The Universe Isn't Sending You Signs, You Are Just Creating Them

Imagine you are standing at a crossroad. Okay? You have two roads in front of you. One road is familiar. The other road is uncertain. You do not know which one to take and things like that. And then something strange happens. A bird flies across the road. You immediately stop. And then you think, is this a sign from God? Right? Then you notice that 11:11 on your phone has appeared. Then you say, "Oh, it is another sign from God." Then you hear a song whose lyrics seem strangely connected to your situation. Then you say, "Okay, for sure the universe is trying to tell me something." right? But then comes the problem. What exactly is the universe trying to tell you? You know how pathetic it is to just think that the universe is trying to send you a sign or a signal or a message. You know how idiotic that is? That is like the Pacific Ocean saying the Indian Ocean is trying to send me a signal. It is not. You have to be different from the universe in order to receive a message. You cannot receive a message if you are one. As I said, you know, the Pacific Ocean cannot receive a message from the Indian Ocean or the Atlantic Ocean and so on and so on. The moment you say, "I received a sign from the universe," it clearly shows that you have fallen into the pathetic pit of your own interpretation.

Now let us decode this thing called the universe sending us a message. So I gave the example that you are at a crossroad, and a bird happened, and you got a number on your phone. Now what is the universe trying to tell you? Is it trying to tell you go left, go right, wait, leave, stay, call that person, forget that person, start a business, do not start? What is it trying to actually tell you? You know, the majority of the time, some random incident will happen, and we choose what we want to choose, and then we tell ourselves the universe sent a message, right? The universe has apparently sent a message to all of us. We all think that, unfortunately, it forgot to include the instructions. And this arises a rather uncomfortable question. If the universe sends us a sign, why are the signs always ambiguous? Because the universe is not actually sending messages. We are sending messages to ourselves. That is the truth. And that is where things become interesting. We usually imagine a sign as something coming from outsiders. All right? A sign is supposed to be information. If I see a traffic light, I understand what it means. If I see a red light, everybody knows stop, right? There is very little philosophy required there. The traffic light does not say, "Perhaps you should consider the possibility that stopping might be an interesting option depending upon your personal journey." It does not say that. It simply says stop.

Imagine if traffic lights behaved like our supposed universal signs. You arrive at a junction, the light becomes purple. You ask, "What does purple mean?" The light says nothing. You drive forward, you crash. Then someone tells you, "See, the universe sent a purple signal. You should have stopped." Right? That is what people say. That is a strange world of signs. A coincidence happens. We interpret it. Then we call our interpretation a message. How pathetic we all have become. The universe has stars exploding, galaxies swallowing each other. There is a black hole which is constantly eating and sucking things up, and then there are animals which are minding their own things. Trees mind their own business, but human beings want to mind everybody's business. We interpret what has happened, and we say the universe is sending a message. The universe is not sending you a message. You have to be different from the universe to send a message. If, let us say, my beloved wants to communicate with me, I have to be different from her in order to know what she is saying. If I and her are one, her thought process becomes mine. There is no communication at all. An ocean cannot communicate with another ocean because there is only one ocean. Similarly, there is only one awareness, one universe, and there is only one thing. The moment you say the universe is trying to communicate with me, you have fooled yourself. You have interpreted it. You have interpreted a tree falling, taking that as a message that God is telling me not to cross that area. That is not true.

You know, this is what happened with the ancient Greeks and many people in those times. A tree used to fall on some person, and then people used to say God is unhappy with the person. God is trying to punish him. That is not true. When people used to fall sick, people believed that gods were punishing those people. No, they fell sick because they were not looking after their body. That has got nothing to do with God. Are you seeing how idiots we all are becoming constantly? You see, we are not questioning. We are not questioning what is happening. We just simply believe and assume, "Okay, tree fell. God is trying to tell me this." Who told you that? Question things within yourself. Then you will understand that you are just the awareness, and you are not this world. You are not this body and mind. You are not the sign from the universe. You are not galaxy. You are not stars. You are not this and all this pathetic blah blah blah stuff. You will figure out that you are this unblemished awareness on which the world itself exists, not all those steps. It is from you that the entire creation came into existence.

