The Secret of Secrets⁶

I wish to tell you that to remain with us at the Centre for about a year is not an easy task. The temptations of the world, anxieties of the world, doubt, fear, ignorance, imperfection, the limitations and obscurities of the individual human being, as well as the earth-consciousness, take people away from the right spiritual path. So those of you who have been with us for over a year should feel and must feel that, by the Grace of God, the Supreme, you have remained with us. It is a tremendous task, an inner battle. The outer battle you can win in a day or in two-to-three months, or even in a year or two. But the inner battle has to be fought constantly and it has to be won every day. These battles against fear, doubt, ignorance, limitation and death have to be won again and again.

Let us start with doubt. If you start doubting the Centre, doubting me, doubting your own capacity for the spiritual life, then you will unfortunately end in failure. Once you have accepted the spiritual life, and once you feel that this is your path and that I am your Master, I assure you, each individual seeker, once and for all, that the Goal of the Beyond is your divine Destination. Your Master has the capacity to take you to your Destination and he will offer this capacity to you, to all those who consciously and soulfully want to remain seated in my Boat. God's chosen Boatman I am. God's chosen passengers you are. I assure you, on the strength of my highest Oneness with the Absolute Supreme, that it is my bounden duty to take you, carry you in my heart to the Golden Shore of the Beyond. These are not mere words: these are my solid realisations, inseparable from the Highest Truth.

I am most grateful to you; I don't want to use the word "pleased." Being grateful is one thing: when you do something for the Centre, come here and work regularly, do selfless service, I am grateful. If you give me a smile, I am grateful to you. If you do anything for me, I am grateful to you. But when I say that I am pleased with someone, with some seekers or with my disciples, that is much more important. If you give me a dollar, I am grateful to you. But when I say I am pleased with someone, that means that my concern has touched the very depths of the individual seeker. All those who have been here for over a year have done me favours many times in terms of aspiration, devotion, surrender, money and all that. For all this I am truly grateful to each individual disciple who has stood in front of me. But again, if I have to say that I am pleased with everyone who has stood in front of me, I am not. I am not. I am pleased with a very few, not one or two, but a very few, who have given me their true love, their pure concern, their utmost feeling of oneness. They have pleased me. When I say that I am pleased with someone, please rest assured that that person has captured my lifelong concern. Otherwise he may be with me for two, three, or even twenty or forty years and not get my inner concern.

Yesterday I told you about a certain disciple who made that serious and harmful mistake of telling others about our activities at the United Nations. So in that way, in that type of consciousness, you may stay with me for six years, ten years or twenty years. God knows how many years you may want to stay. Then again, if you stay here out of habit or lethargy, no divine progress can be achieved. Each time you come, you can make progress, you can run towards your Goal. In fact, each time you come here, you should feel that you have climbed up a rung on the ladder of evolving consciousness.

So dearest ones, you have been with us for one year, over a year, some of you two, three, four, five years. But I wish to say that everyone has to please me every day in your daily activities. Then you will really please me. Selfless service you do. But you do this selfless service when you don't have family problems, when you don't have school problems, when you don't have other activities… in other words, when you are free to come here. At that time, if I get your help, then you feel that you are doing selfless service. But from the highest spiritual point of view, real selfless service is done only when you are ready to dedicate your entire life, totally, integrally, at every moment. When Lord Sri Krishna used to play on His flute, the gopis, his devotees, admirers and seekers used to leave everything: husband, children, household, and run towards His music, His soul-charming music. What was there in His music? The message of the Highest Beyond. So here also, I call you with the message of God, the Supreme. I represent Him for you, for the disciples, but not for others. Otherwise I am just another spiritual man, and if people don't have the vision, they will go to the extent of saying that I am nothing. If they feel that I am nothing, they are perfectly right in their own view. But for the disciples who have accepted me consciously as their spiritual Master, when they go deep within, they see and realise where I stand, what I stand for. And if they come to realise that I really represent God for them, then they should also realise that a day will come when they have to give up everything for the Supreme in me. They have to give up mental power, physical power, vital power, money power and everything. Then and then only is God-realisation possible.

