Saturday Satsang

Hari OM

We cannot transcend the vāsanās by merely suppressing the instrument (body, mind and intellect) since the cause which produces them, namely the vāsanās, can never be annihilated by destroying the effects. As long as the vāsanās, our habitual thought patterns and values, are powerful, the equipments will assert themselves time and again even if we succeed in suppressing them for a while.

Exhausting the vāsanās is the spiritual practice by which the ego rediscovers its essential nature of freedom and peace. This unwinding of the vāsanās cannot be successfully undertaken merely through meditation at a fixed time each day.

Unless we are careful in our contact with the world at every moment at our body, mind and intellect levels, the unwinding cannot be completely successful.

Through meditation, no doubt, the subtle vāsanās are wiped out. But the grosser ones can be loosened and removed only in the fields of activity where we reaped these vāsanās. Hence niṣkāma karma (acting with detachment, without selfish, desire prompted motives) is absolutely unavoidable.

When we identify ourselves with the higher in us, the lower is automatically controlled. This is a natural law of life. That which is superior controls regulates, governs, and orders the lower. Thus, the intellect with its desires governs the moods of the mind, which in its turn controls the sense organs; and the sense organs regulate the play of the sense objects around the individual.

That which lies higher than the intellect is the Self, Consciousness. When a person succeeds in identifying himself with the Spirit in him, all his intellectual restlessness, emotional cravings, and physical appetites wither and fall away like petals from the flower upon the emergence of the fruit.

The subtlety of his awareness and feeling increases, and he recognises life's oneness in its different manifestations.