Yogi Bhajan Lecture Archive
Lecture by :
Siri Singh Sahib Bhai Sahib Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogi Ji
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Lecture on: 10/12/1989
Category: Class Lectures
Location: Los Angeles, Ca
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Public

Touch Your Mind

We are teaching this course “Touch of Mind.” We are trying to reach you so you can understand how God works in his mysterious ways.

I have realized something and I’m trying to communicate it to other people. It is a single man’s crusade. I am not here to establish a religion. I am not here to establish a gang war. I am not here to establish crusades. I am not the son of God and I am not the father of anybody. Neither am I an avatar. But in my own sense of human values, I have realized something very pure.

God is in charge of the planet earth and you are not. I see and believe it, and it seems very practical to me. I see a war between man and God. And I see it is a very cruel war, it is a very egomaniac war. I see it is a very ugly and untruthful war. And I see it as a war which man has waged on God. I see it very honestly. I see that you do not trust God, you do not believe in God, and you do not love God because you do not see or feel Him.

You are afraid of your government, something you chose. You are afraid of your children, who you gave birth to. You are afraid of your employer; you are afraid of your employees that they might go on strike. You are afraid of everybody and anybody for one reason or another. But you are not afraid of the One who created you. Actually you don’t care.

I see you getting up every morning and wanting to be beautiful to impress others. And also, I counsel you when you are very depressed. You are just trying to impress others. And I say you should impress yourself because there is nothing beyond yourself, neither there was, is, nor shall be.

For the last five thousand years the written record proves that man has been told, “You are created in the image of God. You are the light of God.”


Mara minerva eh noor noshad zindagee wohee hei jahodaa naa hee.


Life is what God gave you, but you don’t believe it. You stoned those people who said it. You put those people on the cross. You burned them on stakes. You did everything and you are still doing it today. Man doesn’t want to recognize that God is all. Man wants to feel that he’s something too.

Suppose we all work out to be great yogis. Suppose we work out to be saints. Suppose we work out to be very religious. Does it matter? Will you trust God? No, you won’t. I came twenty years ago. I said, “Let us dwell in God.” I still say it. Under my seal, the banner is, “In God I Dwell.” I led this movement. I believe in it. I asked people to believe in it.

So the question is, “Why have we gone wrong?” We have gone wrong because we do not understand that in our smallness, there is an allness in it. What we do is we judge everything. “That man is dirty. That man is good. That man is bad.”

Your total life, the axle, the hub, is located in the first and second chakra. Normally the scriptures say that when a man’s consciousness rises through the fourth, fifth and sixth chakra and he enjoys the seventh chakra, he learns how to be human. Now which one should I trust? I see you in the first and second chakras all the time. That is my job, morning to night. Rarely some people are in the third chakra; they have a balanced ego, they sometimes have a negative and positive ego, and they have a question. Some people have compassion and kindness but they use it to hook another person. They are fishermen. They put a bait of kindness and compassion.

You use the fifth chakra, which is the truth, to hurt people. “This is the truth; I am telling you that you are a bastard.” What is the truth? Even if the person is a bastard and you know it, you must understand you are a human and you are not supposed to say it. Any truth which hurts another person’s feelings is the biggest lie. And you use it. If there is any hell and if there is fire, you’ve got it. There’s no way out.

Any truth you use to insult another person; any love you use to use another person; any direction you use to exploit another person; any leadership you use to play your ego with another person; are all direct ways to hell, whatever hell is. I mean it is an expression. Hell doesn’t exist; neither is it required to exist. It is just a cooking pot where soul enter the ether to be cleansed. They call it the “second blue ether.” We who practice yoga know that you can go to the first blue ether, which is just like a correction department! When a man gets convicted, he goes there. They take all your clothes because they don’t want you to commit suicide and they tell you, “We are the boss and you are not. You have lost all your rights.”

