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Lecture by :
Siri Singh Sahib Bhai Sahib Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogi Ji
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Lecture on: 03/01/1978
Category: Class Lectures
Location: Unknown
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Twine Thought

Beads of Truth March 1978

There is an absolutely new discovery which I would like to share with you. According to the known facts of science up to today, the intellect releases a thought. Now, this is wrong because in reality the intellect releases a “twine thought.” Mark the word, “twine.” It is just as the weed goes around the trees, the negative and positive thought go together and are released by the intellect at the same time.
I have tried to research why people are unhappy in America. You are very devoted, you want to do anything which can give you happiness. You want to do everything in the world to become great. Then what is the reason why we are unhappy? There was no answer. I thought about it to the extent that I went to read psychology books; what Freud had said, what other people have said, what are the new theories, what is the medical theory? Then one day I thought: “Let me look inside myself.” I contemplated in a very consolidated form on the release of the thought of the intellect. And I found out that between the two solar centers and the intellect-center action of the thought release, there are two thoughts. There is not one thought. But both thoughts are twined. Now I give you an example: “Good we are here.” “Good we are here” is a thought. Now the twine-thought with this is “Is it good to be here?” Are you listening? Do you understand the subtleness of that thought? Do you realize? “Wow! Wonderful!” Then, “Is it wonderful?”
I was reading Gurbani, and there is one line, “Bhagat a bina sensa na jaia,” Guru Amar Das, Third Nanak says, “Without devotion doubt cannot be removed.” It cannot leave you. Without bhagwati (God) there is no “shakti” (creativity). Because whatever you are doing there is a doubt, and doubt is going to intercept what you are doing. So you are being tied down to what you want to do by your own effort. Nobody ties you, nobody puts you down. People who accuse others do it only because they want to escape. They want to use their ego as an escape. “Oh, no, you didn’t inform me, you didn’t let me know, you didn’t do this for me.” No! Nobody does anything for anybody. Everything happens. And not knowing that you have a twine-thought is the reason why we are unhealthy mentally. Because you must know that your basic brain waves, on which your whole personality is based is releasing twine-thoughts. Very subtle. So every action has a question. When every action has a question, if you do not have a goal, and motivation, and motivation supported by your will, you won’t go through any phase of life successfully.
It is a wrong theory by the medical science that intellect releases a thought. It is not true. Intellect releases a twine-thought. And every thought so released by the intellect has a basic question. So to question at the very basic fundamental level of thought is the basic nature of the person. Now, when you question, you have the right to question everything because you are questioning your own basic thought. Then what will carry you out of this duality? You have a thought and you have a question. Motivation! Motivation must be supported by the will, otherwise, thought will enter ego. Any thought which will enter ego will become desire. Any desire with the help of ego, without the help of motivation, will bring disaster. It is just like eating a wild rice, not knowing what it is. Because you are hungry you found a bush, it had a kind of rice, you pulled it out and you ate it. But that does not solve your life problem. Your life problem is to become balanced.
Now, how can a person be balanced? There are two ways to look at it. One is, you release a thought, automatically a thought will produce a question. Then the thought and the question can be watched by our meditative mind. And, what is an intellectual? One who has every logic and every reason but he has nothing to do. You’ll be surprised to see that intellectuals will end up in coffee shops and discuss the whole politics but they never read the newspaper. Practical people, executive people, people who accomplish in life are those who have motivated will, and that comes out of a training in mental capacity. Such people who have meditative minds can make their life happy under all circumstances.
That is why Guru Nanak in the last verse of the slok said, “Jinee nam diaya.” “Nam” is the repetition of God’s Name. It trains the brain to release intellect thought and direct it into a positive capacity of the mind. Japa (the meditative mind) can give you a positive personality. Now, Nam is to make the mind positive, but without meditation it will not give results.
Do you understand the difference between a wise person and a neurotic? A neurotic is a person who pleases his instinct and not his environments. As a human being, it is an obligation of yours to please the environments, because you are part of the environments. Environments are part of you so you have to have that sensitivity. Minus that sensitivity you will always find trouble. But pleasing the environment does not mean being a slave of the environment. Pleasing of the environments means you relate to the environment and environment should relate to you at par.
