Sometimes you don’t have to stand in front of a person. Suppose you see a beautiful tree. Being an artist, a good artist, naturally you will appreciate and admire the beauty of the tree. Perhaps you will even try to sit at the foot of the tree and paint. But the moment you sit down, all the world’s undivine thoughts, absolutely worst thoughts, may start entering into you. Then you will say, “Why is this happening to me? I came here with a pure mind only to paint, so how is it that all the world’s absolutely undivine, impure thoughts are attacking me?” In this case, you have to know that somebody with a low character had previously sat under the tree and invited the lowest thoughts to enter into him.
Again, it may happen that a saint or a saintly person has sat at the foot of the tree and meditated for some time. Then you come and sit there and you get his vibration. It is not only the physical presence of the person that can affect you. Although his physical presence is no longer there, even the subtle presence of the person who was there before may affect you.
Sometimes, while you are walking along the street, you may find that you can’t account for an experience that you suddenly get. Although there is no flower of any kind, absolutely none, still you get a beautiful, fragrant, flower-like feeling, which is very ethereal and divine. Where does this Heavenly feeling come from? Either a spiritual person has been there or some angels or astral beings happen to be there.
So if you are in front of someone who has more capacity than you have, then his presence may help you to acquire more of that capacity. Although outwardly you are not begging him to give you anything and perhaps he also is not conscious of giving you anything, from his very presence you may get that capacity. If he is embodying intuition or any capacity or quality, then you get it. It is like a magnet: you are pulling the quality from him and it is entering into you. Sometimes if you are pulling from him outwardly, then the ego-world enters and he will not give you anything. But inwardly if you pull, then he will give.The only thing is that in one day you cannot reach your spiritual goal. If anybody tells you that you will attain God-realisation in two hours or in ten days or in one month, then I wish to tell you that he is fooling you. Please do not go to that Master. God-realisation is not so easy. I know, because I have realised God. Nobody can realise God in one day or in one month. It is impossible. Just to get a Master’s degree you need eighteen or twenty years of outer study. To attain God-realisation is infinitely more difficult than to get a Master’s degree.
Again, you should not be doomed to disappointment. Do not think, “Oh, I will never realise God; I have done so many things wrong.” You are God’s child. You have gone through some experiences which you call mistakes. But if you feel that you will never realise God because you did a few things wrong in your life, then you are mistaken. God-realisation is your birthright. You have to forget those unhappy experiences. You must not commit those mistakes any more. From today, if you always do the right thing in both your inner life and your outer life, then you are bound to realise God very soon.
So, on the one hand, don’t be disappointed, discouraged or disheartened; and on the other hand, don’t be over-optimistic and think that in a few weeks you will realise God. Everything has its own time. Slowly and steadily you will reach your goal. In the spiritual life you need aspiration; you need to practise concentration, meditation and contemplation. Then you will realise God. Please be sincere and serious in this matter. Then you will see that God-realisation is not something impossible; far from it. It is possible, practicable and inevitable. But you have to be sincere and follow a specific path. You have to have inner guidance and outer guidance from the Master whom you accept as your leader and guide.Before you accepted the spiritual life, you thought that the life of ignorance, the life of pleasure, was the right life. You looked around and you saw that everybody was enjoying the life of pleasure. You said, “So what is wrong with me? If my friends, my neighbours and everybody is in the same boat, then I don’t want to be an exception.” But once you accept the spiritual life, you feel that the life they are leading is not meant for you. You have got now an inner call, a higher call. You can’t be with them. Yes, you stayed with them for fifteen or twenty years. But now you have got a higher call. Now the time has come for you to follow something else, to do something else.
If you don’t accept problems as such, how are you going to conquer them? You will try to avoid problems, and problems will come to you with more power. Most vehemently they will come and attack you. So you cannot hide from your problems. You have to conquer them here and now. If you wait and say, “No, tomorrow I will gain more strength, and then I will be able to conquer my problems,” I tell you that tomorrow will not come. Each second is a golden opportunity and if you misuse this golden opportunity, then you are strengthening unconsciously the forces of ignorance.
