THE REAL WAR IS WITHIN THE INDIVIDUAL All the wars in the world are faked. By being fake, I mean that the wars are based upon economics. All the wars in the past, too, the basis was nothing else but economics: to create greater markets, to provide more employment when unemployment becomes rife, to try to stabilize the economy or the country’s deficit, and war balances that. Wars will always be created in this world. There have always been wars. Every so many years pass, and there is a war. But the real war I am concerned about is the war within the individual man, how to resolve the conflicts within oneself. So often, I use the analogy that it is the nature of a flower to be beautiful, which is not the only thing it does. It also enhances the beauty of the garden. So, leave the politicians and their economics alone and their greed for power. It will always go on. Even in Krishna’s time, the war of the Kurukshetra between the Kauravas and the Pandavas was contrived by greed and possession. Even during the development of Christianity, millions of people were killed. You know the story of the crusaders, the crusades, even in Islam, where they ruled and conquered with the sword to develop the organization. I have stopped calling them churches anymore. Organizations. Business systems. That is what they are. PRAYING FOR PEACE Man must be concerned more about the conflicts that rage within himself, and that is why we have our spiritual practices and the little understanding which I might be able to give you: theory and practice. We have our spiritual practices that reduce the conflict, the inner conflict, that is there. By gaining a more robust and deeper understanding, we can see things differently, reducing disputes. The greatest war that one has to confront is the war that rages within oneself. But at the same time, we also pray for the world’s peace. But our prayers become invalidated because we are not at peace in ourselves. But it is always good to pray for world peace. Many countries have a day of prayer for world peace. Send out good thoughts, good loving vibrations, and some effect will come. But if you think there will be no more wars in the world, that there will be an age of enlightenment, that is not true. That will never happen. There has never been an age of enlightenment because we are a small space in this vast continuum. THE SPIRITUAL FORCE IS SO NECESSARY As highly evolved souls pass away from this planet, not necessarily enlightened souls, but highly evolved souls for whom this planet does not become or remain conducive for their spiritual growth, they go to another world with higher beings. Other planets have more evolved beings than what we have here. In this world, at this moment, there are very few enlightened men. Very few. You can count them on the fingers of your one hand. One or two of them are active, and the others are not. You are just waiting for their bodies to fall off. That is all. But you will be surprised how much this is necessary, how much spiritual force they exert in this world to bring some sort of balance, although not total balance. The odds are too great. QUARRELING DURING THE TIMES OF CHRIST During the time of Christ, you also found all the quarrelling masses. He was the most despised man on earth. His people rejected him. The Sadducees, the Pharisees, Sanhedrins, the Romans, the works. What a tremendous spiritual Force he was. If he were not so great, his teachings would not have lasted until today. Because of his great spiritual force, he had to undergo all the suffering. Because he was an enlightened man, his evolution was too advanced for ordinary people to understand. They condemned him because he used to wine and dine with the Pharisees and the money lenders. They used to condemn him, and even his closest disciples used to be so jealous of him when he was so close to Mary Magdalene. This was discovered in some new scroll they found, and there was a series of articles in The Observer, a paper published in England They could not understand him. How could they? How can you see what is on top of a twenty-story building if you are not standing on another twenty-story building? If you are standing on the sidewalk, you will have a very slanted view and can never see what is on top. But these great men never defend themselves; they say what they want to. They will just go marching on like an elephant marching down the road, and there could be a hundred dogs barking, and he does not care. Let them bark. I go on and do my work. That was the attitude of Jesus. QUARRELING DURING THE TIMES OF KRISHNA Same thing with Krishna. He was a great statesman. Strategy, he was instrumental in creating that war of Kurukshetra between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. Of course, this could be literally or historically explained, and that could also be symbolically explained. But the truth forever remains the truth. The truth will always triumph, and how much dust gathers on the diamond, it must sometime blow off and shine in its full glory to all those that can see. They shall see. IT IS IMPORTANT TO LESSEN THE CONFLICT WITHIN OURSELVES So, the object is to find or to lessen the conflict that rages within ourselves. That is important. For these wars will always be created—all the time. There will never come a time of peace. There is a war going on, a world war going on, but a cold war that is even more dangerous than an actual war. These governments are trying to create all kinds of inventions, inventions of destruction. They want to preserve peace by fear that:
True Surrender: Surrendering by Love to the Inner Divinity, the Universal Self
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INDEPENDENCE – DEPENDENCE – INTERDEPENDENCE When you feel independent at your present stage of evolution, realise that that occurs from your mental patterns. You think that you are separated, but are you independent and of what are you independent? If you are independent, you would be self-subsisting, and you would not need any external or internal force for you to exist, and if you cannot exist, you make an exit. In relationships, you usually start with your thinking processes, making you think you are independent. But when an involvement takes place with another person, your wife, husband, your guru or whoever, that interchange creates a dependency upon the person. The mind becomes dependent because of sensory input: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and feeling. Those are the sensory inputs that create a dependency. Because without the sensory input, your mind would cease to function. The sensory inputs go to what we call the mind-stuff, or manas, which is like a television screen. These sensory inputs are like the transmitter, transmitting onto the television screen. But that is not the end. That input goes to an area which in Sanskrit we call buddhi. That is where the word Buddhism arose: buddhi, Buddhism. This area has analytical faculties. These analytical faculties weigh up the pros and cons of the sensory input, and as thinking beings with intellect, with buddhi, you have the power to discriminate. The power of discrimination and the sensory information is collected to form that ego-self. That ego-self