Chapter 10 from the book, Success and the Spirit , An Aquarian Path to Abundance with Siri Singh Sahib Yogi Bhajan lecture excerpts from 9/10/95 and 1/17/2000. This Chapter is also connected to the Prosperity Meditation, Our Pattern, Personality and Projection, taught by Siri Singh Sahib Yogi Bhajan on 9/10/95.

Chapter Ten – Understand Your Psyche

As we grow older, we feel more fatigue. We do not admit it, but we all mentally become insensitive. Instead of living on our normal intuition, we start living by our ego. Psychologically and biologically, the ego is meant to sustain our identity. But ego is not the purpose of our life. There are two types of people: those who live odd and indifferently and those who live even and happily. There is a human need to reflect your identity. You will reflect your identity so that you can affect the identity. That’s how we mutually talk to each other. We are social. Sometimes in that reflection, our psyches get entangled and we are deeply in love. When we cannot follow the rhythm of our own psyche, we deflect ourselves and we lose the relationship. You do fashion. You look in the mirror and try to look pretty. You may end up looking ugly, but—according to your ego—you have to look pretty. According to your spirit you may be very ugly. You talk too much because you want to convince people you are good. Well, if you are good, you are good. Why do you have to talk about it? What’s the reason that you want to convince other people and gain their friendship? Why do you want friends? Because you are alone? Because you are not sure that this whole universe is in friendship with you? If you tune into the inter-related psyche of the universe, you don’t need relatives, you don’t need friends, you don’t need to ask for anything. If you don’t believe this statement, look at the children. They get everything. They can make a mess out of you if they want. They start crying in the middle of something and they can disturb the entire audience, and you have nothing against them. Yet, if you just make one wrong move as an adult, any person will tell you to shut up. Do you understand, as we grow in life, how much impact we lose? For children, food is free, bathing is free, jogging and walking are free, the mother is a nurse, and the father is a guardian. Where are those facilities now? You get up in the morning, go to work, come back in the evening, exercise. You’re afraid to grow old, afraid to grow lonely. You’re trying to correct your relationships. The child is there and everybody relates to the child—not to the relatives or the friends or the parents. Everybody relates to the child. And you? Nobody relates to you. So it is called “psychosomatic inter-jamming of the psyche.” In simple English, in psychology, it is called “social sickness.” All of you are fatigued by social sickness. The pressure of society takes a very heavy toll. Ultimately, that toll slows you down with a powerful insensitivity. You try to take shelter under religion, social groups, social ideas, and other good charitable work. When you are young, you take drugs, drink, dance, eat and party. Recently, somebody was in a lot of trouble. The person asked me for help. I understood his psychology, psychiatry and medical background and I said, “I can’t help you. You have gone too far.” He said, “No, honest to God, I want to be helped. I don’t want to live like this. I feel I give people a lot of pain. I am very antisocial. I am very reserved and I doubt everything in life. I am miserable. Everybody is miserable. I don’t want this life.” I said, “Look, son, if you doubt yourself, you will fall into the pit of doubts and you will never make sense. If you act and react, you go forward and go backwards—it’s not very healthy, either. If you answer the call of dharma, and if you have no heart in it, you won’t make any sense.” “What should I do?” “Do what is required. You need higher energy. You need your higher psyche. You should purify you so you can enjoy life.” “What should I do?” “Give me my fee.” He said, “I will give you anything you want.” I said, “Not that way. Lay it out. Put some money here. Let me see how much you want to pay for this counsel.” “Fifty dollars?” “No, a little more.” “Seventy-five? A hundred? A hundred and eight?” I said, “You are very chronically stupid. You want to get wisdom for a hundred and eight bucks? See? You have started wrong.” “What should I have done?” “You should have said, ‘In God’s name, in Guru’s name, give me your advice.’ Then, there would have been no choice. I wanted to test how you measure things in life. You measure things in money. Correct your manners. But you can’t correct them. It is in you. Like a cavity is in a tooth. Like pain is in the nerve. You can’t help it.” Chapter Ten: Understand Your Psyche 87 “What should I do?” I said, “For thirty-one minutes a day, do the one-minute breath meditation.” This is a story of a man who is grateful today, who is successful today, who has become compassionate. He has realized himself. Why? It’s so simple. You live the by breath. You die by the breath. If you meditate on your breath, the Pavan Guru, the knowledge of the pranic vidya of creation and creativity and all incarnations, will dawn on you. Some may take a little time. Some may take a long time. But the path is the same. The procedure is the same. You will start winning yourself. You will start valuing your breath. You will start valuing your environments. You will start valuing your projections and one day you will be surprised. Everyone, in turn, will value you. If you watch the development of a human from an impersonal camera, you will find him very afraid and scared. He is an extremely lonely person. Everything that he does on the surface is to get rid of that fear, that loneliness. People can’t even sleep. You have dreams. Dreams. Once, just for fun, I started looking at somebody’s palm. Twenty people wanted to get their palms read. Isn’t it amazing? You all want to know your tomorrow, but you don’t care to know your today. We call ourselves civilized human beings with churches, synagogues, temples, religious teachers, yoga, swamis, preachers, psychologists, sociological workers and counselors with tons of status. Yet, you are all mentally alone. Fifteen thousand books a year get published—fiction, nonfiction, drama, biographies, tons of magazines, libraries, radio, television—but you are unfortunate and still alone. You have never been taught how to turn this loneliness into power. You don’t have a practice. Therefore, everyday you become harsher and harsher and harder and harder. You have never been taught to become you. You have been taught to become “somebody.” All these years we have been taught wrong because we have never been taught to be peaceful. We have never been taught how to achieve peace of mind when everything is upside down. Our existence is not a peaceful, tranquil existence. Therefore life has one simple challenge: act—don’t react. Calm yourself and claim yourself. When you hold up a torch, it takes away the darkness for a long distance. When you reflect, your psyche takes away indifference. Once in a court there were two attorneys giving their arguments. One said, “The guy is innocent.” The other said “No. He is a criminal.” They argued to the jury. They argued to the judge. They argued to the audience. The jury said in its decision, “Though there is a lot of evidence to prove the man guilty, we say he is innocent.” It created a big uproar. So later on, when they could get a chance, they asked the jurors, “How did you come to this decision? When there is over sixty percent evidence against him, how can you say the guy is innocent?” One of the jurors said, “You want to know how? Throughout the proceedings, he was a very calm, quiet and most peaceful person. Isn’t that his nature?” They said, “Yes but you know this … The juror said, “What do you mean ‘this …’? Prove that in his life he is violent. In our hearts, we have searched through the evidence. The evidence that comes from the government is government evidence, but all the civil evidence that came on his side said only one thing: he is a gentleman. He is a peaceful man. He is a very sweet man. And how he has been involved in this, we can’t say.” You do not know that when you speak for yourself or when somebody speaks for you, there is somebody else who will also speak