YOU ARE GOD Denial of the oneness with God does not detract you from the path to that oneness. Man has to proceed according to his understanding. One has to proceed from that dualness and pray to thy Father in Heaven. Later you start realising that you are the branches of the tree of Divinity, and the branch is so connected to God. After you realise that you are He: I and my Father are one. The denial is important. To deny that God is beyond me; that is the real denial. God is beyond me, and I am just a human being, a little personality that I think I am. But the idea in progress on the spiritual path is not to think I am what I think I am but to think what I am. This causes conflict. Because here, on the one hand, I am Jean, Jack and Joe; on the other hand, I am praying or looking for that Jean, Jack and Joe that is so far above. A small fish will think in his consciousness that his Divinity or superior is a big fish. A small elephant will think, “Ah, my God is a big elephant.” A little insect will believe that my God is a big insect. Is that not exactly what we are doing when you say you are born in the image of God? According to scriptural injunctions, you are the image of God. You are not, and this might sound very revolutionary to you: you are not the image of God because image implies imagination. So, you are imagining that you are an image of God. This has been brought about by the perpetrators, by the false prophets that try to draw you into a society of togetherness and without making you know, they make you believe that you are the image of God. So, they are preying, not p-r-a-y, but p-r-e-y. They are preying upon your imagination and misleading humanity and telling them that you are the image of God. You are not the image of God because the image, as I just said, is imagining. So, they are trying to make you guess. I want you to know that you are God. I want you to know that you are Divine and are not connected to the mind that makes images, and that makes you imagine various kinds of images. ILLUMINATION IS THE TOTAL REALISATION THAT I AM DIVINE There is no God. There is a Divine energy which permeates every cell of your body, and because of that permeation, you are God. But because you cannot cognise or recognise it, you feel you are so insignificant and low. You think you are a sinner; you feel you are this, you are that you think you are nothing, and yet when you come to the final realisation, you will know you are everything. And when you know that you are everything, all the sufferings and all the miseries will disappear from your life. I do not imagine that I am Divinity; I experience that I am Divinity. That is the goal, and there are paths to it; there are ways to it according to your temperament. But do not take that as a finality, for you are ever-growing, growing, growing, like these beautiful flowers from the bud, expanding, expanding, expanding, until you reach the totality until you reach the essence of what you are. At that moment, illumination comes that I am Divine, which does not mean image-making, but illumination is the realisation that I am Divine. And when that complete realisation comes that you are Divine, all your miseries and sufferings disappear like that; in a flash of a second, they go. For Divinity knows not of imaginings, knows not of afflictions, knows not of sufferings. And when you are there, it is not imagining because imagining is of the mind. You live it. AS THE OBSERVER, YOU ARE NOT AFFECTED I will talk to you about my personal experiences because I have gone through this. I know what I am! This is a sharing, as I have said before. Why should you not also share that and see that I am Divine and there is no opposition to Divinity? Divinity is unity with the entirety of this universe and even beyond. So, you become the observer of the universe, yet you are still the universe. I am a man walking on Earth with all my frailties. I love to have my cigarette; I love my nightcap, Scotch and soda. Why not? What has that to do with my Spirit? I have realised my Spirit and know that I am He, that my Father and I are one, so let the body behave as it wants. I am the observer of the functioning of this body, which is part and parcel of the universe, and this universe cannot function without contractions, expansions, and conflicts. It goes on all the time. But amongst all that, I am still. I know I am eternal. I know I am immortal. I know. What do I know? I know knowingness. What is God? What is He? He is knowingness, a spontaneous knowingness that you are Divinity itself. And standing from that angle, which I want to take you to, to that hill, and observe the functioning of the body, mind, and all that happens around you, and you are not affected at all because you are the observer. The observer is unaffected, which is the stance, the birthright of every human being. EVERYTHING IS GOOD Study the word ignorance carefully. Ignorance means that you are ignoring that which you are. Take heart, my beloveds, dear heart, take heart. Live, live, live, live, live. Do not be the living dead. The living dead is nescience and ignorance. You are alive. Every act you perform is good as long as it does not harm others or yourself. And everything is good. Why feel
The Eternal Bond: The Spirit’s Journey Through Life and Beyond
SORROW COMES FROM WITHIN ME BECAUSE OF MY ATTACHMENT As we usually say, we feel sad when a person is away or on the other side. Why? We do not feel sad because that person has passed away. That is only the surface reason. We feel miserable because of our attachment to that person, our dependency or emotional need, or our so-called assumed love that makes us sad. In India, there is a sect where when a child is born, they all cry, and when a person passes away, they celebrate. They call when a child is delivered because they think that this poor child has come into all this misery. And when a person passes away to the other side, it is their philosophy that he has gone to green pastures, and they celebrate. This philosophy is not entirely true, but there is something good about it: it lacks that attachment. So, if anyone passes away, there is no need for sorrow, none whatsoever, if we understand that that sorrow is from me. It comes from within me because of my selfishness, my attachment. THE SPIRIT WITHIN ME IS THE SAME AS THE SPIRIT WITHIN YOU I know a woman whose little dog passed away, and she was so attached to this dog. I love animals. But this lady was so attached to this little dog that when the little dog passed away, she suffered so much that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. So, one of her friends brought her to me at our centre in Cape Town, and I gave her these explanations: physically, your dog has passed away, and you are so hurt now because of your attachment. Of course, I went into great detail. But the Spirit within the dog is forever immortal, and if you have a genuine love for