Now, about the life of pleasure. You have to know whether you have received or achieved anything from the life of pleasure. Immediately you will say, “The life of pleasure has given me one thing and that is frustration.” Even if you remain in the ordinary life, the unaspiring life, if you are sincere you will say, “All I have gained from this life of pleasure is frustration.” And then what happens? You see that there is no hope of coming out of this frustration unless and until you are destroyed totally. What today we call frustration, tomorrow will be destruction. We started our journey with temptation. Then, in temptation there was pleasure. And inside pleasure is destruction. After destruction, what remains? Nothing. This is the negative way of proceeding.
Then there is a positive way. That positive way is aspiration. What is aspiration? Aspiration is the inner cry that makes us feel that we have come from the infinite Peace, Light and Bliss and that we still embody this infinite Peace, Light and Bliss. Only we have to bring these qualities to the fore. Now, unconsciously we have it. Unconsciously we have someone called God. But spiritual life means our conscious awareness of God.
You have the treasure within you, but you have misplaced it. When you misplace something, you search for it, but you may not find it immediately. So you ask your friend, your dearest friend, to help you search: “I have lost something. Will you search for it along with me?” The friend comes, and since he is more expert in finding things, he finds it for you. That friend is your spiritual Master. Once he finds it, he does not take it away from you. He will not dare to take it away from you just because he has found it on your behalf. A spiritual Master is like that. He finds your inner treasure for you, and then his role is over. Your role is only to thank him. He finds it for you; then it becomes your treasure. You just thank him.
The life of pleasure has to be replaced by the life of aspiration. In aspiration is the real treasure, the realisation that you come from the Infinite, that you are in the Infinite and that you are for the Infinite Truth and Light.
Each person has a friend and an enemy. If the person aspires, then he feels that desire is his enemy and aspiration is his friend. If he does not aspire, if he is leading the life of desire, then he feels that desire is his friend and aspiration is his enemy. He is familiar with desire, even if it is not fulfilling him; he is aware of its reality in his life, whereas aspiration is a stranger to him. So he feels that desire is his friend.
There comes a time when the person feels that aspiration does exist. But this aspiration and realisation are not meant for him, because from the very beginning he has not led a spiritual life. But again, I wish to say that he is making a big mistake. Aspiration is for him; realisation is for him. Only he has to accept them as his own, very own.A student quoted one of my aphorisms: “One second of gratitude to God is worth three hours of intense meditation on God.” He was finding it difficult to understand this aphorism. He thought that it meant that just to say “Thank you” for one second was worth several hours of meditation. But gratitude is not like shaking hands and saying, “Thank you”. No, it may take you many incarnations to come up to the stage of true gratitude.
Inside the physical body there are thousands of nerves and inside the subtle body also there are thousands of subtle nerves. When everything disappears, when you exist only as a most beautiful flower and you feel that you are ready to be placed at the Feet of the Supreme: that is gratitude. But it may take hours, days, months, years or many incarnations to come to that stage. For one second of gratitude, the preparation may take quite a few years. So when I say that gratitude is the most difficult thing and the most important thing, please remember that I am referring to this kind of gratitude. When everything of yours has gone away, when everything of yours has melted and there only remains one flower, when you remain only as a flower ready for worship and you have placed yourself at the Feet of the Supreme: that is gratitude. From now on, please feel that this is what I mean by gratitude. Otherwise, I will not say that one second of gratitude is equal to three hours of meditation.The divine part in us says, “I am omniscient, I am omnipotent, I am omnipresent, I am God’s son.” But if we don’t pray, if we don’t meditate, if we don’t actually have that realisation, then we are only fooling ourselves. The Christ said, “I and my Father are one.” It is absolutely true, in essence, that we are God’s children, but the Christ said it on the strength of his realisation. If we say the same thing without having the realisation, then people will laugh at us: “Yes, you and your Father are one; that is why you are so ignorant. If you and your Father are one, then you have to think of your Father also as ignorance incarnate.” They will give you that kind of answer.
Human pride and divine pride. With human pride, what can I do? I can strike someone, I can break something, I can insult you, I can scold you, I can lord it over you. Human pride only breaks the cosmic rhythm of life. We have human pride because we have a sense of separativity. I am separate from you, so when I do something which you cannot do, then I am proud. But if I am divine, then immediately I will say, “God used me in order to achieve this and God didn’t use you, but tomorrow He will utilise you to achieve something else. He will operate in and through you, and at that time He will ask me to remain silent. So how can I be proud when I know that I am not the doer? The actual doer is God. Today He wants me, He needs my existence to do something for Him; tomorrow He will need your existence to do something.”