makes you think you are independent, and it also plays a significant factor in your dependency. Dependency becomes a crutch. Dependency also is a form of escapism. Take the case of psychotics, neurotics, who are so totally dependent upon various forms of drugs that they cannot do without them. That is dependency, dependency is a weakness, and primal independence is also a weakness. Interdependency is where two people cannot do without each other. Dependency means that one person cannot do without the other. Interdependency implies that two people cannot do without each other. So, the one is dependent upon the other, and the other is dependent on that one. That is interdependency. FROM A LOWER FORM OF INDEPENDENCE TO A HIGHER FORM OF INDEPENDENCE To live everyday relative life, a significant amount of interdependency is required to preserve equanimity, equilibrium and so-called happy life of love. The man says, “I love you,” or the woman says, “I love you,” which is a misnomer, and it is a total misconception based upon interdependency. I would put it differently: “I am love, and you are me.” so interdependency disappears because interdependency requires two people. While if you recognise the authentic Self that is within you and you say, “I am love, and you are me,” that is love. You are not interdependent because you do not recognise each other separate from each other; only love is there, the man is not there, and the woman is not there. You reach the final point when only love is there, and the last point is independence. So, you start from a lower form of independence to a higher state of freedom. As I explained, the lower form of autonomy is through sensory input, etc. We could call the lower mind that does not cognise the beauty, the reality, the Brahman, the Buddha, that is within us. It does not realise that because the first independence, being so involved in their ego self, refuses to recognise the higher force within. When we come to the area of intellectualising things, discriminating things, you have a thought in mind, “Shall I go to Chicago, or Timbuktu,” and the mind will evaluate what would be beneficial for me. Who is the me that you are talking about? It is that little mind, that little conscious mind. That is the me that you are interested in while living this life. I am also interested in me, but which me? The higher me that encompasses the entire universe. That is the me. So, Timbuktu, Chicago, New York, New Orleans, or Philadelphia means nothing. It is all one. I have got it all in the palm of my hand, not only the whole of your America but the entire universe. It is there. So where am I going to? Nowhere. I am going nowhere. That is the real me. Because of its universality, it cannot go anywhere because it just is. TRUE SURRENDER You have many systems here in America, many cults and creeds, where you are asked to surrender. A person can never totally surrender in the lower forms of independence or dependency. He will surrender mentally with the thought that “I am surrendered to my guru.” That is wrong. You do not surrender to your guru. If you try to surrender to your guru, you are not surrendering because you are trying. But as you develop and find the real I within, the big I within, and you do the entire cycle, independency, dependency, interdependency and then the proper independence where the entirety of the I is realised. Your guru is non-separate from you, and there is automatic, spontaneous surrender. You are not surrendering to the guru’s personality because all gurus are crazy people. True gurus are crazy people, or else I would not be going around the world with a begging bowl lecturing, talking, teaching. As all of you know, I was in big businesses all the time, and I can get into another multimillionaire business tomorrow if I wish to, in commerce—crazy coots. Take Ramakrishna, for example, the tremendous Vedantic sage that lived at the turn of the century. He saw a dog eating from a bowl, and he went to sit down with the dog and ate with the dog from the dog’s bowl. If any modern Western psychologist or psychiatrist passed there, he would say, “Oh, this guy is nuts.” Nuts. But they could not understand Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna identified himself so much with the Spirit in
Letting Go: Awakening to the Eternal Now
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THE MEANING OF “LETTING GO.” There was a person that found himself hanging by a branch off a cliff, and the person that was feeling very distraught turned his eyes to God and said, “Oh God, please get me out of this situation. If you get me out of this situation, I will do anything.” God had pity on this man and looked down upon him and said, “I only require one thing”. And the man said, “Anything. What is it?” And God looked and said, “Let go.” When God said, “Let go, do not hang on to the branch,” the real meaning was, let go of your minuscule ego-self. For whom was the man trying to save in his prayer but just his little ego bodily self, which, as we all know, is very temporary? These three score years and ten pass by in a moment, and within the context of infinity and eternity, it is not even a split second, so you are hanging on for that split second. To be able to hang on, you need a crutch. The tree branch was a crutch. How many of you could honestly say that “I live without crutches.?” 99.99 per cent of the world’s people live and exist with crutches. While you, the real you, that is imperishable, the real you that is immortal, could never die. Yet knowing this or realizing this to a certain extent, you attach so much importance to your mind and body. Why attach importance to the perishables? Even all perishables have limited value and limited life. So, when God said, “Let go,” He meant let go of this body and find yourself, know yourself, the authentic self. “Letting go” means you are becoming unified with that eternal factor which is you, and that eternal factor is nothing else but God, for only God is eternal. Only Divinity is eternal. We live in that eternity, for life too is eternal, life too is imperishable. You are not born to be miserable. You are not born to suffer. You are children of joy, created in joy, by joy. But because you do not recognize this factor, you emphasize the wrong places, and you feel all the sufferings and miseries of this world. YOUR NATURE IS FREEDOM When you were conceived, what did your parents do? They copulated, and was that not an act of joy for them? It could have been the joy of love, or it could have been the joy of lust, but yet the essence of joy was there when you were conceived, and then you were born. Why does the baby cry when it is born? It is not a cry of sadness; it is the cry of joy. This happens because it instinctively feels it is out in freedom from the confines of the womb. To be himself and not being fed by the umbilical cord but to find that independence. That is what a human being wants all the time. You want independence, and you want to feel free, for your nature is freedom itself. Yet we have all these branches we hang onto for the dear, so-called life. Yet the branch will break, so let go. Let go of this mind. Let go of this body in your spiritual practices. Every