Sudden Realization – In Gita Verse 17.13 Any sacrifice performed without regard for the directions of scripture, without distribution of prasādam [spiritual food], without chanting of Vedic hymns and remunerations to the priests, and without faith is considered to be in the mode of ignorance.
Krishna says that to come out of your self-unconsciousness, live a life of sheer joy and ecstasy – that is the only way to live. Remember he himself has lived that way. Living in total relaxation is the only way to pay our respect for all the scriptures. Sharing will happen on its own, if you are joyful.
From your own life also you will recollect the moment when you were joyful and you shared everything.
Every other way is only to commit a slow suicide.
That’s what happens when you are too much interested in goals: today goes by without being lived, and tomorrow remains important – and tomorrow never comes. Whenever it comes it is today. And you learn a wrong habit of losing that which is and of thinking of something which is not. Everyday it will happen: each tomorrow will come as today, and you will not be interested in it and you will be interested in the tomorrow, and the tomorrow is never going to come.
This is how people are simply wasting away. Their lives could have become great oases, but they remain deserts. And the basic reason for people’s dryness is goal-orientation.
Life will try in every way to destroy all your goals.
You will have to learn ways of relaxing in the present. Enlightenment is not an effort to achieve something. It is a state of effortlessness. It is a state of no-action. It is a state of tremendous passivity, receptivity. You are not doing anything, you are not thinking about anything, you are not planning for anything, you are not doing yoga exercises, and you are not doing any technique, any method – you are simply existing, just existing. And in that very moment…the sudden realization that all is as it should be. That’s what enlightenment is!
Enlightenment is not an experience in which you will see great light and kundalini rising up and God standing in front of you telling you, “You can ask any three wishes and I will fulfill them.” Don’t be foolish.
Enlightenment is not an experience at all. It is not that you will be able to walk on water, that you will be able to raise the dead back to life, that you will be able to cure the blind and the deaf and the dumb, that you will be able to do miracles. Enlightenment has nothing to do with any such thing.
Enlightenment is a simple realization that everything is as it should be.
That is the definition of enlightenment: everything is as it should be, everything is utterly perfect as it is. That feeling…and you are suddenly at home. Nothing is being missed. You are part, an organic part of this tremendous, beautiful whole. You are relaxed; in it, surrendered in it. You don’t exist separately – all separation has disappeared.
A great rejoicing happens, because with the ego disappearing there is no worry left, with the ego disappearing there is no anguish left, with the ego disappearing there is no possibility of death any more. This is what enlightenment is. It is the understanding that all is good, that all is beautiful – and it is beautiful as it is. Everything is in tremendous harmony, in accord.
The stars are in accord with the grass leaves, the earth is in accord with the sky, the rivers are in accord with the mountains. Everything is in such accord that existence is an orchestra. Everything is rhythmic, in tune. Existence is music. That experience is enlightenment. And you are not separate from it like an observer, like a spectator. The observer and the observed are one, the seer and the seen are one – you are it!
It is a great participation. You have fallen into the whole and the whole has fallen into you. The drop has dropped into the ocean and the ocean has dropped into the drop. It is impossible to say anything more about it. It is impossible to say, in fact, anything about it. It can only be experienced.
No other method is needed – just an insight that your whole mind is a misery-creating factory, that it manufactures misery and nothing else. Once you have seen it through and through, that very seeing becomes a transformation. You simply turn in. You drop the mind, or it drops of its own accord because you have seen the futility of it. And even if for a single moment the mind is not there, enlightenment is there.
In the beginning it will come only in moments, but those moments are of eternity. Then, slowly slowly, more and more moments will be coming, because you will become more and more a host. And one day the guest and the host disappear into each other – then it never leaves you. And on the outside you remain just the same old person: doing your work, chopping wood and carrying water from the well…. You remain just the same, and yet nothing is the same anymore.
Krishna is teaching you this relaxation. He teaches you the way of non-action. He doesn’t teach you arduous efforts, because they are all ego-gratifying. No effort can help you to become enlightened; it will be a distraction. Only an effortless silence – just sitting, doing nothing, and the spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
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