We have human pride because we separate our existence from others. But divine pride is different. When we have divine pride we say, “How can I mix with ignorance if my Source is God? If my God, who is my Eternal Guru, my Inner Pilot, is omnipresent, and if I am with Him, in Him and for Him, then how can I be separated from others?” With my right hand I will throw the shotput, but I know that my right hand and left hand are one. After throwing, the right hand will not tell the left hand, “Look, I have thrown the shotput fifteen metres, whereas you cannot throw it even one metre.” No, the right hand will immediately feel its oneness with the left hand.
We have human pride when we feel that we don’t belong to others, that we are one inch higher than others. But we have to know that if we are really one, then we can’t be proud. My head never thinks that it is superior to my feet. That would be sheer stupidity. My head only says, “If I have no feet, then how am I going to stand?” I have got the mind, the head, but this head cannot walk. With my head I cannot go across the street. In terms of light, my head is higher, but necessity demands that my feet take me. Again, I can stand up, I can sit down, but if I want to read or write, I need my mind. Even then, my feet will take me to the school to learn. This is called oneness.
Everything is necessary. This moment God is using my head to do something, the next moment God is using my feet to do something. How can my head be proud of its existence when it knows perfectly well that God also uses my feet? Similarly, just because God is everywhere, this moment He is giving me the opportunity to be His instrument and the next moment He will use you as His instrument. So where is the question of pride? Pride comes only when I can do something that you cannot do, or if somebody is using me and not using you. But God uses everyone, so there can be no pride.
Human confidence and divine confidence. Divine confidence says, “I can do this because something divine, God, is within me. That is why I can do this, I can say this. But I could not do it otherwise. I can only mix with my wisdom, light and delight because my Source is God. So I have confidence.” It is like a child who knows that his parents are rich. He is confident because they have money. Here, our money is spiritual wealth. We feel that God, who is our Mother and Father, has infinite wealth, so we have confidence; we have peace of mind, light and bliss. Confidence we get when we see the Source within us, the Supreme. When we see His infinite Light, infinite Peace and infinite Bliss within us, we have confidence.
Otherwise, in the ordinary life there is no confidence at all. When we say that we have confidence, we know within ourselves that we are just showing off. We have not possessed something, we do not have something. No, only we want something or we claim something. When we are sincere, we immediately know that we are trying to fool others, but when we have divine confidence, we are not fooling anybody. We know that our Source is the Supreme, who has everything: infinite Peace, Light and Bliss. That is why we are confident. When we become one with Him, we know He will supply us with all His wealth in infinite measure. When we pray and meditate, we have that feeling. That is called real confidence, divine confidence.But before asking the Supreme to help with your prayer, first ask Him whether you are supposed to pray. This you have to do. Otherwise, you may be praying for others out of sheer attachment, so that the other person will be pleased with you and do something for you in the outer world. If you get a message or inner feeling from the Presence of the Supreme that you should pray for that particular person, then only you should pray for him. Otherwise, the Supreme’s Presence will be there, but He might not be at all pleased by your prayer. And even if He answers your prayer, it will be with tremendous reluctance, because the after-effect may be harmful. Before you pray, if you get express permission from the Supreme to pray for someone, then you are doing the right thing. But if you do something in this world without His approval, sanction or permission, then you will be committing a mistake.
Suppose somebody is very sick. You may think that if you pray for him, it will be a good thing, because he is suffering. But perhaps God wants him to have this experience at this particular time. You have to know that God is infinitely kinder than any human being could possibly be. If you pray to God, “Cure him, cure him,” you may be standing in God’s way. God wants to give him the experience of suffering in His own Way. So always ask God if it is His Will.Nothing divine will be intense unless and until you are grateful to the Supreme. You want intense love for God, intense devotion to God and intense surrender to God’s Will. But you will not have these divine qualities unless gratitude comes to the fore for what God has given you and for what God has not given you. The good things that you prayed for, He has given you, and the bad things that you prayed for, He has not given you. You have to be grateful for the things that He didn’t give you and for the things that He did give you. If He had fulfilled your desires, then He would have proved to be your worst enemy. But instead of asking Him to fulfil your desires, if you asked Him for aspiration, then that He has granted you.
