When Jesus went around and saw suffering, he wept. In the case of Jesus, it was not the ego that wept. When you and I weep, we might be weeping because our egos are hurt in some way or the other. In the case of Jesus, the very quality of that consciousness is love and compassion. We have to accept that, and the compassion that wells up within an enlightened man makes him weep for the suffering of others. A self-realised man is a man who has identified himself as the meanest creature to the highest evolved man, and in that identification, the tears he cries are your tears. The laughter he laughs is your laughter. He eats the food you eat because he is absolutely and completely identified with your very being. There is no separation. All duality has ceased. There is no you and me, or me and mine. There is us, and that is the quality of the way of life of a realised man. Therefore, the realised man would suffer, and his sufferings are not his own. His sufferings are yours. When he sees you suffer, he feels the very heat of the tears that pour through your eyes because he is you, and you are him.
THE SELF-REALISED MAN IS YOU, AND YOU ARE HIM
The self-realised man can say, “I and my Father are one.” When he says that “I and my Father are one,” it means that I have now identified myself with Divinity, and by identification, it also means that the small “I,” the ego I, has merged away in the Big “I”. When the balloon is pricked, the air in the little balloon becomes one with the universe outside, and in that identification, the realised man feels all the suffering of everything. Yet, the realised man, too, can stand apart from the suffering because he is beyond the law of opposites. What makes him suffer is compassion and love, which are divine qualities. Because when a man is devoid of love and compassion, he ceases to be a man; he is an animal.
Within us, everything works more or less in a trinity. Within man, we have the animal, we have the man, and we have the God-man. Christ the incarnation, or Krishna or Rama, were the Godmen on Earth. Even going beyond the stage of Godmen, they became God unto themselves because they had such a significant identification that they could hold the whole of Divinity within themselves within their Hearts. When the whole of Divinity can be captured within ourselves, we are non-apart from Divinity. Then all duality ceases, and we live a life of oneness, the end and aim of all life. So, when we say we came from Divinity and go back home to Divinity, we become identified with Divinity, and identification with Divinity means becoming Divinity. That is when we jump into the fire and become the fire and become the warm heat.
IN NON-ATTACHMENT, A BEAUTIFUL TRANQUILLITY IS ACHIEVED
The state beyond the law of opposites is usually termed bliss. When one experiences that blissful state and lives in that blissful state, he can still be within the boundaries. Being an embodied being, he still lives within the limits of the law of opposites. Yet, he becomes unaffected by the law of opposites. He would be non-attached.
There is a difference between detachment and non-attachment. A detached person is a person who builds a wall around him, which means that he extricates himself from society. He escapes society because he does not have the strength and integration to be integrated into society. That is detachment, but non-attachment is such a quality that you can move around in the law of opposites and yet not be affected, so that you would be able to maintain a state of equilibrium, you would not be elated by praise and blame would not make you sink low under the carpet.
A beautiful tranquillity is achieved whereby a person lives truly to himself, functional to himself and helpful to others. To achieve this state of tranquillity means to reach emotional maturity. Most of us think that we are emotionally mature, but not really so. Many of us are just grown-up children; we remain children. We have to achieve that state of tranquillity founded on a blissful experience, which is non-attachment. When we realise this principle in practical living, we would say, “We are in the world but not of the world.”
That is the ideal state of life whereby we are untouched by the law of opposites, yet we live in the law of opposites. This might sound paradoxical, but it sounds paradoxical only to the analytical intellect. The intellect weighs the pros and cons within its limitations. We have said before that man knows only ten per cent of his mind or lives only ten per cent of his mind. But when we realise what non-attachment is, then we experience it. The experiential value of the Heart, which is appreciated by the mind to a certain extent, will lead us to that state where we become absolutely unaffected and yet not cold, warm, not cold. And to repeat, we live in the world; we are of the world, in the world, but we are not of the world.
IF WE WANT TO BECOME LOVEABLE, WE HAVE TO BECOME LOVING
People have become tired of groping externally. People have become weary of trying to find true happiness through materiality. Because of this need, not because of genuine seeking, but because of materiality’s frustration, they have been forced to seek within.
The most crucial thing man wants today is love, and if you examine it very deeply, you will see that man wants love because love gives man or woman the circumstance of security. We say that I am not loved, and why am I not loved because I am not loving? By producing harmony within ourselves through meditational practices, and with this opening of the heart factor, the Heart, the core of the human personality, is opened up so that love flows. When we start loving, then people cannot help but love us. So, if we want to become loveable, we must become loving. That is what we do, and we change the world that way; we change our immediate atmosphere or environment.
THE QUEST FOR HAPPINESS IS ALWAYS THERE
The purpose of meditation is to experience true joy and happiness because we could never know the Divine by analysis. The finite mind is incapable of appreciating or experiencing infinity. Because the quest is there, the search is there, and even a child searches for that happiness. Suppose parents can create a greater harmony within themselves; a greater harmony can be made by reflection, by the influence exerted by the parent in the home. In that case, a child too will benefit. In a house where the mother and father fight daily, the child will be brought up in an environment of total antagonism, fighting, squabbling, and quarrelling. What are we doing to that child’s mind? We are actively harming that child by this. As we said, the nature of the flower is to grow beautiful, but at the same time, it also enhances the garden’s beauty. Charity begins at home. So, if we can better ourselves, our home life will become happier, our work life will become happier, and the whole environment will benefit because we have tried to improve ourselves. That is our purpose in life.
