive or intensely negative emotion thrown at you in life. That is what will determine how well you able to maintain equanimity in the class. Otherwise it becomes an act. All right?

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Question: “When is a teacher ready to teach?”

Three prerequisites: One, there is in him intense desire to help. Secondary to that, when he has mastered some basic techniques, incorporated some basic technique into his own life so that when he comes before a class or a person, he speaks out of the conviction of personal experience and can elaborate on it without a book, as it were, without having had to memorize notes for the class. And three, when he regards – this should actually be the first, but anyway we can put it three here – is when he regards himself as an instrument of the Guru Lineage. When, in other words, there is not this thought: “I am going to be a teacher.” See? “I am now a teacher.” See? As though it were some kind of a promotion at work: “I joined as a member, and now I am a teacher in the Center!” See? If there is this ego, then your teaching will not be effective, will not be successful. When you sit down in your teaching seat, you are an instrument of the Guru Lineage, and only them will you teach effortlessly, and the Guru will teach through you, and you won’t know where the teaching comes from. The questions which you have struggled for so long yourself, someone will ask that very question; you will open you mouth and the correct answer will pop out, and you will say, “Hey! Where did that one come from?” Right? So, these are the three prerequisites of being a teacher. I would add to it what I have said earlier, and that is emotional equanimity.

I look for emotional equanimity and flexibility of character. People are too rigid in their approach. They don’t want to change. This-is-the-way-I-am kind of an argument. They remain – I see sometimes people of twenty-five, thirty, forty, forty-five, fifty, a permanent rebellious American teenager has become the norm of the life of a large number of people. Entire generation of people has grown in the United States who are permanent, rebellious American teenagers, throwing tantrum at every step. You know, throwing a tantrum at everything: “I’m not gonna do it, because I don’ wanna do it.” You know. See? That sometimes you show it quite clearly and show it that way, and sometimes you don’t, but it comes out clear and simple. And that is not a sign of maturity. It’s a sign of something quite immature.

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Question: “I was listening to your tape today, and it dawned on me that the emotions and spiritual growth are interwoven. And I’m trying to understand within myself exactly where the development occurs. I have my emotions, and they’re powerful emotions at times. At other times there is more contentment in myself. So how do I sort of refine this spiritual development?”

Yes, you know, I have spoken about it for years and years and years. And there’s no way I can put it in a nutshell. But my own experience is that, I have always said that I consider relationships to be the test of spirituality. I’ll put it a little bit, slightly differently also, and I think I’ve said that on some tape someplace, somewhere else too. And that is that as one grows spiritually, the arising of the painful thoughts is reduced, the incidents of painful thoughts. Both the incidents and the intensity of painful thoughts is reduced, see? And the incidents and intensity of positive thoughts, happy thoughts, joyfulness, just simply naturally increases. And if this not happening, you may be able to, you know, touch your heel with the back of the head, but you are not making spiritual progress. The sattvic thought is a pleasant thought. You live in a world of pleasant thoughts and create pleasant thoughts around you, and people respond to you pleasantly. [This] is the first and foremost test of spiritual growth. You can sit and meditate six hours a day, you know, for thirty-six years, you know, and [if you] cultivate painful thoughts in the other eighteen hours of the day, you are not getting anywhere. Just watching your thoughts, watching them and purifying them.

There is a lovely book out, Anger the Misunderstood Emotion by Carol Tarvis, says things I’ve been saying for years. Just wonderful reading, you know. I strongly recommend that book. We can order. It’s expensive. I think about $15.00. It’s really worth reading. In fact, the teachers should undertake a little project in which you have recommended readings, you know, on these subjects, like Diet for a Small Planet [by Frances Moore Lappe], Small is Beautiful [by E. F. Schumacher], Voluntary Simplicity [by Duane Elgin], this book Anger the Misunderstood Emotion. From time to time I have recommended books like that. We should have the kinds of books of which we can talk in a class, you know, just kind of throw and idea: “You might want to read such-and-such book,” you know. A very nice topically-written books, lovely books. We should have a list of non-Institute, general books like that. I don’t know who . . . . It would be a very simple project. You can just keep adding to that list, and later on you can grade it by “Beginning,” “Intermediate” and “Advanced” if you like. You know, or whatever. There are a few like that, very, very nice. I do have a book list on various yoga titles: “Beginning,” “Intermediate,” “Advanced,” “Karma,” “Christianity,” this, that, so on, “Scriptures,” and so forth.

Your personal practice is the key. Keeping of the personal practice. It shows. Personal practice of your own yoga and meditation. Practice of meditation before teaching. We used to have a rule here. I don’t know how well it is still enforced or not, that you come one hour before class and sit where you are teaching from, sit and meditate. Come an hour before; sit and meditate. I had this rule right from the beginning, and if it’s not being maintained, it should be maintained. Get here an hour before, wash yourself, change into your teaching clothes, change your mind, change your atmosphere, sit, meditate, then teach. So, your personal practice of meditation at home, your personal practice before teaching, and your personal practice of mindfulness, cultivating purity of body, mind and thought, see?

And if a teacher himself has neither love for others nor discipline in himself, no matter how much technique you know or how many certificates you’ve gathered, your students will run away. You won’t keep them. Learn to keep your students. Learn to keep your students in the class, and learn to keep your students in the Center after the class is over. You are not teachers of classes; you are teachers of people. Teaching a class is only part of teaching the people, see. And you are concerned with each and every individual in your class. Remember that we want them to continue their practice, we want them to be inspired to do so. You are their model, see. It is not like a university class. You are not like a college teacher, walk in the class, scribble a few things on the blackboard, and you walk out, see. Whether you do your homework, or you don’t do your homework, whether you get “A” or “B,” well, as teacher it is none of your business, you know. A lot of people also come here with that type of attitude: “Why are you concerned with whether I practice or I don’t practice. I pay my fees.” We have had that kind of thing. You have to handle that very gently. Initially anything negative should be handled very gently.

Wriggle your way into their hearts. Three days later the person himself realizes: “I can’t do that to him. He’s such a nice man. She’s such a nice teacher.” Well, you have changed something, see. Create a personality that you can use to other people’s advantage. Create a personality, you see, just by the presence of which other people change, see. A lot of people who disagree with the way that the Center is run, and this and that and so on. Oh, they sort of stay on and stay around year after year and put up with all the imperfections and all the faults and all the flaws. “Well, can’t leave Panditji.” Well, why can’t you leave Panditji? What’s so special? I use their love for myself. I’ve created love in their mind for me, and I use their love towards me for their own benefit. And out of that love they continue some practice and try to make some changes. And my master, he is such a master at it. You just won’t believe it. You do the same. Positive manipulation. You are, without any excuse or apology, you are people-manipulators. You are manipulators of people’s psychology in such a way that they change and they improve, that they get better. You try all kinds of psychological props so that they go away better than they were. That’s all. In whatever area they go away better, it doesn’t matter. Even if their noses didn’t touch the knees, but they went away better in some other way, then that’s just fine, you see.

So it’s your personal communication. A lot of times I’ve found among teachers no eye-contact with students, see. No contact, no personal feeling. A lot of times the teachers in the class are not watching what the students are doing, see. They are just doing your bit. They are just doing their bit, coming in the class and going through the steps, and done. Not really watching which person is not doing it right. And what are his difficulties? What is his difficulty? What is the psychology of a stiff neck? With very many different meanings to this phrase. There is a psychology to a stiff neck, understand. And you have to work on that psychology. But that requires your developing your perception of people, and your perception develops only through love. There’s no technique. You just have to be genuinely interested in the people for the time you are sitting as a teacher or acting as a teacher anywhere, you see. Your genuine compassion – so much pain, so much suffering, you see.

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Question: “Do we have any kind of instruction someplace which explains the psychology of what happens: why somebody can’t bend forward. What is the psychology behind it? Why somebody’s neck is so stiff. What is the psychology?”

