When You’re Left with the Self

PAPAJI: [answering a question about mind and ego]: The ego has a power of its own. Do you know the power of the ego? You dream, in the dream you create so many things. You see the power of the ego. You create, you create mountains, you create rivers, you create oceans, you create forests; you create men, animals, birds. So you have done this now. This is the power of your ego, your mind. So this man, he created another srishti, another world, another universe with its own solar system, with its gods, creator, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva. And its own Indra. And most of us live in that universe. No one knows. No one knows, therefore, you need to open your eyes really to see what the real universe is. 

If you are troubled, if you are misjudging, miscalculating, it’s not your fault. You have been born and stayed and lived and died many times in this way. This universe is not going to give you freedom. That’s what Arjuna says in the Gita. Krishna was asked the question, “How to control the mind?” And the Lord says, tells him (Arjuna), “You can’t see.” Arjuna sees Krishna as a friend, as a warrior, as a comrade. But here now the question is of teaching, of knowledge, jnanam. So Krishna is telling Arjuna, “You can’t see me” — this is the point which I’m referring to — “you can’t see me with your eyes. You can’t see anything, anything real with your eyes. I will give you divine eyes, I will divinize your eyes so that I may be seen by you.” That’s what the Lord says to his devotee. You have to divinize your eyes so that you will see the real universe. In the Real universe you will have beautiful eyes (vision), the same being, each person when they come before you, you will see who  she or he is. Not what you see now. You are seeing with the eyes of cheated persons, seeing with jaundiced eyes, you know. You will see all yellow. So unless this eye is somehow divinized you cannot see what truth is. And that’s what the trouble is. 

Some people are not catching up, you see. They say, “We can’t [follow you], we can’t do it” and that depends upon what they have learned from their previous teachers, a very different teaching, and now they compare. This is not a teaching. This is to hand over what you don’t want. And this is to reject what can be rejected. This is not a teaching, you see. This is something to reject what is not permanent, what is not real and what can be rejected. In the end, what can’t be rejected is your Self. That’s all. So they have not learned this. All the teachers are inflating people’s egos. No one knows what this drishti is and what they have got to do. How to divinize the eyes? By simple devotion, you see. And where is the teacher who can teach you devotion? Where is the teacher in the world who teaches you devotion towards your own being? Every guru will hand you something of his to worship, some rosary of their different sect to don around your neck, some syllable, some word. It’s not going to help. You have to get free of everything that can be done away with, that you can avoid. Finally you will arrive at a point which cannot be avoided and for that you will not to have to do any kind of practice, any kind of sadhana, but to reject. 

Imagine you’ve got two hundred pounds weighing on your head, so you’re troubled and you go to a teacher. Two hundred pounds on your head, this burden has accumulated for 35 million years with this on your head. So the teacher says, when he hands over to you some twenty, thirty, forty, fifty hundred books, he says, “Now you will be comfortable”. Isn’t it? He loads other books on your already burdened head, you see. Already you have got enough burdens. Every teacher has burdened you. May it be a rosary around your neck, whatever it is, the burden is increased, ego is increased, specialization is increased, you see. Isn’t it? So you have to denude yourself of all these superficial things that you have somehow liked and instantly, you have to come out of these things and go to your own being. When you see your own being, you will never be able to reject it anymore. How can you? You can reject your body. You can reject your mind. You can reject your skin. You can reject your relations, society, your country can be rejected too. You can take some other nationality. Then your country’s gone. When you sleep everything is gone. So here finally we have to make this gift to your own self and that was missing. That has been missing, therefore, we are living in a different kind of srishti, different kind of world created by the demon. The original world, the original srishti, is the creation of God itself, the creation of God. He cannot create. He is love himself. He is being himself. He is beauty himself. How can he create things which trouble us? Whose fault is this? We are not seeing. Our eyes are…we are putting on specs of different colors. We see hatred. We see jealousy between man and man. Yeah, so it will not help. OK. Hari OM.