Yogi Bhajan Lecture Archive
Lecture by :
Siri Singh Sahib Bhai Sahib Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogi Ji
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Lecture on: 05/17/1990
Category: Healing
Location: Los Angeles, Ca
.
Public

Depression

class, you need to eat as many melons, preferably cantaloupes, as
you can during the day and then do the meditation at the end of
the day. This class goes with 5/18/90. This is Part I, and
5/18/90 is Part II.)


You won't believe what I'm going to say, but I have said it for twenty years and I know you don't believe what I am saying because you don't understand what I'm saying. What I am saying is that for thousands of years you have been told that you are incomplete, you are born in sin, you are handicapped, you are illiterate, you are dormant, you are this and that; therefore, you have to rise, you have to learn, you have to grow up, etc., etc., etc.

You have also been told that you are not pretty, you are not beautiful, so you have to make up. So you have been told you are spiritually handicapped, you have been told you are physically handicapped, and what? You have been told you are socially handicapped. And now they are telling you that you are biologically handicapped. And now they are telling you much further that your handicap is in your genes. I have been hearing that for years and years and I ask this question to you -- do you mean God is stupid? He couldn't complete anything worthwhile? Is that what we are telling each other?

When we see a lot of insanity around us we start worrying. It takes a lot of insanity to make sense. It takes a lot of death to understand life. It takes a huge volume of suffering to understand happiness. It takes a lot of flowers to make a bouquet. Even an accident, and incidents and commotions and characters and people and personalities are nothing but part of this whole facade called the 'world'.

Please don't misunderstand that anybody is a handicap. Do understand that we only do not know how to manage our energy. No person has to learn everything to be anything. There are some people who have talent by birth. There are some people who are stupid by birth. And every talent which has been bestowed on them, has done worse to them than anything good. Some people are born in luxury and are suffering. Some people are born in poverty and they are thriving, they are enjoying.

Actually man has never understood one thing: it is the most notorious thing in the mind of the man and that is the thought. So powerful is the thought that if the perpetual thought becomes divine, the person becomes divine. If the perpetual thought becomes devilish... ill-willed, negative, stupid, inferior, insecure... person has no chance. Life is a continuous struggle between the two things: positive thinking and positively not thinking.

I have myself reached an age of sixty-one. To be very frank, I am willing to give you a very Catholic confession. And that is: "My Lord, I have seen that humans are suffering for nothing." Isn't it amazing? There's no relationship which anybody can nurture to enjoy. There's no work which anybody can do to be fulfilling. There's no thought or school of thought somebody wants to follow to be gracious. And these inner conflicts which we have as humans just create a very beautiful, big variety of people.

One day I was sitting in a bus. Bus was full with passengers, and I just looked at the hairdos. Not a one hairdo was equal to the other. So I thought everybody stood before the mirror and decided how they want to look. To me they all looked like uncut grass. Nobody knew what they are. They must have looked pretty to themselves.

You know how low and mean we are that we try to look good to ourselves? There's nothing more selfish on the planet for a human just to be good for himself. It's so low and mean, it's just like we are living like an animal. "Ah, don't tell me, Sir. I am doing great these days. I am meditating for nine hours." I said, "What for?" "Oh, I enjoy it." "Good. You should meditate rest of your life. Who cares?" Anything which you do for yourself, you are only clearing your own doubt. Life doesn't start with that, it doesn't end with that. Life is what you have done for OTHERS. That's the beginning of life.

It is amazing. We see animals, birds, life in the ocean. It all is for itself. Then we have whole facade, and then we end up for ourselves. What is self? Something you got without knowing what it is.

It is so simple. You have not designed your own ship. You didn't fix your eyes and your nose in the center for yourself. You did not decide what kind of ears and eyebrows you will have. Why you are deciding now how you want to be?

If you want to win a rat race (and by stroke of luck you win a rat race) then you are a rat. Big deal. Suppose you like to be very beautiful and you end up being very beautiful -- big deal. What that takes you, where? If you are so beautiful that everybody you touch, feel and move with is elevated, THEN you are beautiful.