In the second blue ether they give you a uniform. And that’s called hell. In the third blue either you are sent to a machine room where there is an hour or so of exercise available. Your soul goes through these and when it is cleansed and says, “I am sorry,” they send you back to the planet earth. That is the tragedy. And they say, “Try again. Try again.” That is why we are five billion people. We do not make it, we come back.

So I am asking you do you understand that you have a mind. Do you understand what it is for? Do you feel your thoughts are always clean? Do you feel your nature is very kind? Do you feel your commitment is very compassionate? Do you feel that you don’t slander anybody or gossip about anybody? Have you stopped sometimes to share someone’s pain and turn that pain into happiness? Have you given away money in the name of God, who gave you the faith that God will take care of you when you need it?

These are certain simple layman questions which you come into the world to confront. Are you dedicated? Are you devoted? Do you have discipline? Do you have courage that you will not shake? Do you have enough endurance that you will go through even death for the sake of truth? Do you depend all the time on nothing else but your Creator? Is your love for your children as great as your love for the One who created you, the One who gave you your children as gifts? Do you thank God in gratitude for what you have, though it is very painful? These are the questions you must consider.

When you make love, you hug and kiss and are nude before each other and you have an intercourse, then you ejaculate, you enjoy. Have you done this with your psyche and the psyche of God exactly on a mental level? And when you love someone, you want to produce a child so you have intercourse day after day, month after month, year after year. Is there a child born which is your future, and is there a psyche born out of you which is pure light? What is your future? When you go and eat a sweet dish and you say, “Wow,” have you ever thought, “Oh, God gave me this, yum, yum, yum?” Have you ever done that? Who are you? What is your mental resource? What is your mental source which is so blocked?

If your arteries get blocked you go for angioplasty, angiography, you go for open heart surgery. Your mind is totally blocked to your Creator. Have you gone to anybody to do something? These are very ordinary questions.

When you have fever, malaria, you shake. When the mosquito of temptation stings you and you shake, do you take medicine to heal yourself so you can be all right in the future? Do you feel God is yours and all that He has created is yours, and have you taken ownership? No. You say, “I am trying my best.” What is your best?

I am asking a direct question. Why do you want to find God at all? You say you want to know Him, find Him, understand Him. You have never measured how long your nose is. You do not know the weight of it; you do not know the area of it. It sits right between your eyes. I am asking you, “Do you have eyeballs? Have you measured the weight of your eyeballs?” What’s going on with you as a human? What is wrong with your structure of thinking? Why don’t you understand that you have a mind which has be applied in the universal nature and from that you have to draw peace of mind, tranquility, and you have to be enlightened NOW? Why are you so depressed and mean to yourselves and so mean and ugly to your Creator? Why are you always crying as if you were handicapped? What IS your problem? That you cannot thank Him.

You go to church, you go to synagogue, you go to temple, you believe in Christ, you believe in Nanak, you believe in Buddha. When will you start believing in yourself? How can you believe in anybody else? Who are you fooling and why? I am asking you the simple layman questions. I am asking you the simple layman questions. I am asking you to go explore these questions. I am asking you to explore your own depth rather than trying to find somebody else’s depth. Don’t you see that you have a hundred thousand dollars in your bank and there are some people who have not seen a hundred thousand pennies?

Do you know that in North America the average national income is $20,000? Do you know in South America the average national income is $220? Do you have any answer for it? Do you know that what we as Americans leave uneaten when we go to lunch and dinner in restaurants can feed one-eighth of the world? Do you know how you are the most wasteful nation on the planet earth? Do you know you are responsible for 22.7% of the pollution of the entire universe? We are a very civilized nation. What has gone wrong with us?

Do you know that we have a church in every square mile? Now we have gone very modern. We teach about God on television. Do you know that we have a club called “PTL?” Praise the Lord and Pass the Loot. We don’t have a crystal mind but we have a Crystal Cathedral. We shake hands with everybody in friendship, but we do not shake our inner being for our own clarity and friendship. Do you know you have never touched your soul because you have never touched the very core of your mind? I’m asking you these simple layman, childish questions. I have sat and sat and sat. I have seen and seen and seen. I have heard and heard and heard. I have spoken and I have spoken and I have spoken. And I have found out you do not know who you are. I am asking tonight, “Why not?” Why don’t you want to know who you are? Why don’t you believe, why don’t you trust, why don’t you know? What went wrong with your intuition?

