For all the allegations and rumors and sensationalism that was generated about Paramahamsa Nithyananda having alleged sexual relations with ‘many’ women – the number ranging from 2, 16, 20, 31, 51…the source of all this, the so-called whistle-blower, Lenin Karuppan aka Dharmananda, says the following (quoted in Deccan Herald, April 3rd 2010):

“But a day after claiming he possessed two other CDs containing explicit footage of Nithyananda's sexual activities, Karuppan insisted there was only one video which was now in the possession of the Karnataka Criminal Investigation Department (CID). In an email statement to Deccan Herald, Karuppan claimed he was misquoted on account of a "language communication" gap.”

Till today, it was only based on hearsay, alleged conversations, media conjectures, etc. But now that the real investigation has started by the legal authorities, the fear seems to have caught on with the perpetrators of these false news.

What will be the next allegations that were ‘shocking news’ then and suddenly become ‘misquotes’ now?

Let us wait and watch…

With awareness, anything becomes a blessing, including illness. Have you ever been joyful when you were sick? You can be if you become aware. There is no need to worry about sickness. Even sickness is a part of the flow of Existence. You can feel this if you become more aware of the bigger picture and what is happening at the cosmic level. Awareness simply relaxes you into deeper understanding.

There was a student who wanted to learn martial arts. He approached a teacher and asked, ‘I wish to study martial arts. How long will it take me to master the art?’

The teacher replied, ‘Ten years.’

The student became very sad and said, ‘But I want to master it faster and I will work very hard. Even if you want me to practice more than ten hours a day, I am ready to do it. If I do so, how long will it take?’

The teacher said, ‘May be twenty years.’

The teacher clearly means that hurrying is not going to help! When you are in a hurry, there is only anxiety. To really do something, you need only awareness, nothing else. When there is awareness, there is right action. When there is hurry, everything is blurred.

First of all, there is no need to worry. Life itself holds all the solutions. It is a beautiful self-sustaining mechanism. We just need to allow it to function in its natural way. Then we will awaken to its higher intelligence and drop all our worries.

Not only that, when we witness, our mind slows down. Worry itself causes the mind to rush around in what you call anxiety. When awareness is brought in, the rushing slows down and things happen as they should.

There is a small story about Buddha* and his disciples:

One day Buddha arrived for his usual morning discourse with his disciples. He had a knotted handkerchief in his hand. He showed the handkerchief to the disciples and asked if any of them could come up and untie the knot.

One disciple went up and tried to untie it. He pulled and pulled and the knot tightened. Another disciple went up, he looked at the knot for a few seconds and easily untied it.

All he did was look at the knot and immediately he knew how the knot was made in the first place. So, he just reversed the whole thing and untied it! The knot itself taught him how to unite it.

In life worries are the knots in the handkerchief. If we look at them with awareness, we will know how to dissolve them. We will see exactly how the worry was created and then know how to ‘untie’ it. The worry itself will teach us how to release it.

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Buddha – Enlightened master and founder of the religion of Buddhism.

Awareness is nothing but bringing our focus to exactly what is happening in and around us. It is witnessing. Anything that we watch with awareness will dissolve. That is the power of awareness, whether it is physical pain, mental pain, worry, or something else. When we watch with awareness, we stop the conflict somewhere within us. We start moving with the natural flow of things.

When we watch worry with awareness, we focus light on exactly how worry is created, how it exists. Once this happens, the worry starts to dissolve and clarity starts happening.

What is the solution to this distorted software of the mind?

Deep awareness is the solution. Deep awareness is like a benign virus, if such a thing exists! Once awareness enters your system, the more you work with the mind, the more the awareness gets into the worry software and destroys it!

Another small story:

One day a dog entered a butcher’s shop. The butcher tried to chase it away but the dog persisted and came back. Suddenly the butcher noticed a note in the dog’s mouth. The butcher went near the dog and took the note. Someone had written the items to order on it.

The butcher then saw a ten-dollar bill tucked in the dog’s collar. He took the money, put the ordered items in a bag, and placed it in the dog’s mouth. He was completely in awe of the dog. He closed down his shop and decided to follow the dog wherever it went.

The dog walked down the street to the crosswalk. He put down the bag, jumped up and pressed the button. He waited patiently with the bag in his mouth for the green signal to appear. The moment it appeared, he crossed the road. The butcher also crossed the road along with him.

Then the dog came to a bus stop and looked at the timetable. He checked out the times and then sat on one of the benches waiting for the bus to come. Soon, a bus came. The dog jumped down, walked around to the front of the bus, looked at the number and went back to his seat and sat down.

Another bus came. Again the dog jumped down and went to look at the number. He saw that it was the right bus and climbed in. The butcher could not believe it. He also got on the bus.

