Complete Trust
Paripurno Astha
Quotations
by
Sabyasachi Guha
Compiled by Golda Markovic
“Each one of us is a unique creation of nature and an incomparable movement. A great intelligence is continuously working to maintain this living movement and its equilibrium with the external world. If somehow a ‘complete trust’ – in Bengali we call it ‘paripurno astha’ – develops in us, the naturally induced order, pre-programmed at birth, will begin to unfold. Life then begins to function in a very different way.
“The internal power that is associated with the pre-programmed order is so far beyond our imagination that its exhibition and its far-reaching effects are incomprehensible. All that you need to move in the field of living is naturally supplied by that power, the power that comes out of that order.”
In Appreciation
In the process of compiling these quotes, I was moved by an overwhelming feeling of gratitude for the countless ways that Guha has helped me over the years and the enormous impact he has had on my life. By becoming acutely aware of my own shortcomings, I am able to have more empathy for the suffering of others and a better understanding of the nature of the problems that we as individuals face on a daily basis.
A friend once asked me, “What is it about Guha that makes you want to spend time with him again and again?” At the time, I was unable to come up with an answer that resonated as true for me, and I would often find myself coming back to this same question and relecting upon it. Not surprisingly, the answer came from one of Guha's quotes:
“It is ‘love’ that stops the search and lets something else begin, and then only. And what is that? It is the resonance. The end of the search is the beginning of a new order, a new disposition, and it is never true in the field of information gathering.
“That is the only instrument we have, that gathers information, turns experience into words and images. Somewhere it has to stop. Cessation of the mind. That is the end of search.”
This process cannot be willed or induced by thought. It is a fire, it consumes everything, every desire, and only through complete trust can it begin to unfold.
I call this love.
As you read through the book, may you come to know and appreciate that what Guha is truly offering.
Golda Markovic
February 2014
Introduction
This collection of Guha's quotes is selected from edited dialogues from various discussions that took place in the United States and Kolkata, over a period of three years.
Many are curious about Guha's interactions with U.G. Krishnamurti and the transformative impact that U.G. has had in their life. Guha is always forthcoming and unpretentious in sharing his stories, sometimes moving and profound, other times humorous. His deep affection and appreciation for U.G. is unquestionable. Some of these insightful moments are poignantly captured in Guha's quotes, and in other instances are respectfully interwoven with U.G.'s own statements.
Guha does not propound any intellectual concepts or doctrines, in fact, he dismisses them all as nothing but pure fiction born out of imagination. He emphatically says that he is not defending anything, nor does he wish to promote anything or anyone or any idea. Instead, he focuses on our main concerns of daily living, the complexity of the human individual as a ‘myth-making machine’ at the expense of the body, and the perpetual striving to free ourselves from the burden and stranglehold imposed on us by society's demands.
Guha insists he has nothing to offer, yet those who have been fortunate to hear him speak, who have read his books and articles, cannot deny that there is a resonance of truth in what he says, and a recognition that he is addressing our true well-being.
I think it fitting to end with Guha's own words: “If there is anything to what I am saying, if my words are of any value, it will stand or fall on its own.”
Quotations
Concepts and ideas had no value to U.G. because he had seen it all. He didn't compromise because he did not use the understanding for his livelihood. It was his life, not his livelihood – this is the difference. All the bullshit they are telling you to do by using that false knowledge, that false confidence is a means for them to earn lots of money by propagating some idea. That's the problem. If they don't have to do that, then they don't have to compromise. If they give you a prescription, and you do everything they ask you to do, you may experience some things, yes, but still you will find yourself in the same place – an experience is not going to change anything. The problem lies in the demand of the experiencing structure.
When you try to understand very deeply the source of your intentions, and the more you try to clarify, the more you go to the foundation of the information structure itself. There only lies the mystery. There is a gap between the information seeker and the information that is being collected – these two are annihilating each other. This is a very important aspect of the process itself. Wanting to find out what is going on in your own head, just to report something original for yourself by yourself, without borrowing anything from the culture – is total annihilation. It will give you a kind of death blow, because the center of the information structure itself has nowhere to move when it does not want to borrow any information from anywhere.
~
No human idea mimics life. Nothing of human understanding about life can match its symbiosis. The life that created itself and maintains the balance is impossible for us to understand. Our intellectual capacity is a simple by-product of life's capacity to survive and propagate. That is the whole problem. Always we will understand only a small part – we will never be able to imbibe the entirety.
There is a big shift in focus when you go deeply and passionately into things and you gradually realize that you are swimming in the middle of the ocean; there is no end in any direction.
You are always giving importance to the wrong aspects of your existence. The myth-making tendency of human self-consciousness is never content with what is. It creates an imaginary self and when, through its peculiar logic, it finds it cannot justify its specialness, it creates the bigger ‘Self’ and aggrandizes the little self by attaching to ‘That’, which is the result of an illusory movement. If these things are not sorted out inside you, deeply, you cannot express yourself in a way that will exemplify you as a unique individual – unique, not superior.
It is the respect for life that is the true wisdom. If it begins to distill in humans, it is the only hope, nothing else.