In New York the other day I spoke about selfless service. I said that if I call you at midnight when you are fast asleep, if I call you while you are in the office to do something involving a very important service, if I call while you are studying wholeheartedly for your examinations, then if you are ready to come and serve the Supreme in me, this is called "selfless service". Otherwise, if you come only when you have free time and you think that you are doing me a favour, then you are doing nothing for me or for God. And this favour I do not need. I have come into the world with the highest mission, so I know that the Supreme will bring persons to me who will be really ready to be at my beck-and-call twenty-four hours a day. It will not be my ego which will draw someone to me, it will not be my personality that will bring him or her to me, but my inseparable oneness with the Highest which demands this kind of selfless oneness with me.

Please forgive me. Today I see a few newcomers. Please bear with me and listen to what I am saying. Right now you are not my disciples, you may not become my disciples, but I see that the day will come when you will be the disciples of somebody, either of me or of someone else. If you want to make the fastest, greatest and deepest progress, then what I am saying will apply to you also. Here you have come as seekers. You have done nothing wrong and I am in no way displeased with you, but I am telling you the secret of secrets, that when you are with your Master, you have to behave the way I am instructing my disciples just now.

Now to go on: in the spiritual life, if you accept the spiritual life, it is different from the ordinary life where everything is duty. To think of the children is duty, to do household work is duty; each moment and every action is some kind of duty. It is good and true that there should be in one's life the very high call of duty. To make breakfast for the children is a duty, to please the husband is a duty, to please the wife is a duty. These are all duties; they can be considered the highest duty. To maintain harmony, peace and love in the family is also a duty. But the highest duty for a spiritual seeker is to please the spiritual Master who is the conscious representative of God. The highest duty for a spiritual seeker, at that time, is not the mother, not the father, not the brother, not the sister, not the wife, not the children, but the dearest in Heaven or on earth, who is God, the Supreme. If you make others feel that they are the dearest, you will be sadly disappointed, I tell you.

When I say that the Master is the dearest, you have to know that it is not my body, not my personality, not my ego, but the Divinity in me, the Supreme in me, who is your Master, your real Master. I have consciously realised Him. Tomorrow you will also consciously realise Him. The moment you consciously realise the Supreme, you will not need me, because you yourself will have become one with the Absolute as I am now.

So, for a sincere, spiritual seeker, the Master has to come first and foremost. When you enter into the Master, you are entering into him with your divine, as well as your undivine, qualities, with your imperfections, limitations, everything. If you keep aside your undivine qualities and try to enter into me only with your divine qualities, who will take care of your undivine qualities? They will come to grab you and devour you. That is, if you give me only one per cent of your undivine qualities, the hostile forces will naturally devour you. But if you enter into me with all your limitations and imperfections, surrendering them to me, saying, "Let thy will be done," at that time, my will, being one with His Will, can and will transform your undivine qualities and make them into divine qualities. I tell you, once and for all, that to please me is to please the Supreme. You will be pleasing the Supreme in me, who is also the Supreme in you.

Christ prayed, "Let Thy Will be done". There can be no greater prayer, no greater realisation than this: "Let Thy Will be done." Whose Will? The Will of the Supreme. And for the disciples and seekers, the Master's Will, which is absolutely identified with the Will Divine, with the Supreme's Will, must be accepted as God's Will.

I wish to say that in the future you will be given the opportunity in boundless measure to prove your true surrender. If you please me, you are bound to get the highest and best of everything, on earth and in Heaven. If you don't please me, I myself will not be displeased with any of you, but you will not be granted by the Supreme what He Himself thinks to be the best for you. For example, if, right now, you want to eat a candy because that is what you yourself feel to be best for you, then you can eat the candy and remain satisfied. But if you want to drink divine Nectar, then at that time you will have to refer the matter to the Supreme, saying, "Supreme, I need divine Nectar." He will reply, "I have asked someone to give you the Nectar, but you did not surrender to him, and the best for you, the Nectar, has to be indefinitely delayed."

