Desires or Vasanas Are Conditions

Starting out this... can you say more about even if nothing special happens, why just saying the name, just inquiring, that in itself is not just a framing actually?

Yeah. Yeah. I can be a bit dramatic about that. But let's start with a simpler... Okay. You see, we notice that every moment, or at least almost every moment, the mind has something to offer us. You see, it is giving us a position for us to hold: likes, dislikes, desire, aversion—all of these things constantly. You see, so the more we fill up ourselves with these vasanas, these are the vasanas, these are the conditions. Because when a thought is believed in, when a thought is believed in, that's when it becomes a condition.

You see, I want to live on the 22nd floor. Before that thought came, it was nothing. You see, and if you just let it go, it's still nothing. But once it's believed in, then it's become a vasana for us. Somebody comes to you with an offer: 'There's a flat on the 22nd floor.' It's like, 'I wanted a flat on the...' It was completely irrelevant to us before that thought came. You see, and then it becomes the condition that we have. Or even worse, like 'I don't want.' So if I'm living on the eighth floor and a condition becomes 'I don't want to live on the eighth floor,' you see, then we are just looking for ways to exit the eighth floor.

So these non-existent things, 'vaporware' as I've been calling it, then when it comes and it's offered to us, and then with the power of our belief—we often... I've called belief the tongs. We take the tongs of belief and we pull this thought into our Antahkarana, into our soul, and it becomes part of our makeup: 'This is who I am, this is what I like, this is what I don't.' Okay, now instead of that, the mind is trying to offer you various things but you are in Ram. So the simplest way to look at it is that you cannot build new conditioning, new vasanas, when you're taking the name of God attentively, lovingly. Throughout that time, then you're safe from that.

The same thing comes with the inquiry. So if you say, 'I don't want the eighth floor,' and say, 'Who is this I who doesn't want the eighth floor?' then it's just discarded as rubbish, right? Because the 'I' itself is not found. What eighth floor are we talking about? So both these ways are given to us so that we don't fall into creating new conditioning. And when we are not creating new conditioning, what happens? The cleanup happens. The cleanup happens. All the false is ejected out.