SUFFERING IN YOUR CREATION

What is the difference between pain and suffering?
What is pain? Pain is a protective mechanism. Right now, you would not have the necessary intelligence to preserve yourself if there was no pain in your body. Wherever there is no pain in your body, look what you have done. Your hair, for example, how could you cut it into different shapes and sizes? Only because there is no pain. Suppose there was no pain in your nose, in the name of fashion, how many ways would you have cut it by now? Wherever there is a little bit of pain in your body, you put a few holes in it, but if there was no pain at all, you would cut your body into ribbons. If you were walking on the street and a bicycle came towards you, you would step back, not out of humility, but because you know the consequence of pain.
So, pain is good for you. Pain is a natural process, but suffering is not a natural process. It is always your creation. If pain comes and you respond to it, there will be no suffering; but if you react to it, there will be suffering. There are any number of examples like this. In South India, there was a yogi and sage called Sadashiva Brahmendra. Sadashiva was a nirkaya, which literally means "bodiless yogi." How does somebody become bodiless? If you sit in meditation, you may find that your hands, legs or some parts of the body are missing. They have not gone anywhere, but in your experience they are missing simply because you have transcended the limitations of the senses in a limited way. It can happen to the whole body. If you touch the body, it will be there, but in your experience, it is not there. It is a wonderful way to live. You are in the body but you are no more the body; that is what it ultimately means to be spiritual. In your experience, you are no longer bound by the limitations of the body.
Sadashiva was a nirkaya, he had no sense of the body. And because he had no sense of the body, he did not think about wearing clothes, he just walked naked. He happened to walk into the king's garden while the king was relaxing with his queens. The king became angry, "Who is this fool walking naked in front of my wives?" He sent his soldiers to find out who he was. The soldiers called Sadashiva Brahmendra from behind, but he didn't turn back, he just kept on walking. The soldiers became angry and took out a sword and chopped off his right arm, but he still kept walking. He did not even break a stride. Now the soldiers were terrified, "This is not an ordinary man. We chopped off his arm and he keeps walking." So the king, soldiers and everyone else went and fell at his feet, and brought him back to the garden. Sadashiva Brahmendra lived there for the rest of his life. Even today, this place is preserved in a certain way.
The example that most people in the West probably understand best is Jesus. If somebody were to drive nails into your hands and legs, what you would do? You would scream and yell and curse the whole world. But it seems he said, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do." Could a man say this if he was suffering? There was definitely pain in his body. His body was probably much more sensitive than yours, so definitely there was pain in his body, but there was no suffering. Otherwise, a man could not speak like this.
Pain is a natural process in the body. Suffering is self created. Once you stop suffering, you are suddenly free from what is happening to your body, and you are free from what is happening to the world. Once the possibility of suffering is taken away from your life, you suddenly have no issues with the world; you can just live your life the way you want. Only when the fear of suffering is no more will you walk full stride and dare to explore the full potential of the life process that you are.
 

DEATH: A SPRITUAL PROCESS

The process that you refer to as "life" is something that can be endlessly improved upon. That is the beauty of it. It does not matter if you live for a thousand years and do everything that you wish to do; something more could be done, something better could be done. This is the way of life. But death is super-efficient; it doesn't need anybody's assistance. Life is happening on so many levels of inefficiency, but have you ever seen death happen inefficiently? When it happens, it is perfect. Perfect and absolute. You do not have to think about death, you do not have to reflect upon death, but mortality -- the limited nature of life -- is something that needs to be reflected upon.
Just watch your breath right now: inhalation, exhalation, inhalation, exhalation. If the next inhalation does not happen, phew. Life is very fragile; don't take it for granted. Just see how fragile it is. You always think somebody else will die, but you will also die. It is just that you won't get to read your obituary. Death is not something that only happens to somebody else -- it will happen to you and me. Death is the one thing that has remained unadulterated. The human mind can corrupt everything else, but death has remained untouched. And death is the only certainty in your life. In your life, you do not know what will happen and what will not happen. Life is constantly uncertain, but death is a 100 percent certainty. Don't have any doubt about it.
Being aware of your mortal nature is extremely important. If you remind yourself every day, twice a day, that you will die, then you will naturally move toward knowing higher dimensions of perception. People think they are immortal, that is why they have time to live foolish lives. But if you know that today could be your last day, would there be time to get angry with anybody? Would there be time to do anything stupid with your life? Only people who believe they are immortal can fight to the death, but those who are constantly aware of their mortal nature do not want to miss a single moment; they will naturally be aware. If you are willing to experiment, just see that you have only two more hours to live. You will become super aware; you will not miss anything.
For many spiritual aspirants, the first part of their training is to sit in the cremation grounds. Gautama the Buddha made this compulsory for his monks. Before he would initiate anyone into monkhood, they would sit in the busiest cremation ground and just watch everybody burning. If you do this, simply look without thinking about it, after some time you will see that it is just yourself. It is your own body. Once you can replace that body with yours and still sit, there is a deep acceptance of death. Once there is a deep acceptance of death, life will happen to you in enormous proportions. But because you have tried to keep death away, life has also stayed away from you. The greatest calamity of the human mind is that it is against death, because the moment you reject death, you also reject life. In your mind, you are trying to keep death out but with it, every other possibility stays out.
It is only when you become aware of death that you want to know what life is about. Only when you start really wondering what life is about does your spiritual process begin. Once you come to terms with death and you are conscious that you will die, you will want to make every moment of your life as beautiful as possible. You will have no time for any kind of nonsense. That is a simple way of being aware.
 