Ideas will never reflect and mimic life. Life is too complicated, too vast. The significance of this is that you begin to perfectly respect your life and in the same way you respect another's life. You will never look down on anybody. This comes from the respect you have acquired because you have touched the foundation where you have seen how impossible it is for you to capture life with thoughts and images.
You and your thoughts are not two different things. Without your thoughts, there is no you. That's all you are – what else are you? Your body does not give two hoots for the nobility of your thoughts.
What holds the experiencing structure is the movement that creates self-consciousness and maintains the center of the information structure – this unnecessarily extracts valuable energy. When this energy is available a dissociation can take place and you will think nothing in this world has any meaning, nothing – just a total burning and obliteration all around.
If you try to imitate behavior based on your knowledge about a state and try to prove that you are functioning according to its definition, you will deinitely falsify yourself. There is no doubt about that, no matter who says what.
If one could digest what U.G. was saying, all these brahmasutras, all these gods and goddesses we created in our imagination – a burden for the system – would have no value at all. The thing that was unfolding inside would have given us a powerful balance and the courage to make such an unburdening possible. There is a peculiar problem. It is not that there is nothing, there is something! What is it? Whatever it is, there is nothing outside the human being. It is in the space of life, not in the space of concept and imagination. Everything is inside if it unfolds appropriately. A completely new way of living will emerge. U.G. was a perfect testimony to that.
You have a beautiful but problematic situation – beautiful because the movements in the conceptual space give you the sense of freedom to create and ponder the possibilities, but problematic because the drive to actualize those possibilities creates a burden on the system. When the burden becomes unbearable the movements turn towards understanding itself, which is impossible, since the nature of its production is divisive, illusive and hidden from introspection. The question of what maintains the division has no meaning, therefore there is no functional answer. We are the victims of this cyclic process and the momentum grows.
You have invested a lot of time and energy to accept a particular idea. As soon as that idea is not fulfilled, actualized or working in your living, the lack of fulfillment creates a movement inside you – you call it anger, despair, unhappiness, frustration and/or sorrow. You don't look or reflect at the idea that you are holding onto. It is an entirely fictitious thing.
In terms of thinking, as soon as you think something, if there is an agreement with the predominant intention, it is easy, but if there is a conflict and it is dificult to agree, then what happens? To examine why it is not in agreement, it needs a lot more energy, courage and integrity – that is the only way to discriminate the intention.
When you reflect in an effort to understand how life works, it will always be empirical – and the resultant ideas are static and lifeless. It's the knowledge game. What can you discover that is not known? You may get a few ideas that will help you straighten out certain things – you may have some worries that will go away with proper introspection. This is the same thing therapists can do. They suggest you think about it this way or that way, but it is only a replacement.
The salesmen in the marketplace dish out the absolutely wrong concept, that hope is the only way – this and this alone is the reason misery and slavery perpetuate themselves.
One who looks at life and tries to understand it has not only a very limited and specific capacity, but also gets fragmented by excluding himself. The process of looking is hidden from the outcome of looking – one cannot look at oneself. His ideas exclude the thing that he is looking at and the thing that is making him look. It's a complex mechanism. It is there for a specific reason and there is nothing more to it.
When you have experienced something deeply and have been touched by it, and it has become a functional aspect of your living, then you are not going to buy anybody's concepts about you. In this regard no one can take you for a ride, even by so-called love and devotion!
If you believe somebody who says there is a self, a thinker who is having these thoughts, and you can locate this entity inside your body, you will be deluded because it is an oversimplified model. This is the reason all these explanations of non-duality are never going to be accepted as a model because they will never match the specific outcome of the biological functioning of the brain called mind. The mind is much more complex than the best computer humans can ever build.
There is a tremendous frictionless disposition of life energy, and it is beating at its best inside you and there is nothing you have to do.
We are constantly trying to gather knowledge, all the holy shit, and thinking that this is more than life itself. The human mind is a myth-making machine. We convince ourselves to exemplify things that do not really exist – we may be sentimental about it, but in the long run it is a means of oppression, a means of self-delusion, a means of controlling others. Without our conscious knowledge we gather information to reinforce and exercise control over others. Knowledge is power. I know, you don't. So you should bow down to me!
The concept that ‘everything is material’ was very important to U.G. ‘Thought is matter,’ and our concept of time is created in us by our thought, therefore everything is material. There is nothing spiritual and there is nothing to our images. The movement that generates the energy that powerfully beats inside the body is the prime mover of life. That is the whole thing. If this becomes your meditation, you will be surprised what follows.
The mind cannot function in the ‘power of now’. It cannot. The mind, as soon as it moves, it has to work out a solution out of the past inputs that it has and choose one of the alternatives that it thinks as future. So, it quickly takes the past, narrows the present down and throws it into the future.
We have this capacity to ponder, to reflect. We have this tremendous power of thought, but it is almost always inappropriate and non-functional. If you have this understanding, if you keep reflecting on the functionality of your ideas about yourself, you will see how nature's power functions in a different way and how your intention falsifies you. If you understand this, you will have more trust in the biological system than in your beliefs.
There is a stage after which you will see you cannot fight against thought – the one who struggles is an outcome of thought. You will try all your life and die in hope, or you will use the lingo to make a living and continue to struggle.