What are you looking for? What are you running after? What are you chasing? Don’t you know each day you lose, you lose the experience not to be in the state of bliss and ecstasy? Thousands of you close your eyes and meditate. Thousands of you listen from the pulpit. Thousands of you go on pilgrimage. Thousands of you feel holier than thou. Thousands of you feel depressed and miserable. Is there any time when you just feel pure and nothing else?

I want to touch your heart. I want to make you understand. I want you to have micro and macro consciousness. I want you to love me. I am asking you, why don’t you receive my love? I want to pour my being in you. Why don’t you open yourself up? Why you are so cold and closed and cunning? What has gone wrong to you? I don’t want anything. You don’t want anything. We all are creatures of God. He is the only One who is who He is. Why can’t we understand? Why are we searching for God so seriously? Why have we written so many books and why have we so many teachers? Why are we running the way we are running? And why do we build churches and synagogues and temples? I’m asking you. Why do we believe in the outside show of this façade when the inside is so ugly, so closed?

Why are we afraid of death? Is it not going home? And why we are wasting our lives? Why don’t we serve everybody? Why don’t we inspire everybody? Why don’t we elevate everybody? Why don’t we touch everybody? Why don’t we bring resurrection from the ashes of people’s pain? Why we are missing the point? We dress ourselves up, we beautify ourselves, we do all sorts of things to look pretty, beautiful, attractive and impressive. Why don’t we do the same thing for our inner self that we do for our outer self? Who are you?

Why don’t we act and feel happy? Why, when misery and total tragedy hit, can’t we smile and say, “Wow.” Why don’t we understand that after every storm there is a beautiful sunny day? These are the questions which in a simple way, you can ask yourself.

There is a young girl who came to talk to me. She said, “I want to get married. I have found a boy, he is a gentleman. He is very thorough. He is very educated. He is well to do. He loves me. He can be very affectionate to me.” I said, “You know all these good things about him. What is the bad?” She said, “Nothing is bad.” I said, “It can’t be. All good things have equal bad things. Come back to me after one month and find out all the bad things about him. I understand the good things. But every good thing has a bad thing.”

Everybody’s loss is somebody’s gain. I got sick, so the doctor got paid. Police are there to catch the thief. If there were no thieves, we wouldn’t need police. Somebody gets paid for something bad. Bad and good are just a matter of reference, there’s nothing else to it.

So after a month the young girl came and saw me. She said, “Can I talk to you?” I said, “Very well, welcome. What are the bad things you have found? I know the good things.” She said, “You remember?” I said, “Yes. He’s very good, he can afford, blah, blah, blah. Whole thing.” She said, “I couldn’t find anything bad at all.” I said, “Then if you can continue doing this, marry him.” She said, “I don’t understand. You mean if I find something bad, I should not mind it?” I said, “If you cannot see it now, then never see it. If you want to marry this man and say you are in love with him, become blind, because love is blind.”

Love sees nothing, love hears nothing, love says nothing. It is a state of ecstasy which is called the supreme state of being lunatic. It is nothing more than that. If you can afford to be a lunatic in the supreme sense of your being, you are not in love and you don’t make love, you fall in love. And it is an endless fall.