Student: “Bodymind [by Ken Dychtwald] and some body language books. But there is a book called Who’s the Matter with Me? It’s actually a medical book, and it’s very simply written. I’m not telling you it’s highfalutin medical, but the point is that it looks at what is the personality, what is the particular disease, what is the need in the personality to be sick. And you can just extrapolate from that with your own intuition as to how that applies to individuals, including yourself. I mean, that is who you learn with first. It’s your own house. But it really has helped me just to look at other people, you know. What is the need? And then you’re much more gentle with that person anyway, and then they begin to change.”

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Question: “Should we be teaching only the postures and breath-awareness and mindfulness, or should be going into some of these finer details?”

I have an ambivalent feeling about it. This kind of a thing verges on therapy, and we are not here trained in psychiatry, psychology or medicine, see. That is why we send people with really acute problems to those who are qualified to deal with them in this particular type of terminology. And in a large majority of cases you don’t really need to discuss this in detail. Or you can talk to a person individually and suggest that he go into himself and see where exactly the stiff neck is really coming from, see, and search. But a lot of people are also not quite qualified to do that internal search, see? They are liable to, instead of blaming “X,” they start blaming “Y,” instead of the Alpha – that’s me, the person himself, and finding out exactly where the resistance is coming from. So we cannot at this stage develop that particular content of our classes in that direction until we are trained into psychotherapy based on physical yoga, see? A little of my reading on The Philosophy of Hatha Yoga might help, but I don’t think I have gone into this part of it at all. I haven’t, and I don’t know if any of the other Institute writers or writers on yoga have, you know. But you would have to handle that part very carefully so that you, an unqualified person, may not be accused of using therapy and thereby complicating matters. We have always been very, very legally conscious. That’s why we don’t have biofeedback here. Even though some of our teachers have biofeedback programs privately elsewhere, we don’t have one here for the same reason; that we want to be extremely careful.

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Inaudible Question: “Are there any ancient texts that go into quite this sort of subjects? You mentioned once that precise measurements are taken of the distances between various parts of the body and certain dispositions and character types are determined.”

Yes, there is the ancient text called Samudraka-shastra. I don’t think it has a published translation. I think it has a mimeographed thesis or something available someplace by the ancient author, Samudra. But that is simply more the foundation of a palmistry-like science, you know. You can say . . . . It’s not quite astrology. It’s simply the reading of a person’s body, the way people read palms.

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Question: “You once mentioned that there are texts in which there was a particular method in which Brahmins were taught from birth to assess certain personality types as far as different students go.”

Yes, there are writings which do speak of the body characters with relation to qualification of a student. This is done more in the texts that are not in the mainstream of yoga. For example, Visuddhi-magga. There are one or two excellent English translations available, but you probably will not go beyond the first four pages. It’s so thick, you know, and so detailed. This is the highest manual of Buddhist meditation system and Buddhist meditation pedagogy. And you would find some of this kind on information there. It has not been paraphrased. This aspect has not been paraphrased into more readable English. And I believe that there are similar texts in the Chan school, but I am personally not familiar with the Chinese works. Those people who wrote these works, see, where did they learn from? See. Learn from there. See. Learn from your intuition. Who is going to sit down and memorize, you know, the shape of the nose in relation to the qualification for postures? No. At this stage of our development, it’s a little too ambitious. The basic yoga postures and so on are designed to take care of whatever resistance you have through the movement and breathing and so on, in person of reasonable mental health. A person whose mental health is higher than the normal reasonably expectation isn’t going to come and sit in your class; he’ll go to the right guru, okay. And a person whose mental health is lower than a mean average norm, does not belong in the class. Send him to a therapist. See. Okay. But a little mention of it occasionally is helpful. See. And you just have to learn to perceive what might be the psychological background, see.

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Question: “Panditji, what you have just said I don’t want to labor, but there will be many different interpretations and impressions left for each of us because the idea of psychological background is so widely understood and misunderstood. Is there a specific way in which yoga helps an individual to understand the idea of psychological background and to improve the general tone or to understand that better?”

Okay, when we use the word “psychology,” we don’t use it in the reductionist sense: “my relationship with my mother caused it” kind of thing, you know. “Maybe if you talked with my mother, it might help me.” That is not what we mean, okay. We are talking about the states of mind that we have cultivated. You see, when an incident “X” occurs in your life, there is no mechanically predetermined response “Y” that you must give. People say, “Well, I am this way because incident “X” occurred, implying that to incident “X” there is fixed mechanistically determined response “Y”. You follow? And that becomes an excuse-making and, you know, rationalizing and justifying and so on and so forth for the “Y,” the response that we choose. But, you have response “Y-1”,
“Y-2″,”Y-3” and “Y-4”, and “Z” and “Z-1” and “Z-2” and “Z-3” and “Z-4”, and all the letters in between and all the possible algebraic formulations you can give. You follow? And so, first of all, we must not use, see, Freudian-Jungian analystic methods so completely that we are slaves to them, that we are slaves to the incident “X” that occurred, because person-A in the face of the same incident “X” will respond one way and person-B will respond in a different way. And person-A at one time will respond one way, and at another time will respond in another way, and so on.

So we speak of internal states of mind that we cultivate. I personally believe and strongly believe that ideals are the best therapy for any emotional difficulty. The ideals that you have believed in, that you have cultivated, that you live by, are the ones, you see, that can help you determine your emotional responses, see? If, for example, if you strongly believe in the ideal of monogamy, you can’t have an emotional response to another woman approaching you, no matter how beautiful she is. You simply do not have an emotional response to another man approaching you, no matter how handsome or attractive he is. You see? And another person says, “Well, I was in such a situation. There was nothing I could do about it. Oh well, I’m a human being. This was my response.” Do you follow what I’m saying?

So, I consider ideals to be the determinants of the weakness or strength of our emotions. A certain little emotion may arise, but at what intensity it is experienced is determined by your ideal. You may have the emotion of rage, but your ideal determines whether you are going to take it to its logical conclusion as murder, or throwing a bottle through somebody’s window. It’s your ideal which determine it. “Well, I can’t allow myself to get that far. I’m only going to curse him in my mind, or standing on my balcony, or throw abuse at him. I’m going to take him to court.” You follow? “Well, maybe I’ll have a fist fight with him, but I’m not going to murder him.”

You see, it’s your ideals which determine the intensity of your emotional ceiling and its expression, you see. And it is the cultivating of ideals that I believe in actually, not the cultivating of emotions. Emotions get cultivated automatically as ideals get cultivated. That’s why you cannot find an exact word in English for Yamas and Niyamas. Non-violence: is it an ideal or is it an emotion? Follow? Somebody slaps me on one cheek. My response of slapping him on two, see?, both sides of him, or my response of showing him my other cheek, that is determined by my ideal, see?

And this book, Psychology of the Beautitudes by Arpita is such a beautiful, neat little book on it. Follow? I mean, really to understand the yoga view of emotions, all you have to do is to read the Sermon on the Mount. If you have nothing else, you know, throw away all the books, if you really read the Sermon on the Mount, you have got the yoga psychology, psychology as understood by any person of spiritual aspiration. That has been my savior, okay. I only speak from my experience, you know.

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Question: “Can anyone create positive ideals, coming from any background?”

Can anyone create positive ideals? Yes. Coming from any background? Yes. You already have positive ideals. Everybody has positive ideals. Everybody has the seed of positive ideals. There is no one, no one in the world, because that’s a basic, divine urge in a human being. In us human beings there is a basic beastly urge. There are basic human urges. And there are basic divine urges. See? Which one of these you chose to respond to is up to you. But all three kinds of urges are present in every human being, see? You simply choose to respond to the divine urges in you. You start cultivating those ideals, see. And when you don’t choose to cultivate them, then you have all kinds of excuses, you see.