time I sit down to meditate, I die. The body is dead for me. The mind is dead. I have died thousands and thousands of times. Because the mind is not there to think anymore, and yet every mind goes into thought, I observe the thoughts, and those thoughts do not affect me. I become oblivious of the body. The bodily pains, or what have you, do not affect me. In meditation and spiritual practices, you will reach a different realm, to that higher consciousness, to that Superconscious level where all shackles are gone. YOU FEAR THE UNKNOWN We walk around in this world handcuffed, and we were not meant to do that. If you say that you are born in the image of God, then why do you not also realize that you are also born in the image of God, and God is free, so you too must be free. All this hanging on to the branches of life and not wanting to let go is because you fear. What do you fear? You do not fear death. You fear the unknown. Yet you have had so many, many lifetimes before. You have been born so many, many times before. And you have died so many, many times before. And now, after experiencing all that, you are the sum totality of all your past experiences, and you still fear the unknown. You should know it. If I walk down your main street a few times, I should know the main road and not fear it because I know it. But that clinging to the ego-self makes you forgetful of your real self—the real self, which is divine. So, as you progress in meditation and spiritual practices, you would find yourself proceeding closer and closer to the cognition of the real self, which is you. Then the fear of death disappears. Then the fear of the unknown disappears. For nothing can ever be achieved if you do not leap into the unknown, and yet your little mind says, “It is unknown.” But it is not unknown. It is only the conscious mind, that 5 or 10 per cent which you use of the totality of your mind that says or thinks of the unknown. But going deeper through the mind, the conscious mind, the subconscious mind, and the Superconscious Mind, and where everything is known. The Upanishads say, “What is thereby knowing which all else is known?” What is there? The Upanishads are wrong: “What is everywhere by knowing which all else is known.” For you, in essence, are everywhere, but because that little mind divides or cuts you up into pieces, you find separation,
Life’s True Wealth: Finding Life, Love and Laughter Within
MAN IS SEARCHING FOR HAPPINESS The primary qualification for any person that wants to embark on a spiritual practice or path is a yearning. He must yearn to find something within himself, which he does not know. Some people are yearning to find the answer to things he does not know about, and some do nothing. We start by doing spiritual practices to find specific answers. Many persons would like to ask the main questions: “Who am I? Why am I born into this world? What is the purpose of my environment? How do I relate with my environment, and in the relationship of the environment, am I evolving to greater and greater happiness?” The main purpose of life, consciously or unconsciously, is to find happiness. It is because the nature of man is blissful. Ananda resides within him. Man is essentially Divine, and because of the essential Divinity within him, that is what spurs him on to find himself; to find the Divinity that is within him and that constitutes the mechanics of the path of finding happiness. So, to recap, man consciously or unconsciously searches for happiness. A man makes a million pounds, and he thinks he will find happiness in doing that. But when he makes the million pounds, he is still unhappy, so he tries for the second million, and when he has the second million, he will try to find the third. But is that the path to find happiness, to find that peace that is there within us? We are trying to find externality internally, using the wrong direction. INDIVIDUALLY DESIGNED PRACTICES In our Foundation, the given practices are individually designed and are aimed at the sum totality of that particular person. Based upon the person’s vibration, which a guru can hear in his meditative state, an assessment and evaluation is made, whereby the sum totality of the person is assessed, and thereupon, a practice is prescribed. So, it becomes an individual practice. We have avoided mass practices because there cannot be one medicine to cure everything. You might need a different medicine for a headache than what you need for a toe-ache. So, with our Foundation, all practices are individually designed. These individually designed practices are aimed at un-fathoming that which is within us, and that is the purpose of the Foundation, in order so that man could reach his primal state of bliss. Man is essentially divine. YOU ARE DIVINE When man repeats to himself, “I am a sinner. I am weak”, he will become weak. The message I bring to you is this that you are Divine. That Divinity is just covered up, clouded up, and we have to unfold it. We do not call the Foundation – spiritual development. The spirit does not require developing. It is fully developed within you and me but covered up. We have to unfold it, and we give our practices for the unfoldment. Our meditators find that in doing these individually designed practices, a greater harmony comes within them; they do feel a greater self-integration. Man has three aspects to himself. He has the physical body, he has the mental body, and the Spiritual body. And all troubles begin when the three aspects of man do not function harmoniously. With spiritual practices, we function harmoniously, with more and more and more harmony, and as we become more and more harmonious to ourselves, we create greater harmony in the environment. THE PURPOSE OF MEDITATION The nature of the flower is to grow beautiful. It grows beautiful, but it does something else as well; the flower that grows beautiful in itself also enhances the garden’s beauty. When an individual becomes more harmonious with himself and more self-integrated, his environment improves, which is the purpose of meditation. The purpose of meditation is to live as a self-integrated being, and being self-integrated, one can perform daily actions with greater dynamism and greater vitality. And having become harmonious, we automatically become loving, and when we become loving, we become loveable. When we, through meditation, create this beautiful harmony within ourselves, when the mental awareness expands, and simultaneously the heart expands, then this combination of the mind and heart, with that beautiful expansion and as we gradually achieve that beautiful wholeness, our attitude towards life changes, where we can start loving. Then we will know the meaning of the Commandment, “Love Thy Neighbour as Thyself.” Then we will know the true import. If we use that message “Love Thy Neighbour as Thyself” mentally, we might appreciate some of its meaning. But to appreciate the significance intellectually supported by the experiential value, how powerful that will become. Then we will know what loving your neighbour as thyself could mean. There is a significant difference between knowing something only by the intellect and experiencing something. PHILOSOPHIES MUST BE BROUGHT DOWN TO PRACTICAL DAILY LIVING These qualities of love which are gained through meditation, can be experienced and not only experienced but translated and interpreted in daily living. All philosophies in this world are of no use; if it remains only on the mind level, it is mental gymnastics. They must be brought down to practical day to day living, and our meditations are individually designed and tailored, made for each and every individual person so that he could do his practices twice a day, half an hour morning and evening. And he is shown methods how he can interpret them in day to day living and thereby making his life richer in every aspect of his being. Greater harmony is found in the home, greater harmony is found in work, greater harmony is found in his social circles, greater harmony is found in society. Society and various units of social bodies form a country, and then England can shine to its primal glory again. The empire builder can also start off to be the spiritual empire builder. This movement is in many countries, but England has become one of the leading
