The Magic of Life

T here are two aspects to knowing life: pragna or samadhi. Pragna is the path of awareness. Samadhi is the path of abandon. If you walk through the rain with utmost awareness, you will know rain in a certain way. But if you walk through the rain with absolute abandon, you will know rain another way. If you walk through the rain in total abandon, you will know the whole of it, but you will miss the point of it because you don’t care a damn what the point of rain is.

‘What is the point of this life’ is only for someone who does not have the necessary abandon to walk through this life, enjoying everything that is happening to him. He is trying to decipher the meaning of life because the magic of life has not hit him. With awareness, you will know the meaning of life. With abandon, you will know the magic of life. Do these two things meet somewhere? Yes. If you go into any one of them absolutely, you will realize they are same. They are two doors to the same room, but they are two completely different kinds of doors. Right now, it is like, ‘If I am focused on something, I miss everything else. If I try to pay attention to everything else, I am not able to be focused on anything.’ Better to be focused on something. At least one thing will happen. Otherwise, nothing will be happening ­– life will pass off like a dream.

If you look back meticulously at what happened yesterday – I got up in the morning, this happened, that happened – you will see that with 99.9999 per cent of your experiences, we can easily confuse you whether it was real or it was a dream. It just takes a little bit of talking, because nothing profound has happened; only the five senses are recording. Recording of events is happening, but no experience is happening.

Are you a human being or are you a historian? Are you interested in recording life or experiencing and knowing life? If you want to know life, if you give yourself absolutely to at least one thing, you will know something of life. Otherwise you will only record life. This is why wherever you go today, even if you come to a sathsang, you will see someone pull out their camera. They want to record everything because the only way they can prove to themselves after a few years that they actually went to this place is by looking at the picture, nothing else is left. If you are blown away by an experience, do you want to take a picture?

I happened to be in Turkey. I was in a hot air balloon. There was another hot air balloon which was full of Japanese tourists and every one of them had a camera. One Japanese man was leaning out of the basket to take pictures of the balloon and he just fell from fifty feet.  I thought, ‘Okay, this experience he need not photograph.’  He broke his collarbone and one of his ankles. I am sure he did not need a picture; he will always remember the experience. I am saying just looking out, seeing something could be as big an experience as breaking a bone. But because nothing is an experience, you want to record everything.

Whether you do it with your camera or your eyes, this is what most people are doing – recording life. They are not experiencing life. At least if you are involved with one thing, there is a possibility that you will experience something, otherwise only recording is happening. The accumulated memory of recording is what we are referring to as karma. That means you will become a creature of the past. All these recordings will keep replaying every moment of your life, telling you an old story which doesn’t matter anyway.

I want you to look back and see ten days ago, what happened from the moment you got up till you went to bed, look at it and see. It is as good as somebody else’s story, isn’t it? Here and there, there may be moments of experience, the rest is all just a recorded story. Yoga means to transform this life into a living profound experience, not a mere recording.