SLOKA 49 FROM DANCING WITH SIVA
HOW CAN A BENEVOLENT GOD PERMIT EVIL?
Ultimately, there is no good or bad. God did not create evil as a force distinct from good. He granted to souls the loving edicts of dharma and experiential choices from very subtle to most crude, thus to learn and evolve. Aum.
BHASHYA
From the pinnacle of consciousness, one sees the harmony of life. Similarly, from a mountaintop, we see the natural role of a raging ocean and the steep cliffs below–they are beautiful. From the bottom of the mountain, the ocean can appear ominous and the cliffs treacherous. When through meditation, we view the universe from the inside out, we see that there is not one thing out of place or wrong. This releases the human concepts of right and wrong, good and bad. Our benevolent Lord created everything in perfect balance. Good or evil, kindness or hurtfulness return to us as the result, the fruit, of our own actions of the past. The four dharmas are God’s wisdom lighting our path. That which is known as evil arises from the instinctive-intellectual nature, which the Lord created as dimensions of experience to strengthen our soul and further its spiritual evolution. Let us be compassionate, for truly there is no intrinsic evil. The Vedas admonish, ”Being overcome by the fruits of his action, he enters a good or an evil womb, so that his course is downward or upward, and he wanders around, overcome by the pairs of opposites.” Aum Namah Sivaya.
LESSON 204 FROM LIVING WITH SIVA
GOOD MONEY, BAD MONEY
My satguru, the venerable Sage Yogaswami, discriminated between good money and bad money and taught us all this lesson. Money coming from dharma’s honest labor was precious to him to receive, and he used it wisely in promoting the mission of the mission of his lineage. Money coming from adharmic activities was distasteful to him. He warned that such gifts would, when spent, bring the demons from the Narakaloka into the sanctum sanctorum of our shrines to create havoc in the minds of devotees. This has been the unsought reward for receiving bad money–funds gained through ill-gotten means–for many ashramas this last century. One day a rich merchant came to Yogaswami’s hut with a big silver tray piled with gold coins and other wealth. Yogaswami, knowing the man made his money in wrongful ways, kicked the tray on the ground and sent him away without accepting it.
Yes, there is such a thing as good and bad money, because after all, money is energy. Why is money energy? Money gives energy. Money is power. Money is a form of prana, captured in paper, in silver and most importantly in gold. Actually, gold is the real money, the basis of all paper money, coinage, checks and bank drafts. All the money in the world once fluctuated in value according to the price of gold. Mystically, if you have gold in your home or your corporation–I mean real gold–your real wealth will increase according to the quantity of gold that you have.
Good money is righteous money, funds derived from a righteous source, earned by helping people, not hurting people, serving people, not cheating them, making people happy, fulfilling their needs. This is righteous money. Righteous money does good things. When spent or invested, it yields right results that are long lasting and will always give fruit and many seeds to grow with its interest and dividends from the capital gains. On the contrary, bad money does bad things–money earned through selling arms or drugs, taking bribes, manipulating divorces, performing abortions, fraud, theft, riches gained through a hundred dark and devious ways. Bad money issues from a bad intent which precedes a wrongdoing for greed or profit. That is bad money. When spent or invested, it can be expected to bring unexpected negative consequences. Good money is suitable for building temples and other institutions that do good for people.
Bad money is sometimes gifted to build temples or other social institutions, but often only to ease the conscience of the person who committed sins to gain the money. Nothing good will come of it. The institution will fail. The temple will be a museum, its darshana nil. Its shakti, though expected to be present, will be nonexistent. Bad money provokes bad acts which are long lasting, and it sours good acts within a short span of time in the lives of the people who receive it. In 1991 I composed an aphorism to guide those who have sought my opinion on this matter. It says, ”Siva’s devotees, knowing that bad money is cursed and can never do good deeds, refuse funds gained by fraud, bribery, theft, dealing arms or drugs, profiting from abortion or divorce, and all dark, devious means.”