that dog, you will come across that dog again because there is no more excellent bond than love. I have seen within our movement, our organization, where people from opposite sides of the world meet and get married and be happy, and a couple of days ago, they did not know that each other existed. I could show you so many instances, and in those instances when I met these people, I felt that although it was not a total love yet, this love that these people had still got far to go, there has been a deep bond in a previous existence. That is why they got together so strongly in this existence. So, I told this lady, ” You will meet this dog again, and if not in this life, perhaps in the next life. But you will meet this dog again in some form or other because the Spirit within the dog is the same Spirit within you. And your love is so powerful for the dog that you will meet.” And she felt nice; she felt better. And within a week, she felt normal, and she had recovered. And this is very true. Why do some theologies say you will meet your mother and father, friends, brothers and sisters, and sweethearts on the other side? What does it mean? There is no actual meeting in that particular form or shape. By the time you leave this earth, that person, the object of your love, might have incarnated again already. But it means that if you have that deep, true bond of love with your mother, father, brother, sister, etc., you will meet that very soul in an incarnate form again. That is what it means. That Spirit is not waiting up there for you; that “when is my daughter coming?” It is a fallacy when they say I will meet you on the other side. But it is true if you say I will meet you on the other side again in an incarnate form. Both of us will be reincarnated, and circumstances will be such that we will meet each other again. THE SPIRIT WITHIN IS FOREVER CONNECTED The individual Spirit, the individual soul – in Sanskrit is called “Jivatman”- will forever remain individual. The Jivatman is a composition of your subtle body empowered with your Spiritual Self. The Spiritual Self is always the pivotal point, and around the inner Self, the Spiritual Self is firstly the subtle body and covering the subtle body is the grosser body you shed. So, at the time of death, the gross body is shed, but the subtle body carries on, and that subtle body does not meet your sweetheart on the other side. It is impossible. If possible, it would be a total contradiction of terms because the subtle body cannot recognize them. You need the organisms of the brain, this little three-and-a-half-pound thing up here. You need eyes. You need ears. You need the various qualities of the physical body to achieve recognition. So, if a loved one departs, someone that you have truly loved, that connection will always remain. For real love is the Spirit within. Real love is that God within, the Spirit within, and that is forever immortal. It is permanently connected. And when the mind is powerful enough in its thought processes and can cognize in its expanded awareness of the Spirit within, then that bond created will rejoin. THE ENTIRETY OF DIVINITY EXIST IN THE MOMENT So, there is nothing to fear. There is nothing to lose. There is nothing to be disappointed about. There is nothing to mope over. And there is no need for unhappiness in love, for the more significant the awareness man develops, the more could he conceive of love. Dante said, “The greater the man, the greater his love.” So why be unhappy? Why be bloody fools? What for? Be joyous! Life is a celebration. Everything around you is celebrating. Look outside. These trees are growing. The grass is growing. These flowers are blooming. What are they doing? They are celebrating the glory of Divinity! They are
The Eternal Flow of Life: Death as a Gateway to Life
THERE IS NO DEATH, AND LIFE IS ETERNAL Life and death are not things apart. Life and death are but two sides of the same coin. It can be a fulfilment, and it is a fulfilment if there is a dialogue. By dialogue, we mean understanding the meaning of life and death, for he that knows the secret of life knows not of death; the communication is complete. That is the purpose of dialogue, to understand the ability to realise what life is and what death is. Is there a death if a man discovers that there is no death? Jesus said, “I know of life and death, I speak of life and death, but I ask you to tell the teachings of life.” I might have the words wrong in the context of the way it was spoken, but it is just the gist of the quotation. There is no death, life is eternal, and every gap between one existence and the other is just a transformation. As we have said before, the same clay can be moulded into a cat or a mouse or a dog. The clay is not destroyed, and if there is no destruction to the clay, then, in essence, there is no death but just a transformation. When we are tired of the clothes we wear, we discard them and buy a new set of clothes, but you, the person, is not destroyed; the clothes are changed. You are in this room, and later you proceed to the next room. You are still there in different circumstances, environments, and conditions. Understanding this is dialogue, that dialogue has to take place within oneself to realise that life is eternal, and there is not a single scripture in this world that will say life ends; they all say that life is endless, and death is a passing phase. Death is the greatest thing that has ever been given to man. It is the greatest gift of God, just as sleep is. Try to stay awake for seven, ten, or even two days; how would you feel? Shakespeare said something extraordinary about sleep. He said, “Sleep is the best nourishment in life’s feast.” In sleep, you regenerate and rejuvenate yourself. There is no difference between sleep and death. It is a difference in duration of time. And death is vital to every creature, for all born must die; that is the law, but to understand death, the secret of death, the meaning of death, the purpose of death is so that you can rest. AFTER LEAVING THIS BODY, WE EVALUATE OURSELVES AND PLAN WHAT TO DO NEXT With our daily living so mixed up and muddled with our physical, emotional, and mental selves, we could never stand aside and look at ourselves. Yes, meditators can. That is why we teach meditation. We cannot stand apart from ourselves and look at ourselves. We have not learnt how to face ourselves in the mirror, but when we leave this body behind, then with our subtle body, we can look at ourselves and evaluate ourselves. Just as in sleep, it gives your body and mind a rest, a rejuvenating effect. So, life is after death, too; when we leave this body, we have this chance to rest. We are not tied up in those emotions connected to the external environment. Then, with that rest and being able to stand apart, we evaluate ourselves, formulate, and plan what to do next and what kind of life to take so that I can progress in my path