for you, and that is your character and projection. That is your self. Your self is the strongest thing you have. We have a very powerful magnetic psyche. We can just attract things. We can get things. But do we have that training? No. We sweat, hassle and go after things. Is that living? Hustlers? Poachers? Going after things? Beggars? Seeking protection from the powerful to the weak? Your own dog will not do it. He has a master and the rest of the world has nothing to do with that dog. You have a God. And you are beggars? Hustlers? Requesting everything. Everything is “Please, can I, may I, should I?” Would you love me? Would you like me? What kind of life is this? Is it life? When I first came to Canada from India, the circumstances became totally desperate. All that was there, was taken away—whooosh. That’s what happened to me. I came with a perfect macho image. And it happened. Whooosh. Everything was gone. I said to myself, “There is a purpose. There is a mutual purpose to this challenge. There is a mutual purpose for this pain.” It was so insane. I didn’t have a coat or a sweater. The temperature was minus forty-five degrees outside. The wind was blowing at sixty miles an hour and was about three feet of snow on the ground. Every day it was snowing. It tended my heart. I saw somebody on Church Street lying down on a bench. He started talking to me. And he got up and said, “Hey holy man.” I said, “How do you know I am holy?” “Nobody can walk in this winter other than me and you.” “What are you doing here?” “Drinking. I am in ecstasy. I am warm. You are in ecstasy. You are warm. You are warm hearted.” “How do you know all this?” “You mean anyone born of a woman can stand here and talk to me in this cold? And you have only one cotton shirt on you?” “Well it’s an obligation. You got up and you wanted to talk to me. So I am talking to you.” He said, “Do me a favor. I want real liquor. Real.” “Okay I will send it to you.” “I’ll wait.” I came to the house of yoga and I said to one student, “There is a drunkard bum, he wants real liquor. Can you oblige him?” The student said, “Thank you sir. I’ll just go. So he went. The student brought a bottle of something and he went there. But there was nobody. He had gone. He was not there. I saw the student coming back and I said, “What happened? The bottle is in your hand. You didn’t give it to him?” He said, “There is nobody there. He is gone.” “Okay. Then you take it to your home. Somebody will drink it who believes in drinking. You Canadians all drink like fish.” “We are vegetarian. We don’t drink.” “Give it to somebody.” I came back from the yoga house and there was a shopkeeper, a general shopkeeper. I will never forget his grace and his greatness. He called me and took me into the shop and I said, “How come you are so kind to me?” He said, “This is a bundle that I have tied up. I know you won’t take it for free, so give me two dollars.” I said, “What is this bundle? I never asked you for anything.” “No. You curse me everyday.” “Man, I don’t curse you. What do I curse you for?” “I have this shop on one block. I sell all kind of clothes and you walk almost naked through the street in the freezing snow.” “Well, everything of mine was lost.” “No. I am not giving it to you. Give me two dollars.” I gave him two dollars and I started checking the bundle. There was one small Minolta camera, a spy camera. I said, “How did you know about this?” He said, “Weren’t you working in intelligence? I just put it in if you want to have some photos.” I couldn’t believe it. Well, I took that coat and put it on me and I brought those warm clothes home. I tried my best not to weep for a couple of hours but the tears started flowing from my eyes like rain. For the first time as a human I understood—God takes care of things. He understands people. All of a sudden, it came to me,

Sail pat’har meh jant upaa-ay taa kaa rijak aagai kar dhari-aa.
Mayray maadhau jee sat sangat milay so tariaa.

God provides the provision to even those creatures that He has created in the stone.
The livelihood for what He has created in the stones He has already placed there.
My great lord, in the congregation one goes across all difficulties.