Now, "you" does not mean body and mind. "You" does not mean your philosophies, your gurus, your organizations, your holy textbooks and things like that. "You" means that unblemished awareness which is only aware but does not observe or know anything. The other day, one person was arguing with me, telling me that the knower and the observer are the same as awareness. I was telling him that is not true, because knowing has a certain kind of intelligence in it. When you look at a tree, and another tree, you see a squirrel jumping from one tree to another tree. The knower or the observer knows that there is a tree, and a squirrel jumping from one tree to another tree. But whereas awareness does not know the tree and the squirrel. It just is aware of the presence of the tree and the squirrel. That is the difference between observer, knower, seer, all this blah blah blah stuff and awareness. Awareness does nothing, but without it nothing can be done. It is like the movie screen. The screen does nothing, but without the screen, the movie cannot be played. How much ever great a movie you might be, you might be even Christopher Nolan, your movie cannot be played without the screen. Right?

So then we call our interpretation a message from the universe. But there is a difference between something happening and something communicating. A leaf falls from the tree. That is an event. It becomes a sign only after the mind gives it meaning. Are you seeing what I am seeing? And here is the first crack in the very pathetic idea that the universe is sending messages. If the universe wanted to communicate a specific message to us, it would need some reliable language. Because communication requires more than an event, it requires meaning that can be decoded consistently. Suppose I want to tell you take the left road. I could say it. I could write it. I could point left, right? I could put a giant arrow on the road saying turn left. But imagine I simply sneeze, and you look at me and say, "Was that the universe trying to tell me to go left?" That is what we all do with events and messages. The tree falls, we say, "God is telling me not to marry her." The leaf falls on our shoulder, and we are like, "God is trying to tell me to go back to my ex." This is our interpretation, dude. This is not the universe trying to communicate.

If the universe were trying to communicate, which it does not happen, if it really communicated, its communication would be clear. Communication is not an event but a language. We all must get that right in our head, actually. You have to be different from the universe to get the message. You are not different from the universe. You are the awareness. Awareness cannot send messages to itself. The ocean cannot send messages to the Pacific Ocean or the Atlantic Ocean or the Indian Ocean because there is only one ocean. Similarly, the one who says, "I got a sign," or "I need to get a sign," is this pathetic creation that we have all built together as society, that has got nothing to do with you. You are the unblemished awareness on which the universe, signs, all those things that you name, exist. This can be understood not by listening to me, not by mailing me, not by meeting me, not by doing social service, not by sitting in meditation for so many hours and fooling yourself. This can be understood only when you turn your mind and see things for yourself. Then you will come to an understanding that you have always been the awareness. You have always been the unblemished awareness from day one. It is such a simple thing. But we do not want to see it because we believe. We do not want to see it because we follow. We do not want to see it because we have been told that you need a method, you need this, you need books, you need teachers, you need gurus, you need organization, you need that, blah blah blah.

Let me tell you something. If you are following a method, which many people are doing, hold on to your method like oxygen. It is your sincerity that takes you to the truth, not the method. Whichever method you are following, hold on to it like oxygen. Then you will move forward. If you are holding on to it like a part-time job, nothing will happen. If you are not following a method, it is something that I did. I used to sit and simply relax within myself, not hold on to any thought or any emotion. Of course, initially you will sleep. Initially you will daydream, which I also did. I used to close my eyes and cry over my first lover because she left me. "Why do all this thing happen only for me?" and all those stuff. But it is okay. Keep doing it. That is how the thing is. One fellow was telling me, "Not following a method is also a method." I was telling him, you know, that is a stupid thing. Relaxation is absence of all method. Sleep is absence of effort. If you are putting effort to sleep, that is precisely when you will not sleep. Similarly, when you are putting effort, it is like noise trying to search for silence. The more noise tries, the more noise it makes. Turn your mind and figure things out for yourself. That is the best, surest, and fastest way.