A MIRACLE happened in the life of a stone cutter. A fairy appeared before him and told him,

“From today, you will become whoever and whatever you would like to be.”

The stone cutter had always wanted to be rich, very rich and he wished he could become the king, and instantly he became the king. He slept happily that night, “there is no one more powerful than me from now.” The next morning, the stone-cutter who had then become king, wanted to go round his city in his chariot and called his minister. The minister said: Oh king! It has been raining heavily from yesterday and you can’t ride in the chariot.

The king thought: Is the rain more powerful than me? Then I should become the rain. Forthwith, he became the rain. He was extremely happy as the rain and flooded the city. Suddenly, there came a strong gust of wind which scattered away the clouds and stopped the rain. Very angry at this, the rain thought: is the wind more powerful than me! All right, then I must change as the wind. The rain instantly changed into wind.

The wind became very happy and blew hard and fast. It uprooted very big trees and destroyed many houses too. But, try as it might it could not do any thing with the mountains.

“What? Are the mountains and the rocks in it more powerful than me? I then wish to become a mountain.” The moment he thought so, he turned into a mountain. At dawn, a stone cutter came to the mountain and began to cut on the rock face. The mountain could do nothing. Every cut and blow hurt terribly. Even as the mountain thought, “Is this stone cutter so powerful that I cannot stop him even though he hurts me? I may then as well be a stonecutter” the mountain changed into a stone-cutter. The stone cutter returned to his starting point. One cycle was completed. How he will be hereafter depends upon his desires. This is what continuously happens due to desires.

The stone cutter would not have continued upon such a cycle if at any stage he had remained contented and happy with whatever nature has bestowed on him, and without any pride whatsoever. It was only because, at every stage of his desires, he did not feel fulfilled that he had to go frantically searching: what next? What next?

What we call Karma, is the collection of unfulfilled desires and unsatisfied aspirations that we accumulate during our lives.

Paramahamsa Nithyananda

Nine out of ten people, if asked where their mind is, will point to their head, where we think our brains are!

Brains are not where our minds are. Mind is all over our body; within each cell, within the cell structure, embedded in the intelligence of the DNA and other building blocks of the mind body system that we are. There is as much mind in our little finger as there is in our head or our heart.

Mind is not fixed and permanent; not our cells as well. Cells die and are recreated every second. Our entire mind body system undergoes renewal every so often. What we are now is not what we were a year ago, not what we will be a year from now. Our mind body hardware is constantly renewed.

Yet, we behave the same way as we did a year ago or ten years ago, by and large. We are just as greedy, just as angry, just as depressed as we were a year or many years ago unless we have taken dramatic measures to change. We seem programmed in our behavior pattern.

We are programmed. We are programmed in our belief systems and attitudes based on our past experiences and memories of these experiences. It is these memories that drive us in all our actions. Unfortunately, all these memories lie in our unconscious mind.

We are driven by our unconscious, not by our rational mind as we wish to imagine.

We call this software of emotion filled memories that lie buried deep in our unconscious, samskara. Samskara are the embedded memories of our past, sometimes of previous lives, that drive us into action in the future (Karma). Since samskara are from the unconscious, we are unable to do anything to stop them, to control them or modify them. Unless, a big unless, we learn to penetrate the unconscious.

We can indeed penetrate the unconscious and dissolve our samskara, so meticulously built by our mind since childhood.

All we need to do is to bring ourselves into the present moment. In the present moment, no samskara exist, as these are products of our past. In the present moment, we have neither regrets nor anticipation. We just are.

Meditation leads us into the present moment. Meditation leads us into awareness of our samskara and from there into their dissolution. Meditation gives us control over our life, taking it away from the embedded software of our mind.

Nithyananda

www.nithyananda.org

Nirvana means extinction, extinction of vasanas and karmas. Only when vasanas and karmas die will you start living. As long as they are alive in you they live through you, and never let you enjoy life.

Vasana is the hangover of desires or desires not fully lived; samskaras are desires that are lived but those which leave a thread for continued enjoyment of those desires. Karma is fulfillment. Nirvana also means moksha, liberation. When all vasanas, samskaras and karmas are finished you reach liberation through their extinction. You see a new kind of space in you, new kind of understanding in you, new kind of living in you.

