The art of speaking is very simple. You should only speak to communicate your honesty. Otherwise you should never speak.

If you cannot communicate, what is the purpose of speaking? The purpose of speaking is to communicate yourself. I want to carry myself to you and I want you to carry yourself to me. What is the purpose of Naad? Why did God give you a “mouth”? To create a sound?

If you are a dragon you can shoot fire out of your mouth. If you are Indra, you can let water go, a blast of water. The police use it these days for controlling crowds. They have learned from Indra. Napalm is nothing but dragon fire which burns for miles and miles. Understand that your mouth can shoot flames out and it can also shoot water out. It can create a breeze and be soothing and healing. Or it can create something upsetting and nonsensical.

My expectation is that my students must be successful. That’s all I know. I don’t know anything else. I don’t believe in failure. I believe failure is anti-God. It is Satan. You know I am from the Sacred Heart Convent and my first education was in Christianity. I believe that failure is Satan and to fail is to worship Satan. To fail is to believe in Satan. Everything else is God. That’s how I have divided the universe.

You say you worship God. I say you don’t. If there is anything, directly or indirectly, in your consciousness which accepts failure then you are more attached to Satan than you are attached to God. I believe success is my birthright.

Success with a woman, success with intercourse, success with the physical intercourse, success with the intercourse of communication. Everything in this universe is nothing but intercourse. God didn’t know anything more than one thing – intercourse. Communicative intercourse is the very, very beginning of everything. Physical intercourse is later. Cyclical intercourse is later. Projective psyche intercourse is later. Electromagnetic field intercourse is later. Projective field intercourse into the psyche and reversibility is later. Intercourse of reversibility of the cycle into the psyche of another person in emotions and commotions is later.

The science of Naad, the science of communication, is very old. The entire scriptures that people used to read were written on bamboo strips. They were written in liquid gold. I asked one person why? He said that this is the only way to preserve the teachings. Otherwise everything gets eaten up. That stack of knowledge was beautifully done and written in liquid gold, on very well balanced bamboo.

Normally, we want to talk. The question is – why do we talk? There are many reasons why we talk: to express ourselves, to relate information, to blend two beings, to release pressure from the mind, to persuade, to convince, to win, to get, to grab, to project our personality.  To cause changes and adjustments.

Change is a heavy word when you use it. There, the language has to be corrected. If you say, “I want to make a change” then you are creating a challenge. You want to change but I don’t want to change. To make adjustments is also a heavy word. But it is politer and it makes more sense.

To raise the consciousness of ourselves and others is another reason we talk. If you want to know something, read about it. If you want to learn something, write about it. If you want to master something, teach it. If you do not know how to raise the consciousness of another person, you can never raise your own consciousness. You may know the whole world, the entire knowledge of the universe may be with you but you will not achieve an effect.

Story-telling is the most powerful purpose for talking. Story-telling and humor are two ways of communicating where you normally don’t get burned and have a loss. Two ways to win in the world are to tell stories and to talk through humor.

To penetrate is another purpose, but “to penetrate” is not the proper word. A more accurate word is to rape the psyche. That is our basic need when we communicate. In the beast-part of us, the purpose of communication is to rape the psyche of anything which is within the range of our aura, multiplied by a hundred, and then multiplied by a million. Within a hundred mile radius, we like to talk. And we like to communicate within a million miles. That is all over the globe. So, the idea is to rape: my animal wants to rape the animal psyche of you. It is the most inhuman way of talking, for a human to rape the psyche of another person. But you’ll be surprised to know, seventy-percent of the time that is what we do. That’s the urge. It’s a basic human urge to talk and to project into. Not only do you project, but you interlock yourself.

Have you seen the two dogs having intercourse? They have intercourse and then they turn their backs to each other and get stuck. That is the normal intercourse of communication which the beast in us does to the beast in each other. You know how unsophisticated and ugly it looks when we paint a picture about it. But the picture in the scriptures is of two dogs, their tongues coming out with the dog breath, and they are locked. The majority of us, in our unackow­ledged and unaware life, talk like that.

If you really analyze yourself sweetly and without prejudice, not putting yourself down, not putting yourself up, you’ll be surprised that the majority of you talk like that. Because you want to create your baby. You want to create your puppies. You don’t care what you want. You want to create a third thing called puppies. Otherwise, if you really want to communicate you will respect the other person. The other person will respect you too. There will be a lot of reverence.

What is the purpose of communication? There is one and only one purpose of talking. As there is one God, one humanity, one light, one planet Earth, there is one purpose of communication. It is to discharge your honest being. I am literally translating: “To discharge your honest being.” When you catch the honesty and communicate rather than carrying the other garbage with it, that is communication. The first purpose of life is to know where your honesty is. The second purpose is to know where your heart is. The third is to know where your head is and the fourth is to know your totality. Honesty is a totality.