and reach home to my maker. So, death is so important and understanding this is the dialogue. AFTER A GOOD REST, WE ARE READY TO COME BACK TO THE SCHOOL OF LIFE We understand that by taking sleep, we will feel better tomorrow. If a person is not well, the doctor first says, “Rest, stay in bed”. That is the first thing the doctor says, “Have a good sleep”—same thing. Have a good day. Because bodies can get worn out too, we must acquire a fresher body to return to life’s school. Children get six weeks’ holiday to rest and be fresh enough to return to the same school to another standard, the higher standard. They need that rest before taking that standard. Everything in life shows you that. There is a rest period between every two heartbeats, and every rest between two beats is a death. Man dies ten thousand times a day. When there is a rest between two moments, that split second is death. Like that, there must be a rest period. LIFE IS ETERNAL, AND GOD IS ETERNAL Watch yourself when you are walking; you will rest on one foot while you extend the other foot and rest on the other while you extend the first foot. In everything we observe around us in nature, there is a period of rest, and death is rest, for death, too, is life. But a form of life where it gives us a chance to regenerate ourselves, to evaluate our understanding is the dialogue. When we understand that, we do not fear death because we know that it is just a changing over from one suit into another suit, and life will go on, eternally, for if life ends, God ends, for God is life. Life is eternal as God is eternal. Now, with understanding is the dialogue, and once one understands this and enters into this dialogue within oneself, one finds fulfilment. Understanding is fulfilling. … Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang SA 1978 – 58
Walking with Divinity: The Power of Grace and Conscious Living
DIVINITY IS WITH YOU In our daily life, obstacles will come but do not become faint-hearted, for you have the most significant force with you. The tremendous force of Divinity is with you and within you, and Divinity acts. It does not come down with a hammer or string to tie you up and pull you. He has His ways. He has His ways of showing you the path. You often find instances where you have a problem, and here you just happen to come upon a book and turn a page, and you read one passage, and your entire attitude changes. You see how that force works. It will work through every way and means, and then as the Bible says, He whom He loves most, He chastises. He whom He loves most, He chastises. What is the purpose of that? What is the goal of all the obstacles? What is the purpose of all the suffering? If God is love and love is God? What is the purpose of it all? The purpose is your evolution. The aim is to clear up, to undo all that you have done, not what God has done. Remember, every suffering that we have is by our own doing. We have been the planters. We have sown, and we must reap. That is the law of karma. God has helped there, too, because when you plant, he has brought the necessary sun, rain, and minerals into the ground for that seed to grow. But what kind of seed you are sowing is of your free will: lousy seed, rotten fruit. Good seed, good fruit. You cannot plant potatoes and expect tomatoes in return, but He is always with you. He is in the tomato and the potato. Therefore, as I have said before, your attitude is the most important thing. BECOME RESPONSIBLE I go on telling people to become responsible. Do not even depend upon the guru. The guru only has the torch to shine on the path, the lantern. But be dependent upon your own feet to walk. He will show you the way! He will give you the knowledge, the wisdom. He will stir your Heart and your soul and your mind. He will provide you with the courage to go on the path, the path of the heroes. He will show you how to reach home on the quickest road, for you have to reach home. You have to reach your father’s home! Why tarry and suffer? There is the path. Go! I will give you a push. And if there is a pothole or a little hill, come. Here is my hand. Hold. Let me help to pull you up. But you still have to move your blooming feet. That is how life works. All this comes within the framework of love. The framework of unselfish love can be demonstrated not only by the guru’s love but also by the love of a father, mother, and children to the father and mother and vice versa. All this can be demonstrated in every aspect of life, and when this is well shown in every part of life, then we have some idea of what the living God is all about. If I feel disappointed by the actions of someone, then that disappointment stems within me. I am not responsible for the actions of the other. So why must I be disappointed? The frustration stems from within me only because of what I have expected, my preconception. I get letters, thousands of pages a month from people, and so-and-so writes to me to say, “I love this one so much, but that one does not love me.” And this, that. No, no, no. Do not need. Do not want. “I will love you.” That is what the attitude should be. “I love you, and if you do not love me, OK. Fine. I cannot force you. I cannot force you to love me. That is a quality that has to come spontaneously from yourself.” GRACE IS ALWAYS THERE Always hope! Always have courage! Always have the strength to stand on one’s feet! Always have the power to feel responsible that everything happening to me is because of me and no one else! When a person understands that, we are indeed on the path to happiness. We are indeed on the path of togetherness. This togetherness comes about, to repeat, through spiritual practices and conscious effort to better ourselves, and when these two are put together, Grace dawns on you. The fresh air is always there, as I have said many times. Open the window. The fresh air is there! Grace is there! Grace is not an elusive girl. We are elusive. Does the Bible not say, “Knock and the door shall be opened. Seek, and thou shalt find.” So who has to do it first? We! We have to knock! We have to seek! And then, automatically, everything is there. Desires would be fulfilled. EVEN SELFISH DESIRES WILL BE FULFILLED, BUT BEWARE OF THE CONSEQUENCES Here is something new I will tell you: good desires will be fulfilled, and selfish desires will be fulfilled, too, if you knock and seek. Yes, selfish desires, too, will be fulfilled. But beware of the consequences! Because the thought forces are so, so powerful that even selfish desires can be fulfilled. But there is an aftermath, and it has its consequences which in the long term will add to greater suffering. Immediate, it is excellent. There is a lovely table filled with all the world’s delicacies, but you do not need to be a glutton. There is all the beautiful food to eat. Fine. But if you overeat, very soon there will be indigestion. You have been selfish in your gluttony, but the consequence is indigestion. That applies both ways, for the energies, the Spiritual Forces, are forever neutral. It depends on how you want to use them. BE JOYOUS! LIFE IS A