The thinking mechanism is incapable of detecting that which is addressing the system's well-being. It is not the instrument, and there is no other instrument! It may be of some value at some point, when you see that you cannot move in any direction other than that which is constantly trying to bring a similar disposition from inside.
A thoughtless state does not exist. It doesn't matter who says what. If you think that you will achieve a thoughtless state, you will die with that hope. To live in this society sanely and intelligently, you have to use the common mode of expression that has come to us through thinking.
The difference between Indian and Western thinkers and mystics is that Westerners in general believe that by reasoning and rational thinking one can come to the truth. Indians understood early on that one cannot end the misery of thinking through reason. This is the brilliant stroke of ‘Advaita Vedanta’.
Of course, for an intellectual, thinking and knowledge are its greatest pleasure. ‘Vedanta’ is the end of knowledge. The logic that continuously generates knowledge is not going to be the solution for the balanced existence of a living organism. Most Western thinkers die holding onto the hope that the human mind can know it all, that it can somehow achieve absolute knowledge.
The moment you try to control something, say a thought – your dealing with that means you are giving energy to the thought that you are trying to control, giving life to the very thought that you are trying to get rid of. The only way to deal with it is to take its full impact onto yourself and see where it goes. Be frustrated. Be dejected. Be depressed. The body will handle it.
Unless you arrive at a situation where the system completely realizes that any direction you move is a dead end and that there is no escape, your habitual energy draining by the monkey mind cannot be minimized, let alone the momentum stopped in its tracks.
You have something that's very nasty and you can't get out of that thought; you can always replace it with something that is accepted, more congenial and you feel better. But still, you are replacing those things to get out of that vicious cycle by another thinking structure. That is, as long as that is there, it is manageable, but that is not addressing the foundation of the problem. The foundation of the problem is very different. So to attack that, to address that, you have to come down to a place where you are confronted with yourself. What's your capacity? How badly do you want what you want? – that will bring some action. It is addressing the core problem, not a non-functional hopeful fictitious solution, mixed with a dose of a high producing mythical future.
The process of thinking and its response is using a set of chemicals inside your body. The same set of chemicals is being used by the body's response to its surroundings. A fearful thought, a happy thought, an angry thought – all these create different states in the body, and those states are actually necessary to function in this world. You need a fearful state to protect yourself, you need to be attracted by somebody to have sex, or you need some particular food taste to stimulate your appetite – these are all mechanisms for survival and procreation – they are absolutely essential. The problem begins when it continues beyond necessity, the reason for its existence defeats the purpose of its existence.
The image of U.G. is not different from all the images that you already have, and it is not helping you to see anything, because those images are irrelevant compared to what functions inside you to keep you vibrant and strong, in the space of life. If your background, your self-consciousness has that as a foundation, you begin to see something different, that is why U.G. never failed to say he didn't have anything that you don't. He was asking all the time, “Why do you want to be a cheap copy of anybody?”
The questions are not important, the integrity is important.
You are always adding momentum to that thinking mechanism, to that thinking process, by convincing yourself that a little more clarity, a little more knowledge, a little more this, a little more that, is going to solve the problem tomorrow. That tomorrow will never come. Because it is not thought, it is not thinking, it is not intellectual understanding – none of these things will help you to see this at all.
The movement of the information center convinces itself of its superiority, the recognition of its grandiosity. Creating the movement that causes pleasure is important for humans. Not reflecting why the movement is there to start with, even though we have an instrument to reflect, is the beginning of delusion.
Your thinking mind cannot live in the moment. The moment you recognize that you are living in the moment, you are out. The recognition itself is taking you out of the moment. It is the nature of the mind to constantly access the past and from that past to reconstruct a future, a future that doesn't exist. It's projecting a non-existent future out of the retrievable memory bank, which is knowledge, a reaction known as choice, and using what we call will. That is the foundation and function of hope. The mind is hopeful and feels relieved with that continuity.
The cessation of thought is a big joke – if you believe that, any joker can take you for a ride.
When you get the hang of the mechanism, you begin to realize that the thoughts are arising and your energy is being used to make a thought, thinker and the idea (the object of thinking) – this combination, which is like a closed circuit, is being ‘nipped in the bud’. You come to know the process very clearly. What used to take you to the same old dead end every time is now being taken care of. That promised entity does not exist – what exists is the cycle of ideas, nothing else. So what happens? You begin to function in a way that is so much more efficient. Your needs and wants gradually find a rhythm and become streamlined. You live a life where living and the ideas that you have about living are almost in unison.
There is a qualitative change when the conflict ends, there is no sense of investment, therefore the unknown remains unknown without a trace of pretension – one can say things the way they appear. Repeating an idea comes from the protection of the continuity of the thought-thinker cycle. The mechanism that protects the thinker utilizes the same mechanism that protects the organization called body – that's why the sense of self is akin to physical fear.
As long as you are using that instrument called thinking you are demanding something – you want to hear something, you want to experience something. All you want is a demand. It is usually off-balance and an energy drain.
The conflict between the natural order of the body, which refuses to supply energy for the perpetual nature of thought and thought's onslaught on the system, causes an enormous disturbance in the individual, needlessly wasting energy. The process of freeing oneself from this dilemma is mysterious and cannot be solved by the intellect. Once that fact is faced, there is a tremendous relief from the burden that one has been carrying. The process inhibits the continuity of thought and it begins to slow down.
