Letter 16:
The wish-fulfilling jewel
3/07/07
Everyone,
Hello! How are you? Let us talk about the chintamani. I began to write this five minutes after investigating the subject in deep meditation and observing the effects upon returning to the world.
Peeling away the layers of the mind
People are like lotuses. The petals are closed. Each petal is a layer of mind. A person goes into meditation. When you do this, you are peeling off the layers of the layers of the mind, opening the petals of the lotus. If even one petal blocks your vision, you cannot see what is inside the lotus. However, If you can open the last petal, you will see that inside there is a jewel, the chintamani, the wish-fulfilling jewel.
When you enter meditation, you silence the thoughts and peel away several layers of mind from the soul. The amount of mind that you can peel away depends on the depth of your realisation. If you have peeled away a certain quantity of mind, and enter a state without thoughts, you will see that there remains a void which fills up with the divine presence. Now you are more alert, more alive and more awake than usual.
Cutting the root of desires
You come out of meditation and see that you are full of bliss. You realise that you are smiling and moreover that you do not have any desires for anything because you have had a glimpse of the wish-fulfilling jewel. Your desires have been fulfilled, cut at the root, therefore they have disappeared.
How does the chintamani fulfil desires? If you want a car, meditate and see the chintamani, you will see that no car has materialised when you have come out of the meditation. It is the root of the desire that has disappeared. Someone wants a fizzy drink. Another person gives him nectar, so he drinks that. The nectar is so good that he forgets the desire for the fizzy drink. If someone now offers him one, he will not be able to believe that he used to want one. The desire has been cut at the root. That person has renounced fizzy drinks naturally from the heart.
Gold is better than silver, though silver nevertheless offers something that gold does not have. Gold does not cut the root of the desire for silver, so someone with a lot of gold could still have a desire for silver. The chintamani, on the other hand, does indeed cut the root of desires.
The essence of bliss
What is the chintamani? It is the Brahman, Absolute Bliss. It is the essence of all kinds of bliss and pleasure. Silver and gold are different manifestations of that essence mixed with the forms of silver and gold. If what gives us pleasure comes from outside, it has a form mixed with the essence. If we have an attachment to the form, we do not receive all the essence of the bliss. The chintamani, on the other hand, is inside, and it is not an object, but the subject, our true being. There is no barrier between us and the essence of bliss, our own being.
The sage that knows the chintamani does not have attachments to forms. He, and from time to time other people when they enter elevated states, sees something beautiful outside and experiences pure bliss without attachment. Instead of receiving the bliss directly from the object, the object reminds him of the chintamani that he has found intuitively, and the bliss rises up in the heart. The experience is more internal, in the heart, than external, in the senses.
May we all find the chintamani in the lotus.
Hare Krishna,
Koji