The Bhagavad Gita’s Approach to Stress Management

Crystallisation

The Discipline of Yoga Means Yoga Wants to Create a Crystallised Centre in You: The discipline of Yoga means Yoga wants to create a crystallised centre in you. As you are, you are a crowd and a crowd has many phenomena. One is that you cannot believe a crowd. Gurdjieff used to say that man cannot promise: who will promise? You are not there. If you promise, who will fulfil the promise? Next morning the one who promised was not there.

Gurdjieff used to say, “This is the chief characteristic of man – that he cannot promise.” You cannot fulfil a promise. You go on giving promises, and you know well that you cannot fulfil them because you are not one; you are a disorder, a chaos. Hence Patanjali says: Now the discipline of Yoga. If your life has become an absolute misery, if you have realised that whatsoever you do creates hell, then the moment has come. This moment can change your dimension, your direction of being.

Up until now you have lived as chaos, a crowd. Yoga means now you will have to be in harmony, you will have to become one. A crystallisation is needed; a centering is needed. And unless you attain a centre all that you do is useless; it is wasting life and time. A centre is the first necessity, and only a person who has a centre can be blissful. Everybody asks for it, but you cannot ask for it, you have to earn it! Everybody hankers for a blissful state of being, but only a centre can be blissful, a crowd cannot be blissful. A crowd has no self, there is no atman. Who is going to be blissful?

Bliss means absolute silence, and silence is possible only when there is harmony, when all the discordant fragments have become one, when there is no crowd, only one. When you are alone in the house and nobody else is there, you will be blissful. Right now everybody else is in your house, you are not there. Only the guests are there, the host is always absent, and only the host can be blissful.

Own Vastness

Death is not the end, but the beginning of a new life. Yes, it is the end of something that is already dead. It is also a crescendo of what we call life, although very few know what life is. They live, but they live in such ignorance that they never encounter their own life. And it is impossible for these people to know their own death, because death is the ultimate experience of this life, and the beginning experience of another. Death is the door between two lives; one is left behind, one is waiting ahead.

There is nothing ugly about death; but man, out of his fear, has made even the word, death ugly and unutterable. People don’t like to talk about it. They won’t even listen to the word death.

The fear has reasons. The fear arises because it is always somebody else who dies. You always see death from the outside, and death is an experience of the innermost being. It is just like watching love from the outside. You may watch for years, but you will not come to know anything of what love is. You may come to know the manifestations of love, but not love itself. We know the same about death. Just the manifestations on the surface – the breathing has stopped, the heart has stopped, the man as he used to talk and walk is no more there: just a corpse lying there instead of a living body.

These are only outer symptoms. Death is the transfer of the soul from one body to another body, or in cases when a man is fully awakened, from one body to the body of the whole universe. It is a great journey, but you cannot know it from the outside. From outside, only symptoms are available; and those symptoms have made people afraid.

Those who have known death from inside lose all fear of death.