The Validity of Belief: A Stepping-Stone to Wisdom and Inner Peace
Belief, Bliss, Divinity, Effort, Faith, Force, God, Guru, Happiness, Heart, Joy, Meditation, Mental Patternings, Mind, Peace, Philosophy, Religion, Scriptures, Wisdom
HOW VALID IS A BELIEF? Belief is a word that is not understood, and as a matter of fact, I do not support belief very much in its totality. In other words, a belief is not enough because one’s mental conditioning necessarily creates a belief that might believe that this chair is red when it meanwhile is yellow. A colour-blind person might go through the red robot light believing and seeing that it is green. So how valid is belief? The validity of a belief lies in the fact that it must produce a definite result in a person’s life. Belief also has its value. If you believe something strongly enough, you can make that belief materialise with your mental capacity and the force of thought generated by your power. If you think this chair can move independently and your belief is strong enough, your thought will assume a physical power, taking it from its subtle level to a grosser level of control whereby it can be moved. Therefore, most theologies say, “Believe.” In this modern age, belief is insufficient because with the advance of technology, with the accent put more on mind development, people tend to become more and more sceptical. A few thousand years ago, you could say, “Believe”, and people would believe. At that time, they were more heart-orientated because their belief was not subject to any form of analysis. Because once you start analysing belief, then belief ceases to be belief. Belief knows no analysis. Belief, in this sense, is synonymous with a feeling that wells up within you. You say, “I believe this man is good.” You might not even know the person, what the person has done, or the person’s background, and yet you would say the feeling wells up that you believe in this person, which applies not only to people but also to things. Most of the things that we do in life are done on belief. BELIEF IS ALWAYS ACCOMPANIED BY TRUST Belief necessarily has as its counterpart trust. All the most significant things in life are done on trust. You came to this Course believingly and trustingly that Gururaj will be here. The biggest business deals are done over the luncheon table. With the shake of a hand, there is trust. That we have discussed. The problems of the business deal and the contracts only follow a few weeks later when the typist gets to type it out. And signatures are appended. So, with belief, there is always trust. I believe my father is my father because I have been told that by my mother, and I trust my mother. So, belief always is accompanied by trust. How trusting are we? That is the question. That is the significant lack in the lives of modern man that he does not count. He wants everything to be proven to himself before he can trust. You tell a man, “Believe in God.” He might nod and say, “Yes”, but inwardly, he would say, “Believe in God? What is God? Who is God? Where is He? To me, He is non-existent.” Where is belief? But if some tangible proof can be shown in the various areas of life, then in this modern age, the person will start believing, and that is why I could come and talk and talk on philosophy or various practical subjects; they would mean nothing to people if they did not meditate and find some benefit from the meditation so that the theory that goes with the meditation would be firstly believed. After belief, there would be faith. TRUST IS ACCOMPANIED BY FAITH So far, we have three things. Belief is accompanied by trust, and trust is accompanied by faith. When we want to know about a person’s religion, we usually never ask what religion you follow. We always ask, what faith do you follow? In what have you got faith? So, the person might say, “Oh, I am of the Christian faith, or the Hindu faith, or the Buddhist faith”, but that is also done mentally. Because I was brought up in a Hindu home, or I was brought up in a Christian home, or a Muslim home, so, therefore, I am a Muslim. And because tradition has taught me this, I condition my mind to have faith in the things taught to me. That is not faith. That is just the primary step of belief. Because my parents, elders, church minister or priest have said such a thing, I assume that I have faith, while in reality, it is not. Faith can only be had by experience, and you have to have some experience to have faith. You can describe the heat in the fire, and you could even start believing that the fire is hot. But only when you are nearer to the fire and feel the heat, experience the heat, then you have faith within yourself that fire has heat. So, belief, trust, and then comes faith. But that is not the end and aim. WE STRIVE FOR THE WISDOM THAT IS WITHIN US These are but just steps on the ladder. The goal to reach is to know. To know and knowingness is not on the level of the mind because the mind does not know anything. There is a remarkable difference between acquired knowledge and wisdom. What we strive for is the wisdom within us, and once we know, faith strengthens, belief strengthens, and trust becomes an actuality and not just a conception or presumption. So man progresses – belief, trust, faith into knowingness, that is what we are after. When we find the deep peace within ourselves, having experienced the peace, we know there is that peace and that peace cannot be analysed. You cannot believe in peace until you have experienced it. So, the next stage is the experiential level. Belief has intellectual and mind levels, while knowingness has an experiential level. You believe that chilli is robust; it burns
The Observer Within: Meditation and the Path to Tranquillity
Acceptance, Awareness, Bliss, Brahman, Conscious Mind, Divine, Divinity, Eternal, Evolution, Evolve, God, Grace, Humility, I am That I am, Joy, Karma, Kingdom of Heaven within, Law of Nature, Law of opposites, Light, Love, Manifestation, Manifestor, Meditation, Mental Patternings, Mind, One-pointedness, Oneness, Peace, Purity, Relative World, Samskaras, Scriptures, Self, Spiritual Path, Spiritual Practices, Subconscious, Superconscious, The Absolute, The Three Gunas, Tranquillity, Universe, Yahweh, Yoga