Refinement of Thinking: The Key to Spiritual Bliss
MAN HAS FREE WILL There is no difference between animal and man as far as the physiological and biological self is concerned, and the difference starts from the psychological or the mental level. We could safely say that the difference between an animal and a man is that man has developed the power to think. Thinking is a means that could quicken evolution, and all religions do agree that it is much easier for man to reach the divine stage because he has a mind. Having the thinking ability, there are other stumbling blocks; it is like a coin where you have the heads and the tails; with the growth of the thinking ability in man, he has also taken on not only the section of the mind which could dwell in positive thinking, but he also has taken on the ability to dwell in negative thinking. So, to recap, the difference between an animal and man is that a man has thinking ability, while the animal has not. The animal functions on an instinctive level; its evolution automatically proceeds to the stage of man. Man’s evolution can proceed much faster than the animal. Specific laws of nature guide the animal, and it becomes the development progress as nature wants it to progress; the animal has no say how fast or how slow it wants to progress, but man has the say how fast he wants to progress or how slow he wants to progress or if he wants to remain static. When that point is conceived that the man can expedite his progress or retard his progress or remain static, it would mean that man has free will. Because of the abilities inherent in man, the development in man is very dependent on the other side of the coin, which is free will. On one side of the coin, he has the natural tendency to progress; on the other side, he has free will, which could act as a brake or act as an accelerator. HOW TO EXERCISE FREE WILL How is the free will to be exercised? That is the real question. Free will can be exercised by improving our conceptions and perceptions of things around us here in the relative material plain. As we refine the thinking processes inherent in us, we take the thinking process from a grosser level to a subtler level. In the progression between the grosser to the subtler, the free will in man is also affected, because as we said, free will and the urge for development are two sides of the one coin. If the thinking processes are refined naturally, free will joins in to support that refinement of thinking. When refinement of thinking occurs, free will plays together with refinement. At the gross level, free will could lead a person into various spheres called negative, but when the thinking processes are refined, free will is directed to lead one to positive things. Man still has a choice, and to exercise choice is to refine his thinking. Refining of thinking must necessarily draw on something which is beyond thinking. What refines thinking is the power that is beyond the thinking that helps refine the thinking. It works in a complete circle. That which is beyond thinking is the spiritual ability in a man. Refining thinking through the mental process when it becomes finer and finer and finer, more of the spiritual quality in man is drawn into the thinking and that in turn again refines or elevates or gives direction, good direction to free will. So, in the process of evolution, in the process of progressing to a better and a higher life, we exercise all these three facets of man, the spiritual side, the thinking side and that which is connected with the thinking side, the free will. When a man has refined his thinking process, he starts flowing with the current of nature and as he flows with the current of nature and not against it, that ability to choose also becomes natural in always selecting that which is right. Let us say that you have a choice of going to the bar to have a drink, and at the same time, you have a choice of going to a Satsang. Why does one man choose to go to the pub, and why does the other man go to Satsang? The difference is there in the refinement of thinking. To one, the grossness of the pub and the liquor he puts in him gives him a kind of pleasure, while for the one whose thinking is further refined goes to the Satsang where they will receive pleasure and the refinement of pleasure which is bliss. So here we have the choice. REFINEMENT OF THINKING If we want to go to a pub and force ourselves not to go to the pub, we are repressing certain latent desires we are inhabiting; we are pushing it aside as if we are hiding a skeleton in the cupboard. Our practices develop the refinement of thinking that will always lead us spontaneously to the right path. When we do our meditations regularly, and with great sincerity, we will find that the thinking gradually becomes more refined, and the mind gets attracted to greater and greater bliss. That is why we come to Satsangs because our thoughts during our meditations have produced a certain experience or perhaps a glimpse only, maybe a little glimpse that makes us realise that there is more. One teaspoon of sugar will make something so sweet to a certain extent, and we know that if you put in ten teaspoons, it will be sweeter. So, when we continue with our meditations and our practices, we refine thinking by going beyond thinking, we get a glimpse of the bliss, and the natural desire is produced for greater bliss, so that is why we will not go to the pub because that is a momentary kind of so-called pleasure which
The Dance of Souls: Individuality and Unity in the Divine Play