Then why we can't all do it when we know it so well? We do not have a control phenomenon of our energy. Energy doesn't come from ginger. Or we are not like that sailor man... we pop in spinach and Popeye and then we start punching everything and it becomes all right. We don't eat hot stuff and sushi or something and we can be very powerful and pumped up and next day we are not this.

We have one problem in our life. It's psychologically called depression. If you look at all the disease in the world, it is just depression. Human body cannot cope up with the need of the time and circumstances. It depresses the human activity and diseases the activity. We call it 'disease' -- whatever it is. When a body goes through the aggressiveness, we get what is called 'common cold.' What a beautiful world. Common cold. We are commonly cold. We are cold. Temperature of the body may be very hot. We may have even a fever from a common cold. You give distance to everybody. You stay in bed. You rest. You are forced to rest. You relax. You even do not comb your hair that day. You don't even take a bath. You don't eat your regular food. You cough. You are uneasy. That's the way the body says, "Get down on your knees." You go to the doctor, he gives you an injection... a shot in the arm, a shot in the butt, a shot here, a shot there. Big deal. You start working normal again. You fall apart again.
That's the physical level.

Then comes the mental level. You look fine, you look pretty. You are very ducked up to make a kill. But after twenty minutes of speaking you goof. You don't make sense. You start irritating the people you want to convince. You communicate in a way that people get very angry at you. People feel that you are just the cause of your own insecurity and their insecurity. It's manageable. It's not bad. Sometimes you can put in sweet word here, sweet sentence there. You can get by.

But the worst thing in our human life is spiritual depression. When I don't command my own spirit at my will to come through... when I have something to face, and I cannot do but face it face to face -- that is the test of me which I fail and then I regard myself as incomplete. And this spiritual depression I carry on with me in memory and I do not forgive myself for the loss of the moment in life.

I cannot substitute for it by prostituting and playing with big houses and marble floors and tons of jewelry and pretending to be jubilant and all that. It's all a facade. Every moment of life lost... unfulfilled towards my own spiritual end... is my permanent loss in my own permanent memory.

That is where you are very lonely. Then I can pervert and divert and play sexual games and sensual things. I even wage wars and destroy countries. I conquer, I relish being inhuman. I become totally a tyrant. I disregard all human lives. It doesn't give me satisfaction. I bounce, I trounce, I torture, I torpedo life, I do everything. It doesn't make sense. That is my own vindictiveness, my own vindication from my own self. It's my self hatred of my own time and my own space, within my own memory. I have disgraced my own life with my own action for which I am responsible, I am acknowledging it, I am understanding it, and I am useless to myself. And that is a very private, human thing which nobody discusses with anybody. And this inner torture in one's own inner privacy goes on with one's own self, and there's no solution. Because there's no resolution.

Life cannot be resolved without personal resolution. Life cannot be resolved or realized without personal resolution. It is that resolute commitment which gives you a character. It is that character which is the basic strength... the fundamental strength of human happiness. It cannot be achieved from all the knowledge of outside. If all the knowledge from outside could have made me wise, all I'd have to do is sit in a library where the entire knowledge is in shelves. Today every knowledge is at the tip of the finger by just pressing a certain number on a computer. It can't make a man happy.

In my own personal life I have seen people of religion, I have seen people of philosophy... mental vastness like the ocean. I have met people with physical strength, they are invincible. But I have also found them handicapped, totally self-hating. Self-hatred is a very personal phenomena which is extremely private. Self-love is a private phenomena which grows out of self hating. It is amazing!

