 My name is Dinoop. I just would like to ask something about Surrender itself. I have gone through certain experiences in my life where I was not in control. And that led me to a state of false surrender, I would say, to my Guru, who was Sri Satya Sai Baba at that time, so he left his body now. I feel my surrender was not complete. In the sense that I went in, came out, and that process is ongoing still. As a part of the surrender, I almost feel like I know I am being taken care of by that force. It's like I'm going through a roller coaster with a seat belt, but still the experience of that roller coaster is very overwhelming. So it feels like there is kind of a trying to get away from that experience of going through that process. It's kind of frightening and there is like no particular reason and there is still fear and anxiety coming out, which is very overwhelming. So I would like your advice on how to handle that. Did I understand you correctly that you experience fear and anxiety when you think about, or when the idea in you arises of surrender? No, I think I try to surrender my fear and anxiety also to that process, but it seems like the more I meditate, or I do kind of a surrender meditation, and sometimes after that it's like overwhelming anxiety or fear without any rational reason. I can't attribute a reason to it, it's physically overwhelming. It really kind of makes my body really tired and can't handle it for some time at least. Does this happen when you are in meditation? Usually after. What I am seeing and what I am feeling here is that the meditation processes are taking you into states of experience which are not directly related to the body. In other words into certain states of samadhi. I don't mean a deep, you know, nirvikalpa samadhi state, but certain states which are closer to the identification with the body but are outside the body, they are transcendental states. And when you are out there in a sense, you are alright, you are doing well, but when you have to reintegrate or reenter into the body, the unfamiliarity of the body itself is inducing this kind of anxiety. And the reason for it is that there is no surrender in the system. You can't surrender something to something else. It is you, Dinup, and what's your mother's name? Shobha. And where were you born Dinup? Kerala. Where in Kerala? Chalakudi. Chalakudi, okay, so Dinup, son of Shobha from Chalakudi. If you take that as your identity, a slim identity, not more than that, just that. And if you switch the process around and instead of meditating and going outward, you stay present in the system, your meditation becomes, your practice, your sadhana becomes not closing the eyes and moving outward but staying present with eyes open and just asking the question, Dinup is taking this action, where is it coming from? Is it arising from the truth of your being from the antar guru or is it arising from the ego lie? If you were to take that as your sadhana, why would you have any fear? Yeah, that is also part of my sadhana to see my actions, what kind of motivation they are coming from. And sometimes I get my guidance, but as you say, there is fear of following the guidance as well. But that's a different kind of fear. It doesn't have the element of anxiety and panic in it. Yes, that's true. And the reason why it doesn't have that element of panic and anxiety is because you're still in familiar territory. You have not left the body and moved into a cosmic state. You're in familiar territory. The body is the familiar territory. So in this familiar territory, with the eyes open, you ask that question and even if you're wrong about it completely, you will start to be able to discern between these two as time proceeds. It's a simplification of spiritual processes in general that have taken on such a nebulous persona over the centuries and millennia that no one knows anymore what the other one is actually talking about. I say enlightenment, she means something else. The third one says something else. The fourth one experiences that something else. I talk about ego. She says something else. She thinks ego is something else. The other one does. So the idea is to reduce the complexity and to actually simplify it because existence is not that complex a thing. It's a simple thing. You're here in this body and you're receiving through this body sensations. That's pretty much where it begins and ends. And then what you do with those sensations is the next step. But to simplify these processes and say, okay, I don't have to meditate, go out of the system and then reintegrate in fear. And everyone has a bit of fear in the system when they reintegrate, even the great masters. It is true that like in the state of meditation it feels absolutely great and I want to go back there all the time. But then the question is that why are you in the body at all? If you always want to have out-of-body experiences then you're trying to actually emulate being a spirit. I understand. And so that's also my follow-up question. So we say we follow the truth. And I experience that there is that kind of distinction between being surrendered to something and then that taking over. So are we separate from it? Are we part of it? And where this process leading us to? Because the body is going to fall away at some point. Well, the body is you. You can't even speak. You can't even say the word I without a body. So you are not going to exist very soon. And when I mean very soon, I don't mean I mean when you're 150 years old. Minimum 150, okay. What I mean is that this idea that I will go on, I am the soul and I will go on is a nice little machination of the ego and of the conceptual trying to fool you. You are this thing here. And you are in surrender to the soul, to the truth, to the eternal spirit, if you want to call it that, to eternal soul, to atman, that is without beginning and without end, anadi, ananta has been here and will always be here, will move on once you are dropped. But if my identity is towards the body, isn't that a cause of fear as well? Because at some point, the fear of ending is also there, right? The fear of ending is only there when you are not in the body. The more you are an instrument of the truth, you become an instrument in a waking state of the truth, the less you're concerned with what happens afterwards because you're in this moment and this moment is eternal. And this is not a pretty word in a pretty book, it's actually the experience. If you take up the sadhana, you will experience it. The fear is only there because it is that which is aimed for. It is paradise, it is cosmos, it is janat, all of those things which are there, that. But if you're just here and this, then this is what you are and this is what you experience and this is what you live. And so there's nothing that you're aiming for other than this. So in this moment, there cannot be fear. If