Gururaj Ananda Yogi

We were talking about art yesterday in our small groups. Life is an art, and the art, the paint brush, can be used in such a way to create such beauty. The paint brush of your life. You can just give it the proper strokes to create that beauty. Like Turner, with just a stroke of his brush, he creates a new atmosphere, that English painter we spoke about yesterday in the little groups. You can do the same.

You have a lover that loves you very much. Can you be really certain of him? You can’t. Tomorrow he might find another Fleary and off he goes, and the same thing applies to the man and the woman. You can never be certain of anything. And that adds the beauty of life, the uncertainty, the unknown, that becomes the mystery, that becomes the impetus to keep us going. Otherwise, you’d say, «Ah, what’s the sense of this stupid world? Let me be elsewhere.»

You’re free as the bird, and the bird flies in freedom. Yet there’s a system to its flying. There’s a system inborn within them that during winter months they would fly in a different direction, and summer months in another direction. That kind of freedom we are talking about. That inside you, you know just what to do. And you do it right, if you are free. Therefore in Sanskrit there’s a word, the Jivanmukta: to be liberated while you are still in the body. Not after you are dead. That liberation does not matter. We want liberation here and now. That’s what a poet does, he’s liberated in his poem where he flies to the higher skies and he goes down to the lowest depths.

What really happens is this: that when you die your conscious mind is not there any more, only the subtle mind is there, containing all the impressions. So at the time of death, when the conscious mind merges into the subconscious mind, then all the impressions are carried forward.