Some postulate that using bad money for good purposes purifies it. That is a very unknowledgeable and improper concept, because prana, which is money, cannot be transformed so frivolously. Many among this group of misguided or naive individuals have lived to witness their own destruction through the use of tainted wealth. Also, this brings them into the illegality of laundering money. Money cannot be laundered by religious institutions. Money cannot be legally laundered by banks. Money cannot be laundered by individuals. Further, we know that those who give ill-gotten money to a religious institution will subtly but aggressively seek to infiltrate, dilute and eventually control the entire facility, including the swami, his monastic staff, members and students. If bad money is routinely accepted in abundance and depended upon, it will bring an avalanche of adharma leading to the dissolution of the fellowships that have succumbed, after which a new cycle would have to begin, of building back their fundamental policies to dharma once again.
SUTRA 204 OF THE NANDINATHA SUTRAS
WOMEN DO NOT DRINK IN PUBLIC
All Hindu women, respecting customs of decorum and demureness, refrain from drinking alcohol in public. During pregnancy, they abstain completely to protect the health and well-being of their unborn child. Aum.
LESSON 204 FROM MERGING WITH SIVA
THOUGHT AND AWARENESS
The mystic, while in the beginning stages, tries diligently through his sadhana to extract his awareness from the thinking area of the mind, while simultaneously trying to perceive without thinking about what he has perceived. It is the overview of what has been perceived that the mystic endeavors to superconsciously grasp in a series of flashes. He well knows that thinking is the more externalized strata. The mystic constantly, through every waking moment and even during sleep, endeavors to strengthen his acute observation through perceiving the overview of thought strata rather than thinking through them. My guru often said, ”There is a chair at the top. Sit in it and look at the world from that perspective.” The mystic constantly sits in this chair, looking at mind from the threshold of the Absolute.
It is the baser emotions, when stimulated, that bring awareness from inner depths into the thought strata of the mind, thus strengthening human emotions and feelings with powers of reason and memory. Therefore, for those not too deeply engaged in the external emotional traps, certain sadhanas can be performed to regulate and control these instinctive drives. When they are less impulsive and forceful, one has a sense of being able to control one’s thoughts. Later on, if the sadhana persists, the sense that awareness travels in and among these thoughts is felt, and still later the perceptions occur of hovering above thought, looking out upon the thought strata of the mind or a portion of it.
To give an example of the thought state, and a deeper state of not thinking but perceiving thoughts, imagine sitting before a television set. The set has not been turned on, and you are thinking about various things that involve you personally and wish to distract awareness from them by watching a television program. When you turn to the program, sitting across the room from the set, you have the sense of perceiving the thoughts, moods and emotions of the program, without necessarily thinking yourself. You perceive. Similarly, the mystic can be called the watcher of the play of life, for he is totally identified with his inner depths, rather than the thought strata and structures he perceives.
The mystic lives in a state similar to that of a child, for a child does not think, but perceives. He, of course, reacts emotionally to some of his perceptions, but it is only when he reaches twelve or fourteen, sometimes younger, that he begins to enter the thought strata of mind. The mystic has deliberately arrived at this state of the child through sadhana and, of course, has awakened the facilities in himself to go into the next succeeding, even more refined, areas of consciousness.
The entire concept of creating a thought, or thoughts of the mind already being in existence, or thoughts and concepts disintegrating or being destroyed because they are no longer used, is totally dependent upon the nature of the sadhana of the mystic. There are four different perspectives in looking at the mind from within oneself. In Shum, these four perspectives are called shumef, moolef, simnef and defee. And of course, many more combinations of these perspectives can be utilized and have been, thus creating the various philosophical and metaphysical outlooks that we know today. How thought is seen within one’s mind totally depends on the positioning of one’s individual state of awareness. This, in turn, depends upon prior sadhana he has performed.