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WHAT IS THE SOUL Soul is a word that has been very misunderstood, or perhaps the term has been used in many different contexts. When you say soul, you can mean the individual soul, according to the Sanskrit word, Jivatman, and when you say soul, you can also mean the universal soul that resides in a person. If you use the word soul as an individual soul, then the individual soul is the carrier of your whole existence from times past. From the very first moment that you became individualised, from the very first moment the spark left the fire, from that moment up to now, the sum totality of what you are is carried and conveyed by the individual soul. It is you, so it is your character and your personality. The character and personality of the individual soul are modelled and shaped by our thoughts, words and deeds, not only of this life but of many existences in the past. So, the individual soul contains all that you are now at this very moment. That is the individual soul, but when you talk of the universal soul, that universal soul is the divine force, the divine power that is untouched, untouched by your soul, by your personality. Yet the individual soul draws its strength and sustenance from the universal soul all the time. The individual soul cannot exist without power; it depends on the universal soul. The individual soul is like a light that requires electricity, but the universal soul is the electricity itself. It is independent, not dependent on anything else; it is self-luminous. The purpose of this division is because the universal soul, in some way, must express itself. The universal soul is of such intangible nature and can only be appreciated by tangibility, and its means of expressing itself would be through the individual soul. YOU ARE THE SOUL You are the individual soul; you can never possess a soul because it becomes apart from you and the individual soul is the full expression of yourself when you have a soul. There are sub-divisions of the individual soul from the grosser level to the finest level of the soul. There is no difference between mind and soul, it is all part and parcel of each other, one composite whole, but we use these terms, mind, soul, heart. A person’s heart is the core of his personality: the core, the deeper level, the deeper strata of the individual soul, the heart. The soul is you; it is the total of yourself, and that is the individual soul that would further progress, becomes non-existent, and is annihilated. THE UNIVERSAL SOUL IS ETERNAL In all systems of philosophy, you will find that there is a progression; if philosophy is not a progressive philosophy, then it becomes a dead philosophy. So, when you talk of the individual soul and the universal soul, naturally, you accept the concept of duality. But as we progress slowly and gradually, we will find duality ceasing and oneness becomes. The universal soul is eternal. That is a premise that has to be accepted. What happens to the individual soul, then? Does it annihilate itself? And if it does annihilate itself, what are the processes of annihilation? The process of annihilation of the individual soul is the refinement of personality and character, which are the basic constituents of the individual soul. There, too, we come back to the same principle, refined personality by our practices. IT IS A CLEANING PROCESS It becomes so refined that it merges away into the universal soul, where duality ceases and oneness comes about. To refine a person’s personality, you must remember that the personality of the person is the total of his being—the total of all his experiences through ages past. In the process, that personality, firstly so pure as the spark, might have gained a lot of dirt around it. It is a cleaning process, and as the individual soul becomes cleaner, the nearer it gets to the Universal Soul. In the cleaning process, how do we clean? If we want to sweep this floor, we have to use a broom, and our broom in the cleaning process are our meditations and our conscious effort in the waking state of life whereby we consciously try to be better and better. Meditation helps so much to the betterness. The gross personality of man can be equated with a block of ice. This block of ice with the fire and the heat within one desires to progress, and all desires have fire always; they are hot, they burn. With that heat, the ice melts and becomes water. Some refinement is taking place. The heat makes the water become vapour, and as you would know, the vapour merges away in the air. Then it is like the air in the balloon; if you prick the balloon, the air merges away in the outside air. In the beginning, we thought dualistically that the air in the balloon, the individual soul is apart from the Universal Soul. We felt that in the beginning because of the relative and the absolute aspects of life. But when the air merges away from the balloon into the air outside, we come to realise that the division, the duality we saw, was really non-existent. It was really non-existent, and the annihilation of the personality can only realise this. That balloon that keeps the individual soul as an entity ceases; the balloon has to be pricked. THE PURPOSE IS THE EXPRESSION OF THE UNIVERSAL SOUL The balloon is the ego; the ego is the rubber substance that keeps in that air. With the refinement of personality, we find the rubber; the ego becomes thinner and thinner and thinner. The rubber becomes thinner, and it bursts, disintegrates, and the air in the balloon becomes the air outside. The individual soul ceases and becomes the universal soul, which is the aim and goal of all here. That is the
Unfolding the Spiritual Self: The Inseparable Nature of Spiritual and Material Life
Awareness, Bible, Chela, Christ, Divine, Duality, Evolution, Force, God, Guru, Gurushakti, Happiness, Harmony, Heart, I and my Father are one, Joy, Law of opposites, Love, Manifestation, Manifestor, Mantra, Meditation, Mind, Relative World, Self, Spirit, Spiritual, Spiritual Force, Spiritual Path, Spiritual Teacher, The Abstract, Unfoldment, Universe
UNFOLDING THE SPIRITUAL SELF The idea that spiritual and material life are two separate entities, that material and spiritual values are incompatible principles is definitely a misconception. As a human being, you are composed of three selves: the physical self, the mental self, and the Spiritual Self, and you could never divorce them from each other. Each one forms an integral part of the other. The three bodies, the three aspects of man, are just different vibrations with different degrees of solidification. The Spiritual Self is, of course, at its subtlest, while the physical self is at its grossest. It is one composite whole that comprises the whole, the entire universe. We know that the body can never exist without the mind, and the body and mind can never exist without the subtle energy, which is the spirit. It is impossible to separate them from each other. We use these terms, the physical, mental and the spiritual, for the sake of convenience to discuss the matter. But even in the most physical thing, you would find the spiritual permeating. To make the physical and material life better, we try to let the subtle self of ourselves, the Spiritual Self, become deeper and deeper in the material side, in the physical side. Thereby, it enhances the physical self and the mental self, which is the purpose of meditation where we activate the subtlest level of ourselves. In meditation, we find that beautiful relaxation of the body, the dropping of the metabolic rate, which signifies that the muscles and the mind are at a certain rest and when that is at a certain rest, it gives a chance for the spiritual aspect of man to come forth, to unfold more. It will naturally touch the various other aspects of the mind and the body in its unfoldment. To