Tag: Engrams

Innocence means purity of the inner space, not being affected by thoughts or engraved memories

.Reading time 4 minutes.

Constantly, we are asked to be good, to be pure, and to be innocent. The idea of innocence is forced upon us. Constantly we are taught by society, by moralists, that something is right, something is wrong, something is pure, something is impure, something is good, and something is bad, something is innocent and something is corrupted. Constantly we are taught the idea of good and bad. We are forced to practice something that is good or what society thinks is good. But life is no way related to what society believes in. Life is totally different. What society believes is different from what life is.

There is a beautiful saying, ‘When you think, you think in a generalized way. But when you live, you can’t generalize.’ This is like what they say in marketing, ‘Think globally but act locally.’ Situations can’t be generalized. In your life there are so many things where generalization is not possible, where you can’t decide what to do and what not to do based on popular guidelines. All your ideas about morality, about right and wrong, might not have any relevance practically.

Somebody asked me, ‘Swamiji, why do our ancient Hindu scriptures not speak of gambling? Only the epics speak about gambling.’ Read More

Innocence means purity of the inner space, not being affected by thoughts or engraved memories

.Reading time 4 minutes.

Constantly, we are asked to be good, to be pure, and to be innocent. The idea of innocence is forced upon us. Constantly we are taught by society, by moralists, that something is right, something is wrong, something is pure, something is impure, something is good, and something is bad, something is innocent and something is corrupted. Constantly we are taught the idea of good and bad. We are forced to practice something that is good or what society thinks is good. But life is no way related to what society believes in. Life is totally different. What society believes is different from what life is.

There is a beautiful saying, ‘When you think, you think in a generalized way. But when you live, you can’t generalize.’ This is like what they say in marketing, ‘Think globally but act locally.’ Situations can’t be generalized. In your life there are so many things where generalization is not possible, where you can’t decide what to do and what not to do based on popular guidelines. All your ideas about morality, about right and wrong, might not have any relevance practically.

Somebody asked me, ‘Swamiji, why do our ancient Hindu scriptures not speak of gambling? Only the epics speak about gambling.’ Read More

Vacation or work, living or leaving, are both directly related to your consciousness. It is not related to what you are doing, it is related to your being.!

.Reading time 4 minutes.

Let me share with you some very important truths. If you take decisions consciously, you will never have any stress. Stress happens only when you take decisions unconsciously, when engrams interfere with your decision making. If things are straightforward, you can take thousands of decisions and be completely relaxed. Your life will flow, just like a river! But if you are filled with engrams, even after taking two or three decisions, you will be completely tired. You don’t even have to work, just sit in your chair and think about work, and within half an hour, you will have shoulder pain! This means you are caught with engrams. They do not allow you to take decisions.

If you are continuously deciding without any clarity, and you sit in the leader’s chair, please be very clear, not only will you be suffering, you will be torturing others also!

When the file takes a quantum leap from the mind, each engram writes its opinion on the file! The more the number of engrams, the more the number of decisions, so when the file reaches the ego, it is completely confused! When three hundred opinions are there on that file, what decision will you take! Your ego says ‘Just do whatever you want, just leave me!’ You don’t have any patience to take any decision and decisions are taken in a very haphazard way, without any clarity. If you are continuously deciding without any clarity, and you sit in the leader’s chair, please be very clear, not only will you be suffering, you will be torturing others also! Read More

How does the mind work ? What are engrams or samskaras ? How do they influence our being ?

.Reading time 10 minutes.

What do I mean by the word, ‘state of the leader’?

A true leader is a person who is ready to take responsibility consciously, who is ready to handle life consciously, who is not constantly dependent on the past or his memory. If you are dependent on your memory, if you are dependent on the past to take decisions, please be very clear, you will be a follower. You cannot be a leader. Responding spontaneously to situations is what I call responsibility. A responsible leader is a person who is able to respond spontaneously to situations, who is fresh and continuously keeps himself alive, who is not caught in the past.

Let us understand how the mind works – how we receive data, process it and make decisions.

For example, you are seeing something through your eye. Of course, you receive information through all the five senses – eyes, ears, nose, tongue and touch. Read More

What exactly happens at the time of leaving the body during death?

.Reading time 11 minutes.

This question cannot be answered by a living person as he has not experienced death. It cannot be answered by a dead person since he cannot come back to narrate the experience. Only an enlightened being, a person who has gone through death consciously and come back anew, can exactly explain what happens during death.