Self-love cannot be direct. That is the maya, that is the tragedy. It grows out of the self-hating and if one does not touch the bottom line of self- hating and say, "That's it! I've had it!" and divert himself to the acknowledgement of self-love, then the man can never be accomplished, it doesn't matter who you belong to, and what you are. The process of going through self-hating is just self-analyzing, self-bifurcation. It's totally self-dividing, absolutely going to the macro and micro analysis of understanding of, "Who Am I?" And for that, it is not the question of everybody to everybody. It is a most private, most secret, self-indulgent, hypnotic state of consciousness in which self is being examined by one's own superior self. Moment you know that you've GOT a superior self, and moment you know it is examined, moment you know it has come to a resultant, then you are liberated. And beyond that there is no God because that IS God!
Call it God now, call it God yesterday, call it God tomorrow, achieve it through seminars, achieve it through knowledge, achieve it through poetry, achieve it through swimming in the ocean, it doesn't make sense. Somewhere the examining self has to come in touch with the higher self. And what I'm saying in phraseology, it is passing over your head... "What is he saying? It's something good. What is it? What's my self?"... because you do not know what your self is.

Your mother didn't tell you: "My dear child, you are by yourself. You came to me as a gift of God, or by my sexual environments, or you are the by- product, or you were brought in to me by the crane in a bag... whatever, and you are by yourself. Try to find yourself. And that... yourself... my dear child, my dear love, my dear baby, is always going to be the most important thing in your life." What a stupid, blind, dark world we have created around ourselves that we don't ever talk about this self and the technology of the self! Some people have gone to the caves, to the Infinity of the Himalayas, to find the self. Some have put their whole life in understanding the self.

It's amazing. Somebody was given a gift. It took him ninety years to open it. At the time of his death, lying down in the bed the man said to his wife, "Darling, I remember, I met a man of God once. He gave me some packet. He said, 'Open it when you want to know your self.' I didn't have time all my life. But that packet is somewhere. Figure out where it is." Poor wife started searching all around. Finally in his personal study, behind the books, she found the packet on which was written: 'To be opened when I need it most.' She came and she said, "My dear husband, I found it. Should I open it?" There was no answer. He had gone into permanent sleep. But, she said, "He wanted it to be opened. Let me open it." She opened it. There was a little paper in it which read: "Don't waste time on your environments. It will be a very foolish way to live. Find your self and enjoy it with every moment of it. That is where life has begun", but he was not there to hear it. And that is the story of every life.

Something we should open in ourself the very FIRST day, we don't even open up on the last day. We don't read our own script. We don't act our own manual. We do not understand our own strength. We are all in confession. We have been hit on the head and we are running a rat race. All I hear in the prayer in the morning... the whole universe is singing one mantra: "I want, I want, I want, I want, I want, I want, I want." And I see God snoring. (Snoring sounds.) "What's going on, my Lord?" "I want, I want, I want, I want." He's so tired, He has gone into a permanent sleep. "Lord, what is happening?" "Well, they want." "What they want?" "They don't know." "But they are calling on You." "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear it every day." "But what should we do?" "You sleep, too." "Why?" "I am sleepy."

So Hindu mythology is very pictorial. They made Narayan sleeping on a snake with all the five heads with five faces on him, and he's sleeping. (Snoring sounds.) And we have one mantra, one cry, one calling, one thing, "I want!" "What?" "I don't know." Isn't it amazing?!!??!

Finally somebody woke up God. "Listen to the universe" He said, "Destroy it and We'll build up a new one. It's useless." Is there anybody among you who has stopped this mantra, "I want"? Have you ever looked in the mirror and said, "One who created you, what does HE want?" Have you ever questioned your own higher self, what it wants? Have you ever loved and liked yourself, what it wants? Have you ever lived for your self for a moment? You live for nobody. Nobody lives for you. And then you feel lonely. And then you go to God... Almighty God... and say, "Almighty God, we are very lonely." He says, "Idiot! I am the most lonely. What do you want?" "Sir, I want. I am lonely." He says, "Go to hell!"

That's what the mother does. When a child cries, cries, cries, cries... throws the tantrum, creates the drama... finally there comes a big slap across the face, "Shut up, idiot!" "Waaaaaaaaa!" There comes the other one. "Shut up, I told you! I'm tired of you, whole day!" That's mother nature. Because she doesn't want (mother nature) her husband, who's sleeping, to wake up at all. But the cries of the human, "I want! I want!" thundering cries. And once in a while, "SO WHAT DO YOU WANT? TELL ME!" "I don't know!" "Then why you are crying?" "I don't know." Neither the child tells you what it wants nor it tells you why it is crying. And life goes on.