Some people are very rude. Now, normally you will not life to be rude. Some people like to play a lot and some people are very much cornered in their life. They just corner themselves. All these things are not right, because each step in your life should lead towards maturity. And what is maturity? When there is a balance between pleasure and work, when your balance is between your individuality and your universality, when there is a balance in your retreat and your advance. It is that balanced life which a meditative mind can achieve.
Many people I have talked to in nine years say, “I do not know how to commit.” I agree, you do not know. You people are very lucky because those who do not know how to ‘commit’ will finally commit suicide. Commitment is the excellence of your intelligence. It is the excellence.
You will see people with money, you will see people married, you will see people divorced, you will see people sick, you will see people healthy, rich, poor, up, down, powerful, unpowerful, all sorts of people you can find. But people who are happy are totally different. There is a special class of people who are happy. Happiness neither comes with money nor with power, nor it comes with richness, nor it comes with poverty, nor it comes when you have many slaves, nor it comes when you have lots of students, nor it comes when you have nothing, nor it comes when you have everything. Happiness only comes to you when your mind has the capacity to meditate on the thought when it is released from the intellect, so you may not end up suffering with sequence and consequences. So that is a special training which we have to give to our coming generation of children and which we have to give to our own self.
You can see in America that men are bananas, and I don’t blame the ladies. But also the woman in America is not a woman too. They are also neurotic and what not. We can’t blame a person. “All women are bad,” that is not true. “All men are bad,” that is not true. We agree that the majority of men are bananas. That we agree. Why? Because when you grow up, if you have a heavy mother and a banana father or you have a banana mother and a heavy father you’ll grow up unbalanced. And if, God bless you, you have both as neurotics then only His power can save you, nothing else. Now two things can happen: One is that you can be totally positive. When both parents are very negative, sometimes the children can become very positive and sometimes they can become super negative. So your personal growth ends up with that line which Jesus said, “When I was a child, I spake as a child. But when I grew older, I gave up childish things.” But the question is, “Are you adult?” I had a conversation with a 58 year-old man and after finishing about half an hour with it, I said, “I regret to say it will take a long time to do something for you.” He said, “Why?” I said, “In this 58 year-old body there is an 11 year-old man. Now think how much you have to stretch, from 11 years to fit into the behavior of a 58 year-old body.” It is a heck of a job. Who wants to do it?”
You’ll be surprised. Normally in life we don’t trust anybody. You know why? It is a very simple thing. We don’t trust ourselves. Majority of the people have married to just play out their neuroses. Either wife has a husband as a target or husband has a wife as target. Now if you do target shooting, what will you do? You’ll create a big bang-bang, right? And that is what our lives really are: big bang-bangs.
There is a big campaign going against me these days, “Why do I teach sex?” Well, I should not? Next year I think every human being is going to grow out of the trees. Can you believe the sickness? One respected Sikh wrote me, “Oh, Yogiji, you are teaching these Americans all these old sexual scriptures. Where is it accepted in Sikh Dharma?” As if Guru Nanak grew out of a banana, and Guru Gobind Singh got on earth through a parachute. What are they making of the Sikh religion? You go to a Catholic priest, and all he says is, “No, no, no.” And we believe him. We are so unlearned that there is no reason that we as human beings should be punished for anything, because there is nothing we know. And everywhere in the scriptures it is written, “Ignorance is the worst sin of a human life.” Now just telling everybody this will solve the problem? No, it won’t.
You know the Jews write all those prayers and attach it on their hand. They tie it down with that string, have you seen their ceremony? And they put that word of God on the forehead. What was the reason for it? It was a ceremony to remind you that the Word of God should be realized in your mind. It was a ceremony to tie you down, that your hand should be guided with the Word of God. It was a practice to remember to train the subconscious mind to do automatically those righteous things. Now, they are rituals. What is a ritual? That which takes away the rightful meaning of the ceremony.