repeat, in meditation, we are activating the Spiritual Self so that it will help to support the mind aspect of man and the body aspect of man. It enhances the mind, develops a greater awareness of the mind, it creates a sense of greater perception. As far as the physical body is concerned, we are actively drawing on the Spiritual Self if there is any imbalance in the physical body. This is a great force – a great power, and that slowly encompasses our whole body and therefore makes our body better and creates a greater refinement in the body. BRINGING FORWARD THE SPIRITUAL SELF WILL BENEFIT MAN IN EVERY ASPECT OF LIFE In our experience, we have found that by drawing on this power, people suffering from certain diseases will alleviate a lot of the physical sufferings. Then we find people with a nervous temperament that is very nervous. If the Spiritual Self can support and act as a balm to the nervous brain, to the nervous mind, it softens that nervous mind; it brings a greater calmness. When the mind and body and spirit are brought together to act in unison, to act in harmony, a person becomes more and more stable because now he does not only have to depend upon his physical energies, he can harness the mental energies in his physical and material activities, and still more he brings forth the latent Spiritual Self in him, that subtle energy, that subtle force which is all-powerful. We know, according to physics, that an atom, a very small atom that the eyes cannot see, has so much power it could blow up Table Mountain. In that way, the subtle energy in ourselves is so potent that if we only give it a chance to unfold itself through meditation, it will benefit a person in every respect of life. It will even benefit one in one’s environment. If we make ourselves better, we exude a certain vibration in the environment, and the environment becomes better. If the flower becomes beautiful, naturally, it makes the garden beautiful too. That is what we do in meditation. It is a misconception to think that the material and spiritual sides are separated; they can never be separated because one cannot exist without the other. Some of the Vedic scriptures say that I exist because God exists, and God exists because I exist. You cannot separate them either. One is an integral part of the other. Sometimes the material side takes greater dominance; it predominates this spiritual side where the spiritual side is subdued while the ideal would be to let the spiritual side dominate. Let the spiritual side be predominant so that the physical side, the material side, could become richer and richer, which it does. EVERY PERSON IS A UNIQUE ENTITY We differ from many, many other movements. Before I taught anyone meditation, I explained that every person is a unique entity. If a person wants to become a doctor and if he studies all the books on medicine or the various drugs, he might just be using the wrong drugs and kill himself, but if he has an expert professor to teach him how to use those drugs, then, of course, it will benefit him. Likewise, as explained before, every person is a unique entity in our system. Because of that, there is a particular method, a particular mantra that has to be given, as mantras in many cases are required, to suit their vibrations. THERE ARE OTHER LATENT SENSES IN US THAN THE ORDINARILY USED As I have repeated this repeatedly, perhaps some people do not know about it, that everything in existence is nothing but vibration. These vibrations solidify themselves into gross matter. They exist on the one level as very subtle, and through solidification, like vapour into ice, they become gross and everything we perceive with the five senses. We perceive the same vibration but in a gross solidified state like human beings, tables, chairs. Everything is nothing but vibrations in a solid-state. Those vibrations naturally would have to have motions, and wherever there is motion, there will be sound.
Self-Help and the Power of Meditation: The Courage to Transform Life’s Challenges
Acceptance, Attitude, Bible, Bliss, Divinity, Eternity, Evolution, Faith, Force, God, Grace, Gurushakti, Integration, Joy, Karma, Law of Nature, Love, Meditation, Mental Patternings, Mind, Path, Philosophy, Samskaras, Self, Spirit, Spiritual Force, Spiritual Practices, Strength, The Three Gunas, Universal, Universe
DiSCRIMINATION The purpose of meditation is primarily to integrate oneself, integrate the three aspects of ourselves: the body, the mind, and the Spirit. This can never be accomplished overnight, and it takes time where a gradual integration takes place if we do our spiritual practices regularly. Therefore, we insist on the program of self-help. Self-help requires a lot of discrimination where one has to discriminate which road to take when one reaches the fork. This cannot just come about on its own. In total integration or being quite high on the ladder of integration, one intuitively would take the right fork in the road, but when we are still floundering and finding our way, we are stuck at the fork. One of the ways is to use one’s discrimination. Discrimination increases with greater integration simultaneously with the intuitive abilities, but if we are stuck and do not have the discriminatory power, what are we to do? That is the most difficult question that could ever be asked and which philosophers through the ages have flaunted over. WITH ACCEPTANCE COMES COURAGE One principle comes to the fore; that is a question of acceptance. Firstly, we accept two factors; that I am not integrated, and I have not got the power of discrimination to choose which road to take. When this acceptance begins, a force is activated within us that gives us courage. With acceptance comes courage, the courage to realise that even if I take the wrong road, that will still be my learning. Our minds have been conditioned throughout the ages by all our thoughts and deeds, from the primal spark when man began through his whole evolutionary process; all the experiences gained through ages and ages have formed conditioning to the mind. The mind could be conditioned so that it would find difficulty in recognising the truth or the right road. How do we uncondition the mind? There again, we rely upon discrimination, meditation, and acceptance. Because of the laws of karma, the patterning of our minds, and the aggregate of the samskaras of which we are made, we will have to face our weaknesses; we will have to face the mistakes that our actions have created. But if the attitude is there, I am going to learn from these very things happening in my life. Let us not be like the moth that flies to the flame all the time, knowing very well that it will burn itself and end itself as a moth. The very first inkling of the warmth, the heat of the flame should turn the moth away, but yet the moth is so patterned that it is forever drawn to its death. CHANGE OF ATTITUDE Because man has some discriminating power, not total discrimination, but some reasoning power; he accepts that whatever comes, I will face it. The very negative experience that might come will lose its sting by facing it with courage. It will not be as powerful as it would have been otherwise, so with the courage, one has, one will naturally