When an adult finds harmony within himself, that harmony can be imparted, and the understanding can be imparted to a child. Why do we seek happiness? Why do we want it? We want happiness because inherent within us is Divinity, and the nature of Divinity is bliss. Because our inner nature, the inner core of humans, is bliss, we do everything to try to experience that bliss. It is man’s quest, consciously or unconsciously, to want to experience that bliss, which we interpret as happiness.
Even a little infant too wants happiness. You have a little child; you leave it alone in a room, go out, and the child will cry. The child cries because the child wants the security of the mother. Why does the child want the security of the mother? Because it feels happy when the mother is there. So, from the smallest infant to the most grown-up person, the quest is there; the search is forever there for that happiness which is inherent in us. So even if a child cannot rationalise, it is not essential. The search is forever in the child, too, and no person in this world could ever find happiness through rationalising. No person could ever find happiness through the limited human mind because every situation would have pros and cons.
If an accident occurs and there are four people around witnessing the accident, and if the four witnesses are brought up into court, each one would have a different interpretation because their interpretations would be on the level of the mind. So, the mind is a fickle animal, and that fickle animal called the mind could never experience what true happiness is. True happiness, true joy, and true bliss can only be had experientially.
WE AIM TO SET PEOPLE ON THE PATH TO SELF-FULFILMENT
Everything existing is vibration, either in a subtle form or congealed, compacted form. In meditation, a Guru can hear a person’s vibration. Everyone does not need to have a mantra practice. Still, if that mantra is allocated and based upon the person’s vibration, then his progress in life would be more harmonious and harmony-producing. With centres in many parts of the world and thousands of meditators, we have found rapid progress with people. We have seen greater and greater happiness. We do not promise miracles where a person would become self-enlightened overnight. But the idea is to set a person on the proper path of self-fulfilment. That is, the aim is to stretch a helping hand to a person so that he could be in the right direction to reach home to his Maker. That is the purpose, and if the goal is joy, then the path, too, must be joyful. Always, always. And this is produced by proper understanding. Proper methods and proper understanding are essential.
These techniques can be absorbed and appreciated by people with high intellectual qualities and those with no intellectual abilities. It is a technique, a straightforward scientific method that everyone can do, man, woman, or child, and it is not dependent on one’s intellect. If self-integration depended on intellect, then every university professor of philosophy, and there are thousands of them in the world, should be self-realised, but they are not. The desired quality is a natural desire, an actual want to seek and find. Is it not said in the Bible, “Seek, and thou shalt find”? Is it not said in the Bible, too, that “To enter the Kingdom of Heaven, you should become childlike”? In that state, the mind is not so important. However, a person with a sophisticated intellectual mind wants some understanding, which is given to those who need it, and this is one of the purposes of our courses.
Little children learn practices without trouble, so it is not only for the adult. We have found great success with little children. Children have particular practices where they develop greater concentration in their schoolwork and find greater joy in mixing with their friends. I know of a little girl who had a friend in school, and this other little girl, I think her name was Mandy, used to make this little girl’s life a misery in class, and she never used to enjoy going because of this child. When she started doing her little Child Practice, she began developing such a love for Mandy that her problems were over.
A TRUE GURU WILL BE ABLE TO FIND THE RIGHT PRACTICES FOR A PERSON TO PRACTISE
I like to satisfy everyone and make everyone feel happy. Is that not our purpose in life, to make everyone feel satisfied? Please, the mind, expand the Heart and become one with oneself. That is the purpose.
A genuine Guru can see the entire psyche of the human being, and the perception will be such that the evolutionary stage of the person can be measured, and all the imbalances within a person can be diagnosed and evaluated. We believe we are balanced people, but 99.99% of people are imbalanced because people are not happy. The self-realised man is the man who has experienced total happiness and total self-integration. So, by being self-realised, the Guru can see where the imbalance is, what causes the imbalance, and what practices should be given. The person’s evolutionary status is also considered, and practice is presented to help the person find greater harmony and self-integration. That is the mechanics of it. It goes far deeper into other psychic levels, but that has to be experienced and not explained.
Let us take sugar, for example. We can break up sugar into its chemical components and say this, and that constitutes sugar, but we could never explain sweetness. We have to taste it to know what sweetness is, and these evaluations are done that way. For example, please write a letter to a pharmaceutical company requesting their catalogue. You will receive their whole list of drugs, and any child can memorise all those medicines, but it is only the doctor who knows what medicine to give to who and for what purpose.
So, it is a specialised field which a Guru has acquired through practice, perhaps not only in this life but in many, many other lives, and he uses that because of the love and compassion within him. He uses that to help his fellow beings, and he feels that it is his duty in life, and he wishes to fulfil that duty. The backbone, the background of it, is love and compassion because when you feel that love, you want to share it. You cannot keep it to yourself. Like a poet, when he writes a poem, he writes it because he cannot help writing it. He wants to express himself. These are the methods.
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang UK 1976 – 08