You give yourself, a part of you, to somebody. You don’t give your total self to somebody. Therefore no relation­ship can be honest. You are going to get a flashback and flack back, and somebody is going to be mad at you, because you are not honest to begin with. You are not carrying your honest self to somebody. What happens through communication is that somebody is going to find your dishonesty later on, and you are the source of it. If you will keep your mouth shut, nobody will ever know what you are doing. But you cannot keep your mouth shut. Therefore, the source of knowledge is nobody except you. Because the source of knowledge comes from you in bits and pieces, therefore there is anger against you because you’re not straightforward. The other person takes a long time to think about you and then they find out you were not trustworthy. This is how you lose trust.

That is how I gain trust with your hearts. I come right out and blow your mind. You never like it, you always avoid me, you do everything, but I don’t care. Whatever the situation is, I come right out and put a big cannon ball into you. That is what you have to learn to do. Zero and let yourself go, your total self, not a part of you. Nobody is forcing you to talk. Nobody is sitting over your head and saying come on, speak. But boy, when you talk it should be right out, total self, right out. It doesn’t matter what wrong it does. Whenever the ball is going to be in some person’s court, let that person deal with it. You let it out. You know what you’ll save? You’ll have no heart attacks and no regrets. You’ll be calm and clear, absolutely compassionate and very, very forgiving. Do you want all these qualities? It comes from one source. Speak your total self.

Don’t try to do it with all that show of lunch and dinner and then some sexy movie. You know that you want to take her to bed. You know that, and she knows it too. You are playing such a long game. That is the story of every life. We need cohabitation. We are very sexual. Even with God we are sexual. We need intercourse. We don’t want God. God is everywhere. But what is our job? We want to produce God and have a talk face-to-­face. Is there any human on the Earth who doesn’t want to confront God? I mean, you are so neurotic. Believe me or not, God is everywhere. Leave Him alone, He will leave you alone. But it’s not true that you want to leave God alone. You want to do anything in your power to produce God, and have an intercourse, a communicative intercourse with Him.

You were born out of intercourse, you live through intercourse, you want to have intercourse with God. That is what communication is called: cohabitative intercourse. The finite wants to achieve intercourse with Infinity. Let us make things simple. If you are the finite and you want intercourse with Infinity, why not first learn to have intercourse with the finite?

Speaking to people and communicating with people and trying to convince people is one thing. But there’s a great blunder which we commit. Through communication, we try to control people. The danger in that is, if you try to control somebody, you have to also be in control of that person’s problem. You think you can get away with just a person. The truth is, you are getting away with his problem. Everybody wants to be controlled by everybody, because they want to get rid of their problems. When you are out to get a person, you are out to get the problem, which is not very effective. It is not effective in the life scale. It is rhythmically wrong. It is wrong as an association, it is wrong as a cohabitation, it is wrong as an intercourse. But you can’t control your urge to control. There’s a basic insecurity in us that we think we want to have control.

The fact is that nobody can control anybody. All you can do is flow. You can flow with each other, like rivers and streams flow with each other and they all end up in the same ocean. All things come from God and all things go to God. It’s a very simple formula which you have learned.

 

The problem is that in our brain there’s not a nerve connecting system of sending messages from one part of the brain to another. It’s a kind of mixture, a solution. It happens very fast, but the fact is, there’s no wiring there. That’s something you have to understand. And now I understand why that was to be like that. Because man can improve his whole life by changing that chemical material which carries the messages. My personal feeling is that man must have found it out centuries and centuries ago. It might be tomorrow’s solution to make us healthy, to make us better and to make us untired. Because your total strength is not in your muscles. Your total strength is in that chemical communicating solution. Rasa actually means solution. Rasaa means juice. Naad means communication. Namoda means addressing. It is from so many hundreds of thousands of years ago that this line existed. Naad namoda rasaa. It is that chemical solution which interconnects each part of the brain and each part makes a different chemical solution. The messages are transmitted and the reaction is very fast!

So, at that time, whether there was surgery or not, they might have opened the brain and found out what is under the skull. When they wrote about it, they were very accurate. I was told that those rishis, swamis or yogis used to go into every part of the body and find out the size, shape, transmission power, tissues, nerves, everything

The best in you is your own honesty. There’s nothing better in you than your own honesty. Sometimes you’re beautiful, and you think you are beautiful. Sometimes you are professional, and you think you are professional. You are so many things. But the greatest. most effective thing you can transport, sell, give or gift is your total honesty.

