LEARN TO FEEL

When I was in school, we used to have boxing, you know, in the old British tradition, and the idea was to knock out the other fellow. We used to call it K.O. - knockout - hit on the solar plexus, hit on the point of the jaw. But I find in spirituality I am knocking myself out. And when I am knocked out by myself, it is a problem, because if I have to speak I have no thoughts.

We can say spirituality is the science of going into yourself and knocking your self out, so that this mundane self, this worldly self, this material self is knocked out and the inner Self springs awake, springs alive, springs into awareness. Then starts really our life's journey towards our destination. Because as long as this superficial, earthly self continues to dominate, we are going round in circles. That circle, going round and round, round and round, shows that one wing is dominant.

If you want to circle, one wing [of a plane] has to go down. If you want to go straight, both wings of the airplane have to be level. They call it a level flight. So, when one wing is down, it is either circling right or circling left and you go around in circles. So, to get this level flight is a very difficult thing. It is easier done in an aircraft than in our own lives. We are going round in circles because we have allowed the material wing to dominate, and like [one side of] a seesaw, it is heavy, so we're going down, and we are going round in circles.

So it is a good thing to be able to knock your selves out - forever, I should say, so that this lower self doesn't come back to consciousness. What makes it conscious become conscious itself. Because the problem of life is that that which gives us consciousness, which keeps us alive, which is our life itself, is in a sense inactive, unaware, not conscious. I am deliberately using medical words because the inner self is eternally aware, but it is aware in a different sense. Not in the sense of sensory awareness - touch, taste, smell - things like that. Its awareness is through feeling; our awareness is through senses.

So, you can again have a distinction between the spiritual life and the material life, that in the material life, whether you are rich or poor, man or woman, powerful or weak, you are condemned to a life of sensory perception, sensory awareness. If you want to become spiritual, or start leading a spiritual life, the life of feeling has to start. The life of feeling has to be awakened. Before that can be done, we have to teach ourselves to feel. Not to know, but to feel. I would say that we have to reverse or change that old adage from "know thyself" to "Feel thyself". Feel myself means, I don't feel myself, but: you feel. You understand?

So we have to learn to feel. That is why we close our eyes, we withdraw our senses, go into an environment where we need not hear, where we need not speak, where we need not smell -nothing - all these five senses. I am put into a state of inactivity. Sometimes [people] criticize meditation as a technique which kills the senses. No, we don't kill the senses, we render them inactive. In modern technological terms, they are rendered obsolete. They are put away. But they are there, because even the greatest saint has to involve himself in the worldly life, and then his senses are necessary, at least in the minimum active capacities. Not to be superlatively aware with the senses, but to be aware to a minimum extent, that something is going on to which I must attend.

If there is a fire raging in the house, you must know there is a fire raging around you. You must open your eyes and be able to tackle it, not sit in samadhi and get roasted! We don't want roasted saints. We want living saints, who are living in the inner sense, almost dead to the outer world, with their sensory perception or their sensory mechanisms put on hole, almost like pilots put the entire flight on auto-pilot and relax. The plane flies itself. In computers you have a dormant mode. Just a simple touch and it comes alive.

That state, unless you experience and, I shouldn't say enjoy, but felt with all your being what it is, we cannot really understand. After all, feelings are never understood. Can you understand why we feel pain? Nobody knows pain unless one has felt pain. Nobody knows love unless one has felt love. Nobody knows hate unless one has felt. They are all related to feeling. The true values of life are through feeling.

This mundane knowledge that we acquire through the senses, which we call education, is only to earn our living, to create here in the physical world. The work that we can do through feeling - works of compassion, works of charity, works of mercy - they come through feeling, and therefore they are more related to the divine performance, or the performance of the Divine, rather than the performance of the merely human.

People who have feeling and who have done such service - service of compassion, service of mercy - they are remembered: the Buddha is remembered, the Christ is remembered. The great works of the heart will live forever.

So, spirituality is a science and an art, and an activity involving the heart, where you learn to feel by yourself what is in your Self. That is, we establish in the beginning a very sort of weird, tentative connection with what is inside me. Progressively as you meditate, if you do it sincerely, if you do it, as Babuji Maharaj, my Master, used to say, dynamically, with the idea that it is a purposeful activity - not just sitting in idleness with the eyes closed - it is a very purposeful activity. If I do it in that way, my contact is established deeper and deeper, closer and closer, more and more intimate from day to day.

In the worldly life you are equated with your work: "He built the Eiffel Tower," "He built this," "He built that," "He created this," "He invented that." In the spiritual world, we are identified with being something. "This I am. That thou art. So one relates to being; one relates to doing, achieving. The world of achieving is one science. The world of being is a vastly different science. Here, we are dealing with the world of being, we deal with the idea that we start off somewhere, and progressively become something until we enter a state of being where there is no more change, which is called the changeless state, the changeless condition.

Material life tempts you with the idea of achievement, with the idea of reward. Spiritual life tries to prod you awake, shake you awake occasionally, into an awareness of what you should be doing and what you are not doing. Therefore, in material life there is temptation and punishment, fear and temptation. In spiritual life they are lacking; there is no idea of punishment, there is no idea of reward. You become what you want to become.

I hope you will all share in this enormously noble, divine, realizable dream, and wake up to yourselves. Wake your self up, and bring the two selves together. Thank you.