But, you see, it all requires a great deal of flexibility in human beings. And I am more and more recognizing what a sinister handicap it is that is keeping all of us back in our progress: inflexibility, you know.

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Question: “Is it true that if you’re flexible in the body, that it also reflects in the mind?”

Well, yes. If you are flexible in the body, it reflects in the mind. And if you are flexible in the mind, you are flexible in the body. You know, you may have recently participated in the Tennis-yoga. That’s what’s being talked about, you know. We had Ricardo Mello from the Institute here a while back. And his entire teaching is on how one used the body, how one carries the shot, see?, and so on. It shows his entire character.

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Question: “How does one lead a yoga life-style with flexibility?”

We talk about regulation and we talk about discipline. And then some people are so fixated on discipline that they can’t manage to break a rule without feeling guilty, you know. I was amazed when I first came to the West, okay, way back thirty years ago; well, one of the things I had to learn to do was wear a tie, okay. That’s part of the normal Western mode of dressing. It required a flexibility, see?, to learn to wear a tie, you know. In England, you know, if you are not wearing a tie and you go to some decent company, they say, “Why naked?” See. And then I came here in the middle of the late sixties, and I came from teaching in the university with my ties on, and some of my students in my very first classes sitting on the doorsteps of my house started giggling and laughing: “Hey look! He’s got a ties on!” You know. So for them, that was a position, not realizing that for me that was not the position. For me, wearing a tie was a sign of flexibility. Do you understand? So you take a fixed position. Wear a tie; that is a fixed position. Don’t wear a tie is another fixed position, see? I don’t take those fixed positions, and where the occasion calls for it, I dress in immaculate Western way. And when the occasion calls for it, I dress in immaculate Eastern way. And where there is neither of the occasion, I wear mini-dhotis or a loincloth, you see. But I invite some of my ashramites to come out to a dinner with me and want to enjoy their company, and they are so fixated on wearing jeans, you see, than they can’t stand the thought of flexibility of changing into something that is appropriate for the occasion, see? They are stuck. They are not making progress in emotional flexibility. In everything they will take a fixed approach. Do you understand? So shift. Keep your ideals. Keep your principles. If you’ve got those, you can afford to shift. But if with every shift your ideals change, see, then is not a discipline; it is not an ideal. It is, then, fanaticism.

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Question: “There is a fine line between when to stick to your ideas and being rigid.”

Yes, there is a very, very fine line as to when you adhere to your ideals and when you allow yourself a little leeway. You see, the ideal is maintained in the heart, in the mind, see, and when that is maintained, then you can compromise the external act. Only you are the judge, you see. Only you are the judge, see. Someone hears I have had a long, long, long travel. I’m very tired, and I’m still doing seminars and so on. A not-so-young lady comes and says, “Panditji, let me give you a massage.” I say, “No, thank you very much. I don’t let a woman touch me, okay. I’ll never accept a massage from a woman. For a while I had to decide, for example, whether to accept any of my women students embrace, okay? And I said to Swamiji, “Swamiji, what should I do. I don’t want to offend anybody. People do get offended.” And he said, “Well, keep your mind clear.”

Fine. I keep my mind clear, see? And I know what’s there. Sometimes I also know that the embrace is less than pure, see. If I detect that, I separate myself. I create a barrier. See? But it’s my perception, my ideal in my mind and my thought that is important to me. And it’s not whether I actually let a woman touch my hand or not, see?

So you are the person to see into your ideals, see? Then the external act can be very flexible. All right. Mindfulness. Mindfulness of your ideals. Actually there is nothing to cultivating emotions or thinking less painful thoughts and so on and so forth. Don’t make that such a problem. Cultivating the ideals is the thing, and living by those ideals non-fanatically, follow, non-fanatically. And don’t go around imposing them on everybody, you know: “Hey, this book here says you need to take a vow of poverty. So, my dear husband, you’ve got to throw out your coin collection.”

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Question: “I fear I’m becoming judgmental, passing judgment on people, and I don’t like this quality of myself. Where does judgmental stuff come out of?”

Well, I think the judgement is part of one’s own ego, you know. You see, fortunately or unfortunately, for my own spiritual progress I leave such a spiritually sheltered life, you know, that sometimes even my wife says, “You don’t live out in the world. You don’t understand the problems people have to deal with when they’re out there.” And that is possible. It is possible that at times I am giving advice without knowing exactly what it is that people have to deal with in ordinary daily life, because I have such a shielded, such a protected life, you know. I just don’t have the company, you know, day-to-day, ordinary-life company that some of you people have to deal with, you know. Everybody who comes to me comes with some kind of a spiritual face, you know. And so it’s very easy for me to sit there and say, “Well, I am not judgmental.” See. Once again it’s a matter of remaining unostentatious in spirituality, see? You don’t have to make a loud declaration of your spirituality.

One of the things that I do succeed in doing is that whatever level of a person I meet, I tend to say, “Yeah! Yeah! Sure! Yes, yes! Okay! There is something to that. You know. I choose to be this way. I’m sorry, you know. That’s kind of my preference, you know, and so on. But, yes, carry on doing this way. You might try something else along side here, you know.” Gently drop the hint, see? Because I don’t have to go prove my spirituality to him. You know, I only have to prove it to myself and to my Guru, you see. So, it’s again a matter of the same kind of flexibility. A little humility also, you know.

It’s more, I think, a matter of cultivating humility and just being in general an affable and agreeable, nice enough person who can agree with his opponent, you see? Agree with his opponent and yet carry on with his own lifestyle, you know, without saying, “My lifestyle is better. Now I don’t do it that way.” Carry on with your own life style that you have chosen, quietly, and let your opponent find his own way. When you think he’s ripe for a change, only then speak about anything, but not prematurely, you know. And as you cultivate humility this will happen, see? And people get bogged down; people get stuck; they don’t get a response; they don’t get a positive response because they themselves are not sure inside themselves. A lot of times we are trying to convince others because we are actually trying to convince ourselves, see. And there are these subliminal cues we give out, and our own resistances reflect in others and get thrown back at us in the form of the opponent’s argument, see. And this happens all the time. If you are not succeeding in your communication, you just are not convinced about what you are communicating. If you are not succeeding in your communication, you just aren’t convinced about what you are communicating, see. And if you are convinced about what you are communicating, then the least exertion is most effective. The least exertion is most effective. See? Try. Try least exertion in your communication, see. It works! Thank you.

Just go back to the first of the things that we said. Your success shows in whether the person continues to practice and wants to come back to something more afterwards. What I would like to see the Center teachers do . . . what some teachers are successfully doing is to let the Center permanent membership develop out of your classes, see. Not only teaching a class, but representing the Center, you know, and creating that atmosphere with the least amount of evangelizing. Just dispensing helpful information. Okay.

Thank you all.

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Editor’s Note

This is a transcript of a session with Swami Veda Bharati (then Pandit Usharbudh Arya) at The Meditation Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, on July 17, 1983.

Just a few thoughts that I’d like to share with you, simple things, very, very simple guidelines, okay? Sometimes get letters from little, beginning, struggling centers. What shall we do? We have financial problems. We don’t have enough teachers. How do we publicize? How do attract members? How do we get more donations? How do we become more effective? And all those questions are so familiar from the experience that’s been developed here. And I begin to give them one or two standard answers. One, your purpose as executives, administrators, teachers of the center is not the growth of the center, nor the solvency of the center, nor that you must make a success of the center and how do we go about making a success of the center? The moment you begin to think in terms of “How do we begin to attract more people so that the center keeps running?” you have immediately impeded the progress of the center.