CAN WE REMOVE THOUGHT'S FROM OUR MIND

How can we control thoughts? Can we remove thoughts from the mind?
There is no huge bank of thoughts within you. Thoughts are just going and going, one at a time, one at a time, one at a time. If you try to do anything with them, they will go faster and faster because in your mind, there is no subtraction or division, there is only addition and multiplication. Can you take away one thought forcefully? Experiment and see: For the next 10 seconds, do not think about monkeys. If you try not to think about something, only that will happen. That is the nature of the mind. 
What is a thought? A thought is just a certain emanation, a certain surface fluctuation of the content that you hold in your mind. Your mind is like society's garbage bin; everybody that goes by stuffs something in your head. You have no choice as to what to receive and from whom. If you say "I don't like this person" you will receive much more from that person than from anybody else. Have you noticed this? If you say, "I don't want to have anything to do with that man," you will think about him more and more. The more you resist someone, the more he becomes a part of your consciousness.
If we look at your mind as a garbage bin, thoughts are like the smells that emanate. Do not understand this analogy as negative. A garbage bin is not useless; a garbage bin is very useful. Your house can do without a television and a telephone, but it cannot do without a garbage bin. If you use it when you want, if you open it and shut it when you want, it is a wonderful device. Without it, your whole house would become filthy. But if you decide to live in it, it is a horrible thing. Right now, that is all that has happened. There is nothing wrong with the content of your mind. It is better that you have all the filth in the world in your mind -- otherwise, you will walk into the filth and not know what is what. But now, you are constantly living in the mind, and it is such a torture for people. They don't know how to be out of it.
There are certain types of meditations where you simply sit and notice that you are "here" and your mind is out "there." There is a clear distance between you and the mind. Once there is a distance, whatever the mind says, it has no impact on you. The content does not matter. If you hear the word "Buddha," you may think in terms of Gautama the Buddha. But Gautama is not the only Buddha; that was not his second name. His name was Gautama Siddhartha, and he became a Buddha. Buddhi means "intellect," or the logical dimension of your mind. Dha means "one who is above." So, one who is above his mind is a "Buddha." One who is in his mind is a nonstop suffering human being. Once you are in the mind, your suffering is inevitable. You may watch the sunset and forget your sufferings for a moment, but then you will turn back and see your fears, anxieties and troubles are right there. Once you are in the mind, there is fear and anxiety. You may get breaks here and there, but there is no release from it.
What is keeping this thought process continuously on is that you have identified yourself with things that you are not. You have identified yourself with your body, but the body is just an accumulation of food that you have eaten. Even if you own the chair you are sitting on, after some time, you will get identified with the chair. If your neighbor's child comes and scratches the polish, it will hurt deep in your heart; it will not just be a scratch on the chair. This is because you are capable of getting identified with anyone or anything that you come in touch with. Once you are identified with someone or something that you are not, the thought process is endless. It just goes on and on. It is like you have eaten very bad food, and now you have gas in your stomach. If you try to stop it, your stomach will bloat and burst. But you cannot stop it; it keeps going. Thought is just like this. You became identified with things that you are not, starting from your body, impressions that you take in, things around you and people, ideas, philosophies, slogans, etc., and now thought is an endless process. You try to do many things, but you cannot stop it. Even if you take a stick and hit the top of your head, it won't stop.
So, what can you do? Unidentify yourself with everything that you are not. Keep your house aside, keep your education aside, keep your husband aside, keep your children aside, keep your body aside, keep your mind aside, and keep your emotions aside. Care for them, take care of them, handle them -- but don't become that. If you are not identified with anything, if you are simply here, you will see there is no room for thought at all. Once you have this awareness, you will see thought is a conscious process. If you want to think, you think, otherwise there is nothing in your head, and that is how it should be. Just the beauty of emptiness.