She said, “That is impossible.” I said, “Then you will not marry in love. You will be a wife. And you know darling, what a wife is? One who always says, ‘Why?’ and ‘If...’ Why if, if why, why if, if why? And man says, ‘Go off.’ He doesn’t want to be married to a barking bitch. Love dies, divorce walks in. Do you want that?” She said, “No.” I said, “Do you want to take my advice? You are not yet ready for anything. Go and search. Find out what really you want.” Because love brings reverence, that’s one sign of love. When you are in love, you have reverence. When you have love, you have ecstasy. When you have love, you have the strength of the whole universe, including that of God. It is the mighty self of love which brought God from the unknown heavens onto the planet earth. Nobody can deny it. When a lover has a question or a beloved has a question and their psyches cannot communicate, they are just two selfish humans. Then it is a meadow game played by the string of money and there is a harpoon in the heart. That is called ‘passion.’ It is a devil’s word. It has nothing to do with the heavens. When we are in that state of mind, we are also absolutely lunatic, but with none of the ecstasy, none of the joy. We have only depression and the keenness of vengeance and anger; we become the lowest of the low.

We have never accepted that God made us. We have never cared about who made us. All we care about is what we make of anybody. All we care is what we make of anybody and what we can make into somebody. We are humans, but we are really hunters. We use all our senses; they are our arrows to make a killing. We hide ourselves, that is our skill.

I am asking you when you are an acknowledged being created in the light of God, why do you walk in darkness? What has gone wrong that your love cannot flow? Are you not in the grace of His totality? Have you gone bankrupt? Have you lost your potency? Why don’t you remember your origin? These are the ordinary questions which I shall ask. And these are the ordinary questions which you should ask.

You can boast as much as you want. You can satisfy your ego as much as you want. You can satisfy your physical needs as much as you want. You can be as mental as you want. You can be as spiritual as you want. But you cannot solve your problems if you will not evolve your origin within you. Have you touched yourself, have you hugged yourself, do you know yourself? These are the questions which I have asked you and these are the ordinary questions which you should ask yourself.

Within you is there nothing but emptiness? Or are you fulfilled within? What do we produce? We produce pee-pee and poop. That’s all we produce. That’s of the earth. Do we produce the fragrance of the heavens and that of the ethers? Is our anger and fire exchanged into warmth and love and light? Do we transform our passion into compassion? Has our killing nature ever been transformed into kindness? Do we mean what we say or do we mean only to give people pain? These are the ordinary questions you should ask yourself.

You want to be in touch with everybody. Have you been in touch with your own mind, its eighty-one chambers and three main arteries? Does your mind control you or do you control your mind? These are the ordinary questions which you should ask yourself.

Do you expect to be here forever or you expect to be here for a short while? Do you expect to achieve something great, or do you expect to achieve nothing here? Do you know who you are and what your expectations are and why? Do you have the strength, the measurement, the acknowledgement and the projection of all your expectations? Or are you just meaninglessly expecting something which is neither you, nor within you, nor beyond you? These are the questions I shall ask and these are the questions you should ask yourself every day.

Within the framework of your own mental capacity do you want to know what you should do? Do you want to know the unknown as it is? You must become part of the unknown here, when there’s a chance to know it. Does knowledge hurt you? Do you want to touch it through your very mind? These simple questions which I am asking you should be the guiding stars through which you can understand your longitude and latitude so you can measure the distance you have to travel and your soul can cover the path.

This is your paraphernalia: your five tattwas, your seven chakras, your ten bodies, your three gunas and your being. Have you completely understood them and co-related them and are you fully in control of them all? These are the basic chemical, physical, geographical questions of your own being which I am provoking you to look at.

Have you the slightest idea why your diaphragm works? Why your heart beats, why there is a pulse in every part of your body? What is responsible for it? And when it stops, why does it stop? Do you have any touch and control over it? Whatever happens, happens. When your hair goes gray, you call it old age. When they are black you feel young. You don’t like your wrinkles. When you have wrinkles you go for a facelift, but your mind is not only wrinkled, it is wrinkled to the extent that you have nothing to lift it with. When your baby is crying, you go for help. When your soul is crying, you are deaf and dumb. To reach and touch our minds, tonight we’ll exercise within our own reality and see if we can have an experience.


© 1989 The Teachings of Yogi Bhajan

Above Article Copyright © Yogi Bhajan 2002. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.



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