A talk to new disciples

My path is the path of love, devotion and surrender. If you can love God, the next thing is to devote your life to God. Then, if you devote yourself to God you will come to realise that you have to surrender to Him all that you have. What do you have? Ignorance. And what does God have? Compassion-Light, infinite Light. As a human being I am a meaningless, insignificant creature, but as a realised soul I am something. On the strength of my highest realisation of the Supreme, I am telling you that each human being has to feel that what he has and what he is is ignorance, a bundle of ignorance; and what God has and what God is is infinite Light. Just exchange your possessions for God's possessions. God is ready to exchange but human beings are not; this is the problem.

Everybody who is aspiring will realise God sooner or later — either in this life, in the next life or in a few incarnations. But if we follow a wrong path, then it will take us many, many incarnations to realise God. Nobody can compel an individual to come to this Centre, far from it. Even if I go to someone's place and beg him, "Please come, please come," he will just kick me. He will say, "What is this fool doing?" It is on your own that you have come here. I am most grateful to you just because you have felt something here that is drawing you like a magnet. You must be sure that in this Centre you are most welcome, and that my heart's door is always open to you.

If you accept this path it means that you are giving me the opportunity — or authority, should I say — to take responsibility for your inner life. If you consciously give me the opportunity and authority to take responsibility for your life, naturally I shall put you in my boat to carry you to the shores of the golden Beyond. This is my promise to you and to the Supreme.

If you are going to be my disciple, if you feel that this is the place for you, then there are a few things I would like to mention with your kind permission. The first thing I wish to tell you about is regularity. You can show your aspiration in your regularity. You don't have to give me any money, not even a cent. I will have nothing to say whether or not you want to give a love-offering. My only fee is aspiration. If you have no aspiration, I am really sorry. If you cannot come to the Centre regularly, I am really sorry.

Then if you want to live in God's world, if you want to follow my path, you have to be totally normal. When you enter into God's Consciousness you will see that He is very normal, very simple. It is we who are all complex and crooked. So please be normal.

I see some of you have the tendency to lead a hippie life. Many, many times in the past I have spoken about hippies, and I wish to make it very clear to you that I have nothing against hippies. Hippies are also God's children. I have come to love the world, not to destroy the world. I have come to love all. But one thing you have to know is what kind of life you want to live. We can never say that all hippies are bad. No, I have seen quite a few hippies who have genuine, sincere aspiration. Again, unfortunately there are many I have come across who don't want to aspire, who are very arrogant and stubborn, who want to break everything, crush everything; they want to destroy the world. With that type of hippie I cannot get any results spiritually. I have some disciples who were formerly hippies. Now they are totally transformed. They have told me that there was a time when they knew what hell was and now they know what Heaven is.

Men should please keep their hair short and not wear a beard or a moustache. Do not complicate your life. Also please feel the necessity of bathing. Please take a bath or proper shower at least once a day. Water signifies consciousness, purest consciousness. What happens when you bathe is that water immediately takes you to the purest consciousness within. If you don't take a bath at least once a day, then your spiritual consciousness will be diminished.

My path is the path of acceptance, not rejection. If you want to love the world because God is inside the world, if you really want the divine nectar which we call delight, Ananda, then you have to give up drugs. It is for your own good that I am telling you this. When you were ignorant, when you were a child of two or three, you used to eat mud, sand, clay and so forth. You didn't know any better, so your parents had to prevent you from eating it. But now, if somebody gives you a quantity of sand or mud, will you take it? No, because you have developed wisdom. You know that it will harm your system. In the spiritual life it is the same thing. When you are spiritually very young, your spiritual father, your Guru, prevents you from doing the wrong thing, from entering into the wrong path. Then, when you become a little advanced and enter into the deeper realms of spirituality, you will develop a little wisdom. There you will taste true delight, highest delight, transcendental Delight. Then you can make the comparison between that delight and the so-called joy you get from drugs.

I happen to be the spiritual leader of this Centre. My path, I am telling you, is very simple: love, devotion and surrender. If you really love with what I call divine love, then your consciousness will be expanded; but if you constantly indulge in all kinds of human love, emotional love and sex life, then you are only binding yourself. I am not telling you that you have to give up your lower vital life, your sex life, all at once. No, if you do that, it will only destroy your health, destroy your whole inner existence. You have to give it up slowly and steadily. But the day has to come, the divine day has to dawn when you will give it up completely. If you think that sex life and God-realisation go together, then I cannot help you. In that case I am helpless and hopeless, because that is not my realisation. Gradually you have to transcend your sex life because God-realisation and sex-indulgence can never go together.

It is like drinking tea; if you are now taking five cups of tea a day you have to minimise it. For four or five months take only four cups a day. Then, after five or ten months take only three cups a day. In that way you gradually give it up until finally you have no necessity for it. In the course of time — say five, ten, twenty or thirty years — you have to give up the lower vital life completely if you hope ever to realise God. If you don't want to realise God, if you just want to be satisfied with a few inner experiences, then I wish to say that without giving up sex life altogether you can have a few experiences. But for realisation, highest realisation, God-realisation, you have to give up sex. As I said before, that does not mean here and now, all at once. I will never expect that. Your aspiration will tell you when to give up lower vital movements.

I wish to tell you that God is not my monopoly; far from it. God is your Father, my Father, everybody's Father. If I had the aspiration to realise God, what prevents you from realising Him? In what way are you inferior to me? I have two ears, I have one nose, I have two eyes. I have two arms like you. Just because I cried from within I realised God. In your case also, if you cry from within you are bound to realise God. God is not my monopoly. Everybody can realise God; everybody is bound to realise God.

Dearest ones, you have come here and you have seen me, the so-called leader. But I wish to say that I am not the Guru: there is only one Guru and that is the Supreme. I am just an instrument, a conscious instrument of His; I am His representative on earth. When you come to me, your prayer and meditation enters into me and immediately I take it to the highest Supreme. It does not remain in me; it goes right up to the Supreme, the Highest. So if you feel that you are getting direct blessings from the highest Source, the Supreme, and that your prayer and meditation is going directly to the Highest, then you can understand the role that I am playing.

If you want to give me a chance, please give me the full chance. If you have faith in me, I shall not disappoint you, I shall not desert. But if you do not have faith in me, then please do not waste your precious time or my limited time. My time is limited in the outer world because I am dealing with earthbound time; the time that I am spending here with you I cannot spend elsewhere, so I am caught physically. But in the inner world I am dealing with eternal time for the disciples' realisation. In the inner world I can achieve and perform many things in different places at the same time. In the outer world I may be looking at your face with my physical eyes; I can't see anything but what is outwardly here. But with my third eye I can see and do many things.

I have the deepest love for all of you who have just started coming here. Again, I wish to say that if you cannot accept my path, there are many spiritual Masters in this vast world who will embrace you. God has not given me the capacity to deal with those of you who will consciously or deliberately ignore my teachings. I am not competent to accept you. But there are other teachers who will gladly accept you.

Whether you stay with me or go to some other teacher, I wish to say that my good wishes, my love and blessings will be forever with each of you whom I have seen today.