If somebody says that he is experiencing his mind dropping away, don't believe it.
Your investment in logic is based on certain suppositions – meaning that you will probably find the cause and effect of the movement of life. You have a hope, and with that, if it begins to break down, the information structure that is there with a very inept logic created by the human social intellect, begins to lose its grip. It's not that you will not believe anything, but that belief will always be in the context of functionality. The moment it addresses something outside of that – you have seen where it goes. You know it's a blind alley.
All thoughts have a material origin – even your investment in what you consider spiritual. You have this part in your information world that U.G. was constantly referring to. You do not give importance to what you already have, to what is most important and vital. All your experiences and your enormous information bank has not helped you to resolve your conflict.
All creatures face challenges as they pass through the movement of life. Inside us there are two groups, one wants to invade, the other to protect. The battle, the war is always going on. Sometimes, due to circumstance, one wins, sometimes the other. If the system cannot protect itself, it's finished, it goes.
Gaining knowledge to end conflict and misery is an exercise in futility. Getting knowledge to make a living, yes, because the whole world functions according to that. It is a knowledge-based society, but the instrument that you use to gather information and process it for these purposes cannot help you to address the misery that you are facing as an individual. You try to find out – if I know why I am sad maybe I can address the sadness. No. If you know why you are sad and then you come to know that it is not in your hands, giving up means you are giving an opportunity to the system to function appropriately, instead of giving energy to the lingering thought. By allowing the system to function, if you are lucky, perhaps it will address something – maybe it can help.
The moment you take something for granted, make an assumption, create a faith and keep working at it, the conflict is not going to end. The outcome of life is never going to match your concepts, in which you have an enormous investment and which you don't want to lose. Anything that makes you suffer, from a social injustice to a physical affliction, the sense of self will justify and try to maintain the faith.
The faith is you and you do not want to come to an end. Your understanding will tell you that God is punishing you because you have done something that is not fulilling the condition that should satisfy the idea you are holding onto.
If the movement of life hits you hard enough to halt the movement of thinking, the whole dynamic will be revealed to you in a way you can never imagine – it brings ‘right thing in right place’. When it hits, it puts the nature of thinking in the right perspective. You do not use your fingernail to stab yourself – that's what the continuity of thought does. All the self-dissolving meditation, guru worship, reading of holy books, chanting – bhajan and hymn – everything, all aspects of doing things to obliterate self-consciousness will fail. Anything you do is using the illusive space to maintain its dominance.
You need an object to think – sometimes the subject is the object. It is impossible to have no object of thinking. The God that is a product of conceptual space only exists in the parallel world, in the space of imagination, never meeting life!
It's your thinking. You have an idea and you want to dominate others and perpetuate that idea and convince everybody that it is a good one, and push them to do something, push them to believe something, push them to say that this is the way to happiness, this is the way to live – that is the problem. You feel eager to impose your ideas on others and the other people are already under tremendous pressure created by your eagerness. Society is always doing that to every individual.
Every time there is a movement in any direction, if it finds that it is hitting a dead end, it slows down and eventually stops. Suppose I ask you a question that you don't have an answer for, what do you do? How long can you think about it? That movement, which is the search, calms down and comes to an end. It can begin to work out the solution through its own ordering mechanism – your system is ready to trigger the inactive process that will ultimately overpower the fictitious faith that it is the controller which it is not. When that ordering takes over the innate organism itself, you will find yourself in a very different situation. You will discover that what used to draw your concern and disturb you is merely a figment of your imagination, along with everything else that you give so much value and importance to.
The capacity of the human being to think means we have the capacity to imagine a world outside the space of life. The capacity itself is a product of the movement of life. That space where we imagine and create can exist in relationship with preordained knowledge. The concept of identity born out of that capacity, although closely related to the biological proprioception of the particular organism, creates a sense of separation and illusive fear, hence a drive toward belonging and fearlessness. The urge to return to where the identity crisis began is translated into the preordained knowledge of human society in the acceptance of the almighty God or a state of dissolution. Everything is always in relationship to that definition.
People you choose to listen to are telling you how to ‘get’ – how to get peace, how to get love, all the time they are telling you ‘how how how’ – it's a constant. And suddenly there is this guy, U.G., telling you “There is no ‘how’. Your wanting to know ‘how’ is the problem.”
The unitary nature of consciousness demands closure, hence the desire for a ‘final cause’. That's why we create all these assumptions – God, the Creator, soul. Greater understanding means nothing to consciousness – in scientific terms it is like the definition of infinite and zero, anything finite is as far away as anything else.
When we believe in somebody and trust that person to be realized, the very presence of that person can induce in us a similar condition, but that effect is ephemeral like seeing a good movie, attending spiritual talks, participating in yoga and meditation retreats, or associating with feel-good new age enlightenment peddlers – new titillations through new information to fool the senses, all short-lived.
An actor can play the role of a king better than a real king – that is human camouflage. You are only conditioned to respond to acting. You have nothing other than that recognition, but unfortunately you will only respond to a wordsmith who will play the game of logic and come out victorious!