Your work is compassion. Your work is love. You happen to have, somehow, stumbled into a tradition which is tremendously helpful. And if you are a good Christian, your work is not to expand the church, but to give out the Good News, right? You are familiar with that phrase? The Christ has come. This is the Good News. That is the work of a real missionary, not the ones sponsored by the, you know, antichrist. Your work is compassion. There is terrible, terrible suffering in the hearts and minds of people and their lives. There are tremendous weaknesses in everyone, including my spine. And while I am busy strengthening my spine, I help others to the point to which I have helped myself. No more. You cannot pretend to do more. And no less. See? So that people wherever you are can derive a benefit from you. That’s the way I am trying to mold my life.

I will not say I have molded my life. I’m just trying to mold my life. I sit in an aeroplane, and I put a little brief case under me on the seat, and I sit, and I sit erect, and while the next fellow is busy taking his free one-dollar shot, no, I sit there holding my nose [in nadi shodhana] and get these glances: “Oh, what a silly thing. This man is sitting here holding his nose.” And I chuckle in my mind, and I say, “There are people here doing sillier things, like smoking, and nobody gives them sideways glances.” If you are certain about what you are about, there can be no doubt in your mind. There can be no fears in your mind. There can be no insecurities in your mind. There can be no embarrassment in your mind. And sometime people will come around, “What were you doing?” And I give them my Meditation Center card. I have given lessons in the aeroplane. Even the time I was flying once from India after attending to my sister’s death – my only last living relative – on the way I taught at least three people. Do you need a center to teach? No, you don’t. You need yourself. You need your compassion only, see? And because you need to teach because people need to be taught, therefore the center is provided. Get that straight in your mind. There are administrative problems and financial problems, and this and that, and so on and so forth, okay? But for the last ten years we have been insolvent. We are never solvent. Because our work keeps growing, see? And so the resources have to keep growing. But resources are there to support the work. The work is not there to support the resources. All right. So that’s one point that in our mind we should be careful about. Then, if your work requires that you need to ask somebody for money, you will not have the embarrassment because your internal mind is clear. You have embarrassment because your internal mind is not clear, but you are uncertain of your own compassion and your own work, someplace. See?

The second thing I tell these centers is that the growth of centers in different places depends upon the personal spiritual growth of the teachers. The growth of your work depends upon your personal growth, your spirituality. Techniques come easy. Anybody can memorize all the exercises. What’s the difference between a yoga teacher and an acrobat? Huh? An acrobat can twist his body into far more complex shapes than any of us is going to manage to do in this life, see? But if an acrobat came here and bent backwards and touched his nose to his heel and said, “Well, can you make me a yoga teacher?” I would say, “No.” “Well, I can provide very exciting classes.” “All right, I’ll come and I’ll pay you to enter a circus and see you. Wonderful! Keep doing your job. There you are!” So it is the personal spiritual growth.

Now, there are not too many hard formulas for that: very, very simple, platitudes; you have heard [them] all before. Keep applying them. Keep applying them. Be very clear about what yoga is all about. None of this astral stuff, and psychic stuff, and people walking about with pyramid-shaped wire hangers on their heads. No. Antennas, receiving messages from UFO’s – Oh God! Some of our members recently – I would say ex-members – were in a two-page article in the newspapers, going about doing this electronic, psychic stuff, and talking about higher consciousness, you know. Stay away from that phenomenon. That’s nothing to do with spirituality. You want entertainment? Go to the movies. That’s fine. You can read some novels, stories – sing, dance. If you are talking of this psychic and astral stuff, know that you are giving yourself some diversion and entertainment. But so far as yoga is concerned, please stay on the straight and the narrow. And those who want that electronic, psychic stuff, let them pursue that. You have nothing to do with it. Okay? Let that be very clear because in all of us there is a temptation to want to think, “Well, there has got to be an easier way than having to sit down for a half an hour of meditation every morning. Can’t I just receive a message from a UFO and pass it straight through electronic cords dug into my skull?” Neither Moses nor Christ went around wearing wire hangers around their heads. A crown of thorns I can understand. Okay? Be prepared to wear a crown of thorns. All the pursuit of miraculous powers, the desire to do mind-reading – which in any case should be banned by the privacy act. And don’t attribute any of that stuff to your teachers. They have nothing to do with it. Okay?

Don’t consider your teachers your emotional pegs to hang your emotions on. Don’t treat us as father figures and Swamiji as a grandfather figure. Because then for a while you fulfill the need for a father figure, and then the moment we do something that is slightly unpleasant, then all the tremendous agitation and resentment you’ve got against your father, then it all comes pouring forth, and then that center is no good. None of that. See? Learn to stand on your own two feet and be self-inspired. Be self-inspired. Whenever you feel yourself going down, the great prophets and sages for centuries have spoken these words, have written these words, have given this guidance: Read something inspiring every day! Read something inspiring every day.

Love your family. Honor your elders, since you need father figures anyway. There can be no better father figure than your own father, no matter how badly he treated you as a child. Well, there are exceptions. There is no law that is a [perfectly] written out law.(?) But there is no better father figure than your own father. There’s no better mother figure than your own mother. You just happen to know their weaknesses more because you are close to them. Ask my children about my weaknesses. Okay. Do you follow? So, love your families. Love your elders. Practice humility. Practice compassion. Love everyone on the street. But “love all” does not always mean kisses; sometimes it also means a karate chop. You see a woman being attacked. Love the woman and protect her. Love also the man who is attacking her. And because of that love, give him a karate chop, to save him from himself, out of love. And if you do it out of love, then the strength of your chop will be no less than necessary to prevent him, and no more than necessary to prevent him. Any less is violence. Any more is violence. But exact, optimum force is not violence.¹ Follow? And with that view, love everyone. Give as much of yourself as you can. Keep giving. Keep giving. Keep giving. Keep giving. Keep giving. Keep thinking of more and more ways to give. Whatever it is that you can give. See? Give happiness. The greatest of the gifts in the world is giving happiness. If you have made one single person in the world happy, the Lord God in heaven will come running barefoot to see who you are. You won’t have to go looking for God. God will come looking for you. I’m telling you that. The most difficult thing in life is to make other people happy. And if you have make one person happy in your life, one person, you don’t have to worship God, you don’t have to go to church, you don’t have to sing hymns, you don’t have to do any prayers, you don’t even have to sit for meditation. Lord God in heaven will come running barefoot: “I have got to see this person; who is that? He is making one of my creations happy.” Find ways of making people happy. Find ways of making people comfortable. Find ways of comforting people. Love all. Give. And if you have a block against giving, give. That is the only thing that removes the block. There is no other technique. If you have a block against giving, give. That alone will remove the block. If you are standing before an obstacle, the only thing that removes the obstacle is your ability to jump over it. Or the obstacle remains there standing firmly in your way. Have the courage to go ahead and give anyway.

When you learn to give, you can learn to withhold. See? Meanwhile, practice giving. This is the technique of teaching. You follow? You are here sitting and listening to me. You know why? Because I love you. See? I don’t have time to see all of you separately, and I don’t have two hours to spend listening to your tales of woes and sorrows, so you think I don’t love you. But if all the two thousand initiates, those who have stayed around and those who are gone their way, were to demand two hours a week of my time, would I be able to give that. So I have to limit my ways of giving my love to you, see? And in spite of the complaint: “Panditji is always busy. He never has time for anybody, and so on,” you know, you are here because I love you, because the guru lineage loves you, and because the guru lineage teaches me to love you. And the moment I sit down here . . . . Ordinarily I am an ordinary, a very, very ordinary human being. You don’t know that. And the moment I sit down here, the Guru Lineage takes over, and it’s their love that begins to flow and opens my mouth. And I promise to speak for ten minutes, and I’m speaking for twenty.

