by Yogi Bhajan: If we consider that physical health is the sustainer of life, then mental health may be considered as the real essence of life. A man might be beautiful to look at and may have a very divine spirit and may be very healthy. God might have created him on Sunday when He was in a very restful mood, but if his mind has very different facets, if his mind cannot commit, cannot accept the challenge of the variations of life, cannot quickly adjust in the face of temptations but can be brought down to the mud, then his life becomes really miserable. Life becomes totally worthless, because a slip of the mind is a slip of the destiny. You know, there are certain areas in life which are very powerful. Once you just make a slip of the tongue, God knows where it is going to take you. Once you make a slip of the mind, there is no chance, because the driver, the controller, the essence of your life, is nothing but the mind.

The mind has super beauty in it. Somebody once asked for a definition of the mind. “The mind is the Governor, appointed by Almighty God Himself within my kingdom.” Whereas the beauty of the body is very stimulating, and the body has a long friendship with the soul. If the soul won’t leave, the body won’t give in. If one thing has to ultimately leave, that is the soul, and the soul has a certain period of time through which the body shall continue. The body shall sustain as a faithful friend as long as the soul sustains itself with it. It is a counterbalance; they are very personal friends. Soul is the pure essence of life, and body is the circumference of life. Try to understand it mathematically, otherwise, if you try to understand it spiritually, you will be messed up, because no one has understood this theory.

Once Vyasa was asked, “Why is this world suffering?” He replied, “They don’t understand where to correct. Some correct the body, some try to reach the soul. There is nothing wrong with the body, nor there is anything wrong with the soul. They are interlinked, interconnected. They are for each other, and they cannot be the problem. The problem is in the mind.”

When a person has something, and he is not grateful for it, the law is to take it away from him, so through that pain, he acquires gratitude to the Creator. Thereafter the person learns to give and the moment the person learns to give without condition, he mimics the action of God. As long as a man is speculating – to agree or not to agree – he’s playing the game of the devil. But the moment a person agrees to give and give and give, then God gives everything. Once a person gives himself to the righteous path of divinity and decides to be a soldier for righteousness and a saint for humanity, that person has achieved God-like grace. It is a mental capacity. When you reach a state of consciousness where nobody can reach you, nobody can buy you, nobody can have you, then you are priceless.

There is no difference between a prostitute and a woman. Simply, one has a price and the other hasn’t. The price can be emotion, it can be temptation, it can be anything. One woman belongs to One only, and the other woman belongs to all and thus belongs to none. One has a privacy of personality and the other is a bunch of emotions. Just the same are the seeker, and the student. Somebody has emotions and somebody has devotion. The mind is the same way – some caters to all facets of the mind and some only cater to one facet of the mind. Whenever an individual makes it possible in his life to cater to only one facet of the mind – to keep up above all temptations to the tune of the One – he becomes totally representative of the One. As long as other feelings are there, then there are many other deities there. It is a hospital, a mental hospital. There are a lot of desires: Miss Wish, Miss Desire, Miss Corruption, Miss-this and Madam-that. It is a whole scene, and it is not a singular, private domain. It is not yet titled, and privacy is not yet established.

This back and forth, back and forth, sometimes becomes a powerful habit, and that is the worst difficulty. It becomes a subconscious habit, and it affects the very inner realm of the mind. How much it takes for a person to rise above the clouds depends on how much he can consciously guide his subconscious mind. It is a test of maya. The trip of living on this earth is nothing but an experience of polarity, and nobody can be above it. Remember that law: On this earth there is a North Pole and a South Pole. You always see two things, you and your shadow… Because you are something, shadow has to be nothing. For the right course of life, you have to be pure so that only purity should reach you. Don’t isolate, don’t close the doors of your mind. Thoughts come, let them come, but clean thoughts. Just as you don’t want to close your house on people, let people come, but clean people. If somebody has to lay a trip on you, then you must be the one who should lay a trip, because you are the owner of your own kingdom. Let somebody not steal your privacy. When the privacy is stolen, the consciousness is gone and that cannot be recovered except through Gur Prasad Gift of the Guru: Guru’s grace. When the Guru blesses, then nothing is impossible.

The doors in the house of the consciousness have many windows and many unwanted, undesired thoughts. Like birds, they come in and they sit and they do their job. From one karma, people do not learn, from two karmas they don’t learn. Those who want to be a Guru, I can understand them. They’re all right. But those who are going to find a Guru, what are they going to get out of me? Nothing. The Guru is already found. One only has to elevate himself to live up to the teachings!

Status symbols don’t work in the spiritual world. The spiritual world is the private domain of God and the spiritual world has nothing to do with the fluctuating consciousness. There is One God and one theme, and that is belonging to God.