The culture is occupied with the thinking mechanism. This mechanism needs its status quo to bind you up in its game. If you rebel, you are still participating in the game; there is nothing you can do to escape. When it becomes an absolute certainty that there is nothing you can do, and that there is nothing the body has to achieve in terms of social justification – spirituality, God, love, bliss, beatitude – you will begin to function in a different way. That bondage mechanism, which has been introduced by the culture, will lose its ground on this particular body and it will behave very differently. Guaranteed.
What you call love is a result of certain movements inside your brain – along with this comes a sense of appreciation. That sense of appreciation will change its character if what you see in me no longer matches your background and intention. The same love will turn into hate or indifference. It's not a constant factor. It's not like the sun continuously giving you light, it's never going to be that – it's conditional.
We have been deeply conditioned to not accept anything without hope. It is the perpetuator of the future. That continuity mechanism in the thinking world is consistently taking you for a ride.
Why are you in your imaginary space creating an investment of hope and you feel good, and when that investment doesn't materialize, you feel bad? All the time you are dealing with a fictional imaginary space and it has nothing to do with the reality of the situation you find yourself in.
There is no way out. Misery is written. What do you do then? It's a miserable existence. The more you want to get out of that misery to seek happiness the more miserable you will feel. You as you know yourself didn't create the body, hence you have no right to end its life – then what do you do?
The world is just like this, where we are talking to each other. That's it. Everything we do is an extension of similar activities, and nothing exists in a realm or state that is anything other than this. That does not exist – what you are left with is just this is false. The moment you feel happy about that state, you are ‘out of here’. Trying to understand what I am saying you cut my flow because that is the way your world of imagination is tied up – that's the problem.
The social influence is always functioning in us. To break that effect is not an easy thing – in fact, it is death. It's a process that will lead you to feel you will never again open your eyes.
Hope never dies. You still have hope that some knowledge, some effort of your own, or some other person's wise suggestion is going to help bring you out of this sense of discomfort. Believe me, it's not going to.
If someone understands that it is not possible for him to understand, he should say so, rather than assuming something mythical and putting himself in a place where he can't deny it! If you say I don't know what it is, I have done everything possible, then there is never going to be any further movements to find that out, or to invest energy in an image or idea, and say something mythical.
The social dynamics are there to make you feel miserable or proud for the sake of the status quo – they want to use you to get what they want to get from you, or as U.G. says, by making you want what they want you to want.
There is no way out of misery. You can go to a shrink, therapist, do-gooder, guru, priest – he will give you small doses here and there, take your money, you will come back to square-one, guaranteed. You can take a little alcohol or medicine – and it might well become a permanent attachment to your life! There is nothing you can do.
If you aim through meditation to dissolve the self, to achieve a thoughtless state, you are going to fail and end up in disaster. All meditation efforts are a movement in self-consciousness – therefore it is going to keep self-consciousness dominant. When you try to meditate, it is a movement in the field of consciousness that produces the sense of self, hence it will perpetuate the dominant role of the sense of self – the source of your problems.
The addiction to searching will inevitably turn you towards spiritual prostitution – it must come to an end for anything to happen – if there is anything to happen!
The hope that maybe there is something, maybe out there somebody is going to show you a new direction which will help you to solve the problem of your life. Absolutely none whatsoever. If you accept that there is nothing there to be changed, you will have no need to go to anybody ever again, and life will begin to unfold in its own way.
All religious hopes, which promise a better life, or the possibility of going into an advanced spiritual state are in the category of fiction. They have no realistic ground at all, none whatsoever. Hope is always exercised in the space of imagination.
The hope through which society maintains its influence – teaching, understanding, resolution, emancipation – all these things bring about some kind of passionate activity in the thinking world. By knowing a little more you will solve this problem for yourself and others. There is an even greater hope that you will perhaps achieve some vague state that you don't know anything about, what people are discussing in the marketplace – enlightenment or liberation or moksha. It's all a marketing gimmick, nothing else. It's easy to sell because you think that will solve everything for you. It is a market that creates buyers and sellers, disciples and gurus.
We are all agents of the value system; the moment I instruct somebody about certain things, I am also its agent – it is perpetuated through me. There cannot be any teaching that adequately addresses these subtle things. All one can do is to question – question the value system, try to understand what is best for this organized form. You must be totally ruthless and selfish and find out. How much of your energy should you use to get what you want to get, and why do you want to get what you want to get. These are the things that one has to sort out for oneself.
‘Not knowing’ will put you in a perspective where there is a chance of you imbibing the most important ingredient of life, symbiosis.
Why do you feel alienated? It's a value system judgment. You are judging yourself – nothing else. There is a gap, friction. The image that you have of yourself is not satisfactory in the light of your present situation, that is the friction. It causes you to want something, which you call intentionality. You do things because you are convinced that the intention to fill up that gap will change something, that it will eliminate the conflict. What else is there? Just words and images, words and images – nothing else.
Movement is the foundation of life, anything static is dead. The movement is the throbbing of life, just being alive powerfully. That's why, silence, nothingness, is bullshit. That's just a connotation.
There is a certain protocol given by society and if you don't obey it, you will face the consequences. There will be plenty of conflict within you – good, bad – you may rebel, but you will be impelled to come back. No matter how much you rebel, that social influence is going to be there in you. You have to deal with those things by yourself. Nobody can help you. If you understand anything about humans, you will never ever try to push another person to function the way you want him to.