I am going to reveal the mystery of death now. This may be surprising, even shocking to many of you. But this is the truth. Whether you believe it or not, accept it or not, this is what happens at the time of death. We do not just have one body. The physical body is just one of the seven bodies we have. It is the only gross body that can be felt and seen in space-time. However, we actually have seven layers or bodies or planes of existence. Since these layers have a subtle existence they cannot be seen or felt by the ordinary eye.

Each of the bodies holds a corresponding emotion. For example, the pranic body holds all the desires that arise in life. The mental body holds all the feelings of guilt experienced in life. The etheric body holds the experiences of mental pain felt in life.

When the spirit leaves the body it crosses all the seven body layers. The physical body dies. But, the remaining six bodies do not totally die. If you are holding a lot of desires in your life, all those unfulfilled desires are held in the pranic body. So even though the physical body dies, the pranic body does not die. When the life force leaves the pranic body, the being experiences tremendous suffering. Read More

Why should we do puja ?

.Reading time 5 minutes.

Puja is a ritualistic offering. Puja is nothing but an everyday remembering of all the clicks that have happened in you till date, so that the necessary click will automatically come up whenever you have a problem.

When a master teaches, it is not even a teaching, it is a powerful experience. When you do not use the initiations received through him, when you do not again and again use those shaastra-shastras – knowledge-weapons given to you by him, not only do they lose their power, you may not even be able to remember them again. This is the important thing to understand here.

For example, let us say you have a cot. If you do not use the cot for two years, the cot will not become unusable or it will not disappear. After two years, you can still use it again. But if you do not use the knowledge given to you, the initiations given to you, for two years they will not be sitting in your bedroom waiting for you to use them! No! They will simply disappear, that’s all. Read More

How can we clear our Karmas ?

.Reading time 9 minutes.

Let me explain the three types of karma from a different angle.

You see, if you take all the possibilities that you are aware of and that are available to you in the cosmos, we call that as agamya. There are all kinds of possibilities. You can become a fish, you can become a snake, you can become a man, or you can become a god. All these are possibilities. We call that as agamya.

There are also other possibilities that are available to you. These are not only within the field of your awareness like the things that you know such as fish, monkey, dog, donkey and man, but also many other possibilities that are unknown to you. Those we call sanchita, the whole range of known and unknown possibilities.

The whole is sanchita and the possibilities that lie in front of you are agamya. You then decide to play only with certain boundaries of these possibilities when you come into this body. That is what we call prarabdha. See when you came down, you decided to play inside certain boundaries. That boundary is what we can call prarabdha. Read More

Aagamya, Prarabdha, Sanchita karma

.Reading time 3 minutes.

There are three types of karma – agamya, prarabdha and sanchita.

Sanchita karma is like a bank, a reserve bank. Understand, this may not be the first time you have taken a body and come to planet earth. You may have taken millions of bodies before! In those millions of bodies, whatever thoughts you had, whatever you spoke, whatever you did, all those unfulfilled experiences have become your engrams or engraved memories. Put together, they are like a bank called sanchita karma. When I say ‘bank’, it is not a collection or saving, it is debt! You will have to pay back all the loans!

The next type of karma is prarabdha karma. Prarabdha means, from the sanchita bank of karma you take some karma out of which you create your present body. You then decide to enjoy and exhaust all those karmas that you brought with you through that body. So prarabdha is just a small bit of the accumulated sanchita karma account that you have brought into this life. You have planned to enjoy or exhaust these through this body of yours.

The third type of karma is the worst. It is the agamya karma, the karma that you start collecting after coming down to planet earth, because of fresh thoughts, words and deeds.

Anybody who lands on planet earth has to exhaust his prarabdha karma before he dies. For example, let us say you have 1000 karmas in your sanchita bank. Out of these 1000 karmas, suppose you take only 10 karmas with you as your prarabdha karma when you take up your body saying, ‘Let me finish these 10 karmas this time.’ However, after coming down, instead of exhausting your own prarabdha karmas, you start watching others and collecting karma based on their desires. These are desires that you have borrowed from others around you. Because of these borrowed desires, you create certain thoughts, words and actions.

For example, if you see someone more beautiful than you, your thoughts multiply due to comparison and jealousy. You create karma based on thoughts. Sometimes you talk ill of others, without knowing any of the related facts. When you do this, you accumulate karma based on words.

source: Living Enlightenment

Reducing the engrams in the first four layers is making friends with your body and best way to heal yourself!

