Question & Answers with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

Oh, it’s all computerized automatically. Our brain is a super computer. You just tell me one thing. How with your little cell phone with just 10 to 12 buttons, you can talk to millions of people; can’t you? Do you need to get different cell phones to talk to different people? How many millions of calls can you make in your little cell phone? Is there any limitation? Can you call China from your cell phone? Can you call South America? Can you call Australia? You can call India! You can call all over the world with that little box. And you think the brain which has made the cell phone is less in quality in any way? Or capacity?! Or capability?! Come on wake up! Our brains are so much more powerful and so much more capable of capturing or enveloping the whole universe. We only don’t know how to use it, that’s all. I need to learn this technique, how to have a brain and not to use it. (Laughing) If there are some experts here please teach me. I’m willing to be your student. How to have the brain and…

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

Listen, in the absolute sense, no but in relative sense there is. You can feel those things but it is not a permanent thing. It is limited by time. Like smoke comes; smoke is not a permanent thing. Smoke you could find in somebody’s farm when they are burning the leaves then smoke comes. But it’s not going to be there forever, you are not going to live amidst smoke 24 hours. Smoke comes and it vanishes. When fog comes, planes wait for that little time. Once the fog is clear the planes take off. You think planes are worried about the fog? No. It’s just matter of time. Similarly some negative energy comes, you feel it, you feel upset, you feel something in the stomach, you feel something in the body but it’s only for a few minutes and it just goes away. See it goes even faster with a few pranayamas, bhastrika and mediation. All this will chase away those negative vibes. Why do you have to be worried about negative vibes? You should never be paranoid about negative vibes. Negative vibes are just like passing smoke or fog. You know of course in L.A. there is smog but the people don’t leave L.A. The city is not deserted. Millions of people live there. It just comes for a while and then disappears. And negative vibes don’t even come as regularly as the smog in L.A. They just are there for a few minutes, at the most few hours and then they go. And you have the key to get rid of them. Excellent! And one more thing is salt. Bathing in salt or putting salt in the bathtub can also take away any negativity. You know why people feel so happy in the ocean? Because there is salt in the water that cleanses the subtle and not just the gross. But when there is mantra chanting it’s even more powerful than the ozone or salt in water. That’s the strange thing in India. You will find the beaches are empty, nobody goes to the beach. Do you know this? Nobody goes. Even if you go to Bali, the Balinese people are not fond of the beach. They don’t go to. Only tourists go into beaches. Same in India, you will find local people do not go to beach. It’s not a favorite spot. Maybe in evening they may just take a walk. If you are in Chennai it gets very hot so you get little breeze. They are not fond of salt water, going into ocean. People seldom do because there is no inner craving, that it gives more than the inland. Are you getting what I’m saying? You already get so much energy so your system doesn’t crave to go near the ocean or take a swim in the ocean to feel better because on the land mantra chanting has been happening for millenniums, for ages. So it’s still vibrant. So prana is already high. It’s not especially high along the coast.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

"Nava" means new, "Puna" means again. Making something new again, that is "Punarnava", bringing new life, infusing newness.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

‘Nava’ means new, ‘purna’ means again. Making something new again, that is ‘Purnanava’, bringing new life, infusing newness.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

Doer-ship and freewill is connected. Doer-ship is when that ‘I’ is very strong, ‘I want to do it’ or ‘I do it’. The ego is very strong. So when you asserting your free will attach yourself to the achievements you have done, then you will find that your will is there. I won’t call it free will, it’s a will attached with too much of doership. It might fructify but with a lot of effort and in the end it does not give you so much happiness. You have achieved something but find that it was not worth all that effort that you put into it. But free will without the doer-ship is not called free will, it is Divine will.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