RISING TO THE SUPERCONSCIOUS LEVEL, YOU BURN ALL THE SEEDS OF KARMA In many organizations, spiritual practices deal solely with the mind. This is good, but then there is one danger. You might be shifting energies from one sector of the mind to another sector of the same mind. But have you dissipated them? You cannot annihilate them. You can throw them off. And yet, if you are still amidst this chaos, the law of cause and effect will be in force. But there is a way where you can go beyond cause and effect, and all these practices we do are widening our awareness; they are methods that would remove the cause and the impact and reach the state of causelessness. And when the cause is gone, the effect cannot be there. You see the great hope the human has. I do not know how many humans we have here, but I assume there are some. Ninety-nine percent of people are ruled by the animal instincts from which they have just passed through. Children in Form 6 will always be influenced by the teachings found in Form 5. But this all has to be discarded, not discarded violently, for the more you try to discard, the more suppression occurs. Inhibitions take place, and they multiply forever. Like many institutions in America, people say that you have to live through all this. You have created specific causes, and you are subjected to the effects thereof. This is very true on a relative level, but you can rise above that, and by rising above that to the superconscious level, you burn all the seeds of karma. All the seeds of karma can be burned up instantaneously. The law of cause and effect is also a law of opposites, and once one goes beyond the law of opposites, once one transcends the “Three Gunas” and then performs an action, that action is non-binding. MAKE YOUR SUFFERING AN OFFERING TO YOURSELF BY ACCEPTING IT So, the question is, what are we going to dwell on? Are we going to think of the chaos in the world all the time? Are we going to wallow in self-pity of the chaos within us? When thinking of turmoil, chaos, chaos, you bring unto yourself all the chaotic forces of the universe. You become a magnet of chaos, drawing to you all the chaotic filings, iron filings, and chaos in the world. So “arise, awake, and stop until the goal is reached.” Vivekananda has said this. So, what is the solution? What is the solution to escape this whirlpool of chaos you are enmeshed in? Like the silkworm weaving, weaving, weaving, and getting entangled in the silk it has woven. You do not need to go through lifetimes upon lifetimes to reap what you have sown. You do not need to go through lifetimes to suffer the effects of the causes. Once you, through spiritual practices, find the secret of going beyond cause and effect, you are going beyond time and space, for cause and effect has validity only in time and space. When you, through spiritual practices, enter the realms of timelessness, then cause and effect vanish. As long as you are enmeshed in the chaos, cause and effect will be a reality, and you will have to suffer the consequences. Why not make that suffering into an offering? For there lies the secret that you offer yourself. To what? To whom do you offer yourself? Forget the God. None of you know who God is. It is beyond all analysis. You can only talk about it. You do not know it, and how can you offer that to someone you do not know everything about? So, let the offering be to yourself. Offer the suffering to yourself, meaning that you are accepting it. During this week, I said there is no suffering at this very moment. No one is suffering now. You are using the instances and incidences of the past, which are gone, and it is the memory you have of the pains and pleasures that give you pains and pleasures now. Otherwise, the projection of the past into the future, filled with expectations, makes you suffer. And yet, at this very moment, children of God, you are not suffering. You, children of Divinity, are suffering memories; memories make you suffer. So, in the stillness of meditation and spiritual practice, you are in the present, not in the past, and not in the past projecting itself into the future. CHAOS IS SELF-CREATED BY YOUR CONSCIOUS MIND AND YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND This can be done through developing awareness. What is awareness? You are aware, only very limitedly, because what you have activated is only the conscious level of the mind, which is only 5 percent of your mind. Twenty-five percent is the repository of all the samskaras, all the impressions you have gained, and 70 percent is the area of the superconscious level of the mind. Like the iceberg, nine-tenths of it is below the water, and you only see a little above it. That is where we dwell. Through meditation and spiritual practices, you dive deeper within. You bypass the conditioning of the conscious mind; you bypass the memory box or the repository of the events of the entire universe since beginless time. You bypass that and reach an area where neither good nor bad exists. At the finest relative level, the superconscious level, which I have said before, the personal God, which is so clear and near the Absoluteness of existence, makes itself an instrument to reflect that energy without attributes. It reflects through the clarity of the superconscious level to overcome all the samskaras, impressions, causes, and effects that your conscious mind perceives and finds the world and yourself chaotic. You see chaos where chaos does not exist. There is no chaos—your interpretation, your conscious mind that is the chaos, and no one else. So, this is self-created by your conscious
Beyond Chaos: Finding Stillness Amidst the Motion of Life
Awareness, Buddha, Christ, Compassion, Conscious Mind, Divine, Divinity, Eternal, Force, God, Happiness, Joy, Kindness, Kingdom of Heaven within, Krishna, Law of opposites, Light, Manifestation, Manifestor, Meditation, Mental Patternings, Mind, Omnipresent, Peace, Philosophy, Purity, Relative World, Samskaras, Self, Spiritual Practices, Subconscious, Superconscious, The Absolute, The Three Gunas, Tranquillity, Unfoldment, Universe
THE ETERNAL CONTRACTION AND EXPANSION IS THE SEED CAUSE OF THE UNIVERSE You say the world is in chaos. Who says the world is in turmoil? Who is the sayer of these words that the world is in chaos? You say with your mind that the world is in turmoil because your perception tells you that the world is in chaos. With an altered perception through spiritual practices, you transcend the chaos. You go beyond the chaos where no chaos remains, and only peace remains. Essentially, there is nothing else but Sat-Chit-Ananda all the time. Total existence. Total knowledge. Total joy. But your mind is the factor that distorts this knowledge, and you find chaos because the mind is only capable of looking at the surface of things and not below it. You go to the seaside, and what do you observe? The waves are going up and down and up and down. And yet, within that chaos, there is a system if you look more closely. The waves are flowing to the shore and not away from the beach. So even if the mind perceives chaos and the turbulence of the waves, why can the mind not perceive that even in chaos, there is a system, a chaotic system? When things function within this so-called perception of yours, you will find that in that system, there remains a tranquil factor: precision. But the mind is so confused that it does not see the ever-onward flow of the