I thought I should elaborate on this morning's subject of 'samskaras and bhog'. Whether you wish to think of a previous life, which automatically means a future life, or you wish to be very Christian and think only of this life, it doesn't matter. I suppose the original idea of samskaras came to the Hindu mind - you know, they also call it karma - by observing how children are born with different potentials under different circumstances in different environments. One of the first questions my Master was asked when we came to Europe in 1972 was, "Why is God so unjust that He sends babies into this world, some very healthy, with silver spoons in their mouths, some golden spoons, some in beggar homes, some castaways found on church doorsteps, etc.?" Now, that is a limited way of expressing one's concern for these children, because it is very easy to put the blame on God and say, "God must be blind. God must be unjust. God must be cruel. Otherwise, how to explain a three year old baby who has diabetes, another has lung problems, one is robust, one is a prince, one is a pauper?" So I think the basic surmise of the Hindu mind must have been that God cannot be cruel, God cannot be unjust, God cannot be a tyrant, you know, to send babies out like this into this world. Because it would be like a manufacturer receiving raw materials of different grades, and he is expected to produce a standard product. It just doesn't happen that way. Of course, even in your Western religions, Christianity, Judaism, you do believe that God is love. It is taken for granted. Then why this question that, "If God is love, why are these children so different?" Science comes in with one answer: genetics. But genetics does not make paupers or princes. Genetics only makes for human physical, mental, and other attributes. You cannot, for instance, create a king by selecting a pair of mates and saying, "This child will be a king." A king's child becomes a king. A lion's child is a lion. So heredity does not explain these things. So science fails. So we turn to this possibility that perhaps the contributory causes were in the past. And the proof of this is that if you observe even a selected batch of children who are all from the same background, with similar potentials, like the branches of a tree they diverge in different directions as they grow up. So even a selected batch, a trial batch, shows that, however equal these children may have been when they were born, they cease to be equal very soon after. So that's why I said you may believe with the Hindus that it is the past life, or as Christians, in one life, but there is a difference. And eventually, I suppose, Hindus came to the conclusion that, depending on how we react to our existence and to our environment, we create samskaras. So that is a simple answer to how samskaras came into being, because many people are upset. They say, "Oh, but I didn't do anything which created the samskara." Psychologists will tell you that if you have a dream, you must have done something to have that dream. You can't dream of something which you have not created, in some mysterious fashion, in your equipment inside yourself. There, too, it is fascinating to find that there was a fellow who called himself Carl Gustavio, who was able to go back and back into the past and, you know, refer to some sort of collective unconscious, as he called it, to explain for instance the commonality of nightmares. So when you come to the basic fact of nightmares during sleep (cauchemar), and suffering in the waking state, it seems inevitable that we go into the past. So samskaras are defined as something we have created by forming impressions because of our thoughts and actions. Babuji Maharaj has explained this beautifully when he says, "If you look at a rose there is no samskara, but if you attend to it with your mind and say, 'It's very beautiful,' the samskara begins." And if you go back again and again to smell it, admire it, hope you had it for yourself, the samskara becomes deeper and deeper. And someday, if such a person comes to the spiritual fold, in some sitting or the other he will see roses as an experience. So these spiritual experiences are nothing but re-creations of the original impression or the object which created that impression, and it is a signal, an intimation, that what created the samskara has been cleaned off - you see, the samskara has finished now. People who study geology, and especially palaeontology - fossils - will understand this. There must have been something to have a fossil there. You can't have a fossil from nothing. God does not create fossils. A body falls into the river or is buried in some slush or some slime, it is covered over, and over eons of time the body is going, leached out, but something is put in its place - sedimentary rock formations, perhaps, and millions of years later, when you dig into that strata you find these fossils. So it is a science. Going back into the past is veritably a science, and you cannot say that dinosaurs had a past, but human beings did not have a past. Because human beings have also been found fossilized, for instance. You have them from the most ancient times, you know, what they call the Peking man, perhaps, Cro-Magnon, to Neanderthal; and it would be a limitation of the intellect to think that they lived once, and that was all, they had nothing else to do, because then evolution becomes something which we cannot accept. What is it that evolves? You know, these and similar thoughts made me come to the conclusion - some of which I have expressed in those lectures which form a book which is called The Role of the Master in Human Evolution - some of these thoughts made me come to the conclusion that the soul cannot evolve, because the soul partakes of the essence of divinity itself. In India we believe that it is a spark of the Divine, and the spark is nothing more than the original, like sparks flying from the fire, for instance. So, in our existence, if we are able to lead life without forming impressions, either of a positive nature or a negative nature - because in samskara there is no such thing as a good samskara and a bad samskara; it is possible to live without creating samskaras - but the fact that you have