17 January 2015 - QA 9

Gurudev, in the Ishavasya Upanishad, it is said that we can indulge in the material objects through sacrifice. How to bring this into experience?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Ask this question to yourself before asking it to me. Every time you breathe in, you have to breathe out. Without breathing out, you cannot breathe in.

You are able to indulge in anything because you leave it for short intervals in between. Is someone able to eat continuously without stopping? No. You eat and then you stop. The same is for any experience that you gain from the five senses. Can you keep on listening to music without any break? No. You listen to music for a while and then you want to shut it off. You cannot eat 24 hours a day, or listen to music 24 hours a day, or smell something 24 hours a day. In the earlier times fragrances were very popular with people. Nowadays, you are getting fragrance free soap. You are getting everything free of fragrances.

All the experience you gain from your five senses, including the thoughts that come out of your intellect cannot be carried on continuously.
Let us say that you have 20 questions. You ask one question after another, but after that what? Suppose you have learned everything, you have received the answer to all your questions, then what next? Just to satisfy this little intellect, we want an answer to calm it down.

The element that is beyond the intellect is within you. Every answer has just one objective, to make you silent. Every question has just one objective, to dive within. If diving within is all that you want to achieve, then what is the purpose of asking so many questions. What will you achieve after asking all these questions and listening to all the answers? Just relax.
Somehow you have to let go of all the things you have learnt. There is a saying in South India, “Unless you forgot what you have learnt, you will not achieve liberation”. All the things you learn — music, Ayurveda, chemistry or physics, you have to forget it. Unless you forget it, there is no liberation.