I’ll tell you one more secret of success in life. It’s a very simple trick. Very difficult to master because you have doubts. Everybody here has doubts. When you sit and listen to it, you say, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Oh yeah! That’s right. Ah ha!” But the moment you put on your shoes, there is some black magic in the shoes. The moment you put on your shoes to walk out of here, the black magic takes over, and you say, “Hum? Well, I’ve got to think about it.” And you take off your shoes, and the black magic is there all over your feet. The next time you buy shoes, find some that have not been hexed. I’ll tell you one secret. I’ll tell you two or three little secrets, okay? Wherever you go, wherever you sit down, you sit in a bus, you sit in your car seat, you go to a party, even if you are going to get drunk, it doesn’t matter. . . . Wherever you go and sit down – you come in here and sit down – okay? – mentally, without any ritual, without letting on that you are doing anything unusual at all, behaving among the rogues as a fellow rogue – do you follow? Wherever you sit – if you are a policeman and sit in a policeman’s chair, and if you have been arrested and have to go sit waiting on a bench, or you sit waiting in a doctor’s office. . . . Wherever you go and sit down – okay? – mentally say your mantra three times, and surrender that seat to the Guru Lineage. You don’t know what “Guru Lineage” means. Let me say this plain and simple. No matter how much we talk about it, you have no idea at present. Only when you begin to teach, you begin to suspect that there is somebody who is helping you teach. But you can’t figure it out. You can’t quite pinpoint it. Okay? Wherever you sit down, mentally surrender your seat to the Holy Ghost, to the Guru Lineage, to the teaching Spirit of the Universe, through the tradition that is yours. You say, “I am here; this is Thine.” It doesn’t matter what you are doing. Even if you go and sit in a prostitute’s house. And those who have never gone to a prostitute’s house should go, because if you don’t, who else will? Do you understand? Don’t they suffer? Wherever there is suffering, that is your place. See? Charita bhikko charakam. Bahujana hitaya. Bahujana sukhaya. When the Buddha sent out his first band of monks, he said, “Monks, wander, for the benefit of the many, for the comfort of the many.” “Monks, wander,” he said, “for the benefit of the many, for the comfort of the many.” “Monks, wander. . . . ” That is the motto – Bahujana hitaya. Bahujana sukhaya – “. . . for the benefit of the many, for the comfort of the many.” So wherever you go and sit down, just remember the Guru Spirit and mentally surrender that seat. Don’t make it look odd. Don’t do anything psychic, astral, you know – close your eyes or roll your eyes up or down or sideways, you know. In the eyes of the world be normal.

The wiser you get, the more idiotic you should act in the world. That is a principle. It’s been given to the disciples throughout the centuries. The wiser you get, the more idiotic you should act. See? One time Swami was telling me this. Some place he was staying and there were too many people gathering, too many people gathering, too many people gathering, bothering: ‘Swamiji, I want a child. Swamiji, my husband is quarreling with me. Swamiji, my wife is . . . . ‘ “‘I can’t sit down to meditate.’ And I was trying to tell my host to save me from this crowd and this throng. I don’t want any of it. And the less I want, the more they come. So one day when the time was for all the people to come, I sat down with this Johnny Walker whisky bottle. I filled it with water. And when people came and sat down, here I was pouring from the Johnny Walker whisky bottle into a glass and drinking and acting stupid. After three days everybody stopped coming.” He has all these funny stories to tell.

Oh yes, one day he was in the mountains, here in the Rockies, and he had gone away to be alone. And he was walking in the town of Vale, Colorado. And somebody from behind over there across the street shouted, “Swami Rama!” “So I kept walking.” “Swami Rama!” “I just kept walking. He came across the street, running after me: “Swami Rama!” “Oh,” I said, “You must be mistaken. You are thinking of my twin brother. I have a twin brother that looks exactly like me, and people always mistake me to be Swami Rama.”

So, whatever you practice, practice unostentatiously, without any external demonstration. Wherever you sit, sit down there, surrender that seat to the guru, say you mantra three time, carry on with whatever you are doing. And keep doing it, even if nothing happens. I’m telling you a very great secret. Whatever success I have had in helping people in any way, or making my own progress, has come from this one secret, nothing else. When I need something, before I ask anyone, I ask my Great Mother. See? Wherever you walk, carry God in your heart, just in your heart, locked away safely, like a precious treasure. When you have a treasure, you don’t go around showing it to everybody. Okay? You have no idea what God is. Okay, the Methodists say one thing; the Baptists say something else, you know. And that man Khoumeni has his own idea of God. You have no idea what God is, but carry the thought in your heart anyway. Wherever you are, carry, even when you are in the loving embrace of your spouse, love God. I read a beautiful sentence from Rabindranath Tagore yesterday: “In love God kisses the finite. In love man kisses the Infinite.” In love God kisses the finite, and man kisses the Infinite.” So, always kiss the Infinite in whomever you kiss.

That leads us to one more principle: If you want to be an effective person, effective, to be able to accomplish whatever you want to accomplish over the years. It will not come in one day. I will tell you two secrets. Keep your sexual thoughts limited to one person. It will give you tremendous energy. It will save the unnecessary discharges of energy from your body and mind. You will conserve your mental energy, and you will learn to channel it. And secondly, do sex when you are doing sex, but don’t do it all the time. Don’t keep doing it just walking about here and there. It will also make your sexual experience tremendously more intense, joyful, and pleasant. Two things. I’m not asking you to take the vows of celibacy. You are not monks. See? You are people of the world. Next to God, sex is perhaps the greatest pleasure. If you want to enjoy sex, if you really want to enjoys sex and have some satisfaction from it, it will not come from what the books on Kama Shastra, the Kama Sutras, have called sashu-vrtti (the way of a rabbit), which is the way of most people who are uneducated in the art of sex – little discharge here, little discharge there, little discharge there, little discharge there. That’s not the way of enjoying sex, of gaining satisfaction in sex. Save your mental energy for one person and I assure you it is not possible for one man and one woman to finish exploring each other in one lifetime. Human beings are tremendous walking treasures. It’s not possible! People say, “My sex life has become boring.” I don’t understand that. I am puzzled as to what they are saying. There are only two secrets to a successful sexual life. Save your sexual thoughts for one person, and don’t do sex when you are not doing sex. It’s impossible for an average person to follow this second rule, but try it anyway. In about twenty years time you will begin to experience satisfaction. And if you don’t follow this rule, you will die, but you will never have said, “I have received satisfaction in my sexual life.” The difference between the pleasure of sex and the pleasure of God is – between the pleasure of sex and the pleasure of meditation is – in the pleasure of sex you always have the expectation of satisfaction, but never the satisfaction. The moment you have done the act, you are not satisfied. You want some more some other way. In meditation there is satisfaction. But in sex you begin to derive some satisfaction by following these rules. Kiss the Infinite. Save your sexual energy for one person. So sex only when you are doing sex. These are the three principles. I can say a fourth. The fourth is to constantly give of yourself for the pleasure of the other. There is no fifth. What does it have to do with teachers. These are matters of personal spiritual growth. This is the art of love. This is also the conserving of your mental energy, which you discharge uselessly. You can make love to your wife or husband every day, but only at the time you are making love, and you are a celibate. And you will be surprised when you follow these three or four rules, you will be surprised at the tremendous amount of love that grows in you because of that energy which you have not uselessly discharged. Do you understand? Don’t go say to your husband or your wife, “Well, darling, you know I am a teacher at The Meditation Center, and we believe in celibacy. You can practice celibacy if you know the art of sex. And these are the four things. The energy that you will conserve by following these principles flows out from you as love and compassion. For the rest of the creation you will come and sit before the class, and your one glance will say, “Yes, he loves us.” And you will speak from the Heart. And people will listen to you. And you will be effective. You will be an effective teacher. It will also help you overcome many, many, many, many other emotional turmoils. See? Restraint is not repression. Restraint is conversation of energy. And all the power, the so-called powers of effectiveness attributed to the saints, the spiritual teachers and so on, derive from not from repression, but from that restraint which is the conservation of energy.