When you drink or smoke once in a while you enjoy them. As long as you have the freedom to drop them you enjoy them. When you get addicted to them they enjoy you. Addiction is when you do not enjoy the habit but can not do without it. You can get addicted to food, TV, newspaper, gossiping. When you are addicted, food eats you, cigarettes smoke you, and liquor drinks you. When you do not have the freedom you are used.

You are in a mall and see a shoe. The thought, the vasana takes hold of you to acquire it. You move on. After a week or later you see the shoe again. This time the feeling is stronger. Samskara has logic. It tells you that if you get the shoe you can jog and you will be healthy and so on. Vasana is any seed that falls on ground. Samskara connects the vasana to you with logic and makes it grow. If you are spiritually inclined the samskara will tell you that with healthy jogging you can meditate better. Vasana is blown through samskara into an imprint. Then you buy the shoe. This is karma, the full blown tree that arises from the seed of vasana. After two weeks the shoe is stored in the cupboard never to be used again. The cycle then repeats.

In the outside world what you thought you would achieve you do not achieve; you do not enjoy. In the inner world you create room for more vasanas, samskaras and karmas. You have created the habit. While losing the capacity to enjoy you have created the habit to desire more. More you have less your sensitivity to enjoy. When you have too many things you can not enjoy these acquisitions. One who has ten clocks will never keep time. Your energies are spent in vasanas, samskaras, and karmas instead of in enjoyment. You have no energy left to enjoy. You take things for granted. You lose the sensitivity to enjoy.

Paramahamsa Sri Nithyananda

There are three types of Karma – agamya, prarabdha and sanchita.

Sanchita Karma is like a bank, a reserve bank. Understand, this may not be the first time you have taken a body and come to planet earth. You may have taken millions of bodies before! In those millions of bodies, whatever thoughts you had, whatever you spoke, whatever you did, all those unfulfilled experiences have become your engrams (engraved memories) Put together, they are like a bank called sanchita karma. When I say ‘bank’ it is not a collection or saving, it is debt! You will have to pay back all the loans!

The next type of karma is prarabdha karma. Prarabdha means this: from the sanchita bank of karma you take some karma out of which you create your present body. You then decide to enjoy and exhuast all those karmas that you brought with you through that body. So prarabdha is just a small bit of the accumulated sanchita karma account that you have brought into this life. You have planned to enjoy or exhaust these through this body of yours.

The third type of karma is the worst. It is the agamya karma, the karma that you start collecting after coming down to plane earth, because of fresh thoughts, words, and deeds.

Anybody who lands on planet earth has to exhaust his prarabdha karma before he dies. For example, let us say you have 1000 karmas in you sanchita bank. Out of these 1000 karmas, suppose you take only 10 karmas with you as your prarabdha karma when you take up your body saying, “Let me finish these ten karmas this time.” However after coming down, instead of exhausting your own prarbdha karma you start watching others and collecting karma based on their desires. These are desires that you have borrowed from others around you. Because of these borrowed desires, you create certain thoughts, words and actions.

For example, if you see someone more beautiful than you, your thoughts multiply due to comparison and jealousy. You create karma based on thoughts. Sometimes you talk ill of others, without knowing any of the related facts. When you do this, you accumulate karma based on words.

The Karma theory (theory of action and reaction) has no basis according to me. It is only a faith, a belief created by man. By creating this law, man has done a great service to society, but he has done a great conspiracy against humanity. For social well being, this theory or law is good. For example, one implication of this is that you will not kill me, so I should not kill you. It is only an understanding between people so that they can live in peace and harmony. There is no spiritual attribute to the law. But, we can start giving a spiritual explanation saying that you will be punished for your sins. This sense of torture is not correct. It is just to instill fear in you so that you follow the dictum of morality as dictated by society.

May be when you are teaching kids about morality, you may resort to telling stories to teach them the idea of right and wrong and what repercussions can happen if they don’t follow morality. But this type of fear is not necessary to make mature people understand morality.

The truth is that you neither carry your sins nor merits with you. Then you may say that means we can do whatever we can in our lives without regard to others. What you carry with you is the mental setup. For e.g, a murderer carries the mindset which tortures him. Be clear , it is not the burden of a hundred murders actually that he carries with him.

You think that you will go to hell if you do sin. Actually, it is the other way around; you sin because you are in hell! when you are in bliss, you can not harm anyone. It is only your conscious attitude that will make you joyful.