already come here into this human existence necessitates our accepting a conclusion that we have created this life for ourselves. The soul does not create a life. The soul is already there. To me, it is a perfectly clear and acceptable conclusion, as far as I am myself concerned. That the soul, in its infinite wisdom, in its onward path towards wherever it has to go, what we call the original home, in the interregnum between two lives, decides upon where and how it shall be incarnated again. That's why you use the word 'reincarnation', which is nothing very wonderful, nothing mystical about it. It only means to become embodied in the flesh again, from the carne. Carnal, carne - anything to do with the flesh is carnal. Carne in Italian means flesh, and incarnation means to be in the flesh. So in Sahaj Marg, we only think of the soul as eternal, and life as that soul being embodied in the flesh. We cannot say the soul is alive. Something which is eternal has neither life nor death. This is something which people don't try to understand. They don't think about it. The soul is eternal. Therefore, it cannot be dead, it cannot be alive, it cannot be born, it cannot die. But in some mysterious manner, which Babuji called the separation from the original home, each soul created for itself an ego. And therefore began this enormous voyage out into the universe, where at some stage we can perhaps find this nostalgic longing to be back in our original Home, and that signals or indicates the commencement of a possible return journey back to our original Home. It does not promise it, because many things which we begin we don't finish. People come for sittings but they don't continue. They expect to have fun during meditation - happiness, pleasures. But it is as silly as a person going to sleep saying, "I shall only dream of being a princess tonight." That is for children in those small stories we have of, I don't know, Le Petit Prince, and things like that - Rin Tin Tin. Others have to face the possibility that in their sleep, the dreams can come only in the way in which the dreams have been created by each one of us individually. To put it in a very crude way, a man who eats bad things is going to have diarrhoea. Somebody who eats some other sort of food is going to be constipated. We all know that the physical output depends on the input. We are, in a sense, a manufacturing unit which takes in impressions, converting them into thoughts, which become samskaras, and we suffer consequently. Because the law says you can only suffer in the plane in which the activity has been undertaken. I hope you will appreciate this, that there are various dimensions to being. For instance, I cannot eat bread and think I am going to have noble thoughts in my mind. Bread doesn't produce noble thoughts; it only satisfies hunger. So food cannot be related to my thinking process. But nevertheless, Babuji says that, depending on what you eat, you can create samskaras, because samskaras are created by my attachment to my food. "Aha, wonderful bread! Bread with raisins, bread with walnuts, bread with almonds." You know, all this paraphernalia of existence. And two, three days, if I go into this cafeteria and find this lovely Irish bread with the walnuts and raisins in it, I am going to miss it - if I attend to it. But if, like Babuji, I am eating in constant remembrance and I don't know what I have eaten, it has no affect on me except the physical effect of having eaten bread and walnuts and raisins. So you see, food is not responsible, drink is not responsible, but it is always the mind which is responsible for the creation of samskaras. People often say, "I was tempted." It is a very common thing, an experience, that the same thing does not tempt everybody else. I mean, you see something in a shop which tempts you, but nobody else seems to be tempted by it. A man sees a beautiful girl outside, but ninety-nine people don't even twitch their eyelids, but one fellow is made crazy. Or, a woman sees a man and she is tempted, but not the other girls around her. So you see, temptation is not in the object which tempts us, but is in us, where something responds or resonates to something outside. It has always been a fascination for me to observe how people fall again and again into love with the same type of girl or boy. They don't change. Third girlfriend - very similar to the first one or the second one. Fifth - same story, you see, because we have no choice. I can change the girl, but I cannot change the samskara which brings that particular girl into my life. So it is one of those fantasies to think that just because I have changed my girlfriend, or the girl has changed a boyfriend, I am going to be happy and live ever after like a Prince Charming and Princess Charming in fairy tales. These things happen only in fairy stories. Therefore, the Hindu says, what your samskara has created for you, you cannot possibly avoid. Don't try changing your partner; your misery, you cannot change. But then, unfortunately, we believe in the Tarot and other cards, and we think we can pick out a new card which will change our future, our destiny. It will never happen. It will never happen because of two reasons: one, I created my destiny myself; two, God has no direct influence on my destiny. Please excuse my saying this. People may not accept it. It may go against their theological background, it may go against religion, etc. But if God had a part in it, we again come to the conclusion that God must be some sort of a blind, cruel blighter who discriminates between us - who creates white Europeans, black Africans, indigo brown Indians, yellow races in China. So God (again we come back to this vicious circle, you see) is not responsible. We are responsible. So having been responsible for it, the Masters have always said, "Well, unmake your future. You have made it. Now unmake it." How? Well, every woman who has knitted a sweater knows that if the ball of wool falls on the ground and gets all tangled up, she has to untangle it. She may curse a bit, or quite a lot in the process, and put the cat out of the window, but it has to be untangled. It is as simple as that. Now, assuming that these samskaras are formed by us in our past, whether in