*Chapter 1 – The Mind Facing Inwards Is Always Happy*
*Day 4*
We can realise our self to the extent that we raise our energy. The first sutra is “Chaitanyamatma”. You are alive, but you are living as though you were dead.
Sleeping, eating and talking – you are like one who walks in his sleep. Often, mothers feed milk to their half sleeping children, who do not remember anything later.
In the morning, they complain that she did not feed them food or milk. We also live like this, as though we eat while we are asleep and continue to slumber.
We do not have knowledge of ourself. How do we get knowledge about ourselves and about the soul? Knowledge grows as our energy rises – “Chaitanyamatma.”
This is the first sutra. If we succeed in this sutra, then we can reach our goal and raise the energy in the body and in life.
The moment our energy is low, our speech gets confused, and we become lazy. When you talk too much your energy lowers, and you get bored.
If you have not experienced this, then do an experiment. Try to abuse someone for one and a half hours continuously, which may or may not even be possible – in a short time your stomach will feel sick.
We lose energy, which is required to digest food, and so the brain also stops working and starts functioning like a fool. Even if we eat more, vitality lowers.
Have you experienced this? We are not at our best on a day when we overeat, isn’t it? There are Brahmins who specialise in eating at death ceremonies, especially in Mathura and other such places.
They are called “panda”. Their only job is to eat wherever there is death ceremony. When many people die, they are in great demand and sometimes have to eat at as many as five or six places in a single day.
Once, a son accompanied his father to the ceremony and thev had a competition to see who could eat more. During the meal, the son drank a glass of water.
The father got angry and slapped his son, asking him, “Why are you drinking instead of eating?” But they were not able to talk about it then.
On reaching home, again the father asked the son the same thing. “I drank to settle the food I had eaten so I could eat more”. The father slapped him again and said, “Why didn’t you tell me there?”
I could have done the same and eaten more. On another occasion two ladies, who were neighbors, were talking.
One was making the bed for her husband at one in the afternoon and so the other lady asked her, “Why are you making the bed so early?”
The first one replied, “My husband has gone for food at a death ceremony. He will have to sleep as soon as he returns home”.
Hearing that, the other lady said, “That is better. For my husband, I have to send the bed to wherever he has gone for the ceremony. After eating he cannot even make it back home”.
Eating is also tiring. Where is your energy if you overeat? It is the same with those who oversleep – they cannot be full of vitality.
We can realise our self to the extent that we raise our consciousness, our vitality. That is why we should do pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya and meditation.
When you start doing these practices, then consciousness dawns. That is what the first sutra means. You are searching for your self.
Your self is not something that is separate from you. Your consciousness is your self, from which everything has been created.
It is possible to experience this only when you become one with your consciousness. The same consciousness also makes it possible for you to understand yourself.
Only this consciousness can understand itself. As consciousness, or energy, increases knowledge also grows. One who is awake has tremendous consciousness.
Even the sleeping man has consciousness, but only the one who is awake knows it while the other one is unaware of it.
When we look at nature, consciousness is visible in every atom. Only in some it rests in a dormant state, in some it is partially expressed and in others it is expressed inabundance.
If one understands this and wakes up to this consciousness, one can reach the light of joy in our body is our consciousness.
We chant, do yagyas and practice yoga in order to raise our level of consciousness and move towards the goal of self realisation.
In fact, raising the level of consciousness is not the right phrase, because consciousness does not increase or decrease.
It is only when we realise that everything is consciousness that we start to experience consciousness.
Ayurveda Initiative 
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