At every moment during the day you are energised by good thoughts or assailed by bad thoughts. You have to know that the good thoughts which you get are coming directly from the Supreme, and the will to fight and destroy or illumine the bad thoughts is also coming from the Supreme. He is inside you as a Warrior when wrong thoughts come to attack you, and He is inside you as the Heavenly Father, the Supreme Beloved, when good thoughts come to illumine you. So, naturally you are grateful.
So use your gratitude-heart to feed your prayer. Early in the morning, if you don’t renew your gratitude-heart during your meditation or prayer, then nothing will be intense. At every moment your gratitude-heart must feed your intense inner cry and aspiration. Then you can intensify your prayer, your aspiration, your dedication and everything.God sees everything, but in the outer life, if we ask Him for something and He gives it to us, then we get the glory. At that time, however, as individuals we are separated from Him. We feel that God is somewhere and we are somewhere else. We never think that He is around or beside us. We don’t remain in our highest consciousness where we feel that we and God are one. If we feel that we and God are one, then the question of prayer does not arise, for our needs are His needs.
As long as we feel separated from God and feel that we have to ask Him for what we need, then we get joy from our prayer. We feel, “Just because I prayed, God gave me what I wanted, so I am worthy of having His Compassion.” He would have done it unconditionally, but we would not have had the same kind of satisfaction. In a race, if somebody tries very hard and runs the whole course, she will be so delighted when I give her a trophy. She has run with such difficulty and with so much trouble, and she feels that she has earned the trophy. Now, even if you don’t finish the race, I can also give you a trophy, because the trophy is there, but you will not feel satisfied because you have done nothing. God can give everything unconditionally, but you will not be happy, whereas the person who tries and shows the capacity really deserves what he gets. Here the fulfilment of our prayer is the trophy. If somebody prays and meditates and gets something, he will get more satisfaction than if God had given him the thing unconditionally.
Prayer intensifies our intimacy with the Supreme. Meditation increases our oneness with the Supreme. Before we meditate and become one, we have to acquire intimacy. First we have to feel that we and God are intimate friends; then we can realise our oneness-reality with God. Before we meditate, if we pray for a few seconds, then we are developing our intimate connection with the Supreme. Then, once we start meditating, we are developing our oneness-reality with the Supreme. Prayer is intimacy. Meditation is oneness. Unless we are intimate, how can we become one? We have to become intimate first; then only we can become one.There is a great difference between charity and self-offering. In the spiritual life, when we use the term self-offering, it means that we try to give what we have, unconditionally. What we have, we give to God or to mankind. Self-giving comes from the integral, entire being, but charity comes from an infinitesimal portion of our existence.
When we give something with charity, then we have a kind of inner feeling that the world will come to know of our kind action and appreciate and admire us. We tell others that we are giving something through charity, and then we wait like a beggar. Inwardly we try to see who is appreciating us or who is acknowledging our charity. So always there is some condition behind our gift.
Self-giving is a giving of the entire being: body, vital, mind, heart and soul. What we have and what we are, we are giving to the divine cause. This is the difference between charity and self-giving. Charity is a form of self-giving, but this self-giving is only in a very, very limited measure. It is by no means complete self-giving. Complete self-giving comes only from the spiritual life, only when we have the capacity to identify ourselves with the infinite Light and the infinite Vast.What is Light? Light is Delight, and Delight means nectar. This nectar is immortal. In one of our Upanishads it is said that all human beings come into the world from Delight. Again, Delight is Light, God the Light. We grow in Delight, but we do not see or feel the Delight right now because we are living the surface life in the meshes of ignorance. But we shall continue to grow and, at the end of our journey’s close, we shall again enter into the effulgence of Delight. We came from Delight, we grow in Delight and, at the end of our journey’s close, we shall retire into Delight.