MAKING FAMILY INTO BLESSING

On a certain day, at a family dinner, Shankaran Pillai* announced that he was getting married. His mother looked shocked and asked, "Who are you going to marry?" He said, "I am marrying Lucy, our neighbor." Immediately the father said, "What? You're going to marry Lucy? She doesn't have any inheritance. Why would you want to marry her?" Then the uncle looked at Shankaran Pillai and said, "You're going to marry Lucy? Her hair is a mess." The aunt said, "You're going to marry Lucy? Her make-up is terrible." And the little nephew, not wanting to be left out said, "Why will you marry Lucy? She knows nothing about football." But Shankaran Pillai insisted, "No, I am marrying Lucy." They all asked him, "Why?" Shankaran Pillai said, "She has one great virtue. She doesn't have a family."
When a child is born, it is not made to the extent that other creatures are made. It needs nurturing, training and molding. So the need for family arose. Family is a very supportive base for a human being to grow. But for many people, family does not become a support, it becomes a hurdle. It does not become an uplifting process, it becomes a way of entanglement. Especially for those who walk the spiritual path, family usually becomes the biggest hurdle. Not because family is a problem, but because of the way you hold it.
Family is an example of how anything that is created for your well-being can be turned into a disadvantage. You see this happening in many different ways. For example, affluence should have been well-being, but most people use it like poison. Education should have been well-being, but educated people are the ones who are destroying the planet right now. What has been given to us for our well-being could have been the greatest blessing upon humanity, but instead it is what is threatening the very existence of the human race.
Similarly, family, which should have been a support and a means for one's growth, becomes a process of entanglement and a burden. Essentially, this process of getting entangled with life around you is happening not because of who is around you, but because nothing has been done about your inner nature. If your inner nature grows to a certain point of maturity and fullness and feels like a complete life by itself, your need to cling to someone or something would naturally reduce.
The need to cling, this compulsion to turn everything that is for our well-being into a detriment to our life, is essentially because of an incomplete persona. If you plant two trees close together, you will see that these two trees have enough sense to grow apart, so that each gets enough sunlight. Both of them are rooted in the same earth, and they do not have the freedom to walk away, but still, they create enough space because each just exists as a piece of life, and every piece of life is a complete piece by itself. If you just sit here as just a piece of life, you would know that you are complete. But if your experience of yourself is just your persona, you will always feel incomplete and you will always have a terrible need to cling on to something or somebody.
So, is there a complete persona? There is no such thing. A being is complete, this life is complete, but a personality is never complete; it can never be in the very nature of things. The more you invest in your personality, the more incomplete and insecure you feel. The more attachment to people you create, the more fear of separation you will have. If life chooses to separate you from someone, in your experience you will feel as if you have been torn apart from yourself, as if you have been broken into two pieces. But you are a complete life; you do not need a stake to keep yourself up, if only you are willing to be here just as life. What we call "meditation" is just this, that instead of being here as a person, you are here just as a piece of life -- which is what you really are.