you bring yourself, all of you actually, to this moment right now, here and now, now, now. This moment, this moment, here, here. Present, present, present. Where is the fear? Where is the fear? It's gone. You can't be in this moment consciously if you're not here. If you're there, if you're that, then that's where you are. And you're detached from the reality of this body and you consider the body an illusion. But then you have to reintegrate and suddenly you realize, oops, it's not an illusion, it's painful. I have physical pain, I have emotional pain, I have conceptual pain, you know? So you have to take up that practice which is almost antithetical to the practice that you have been undertaking till now. But it's experimentation, spirituality's experimentation. It is not a religion that tells you what exactly you have to do. It is inspiration and experimentation. And then you'll find out that you won't have any panic anymore. You just won't. Yes, you'll be afraid, oh, the soul is telling me to do this, ooh, I don't want to do this. What will my mommy say and what will my daddy say? But at least you won't have the panic, the existential panic that appears when the reintegration starts, once you've been out of the system. And when you're here and now, you can be in surrender. If you've had a guru who was in his body then, then you know what surrender is. Now, you surrender to the antar guru or find another guru in a body. Yeah, I have the experience of surrender, but as he said, it's not complete. It comes and goes. Or my ego makes, oh, I am in that learning process still. That's what is going on. But I have a follow-up question if you don't mind. So if you look at what Mahasri Ramana was teaching about atma vichara, when you look at it, it looks almost like going into this kind of witnessing. But you're saying that it's, I think I misunderstood it. Can you explain? Well, it depends on what your interpretation of atma vichara is. Because each person sitting here will have a different interpretation of what he's talking about. No one has clarity about these things. Finally, the simplification atma is the soul. And atma vichara technically would mean thoughts about the soul. What does it mean for you? You have to speak about what it means for you. And then I can reflect on that or respond to your question. What I was practicing as a part of that was to remain as the presence. That was my practice for a long time. And when I remain as the presence, then the thoughts drop off. And then I go into a state of bliss where I'm just aware of the presence. When I start atma vichara, I see the presence as my guru. And so I surrender to the guru there. And I kind of feel there is kind of emerging. When I see that, I can also see my thoughts. So you're saying that the witnessing part is not the aim, right? It is to be. Right. Aim is to be. Just to be this instrument in action. Because the moment you start witnessing, you separate yourself from yourself. And there's two of you then. There's the observer and there's the observed. So then you are in witness consciousness in sakshi bhava. The observer is observing the observed. But then what happens is that suddenly there appears behind that observer, another observer. And that observer is observing the observer. Who is observing the observed? And then suddenly there's one more observer. Observing the observer. Who is observing the observer? Who is observing the observed? And as that grows and as those number of observers grow, the path to the mental institution reduces in distance. And this is something seen again and again and again and again and again in the satsangs outside. One example of what I mean by that is someone coming to the satsang and literally shouting at me, how dare you say these things? And what authority do you have? And I mean, it was a sweet young person. I'm not trying to illustrate how mean that person was. I'm trying to illustrate what I mean by the path to the mental institution. And this went on and she was really very angry. She was throwing stones at me. I mean not real stones, but. And then finally I said, okay, if you don't feel that what I'm saying resonates with you, then why do you keep coming here? Because either you're ready for a discourse on this or you're ready to ask me questions because a prasna or satsang is not a sharing field. It is a field of question and answer. The person on the chair asks the question. The person on this chair gives the answer if there is one available at that moment. So her answer to me was that I haven't come here. My body has come here. This was an answer, it's on record and not just once but many times such answers. Or you have spiritual masters who have had friendly touching around with couple of their disciples and then when the disciples rose up in anger together the female disciples in that case, then he just said it was not me doing it, it was my body. And I understand that it has a certain spiritual significance and a spiritual experience can also result in a statement like that, which is not just someone trying to take advantage of another person or absolve himself from responsibility. But on the surface of it at least, to me this would mean that the person is not taking responsibility and one can do it and two can do it but when a hundred do it, then we have a problem. So if you keep on observing and then the observer observes the observed, all of this happens not because there is a fundamental problem with Atma Vichara but because there is no surrender in that process, if someone takes a book and opens it and says okay, Atma Vichara, I'm going to do this now. I'm going to question myself, it doesn't work that way, where's the surrender? You cannot reach the truth without samarpan. You cannot touch the truth with your fingertips. You'll never be able to do that unless you bend to the inner master at least if you can't bend anywhere else. So that process, if not accompanied with surrender will result in, it's a conceptual thing, isn't it? You observing something is a conceptual exercise. Where is the body in that story? So the body is doing something which is disconnected from it because if you say, I'm asking the soul or I want to go into cosmic samadhi states and it's the body that wants to do that because the I is an expression of the body, it's not an expression of the eternal soul. So a bodily experience, a bodily wish, a bodily yearning will have to be fulfilled in the body for it to be a fulfilling experience. It cannot be fulfilled outside the body which is why most people don't experience enlightenment and when they do, they wish they hadn't. How many people have come to these satsangs saying I'm enlightened and I don't want to be enlightened? Can you unenlightened me? Because that distance with the body is so big and that duality is experienced so strongly when the aim was a non-dual experience.