have greater acceptance. The one feeds the other, acceptance gives courage, courage engenders greater acceptance, and that is how man’s attitude towards life and attitude toward his environment gradually changes. Total self-transformation cannot come overnight. We are patterned conditioned creatures. We have to uncondition. With the change of attitude, greater hope is born. When greater hope is born, it helps greater courage again. Greater courage helps greater acceptance. It is all interconnected with each other. Very consciously and with the help of our meditation, we change our attitude towards life, and experiences are necessary for life to bring us to the attitude, to the understanding that all there is, and whatever experience I am having has been brought upon me. In other words, we develop another quality—the quality of taking responsibility upon ourselves for ourselves and the environment created around us. The environment has not created you; you have created the environment, and if the environment has negative forces in it and if you are strong enough, those forces will never affect you. Still, because we are weak, those forces can attack us. But with this attitude that I stand firm as a rock amidst all these dashing waves, then all the negative experiences, unpleasant experiences lose their power, lose their force and then we can say in the words of the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling, that the whole world around me can turn mad and I do not lose my head. Those are not the exact words but is a gist of the meaning. TAKING RESPONSIBILITY With acceptance comes courage. With courage comes, this beautiful attitude, with that attitude is created a sense of self-responsibility, the recognition that I am what I am because of what I have been. When one creates this attitude, automatically, our eyes open. Automatically, the intuitive flow starts flowing, a clearing up of the samskaras start taking place, and when that clears up, and you stand at the fork, you will spontaneously take the right road. That is the other way that comes about even before a great level of integration is reached. Even though this road, even though this path, a greater and greater integration comes about, and there is nothing in life that has not got some positivity in it. You know the old saying, “Every cloud has a silver lining”. Everything we do has something very beautiful in it. You know the story of two men digging holes. One said, “I am digging a grave,” the other said, “I am digging for the foundation of a cathedral.” To develop a positive attitude towards life does not require great discriminatory powers. It does not require a great intellect. As the attitude changes, everything becomes more and more beautiful. This flower is beautiful to me now, but if my attitude towards it changes that, “ah, how did this flower grow? What powers of Divinity have come together to make this flower
Switch On the Light: Discovering Your Divine Essence and Limitless Potential
Bliss, Buddha, Christ, Divine, Divinity, Ego, God, Guru, Integration, Joy, Krishna, Law of opposites, Light, Love, Mental Patternings, Mind, Philosophy, Self
SWITCH ON THE LIGHT No man needs to go through misery, and no man needs to have any suffering. You are suffering because of your interpretations stemming from a patterned mind, a conditioned mind, for which you and only you have been responsible. So, what do you do when you cannot unpattern the patternings over millenniums, thousands and thousands and thousands of years of your very existence? If the room is dark, why analyse the darkness? Switch on the Light. Is it going to help you to analyse the darkness? No. And that is what I discuss with the psychoanalysts, Freudian, Jungian, Bullshitians. Get rid of the darkness, get rid of nescience, get rid of ignorance, and it is so easy, so, so easy. Seek, and thou shall find. You do not need to seek; it is there already. And if you insist on the word “seek,” then it will mean that you will just have to turn your mind a little bit, and you will find. But what do you find? You will find yourself. You will find your authentic Self, your Divine Self, composed of nothing else but joy, joy, and joy. WHEREVER THERE IS PLEASURE, THERE WILL BE MISERY Because you are so mixed up in the law of opposites, you go battling on and on and on. You are not seeking joy; you are seeking pleasure. And wherever there is pleasure, there will always be pain – the law of opposites. When there is sunshine, there will be rain. Where there is cold, there will be heat. So, you vacillate between the two extremities of the stick: pain there and pleasure there. You are staggering and up and down; it goes like the seesaw. One moment down, another moment up. By coming to the centre of the seesaw, you find the balance. The centre of yourself. Where there is this total integration, you do not need to fluctuate between pain and pleasure, you go beyond pain and pleasure, and you reach the area of joy, which is different. Joy, bliss, totally merged in joy and bliss. You can put any label you like. You can call it God, you can call it Allah, you can call it Bhagwan, you can call it whatever. That is your true Self, not the little ego self all so mixed up in Auntie Mathilda’s problems or Uncle John’s problems. That is not your true Self. We are searching for joy, and joy is Divine. Divinity is God, and once you find that, you have found everything. YOU THINK THAT YOU THINK He is in the crawling worm, and He is the dog? How much more is He not pervading you: you, the thinking being. Thinking being. Since when did you start thinking? You have never thought. You think that you think. You have never thought. All the analysis you go through. All the rationalisations you go through are biased because they are patterned and conditioned by the thoughts thrown upon you since you were a child. Your parents condition you into certain things, your teachers condition you, your ministers condition you, your environment condition, and your boss condition. So, do you think? You are a creature of conditioning. Let us move away from the patternings and become thinkers. If you want to rationalise, then do it properly without being conditioned by others. Be yourself. BE YOURSELF; YOU ARE DIVINE Everyone tells you to be like Christ, Krishna, and Buddha. I said, “False. Be yourself.” Then you are honest to yourself, sincere to yourself, and what is greater in life than to be yourself, sincere to oneself? You are not sinners. You are children of Divinity. Every drop of blood that flows through your veins is Divine. You call yourself; I am a sinner, a sinner. I do not know where this idea came from. It never came from Jesus Christ, that is for sure. Believe me. It came from organised churches that filled their coffers. They tell you of eternal damnation and put you into fears of all kinds instead of instilling love in you, which is your true nature. Did Jesus or Krishna or Buddha not represent love? Is God not love? Then why not speak of love? Why talk of eternal damnation? Conditioning again. I am a sinner, a sinner. Keep on repeating to yourself that you are sick, sick, sick, and you will become sick. But say to yourself, “I am the product of the