And with all of that then comes the need to constantly train yourself, constantly train yourself, read more on yoga, make experiments with your postures, observe yourself, observe the effects of diet on you, observe the effects of your emotions on you, observe, observe, self-observation, self-observation, and your practice of meditation. The physical yoga practice is a meditation also. And your meditation is meditation. And no matter how busy you are, don’t stop your meditation. Before you sit down to meditation, you will say, “My, I have this to do, and I have that to do. Now how am I going to get it all done? And I don’t have this half hour to spare.” So people don’t sit for the meditation – “I’m too busy.” The moment that you sit down, you will find that you have that half hour to spare, and no great earth-shaking harm came to you. And all your affairs were taken care of, you know. Busy-ness is no excuse. Meditation makes time for itself. And when you have practiced meditation and learned to direct your mind, automatically you will find that you are able to accomplish in less time the very things in which you previously took more time. Because, you see, the time we take in accomplishing things in life is not the time taken in actually doing it, but the time we take in being confused about what we have to do. See? And that confusion clears away, see? You are too busy to sit down only until you sit down. When you do actually sit down, you will find there is time, and your affairs will be taken care of.

And these are the basic principles of growth in anyone who is a teacher. To be a teacher you don’t have to be teaching classes. When you are filled with the energy, love and compassion, the students come to you. They gather around you, whether you are in a center or you’re not in a center. Wherever you are, that center is there. See? A man like Swami Rama comes to the United States. He does not bring a center with him. I did not first create the Center and then start teaching. If today you throw me bodily out of the Center, do you think I’ll be without a center? Huh? I’ll stand at an airport; I’ll have my center there. The center is in you. The rest is an arrangement for effectiveness. It’s a support system. All the membership, all the finance, all the contribution. No? It’s a support system, a shelter, a roof, a place where people can, well, have a rug to do their postures on.

And you people have provided that space. That is great. The teachers come and give of their time and give of their services. But one thing aches me. Many of our teachers are not really paying attention to their own spiritual growth. That is what aches me. They’re not keeping up with the studies. They’re not keeping themselves informed. They’re not trimming the fat off of the mind. No. And that really aches me! It really aches me! And that is what I would like to see happen – tremendous growth in the people. You know?

All right. Listen to this again and again. And if I don’t speak to you for the next ten years, what I’ve said to you this morning is enough for you for the next ten years. And above all, be self-inspired. Okay. God bless you. Thank you.

I’ve been meaning to read to you some passages:

We find the Buddha praising an Almsman who in his doctrinal discourse was demonstrating to the brethren, making the Law acceptable to them, setting them afire, gladdening them with urbane words, well- enunciated without hoarseness, with exposition of the meaning, pertinent and unbiased. We see the Buddha explain his teaching to his audience. He said, “Whatever may be their sort, I make myself of the like sort, whatever their language, I speak that language” – becoming as we are that we may be as he is. “But they knew me not when I spoke, and would ask ‘Who may this be that speaks thus, a man or a god?’ Whereupon I demonstrated the Law, made it acceptable to them, set them on fire, gladdened them. Whatever is not adapted to such and such persons as, are to be taught, cannot be called teaching.”

So you have to know intuitively who you are speaking to, and how to speak to him. Thank you.

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Editor’s Note

This is a transcript of a lecture given by Swami Veda Bharati at The Meditation Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, in 1982. Swami Veda Bharati was Pandit Usharbudh Arya at that time.

¹Swami Rama’s motto for the Himalayan Institute is from the Bhagavad-gita II.50:  yogah karmasu kausalam  = “Yoga is skillfulness in action.”

The title that I gave today was Communicating with Students. From what we have been saying all of this time, that should not longer be a problem. And I am going to play my old broken record all over again and will not tire of playing it. Your work is with yourself. You are working hard on your postures or your breathing or adding one more exercise to the list of those that you have mastered. But where it’s at is in your emotional framework. Let me remind you here again that we are doing a whole weekend on the Yamas and Niyamas next month, and I expect the teachers not to miss it, because that’s where it’s at. Asana, the third of the eight limbs of yoga, comes after Yama and Niyama. And a large number of us have not even begun to give serious thought to the Yamas and Niyamas. If you have got your Yamas and Niyamas straight, you have no more problems in the world. That is the test of the perfection of the Yamas and Niyamas, because then you have somebody solving all your problems. And that somebody is called the Yamas and Niyamas. You have a referent. You have some place to which to carry your problems. You have a set of guidelines. You have a set of systems against which you evaluate and measure everything in your life. Somebody there is counseling you. This applies. This does not apply. This is effective. This is not effective.

Please remember that to be an effective teacher, you have to be an effective person overall. An effective person is she or he who takes a task and is able to bring it to its fruition according to his or her will. And one needs to test oneself throughout life as to one’s effectiveness. How effective am I? Do I decide in my mind what I need done, and do I find that it got done according to my wishes? Has it produced the fruit of the color and the ripeness that I wanted. And if I have not produced the fruit of the color and the degree of ripeness that I wanted, why is it that I did fail? This can be with regard to your marital happiness: “Am I happy as I want to be?” No? Then make yourself happy. Be effective. And it is within the power of your will to do so. And I assure you, I do not speak as great swami, a renunciate far removed from the world of daily problems, but as a person who all his life has dealt with all the problems that you deal with, even on a larger scale. And I am giving you the benefit of my experimentations. I have not led a life free of problems, or free of suffering. But I have learned the art of solving the problems. I have learned the art of reducing my suffering. That is the only difference between you and me. What I’m asking you to do, what I am suggesting that you do, is to find the mental blocks that there are inside you against the solutions to your problems, the mental blocks that are preventing your success and your effectiveness. If your mind constantly dwells, it has no time for solutions.

If your mind constantly dwells on problems, it has no time for solutions. It is the nature of the mind that it can do only one thing at a time, at least your rational and emotional mind. It can do only one thing at a time. If it is busy complaining about the problems, there is no way that it can find a solution. The only way to find a solution is to neutralize your mind as regard to the problems themselves. Neutralize the emotional content of your mind with regard to a problem. By neutralizing your mind I mean neutralizing the emotional content to a problem before you can find a solution. And then the solution will present itself. This applies to your marital life. This applies to your other relationships. This applies to all the internal mental habits of anger or of depression or of self-pity or whatever it is that you have developed. These emotions are our enemies. They are blocks in the way of our progress. They reduce our effectiveness. And when our effectiveness is reduced, we go through a vicious circle in life: “I am not effective. Oh, I always fail. Oh, I am no good. It’s not going to work.” Somebody says, “Well, you’ve got to try.” “Well, all right. I will try, but don’t think it’s going to work.” So I have already blocked the possibility of my success. Because the energy, the mental energy, the free flow of mental energy, the free flow of my prana, which is liberated, released into a specific direction when my mind is emotionally neutral, that will bring the effectiveness about, that free flow is blocked by these mental situations.

And the unfortunate thing about the emotional content of our mind is that we are most often not aware of it. People who deny a certain emotional state are not dishonest, nor are they liars. People who deny being angry, people who deny being ill, people who deny being depressed, people who deny being in a mental state called selfishness, they are not liars, they are not deceivers; they simply are not aware. They simply are not aware that they have this mental content. And awareness is our first step. And we are not aware that the presence of these mental situations, is affecting indirectly our other situations and is reducing our effectiveness in life.

A human being has such a potential that he can just about accomplish whatever he sets out to accomplish. There is nothing on this earth that can be denied to you. I want you to believe this. There is nothing on this earth that can be denied to you. You can have it if you know the right mental way to go about accomplishing it. But, you see, there are a few subtle tricks. You have to judge your capacity to concentrate. There is nothing in the world that can be denied to you once you have learned to gauge your capacity to concentrate. And the greatest obstacle in the way of your concentration is the habit of dwelling on your problems. People say, “How am I going solve my problems if I don’t think about them?” Constructive thinking is one thing: sitting down, looking at the problem, analyzing it, examining the possiblities, with a clear and neutral mind, a mind without an emotional load concerning the problem. Because it is that emotional load which creates the block.