There is a battle within. The battle is social dynamics and it will not leave you alone until the information structure collapses and no longer creates a sustainable load on the system.
Until U.G. breathed his last, he had to fight against our tendency to create myth and our weakness towards blind faith and useless ritual, and instill in us the courage to see things the way they are. Putting a picture of U.G. on your shrine and reciting the Vedas is easy, but the very thing that settles down out of a demand for security and comfort is bondage and a prescription for misery.
Don't go anywhere, don't read anything, don't listen to anything – you already know a lot more than you need to know to just function the way you are. You don't need anything from anybody. Truly. Nobody. What you need is money – find a way to use your talent to make money. Do you really need anything other than money? Tell me. Nothing.
Are you going to wage a war to keep humanity on the right path? What is the right path? Do you know a path that has worked? Actually, there is no path. There is no logic, none. Unless you have again brainwashed yourself to believe that this is a perfect society, that this is the right path you cannot ‘go for it’. If and when you do that, you are just like one of the old ‘saviors’, creators of paths that never worked. If it were not so you wouldn't be reading this.
We continuously generate myth. We live in a fictional world. We create fiction. We read fiction. We love fiction. We live in fiction. We dream fiction. We are basically a species spinning its own web out of imagination.
What you want to do is what they have convinced you to do. It is a social influence, and our whole life is spent going on and on trying to find out what you should be doing – an unending activity. You are the culprit. You do not understand that thinking cannot resolve these things, yet you are all the time using the thinking mechanism. You want to understand, you want to solve your problem. Your thinking is not giving you the solution, but its apparent success is ‘hope’. Thought and thinker are going to be perpetually involved with these ideas. All that will come of it is the social influence – nothing else. There is no way out, but then you will never ask anyone, “What shall I do?”
In social dynamics, there are internal dispositions that address our well-being, but they are often camouflaged. In the name of providing well-being, some people pretend to possess that disposition in order to exploit others. They will say, “Yes, this will help you, and I have it to give.” This is the source of the conflict. There is always a danger of eating poison, but at the same time you can't survive without eating.
You need anger, you need jealousy – these are the actions of the human species that are functionally important but only in demanding situations, not as continuous corrosive ingredients that destroy the very thing these aspects were created to protect.
Even on U.G.'s deathbed, until the very last moment, every single second – it's not that he was hiding anything – he could not compromise. That was the difference between his world of action and the world that we live in; we want to live with and give others false hope. He could not and would not do this. To U.G. that was the most important thing in the world because anything else was just useless. He was telling you that for your own good. He was not giving false hope because hope is the perpetrator of the thinking mechanism. You think because so many people have talked about nirvana, enlightenment, emancipation, liberation, rapture, whatever, maybe it is there? That will take you for a long big ride, and you will die in hope. That's exactly what U.G. was saying.
Our value system imposes conditions on individuals to follow certain ideals and set up goals. It projects an ideal and creates a path to reach it. As a result we find ourselves like goods in a factory, a product on an assembly line. The value system will emphasize again and again that if you work hard you will be amply rewarded, if you seek you will find, if you practice from the heart with love and devotion, if you have faith in God and diligently sustain it, you will function perfectly – and this is the goal of life. This is the game we play with ourselves and others.
Certain practices have been invented to reduce complexity. Deep faith can bring about a reduction of conflict, and therefore to some extent reduce continuous stress, which is the demand of the self. If you keep thinking about Jesus, for example, your number of diverging conflicting ideas decreases – feedback is supplied through one channel, true, but there is a bigger danger. Not only can you get stuck, but to defend this idea you have to use all the other mental faculties, and you are back to square one. Now there is a fresh new burden for the physical system.
U.G. was not joking when he said, “You can't be interested in what I am saying.” ‘You’ does not mean the body; the body wants to throw that squatter out. You have no desire to be thrown out because you are the slave who habitually uses this palace all the time for illicit, meaningless purposes. Our body desperately seeks equilibrium with the rest of life.
The body is constantly rejecting and fighting and creating a new environment to adequately handle pressure. One outcome of that aspect is the gift of talent, which every single person has. Talent is something that you need to address and handle the challenge of society, nothing else. There is no other fundamental truth behind it.
If I know that this is the way I make my living, because this has a social value, and the value is created by cultural give-and-take, and I am very clear about it, then there is no conflict. The friction comes in the investment and belief that what I am saying is the truth and the only thing that will help you. That is the ‘fascism’ of thinking.
It is this anarchy inside us that refuses the social dominance. What is social dominance? They want us to be something, and there is something that is refusing it – it is a constant battle. Why should I know anything other than what is necessary for me to get by? It's a burden.
The nature of the self is to find itself in a space where it feels safe and happy. One of the ways the self feels very happy is when it is aggrandized. When I say you are good, it's part of that reward and punishment mechanism. You are rewarded and a set of chemical dispositions changes, which you identify as liking, and you indiscriminately pursue the same disposition in a fictional world. Your system really does not approve because it loses its fundamental balance.
You try to control certain things because religion and tradition told you that if you do this, this, and this, you will receive the grace of the creator of the universe – as if such a thing exists!