Now as we stand today we have lost two Mukhia Singh Sahibs and I’m so glad we could lose them. Because we must learn to lose things to gain things. We must set and study every possibility of our life. We must experience what a loss means. We must not be swallowed by the ego of gain. It is to understand where we are going: We are going to be very practical, intelligent, balanced human beings. It is that thought which we project in America. We don’t relate to Las Vegas because we do not want to gamble our well earned freedom. We do not relate to prostitution of our society because we do not barter it with our modesty and our sincerity as Americans. We are refusing as people of 3HO, to relate to unhealthy environments or to those things which relate to or lead us to unhealthy environments. We want to cut things at the sequence rather than at the consequence, because no human being is powerful enough to fight the consequence. But you are strong enough to turn away from the sequence so that you can have a few happy moments in your life.
You can’t negate things of trust. Once you are given the trust you have to carry out the trust. Instead of carrying out the trust you negate trust. You think you are achieving something. No, you are not. You are creating sickness in your own mind. What is the sickness of the mind? The fear of the self. That is why Guru Nanak, in the opening sentence of Siri Guru Granth Sahib, describes God’s qualities, saying: “Nirbhao, nirvair: revengeless.” What we do in our society when we fail is to take revenge on other people. When I cannot write a letter, I start yelling at my secretaries. What a wonderful thing. Beautiful! Idiot, you didn’t write a letter! You forgot it. It was your duty. Poor thing is always ready to take dictation. You didn’t dictate it and now you are yelling at her. Why do we do that? Because we believe in saving face, not the soul. And “any human being who will not be willing to save his soul will live unhappy on the earth.” From every thought, when you proceed in action, you must ask one question: “What do you say, my soul?” Because in the end, when you’ll quit, you will answer to your soul. You will not answer to your teacher, you will not answer to your imagination of God. At the moment of going, one thing will be with you which you have to answer to: soul. And we relate to everything except soul. We relate to friends, we relate to cocktail parties, we relate to intrigues, we relate to power trips and what not.
That is why they say there are only a few elementary souls. There are complementary souls and supplementary souls, but sayeth the scriptures: “You can always transform yourself from supplementary and complementary to an elementary soul.” And it is that state of consciousness when the soul lives and dwells in the body in an elementary way that it receives, perceives and experiences God. Otherwise there is no difference between you and the worm. Gurbani says, “Vishta Ka Keera.” ‘Vishta’ means human stool, human remains, human droppings, whatever you want to call it. And that worm in that stool is what your life total is. “Ulach palich sagaleee mohi, joothay tanday moh.” “Ulach palich, ulach palich” means: “Doing the same thing.” Don’t you say sometimes to me, “Well, I look at my pattern.” You remember that? “When I look at my pattern I see myself doing the same thing.” It is just like a dog’s tail. Somebody got mad at his dog because his tail was just curled. So he took a straight bamboo stick and put the dog’s tail in it to straighten it out. Twelve years passed by, and the dog was quite old and he said, “Now dog is old, he may die any day. Let me see whether his tail is curled or will remain straight?” He pulled the bamboo stick and he found it went back again as it was. So whenever in Northern India we want to address somebody that is not changeable we say, “Kutay kee pooch.” That means the dog’s tail. “Kutay kee pooch.” It’s not going to change. You can’t make a fish to walk on the land.
But you can make yourself to change your pattern. Why? Because you have a will. You don’t have only intellect. There are two things given to you. You forget. You have a body and you have a soul. Your mind can be subject to the body. It can be subject to the soul. I’m not asking you to follow me. I’m not asking you to study with me. I have done well. I am freaking out because I have to freak out to be with you freaks. We have to have the same level. You understand? I am asking you one simple question, “Do you want to be happy, or don’t you want to be happy?” I will tell you how to be happy or you tell me the way how to be happy. But somehow we are to sit together these ten days when the energy of the sun is at 90 degrees. Summer Solstice and Winter Solstice are not small things, remember that. These are the two times when the electromagnetic field of the human brain is highly positive. That is why we celebrate Christmas. We knew Jesus was not born on December 25th but in August. He was a Virgo. But with the general consent of the church, we shifted his birthday to have a white Christmas. That is the power of these days, because as a human being this earth rotates as so do we, and this 25-watt computer in this skull has a lot to do with our life.