— Guru Arjan, Rehiraas Sahib, as translated by Yogi Bhajan

What do we have here? We have a sense of congregation, a sense of consolidation, a sense of sharing. What is this lecture? It is just a cause. This is our psyche, the flow of our identity for each other, for our understanding. It’s our meditation when we get ready and come here to sit, sing for a while, listen to a talk, try to ponder over things. But while we do that, we exchange the psyche. That enrichment happens. Those thirty trillion cells and their most booming power intermixes and creates a sense of purity, of piety. Sat sangat milay so tariaa: The purpose of this congregation is so that we can elevate ourselves. I travel everywhere. I don’t have to search like lord Buddha all my life to find out why we are suffering. We are suffering because we do not trust ourselves. It’s that simple. I see this common disease, this sickness: there is no self trust. We look in the mirror, and we want to look good. Or we take notes, and then make speeches. We want to convince each other. Look at how emotional we are. We shake hands and say, “Come on. Cheer up. How are you?” What’s the need of this? Don’t we know each other? Love each other? There is no reason for me to tell you I love you and there is no reason for you to tell me you love me. But there is a common reason—the only reason that we coexist at this time and space. And it’s a gift. Why drift from that gift? Why do you care that somebody is fat, small, or skinny? Why do dimensions bother you? Why does intelligence bother you? Are you not intelligent enough to understand that this is the time we are together? It’s very important. And it’s very important that, at this time, you are just you. Whether you are sick, unhealthy, hungry, tired—you are you. Just that. That’s very important. When you are not you, understand how miserable that situation is. Within a relationship, there are two individual identities. Male and a female, male and a male, female and female. Child and parents, parents and child. Whatever you want to identify it as. But the net result is that it has to be decided on values. If a woman wants what she wants and it is without values, she is actually going to self-destruct. If a male wants what he wants and it has no positive values, then it is not going to work it out. If commotions can make emotions, and if our feelings are all healing, we would be living in the heavens. Let’s break this deadly, monotonous, low, social fear and open up this congested brain. We should work the third neurological plate, which sets our pattern, our personality and our projection. There is a part in our brain called the third neurological plate cycle. It is in the hemispheres of the brain and it sets the pattern of our personality. What I am telling you about today, they will find out medically in a hundred years. Let them research it. There is a little stem of the brain. It has three rings that set your temperament, your metabolism and your pattern. Additionally, the effectiveness of your personality is in how you speak. When you get up in the morning and open your eyes to be yourself, that first minute sets the whole frequency of the day. If one day, you get up and feel indifferent to yourself for that first minute, then during the whole day, everything will be indifferent to you. There is nothing wrong within you, but the frequency of your psyche and the frequency of the psyche of the day will not connect.

There are two parts of your body that are undeveloped: the upper palate in the mouth and the frontal lobe. The upper palate has eighty-four meridian points. The thalamus and the hypothalamus are on top of it. That controls your personality in terms of your automatic habits. And that can be organized, developed and set. The frontal lobe is where your personality is manufactured every day for day-to-day work. The total personality comes out of it. It is where your systematic work or your expertise is expressed. It’s through the development of the frontal lobe that a doctor becomes a specialist, an engineer becomes a professor and a human becomes a saint. You don’t become a saint by being born in the house of a saint. You don’t become a doctor by being born in a house of a doctor. You have to learn, then become learned, experienced and candid. You have to show the steadfastness of your expertise. Then people will trust you. Then you don’t need fantasy, and you don’t need to hassle. Things will come to you wherever you are. There are two ways of living: one way is to go after things, the other is to sit and be and let it come to you. You can choose which way you want to live. Every person has the right of progression and every progressive self has to have a definite discipline so that he or she can create a frequency and a projection. To us that is God. If we are energetic, vibrant, unafraid, relaxed and happy, that is God. The opposite of that is the devil. But we know how to create God, so why talk of the devil? Because the power is inside us. We have to work with our own neurological system. Meditation is for nothing else but to set up the neurological balance. It’s very incorrectly taught in the west. They think meditation means something. It’s nothing. It’s simply to set up the glandular and neurological balance. The time has come. Become your own master. Stop chasing masters. Become your own reality. Stop chasing religion. Become your own God. Stop chasing God. Be you. In the beginning, in the middle, in the end, it is you and you alone. Live well in your inner peace, in your inner strength and when you feel weak, call on your soul, your friend. It costs much less than a telephone call. On average, you breathe fifteen times a minute. Suppose you have to live one hundred years. If you breathe one breath a minute, you can live fifteen hundred years. Because life is measured by the breath, not by the years or the calendars. If you sit down and breathe one breath a minute, in exactly thirty seconds, you will find you are talking to yourself. In three minutes you can get over any kind of mood that a psychiatrist cannot get you out of for centuries. Why are you suffering?