If somebody tells you what state he is in, he is telling you a second-hand fact – his description is borrowed from culture. The moment you try to look at yourself, all you will see is whatever society has taught you to identify with. That knowledge is the description that you are using to describe yourself, to tell yourself that you are in such and such a state. You are not doing anything more than that. You cannot, it is impossible.
If you believe in God, you never give up your concepts, but if you accept that you don't know, you don't blame yourself or praise yourself for whatever happens.
There is this simple, physical body, but you want to dominate everything because it is the nature and function of thought, and you are the product of that. The body will never set up a proposition like that – it is not worried about the future or imaginary goals or ideas. It has no such investment. If the process that leads thoughts to run amuck begins to slow down, nature becomes the dominant functionality and thinking can be reduced to a background murmur and take a back seat. That's the only way the sense of self will be on track. The energy of the system is optimized and the activity in this biological space becomes primary so that the dominance of the illusory movement will be destroyed for good and will only arise when there is a functional demand. Mother Nature has taken over!
The body does not care about what information you gather. All it cares about is how that information is creating stress and strain. If the information is stressful, the body is going to reject it. If it is pleasurable, the body is going to reject it too after some time. The body does not like happiness and sorrow to go on too long. It wants to return to its equilibrium. The demand for happiness is a problem for the body.
The body is peaceful. Your demand to bring peace is destroying your peace – it's torture for the body! Your demand is the single mental act that is responsible for taking you away from the peace that is already there.
Movements, accompanied by a pleasurable sensation as a result of illusory continuity, will be shunned by the system because it becomes too much for the body. All the habits that formed that you can't control, which are detrimental to the balance of the organism because this mechanism was not allowed to command, would become naturally responsive and not habitual. It's a very strange competitive movement, the supreme intelligence of the body, extremely complex through and through. As long as that balance is not established in the system, the other fields of pleasure movement become very important.
In all ancient texts, holy books and scriptures whenever they refer to a natural physical desire, they give the impression that it is a low-level animal state – like hunger and sexual desire or natural pain and pleasure – it has a negative connotation, and it is to be overcome. But these are the fundamental aspects of the movement of life and U.G. acknowledged their validity. My doubts are more important than my faith – that is what I feel is more fundamental than what my culture tries to convince me to identify with. Dealing with the doubts can bring about proper discrimination. My desires are real and my effort to become desireless has no foundation. By accepting the greatness of being desireless, one is forced to be false.
Humans have a separate parallel existence through thinking and image making. These two have created a world that can exist by itself separate from the stimulus and response that connects life. You can sit here, read a book and create a fictional reality as if you are there. In reality, in the space of life, that does not exist, but you are responding to those words and images anyway. Your continuous response has created a demand for more and more responses.
What is happening now is that the demand for such responses has tremendously exceeded its necessity. Your thinking world that is a product of your imagination, if somehow it cannot justify anything, it begins to slow down. What would be the justification for a ‘well-being’ that is not in the field of thoughts and images? Is there any well-being that is not justified by thought? The ‘outcome of thought’ are just words, right? The body does not care about all these things. It just wants to be in a less stressful situation as much as possible – it does not care about justification. If suddenly your energy, which was draining all the time through incessant concern mediated by thought, cannot drain any longer, a different process begins to unfold. There will be a big shift in your disposition. In that state, where your stress is minimized, the body will begin to function and carry out its journey for the establishment of its preprogrammed order. At a certain point the balance of order and disorder can tip towards order. A shift in the glandular mechanism is the signal of that order, and the whole thing begins to function in a different way. It does not need any thought-induced logical justification any longer.
We call the movement of the information center that generates pleasure ‘self-aggrandizement,’ and it is also involved with the body, but originates in the fictitious world. It is, however, part of the same pleasure movement that makes us feel good for food and sex. This movement of thinker, thought and the object of thinking, together creates a vicious cycle which you call desirable and with that the demand to continue is created perpetually. That is what it is demanding from inside, even in your dreams. You like to have pleasurable thoughts and you want to dispel thoughts that cause pain. You keep the demand going, but the response of that demand is not addressing the natural balance.
The animal that migrates from north to south does not have an image about where it is going and why – it is simply following its innate programming. In our interpretive mind it sees the activity has beauty, grace and wisdom. We, as we know and understand ourselves, are a product of that also, but we use our knowledge in a different way – through a much weaker discriminating filter, a filter that allows the aspect of consciousness, which produces the thinking or sense of self, to grow out of proportion.
We have invented God. We just can't accept the unknowability of the source of life and consciousness in our functional existence – first we invented God, now we are inventing something or other to prove or disprove that invention.
The strength and vitality to maintain the organized form is very deep and strong. It has created inside itself a mechanism to protect itself from the invasion of others so that this organized form doesn't break down – it will not allow it to break down. The mechanism that protects it, we call fear. Whenever this body is threatened, there is a tremendous resistance from inside, a tremendous resistance that brings out flight, fight, or inaction, to protect itself. What is not generally known is that a similar mechanism is invoked to protect the sense of self!
Can the presence of a person bring about and address something that is good, down to the core? Is there a possibility of something like that?