And, you know, I feel so sad at those of you whom I see with some frequency. I perceive the problem you have, and I say, “My goodness! This person is not seeing where his problem is really coming from.” And nobody else can show it to you: “My wife does not let me come to the Meditation Center.” “My husband is unhappy.” This, that, so on, so forth. “Am I recognized over there?” “Is my importance acknowledged?” “Was I greeted with due honor when I entered?” You see, these are very shallow symptoms where you are trying to compensate through the externals. This “honor,” “respect,” “acknowledgement” stuff [points to] some other inadequacy that you feel elsewhere. Someplace inside you there is inadequacy which you are unable to fulfill because you’re unable to acknowledge it. You are unable to see it. Or, even though you see it rationally, you have not the courage to fill that weak spot in you. So you are trying to look for strength, for compensation for that inadequacy in somebody else acknowledging you, in somebody else honoring you, in somebody else giving you an uplift. That is not the way of serving the world, or serving the guru’s mission, or serving your students. “Are my students acknowledging me? Are they respecting me? Am I making a good impression?” These are all emotional blocks. If you will be concerned on making a good impression on your students, you will never make a good impression.

So, point one, you have to learn to stop dwelling on your problems so constantly, consciously and unconsciously. Go, give yourself some selfless task and accomplish it. I don’t care how small a task. Start with small tasks. And then take on larger tasks. Try to take on those tasks against which you have some kind of a block. Overcome those blocks. Do something you don’t like. And do it lovingly. What that requires is becoming emotionally neutral about that. There is no person in the world whom you cannot please. There is no person in the world in whom, if he is the hardest rock on earth, whom you cannot melt slightly. There is no obstacle that you cannot somewhat reduce in strength. At present it will be highly ambitious to say, “Well, okay! Good! I am going to free myself of all my obstacles by tonight.” That you can if by tonight you can free yourself of all your blocks. “I am not succeeding financially.” It is because you have a block. You do not know how to. And not all the financial advisors in the world can help you. And the block in not in money matters. The block is not in your learning about economics. The block is elsewhere. Somewhere, someplace, sometime in your life you learned to accept defeat. Somewhere, someplace in your life you created a block against success. And if you can only point your finger at that block, success is yours. Go back and see where the block was created. What was the object of your fear? Overcome that object of fear. Go do again what at that time you refused to do because you were afraid. A trapeze artist who falls from the trapeze and wants to continue his career has to go right up to the trapeze right away, at that moment, immediately, or he will never go up on the trapeze again. And his career is ruined. Can you find out what it is that you have been afraid of? I challenge you to go and do that, today, tomorrow, in the next month. Take your time getting up enough courage. Allow your heart to beat faster for a while. That’s okay. Go and do it.

What does it all have to do with communication with students? That is all that the communication of students is made up of, is reducing your blocks; not reducing their resistances. Not reducing their resistances, reducing your blocks, which invite their resistances to you – to what you are teaching, to yoga, to the practice.

Every teacher should keep a spiritual journal. Make sure it is a spiritual journal, not an emotional journal. It’s not a journal filled with complaints against the world, or complaints about yourself against yourself. That it is a spiritual journal. An emotional journal is another thing. That is a different therapy. But that is also an essential part of self-therapy. But don’t confuse the two. The emotional journal and the spiritual journal are two different things. In a spiritual journal you have got your goals, your ideals, your principles, all clearly set: “I believe this. I believe this. I believe this. I believe this. I believe these to be the guidelines of my life. These are the lights under which I will find my solutions. I believe in being this kind of a person, this kind of a person, this kind of a person. I shall be thus. Thus shall I be.” And measuring yourself against those goals, those internal, purely spiritual goals, measuring your acts, your thoughts, your words, your emotional content against those emotional principles that you have established on page one, on January 1st, and saying, “Here I succeeded. Here I failed. Here I succeeded. Here I failed. This is the way I shall attempt to succeed. This is the way I shall reduce my failures – my spiritual successes and my spiritual failures.”

An emotional journal is a necessity for many. In an emotional journal you can write anything you want to. Write it, write it, write it, fill pages. (I wish I could use that time to write my books. If you have time to do that, come help me write my books.)

As a person develops insights into himself for herself, so he or she develops insights into others. Because any problem that anybody has ever faced, everybody has faced – perhaps to a small degree, to a minute degree – but everybody has faced in his or her own life. It’s a difference of degree. You have experienced the problems of every person in the world. If you cannot reduce your wife’s resistance to you, or your husband’s resistance to you, or your child’s resistance to you, you are not going to reduce your students’ resistance to the teaching that you are imparting. The principle of reducing the resistance is the same. If you will not train yourself to be effective in general life, at your job, in your money matters – it could even be your attractive dress – if you have not learned to make yourself effective in life, you will not be able to make yourself effective in a classroom. Go and make yourself effective. This is possible by having your spiritual goals clear, your mind free of 24-hour concern with your problems. The concern should be with solutions, not with problems. The concern should be with figuring out the way. And you may not do it in two months. You may accomplish it in twenty. But accomplish it you will!

I’d like to stop here and have you ask questions that are relevant. You can ask for yourselves, or you can ask for others.

Question: How do we bring that awareness to ourselves?

It’s simply a question of consistent looking at yourself. You see, you dig, and you dig a little more. But, you see, it must always be against a value system, or you end up confused, or you end up self-defeated. “Oh my, it’s just not working. Oh, I am so poor. I am so bad. I am just no good.” Because you are not measuring it against a value system. You have not set your goal. When you have set a goal: “Here is the mountain that I am climbing. Well, how much more I have to go? How much more I have to go? How much more I have to go?” You keep track of your progress. When I get angry, my concern is not “Oh, there I go again. Oh, I am angry. I am no good.” My concern is that now, “Oh my, I have added another karma to my mind. Now I have to wash my shirt again. I splattered it.” And I try to find my way to go wash my shirt. You have to find the water, and you have to find the soap, and you have find the place to wash it. This is a different approach from the normal approach that many people need, of course: Well, you got angry. You have to find some way to express it, okay. But what I am saying is there are two reactions possible right in my mind. Just as you have to any situation a choice of a fight or a flight response, mentally, so you have to any provocation the choice, the option, of a blessing or a cursing response. People go only so far as to say, “Well, you feel like cursing, then curse.” But I say you have the option of feeling like a blessing or feeling like a cursing. But there you exercise the option at that subtle place where you have the choice of a feeling inside you. “Shall I feel like blessing, or shall I feel like cursing?” Do you understand? And that subtle place people have not learned to acknowledge. That place is where the spiritual will resides. That place is where the principle of volition exists. And that principle of spiritual volition is not being used. And life becomes a mess. It becomes a confusion. See? And you will just have to learn to exercise that volition against a value system about which you are convinced. See?

It is the same thing as when people say, “Well, you talk of Yamas and Niyamas, and you talk of non-violence. I would be foolhardy, if someone is pointing a gun at me or threatening me with something, you see, not to try to defend myself.” I say, “All right. Yes. I totally agree. You should defend yourself.” And I will not advise you to go into a forest infested with wolves alone and unarmed. But I will not advise St. Francis to go armed. Do you follow? Because where your mind is, you need those arms. But where St. Francis’s mind is, he doesn’t need the arms. See? As you refine yourself, as your refine your non-violence – I will say a little bit more about it in the Yamas and Niyamas weekend – you see, well, you start carrying a smaller gun. Well, I don’t know if that’s a very good metaphor right now.