I once asked my grandfather, “Grandpa, why do you bow so long and deep during your prayer time?” He used to laugh and he made me come with him and stand before a mirror and he asked me, “How do I look to you?” I said, “Grandpa, you look very great, you look very holy, and you really look like a saint!” He laughed and said, “You in your innocence know me as nothing but a saint, and I am grateful to God that I was born in a family where I could retain my saintly appearance. For that birth which God gave me into such a family where it was a ritual to appear like a saint, I always do long meditation and I bow for a long time because God was merciful to me. Perhaps if I were born under a different tantra (longitude and latitude) I’d have been born in a family where this would have been the last result. Now, outside I look like a saint, and I have to work inside, and inside is just my own hassle. For that I bow because I have a handicap over others. You know, neither I have to walk with saffron robes, nor I have to go and sit in a graveyard. I sit in my own house, in my own estate, and I do what everybody else does and still I look saintly.”

And that’s all Guru Nanak wanted to teach. He said: Why to go into the jungle, why leave your household, why become a beggar or put dust on your head? Meditate on God. Retain Him in your heart. Work through the sweat of your brow and share with your brothers and give as God gives to you, and live as God made you. He came out with a formula of consciousness. All saintly people have one thing very common among them, and that is the kindness, the forgiveness and the loving nature. You talk to a man of God for hours and hours and you will find one thing in him, he’ll go on talking about God all the time. He dreams about God, he talks about God, he lives for God and he sees God, he’s good for God, he’s bad for God, he’s tall for God, he’s short for God. When life becomes directed towards one aim, then this mantra becomes true: “God and me, me and God, are One.”

Some people cannot belong to a man, so how can they belong to God? If we cannot belong to this earth – when can we belong to the Creator of this earth? We speculate, we change – today we promise, tomorrow we shift. Tomorrow we promise, and the day after, we have a different notion. Today we take a vow and tomorrow we break it. One day we take a vow and the next morning we are different. After all, the One Who has created you, He knows you. The lover knows the longing of the beloved. If the beloved does not feel that the lover knows, it means she feels the lover is a dummy. And when the lover of the beloved feels the lover is a dummy, her love is dead already. Then she is doing a performance, which is out of ego and ritual and there is no love.

The very ‘in’ feeling, when two people are merged, means that then, there are not two beings. Then why to cheat? Why to defend? Why to talk? Why to argue? These arguments, these defenses, these reasons, these situations are only when the One is not found in the oneness of one’s own mind. Then you have to structure defense mechanisms. That is why Guru Nanak says, “Don’t call them great who sit together, live together, eat together, because they are not together. Great are those who have two bodies and one soul.” When oneness is because I am alive, you are alive; when oneness is because of time and space – my friend, oneness has not been found. Oneness is, wherever you are, I am. Wherever I am, you are there. That is oneness. Once you have belonged to me and I have belonged to you, then it is the end of all that searching. Oneness is that amalgamation within the mind. As long as the oneness is the amalgamation of the body, it is the temple of grossness. Oneness is a subtle thing. It is not gross. It cannot be seen; it can be felt.

Sometimes out of our mental conditions, we are on the very low ebb of consciousness. We do not want to rise, though we know we should. We have an opportunity to learn the technology to be graceful, and there is a chance to be graceful. But we misuse it because we were in a position to misuse it. You know it takes a long time to build something and it takes one moment to destroy anything. Consciousness is nothing but a faith between you and God. It is nothing but a finite faith with Infinity – one’s own infinity.

The law of consciousness is that everything is nothing but consciousness – then to live for achieving higher consciousness means making a promise to be conscious of all facts, of now and then, of ever and ever. It is a pledge and a dedication. It is very serious when once a penetration happens, a penetration of the macro-consciousness into the micro-consciousness, still the sinful life goes on and on, endlessly, never to be elevated by its own Creator. It is very serious. You pledge something to somebody and then you make a hole in it, an escape way, and you are actually making holes in your holiness, in your own consciousness. And then you seek liberation? From where?

Whosoever shall belong to God, the Infinity, their price becomes infinite. If you’re not ready, it is your problem. If you don’t want it, it is your problem. All you have been given is a chance. Men live on this earth and they die, but the saint lives on after death. You have the choice to live as a saint on this earth and to live forever. Guru Nanak said during his lifetime, “Somebody tells me that I am a devil and somebody tells me I am a saint.” But today they always speak of “great, great Guru Nanak.” Jesus was put on the cross and Moses had to go through the Red Sea. What is there which has not happened to men of God? They had to qualify through the test of infinity in their faith.

Window shopping does not mean you will have any groceries at home. Window shopping does not mean you will have a good meal tonight. Window shopping only tires a man out. But if window shopping is nothing, then window shopping is everything, because it pollutes the mind quite a bit.