After a few stops, the dog stood up and pushed the button for the bus to stop. He got down with the bag in his mouth and started walking. The butcher followed him.
The dog entered a gate and dropped the bag on the doorstep. He jumped up and rang the doorbell. There was no response. So, he jumped onto a windowsill and banged his head against the glass several times. He then waited at the door.

The butcher was watching the whole thing.

A fat man came and opened the door. To the butcher’s surprise, the man started abusing the dog. The butcher couldn’t bear to see it. He ran to the door and asked him, ‘Sir, what are you doing? The dog is a genius. He is helping you so much! Why are you abusing him?’

The man replied, ‘You call him clever? This is the second time this week that he forgot to take his key!’

There are so many miracles happening around us! But all the time we are moving down the track of our own inner software, so we miss the miracles.

A blind man and his guide dog entered a hotel and sat down at a table. After ordering some food, he spoke loudly to the people there, ‘Do you want to hear a blonde joke?’

The whole room fell silent. One man went up to him and told him, ‘Before you tell that joke, you should know something. The hotel owner is blonde, the security guard is blonde, and I am a six foot tall, 200-pound blonde, with a black belt in karate. The lady to your right is a blonde wrestler. Think about it seriously. Do you still want to tell that joke?’

The blind man said, ‘No, not if I have to explain it five times.’

Each one’s worry is different, according to one’s own inner software!

The big problem is that you become so used to your inner software that you end up like an island that is cut off from the fragrance of the mainland. You are cut off from the fragrance of Existence because of your worries. You miss the miracles of Existence that are continuously happening around you. You forget to appreciate and remember only to complain. You forget laughter and remember only anxiety. You forget bliss and remember only stress. Remembering these negative things becomes a mere habit.

A small story:

One friend said to the other, ‘I am in love with two girls. One is very beautiful, but has no money. The other one is not that beautiful, but she has a lot of money. Who should I marry?’

His friend replied, ‘I am sure that you really love the beautiful girl, so I think you should marry her.’

The man was relieved. He said, ‘Thank you very much!’

The friend asked, ‘I wonder if you could give me the name and telephone number of the other girl!’

The crisis is different for every person because the mind is made up of a unique set of thoughts for each person. When the thoughts are different, the dilemma becomes different. The worry becomes different.

One more thing is that when we fall into this software, this worry, again and again, we often end up in dilemma.

What is a dilemma? It is moving back and forth when making a decision. The moving happens because there are so many thoughts inside you trying to put their signatures on your final decision! There is a great conflict between these thoughts because they were recorded at different times and under different circumstances. So they conflict with each other when a decision has to be made. This conflict becomes your dilemma. For each person, the dilemma is different. There are no standards or rules for a dilemma.

Understand that the mind is like a piece of hardware programmed with the software called ‘worry’. For example, let us say you experience depression, or worry, every morning at ten o’clock when thinking of all your unfinished office work. Ten o’clock gets recorded as a low mood time for you. Everyday at exactly ten o’clock you will experience a disturbance in your mood. Many of you might have experienced this. The same low mood happens on Sunday when there is no office to go to. Then you tell yourself, ‘No, today is a Sunday. I don’t need to go to the office. I don’t need to think about those things.’ Then you have relief but the mind goes back again and again to the same mood, because our mind is programmed hardware.

The stress of suffering or worrying becomes part of our being. If the worry or stress is taken away from us, we feel lonely. We feel we are missing something. When we enter into old age, there won’t be much to worry about because no one will expect us to solve any problems. If you watch elderly people, even if their children are married, and sometimes even their grandchildren are married, they will sit religiously every day and read the ‘wanted bride and groom’ column in the newspaper!

One man got up from deep sleep with a jolt. His friend asked him, ‘What happened?’

He replied, ‘I suddenly remembered that I forgot to take my sleeping pills.’

Worry is a deeply embedded pattern in us. It happens independently, without any solid, valid reason to justify it. It is an addiction like smoking and drinking. I read about some recent research conducted at the American College of Chest Physicians. It said that the proportion of people classified as highly nicotine dependent has increased by thirty two percent in the last eighteen years!

Any addiction happens because we want to maintain our patterns. The same is true with worry. You worry to maintain patterns. It becomes your nature.

Understand that sensitivity is different from worry. You can be very sensitive to the moment, but not worry at all. If you see children, they are highly sensitive to you when you are sick. But they won’t worry like you do. As long as your child is sensitive to others’ needs, it is perfectly fine. He doesn’t have to worry to show it. In fact, be happy he doesn’t multiply the worries in the house!

