SIGNPOSTS ON THE PATH OF UNFOLDMENT
When a person starts seeking signs of his progress, his progress will stop. The very expectation of seeking signposts will prevent progress because you become so intent on how fast you are going that you slow yourself down.
How can you judge whether you are more loving and compassionate? How is anyone able to judge that? You might be in a certain mood today and feel so loving to everything around you. What is the permanency of it? It could be just a mood-making thing. Say you win the football pools tomorrow, and momentarily, you will feel loving to everyone because the world has been so kind to you, and then you want to be kind. How long is that going to last? How can we judge ourselves?
It is not a paradox. It is the extension of one idea to another. You might do a compassionate act today, and the next moment, the next day, or the next week, you will do something totally uncompassionate. This is what we find in our lives.
When the factors of kindness, love, and compassion arise, we must look at their motivations. Is it a mood? You are in a mood this evening and very loving to your wife, and tomorrow evening, you will come home and start a quarrel. What is the use of that? Was it love in the first place? You might have just had a lovely day at the office, and in that joy, that so-called joy, you come home and express it. You allow it to permeate. Nevertheless, this is very encouraging. It shows a person’s capacity.
There could be people, and I have met thousands of them, who will perform an act of extreme kindness and go out of their way, and yet the next day, they will do things that would be harmful or hurtful to people.
On the see-saw of life, we cannot judge because all those things that stem from the mind level are forever fluctuating, going up and down and up and down.
It is only when we go beyond these polarities and reach the centre within ourselves, the centre of the see-saw, that we will not feel elated or deflated by whatever circumstances.
You feel compassionate and loving without even trying to feel love and compassion. It becomes second nature to you. Every action, even a minor action, will contain those elements. You will not recognise it when you become kind, loving, and compassionate. Then you will not say “I am loving” or “I am compassionate” or “I am kind”. You cannot say it because you will not recognise it. It is an area which goes beyond the mind.
So as soon as you feel in a mood one day that “I am so loving and so kind, I did so many good things today,” you are analysing it. As soon as you analyse, it is on the mind level, and the mind is always turbulent, so that is no signpost. There can never be any signposts. Yet, in life, we must consciously take good actions.
Even if it starts with a mood, that is okay, but do not regard it as a signpost because one action breathes another action. A good action breathes greater goodness, but remember that we have been speaking about a patterned mind, and we have to unpattern it.
ACTIONS DONE CONSCIOUSLY WILL STRENGTHEN
Actions done consciously will strengthen themselves and repeat themselves, and by constant repetition of good actions, we start to sound very spontaneous. And when we reach that height of spontaneous good action, we will not even think I have done a good action.
One must never worry about signposts – that how far have I travelled now signpost. That is not your business. That is the business of God to see how far or how close His children have come to Him. You know, it is no use for a man to take over the work of Divinity.
It is no use because you can only do that when you have become one with Divinity and not before. Until then, all the things we do in life, all the moral and ethical precepts that we adhere to and practice, are nothing but preparations to reach that neutrality beyond all the laws of opposites.
For in that area, there is no kindness or unkindness. There is no love and no hate. It is beyond it all, but for practical purposes, living in this relative world, we must consciously perform actions conducive to our evolution without looking for signposts. As soon as you start looking for signposts, you are tying yourself further into karma because the very act of looking for signposts is looking for the reward. How far have I reached after doing all this?
WORK FOR THE SAKE OF WORK
The Scriptures would tell you, work for the sake of work. The rewards will come by themselves. The rewards come more quickly, act right, and the rewards will come. There will be subtle transformations in your life; if you are ready for them, they will arrive quickly.
If you have a big bundle of karma behind you, the transformations are still there, but it will take longer to lessen the weight because you have come with so much. And if you have come with little, it would be quickly noticeable, but you do not dwell on it.
When joys and happiness come, you allow them to come. When sorrows come, you will enable them to come. What is the difference in any case? You do what you like. There is only one certainty in life: death, discarding this body. That is the only certainty you have in life. There is no other certainty from the mind level.
But we want to reach the other certainty of immortality that man within himself, his Spiritual Self, is forever immortal, where there is no life, no death, only life. As we experience life today, we are not experiencing it in its pure form. That is why we think of happiness and miseries and feel more miseries than happiness.
Because we do not live life as it should be in its pure form, we have to go through these miseries we have created ourselves. Nobody has brought these miseries to us. We have made the conditions. It is neither a contradiction nor a paradox that one must not look for signposts but must be loving and lovable simultaneously. It is not a paradox.
Be loving and lovable, and forget the signposts. If you travel to London from here, you are going to reach London if you are on the right path. As you travel to London, it makes no sense whatsoever to watch the signposts say 100 miles, 70 miles, 60 miles, or 10 miles—what is it going to help you? It does not help. It will just make you think, “Oh, well, I am just ten miles away from home.”
“I have been away from home for a week, and I left the house in a mess, and now this has to be done, and that has to be done, and so much work to be done.” You are living into the future, I always say to a person; if the dishes have to be washed, they have washed the dishes ten times in their minds before they get down to it. Signposts do have the same effect on you.
DO NOT LOOK FOR SIGNPOSTS
If one looks for spiritual signposts and says, “Oh, I have only got one more mile to go,” you will be stopped immediately. All four wheels will have punctures simultaneously, and you cannot move because you are building up your ego there. “Ah, I have progressed so fast and have just a mile to go, boy.” You are building up an ego barrier, and I have done this and reached here. If someone comes to me and says, “I am a very spiritual person,” I say, “Thank you very much, go next door.”
Do not look for signposts but live splendidly, beautifully and joyfully. In reality, everything is joy. We cover it up with our thoughts and all the workings of our mind and samskaras and karmas.
Our path of unfoldment is to unfold those veils, and once those veils are removed, the truth, the immortal Self within us, will shine out forever. Everyone is eternal and permeated by that one Spirit, the one Spirit that has no second.
One ocean only and little bubbles thinking we are so permanent; within a second or two, the bubble bursts and becomes the ocean again. The wave subsides, and it is still the ocean.
We realise that there is only one ocean, and that is the realisation one has to come to. One reaches that not by watching signposts. One reaches that automatically because it is not a thought process. It is an experiential process. That is how it goes.
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang UK 1980 – 18