waves, eternally coming to the shore. And there, the waves subside on the shore. Yet, when your awareness grows more, through spiritual practices, you will observe the surface waves and dive deeper to perceive the calmness that lies beneath. You talk of wars, you talk of pollution, you talk of miseries, you speak of unhappiness; who suffers this? Are you the sufferer? No, you are not. The mental formations and the patterns that you have created over the ages or even in this lifetime are the ones that suffer. Who is the one that suffers? What is the basis of its reality? How accurate is the sufferer, and how real is the suffering? That is the question that we have to ask. As long as man dwells in the conscious mental spheres of life, there will always be this conflict, and without this conflict, this world, as I have said, can never function. There will always be contraction and expansion; there will always be unification and diversification throughout eternity. For that very motion created by contraction and expansion is the seed cause of this universe. THROUGH MEDITATION AND SPIRITUAL PRACTICES, YOU CAN RISE ABOVE CHAOS But where do you place yourself in practical life? Do you put yourself amidst the chaos you observe around you, or do you set yourself within the center of yourself? Despite the chaos that your conscious mind observes, and within the limitations of the observation, you are beyond it all, where the accurate observer observes the small observer observing. There lies the secret of your tranquillity. This world will continue as it has gone on for ages and ages. Since primitive times, there has been chaos, and chaos is nothing but conflict: conflicting forces, opposing forces; where there is day, there will be night; when there is rain, there will be sunshine. They are two sides of the same coin. But why just observe the sides of the coin instead of taking the coin as a whole? Split the coin and go to try to buy a loaf of bread. You cannot. You could not take the heads alone or bring the tails alone. You have to take both. So, if the world is in chaos, does it mean you have to be part and parcel of it? There will always be chaos. It is unending. That is the honest Maya, the play of this universe; without it, this universe could never exist. The law of opposites has to be there, and the only thing you can do is go beyond the law of opposites, and that one does through meditation and spiritual practices. You will feel chaos when you are down here amidst the chaos. But when you rise above the chaos, there is no chaos. DO NOT CHANGE THE WORLD, CHANGE YOURSELF One of our meditators was telling me a story some while ago. She said, “Guruji, in my meditation, you and I were traveling through the Alps, and the mountains loomed so large, the pass was so narrow and slippery. I was driving, and I was thinking, “How are we going to get through the mountains?” And suddenly the view changed,” she said, “and we were in an airplane high up.” And then she asked, “Guruji, what are those little things down there?” “Those are the mountains and peaks that you were speaking about.” So, we have to rise above chaos and not be entangled in the web of chaos. You will have these factors forever existing as far as relative life is concerned. For relativity, the manifestation of the Manifestor creates this motion, and without motion, nothing could ever exist in the sense of what we regard to be existence. On the relative plane, everything is authentic: a toothache is accurate, a toothache is actual, pleasures are real, and pains are real to you. The three gunas control this chaos, which is part and parcel of the imbalance created through the non-tranquillity of the gunas, and this will forever be there. Many reformers have come: Krishna, Buddha, Mahavir, and Christ. And yet, despite their teachings, there is still chaos. There was chaos during those times; today, there is still chaos, perhaps in a different form. There was lust, greed, avarice, and covetousness; it was there and is still here today. So, it is not possible on a collective scale when people talk of getting rid of the chaos in this world. But it is likely on the individual level, where you reach
Acceptance and Love: Awakening the Heart’s Infinite Power
ACCEPTANCE SHOULD CONTAIN THE FORCE AND THE POWER OF THE HEART Acceptance of a thing is usually first created by the mind, where you accept a particular situation with the mind but not necessarily with a blind or biased mind. Acceptance should be done in its true form and with true analysis. Then only is the mental acceptance of any validity. Anything you accept with your mind today, you can un-accept or reject the next day if there is no true understanding of the matter. So, it is not only the mind that is at play, but more important is the heart that is at play. Acceptance should not only be with the mind, but it should contain the heart’s force and power. It has to have that feeling that I feel; I accept this flower to be beautiful. Today, I might like this flower, and tomorrow, I will get tired of that flower. So what use is that acceptance? But if I thoroughly feel that I accept this flower to be beautiful, then tomorrow, that flower will remain attractive, and the day after, it will still be beautiful. That is true acceptance. WITH ACCEPTANCE THERE MUST BE DETERMINATION People often accept things not by strength but by weakness, like cowardice. They say, “Oh well, nothing can be done about it, so okay.” If I am selling a box of chocolates for £2 and cannot find any customer, I sell it for $1, which costs me, and I accept the pound. But there is no happiness in it because I know I have put in a lot of work, put in a lot of trouble, I have traveled around knocking door to door to sell my chocolates, and now because I need to feed my wife and children at home I accept the pound. I am making no profit, but I need that to take home some bread. It is also a kind of acceptance. But, with what feeling do you accept. That is the essential and crucial feeling that “Oh well, it is the will of God. I have done my best.” Then, that acceptance has some fruition. It has some value; otherwise, it is just cowardice. It is a retreat. I lost my job or shop, but I did not want to. But because you are placed in such circumstances, you have no other way out. But in the beginning, if you accept the situation that I will lose my shop or my job, but I will work very hard to create another problem, a job that is better or a better shop, then that acceptance can bear fruit. So, with acceptance, there must be determination. The entire India was ruined and is in poverty because of acceptance, a stupid kind of acceptance. They talk of Karma, “Oh, you know what is meant for me, you know will come.” That is absolute rubbish. The fields are left untilled; the agricultural products are not there—so much hunger. Factories are going idle, yet there are millions and millions of people there, but they