GIVING: The Ultimate Transection

Life, in its millions of manifestations, is essentially a variety of transactions. The transactions can be of many kinds -- between nations, cultures, individuals. There are transactions which are cellular, atomic and cosmic. Even as you sit, this very breath is a transaction. There is really no choice whether to transact or not. The choice is only about whether you will do it gracefully or in an ugly manner.
Everything is a transaction; a war is a transaction, even a horrendous rape is a transaction. So are commerce, love and devotion. Some transactions are an expression of human depravity, some are an expression of human ingenuity and beauty, and some are a blossoming of human consciousness. If you can just sit and do absolutely nothing, you will see the highest level of transaction of cosmic proportions is happening right here. You don't have to do anything.
It has been my fortune and privilege that at a very early age, I became witness to a certain state of giving which was beyond anybody's understanding, including mine. My great grandmother lived to be 113 years of age. Because she would never die, people thought she was a devil of a woman. She buried her husband, she buried all of her children and a few of her grandchildren, but she wouldn't die. In the morning, if she was given breakfast, she would always go about giving away some of it to the ants, birds and squirrels, particularly to the ants. And there would be unsolicited advisors around who would say, "She is throwing all her food around, this old woman will die ... "
If you do not know how to become an abode of divine grace, there are simpler ways of getting there. One simple way is to make your life into a giving. When I say a giving, it is not to be understood as an act. Giving is an act is a deception because what can you give? Everything that we have, including this body, we have taken from this planet. What we can give is only a paltry part of what we have taken. Giving as an act could be very deceptive and could turn ugly, but if your way of being is giving and your actions are only a manifestation of that, when you open your heart to give, the grace of the Divine invariably seeps in. That is inevitable.
There were many days where I saw her with a little bit of breakfast that was left on her plate. She would simply sit there, watching the ants eat. Tears would be streaking down her cheeks and when somebody asked, "Won't you eat?" she would say, "I'm full. I'm already full." I thought she had some kind of an emotional love affair with ants. I was only three, four, five years of age. She was well over 100. It was many years later that I realized there is another way to transact with the world. If the ants ate, she was being "nourished." A logical mind would never understand this. This would look like rubbish to a thinking mind, but she was nourished like this.
This is something that we cannot medically explain, but I have noticed that whenever I fast, for the first two days I always put on weight. People can say, "Oh, you must be drinking liters of water." Life happens in many ways. Your nourishment is not just from the food that you eat. The rest of it is the air that you breathe, the water that you drink, and the sunlight. Without these things you will dissipate.
First, I want you to understand. You have come with nothing, so you cannot give. We are just trying to deceive the Creator. We just act it out. The Creator also plays along, so it's okay. We are playing a game. We are smart, so we are trying to deceive Him, but being intelligent, the Creator plays along. But there is nothing here to give; we have picked up everything from here. We take a lot and give a little, and that is the only way you can live. It doesn't matter how much you give. What you have taken is always bigger than what you have given. That is the only way life can be.
So don't make too much out of giving. It is just a trick. If you do not know any other mode of opening yourself up to that which is the source of creation, this is a simple possibility. Just making every act and every breath into a process of giving -- seeing how you can contribute to everything around you, no matter what you are doing. You will be so rich that the experience of life, the beauty of life, will set a glow on your face because that is the only way life functions.
The process of life is a giving. It is a transaction. In every giving there is a taking. We are taking more than we are giving, but in your mind, just ignore the taking. You just keep giving because you do not have to take; it will be pushed into you. Fortunately, the Creator is that graceful.
There was a man who cleared 100 acres of forest and made it into farmland. His two sons helped him and they became prosperous. When the man was dying, he called his two sons and told them that the land should never be divided, but the produce should be taken equally, 50 percent, by each son.
Accordingly, they went by their father's word. One of the brothers got married and had five children. The other one never got married. Life went on and they each took fifty percent. One day, a worm entered the mind of the brother who had a wife and five children. He thought, "I'm getting 50 percent; my brother is also getting 50 percent. I have a wife and five children. My brother has nobody. When he gets old, who will take care of him? He should have a little more than me because I have the wealth of my children. But he is too proud; he will not take it from me." So in the dark of the night, he carried a bagful of grain quietly and walked into his brother's store, dropped this bag and walked back. Whenever he could, he went on doing this.
The same worm entered his brother's mind. He thought, "I am alone, my brother has five children to feed and I am getting 50 percent, but if I give him extra, he will not take it." So he started doing the same thing at night. This went on for many years and both of them never noticed. One night, both of the brothers carrying sacks of grains in secrecy walked towards each other's storehouse and came face to face. Suddenly, they realized what was happening. They looked away from each other, it was too embarrassing, and dropped the grain and went back to bed. After a few years, they passed away. The townspeople wanted to build a temple and went all over looking for a site. Then they decided on this place, where these two brothers met and felt embarrassed about their giving. They thought this would be the best place to build a temple.
So, if you are giving and you are embarrassed about your giving, you have built a temple in the place where you are right now.