.Reading time 10 minutes.

We have seven energy layers in our body.

The first layer is the physical body layer that you carry, made out of flesh and blood.

The second layer is made up of the prana movement inside your body. Prana is actually the life energy that you take in when you breathe. Air is the medium that brings in prana for sustaining your life. There are five stages in the movement of prana in your body that constitute what is called pranic* body or breath body layer.

The next layer is the mental body layer. The continuous words or thoughts that rise in you are called inner chatter. The inner chattering that is continuously going on inside of you is the mental body layer.

The fourth layer is the emotion layer. I can say that intense inner chatter that does not respond to your logical analysis is what we call ‘emotions’.

The silence you experience during deep sleep is the fifth layer. It is called the causal body layer.

In deep meditation, the joy and the intense vibrant silence from the thoughtless awareness that you experience is the sixth layer.

The seventh layer is enlightenment.

We store different samskaras in each of the seven different layers.

Chronic fatigue is deeply related to the intense craving for rest. Please understand that this intense craving for rest brings diseases that will make you bedridden.

Actually if you see any advertisement for resorts, especially beach resorts, it will show a beautiful beach, an easy resting chair and a picture of somebody resting and looking so relaxed. The moment you see that, immediately something starts happening in you. You feel that you too should also be lying like that, completely resting, totally in peacefulness, in deep peace. That is what I call intense craving for tamas.

Understand, if you really find that same beach, that same chair and lie down, you will not have that same peace that you visualized. Till you exhaust the tamas engrams, the lethargy engrams, that you carry in the physical layer you cannot rest. Your desire for rest will not let you rest because the desire is from engrams, from samskaras.

Try to find the same beach, same chair, same bench, same place and lie down. The moment you start resting, in a few minutes this samskara will settle down and the next layer samskara will come up. Even your decision to rest, if based on a samskara, you cannot rest.

The samskaras related to chronic fatigue or tiredness are stored in the physical body. That is why when you try to do some exercise, a workout, or even simple walking, the first thing the body will bring out is tiredness. But without bothering about these first level samskaras that are rising, if you continue to enter into the action, suddenly you will see that the same action brings energy out of you. If you start walking, in a few minutes your mind will suggest ten times, ‘I am tired. No…It is too much! We did enough! That is enough for today. Tomorrow we can do.’ But if you don’t bother about these samskaras and just go ahead, within a few minutes the same action will bring energy.

Chronic fatigue, which is a deep feeling to be in inaction, to be in rest or non-moving state, is stored in the physical body layer.

I can say that when the deep desire for vacation or the deep desire for rest, the chronic fatigue, leaves your system, ninty per cent of your spiritual journey is over. This first layer samskara is the worst problem.

The next layer is the prana or breath layer. The samskaras related to desire are stored in the prana, the breathing. That is why, whenever your desires are changing, suddenly you will see the breathing pattern will also change. For example, if you are caught by strong desire like lust or anger, your breathing pattern will change. It will be chaotic. The more you enter into action based on those desires the stronger these engrams will become.

The third layer is the mental layer. In the pranic layer, which is the second layer, you store your thoughts about how your life should be. In the mental layer, you store your engrams about how your life shouldn’t have been. This layer is built on guilt.

If your energy is flowing continuously towards the future, it is desire. If your energy is flowing continuously towards the past, it is guilt.

In the case of this layer, you don’t need to do the same action again to strengthen the engram. Just the information or remembrance about that action will strengthen the engram. For example, if you have seen the same place, or if you are seeing the same person, if you are facing the same situation, immediately those engrams will become strong and they will be awakened.

The fourth layer is to do with emotions. In this layer, you store all the visualizations related to pain.

Understand, this fourth layer of pain is a very powerful layer. You don’t need any action or information to strengthen the engrams. Neither do you need action nor do you need information related to pain.

So you don’t have to have the same pain again and again. You don’t even need to receive information related to that pain. Just the engrams are enough. They can multiply. They can simply expand and multiply.

The fifth layer is what you experience in deep sleep. Even though there are engrams in this layer, you cannot do anything about them, because in the deep sleep, your mind cannot do anything. It is an unconscious layer.