will not make any effort, and that is not Karma. Karma means action. You do something about it. Acceptance of the present situation is okay, but you have to be determined to better the situation. You do not go to sponge on others. But if you see that you fulfill your obligations, acceptance is worthwhile. Otherwise, it is a retreat. You are cornered in the street by a few hoodlums. So, what are you going to do? Stand still in the corner; you cannot get away and let those two hoodlums smash you up. No. You will fight. That should be the attitude. You accept that I am in a situation from which I cannot escape, but I am not going to stand still and let them bugger me up. I am going to fight. A TRUE ACCEPTOR IS A HERO! A MAN, NOT A MOUSE I had the experience as a young schoolboy where I was going through a lonely street, and there were two young hoodlums there who saw me coming up the road, and they would take off from me whatever few pennies I had on me. But when I saw them standing there, I would not cross over the road and walk on the other side. I put my hand in my pocket to make them feel I had some weapon, and I walked right through between them. And they never touched me! You accept a situation, and you do something about it. Otherwise, you are a coward. I can give you another example. One Saturday afternoon, I worked late in the office until about 4 o’clock. There was a lot of work to be done. And I said, “Oh, I will leave lunch out today; I will have supper. The work must be done”. In Cape Town, the streets are bare on a Saturday afternoon, and the streets are empty. I had to walk through one road, which was empty. And there were three of these hoodlums and gangsters that saw me. I am always well dressed, and they thought well, here, we could get something. I had about thirty Rand in my pocket. So, they pushed me into a shop doorway and riffled my pocket. I said, “Take it”. They took it and started running off. Then I shouted to them, “Hey, you have forgotten my watch, you have forgotten my fountain pen. Why not take that also?” They came back, and one said to the other in Afrikaans, “Heer ist ein anderes souter mann” which means he is a different kind of man. And they gave me back my wallet and walked away. I accepted the situation, but I did something about it. Do you see how acceptance works? Otherwise, you just take things. My child is naughty, so I will just accept the child is naughty. No! You acknowledge that the child is naughty, but you teach him.
The Illusion of Belief: Finding Divinity Through Direct Experience
WHY BELIEVE? Non-believing has as its essence believing. You will never have a non-believer in this world anywhere, ever. Everyone believes in something. You think you will have a puncture and carry a spare wheel. You look at yourself in the mirror and think or feel that you look so pretty, and you might be ugly. So, you believe. Belief is nothing else but a mental conception. You always believe in believing, non-believing; you still believe in thinking. So where is the difference? No difference at all. But when you apply that word to theology, you say, “I believe in God” it is a different thing altogether, and the essence of itself is the same thing. I believe in God. How can I believe in God when I have not seen, known, or experienced Him? Is that not non-believing? Is that not just a mental concept conjured up in your mind into a fictitious figure? And He would be fictitious because you have not experienced Him. It is fiction, created by yourself and no one else. Yes, there have been your parents, your teachers and all the various churches or what have you. They say, “Believe, believe, believe, and you go to Heaven.” Do you go to Heaven by believing? I ask you this question. I believe in Heaven, okay, so because I believe in Heaven, I will go to Heaven. Yes, you will, fictitiously, in your imagination; because there is no Heaven and no Hell. What you make of life is all here. Heaven is here, and hell is here. And the other dimension after you leave this body has nothing to do with Heaven or Hell, but only that which you have created in your mind because of your belief. THE FORERUNNER OF BELIEF SHOULD ALWAYS BE EXPERIENCE The belief system is sound but not so much applicable to this age. In this time of high technology, everything has to be proven. If I tell you, “Believe me that you are not sitting separately away from me, you are attached to me, and billions and billions of atoms attach you to me.” You would say, “Guruji is talking rubbish.” But if I bring you a very high-powered microscope to show you all those atoms attaching us, you see with your own eyes. Then you will say, “Guruji, that is true.” For nothing is apart – everything is just a mass. I personally also have beliefs, but my beliefs are founded on experience. So, the forerunner of belief should always be experience. If you wear a size thirty-six dress, you will not go into a shop believing that it will fit you. You go into that dressing room, and you will try it on and see if it works well. Then you will buy that dress. If these things can be done in tiny little things like dresses, suits, pants, and shoes, why can they not be done on a higher level? Try it on. Try God on you. Experience Him as it fits you, and then take Him, and He does not charge any money, unlike Woolworths, Harrods, or any of those places. Try Him on, fit Him on, and He will fit so snugly to you because He is like these stretchable socks; you know that anywhere you can buy a pair of socks, and they stretch to the size of your feet. THE ACCEPTANCE OF DIVINITY IS BASED ON EXPERIENCE Belief is always constituted by one’s personal ideologies and personal conceptions of the thing you believe. The acceptance of Divinity is not dependent on belief. No, the acceptance of Divinity is based on experience. When you experience within yourself that Divine force permeating you, you can never deny it. After you have eaten and tasted honey, you can never deny the sweetness of that honey, and you have tasted it. Meanwhile, if it stands on a store shelf or in your kitchen unopened and you tell all your friends, “Ah, you know that is honey, it is very sweet.” But you that have not experienced the sweetness of the honey, what right have you to tell another that that honey on the shelf is sweet? And those are the false prophets that the Bible talked about. They have not experienced anything yet and want to speak of the glory, greatness, and beautifulness of love and God. Why did you not talk about cabbages, cauliflowers, or carrots that you have tasted and eaten, boiled, fried, barbecued or curried? Talk about that. Say, “Yes, I did a curry dish from vegetables, and I put in a pinch of garam masala and a pinch of all the other stuff that goes in it.” Talk about that. THERE IS NO ETERNAL DAMNATION Never talk about anything you have not personally experienced. That is the greatest mistake our churches are making. They