You can clean the physical parts of your house like your carpets and floors, but what about the space inside your house? This space is the energy that circulates throughout your house. It captures all the thoughts you radiate. It sets the very mood of the house. Your worries rest like cobwebs in the space of your house. That is why when you enter your house, you experience a familiar pattern of worry. The patterns remaining in the space of your house grip you when you return to it. Understand that your mental setup settles into the space of your house.

By contaminating the space in your house, you subject others to the impure improvement without their consent. That is the problem. Many people perform rituals in their homes to cleanse the energy, but that is not enough. After the ritual, you again start airing your negative thoughts in your space. Unless you break free from the mental setup or worry, there is no point in doing cleansing rituals in your home. Along with rituals, you must start airing positive thoughts, so the energy in your house will remain clean.

There are two things to understand: chronological planning and psychological worry. Chronological planning is needed to set up a schedule for tasks or projects to be completed. For example, you decide, ‘I will wake up at six a.m., do my meditation, then take a shower at seven a.m., and leave for the office by eight a.m. I’ll finish work by five p.m. and return home by six p.m.’

This type of planning is perfectly alright. But before you come to each task on your list, you start creating anxiety about it. You think of the pros and cons of each, etc. This is called psychological worry! This is not needed. Chronological planning is fine, but psychological worry is not needed. It is like trying to cross a bridge before it comes.

So much energy is spent worrying, and it is all of no use. In the story I just narrated, it does not mean that the son does not care. He cares without worry, that’s all. Why contemplate over the bridge even before it comes?

The problem is that parents expect their children to worry! If they don’t worry, they brand them as uncaring. It is possible to care without worrying. Care is doing, worry is chattering. There is no use chattering. Chattering is like trying to cross a bridge before it comes.

A young boy was driving his mother to the neighboring village. They were nearing the village when they remembered a particular bridge that used to be very old and unusable.

The mother got very anxious and said, ‘I will never cross that bridge by car.’
The son said, ‘Let’s see how it looks when we come to it.’

The mother said, ‘I’m sure the bridge will break if we attempt to cross it.’
The son replied, ‘Let’s see how strong it is. We won’t cross it without checking it carefully.’

The mother said, ‘If something happens to you or me, your father will never forgive me.’ She kept going on like this, becoming more and more upset.

Soon they reached the spot where the bridge stood. The bridge had been replaced with a new one!

One man had just moved in to a remote part of a village. One day, he was seen throwing handfuls of bread crumbs around his house.

His neighbor who was watching him asked him, ‘What are you doing?’
The man replied, ‘I am keeping the tigers away.’

The neighbor was surprised. He said, ‘But there are no tigers in these parts!’
The man replied, ‘That’s right. Very effective, isn’t it?’

This is how we are trained to worry! The other day, I read a survey about worries. It said that forty percent of the things we worry about never happen, thirty percent are in the past and can’t be helped, twelve percent concern the affairs of others that are not our business, ten percent are about illnesses that are mostly imagined, eight percent are worth worrying about but they are also not worth the energy to worry. They can be overcome by simply putting faith into action. So really, zero percent of our worries are worth the effort!

People will believe anything that is said with statistics! So I am talking with statistics. Otherwise, just one line is enough: don’t worry, just do. Things will happen as they should!

One man was pushing his baby in a pram. The baby was screaming at the top of his voice. All the while the man kept repeating quietly, ‘Keep calm George. Don’t scream. It will be okay.’
His wife told him to keep quiet.
A woman who was watching this said to the wife, ‘Why are you so rude to him? He is really doing his best to pacify your son!’
The wife looked at her with resentment, pointed to her husband and told her, ‘He is George.’

When parents express constant worry, children grow up thinking life goes on only because of worry! Understand that life goes on not because of us, but in spite of us!

Worry is an unwanted legacy passed down from grandparents to parents to children. Children are like sponges. They simply absorb the body language and attitude of the parents. The parents are not even aware this is happening. For example, if a child hears the mother repeating a certain worry four or five times, the child simply internalizes the habit. He grows up repeating statements unnecessarily, which is one attribute of worry.

Ultimately he carries the worry with him into marriage and then both he and his wife must deal with it, even though it was originally his mother’s concern. They will then hand it down to their children, unless they stop naming it and learn to live with what IS.

Many people get worried about what they see in their dreams and come to me for interpretations. I tell them that we are unable to even accept what happens in reality, then why bother about what happens in our dreams?

On day, a man dreamt a strange dream and became very curious to know what the dream meant. He went to his master, told him about the dream and asked for an explanation.

The master told him, ‘Come to me with dreams that come to you in your wakeful state. We will work them out. The dreams of your sleep belong neither to my wisdom, nor to your imagination.’

