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Of one heart and mind I make you, devoid of hate.
Love one another as a cow loves the calf she has borne. Let the son be
courteous to his father, of one mind with his mother. Let the wife
speak words that are gentle and sweet to her husband. Never may brother
hate brother or sister hurt sister. United in heart and in purpose,
commune sweetly together.
Atharva Veda 3.30.1-3. VE, P. 857

Monday
LESSON 197
The Curse Of Profanity
Many people, even those who consider themselves
religious, go through life using profane language to express their
frustrations at each difficulty they meet. Do they know the effect of
these negative mantras? Apparently not. People who swear --
even if it's just under their breath -- are cursing themselves. What
does that mean? It means they are holding themselves back in life. They
are demeaning themselves and making themselves unsuccessful. Their lack
of success will create more frustrations within the home, and more
swearing. Even thinking a swear word is a mantra.
Why do people repeat mantras?
To generate a positive force for successful life. Why do people swear
mentally, under their breath, or verbally, or at their children, or at
their wives, or wives at their husbands? To vent their anger, spite or
sarcasm, or just by mindless habit. But in the process they unleash a
negative force that will ruin their lives and break up their homes.
Every time you swear, that swearing goes into your subconscious and
hooks up with all the other swear words you've said since you were a
kid.
Many people habitually say, "I'll be damned," "Damn you,"
or "Damn it" as emphatic figures of speech. But all speech has its
effect. Such mantras block their future and bind them to what
they wish on others or crassly blurt out. This is a good way to curse
oneself, to be sure -- to build up a big balloon of negative energy.
Under that negative force, they will never be able to relax or enjoy a
vacation. Many people live together as a family, but their home is
broken, their lives are broken, because they broke their own heart and
forfeited their own courage simply by swearing a repeated mantra. Using profane language is a curse upon the system we call life.
What
is even worse is knowing you shouldn't do something and then doing it
anyway, even knowing why you shouldn't do it and doing it anyway --
knowing why you shouldn't swear, why you shouldn't be abusive to the
children, why you shouldn't be abusive to the spouse, and then doing it
anyway! It has a triple impact of negative force on the subconscious
mind of the individual if he knows what he is doing to himself and to
the minds of others, if he knows the law and yet ignores the law, the
divine karmic law that he accepted.
Now, having heard this, if you continue to break the law, you bring a triple curse upon yourself! That is the built-in prayashchitta, the
automatic penance or penalty. Those of you who know how the
subconscious mind and the sub of the subconscious mind work can see the
negative impact very, very clearly. And if you continue knowingly doing
what you know is harmful to you, you will earn a bad birth. Do you want
that? Maybe you do. Or maybe you don't believe in reincarnation. Well,
it's going to happen anyway.
I was on a United Airlines
flight. A stewardess spilled something. She didn't use the "d" word or
the "s" word. She kept a smile on her face and cleaned up the mess! Why
didn't she swear? Because if you're an employee on a United Airlines
flight you don't swear, or else you don't take the next flight! That's
why. This shows there is an integrity built within everyone by which
they can break a habit cycle if it means some benefits to them. In this
case it was financial benefit, also avoiding the embarrassment of
losing her job.
The motivation to change isn't that clear
when, for example, someone is working at a construction site where
everyone else is also swearing. But the motivation to stop swearing
should be clear, because it takes its toll even if you don't realize
it. It is simply taking longer to lose your job, because swearing will
make you less productive, less efficient, less liked by others. You'll
be cheated, you'll make wrong financial decisions, and your income will
go down. Your inspiration will go down. You can count on it, because
you are repeating mantras to destroy everything that you have.
You won't be able to appreciate that sunset. You will be so confused on
the inside that all you'll see is your own mind. Avoiding all that
should be the motivation; but the effect of swearing is slow,
insidious, and in most cases not appreciated.
Tuesday
LESSON 198
The Courage To Change
It's up to the individual to stand on his own two feet, take his life in his own hands, his karmas in his own hands, to bear his karma cheerfully and work with it. Nobody else can do that for you. Gurus and swamis can point the way and give certain sadhanas, but they cannot do it for you. They won't do it for you. If they did do it for you, it wouldn't do you any good!