Suppose somebody gives me a beautiful sweet. On top of it, there’s a dead fly. Am I going to eat it? First, I’ll say it’s  black pepper. Then I’m going to look and I’ll see the wings and say, wait a minute! What I mean to say is that the whole work which was done is lost. One bug in your life, one neurosis in your life, can take away your whole joy of life and waste it. That is why Guru Gobind Singh gave you the Wahe Guru mantra, to clear the bugs out.

What we have tried to impart is how to honestly communicate your personality outwardly. If there will be a chance to teach another course some time, we’d like to teach you how to receive the essence of honesty in the communication which is being blasted towards you. It is a two­ way system, you know. You communicate and you receive communication. What happens is, what you communicate and what is being communicated to you, between the two, your computer in your sub-conscious stores the memory and works out your patterns. Then that becomes the life style. You have to understand that neither your ego works nor you work. It’s all from that mechanism. The mechanism has no value. The process of passage is not designated and designed and covered by you! It is covered by two processes: Your communication and how you receive the communication. Whatever that subconscious process is, that is what you are.

Our next effort will be to talk about your communication, to talk to your subconscious and try to style out the patterns. The art of communication is: whenever you open your mouth, remember you are ejecting your honest self. A relationship is not based on communication. A relationship is based on how honestly you are being trusted. There is no such thing as a relationship which has no foundation. A dishonest foundation has no relationship. If you want your life, you have to have a foundation of communication, and it has to be solid, honest and trustworthy.

You can love the whole world, but you can only trust a few people. The few you trust become the lead in your life. When the few you trust hurt you, you are hurt so bad – your money, your bank credit, your wife, your children, all get hurt.

The technology to avoid that and to get through that is the science and the knowledge we are pursuing. It is from the ancients and it is called Naad Yoga: the science and art of communication. There are words, or there are naads, and these are all sounds which you have chanted. Through these naads, the chemistry of the communication serum is changed.

Nobody outside has injected you with anything. You have injected it within yourself and the process will make the change. That is how it is done. I believe no change is possible or worthwhile if it does not change the foundation. What matters to you is what matters to you. Patchwork will never ever give you the satisfaction of you. The best effort is not to do the patchwork. The achievement is to hit right at the base, and build it all the way up.

There are three ranges of speaking the same thing. Let’s say the purpose is to ask for a glass of water. “Could you please get me a glass of water?” That’s called medium-soft. “Get me a glass of water!” is called harsh, and “Could you, my dear, be so kind as to please get me a glass of water?” is soft. When you speak soft you are exalted. When you speak medium, you are acknowledged. When you speak harsh, you are hitting yourself. Anyone other than your spiritual teacher is not publicly, morally authorized to raise his voice. Because we are only entitled to shout and yell and scream when we have to project and penetrate the aura. It’s one of the most animal jobs a spiritual teacher has to do. Because when we have to break your arc and ego and penetrate, then we have to play this badminton match, this tennis game, whatever you want to call it. You serve the ball really sharp, and serve back, and you hit and return. It is called wrestling. It’s not called communication. In battle, the communication is not communication at all.

Good times and bad times are just times.

The idea is that the person should be invincible. That is what I believe. Good times and bad times are just times. Good times are good times and bad times are bad times, but both are times. You should remain you. I believe good times can destroy you and bad times can destroy you, so destruction is both times.

If you think good times will not destroy you, forget it! And if you think bad times will not destroy you, you are also mistaken. Neither good times can save you. The rich are more sick than the poor. If richness would have bought God, everyone would have bought Him in pounds! If success would have brought you respect, then every successful man should be respected. Actually, successful men are hated the most.

Words are the power of God. You can play with words. But what you can gain through words is the entire world. What Guru Nanak did, what Jesus did, what Abraham did, what Moses did, what Rama did, what Krishna did, is the game of words. If Krishna would not have had the Gita to his credit, who is going to worship a man who has eighteen thousand wives? If Rama had not had the Maryada Prashotmi to his credit, who would have worshipped the man who made his pregnant wife run away from the house?

So, if you think all your life you have to have a measurement to always be right, that’s not true. Good times and bad times, and bad times and good times will continue. The question is, who you are. If you are who you are, and you come out to be who you are, you have done it.

Beloved God bless us, besiege us with Thy Love, nurse us with Thy Light, and give us the chance to experience the most beautiful word of Yours. When the end comes, may Thy praise be on the tip of our tongue and may we leave for our final home in absolute grace, divinity, and dignity. May we all be blessed by Thy company alone.

Copyright The Teachings of Yogi Bhajan.