"I am Religious!" "I am very Rich!" "I've got everything!" "I am President!"

Of what? You are not president of your bowels. You can't go to the bathroom at your own command, Mr. President. You get constipated, you do not know what to do. Metamucil, whatever that is. Something that is very organic, get on it.

I went to the doctor this morning. It was a very funny dialogue. He said, "What medicine you are taking?" And I put my whole bag in front of him and I said, "This is it." And he said, "This is enough to make you sick." Then he changed his attitude and he said, "Well, because now you have come I have examined you, I'll give you two more medicines." I said, "That's what I want" I said, "But I forgive you, in the name of God. I won't do this job, putting everybody's nose open and looking into it. It is a very harsh job."

They get paid well, but God, what do they see? Sinuses? Have you ever seen what a gynecologist sees? Have you ever seen what a surgeon sees? They don't see the face of the person. They put a cloth on it. They just have a cut where they have to cut. They just open it and stitch, stitch, stitch. Because ultimately you don't see what you are dealing with. The proficiency and efficiency of your life, personal and impersonal, ends right there. You do not look at the destiny of the person, his desperation, the call of the soul, his attribution towards his own cry and his own pain. And you just put a surgery through. You are all surgeons. Nobody's a healer.

Even in surgery you go by the rules... go by the book... because you just want to pass this day. That's all this life is. You just want to go from this crisis to that crisis; from this crisis to that crisis. Aren't you tired like a monkey jumping from one tree to another tree to another tree? Don't you feel that that's very painful? That is where yoga comes handy. Yoga says: "Within you, unite with your own higher self, and create a friendship. Meditate to clean the garbage so that through subconscious you can see your supreme conscious."

Thanks for the Los Angeles people and their prayers. I got sick and I'm stuck here for a week, so I thought we'll teach. Class is very harsh tonight, as life is. You will be challenged by your own muscles which you always think of, but if you have brought with you the spinach, take it as much you can because you are going to face it. You are going to face it. Your own collaboration with your own self is missing. And I hopefully understand that you are very happy tonight to be here. But when you will leave, you will be very sorry, and may not show up tomorrow. That will be nice. But let us see how much we know ourself.

I'm going to continue this series of "Breath and Brain" which is actually my way of simply saying: "You and your permanent personal patterns of the neurons and their capacity to reform and rejuvenate in you the life spectrum which sometimes is very confusing." If you understand philosophically.

Everywhere your own spectrum of your life, in the pattern of the brain and its neurons, is extremely conflicting and confusing. And that is the source of every unhappiness we have and it cannot be resolved without dissolving the subconscious barriers. It doesn't matter how hard you try. No money can buy it and no power can dissolve it. The solution for your life is in you.

Solution of your life and the secret of happiness is in your resolution and your commitment to your characteristics, and your character to perform in a way that methodologically and technologically you can understand your process of life for progressive nature which you have as your guardian angel. There's no guardian angel sitting with two things over you and hovering like a bird. It's all YOU. And it's the total script of you.

You are the only scripture God wrote in person. You are the only holy thing He could create out of his hole. Otherwise God is the biggest ass hole a man has ever seen. And that's what you prove Him to be! Because you don't understand your own life, so you have a concept of holiness... Immaculate concept. It is just asking for a big meal and paying nothing. You are all hungry to know your spirit. You are all sleepy to see it. And that is the contrast we'll go through.

Please forgive me if you reach home late tonight. But you know, my problem is, I do my job. I work because it is a work... not that I have to please you or I have to pound on you. I have to do what I have to do. Forgive me for my thankless job tonight. I have to stimulate you. I'm going to work with your 7th and 8th upper top vertebrae which means your shoulders and the first vertebrae in your neck. I'm going to stimulate that area and the under area I'm stimulating to the over area which is Jalandhar Bhand (neck lock) which your throat chakra which will relate to its own capacity, and thus it will stem up on the stem of the brain to ordain the hypothalamus. We are going now the indirect way. We are reaching the wife to tell the boss to do the work tomorrow in the office. That's what practically we are doing tonight. Because boss is stupidly angry -- can't see the face. You know? You understand that position sometimes? Sometimes you reach by the alley door into the mansion. That's what we are going to do tonight. Okay?