People
who are cynical are expressing their anger and contempt with snide
remarks. They may seem to be joking, but their sharp feelings come
across anyway, which stimulates that lower chakra until one day their cynicism will turn into really good anger. Then they build up new karmas they never had before, which they will live with until they are faced with those karmas.
Some
devotees take pride in saying, "I've been with Gurudeva for forty-five
years." "I've been with Gurudeva for thirty years." But if you ask
them, "Do you still get angry?" "Yes," they say. "What have you
realized?" "Well, that I shouldn't get angry." "Do you still get
angry?" "Uh-huh, yes, sometimes." Those people haven't been with
Gurudeva at all! They've just been hanging around. Because the results
of everything we have been teaching have not taken hold. Results have
to manifest in the lives of each of you. Otherwise, you're just bodies,
sitting there listening to me talk, living your own private life,
living a double standard. Just bodies. So, there can be a lack of
sincerity. I want my shishyas to do a job, do it right, and be
on to the next one, not this insincerity of playing with me, playing
with my mind. I don't like that.
You can't work at
correcting something. You either do it or you don't do it. You don't
work at not falling off a cliff, a big precipice that drops off a
hundred feet. You just don't step forward; that's what you don't do!
When you come to the point where you hear about the Self, and you get
interested in the Self, you're at a point where you can break the cycle
of certain karmas through sadhana. You're either going
to do it or you're going to think, "Oh, that's kind of silly, you know.
It's really nice to listen to Gurudeva, but to actually take these
teachings seriously and make changes in my life, well...ho hum. That
kind of attitude, that kind of ho-hum, lazy attitude, also results in
making new karmas, because others look at you as an example and
take up your example. It's living a double life that I am talking
about. It depends on the strength of the person's soul whether he
actually makes some definite changes in his character or not.
Wednesday
LESSON 199
Verbal Abuse Of Children
It's one thing to hurt yourself through swearing,
but it's a double hurt of yourself if you hurt another person. We wrote
quite extensively on the widespread problem of corporal punishment and
child abuse last year in HINDUISM TODAY. We explained that those who
abuse their children, their spouse -- even husbands get abused and hit
and scratched -- are hurting themselves five to ten times worse than if
they simply hit themselves once instead of hitting their child. We find
that in some homes the advice to stop was taken very seriously. Scaring
children by threatening them has also ceased, at least in the homes
that I am aware of in the broad Hindu community. But verbal abuse of
children has increased, calling children bad names in order to put them
down, expressing anger by viciously badgering them: "You're stupid!"
"You're worthless!" There's a long list that apparently nearly every
mother and every father has memorized. It goes on and on and on, this
constant downgrading and demeaning, expressed in the name of
discipline, starting at five or six years of age and continuing until
youths are old enough to leave home on their own.
The verbally
abused child's self-image is terrible, but the pain and humiliation is
locked away in his subconscious. He covers it up and forgets it, but it
continues festering there, and one day bursts forth. If he is a
kind-hearted child, he will protect his own children in the future from
verbal abuse. If he is a mean-spirited child, he will release what his
parents put upon him and into his mind, all of that hatred, upon his
children. So, the verbal abuse continues generation after generation.
Its pain and hurt long outlasts that of a slap or a beating.
In
some parts of the Hindu community we hear a lot about curses. The more
intellectual, Western-educated Hindu doesn't believe in curses at all.
But what is a curse? A curse is negative energy gathered together and
pointed at someone you don't like. Those priests who are able to
conjure up a curse -- and are often paid for it -- take careful
precautions to protect themselves from being cursed by their own curse!
Sometimes that protection doesn't work, and they become ill,
occasionally even die, or become tremendously confused as long as the
curse is working.
To freely hurl mental harassment and abuse
at a child who can't talk back -- lest he be slapped down, dragged
across the floor and slammed against the wall -- is cursing the child
as well as oneself. It is also cursing the home, as well as the entire
family, because this tremendous force of negative, angry energy that
has been suppressed leaches out and fills the room and the entire
house. Call a child one bad name and you are calling yourself ten bad
names. And that goes into your subconscious mind, because the
perpetrator of the crime also hears what he has said.