Two weeks ago a lot of people telephoned me. And I asked my appointment secretary to hold the telephone calls. I took one week of telephone calls, and didn’t answer them back. I took out of them, 52 telephone calls, which were pretty serious according to the note. I called back and asked those 52 people one question, “Are you doing your yoga or not?” “Off and on.” I said, “Problem is all there.” The rest of the seventeen calls were from those who were doing their yoga practices regularly and their problems were simple and straight. The behavior problem was with those people who have neglected their yoga exercises, because as a result they’re unable to maintain the glandular secretion which is essential for a normal elevated human behavior. You are unable to perceive and mature your own intellect through wavelength if you do not have the capacity in your body. Your body is not just a structure. It has glandular secretions, which control your reactions and actions.
Once someone asked me why we can’t meditate sitting on a chair? I said, “We can’t.” He said, “Why?” and I said you can’t do two things. You cannot meditate on a chair and you cannot meditate without a shawl on your shoulders. “Why?” Answer is simple. But cutting down the circulation in the legs we support the circulation to the brain which needs a lot of blood supply when we meditate. Real meditation is not a joke. We have to keep the shoulders warm because that is where the temperature drops. Judaism is a householder’s religion. Their prayershawl is more important than anything in the world. Now to suit the modern times people want to meditate on a chair. Tomorrow because of space, people will have their kitchen next to the bathroom. Why not put the toilet seat in the kitchen? It takes absolutely no time. You can ease yourself when you want, you can cook when you want, or you can ease yourself and cook at the same time.
There is some sensitivity in us as human beings. There are some fundamental sensitivities that cannot be deprived. We cannot be under emotions, emotions can be under us. You can pick and choose from your emotional life. Your emotional life cannot pick and choose from you. This is the law of God, therefore, it is the law of the earth. Those who have more and give less are not valued. They will lose the respect. They are not leaders. And a human being is meant and made to be the leader and nothing less than that. Within your own sphere you should be the leader.
Look at the politics. If you do not satisfy your constituency and you have a hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner, nobody comes. They may be thinking, “Enough of that nonsense, he doesn’t do a thing, when we call he never answers a phone.” You can hang in for two years in the Congress and after that you go for a vote, and nobody votes for you. But if you really deliver and serve your constituency, you call a two-hundred-a-plate-dinner and give only rice, but still people will come.
In your life your destruction comes from your insecurity and insecurity is an act of grabbing, and when you grab, God knows what you’re going to catch. You know that we have a common word in America, it is called ‘split.’ I want to split. You know those hippy days? Now question is I have grown with you. That is the problem, so I know you very well. With all your white clothes, it doesn’t mean anything. I know in between what was there. So in those days when you were not white, you used to do the act and split. That was all life was. Now things have not changed. Now still you do your act and prepare to split. But then, you wanted to go and you had a place to go. Now things are changed. There is no place to go, because your subconscious knows that there is a lot of problems outside in the world. Every mind which has a little bit of intelligence wants to be steady. And this steadiness is the urge or the longing of every mind which has an iota of intelligence.
Ten years ago in a hotel in Chicago, eight most successful people met. Six years after that meeting six of those men either died of heart attack or suicide or this or that and two of them got wiped out. Question arose, “Why does this happen to a successful person?” The answer is the moment you feel you are successful, you also feel bored. So, feeling of success brings boredom because it inflates the ego. What is success? When you think you made it. But you have never made it until you put it aside. Therefore there’s no such thing as success. You have part of the game. You leave it behind or you take it. There’s no such thing as quitting, and there’s no such thing as “I am successful.” Is there anything in the world which is successful? Because in everything there is a chance to improve. In everything there is a chance to work more.
I have realized that many 3HO people also are cheating. They are not doing their Kundalini Yoga exercises. I am convinced that such people will not find happiness. I am convinced dharma is a beautiful philosophy, it will give a good life, it will give steadiness of the future but your base has to be a base. Those who are not careful about the base will not have the upper story intact.
© YB Teachings, LLC 1978
Above Article Copyright © Yogi Bhajan 2002. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.



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