The impressions of the intellect and the cravings and aversions of the mind go with the subtle body. So when you die what happens is for sometime the soul is in confusion, it does not know. It has just come out of the body but it does not know what to do. It doesn’t want to get into the body because the body appears like very gray matter, very dark and completely unbearable. So it doesn’t want to get into it, it feels very bad and averse to its’ own body most of the time. Sometimes they go in. So the soul is out there and very peaceful, the soul is totally at peace. They see people crying, wailing. It tries to tell them, ‘hey I am okay, don’t worry’, but they cannot communicate. There is a tradition to keep the light burning at the bedside of the body. It’s in Christian tradition as well, right? It’s in the Hindu tradition as well. Why you keep a light burning near the head so that when the soul suddenly looks at that light and knows that it is light. Let it be reminded that it is light, if it is still craving for something. Just to remind the soul that the nature of the soul or spirit is light, a lamp is kept or a candle is kept burning near the body. It’s not for us, it’s for the soul because the soul can still see, and smell. It has lost the sense of touch but smell and light are still there; smell, sight and sound all three will be there. So the ancient tradition is just before cremation the son or daughter; son usually, takes the head of the person into his lap and in the ear he says, ‘you are light, you are soul, you are not the body. Drop all your attachment to this body’, he tells them. And then the body is given a bath and then taken to cremation. These words are all in Sanskrit, and people simply repeat it in Sanskrit without knowing it because the priests tell them to say these things. To tell the departed in his ear that, ‘the five elements will go back to five elements. You are not just these five elements you are light, you are soul, you are spirit, you’re free and you move on now.’ This is what you say in the ear of the corpse, in case the soul is still hanging around and it does. It does hang around because it doesn’t know what to do. So it takes nearly ten days for the soul to get use to this other plain where it has gone. And once it reaches that plain of ancestors, one day there is one year for us. Our one year is just one day and one night for them in that realm. So there are three levels or lokas there also; one is Vasuloka, second is Rudra, and then Aditya. Three lokas are there and so they remain in this for some time. And there are three different Devas, they take them to those places. Someone who is a pious and died in a very good life they are taken direct to these lokas and three angels called Pururava, Ardrahva, and Vishvadeva. Three different Devas come and take the soul according to the level. It’s interesting! So in a yearly ceremony that is done, the day you remember the ancestors. First you invite these angels to bring them to you, for you want to honor them. These angels, they are the custodians. So you tell them ‘Visvadeva you bring my father, my mother or my grandfather or grandmother for this ceremony. Bring them for I would like to honor them.’ Ancient people knew all these so well, they had access to those realms. Even today people do this, they do the ceremonies and they do all this.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

It depends on your type, what you want to do. You choose, choice is yours and blessings are mine. There are challenges both ways, being single is also a challenge and being married is an even bigger challenge, that’s what I have heard. But one thing I want to tell you whether you remain single or married I don’t mind but what I really mind is you be happy either way. You’re married be happy, if you’re single be happy. Don’t think only by getting married you will be happy, that is a blunder and if you think if you were single you would have been happy after having been married that again is another blunder. You got it? So just be happy whatever you are doing, okay. If you want to be single fine, be single, very good. But sometimes if you feel that it’s too much for you to be single and you want to be married, I give you blessings. We’ll make some arrangements here in the ashram so that anyone who wants to get married you can come here. We have a nice hall, we have a very good dining hall, and we have everything. We will have a permanent priest here who can explain to you about the ceremony. Some people here who want to become priests we will get them training. Come for two months or three months to India and we will train you the Vedic way of marriage also, with meaning and with everything. We will do that and we will hold classes to train someone to conduct good weddings, okay. The ancient type of wedding is very nice, the vows and it’s very beautiful. You marry with, not human beings as witness but as the five elements as witness. You keep water in a pot and the water, fire, the space, the sun and the moon is witness for your marriage. So it is not just marriage between two people, two persons but it is also connecting with the universe that two are getting married with feeling their connectedness to the entire universe. It’s very nice, very beautiful. Of course you can have other type of marriages also. We can do all that, what do you think? Good idea! Only single people are clapping (laughter). Now idea is idea, you can tell other people, your friends. We will do something like that here, some nice birthday celebrations and all that and people can come.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

Pranayama and Sudarshan Kriya. It has helped millions of people.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

Absolutely, everything exists in the present moment. What exists is only the present moment, yes.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

What’s that? Yes, yes, you can do a lot of things. If you have no other responsibility you can take bigger responsibilities. More work on a bigger cause. You can do that.