Sañjaya says Kṛṣṇa was smiling as He uttered these words. Kṛṣṇa must have been laughing at Arjuna. ‘You fool; you pretend to be wise and quote the scriptures.Who do you think you are quoting the scriptures to? What can you understand of what I Myself have said?’
Kṛṣṇa continues: ‘Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you and all these kings, and never in the future shall any of us cease to be.’
na tv evāhaṁ jātu nāsaṁ na tvaṁ neme janādhipāḥ I
na caiva na bhaviṣyāmaḥ sarve vayam ataḥ paraṁ II 2.12
With this verse begins the essence of the whole Gītā. This is ātmajñāna, Self-Realization, the knowledge of completion. If you can understand this one verse, you can become enlightened straightaway and enter into eternal bliss.
With a higher frequency of thoughts, you think you are the body. When the frequency of thoughts reduces, you think you are the mind and just emotion. When the thoughts become zero, you realize you are Ātman, Self; you exist in the past, present and future.
If you think our souls will also die with our bodies, you are wrong. We were there before our birth and will remain after death. It is not true that any of us will not be in the future.
Listen. You existed in the past, exist in the present and will exist in the future. Your face and body may change but you continue to exist.
Then why do we think we will die and why do we fear death? If what Kṛṣṇa says is true, why are we worried about this life and about death?
You need to first understand the concept of the past, present and future to enable you to understand what Kṛṣṇa says.
Let me explain this concept of time first.
Time is like a shaft continuously moving from the future on the right into the past on the left. The future is on your right and the past is on your left. The future is continuously moving into the past; every moment and every second it is turning into the past. The present is the point where the future and the past meet. Your mind as such is nothing but movements between the past and the future.
You cannot have any thoughts if you stop thinking about the past and the future. Your thoughts consist of nothing but the constant movements between the past and the future. The more your thoughts shift from past to future or future to past, the higher the frequency of thoughts. The less you shift from past to future or future to past, the lesser the number of thoughts. Try to think of something in the present, you will find that you cannot. You can think of it only by taking it into the past or future. You are either worrying about the future or remembering the past.
The higher the frequency of thoughts, the more you are caught in the physical and material world. For example, if you have 100 Thoughts Per Second (TPS,) it means you have jumped 100 times back and forth between the past and future in one second! If you have 80 TPS, it means you have jumped 80 times between these two dimensions. The higher the frequency, the more you will be away from the present and more problems you have. If the number of thoughts reduces, you fall into the present moment.
The past, present and future, all the three put together are eternal, Nitya or Ātman. Only when you come to the present moment do you experience Ātman—your true Self, but as of now you are constantly shuttling between the past and future. When the number of thoughts reduces, you will not even be aware of the passage of time. For example, when you are with someone you love, even two or three hours will seem like a short while. But, when you are with someone whose company is boring, even a short time seems very long.
Time is more psychological than chronological. That is why, in our scriptures or Vedas, we have the word Kshaṇa to describe the unit of time. Kṣaṇa does not denote one second, but is defined as the gap or time interval between two thoughts. The larger the kṣaṇa or the gap between two thoughts, the more in the present we are. Each person’s kṣaṇa will be different depending on how busy his mind is! When our TPS is lower, we will naturally be in completion, in ecstasy, in bliss. When the number of our thoughts is high, we are in hell. Hell and heaven are nothing but the number of thoughts that we entertain, that’s all. That is why I say heaven and hell are not geographical places, but psychological spaces.
With a higher frequency of thoughts, you think you are the body. When the frequency of thoughts reduces, you think you are the mind and just emotion. When the thoughts become zero, you realize you are Ātman, Self; you exist in the past, present and future.
Only a man who’s TPS is zero can realize what Kṛṣṇa says – You will be there forever. But now, as the frequency of thoughts is very high, you do not have the patience or energy to understand who you are and your nature.
Kṛṣṇa says beautifully,
‘You were there in the past, you are in the present and you will be in the future; you do not die. You existed before birth and will remain after death. Whatever dies, can never live. Whatever lives can never die.’
When Kṛṣṇa says, ‘You are the eternal soul,’ He means that as a being, you are beyond time.
Here, your deep consciousness says that something is living in you. This quality you wrongly attribute to your body and mind. You are not the body or the mind. As long as you are caught in the past and the future incompletions, you think that you are the body-mind. The moment you come down to the present moment, you are in the eternal space of completion, you experience that you are beyond the body, beyond the mind.
KAILASA's Words of Eternal Bliss, Nithyananda! 