This experience of Delight we get only when we meditate. When we meditate, we get inner peace or peace of mind. Delight is visible, palpable and tangible only when we have peace of mind. Unfortunately, the modern, intellectual, doubting and sophisticated mind does not care for this kind of Light and Delight. It cries for outer information or it cries to achieve the Truth in its own way. But even while achieving the Truth, it negates the Truth. The mind sees the Truth for five seconds and then, when it is about to achieve the Truth, it doubts the possibility and potentiality of the Truth. Then who is the loser? It is the mind. But if we live in the heart or in the soul, which is within the heart, then we identify ourselves with the Light and immediately we become the Light. At that time there is no doubt; there is only a flood of certainty.
So if we can live in our inner existence even for one minute a day, we will see Light and feel Light in abundant measure. When we feel Light, we will feel the possibility of growing into the effulgence of Light. Our inner sun, which is infinitely brighter than the physical sun, will dispel the ignorance-night of millennia. Let us try to go deep within and enter into our inner sun, our cosmic sun. There we shall see the infinite, permanent Light waiting for us and crying for us. It needs only our conscious approval and co-operation to come to the fore.God and God’s Grace can never be separated. The divine Grace is constantly descending upon us. He who is aspiring sincerely is consciously aware of this divine Grace, whereas he who is not aspiring is keeping his heart’s door permanently closed to the divine Grace.
If we approach God through His Grace, then we are more successful. When we think of God, if we immediately feel that God is Grace within and without, then we will find it easier to approach God. The moment we think of God’s Grace, we feel that His infinite Peace, Light and Bliss are already in the process of entering into us. But if we think of God as omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, then His divine qualities we do not see flowing through us. When we think of God as Grace, then all His divine, infinite qualities we feel entering into us. At that time, they become part and parcel of our inner and outer life.
From now on, let us feel that it is through the Grace of God that we can go to God, not that by going to God we are going to have His Grace. Here is a subtle difference. Let us think of God’s Grace, which is constantly flowing, and let the flow carry us into the Source.Take a particular desire that you may have had as a child. Now that desire is no longer in you or around you. At the age of seven, let us say, you wanted to be the greatest poet on earth. Now you are fifty years old and you are not a celebrated poet; far from it. You have not become even an ordinary poet. But this does not disturb you in the least, because you have entered into the spiritual life and that old desire has been “destroyed”. That desire operated in you before, but now you want only to enter into the life of infinite Truth. Your desire-bubble has burst; it is totally gone. What has actually happened is that it has been transformed into aspiration. This aspiration wants to achieve the Highest and grow into the infinite Light, Peace, Bliss and Power of God. If you look for your old desire with your physical eyes, then you will see that it is nowhere to be found. The desire which you cherished at the age of seven has been totally destroyed by the illumining light inside you. The illumining light has given you the flame of aspiration. Or you can say that God’s Grace has entered into your present-day consciousness and transformed your desire into aspiration.
So your limited desire to be only a poet has been transformed into a much vaster desire. Now you want only to be God’s chosen instrument and to deal with Infinity, Eternity and Immortality. You want to change the face of the vast world, and it is only as an instrument of God that you can do this: not as a poet, not as a philosopher, not as an artist, not as anybody but a true instrument of God.
You started with desire and your desire could have made you a poet. But now your aspiration is making you a true lover of mankind and a true saviour of mankind. So where is destruction? It is only the transformation of your limited consciousness into the unlimited consciousness, where not only possibility and practicability but also inevitability are constantly shaking hands with your inner life of aspiration and your outer life of revelation and manifestation.When a Yogi sends forth his soul’s will-power and light, it immediately covers the length and breadth of the world. If one enters into the inner world, one will immediately discover the power of a Yogi’s goodwill. The Yogi is certainly helping humanity, but in his own way. So if people say that the spiritual Masters who are in the Himalayan caves are not doing anything for the world, they are mistaken. These spiritual Masters are doing something in the inner world which is very important and significant. Only those who have inner vision can see, feel and realise it.