If you are still worried about your dreams, you should know that dreams tell you about the state of your mind during the day. Learn from your dreams and think how to transform the mind during the daytime. For example, if you think too much about lust when your are awake, your dreams will be lustful. If you worry too much about passing with high grades, you will write exams in your dreams! If you worry too much about relationships, you will fight with someone in your dream. So wake up to what your dreams indicate to you. There is nothing more to interpret from your dreams. Wake up and see what is as it IS.

A small story:

One disciple kept asking the master, ‘Master, where is paradise?’
Finally one day, the master asked him, ‘Do you really want to know?’
The disciple sat up and said, ‘Yes!’

The master said, ‘Alright, my first disciple Hemachandra is in paradise.’ After saying these words the master closed his eyes and went into meditation.

The disciple knew it would be a long time before the master opened his eyes. So, he went and asked some of the disciples if they knew where Hemachandra lived. No one seemed to know.

Finally one disciple said, ‘I know how to guide you there, but I have never been there myself. It is in a deep valley beyond a range of ice covered mountains.’
The disciple wrote down the directions carefully and went back to the master. He told him, ‘Master, I wish to pay a visit to Hemachandra!’
The master was absorbed deeply in some work. Without even looking up he said, ‘Go ahead.’

The disciple started on his journey. He walked for many days, passing through sun, rain, snow, and what not. He became exhausted, on the verge of death. It took him one hundred days to reach the valley. When he finally reached it he looked at the valley and thought, ‘This valley doesn’t look all that great. I have seen many more beautiful valleys. Why did the master call this paradise?’

He looked around and walked further and finally found Hemachandra’s hut. Hemachandra was very pleased to see him. He served him food and asked how the master and other disciples were doing.

All along, the disciple was thinking to himself, ‘Master called this place paradise? I can’t believe it.’

After a week-long stay he left and returned to his master. It took him another one hundred days to return home.

He went straight to the master and stated, ‘You said that the place is paradise. But what I saw was the most ordinary place ever!’

The master said, ‘Oh god! At the time of your enquiry, had you been more explicit about your intention, I would have told you the truth.’

The disciple asked, ‘What is the truth?’
The master replied, ‘Hemachandra is not in paradise. Paradise is in him!’

When you live close to Existence, without any expectation, seeing what is as it is and finding the blessings in it, you will carry heaven in you! Heaven is not geographical, it is psychological. It is not physical, it is mental. If you decide, you can be in heaven right now.

One man got onto a bus and sat down next to a young man. He could see that the man was a hippy. He was wearing only one shoe.
He asked him, ‘You have lost one shoe?’
The young man replied, ‘No, I have found one shoe.’

Stop naming any situation, person, or thing! Just see, that’s all. Don’t give room for condemning or accepting thoughts.

Initially there’s a compulsion to pass judgment on anything that you see because that is your habit. But when you experience the great energy released in you by seeing what IS, you want to remain that way – free from thoughts, worry, and suffering.

When you see what is as it is, you are in heaven. When you want to see what you want to see, you are in hell. If you understand that everything is auspiciousness, you will drop expectation and see things as they are, because everything is auspiciousness.

Someone asked J. Krishnamurti*, the famous Indian philosopher, how to fall in tune with what IS. He beautifully says, ‘Just don’t name it, you will find you are in tune with it!’

Usually, when we see something, we either try to identify with it or we try to condemn it. For example, if you are told you are arrogant, you either accept it or you try not to be arrogant! You never understand or go beyond arrogance. You can only understand within your frame of reference, what you are familiar with. Because of this, you are caught in a limited view of possibilities. To really understand, you need to go beyond this limited point-of-view. To do that, you have to stop naming it arrogance, that’s all! There will be no more arrogance. Only by naming it, you start the conflict. That is how you see what IS – by not naming it.

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J. Krishnamurti – Renowned Indian philosopher.

How can you keep thoughts away from what truly IS? How can you enjoy each moment all the time?

Try this small technique. When you see something, for example a person, or a situation, or a book, or anything, normally old thoughts and familiar reactions immediately rise in you. Bring in the awareness that these conditioned thoughts and memories cloud your judgment and visualize shattering those thoughts. Next, see the situation, or person, or object now with a fresh eye, as though you are seeing it for the first time! Suddenly you see how much you missed, because of your own worry and thoughts.

Even when you see your husband, wife, brother, or anyone, look at them as though you are seeing them for the first time. Suddenly, you realize that not only does worry not arise, but also that you start seeing everyone alike, whether they are strangers or familiar to you. That is the right way. No one is familiar or unchanging. Even your wife is not known to you. Everyone is constantly changing every moment along with Existence. Only your mind is trying to make them appear to be permanent.

Once you start seeing what is as it is, all your energy will integrate within you. There is no more worry, no more conflict. Worry arises because your thoughts resist what you see. Once the conflict disappears, all the energy invested in worry is released for you to integrate!