Many
people verbally abuse children in order to motivate them, to make them
courageous, to make them stand up straight, to make them do better in
school. Any psychiatrist or psychologist will tell you that to tell a
child he's stupid is no motivation to do better in school! To tell him
that he's a pig, he's a dog -- and then there are the four-letter
words, the "f" word and the "b" word -- is no motivation whatsoever.
But the children have to take it, because they are dependent for
housing, clothing and food. The verbal abuse goes into their
subconscious mind. But it goes double, triple, quadruple into the
subconscious mind of the mother -- and the father also if he hears the
mother cursing the kid -- and on and on until finally the whole family
has cursed itself, become filled with the hatred, the scorn and the
filthy meanings of the words they have spoken to one another a thousand
times.
Will that family be successful? Never. Will that family
enjoy vacations? No way. Will they be totally frustrated on the inside?
Yes. Will disease come to that family? Of course! They are creating
disease by the disease they are putting into their own subconscious
mind, and the harm to the astral body will eventually affect the
physical body.
Thursday
LESSON 200
Making Up For Abuse
Of course, parents who curse their children can't
hug them, can't show the same love for them. That would be
counterproductive! In fact, many families think it's weakening to the
child to hug a child and to show love or to congratulate the child.
Thus we have whole societies and entire countries that hold themselves
down, generation after generation and do not flourish, and therefore
are held down by other communities who are doing the same thing, and
that are held down by other communities.
What is the prayashchitta, what is the penance, for foul or abusive language -- for
language that hurts? If you call a child stupid, or call him a little
bastard, counteract it by telling him he is intelligent, wanted in the
family, loved. Counteract the abuse by saying five good words for every
bad word. Otherwise, the parents will have a bad birth. What is a bad
birth? Being born diseased. A bad birth is being born without parents.
A bad birth is being born in a land that has no room for children.
There are lots of suffering kids these days who abused their children
in a past life without mercy, taking out their frustrations on them.
Which is worse, beating the child physically or berating him with
words? The pain of the beating will go away, even the memory, somehow.
But the words will ring deep in the mind of the child throughout his
lifetime.
Now, if the child performs certain sadhanas
and is able to forgive the family for the verbal beatings, what then
happens? It breaks the curse. Then what happens? The whole force of
that curse goes back on the mother and the father. The child walks away
free, healed, and his parents take the impact of their impropriety.
They take the impact of their bad words. To young people who are cursed
by your families, I say take your life in your own hands and plan for
your own future. After all, why would parents curse and call bad words
and put down a child but to control him, use him as a meal ticket,
social security, make him so afraid that he can't talk to them!
In
many homes parents are not beating their children anymore, but they
still raise their hand in the threat to hit them! The child knows that
if he persists, he's going to get it right in the head. Physical
threats and verbal abuse turn a child into a
person who is weak, discouraged, without courage -- without courage
enough to have a con-versation with his mother, without courage enough
to have a conversation with his father, without courage enough to have
a conversation with himself, to develop any initiative, to stand on his
own two feet, to be a leader. If your kids cannot or will not talk to
you and have a conversation with you, you have probably hurt those kids
and scared those kids so much that they don't want to be hurt by you
anymore. It's as simple as that.
There are awful stories we
hear about slavery, how slaves were brought to America, Europe and all
over the world, beaten and whipped to bring them down to abject
servitude so they wouldn't cause any problems lest they be beaten
without mercy for the slightest thing -- beaten even if they did
nothing wrong, just to keep them in their place. That's what verbal
beating does, too. It keeps kids "in their place" so they become
useless slaves in the family, earning money to give to parents who
still curse them, and then feigning love toward the parents lest they
get more verbal abuse. We see this happening all the time. I hear and
receive by e-mail desperate testimonies from children and young adults
on how they have been abused, physically and with words, in their own
home. From the many experiences I know about, I can assure you that
words can hurt a child as much or more than a bamboo switch, a belt or
a fist.
Friday
LESSON 201
Advice for Abused Youth
We want to talk to the next generation that's coming
up. Fourteen-year-olds, eighteen-year-olds, twenty-year-olds, stand on
your own two feet! Make your decisions according to dharma. What is the book of dharma? Weaver's Wisdom, the famous Tirukural.