As long as the Karma theory is based on fear, it will never give fulfillment. No morality should be based on fear and greed. It should be based only on understanding. Man should be given techniques to create such a deep awareness; he should be taken to that level of maturity to understand the laws, there should be no fear of hell and heaven. Surely there is no hell or heaven based on Karma theory. In fact, if you associate yourself too much with the so-called ‘wrong actions’, you are tied so closely to your body that you can’t disconnect yourself from it at the time of death.

For instance, a man who has lived only for sensual pleasures can’t leave his body easily at the time of his death. There is too much pain and that is really what hell is.

If you live with awareness and consciousness, you will radiate joy, bliss and compassion. You will experience life to be so enjoyable and radiant that living leaves little time for anything else.

This is the reason I never give rules even during our meditation camps. I never ask people to refrain from non-vegetarian food. Surprisingly, even confirmed non-vegetarians have become vegetarian after attending my meditation camps. The awareness and consciousness will become so sharp and heightened that your very being will start guiding you. There is no need for any law. If I force vegetarianism on people, they will come up with excuses for not giving up non-vegetarian food.

So, I don’t believe in morality since I know it is not going to work. I believe in experience. I don’t believe in conscience; I believe in consciousness. When the consciousness happens in you, automatically, awareness will happen in you. All the social morality will start happening in you. There will be no conflict between inside and outside. Morality will become your life.

People spend more time arguing about whether they are driven by destiny or acting out of than doing what they should do. They forget that they waste their time of their own accord, their own sweet freewillfree will!

There is no such thing as future. Future does not exist till you create it in your present moment, here and now. We all waste our time regretting or savoring what happened in the past and speculating about what would like in the future. Neither is of any productive value. There is nothing we can do about the past, it is gone; it is history. There is nothing that you can do thinking about the future; you have to act now to make your future. Your future is in your hands, and your hands only. Trying to fashion your future based on past experiences is like driving car looking at the rear view mirror. All you will meet is disaster!

We are comfortable being told that we are destined to do certain things. We are relieved when we learn that our sins and problems are because of our past karma, because then we can disown responsibility.

Be very clear, there is no such thing as karma, the way you understand it. Your unfulfilled desires shape your actions and this is karma. As of now your future is driven by your fantasies, your unfulfilled desires, and what you do not have. When the product arrives, you ask, who ordered this, not I!

Start being comfortable with what you have. Enjoy what you have acquired instead of hankering after what you do not have. Spirituality is not about renouncing in the sense of what you understand. There is nothing that you have now that you need to renounce. Nothing at all. Just renounce what you do not have, your fantasies. You will see your life change in front of your eyes.

When you focus on enjoying what you have now, you will have to focus on the present instead of wasting time speculating and regretting. Your entire mindset will be on action. Because this action is not tinged with regret and speculation, you will automatically fall into what Krishna refers to in the Gita as the action without expectation.

When you learn to stay in the present, your freewill destines you to be a true Yogi, one who is truly uniting material and spiritual life. You will be in eternal bliss, nithyananda.

Nithyananda

Living Enlightenment – Gospel Of Paramahamsa Nithyananda

A monastery is not an ashram.

In a monastery there is hierarchy; there is order; there are rules, regulations, and how much work each person has to do.

In an ashram, there are no man made rules and regulations. No one measures how much one does and how much another does. There is chaos, outwardly. There is no equality on terms of responsibility or duties in an ashram; but there is uniqueness. Each person in an ashram does what he or she is best suited for.

In an ashram, an inmate does not work out of fear, greed, motivation or necessity. An ashramite, a resident of an ashram, works out of gratitude. Once people start measuring what they are doing and what others are doing in comparison, you create a political organization, not a spiritual organization.

People mostly work out of fear and greed; all organizations control people out of fear and greed. A few graduate out of fear and greed and then get caught in the need for attention, or jealousy and comparison to prove that they are some way superior to others. Even those who shed all these negativities retain their ego, need for an identity. When all these are shed, one moves up in surrender, working out of sheer gratitude.

A cook in a monastery cooked in the monastery for thirty years. He never bothered to be around the master, rarely attended the master’s discourses. When it was time for the master to leave the planet earth, he called every one to announce who would be the next heir to his seat in that monastery. All of them were expecting one of the disciples very close to the master would succeed him as the master. The master, however, appointed the cook as his successor. He said to his disciples, you have been listening to my discourses all these years, but this cook just lived my teachings. Just with these words, the master made the cook enlightened and capable of being his true successor.