If you are really integrated enough, if you are honest to the core, if your purpose still has that power of discrimination, you will want to sort it out for yourself, not to just feel happy because you are having a vision or dream of God. If you have that discrimination alive inside you, then you will begin to see what that experience has done to you – nothing! When someone comes with a grand promise that if you do this you will experience that, it will have no value to you. So, you become a useless entity for those phonies. But, if you don't believe yourself, if you have not experienced, if you are naive, if you are gullible – that is what we normally are – then their camouflage works. They are doing everything for either self-aggrandizement or a living. Nothing else.
One who has no objective in mind, no goal-oriented drive, will never do any harm to you or anybody. That is why U.G. said, “If one is not judging, not looking for good or bad, it is impossible to do bad things.” If you are not worried, not judging, you have no investment and you are not addicted to imposing morality on others.
You cannot interact with others without using thought. You have to use it, yes, but as a functional system, not allowing thought to think that it is the owner of this body – it is actually the other way around! It is because of this body's infinite mercy that it is allowing this mechanism to go on. It is exactly the opposite of what you think.
Only total trust can allow the body to straighten things up for you – it slows down all other movements and efforts to bring about a change – your efforts actually deplete important energy. Your usual process is detrimental, opposing whatever one is hoping for and expecting. That energy is necessary for the establishment of the order – the order already there, waiting to reincarnate and express itself. Anything you do is inhibiting its natural process of emergence.
You are in a crisis, it throws out a solution, or you shut down and it suddenly starts working differently. This is the power of self-organization – simply the magic of life!
If an internal shift happens to an individual, and as a result of that shift it looks like he has renounced everything and therefore unburdened himself from the pressure of the value system, and if his living is attractive, then others may try to similarly renounce to achieve that kind of functionality. But that does not work, it is unnatural and it generates untold misery.
Only humans want more than they need. Because of the weakness of this faculty in our cognitive capacity, the moment we allow self-consciousness to hold on to a certain concept, say God, or any ideology, we allow it to grow greater in importance than life demands. That is the problem.
Be somebody. You will be rewarded if you are somebody. From childhood, that desire becomes one supreme intentionality. In the religious system it works in a reverse way – you will become a glorious personality if you can kill your so-called ego completely. Either to be somebody or showing people that you are nobody, it's the same movement. Anything you do to increase or decrease the so-called self is an exercise in futility.
The behavior that comes out of a particular functionality does not need justification and you don't have to know how it is functioning. You don't need to know what nuclear reaction is going on in the sun to feel its warmth. You don't need to know the existence of neurons to ‘see’.
Our functionality is primarily involved in two things. One is the improved action of the body as an organism to maintain the balance of life, for example the bacteria, how they attack and protect us, and how the body shields itself from the elements of nature. The other is its appropriate proprioception, which maintains the balance between images and thoughts that affect the organism. These are the two main ingredients that make our life move in the present situation. If we think there is anything more, that will be, according to me, a myth-making structure.
All the sensations that we have – everything – has a reason for its existence, but it has a time and space. The moment it is beyond that it creates an unnecessary disturbance which becomes an enemy to something that was supposed to be its friend. All the activities that we carry out in our brain all have a very perfect rhythm – that's the natural state – the rhythm, the balance with the surroundings. If it is functioning accordingly then there is no problem.
It's a big reaction, a big pain, a big headache, when the whole system is pulverized inside to kill the deep thinking process – it is a kind of death. It halts the entire system.
We have life, and that is the most important aspect. It is not a question of ego or self-satisfaction – everyone has it. It is a misconception that I know more than you, that my experience is real and I understand more than you do, and so I should be in a better position to get a bigger share from Mother Nature. This is the beginning of the delusion that leads to exploitation!
No experience can actually tell us the simple inference that God is there or not there. It is a subjective belief, an inference you draw from certain experiences and it's borrowed from culture. Experience will never tell you, because experience of this can never become a functional reality.
Having no investment in a particular outcome is the mode of functioning that U.G. was talking about. He said this is the action the Bhagavad Gita was actually referring to, Karmanye vadhikaraste, you have only the right to act. The effects and fruits of that action are not in our hands. The movement of thought, which produces retrievable information, cannot conceive of the way life unfolds. I cannot know the future – that is my take on the subject. As far as I can understand, consciousness does not propose the idea of a future – it has a window of remembered presence and an inconceivably equipped innate drive.
There is a strange disposition that can stop the momentum of seeking. It is then that something radical can take place and allow something else to begin – then only. And what is that? It is attraction, resonance and a gradual unfoldment. The end of the search is the beginning of a new order, a new disposition. It is never true in the field of information gathering. Somewhere the movement that creates desire, that maintains the sense of self, has to come to an end. That is the end of the search. What are you looking for? The continuity is never coming to an end.
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To those who seriously question the meaning and purpose of life, Guha's words can be quite shocking to hear and difficult to uphold. He makes no promises, offers no hope, says there is no such thing as love, or truth, or God, or enlightenment, and no way out of the misery we face in our daily living imposed on us by society's perpetual demands. Furthermore, he has no desire to convince us otherwise, for he says, “If you accept one idea, it will lead you to examine another idea, and it goes on and on. There is no foundation or fundamental truth that can satisfy you.”