say, “Believe in this and believe in that and you shall be saved. Otherwise, you will land up in eternal damnation.” Damn, those buggers. Because there is no eternal damnation. How can damnation ever be eternal? If damnation is eternal, then Divinity is also eternal, and how can the two co-exist? Divinity and damnation, how can they co-exist? Because there is only one eternity, and two things cannot exist eternally together. When it comes to eternity, there is only oneness all the time. That is the biggest mistake all our churches, temples, mosques, and synagogues have made. When they cannot get you in their folds with love, they try to contact you with the threat of eternal damnation. If you do not pay your dues to the church, synagogue, or temple, you are damned. You are damned. Now the word damned is perfect. To dam up water means the water cannot flow. It stays in the same place. There is no flowing, and you stagnate. It is only flowing water that does not stagnate; that is how the word “dam” or “damnation” originated. IN THE SPIRITUAL PATH, NOTHING
The Myth of Collective Enlightenment: Why Enlightenment Belongs to the Individual
AN AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT? Some Teachers have promised an Age of Enlightenment where the entire world will be enlightened. If we study known history, this has not happened so far, but these teachers saying there will be an Age of Enlightenment have not told us how many million years. There can never be a collective Age of Enlightenment, but there can be enlightenment for the individual. Our perspective or view of the continuity and this universe continuum is minimal. As the highly evolved beings pass off from this little section we are looking at, in the process of evolution, there are lower beings or people at a lower stage of evolution coming in this spectrum. It is a continuous flow, and this constant flow has to be there because an Age of Enlightenment on Earth would mean stagnation, and this entire universe will collapse. ENLIGHTENMENT CAN HAPPEN ON AN INDIVIDUAL SCALE ONLY There must be a motion to keep this universe going, for everything is in motion. As I have said, the universe is nothing but vibration, and vibration is motion. So those of us who reach enlightenment will pass this little sector onto another sector, but from the other end, there would be entering those that require the development and the evolution that those few have reached and passed across. So therefore, in this same motion, in this same cycle, all these various forms of energies entering from one end at a grosser level and leaving at the other end at a finer level will forever continue. So, enlightenment is there, but it can only be achieved on an individual scale, not collectively, where the world’s entire population will become enlightened. There will still be much more technological progress, but that has nothing to do with enlightenment. Enlightenment means becoming one with Divinity and one with Divinity you assume the form of Divinity, and up to now, this little planet has never contained all Gods. So, this cycle will forever exist. EVEN INCARNATIONS CAN NOT GO AGAINST THE LAWS OF NATURE According to the Sanskritists, there are three Gunas in this energy, Tamas, Rajas and Sattva. Tamas is inertia or darkness; Rajas is the activating force; and Sattva is light. This can also be termed the conscious mind, the subconscious mind and the Superconscious Mind. So, the duty of man in his way is to reach from the little conscious through the subconscious to the Superconscious, which is at the finest relative level of existence. So, when he gets the finest relative level of existence, he passes beyond relativity, meaning the Absolute. It is a fallacy to believe that this world will become enlightened in totality. There have been great men, like Mahavir, Mohammed, Buddha, Krishna, Christ, and Incarnations on earth if you wish to call them that, for they were that, and yet they could not transform this entire world and bring it to an Age of Enlightenment. Do you think they did not have the power to do that, a real incarnation represented in an embodied form, a representation of the entirety of the universe? Could they not achieve that? But even incarnations cannot go against the laws of nature. They can give it a bit of a push, fine, but they cannot go against the laws of nature because the universe has to function within its rules, and there are laws within laws, cycles within cycles within cycles. So, assuming that this entire world will be enlightened is invalid. But the man on his level can achieve full enlightenment and become one with the Absolute. And not only that, whilst still in an embodied form, he can experience all the levels of existence from the mundane, conscious, sensuous, or sensual level right through the subconscious and the Superconscious and infuse all that with the Absolute, the Absolute existence that Absolute energy. He can do that, but that happens on an individual level. BIRDS OF A FEATHER FLOCK TOGETHER When a person reaches that stage, he will automatically draw those of like mind to himself. A very highly evolved person will always draw to himself those that are also evolved to a specific measure that you can be very, very sure of. In one of the Eastern languages, there is a saying that the guru will only have chelas according to what the guru is like. So, you have some gurus, sham gurus, in this world, racketeers, business people, money-makers, and they draw to themselves like people. “Birds of a feather flock together” is another old saying. The point here is that if one person reaches enlightenment, he will draw to himself people that may not be enlightened but that are on the path and relatively near. They are well on the path or grounded, let us say that, and the enlightened man helps those. Did Jesus not have the power to have the entire world as his followers at that time when he was alive? Did he not have the power? Why did he only have five hundred very, very devoted chelas? Because those five hundred had a certain evolutionary status, they could be near him. And this happened with all the great incarnations in the world, all the true Teachers in the world. AN AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT WILL NEVER HAPPEN So, when a person reaches enlightenment, it does not mean the entire world will be enlightened. It is an impossibility. But those attracted with love and devotion to that particular personage are somewhat ready for a higher stage, and such a personage has to pay personal attention to everyone attracted to him. This attraction is not mental; it is a spark that comes from within that you cannot help. The filings cannot help being attracted to the magnet; it is a natural force. So, let us forget the idea of the whole world becoming enlightened at one time; that will never happen. That can never happen, or else the entire continuum will break, everything