------------------------- MEDITATION SUMMARY ------------------------------

(Note: This class is to be done in the evening. And you are to have
eaten many melons as possible during that whole day.)

1. Siddh Shiva: Whenever you have grief, do this exercise. It gets rid of centuries old grief.

Position A. Sit with crossed legs, eyes wide OPEN (don't meditate). Elbows bent down by sides, upper arms by the sides and forearms parallel to the ground & right above each leg, with the palms open & facing up and placed right above the knees.

Position B. Sort of curve the arms up so the hands bounce up to the shoulders. As you do this, the tongue goes out AS FAR AS POSSIBLE! (very important to affect the subconscious & get rid of grief). Return to position A, and the tongue goes back into the mouth, mouth closes, and the arms go back down. Do all this POWERFULLY with the breath. Inhale through the nose as you go into position A and exhale through the mouth as you go into position B. Breathe HEAVILY! Listen to the tape: "Se Saraswati" by Nirinjan Kaur & Guru Prem Singh. Do it about seven minutes total.

End #1: Inhale and hold the breath in. Press the tongue against the upper palate as hard as you can for 20 seconds. Exhale. Repeat this process two more times (3 times total) then relax for 3 minutes.

Comment: This is a very precious healing breath!

#2. Exercise to create an inner balance which then creates a healing.

Stretch the arms up over the head, elbows straight, palms very flat and stiff, facing forward with the the fingers together and the thumbs extended stiffly to the sides. Begin moving the left arm in a clockwise or circle which will be over the area from overhead to over the left side of the body. Move the right arm in a counterclockwise direction mostly over the head and over the right area of the body. The movements of the two arms don't seem to be related in any fashion. One arm gets into a certain rhythm of a circular movement while the other arm does the same. (Note. You can reverse directions if you wish. First SSS demonstrates with the left arm going clockwise, and then later he demonstrates the left arm moving counterclockwise.)

Comment: The idea of the movement is so the armpits get stimulated, so make the movement of the arms just an extension of the movement of the armpits and the sides of the rib cage. The exercise stimulates the ether in your aura so much you'll be just light. You'll lose your gravity. Usually we condemn ourselves and we have to feel guilty to be happy. This completely breaks through that. The tape: "Heal Me" by Nirinjan Kaur is played. Do this for 11 minutes and then rest for 5 minutes.

3. The 3rd part of this exercise is to combine the breath of life into the balance of the Ida and Pingala.

a. Inhale through the left nostril by blocking the right nostril with the right thumb. Exhale through the right nostril by blocking the left nostril with the right index finger. 3 minutes.

b. Talaval: Firmly grasp the knees by placing the palms flat down on top of them. Begin swaying your body forward about a foot, and then backwards about a foot in a rhythmic fashion. The grip of the hands should be so firm that it keeps you from tilting over when you go backwards. This posture increases the circulation in the area of the breasts for females so they will not develop breast cancer. It will develop your automatic concentration, so you can concentrate whenever you want. It will also expel the dead cells out of your physical body. Keep your spine "tight" while doing the exercise. Tape played: "Humee Hum Tumee Tum" by Livtar Singh. Do for three minutes.

End: Inhale deep and tighten your whole body and shake your body as much as possible. Do this 5 times total, holding the breath about 20 seconds the first time and 15 seconds the other 4 times.

END OF LECTURE

Okay, tomorrow we'll complete the other three parts. Eat as much cantaloupes as you can -- eat anything else, I'm not worried, but don't spare a cantaloupe if you can get it. Tomorrow eat as many cantaloupes as you can during the day.

----------------------------------------------

END OF TRANSCRIPT
5/17/90
YOGI BHAJAN
Transcript by Tej Kaur Khalsa, Los Angeles, CA


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



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