There have been many spiritual figures who have stayed in caves in the mountain-tops and offered their soul’s light and soul’s concern to humanity. They are doing the right thing because their inner beings are telling them to help humanity in this way. Again, some Yogis operate in this way because they are afraid to mix with the world. They think that the moment they come into the world they will lose their aspiration or realisation; they will be caught again in the meshes of ignorance. So they say, “I have come out of bondage; now let me help the world from a distance.” They see that the world is suffering, but they want to offer their help only from a distance. But the dynamic and heroic souls are not afraid of the world. They feel that they can identify with the world and, at the same time, maintain their inner power and inner oneness with God. They say: “Let us give what we have. To help even one individual we are ready to come into the world and mix with the world.”In the spiritual life also your conscience will tell you what to do and what not to do. But in order to use your conscience as a guide, you have to be very careful. You have to remain calm and quiet; otherwise, your vital being will imitate the voice of your conscience and confuse you. It will make you feel that what you are doing is right, even though it is wrong. You don’t have to learn how to meditate in order to be calm and quiet for a few minutes. Many times when you are tired and exhausted, you just sit quietly. So you can sit quietly, and when you do, you will hear the voice of your conscience. It will say either “yes” or “no”. Only two words it has: “yes” and “no”. You want to do something and if it says “yes”, then you can do it. If it says “no”, then never do it. You should not argue with your conscience; only you should listen to its voice.
Again, you have to know that there is a great difference between knowing what is right and wrong and achieving the right thing. Someone may know in a mental kind of way that God-realisation is good, but he may not cry for realisation. His mind may know that God-realisation is good, but he may not work for it. In your case, you not only know that God-realisation is good, but you go one step further: you pray and meditate. So you are bound to have realisation one day.
You started with conscience. Your conscience or your inner being told you that it was good to meditate. It told you that if you meditated, you would attain peace, light and bliss. You believed the inner message when you got it, and you launched into the spiritual life. When you enter the spiritual life, you not only know what is right but you also get the inner strength to do that very thing. Even a child knows the difference between what is right and what is wrong. But in spite of knowing, he may not have the capacity to do the right thing. But when one follows the spiritual life, one gets the inner strength to do what is right. A thief knows very well that it is not good to steal, but a thief will not have the strength to stop stealing, while someone who follows the spiritual life will definitely have the strength to realise God. So now that you have launched into the spiritual life, you can rest assured that you will not only be able to know what is right, but also to do what is right.But if you don’t work at all just because you are afraid that you will fail, then you will get zero; you will not pass the inner examination. True, there are people who do not work, yet they appear to be satisfied. But they are not actually satisfied. A lazy person, an idle person, can never, never be satisfied for even one minute. On the physical plane, a lazy person’s satisfaction means that he does not have to work; he does not even have to climb down the staircase. But although he is satisfied on the physical plane, on the mental plane evil thoughts are making a big hole in his mind. He has stayed five hours in bed after the sun has dawned, so he has got satisfaction by stretching his legs. He is so satisfied because he did not have to budge an inch from his bed. But hostile, undivine forces, unlit emotional forces have all come and entered into him. So what kind of real satisfaction can he have?
If wrong forces enter into you, and you enjoy vital thoughts, then after an hour or two you will get up and cry. When the soul comes forward you will say, “What have I done? My first mistake was not to get up early in the morning. Then my second mistake was to indulge in these vital thoughts.” This is what is happening in the spiritual life of many seekers. So I always say, do the right thing. Early in the morning, meditate. After meditation, if you are not very happy or peaceful, if you feel that peace has not descended, just offer your experience up to God. This very act of offering will be your satisfaction.Sometimes in spite of your earnest aspiration to feed your soul, you don’t have enough inner wealth. How are you going to buy the aspiration necessary to feed your soul? You have to go to a place where spiritual people are praying and meditating. They will help you immensely, and you will be able to help them. You will speak to them on the phone, you will be with them and mix with them, and you will see that you are throwing abundant light on their life of aspiration. If you feel that it is impossible to be under the guidance of a spiritual Master, you will need the company of spiritual friends.
Eventually, you will feel the necessity of finding someone who can consciously feed your soul, a spiritual Master. He has the capacity to feed your soul and when he does so, you will see that everything goes right. Your inner world is flooded with joy and delight. If you want to remain in the highest, purest joy, then you must follow the path of a spiritual Master. He makes a conscious promise to your soul and to your outer being that he is responsible for your outer and inner life. He will make you feel that the outer and the inner must go together. The inner must energise the entire being so that the outer will fulfil its role.
