Beyond the disciple's experience

There are two significant experiences in your life of aspiration which you will one day get, but which right now are beyond your imagination. One is the experience of unconditional love. Have you loved anybody unconditionally or has anybody loved you unconditionally? No, only God has loved you unconditionally. So, right now, unconditional love is beyond your experience.

The other experience is that of not being affected in your inmost depths by any outer occurrences. Now you do not even see that inmost corner where your true wealth is. When you do see it, you will then feel it and finally grow into it. But right now, in the outer life there is not a single day when you are happy for twenty-four hours. There is not even one hour in which you can say you were continually happy. You may say, “Not so!” But I will beg to differ. Your happiness is judged like this: Yesterday if you felt terrible and miserable, you make a comparison between yesterday and today. Then you say, “Today I am very happy.” But when it is a matter of real happiness, if you become sincere you will say, “No, today I am not totally happy.” If I ask you, a hundred times out of a hundred you won’t be able to say that for a whole hour you were happy.

Your happiness-sun is eclipsed almost all the time by clouds of fear, clouds of doubt, clouds of anxiety, clouds of worry and other things. This is what you are experiencing every day in your outer life. But you have something deep inside you called the inner life. If this inner life or soul, let us say, is totally illumined, it will not be affected by outer disturbances.

I become totally one with you people in your suffering, in your frustration, in your anxiety, in your divine thoughts; in everything I am one with you. But if my inner Peace, Bliss and Light were affected by my oneness with you, by this time you would have seen our whole mission totally collapse. In the outer world when you do something wrong, I scold you and act concerned because I am totally identified with you people. But in the inner life, where I am absolutely one with the Supreme, I am as detached as the Himalayas. Usually I won’t be at all affected, no matter what kind of unthinkable, unimaginable, stupid or bad thing you do. If I am not affected in my inner existence by someone’s wrongdoing, that person can still have hope that he will be able to make progress and realise the Truth. Again, it has happened that somebody does affect the inner existence of a spiritual Master by doing something unpardonably wrong in the Eye of the Supreme. Then the life of that particular person is totally lost. If I am affected in my inner life, the responsibility for that person I just cast aside.

Right now, ordinary experiences in the outer life will affect you. But if you bring Peace, Light and Bliss from the inner life into the outer life, then you will not be affected. It is like someone in the kitchen who smells food but does not eat the food. Even if the food is poisonous, the smell will not affect him or do anything harmful to him. Similarly, there will come a time when you have made so much progress that in the inner life you will not be affected at all by the outer life. You will not be affected by either a good thing or a bad thing, just as spiritual Masters are not affected in their highest realisation. If they are affected there, then they are not real spiritual Masters in the inner life. That is why although I get colds, fever and all kinds of human ailments, these outer disturbances do not take away my Peace, Light and Bliss. When you get a fever or any illness, you can’t meditate at all. In my case, even with the highest fever of 104 or 105 degrees, I will be able to do my best meditation because my meditation can never be affected by my fever. I can easily separate the body from the soul, but the disciples cannot.