It gives you all the tools you need to live a very good life. If your
parents are verbally abusing you, don't let their words affect you. Try
to have compassion by appreciating what led them to the point where
they could say these cruel things to you; but realize that they can
offer you nothing but more abuse, because they are in the process of
cursing themselves. The message is to "stand on your own two feet, take
your life in your own hands, claim your independence," once you realize
that life at home is not going to get any better.
In certain
shops in Asian cities, parents can buy bamboo switches, belts and other
instruments of torture made just for punishing kids. Few realize that
their mean words can cause just as much hurt, if not more. Parents have
developed long lists of words used to demean and belittle. It has
become an unspoken rulebook of how to bring their child down to feeling
like he's a big nothing, willing to do anything you say, because he
inwardly begs: "Don't hurt me anymore. Don't hit me with your words.
Don't hurt me with your long silences and by turning your head away
from me. Don't hurt me that way anymore. I'll do anything. I'll get a
dumb job and work at it fourteen hours a day to give you some money, to
pay you for not hurting me anymore." That's what we have in the Hindu
community around the world. And that's what we don't want to have in
the Hindu community around the world.
What can a child of
eight, ten or twelve do who is being verbally and physically beaten at
home and in school? Nothing. It's a sad situation. I've received lists
of abuses from children of that age, just exactly what their mothers
have said and what their fathers have said. It's a tremendous pain in
their mind. We've given young people the prayashchitta, the
remedy, of putting a flower in front of their parents' picture for
thirty-one days. Most can't do it. They just can't do it. We ask them
to say each day, "I forgive you for playing my karma back to
me," but they just can't do it. The hate, the mistrust, the
disappointment, the hurt, is so great, they've been put down so low,
that they just cannot do it.
My counsel to Hindu families is:
Stop the physical abuse. Stop the verbal abuse. Stop the war in the
home. Use positive discipline. Praise your children. Discover the good
things that they do and tell them how well they have done. Celebrate
their Divinity. Enjoy them and enjoy good times with them. This is the
family tradition and the ideal of Sanatana Dharma, the Hindu Dharma of
the past, before the Church of England reigned over India for 150 years
and changed education to their way of thinking, making beating a must
in schools and homes in accordance with the many biblical verses that
highly recommend "not to spare the rod," and the theological rationale
to "beat the devil out of them." Hindus of today's world have begun
working together to stop the abuse, passing and enforcing laws to bring
us back to the true meaning of discipline, which is to teach, train and patiently guide. We must remember that ahimsa, nonhurting, physically, mentally or emotionally, is the bedrock of Sanatana Dharma.
My
advice to verbally abusive parents: stop tearing them down by telling
them they're stupid, that they're too small, too fat, too lazy, too
ugly or too naughty. If you constantly tell a child he is naughty, he
will become naughtier. If you constantly tell a child he's nice, he
will be nicer. It just works like that. All the psychiatrists agree
with this approach, to be sure, as do mothers and fathers who really
love their children and take an interest in their children.
Saturday
LESSON 202
Backbiting And Gossip
There are two very great religious laws, and you
have heard me talk about them before, and if you follow them and obey
them, you will have the spiritual protection of your own intuitive
mind. Your intuitive mind will be available to you all of the time.
One of these great laws is the law of dashamamsha, tithing, and the other great law is shaucha kriya,
doing good. Now, what is doing good? Doing good is controlling your
mind, really, because when the mind is out of control or when you allow
it to be out of control, you are really under the control of the
instinctive mind of other people. You are more or less like a puppet in
their hands. Therefore, we teach, "Think before you speak, and speak
only that which is true, kind, helpful and necessary." This is very,
very difficult for most people to do. If you carry each thought on the
tip of your tongue, quite often it won't be your thought at all. It may
be what is seething in the instinctive mind of people around you.
That's what makes for backbiting and gossip. Like those who swear,
those who gossip do not think. They pick up the low, seething
vibrations of the instinctive mind of everyone around and, like
stovepipes, emanate the smoke of the fire that is burning or smoldering
or fuming or raging underneath. Many undeveloped people believe and
repeat the last thing they hear spoken by someone they consider higher
than themselves. They gossip freely, hurt freely and are often the
pawns of strong-minded, unscrupulous individuals who use their
ignorance and weakness to further their own selfish ends.
Do
you know what gossiping is like? It's like scratching an itch.