If in the first four layers you can reduce the depth of the engrams, samskaras, the fifth layer and the sixth layer will be cleansed naturally. The fifth layer will be cleansed if you clean the first four layers. If the fifth layer is cleansed, you will start experiencing the sixth layer more and more. The sixth layer is the meditation layer.

If you are getting into the deep sleep layer more easily, it means the first four layers are clean. If the first four layers are not clean, then you will suffer more in the fifth layer. That is why, when you have more stress and load, a lot of suffering related to sleep starts happening in life.

Not only that, if the engrams in the first four layers are too many, in the fifth layer, the relationship between you and your body gets disconnected. Reducing the engrams in the first four layers is making friends with your body.

We don’t realize how we abuse the body. Understand, if you are overweight, it is directly connected to some of these engrams. When you feel lonely and empty inside, you start filling it. You start filling it with food or by drinking. Usually women choose food. Men decide to drink. Of course, in the modern developed society, you can’t generalize! When you are feeling empty and lonely, you have to fill yourself with something.

Every single thing happening in your life is directly connected to some engrams. Removing these engrams, I can say, is making friends with your body, creating a deep friendship with your body. This is the best way to heal yourself.

source: Living Enlightenment

Go to the depths of right understanding about pain and pleasure

.Reading time 12 minutes.

Today I will start with the 14th verse 2nd chapter of Bhagavad Gita.

maatraa-sparshaastu kounteya sheetoshna-sukha-duhkhadaah |
aagamaa-paayino’nityaah tans-titikshasva bhaaratha II 

‘Oh son of Kunti through the contact of the senses with the objects there results heat and cold which in turn give rise to pleasure and pain and these have a beginning and an end. Oh descendent of Bharata understand discrimination that they are impermanent and ignore them’

Verse after verse Krishna is throwing atomic bombs; the inner atomic bombs. If the samskaras are to be destroyed, the engrams have to be destroyed; these verses are the best inner atomic bombs. See it’s not a moral teaching; understand that is the main thing. And a person like Krishna does not believe in morality, understand that… He does not believe in the so called social moralities. And he has done everything antisocial and illegal. I am telling you everything which is antisocial when he existed illegal when he existed. When he was in the body whatever was antisocial and illegal he has done everything.

A girl asks… a small story… a girl asks a man will you love me after marriage also. The boy says that depends on your husband if he allows me. You are laughing. This is what Krishna has done. Radha is married. Do you know? Radha is married to somebody else. She was already married when these two fellows were having affair. Whatever is considered as immoral, antisocial, illegal, he has done everything. Man like him, if he speaks, understand it is a straight truth; not tainted or painted or coated or mixed with any of the social norms and rules and regulations. Read More

.Reading time 3 minutes.

 LEADERSHIP is the result of a conscious choice made by an individual. Most of us achieve the status of a leader, but not the state. State is totally different from status. Status comes from society. If we are leading a group of people, or if we are forced to take the responsibility of some department or if we take the responsibility out of greed, the status comes.

Leadership ‘state’ is totally different.

When I use the word ‘state’ I mean our inner space or our being should be mature enough to handle what we are entering or the responsibility which we are assuming. When we just get the status without achieving the state, all the problems which exist in the corporate world start — stress and tension at the personal level, and backbiting and politics at the level of the team. When we become responsible for others, we no longer are focused on ourselves. We move towards serving other people.

Serving other people is leadership. Caring for our own needs without shifting the focus to others is absence of leadership.

A responsible leader is a person who is able to respond spontaneously to situations, who is fresh and continuously keeps himself alive.

However, most of us are constantly taking decisions, unaware and unconsciously through our past memories or Engrams. . As long as we are caught in our unconscious engrams, we can never achieve the state of a leader. We may achieve the status of a leader with a lot of suffering and struggle. When we sit in the leader’s chair with a lot of suffering and struggle, we tend to create the same suffering and struggle for our subordinates. These engrams dictate our productivity, interpersonal skills, teamwork, judgement — all our responses and behavior  But engrams are never understood or given any importance in the field of corporate training and leadership development.

Eastern mystics have spent thousands of years exploring and discovering the inner world. They have created tools and techniques to create the right ‘inner software’ to cultivate leadership skills. Meditation techniques are the software that help us eradicate the engrams. Our goal should be achieving the state of consciousness of a leader and not the status that is achieved by becoming a leader. Let us all start shifting our energy to achieving the state of leadership. There is an invaluable feeling of fulfillment that happens to beings who achieve leader consciousness.