Yoga and life can never be separated. What life wants is fulfilment, and this takes millions of years. But if Yoga is accepted, it expedites the process. What would take twenty years to get, you can achieve in two years or even two seconds if you follow Yoga. Yoga means union with God’s Will. Yoga greatly expedites realisation. Since God is omniscient and omnipotent, God can give you what He wishes in a matter of seconds. If you do not enter into the spiritual life, it will take you thousands of incarnations to realise God. But if you follow Yoga devotedly under the guidance of a God-realised spiritual Master, then in one or two or three incarnations you are bound to get realisation.
If you feel that your outer life is one thing and Yoga is something else, then you are making a Himalayan mistake. Yoga is conscious oneness with God’s entire existence. So if you want to expedite your soul’s journey and make faster progress in your outer life, as well as your inner life, Yoga is the answer. When God’s Will becomes your will, you can achieve everything sooner than at once. If your will is not one with God’s Will, then no matter how hard you work or how sincere you are, it will be impossible for you to attain to your highest.
In conclusion, you will never regress if you accept Yoga, the path of inner discipline. Union with God is the fulfilment of the soul in the inner life as well as in the outer life.We always have to see the light in a positive way. I may say that I have light in a very tiny, infinitesimal measure. But if I say, “I don’t have any light at all. All I have is darkness,” then I am fooling myself. Again, if an ordinary human being says that he has abundant and boundless light, then he too is fooling himself.
If you think that you have no light at all and that you are all darkness, this is false modesty and self-deception. False modesty and self-deception will never lead us to God-realisation. If you constantly think, “I am impure, I am insincere,” then you really become impure and insincere. Somebody may say to you, “I am impure,” but when he says this, he feels in the back of his mind that he is at least one iota more sincere than his neighbour, his friend, or somebody else. He tries to make others think he is sincere by exercising his false modesty. In this way insincerity also comes from impurity. So insincerity, imperfection and negative thought are all forms of impurity.
When we see something inside ourselves, we try to exhibit it outwardly. If I have insincerity inwardly, then I demonstrate it outwardly also. That is to say, if I have insincerity inwardly, then I will take refuge outwardly in the house of insincerity. But if I am sincere and pure inside, then outwardly I will take shelter in the house of purity and sincerity.
So the worst impurity includes negative ways of thinking, insincerity and the feeling of unworthiness. All these negative qualities are self-imposed.We have to know that the spiritual life is neither a bed of thorns nor a bed of roses. There are always deserts in life’s journey. Everybody has to go through the desert in his aspiration; but there comes a time when there is no desert. It is light out now. The daylight is followed by night and again night by day. But the time comes in our inner aspiration when we enter into a deeper consciousness, a deeper being. We become one with our soul. When we are able to listen to the dictates of our soul, when we are in communion with God, then our consciousness is full of light. Each thought, each idea is full of light. Then there is no night. It is all light. That is the very highest state.
When we are in an ordinary state, when we are seeking and crying and weeping, the best thing is to read the books of spiritual aspirants or Masters. Or we can mix with brother or sister disciples who are not having the same difficulties. Suppose that today we find it difficult to meditate. Then we can go to our brother or sister and they will lift us up. They will say something very good about the aspiration they saw in us about two months ago. Or they may say something about God or about our Guru that will lift us up. The same thing may happen to them sometime later and then they will come to us. To have brother and sister disciples is the greatest blessing for spiritual aspirants. There are seekers whose Gurus have left the body and who do not have sister and brother disciples. When their aspiration wanes, they stay at home and cry and weep, and eventually they are consoled. But the easiest way to get aspiration is to go to another disciple and he or she will elevate our consciousness. They will enter into us and bring out our own light, which has now been covered with depression, trouble, misery and anxiety.But if the message comes from the soul, I tell you, you will have tremendous conviction, and both success and failure you will take with the same satisfaction. You will feel this way because you got the message and you executed it. While you are executing the message, you will not expect anything in your own way. You will not expect that he will speak to you or you will get a particular thing done, no. Only you will do it, and then the result will come either in the form of success or failure. In this way you will be able to know if a message comes from within.