a distant past or a near past, we have to remove them in two ways, which François described this morning. One is by bhog, which is the only way to non-spiritual people. Bhog is nothing more than having to undergo the consequences of the samskaras which we have created ourselves. People, rather understandably, think that only suffering is samskara, pain is samskara. But please understand that such joys and pleasures as you have in your existence are also because of your samskara. So if you want to give up the one, you have to give up the other, too. Again François said this this morning, that they are two sides of a coin, and he is right. You cannot choose, you cannot plan for, you cannot create a life of only joy, and only pleasure. It is not possible. Because where one goes, the other goes with it. They are twins. It's like light and shadow. No light - no shadow. A lot of light - dark shadows. So you see, we call this world the world of dualities, because in this world there are both, and you cannot choose between them. If you choose, what you have chosen may come, the other will follow immediately thereafter. A good drink, and a hangover, for instance. A binge, not just a drink, a binge - pub crawling. And next day, as somebody said yesterday, you really crawl, but no more in pubs! So the sort of thing where we are able to equate action and consequence is limited to a certain time frame. But suppose something I did is going to have a consequence years later, or millennia later - we are not able to understand the cause and effect relationship. It is as clear as that. But, according to Western logic, everything must have a cause. We are even looking for the cause of the universe. We are talking of the Big Bang, we are talking of the steady state theory of Fred Hoyle, continuous creation of matter, how a child comes into being, what are the mysteries of conception. So you see, we are always delving into the causes of things, but we are not able to face this particular aspect of the cause and effect relationship, that anything which I perceive as an effect in myself must have had a cause in me. So we look for something to blame outside ourselves. "It is God." He is easily accessible to all. We may not believe in Him, but He can always be available for us to blame. And the poor fellow is always there. The whole of humanity has spent most of its time in blaming God - even the devout Christians, even the most devout Catholics, because it's easy to blame somebody for what we have done. "Why did you go for a drink?" "Oh, what can I tell you? O'Reilly came and he invited me. We are good friends, and I couldn't say no to him." Poor O'Reilly! "Why are you like this?" "Oh, because you know, I had a bad childhood. My mother and father never loved me. They destroyed my innocence. They destroyed my faith in myself." Yes, but who told you to be impressed, in the true sense, by what your parents did? Why don't you just say, "Dad and Mom, I am going to be something different." Nothing necessitated this being impressed in this way. So we are always blaming either the past or God - two things only we have to blame. And of course, friends, relatives, neighbours, etc. We must first of all give up this tendency to blame any source outside ourselves. The first step in spiritual progress will not come unless we accept responsibility - I don't say blame, I don't say credit, but responsibility - for everything that is happening to me - in me, and outside me. This sense of responsibility, it is absolutely inevitable that a spiritual aspirant develop, because without that sense of responsibility there is no progress in life. We call such people irresponsible. It is not only drunks who are irresponsible. It is not only gamblers who are irresponsible. It is people who will not understand that they are responsible for themselves - they, too, are responsible, and they are in the majority. So, when I accept responsibility, now I say, "How can I change this?" Because if I have been responsible for what I am, by Jove, as certainly as the night is the night and the day is the day, I shall be and can be responsible for what I am going to be, too. Step number two in spirituality: I can make my future. There is no karma which binds me to a future. It might have bound me till now, but my future is in my hands. I don't need to pray to God for it. I don't need to pray to anybody else for it. I need only to pray to myself: "For heaven's sake, wake up. Get going. Get on with this job of creating yourself in the way that you want to be, in the way that you are destined to be, for which you were created originally by the Creator." So you see, spirituality necessitates acceptance and responsibility for what you are, and thereby guarantees to you the possibility of becoming what you wish to become. Because if you are not responsible for your present and for your past, you cannot be responsible for your future, too. I cannot see the possibility of partitioning responsibility into historical periods of the past, the present, and the future. Either I am totally responsible for everything, or I am totally irresponsible or not responsible, and then comes this, what shall I say, rather chaotic mental condition, that I am between the Devil and the deep sea, between hope and despair, between possibility and impossibility, between the dark night of the soul and the beautiful transcendental luminosity of innocence. So you see, you never have a future for which you can take responsibility unless you have a past for which you are responsible, and you accept that responsibility. So, the samskara theory is something very beautiful, you see. It says, "Be responsible. Whatever you have been, was because you were whatever you were. Now you want to be something? It is possible." Because the very samskaras which have created you and brought you here to what you are today can be changed, I repeat, in two ways: bhoga, which is universal, applies to everybody, and will only govern our lives unless we take to a spiritual practice; and, fortunately, the aspect of cleaning in Sahaj Marg, where, without bhoga, the samskaras are removed. To be continued… (Talk given in Dublin, Ireland on August 17, 1994, printed in Constant Remembrance, October 1994) |