I cannot forget one line which my saintly grandpa used to say to me whenever we would go for a walk together. It was a Persian quotation, but I never have forgotten that sentence: “If you say ‘no’ to temptation when you are young, it is the act of the prophet. Otherwise, it is like that bloody wolf who has grown too old to hunt, and now declares, ‘I am vegetarian.’” If you want to do something and you have the courage to do something, then do it when it is impossible. Whosoever makes the impossible possible is rewarded. What is a hero? That man who makes the impossible possible.

When you are young, the mind is sensual, horny and sexual. It deviates to different corners and sides. It has temptations and it makes attempts. It has offerings and opportunities. The day when somebody lays bread around you when you are hungry and you don’t even look at it, then you have found the real ‘you’ within you A car without brakes is not worthy of riding. A consciousness which cannot discriminate between right and wrong is not worthy to be called human. And a personality which pledges itself and cannot keep its individual privacy is not worthy of being reborn as a human.

The sustainer of the self is God, and the guidance of the living of life and the nectar of life comes through the mind. The entire “Song of Bliss,” the “Anand Sahib” of Guru Amar Das, is written about only the mind. It talks to the mind: “Oh mind, that One Who does everything for you, why let Him go away from the mind? O mind, you are the light of God, know your principle, know your essence.” It has been made as a daily requirement for Sikhs to recite this prayer, so that perhaps the totally sensual, frustrated, polluted, multiple mind may become purer and purer. Then in the end, Guru Amar Das says, “Oh blessed one, listen to the Song of Bliss.” And then he blesses this action: “Whosoever has listened to it and sung it, God and Guru shall help them.” He says to the body, “Oh my body, in you He made the soul to sit, to create the light!” Have you ever talked to your body like that? Or do you look at your body in a mirror and say, “Where I am going to sell it today? Who is my buyer? What kind of Mexican lunch is he going to take me to? Or is it going to be Chinese or Spanish? Or is it going to be a necklace?”

Through a complete set of 8.4 million incarnations and through the utmost grace of the Guru, the Lord was worshipped and then this human body was granted. You want to play with it? The body is the biggest friend of the soul – the extension facet of the soul – and this permanent friend won’t leave! The soul has to leave or the body won’t. Body shall stay with all the sickness and every disease, for the sake of this friend. But when the soul leaves, it dies.

If somebody doesn’t know – that is all right, but somebody who knows and does wrong, and does it to do it, and does it to be sorry about it, and again does it – isn’t it a joke on one’s own consciousness?

God will bless, Guru will keep on praying. But, getting saved from disaster is nothing my friend, if you have lost the radiance. A diamond is not valued when the facet is lost. It is just a stone, pure carbon. The value comes when the facet is given to it, when it has the capacity to take the sunlight and transform it and transfuse it into its different rays, and make it pinpoint, concentrate, on the body to absorb. Stones are precious because they are difficult to grind and shape so that they are capable to transform, as antenna, the sun energy into the being. That’s why the wedding ring exists. “All right. I exchange with you this wedding ring as a permanent memory of our oneness.”

Grossness is different. Those who are short of memory, those who have a very crude memory, they need a reminder. The fragrance in a rose doesn’t need a bedroom and a bathroom attached to it in order to live in the rose petal. It is a part of it. It doesn’t require a territory. All it needs is a rose, and it keeps the links with the rose and the moment it gets fresh air, it spreads.

That is fulfillment. Wherever you are, spread the fragrance of the Truth. Saints “sayeth not,” they spread the light. The righteous one is known by his own divinity within his own self. No action of the world can alter the path of the righteous man once he has given himself to it. Why should this precious life be lived as a prostitute? Why do you let Tom, Dick and Harry come and play with you? Why can the mighty suppress you? No. You are the Ultimate. Your mind is your mind. It is in between the body and the soul. It is your friend and servant. It is not your master. Whosoever has his mind as his master shall never find The Master.

You always have to give your mind as payment to the Master to find The Master. Those who say they have found the Master, they are like that phony student who says, “Oh, I am qualified!” The Master has to test you and say whether you have found him or not! Student cannot find the Master. One guy once wrote me, “Yogiji, the moment I saw you I found the Master.” I wrote him back, “You are the one idiot in my life.” How can you determine whether you are a graduate or you are not? Baby, you must go through! You must earn this Masters, pass the exam, and then your Master will declare whether you ‘pass’ or ‘fail.’ Master is found when Master declares to you, that you have found the Master. When the Master trusts you, when the Master puts his hand on your shoulder and walks, making you as a staff of his, then you have found the Master.

Life is given to you to experience, through the process of the mind, the joy of life. The body has a soul as its constant friend. It is only the training of the mind which we require.