Sometimes some of you feel, “If God asked me to do this, how is it that I failed?” But you can fail even if you have done God’s Will, because God may only be having an experience in and through you. Sometimes I ask you people to do something and you are not successful in doing it. Then you will say, “Guru was wrong.” No, I was not wrong, but the Supreme wanted me to tell you to have an experience. If you feel that because I told you to do something, then you are bound to get success, you are mistaken. I always say that success is not what we are aiming at; we are aiming at progress. Your progress is to have faith in me, and my progress is to have faith in you and in the Supreme. Your faith in me is your progress and my faith that when I ask you to do something, you will do it — that is my progress.
So if you get the message from the heart, from the real heart which is identified with the soul, then I tell you the result will not bother you. Otherwise, if you get the message from the mind, then before you even act, hundreds of questions will enter into you. And if the result, according to your vision, is not satisfactory, then you will be puzzled. You may say that the message you got from the soul is false. But it is not false. Only it is an experience that God wants to have in and through you.In the spiritual life, what happens? Today you have done wonderful meditation and then you feel, “Oh, since today I have done such wonderful meditation, tomorrow I can relax.” You feel that with today’s meditation you will maintain the same speed tomorrow, but it does not happen in that way. Tomorrow again you have to make yourself feel that your new achievement has to be tremendous. Our difficulty is that when we do something well, we feel that we deserve some relaxation; otherwise, our satisfaction does not dawn. Satisfaction first dawns for us when we do something well and then when we don’t do anything at all, we feel that still we deserve the same result. It is our due. But every day when we meditate, we have to feel that this is the last day for us. Tomorrow we are going to die. We know that we are in the Heart of the Eternal Supreme, the Infinite, but we have to feel that today is the last day for us to aspire, absolutely the last day. Today if we fail, then we will get zero. We will be out of the race. Then, when tomorrow comes, again we have to feel, “Today if I don’t realise God, then I am gone. I am doomed. I shall have to wait for another five thousand years.” This way if you aspire, then your sincerity will come to the fore. Always make yourself feel that today is absolutely the last day for your God-realisation.
The hour has struck. The teacher will give you only two hours to complete your examination. In two hours’ time, even if you cannot complete your papers, still the examination is over. Then tomorrow, again you sit for the examination and you feel that tomorrow is the last day. But today while the teacher is giving you the examination, please don’t feel that tomorrow again the teacher will give the same examination, that tomorrow again you will have the time to complete the examination. Once the teacher stands in front of you, feel that today is the last day. Either you pass or you fail. Today if you fail, then don’t feel that tomorrow again you will sit for the examination. Absolutely forget about today’s job. The past is gone. It is dead. You don’t have to think about the future. Feel that the future also does not exist. If the future does not exist, if the past does not exist, then what exists for us? We have only the present. Here in the present we have to be either totally divine or we shall remain undivine, as we were yesterday. So, since we want to become divine, let us do the right thing. Let us make ourselves fit instruments. We have only today. Then again, when tomorrow comes. with a new hope we can say that today is a new day for us.
Always say, “Today is the only chance I have, absolutely the last chance.” Then you are bound to get a good meditation. Otherwise, there is no goal. If you feel, “Oh, now I am only twenty-eight. At the age of seventy-eight I will realise God,” then you will never realise God. Perhaps at the age of thirty or forty God will call you to the other side. When the time comes for you to go to the other world, whether you are seventy, eighty or ninety, it is up to God, you have to go. You don’t know when it will be, so you should make yourself feel that today is the last day for you to achieve everything that you are supposed to achieve. Then, today if you fail, tomorrow again you have to feel that you have the same opportunity. But if you feel that the opportunity will again come and knock at your door, then you are lost. Today if you waste your aspiration or if you feel that you don’t need aspiration because you have so many tomorrows, I tell you, before many tomorrows come, everything will be gone. But if today is the last day, then your sincerity, your aspiration, all your divine qualities will come to the fore. You want to reach the goal, you want to run so you will definitely reach the goal.> WE BELIEVE...
> ... and we hold that each man has the potentiality of reaching the Ultimate Truth. We also believe that man cannot and will not remain imperfect forever. Each man is an instrument of God. When the hour strikes, each individual soul listens to the inner dictates of God. When man listens to God, his imperfections are turned into perfections, his ignorance into knowledge, his searching mind into revealing light and his uncertain reality into all-fulfilling Divinity.From:Sri Chinmoy,Flame-Waves, part 12, Agni Press, 1978
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