What resistances do you find from your students? You know, my recipe is just one person’s recipe, something I have tried. And having said that everyone can succeed at tasks taken, I can’t say that my rate of success is more than 50%. Okay? When I encounter, not resistance, but a situation where I think that resistance might be possible, I voice the resistance myself before the other person can voice it. I make a joke of it, or something – defuse it. I make the person feel I am on your side. Not just to keep an open mind. I make the person feel, yes, I am on your side: “Yes! Ah ha! Oh what a dumb thing! Yes, having to come and be forced to do something. Oh, it’s horrible. Why don’t we just chat. Treat me as a friend. I am here because I have been asked to do it. The way it works for me is that, that, that, that.” Get the people on your side by taking their side. And I have found that very effective. But, you see, if I were to go knowing that it’s a place where resistance might come and I go afraid of that resistance, I am blocking my success. See?

Say, you are working in a half-way house. Your mind is somewhat clearer than the mind of the patients there. That’s why you are a counselor. That’s why you are a teacher. That’s why you have been chosen to go. Right. Well, if your mind is clearer, you have a stronger mind than theirs. You have the capacity to influence their minds. Because your mind is clearer, it is somewhat more capable of concentrating, is somewhat more capable of enduring –see? – It is somewhat more capable of creating some conscious energy someplace, you impair the possibility of it’s effectiveness the moment that you go with the fear: “Well, they are being forced to do it. They’re not going to like it. Now how shall I handle that?” You have created an emotional block. See? But if you go with a knowledge of your clarity, you will find the right words, you will find the right way of winning them over. But you see, once again, the principle of blocks and unblocking the blocks is not specific to a situation. Your blocks – even though the symptoms are specific, at a specific place . . . [are within you!]. (end of tape)

So one has to take a good look at the totality of one’s mind, not just the specific symptoms, and cleanse the mind in its totality. You cannot say, “I tried so hard at that place, and it did not work out.” Okay? At that place, what is coming out of your mind at that place is only a wave behind which there is a whole force of a great tide of the sum total of the input and output of your mind. Work on the totality of your person.

Question: How does meditation work with these blocks?

Because meditation is a time of unblocking. At that time it [the mind] is not dwelling on problems. It is dwelling on the possibility of the peacefulness and the clarity of the mind, and the one-pointedness of the mind – training the mind to be clear of those blocks and problems. So it shows to you that it is possible for the mind to dwell free of that obsession that we have with our problems – and all of us have that obsession. And the stronger your obsession is, the less your rate of success. The stronger your obsession is with your problems, the less is your rate of success.

Question: Students in class are able to quiet down, but when they come to class the next week they are all stressed out and nervous again.

You see, just as you have to work on yourself, they have to work on themselves. You know, you cannot take a magic wand and just transform them. You have to accept the fact that it’s not you that they’re resisting. They have their own resistances. Sometimes people begin to blame themselves for other people’s failures. You do only what is conceivable, what is possible within your capacity and your awareness, the maximum that you are capable of doing at that time, you know. And, who knows, someday you might become a Buddha and touch somebody, and the robber becomes a saint. [The story of the Buddha and the outlaw, Angalimala] You know, you keep working towards that.

So far you have no claims to such power, see? Some people try to imagine those powers. That is also not where it’s at. I have one test. A lot of people come to me. They think that I know this, that, and so on, and that maybe I go travel in the astral world every night. Maybe I go to the sun and moon with the space shuttles not withstanding, and so on. I’ll tell you one thing. I am such a hard nut. I am totally cynical about all spiritual phenomena. I am totally cynical about all predictions, about any statements about “my past reincarnation” or about somebody else’s future one, or somebody’s ESP and somebody’s psychic faculty and, you know, this and that and all the rest of it. I don’t believe – excuse my language – I don’t believe a damned bit of it. I only believe in my practice of meditation. And the rest doesn’t concern me at all. And my one principle always has been and is – and that is what my master has confirmed and taught me and retaught me – is look at all the possible material, physical, physiological, psychological explanations. And if there is any such explanation available, then dismiss it as a spiritual phenomenon. It is not a spiritual phenomenon. Look for all material, physical, physiological, psychological explanations, and if there is any such possible explanation, accept that. And then, if none of those possible explanations applies, then, perhaps, then perhaps it is a spiritual phenomenon. You might have missed some explanation. And that is my personal philosophy. When people come with all sorts of sensations in their bodies, I ask them about their sex life. “Oh, I care only about spiritual things. Those things do not concern me.” And I see the phenomenon right there, you know. So I am just not into that world.

And don’t be afraid, you see, about being disappointed of not being able to find spiritual phenomena. They are very subtle and very, very, exceedingly pure places to be at. Just test out. Just check out. This is something I have been wanting to say for a long time because I see all this delving into, you know, worlds of the subtle forms. They are dangerous. They are not helpful.

On a very, very elementary level I still find that a very large number of teachers, walking in the classroom and teaching a class of an hour-and-a-half, still have no contact with the students. I find that people walk in, and they are interested in the class, but not in the individuals. The individuals do not feel your personal interest. Sometimes, when you are able to overcome your blocks, the individuals feel your interest in their technique – as to how they are doing. But they do not feel your personal interest in them. You would say, “I have never seen this person before. How can I be interested in him?” Well, that’s the difference between the beginner, living in the ordinary world, and a person with spiritual aspirations. Your love is for the whole human family – and not just by saying “the whole human family,” so that you see the forest but do not see the individual tree.

This love should not show itself in all kinds of tears and embraces. But the person should know that you are interested in him, in her, at a very, very pure level. This comes by expanding your Heart Center. Speak from the Heart Center. Speak from the Heart Center, as though your words are coming from the Heart Center. And your eye contact. The eye draws the energy from the Heart Center. This applies to counseling. This applies to a discussion. This applies to a debate. This applies to a classroom situation. Speak from the Heart Center. Let the energy of that come out through your eyes, and let the eye contact be with everyone. And in that eye contact your love shows. And it’s a controlled love. It’s not pity. It is not sympathy. It is simply your commitment to helping. It’s simply your commitment to helping. That is what teaching is – commitment to helping.

Question: Sometimes I feel like I am not prepared to teach others.

You see, one cannot prepare oneself for teaching a class. It’s a whole life preparation. I prepare myself twenty-four hours, thirty-six hours in advance. I don’t think about what I am going to say. If I were to think of that, I wouldn’t have anything to say after – you know, I have been speaking for thirty-nine years. For thirty-nine years, almost every day! Where is the stuff to draw the material from? I would have to spend twenty-three hours a day in a library if I had to prepare my subject matter. Understand what I am saying? I prepare myself. And I prepare myself twenty-four hours, thirty-six hours in advance. I sort of tune myself to that. That means conserving my energies, conserving my emotions. Whatever little degree of effectiveness that I have with you people, that you can sit down and keep coming back to the Center to listen, it comes from that total frame of mind I have to keep twenty-four hours, thirty-six hours in advance of speaking anywhere. So again, it is not the specifics of the situation that determine your success or your failure. It is the totality of your mind. And if I feel sometime that I have not – occasionally – that I have not put the concentration into myself that I want to, I cancel the class. Seldom. I don’t think I’ve ever canceled a class for mental reasons. But I would do it if I felt that my mind had wavered into other emotions in the last twenty-four hours to thirty-six hours. And my concern for my students has been the greatest inspiration for me to purify myself. Not just my guru’s pleasure, because a child knows he is dirty; mother will wash him. I have that much confidence in my guru. And he does his job for me, you know, and so on. But, you see, I remain constantly aware of this thing: I have to do a duty towards you. And I can’t do it if, twenty-four hours before, thirty-six hours before, I am out in this anger or this self-pity and this depression and this identity crisis, and God knows what other stuff – you know, that people stuff their minds with. Then, you see, I wouldn’t have the energy. I wouldn’t have the concentration. I wouldn’t have the love. I wouldn’t have the care, you know. And you will come once, but you won’t come twice.

Do you understand? See, I am not saying that I am explaining myself. I am trying to tell you where your progress and your effectiveness in life lies. See? That’s where your effectiveness comes from – the total frame of mind.

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Editor’s Note

This is a transcript of a lecture given at The Meditation Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, in 1981.