Something is antagonizing your mind, so you gossip, and you go on and
on and on until somebody changes the subject for you, or until somebody
does something else that you can gossip about. Shall we say that
backbiting and hurtful gossip are the dissipation of the creative,
spiritual force? That's all they are, dissipation of your great,
God-given inner power. Anyone will tell you that to dissipate your
energy is bad for you, but you do that when you gossip. By doing that,
you are only the chimney, the dirty smokestack, of the seething
instinctive mind, the ugly state of mind, of other people. You are not
in control of your own mind. Have I painted a picture that is bad
enough, hideous enough, gruesome enough, for you all to stop gossiping
and control your mind a little bit? Gossip invokes the asuric beings on the lower astral plane and makes new karmas for the gossiper, who will be gossiped about in the future when the karmas return.
Let's paint another picture. When you defile others, mentally and verbally, through backbiting
gossip about the happenings in their lives, you are hurting them. You
are actually making it difficult for them to succeed, to even persist
where they are. They sense, they feel, the ugliness that you are
projecting toward them. Many women gossip about their husbands over the
telephone to other women while their husbands are at work. How can the
husband be successful with the wife's mind, in which he presumably
trusts, working and plotting against him in such a chaotic condition?
Gossip and backbiting, like verbal abuse, hurt another. You know what
happens according to spiritual law when you hurt another. You are only
hurting yourself in the future. Of course, you don't meet the hurt
right away, but in a few months you will find that it will come to you.
You are hurting yourself in the future if you hurt another in the
present.
It takes great sincerity in life to control the mind. And the power to be sincere is based on honesty. Honesty, arjava,
gives a great boon to you. It gives you stability. It makes you strong.
It makes every atom in your being vibrate with an inner power. It gives
you perspective; it gives you the eye to justice. But you must first be
honest with yourself. Then the next time you see something happening in
the life of another person that you would just love to sit down and
gossip about, stop the menacing wheel of your mind and think about the
experience and feelings the other person is going through.
Sunday
LESSON 203
Thoughts Have Power
Each thought and each word has a form, an etheric
form. That is why when a room is happy and you walk into it, you feel
joyous. When a house is sad and you walk into it, you can sense that
misery, for every thought you think and every word you speak takes form
and shape in the ether.
Prana is mental energy. When
you use mental energy, you make mental creations. When you use physical
energy, you can create physically. With your hands, you can build a
house, you can cook a dinner; you can do many things with your physical
energy and your physical body. With your mind, through the use of prana, you can also create for yourself. How many understand the meaning of the words prana and mental energy? You would be surprised at the power that you have in your mind as an individual.
Every
positive thought that you have manifests in a subtle world and remains
there for the length of time that it took you to generate it.
Everything that you make with your physical energy on the physical
plane will remain on the physical plane in physical form according to
the time and effort that you took to generate it. If you have done a
very fine job, it may remain over a hundred years. If you didn't put
much effort into it, it will not remain long on the physical plane.
Let's
think about the mental world for a moment. Suppose you are generating a
thought for something good to happen, a positive circumstance you want
to come your way. You concentrate upon it, and you generate it and you
make the picture just the way you want to see it. Then you are happy
and joyous. You feel as if it has already happened. Now suppose you
drop into a lower state of consciousness. You begin to gossip. You use
foul language and backbite. You lose control of your mind. You don't
put your intuitive mind first. You put the instinctive mind first and
begin to think: "Oh, that can't possibly happen because of this..." or
"I can't possibly do this because of that...." You are building a
negative pattern of fear, worry and doubt that covers up the beautiful
picture and snuffs it out. Then, when it does not manifest, you say:
"My prayers were not answered. God was too busy helping somebody else.
He couldn't help me." But you were the creator. You preserved it on the
mental plane for as long as you could, and without knowing it you
destroyed it before it manifested physically. That is one way you can
go on through life, as so many, many Hindus do -- blaming others for
their own self-created failures.
Do you know what all of that
is? Confusion of the mind! So, we have two alternatives: confusion or
control. And we have all the spiritual laws to follow that help you
control your mind. When the external mind is controlled, then the
spirit or inner being, the Reality of you, can shine forth. Shall we
say that a confused mind is like a cloud the sun cannot shine through?
A controlled mind is like clear ether which the radiance of the sun can
shine through.
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