Divine, I am Divine. Nothing is impossible for me.” Nothing is impossible. You put a stroke between the I and the M: I’m possible. That is the man’s attitude to living a happy, successful life. Success is to have access to your authentic Self. Not the millions in the banks; they mean nothing. Because you are just passing by, you are not going to take anything with you in any case. WE ARE JUST PASSING BY There was this American student of philosophy, and he was fond of reading the works of a particular rabbi that lived in Israel. He was on a study tour, and he was pretty close to the village where this rabbi lived. Knowing that, he thought, “I have read so many books written by this rabbi; let me give him a lookup.” That is always an Eastern custom that you never go to a guru or a rabbi empty-handed. If you cannot afford anything, just a little petal you give as an offering. So, this chap went to the rabbi and took nothing. And he says, “I am sorry, Rabbi, I was just passing by, and I could not manage to bring you an offering.” And they started chatting around about this, that, and the other. And the rabbi’s room was empty, and after a while, this man noticed. He says, “Rabbi, why is your room so empty, and you are sitting on the floor?” And the rabbi replied, “You are just passing by here; I,
Why Meditate: Awakening to Your Universal and Individual Nature
Conscious Mind, Divine, Divinity, Ego, Force, Happiness, Harmony, I and my Father are one, Integration, Joy, Kingdom of Heaven within, Light, Love, Love thy neighbour as thyself, Manifestation, Manifestor, Meditation, Mental Patternings, Mind, Oneness, Peace, Self, Separation, Soul, Spirit, Spiritual, Spiritual Practices, Subconscious, Superconscious, Unfoldment, Universal, Universe
YOU ARE NOT APART FROM DIVINITY You are the soul. You are nothing but the soul. You do not possess a soul; you do not possess a mind; you do not possess a body. You are the body, you are the mind, you are the soul, and at the same time, you are Divine. You are seeking, consciously or subconsciously, or even, according to Jungian theories, unconsciously, you are seeking happiness. You are seeking peace; you are seeking joy. Why should you seek this when you are already joy and already peace? You are not apart from Divinity. If Divinity is omnipresent, then that omnipresence exists within each cell of your body. Billions of cells in your body contain that Divine Force. You cannot lift a finger without that Force being present. But you lack recognition of the cognition that you really are. There is no separation between you, your environment, and the real Self that exists within you. The delusion only comes when you regard yourself to be separate from that which Is. You regard yourself to be separate from reality and dwell in the field of unreality. It is a fixture of your personal imagination that tells you I am separate from the Divine. It is your imagination, your illusion, your delusion that creates the misery and unhappiness within you, and yet right behind there, somewhere you are questing, you are searching for that joy and peace. If that joy and peace did not exist within you, then there would be no search. Because of its very existence within you, you are trying to discover it. We call our organization the International Foundation for Spiritual Unfoldment. Remember the word “unfoldment” and not spiritual “development.” You are fully spiritually developed as you are, and you only require unfolding. YOU CAN BE NON-ELSE, BUT THE REALITY Every person is a unique individual being. Where did this individualization come from when the entire universe exists in total wholeness? Is your individualization illusory? Is it delusion? Where I regard myself to be I, me, mine. That is where we miss the point because you are not what you regard to be you. What you regard to be you is that conditioned, patterned mind that says, I am Mary, I am John, I am James, I am Dick, I am Tom. But you are neither of those. You think you are Tom; you think that you are John, you think you are Jean. Where does this John, James or Jean come from? What is your reality? What gave you this name and form that calls you yourself John or James or Jean? Is it not but name and form superimposed upon the real Self, which is you the Divine Self? You can be non-else but the reality, for if Divinity is omnipresent and the true reality, then what are you? A dream. A superimposition upon that which is real. To find the real you, you must get rid of the superimposition. You must get rid of the idea of me and mine. For you are neither me nor are you mine. You are non-possessed by anything. All the miseries and the sufferings begin with this idea: this is my table, this is my chair, this is my wife, this is my beloved, this is my son, my daughter. Yet, how can you possess anything else when you cannot even possess yourself? THE INNER QUEST IS TO FIND THE TOTALITY To come to that realization of non-possession, you have to become an integrated being. 99.999 percent of people in this world live a fragmented life. One thought pulls this way, the other thought pulls that way, and a third thought pulls somewhere else. Fragmentation. And that brings up the question of techniques, how you can integrate yourself—integration, which means that your body, mind and spirit work in total harmony, in totality. We are not living the totality that we are, which is the cause of all our sufferings and miseries, and the inner quest is to find the totality. When you cannot find the totality, what happens to you? Dissatisfaction. You are not satisfied with anything. The search becomes so external all the time. You have a five-room house, so you want a ten-room house. You have a Cadillac, so you want a Rolls Royce. You have five million in the bank, so you want ten million, so erroneously you think that this is going to bring you that joy and happiness. Possessions – me and mine – superimposed upon the reality that you are. The idea of that little self, that little egocentric self, that little ego self makes you think that the whole universe revolves around you; you think you are so important. How do we get away from the idea of the ego-self? That is where spiritual techniques come into play. Spiritual techniques do not destroy your ego. The ego cannot be destroyed. There is nothing in Heaven or Earth that is destructible. Every atom is eternal and immortal. Even when you discard this little body, the body only disintegrates to flow back into its original elements: air to air, ether to ether, dust to dust. By dying, you are doing a great favour to all the insects in the ground where you get buried. So, even in death, you are serving a purpose. THE EGO-SELF CAN BE REFINED The ego-self comes between you and your real Self, the small “s” standing in the path of the large universal “S,” which you are. What shall we do with this damn ego? You cannot destroy it, and it is there all the time. But one thing can be done; the ego-self can be refined. The ego-self of man is like a piece of rubber: very opaque, and the Light cannot shine through. By refinement of the ego, we stretch that rubber, so it becomes transparent, and the inner Light, the Kingdom of Heaven within, shines in its fullest glory through the