People are not equal. Each one comes with one’s karma and with different attitude.  As long as the Master is around, He will take care of every thing. When Master is not there, the whole thing will become dharma, set procedures. When the Master is there every thing will become moksha, liberation. That is the difference between dharma and moksha. Work for moksha. That is the difference between an ashram and a monastery.

Nithyananda

Living Enlightenment – Gospel Of Paramahamsa Nithyananda

Imagine for a moment that the first half of this column is empty. Imagine that the tape you are listening to you is silent and has no content for just two minutes. What happens?

Your mind races. Thoughts flood you. What has happened, you wonder, what has gone wrong? Why are there no words?

Nothing has gone wrong, nothing at all. Your mind cannot tolerate silence; that is all. Thoughts and words are a call of your Consciousness telling you that your center is unfilled.

There are two kinds of people. One kind is the people who follow words and seek meaning behind the words. Another kind is those people who ignore the meaning and seek the source of thoughts.

Seeking words and thoughts cannot fulfill you. When you seek words you move into the outer world. You move into the space of sense objects, which results in pain or pleasure. However many times you may experience the physical or sensual pleasure led by your thoughts, you still keep seeking the same pleasure. What one calls karma, is really the effect of these unfulfilled desires.

The meaning of thoughts and words is not to provoke movement towards these external experiences that can never be fulfilled but to move towards the center, the core of your being. Only there you will find the comfort in silence.

Words soothe your superficial mind the same way as scratching an itch seems to provide some comfort. In actual fact it makes the problem worse. It is the same with words. More words you use more confused you are. Be careful of all these scholars and philosophers who use highly complex language and words to propound their theories. They themselves do not understand what they are saying, so they are forced to confuse others by using complexity as a tool.

Whenever you ask questions, more questions arise. This is seen as the measure of intelligence in our system of education. When one really understands, one realizes two things. Firstly, one realizes that questions and answers do no lead to any understanding at all. Secondly, one realizes that understanding happens when thoughts cease.

Truth resides in silence. Truth resides in contemplation. As you move inwards towards the source of words and thoughts, mind become still in simplicity.

This stillness, this silence leads to fulfillment.

Nithyananda

KARMA is the collection of unfulfilled experiences that stay in us and constantly pull us to fulfill them.

~ Paramahamsa Nithyananda – from his Best Selling Book: Living Enlightenment

Pure action with no end objective is KARMA

~ Paramahamsa Nithyananda – from his Best Selling Book: Living Enlightenment

KARMA is not a law of reward and punishment. It is a reflection of your mental state.

~ Paramahamsa Nithyananda – from his Best Selling Book: Living Enlightenment

You create your own KARMA. Karma does not create you. You are not a by-product of your actions. You are far bigger than your actions.

~ Paramahamsa Nithyananda – from his Best Selling Book: Living Enlightenment

Intention is the baggage, the karma, not the action. If action creates intention, it becomes the baggage. Pure action with no end objective is karma.

~ Paramahamsa Nithyananda – from his Best Selling Book: Living Enlightenment

To preview the book please use the following link

http://living-enlightenment.com/living_enlightenment/index.html

When you have even one glimpse of pure consciousness, no Karma can influence you. Your frequency becomes much more than the frequency of Karma. Karma can work on you only as long as you have thoughts. In conscious awareness you go beyond thoughts. So , naturally you will start ruling over Karma. Any meditation when done intensely can give you a glimpse of consciousness – the Truth.

That is why they say, meditation is like exposing your film directly to the sun. If the camera shutter opens for one second, whatever is in front of the camera will be recorded on film. If the shutter is left completely open, what will happen? If the sun’s rays directly fall on the film, what will happen? Whatever is recorded will be erased.

When you took birth, for a moment the camera shutter opened and life entered your body. Whatever was there in the scene outside at the moment was recorded. By the word scene, I mean the planetary positions at that moment. That is why the time of birth is very important. Based on that, your consciousness functions. However, during meditation, I consciously keep the shutter open for quite some time! So naturally, whatever is recorded will be erased!

So the first time the shutter was opened was when you took birth. The second time the shutter is opened is when you are initiated. This time the shutter is kept completely and naturally open so that the sun’s rays enter and wipe out all you Karma. That is why when you are initiate by a master, you are call dvija – twice born a new life. And the man who operates your camera, who holds the shutter open for the period of time, is called the guru. He is the master!!