This is how I describe it scientifically. The macro- and microwave continuity of the psyche of projection will always interfere with the totality of the whole universe. Where the individual is bombarded with the mega million thoughts and variations of other people, and those variations create brain earthquakes. But if a person is a practitioner of certain scientific knowledge in which he or she can balance him or herself, then the balanced situation can take all those attacks and normalize them to remain as an individual. Under those circumstances you will be under your personal self. You will be your own personal managers and you will be personally happy persons, because then you will know the self. There is a story about a young man who was walking who saw a lion coming. The lion started running after him. There was an old man who said, “Oh young man, don’t run. Go up the tree.” The man immediately grabbed the tree, went up and sat there. The lion tried to get him, but eventually got tired and went away. The young man came down and said to the old man, “I want to thank you.” The old man said, “Learn in the future my son. When calamity hits you, elevate yourself.” He said, “You are a young, inexperienced guy. You wanted to run away from the lion. The lion would have gotten you. But when you elevated yourself, he had no way to catch you.” In every thought in our life, we must elevate. If we know meditation, if we know concentration, if we know anything in our life, we should learn one thing: elevate. You know, there are religions like Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and all that kind of thing. They are only one word: Jehovah, Hallelujah, Rama and Sata Nama. If you just understand the first syllable, every religion has one word. That’s it. And then they make a big philosophy out of it. Actually it is one word. “God.” If you meet a Jew, he will say Jehovah. If you meet a Christian, he will say hallelujah. If you meet a Hindu, he is going to say Rama. If you meet a Muslim, he is going to say La-Illah and if you meet a Sikh, he is going to say Sata Nama. Actually it is one word. They don’t have more than one word. The rest is to collect money. I used to go to all the countries and meet all the religious leaders because I am the head of a religion, myself, so it was very possible. They would come to have a cup of tea, and for one year, I would ask everybody this same question: “Why are we different?” And the answer that came was, “Turf.” I couldn’t understand what “turf” meant. It means the collection basket, the money, the political influence, the congregation. That’s all. Everybody is afraid that I will steal their students. I have more students than I can handle. They are already a headache. God, these people should take some of my students—they are not easy kids. But these religious people are always afraid. They judge a spiritual person by how many students he has. How many ashrams he has. How much political influence he has. They don’t judge him by how content, contained and wise he is. How peaceful, neutral and impersonal he is. And how strong he is to crack open your head and put a new brain in it. Because you have never met a teacher. There is one description about what happens when you meet your teacher. The description is from Ramanand Paramahansa. He said, “Before I met my teacher, I was very wise, very clean, very clear, well respected and well acknowledged. The moment I met my teacher, I became nothing. It was a very bad omen. But later on I realized, I had become wealthy.” In the West, you have not met teachers because teachers come here to depend on you and you are catered to—because you are all window-shoppers. One day, you will become real students and you shall become real masters. If a seed does not go into the dust, and if it does not split, it never sprouts. It can never become a tree again and it cannot give more seeds. The time has come. You have to be you. Neither very haughty nor second-hand fashion. Be a beautiful, bountiful and blissful human. Nobody can create you. God created you in His own image. Don’t create your own images. There is just one image of you—as you being the being of God. It’s very human and that is what the Age of Aquarius is all about. It will be an age of humans and peace, love and service and we shall all be relatives. The small wars and fights will go. Humanity will prevail again. As the Berlin wall fell, other walls will fall. We will all be united under one God. One Spirit. One Self. If you can keep on practicing what you have learned, it will keep you healthy, happy and holy. You have nine holes. Watch what comes in and goes out of those holes. That will make you holy. You have nine holes and two hands and two legs. That’s called thirteen. You are born with thirteen, you will live with thirteen, and you will die with thirteen. Whosoever controls all thirteen will live forever in peace and prosperity. I have a dream that one day you will grow and carry this dharma to serve humanity. It will be very easy on you if you leave behind your shortcomings, forget about your miseries and just serve and uplift others in the name of the Lord. Whatever religion you were or you are or you will be, uplift people and reach out.