Other spiritual Masters, especially fake Masters, are growing like mushrooms all over the world… innumerable false Masters. But true spiritual Masters are very few on earth who have the capacity to give Nectar just as the Supreme gives it. They are eager to give it, but you are not receiving it. You are not receiving the Nectar.

To come back again to responsibility and duty: if you really want to be fulfilled on earth in infinite measure, if you really want to be happy, successful in both your inner life of aspiration and your outer life of dedication, then you have to listen to your Master if you are really sincere and wise. He will tell you what is best for you. However, if you feel that there is no Master, there is no God and it is all you… you… you, if you make the decision and feel that this is best for you, then you are not really ready for our Path. But if you feel that there is someone who has been dearest to you in all your incarnations — that this is not your first and last life — then you will listen to Him. If you think that this is your first and last incarnation, you are totally mistaken. Those who think that this is their one and only life are making a Himalayan blunder; they are only deceiving themselves. In one incarnation alone nobody has realised God; nobody can realise God.

In one incarnation, you can't satisfy even ordinary things: you can't satisfy even ten individual desires. At the age of eighty, all your unfulfilled desires come forward, unsatisfied. You say, "O God, I have had so many desires and now I am eighty years old and on my deathbed; I have not fulfilled even one of my important desires." God will answer, "My stupid child, who asked you to start your journey in the wrong way, with desires? Why did you not start your journey with aspiration? Why did you not have only one aspiration, that you wanted only God?"

When you reach God, it is all Eternity, Infinity and Immortality. If I want to reach Rome and I walk along a wrong path, how will I reach Rome? My destination I know, but if I am following a wrong path, how can I reach that destination? So here I am saying that when God is my Destination, but the road I have taken is a wrong road, a wrong path full of desires, then how can I reach Him? But if my road is the Path of Aspiration and my Destination remains the same — God, then I am bound to reach Him by walking along the right Path.

Now in the spiritual life, the necessity of surrendering one's will to the Divine Will is the only thing. There can be no other thing, no other way. There can be only one choice; there cannot be two choices in the spiritual life. There can be only one need, and that is to offer one's individual will, to surrender one's individual will, to the Will of the Supreme.

Everything I am saying is intended for the sincere spiritual seekers. You seekers are considered to be spiritual: that is why you have come to a spiritual man. On the strength of your sincere approach, I am here, telling you all these things. Now all over the world, there are millions and billions of people who are still sleeping on earth. We cannot call them spiritual at all. You people are spiritual, and that is why I am telling you what spiritual people should do, not what unspiritual people habitually do. Unspiritual people can do millions of things, all foolish, all wrong, all absurd. But from you, God expects something else. He does not expect you to do anything wrong, either consciously or even unconsciously, because He has chosen you as His very Own. He has not chosen others. Once He has chosen you, you have to deserve His Affection, His Concern, His Blessings, everything He gives you. Others who are not ready are not invited. So let them take their time. But you have already made commitments to your inner being, to your soul.

At this point, you know that one thing is truth; another thing is falsehood. You now have the capacity to discriminate. You know how to be sincere because millions of times you have done and said sincere things. Again you know what insincerity is because you have many times said and done insincere things. So you have developed inner insight and discrimination. And here, nobody has compelled you to accept the spiritual life; your choice has come from deep within. Nobody has forced you. If you don't want the spiritual life, neither your friends, nor your parents, no matter how hard they try, will be able to bring you. And again, if you want the spiritual life and your parents don't want it, no matter how hard you try to bring them here, you will be unsuccessful. So you see, in the case of your parents, they cannot bring you, and in your case, you cannot bring them. Why? Because either the parents do not have that sincere call for God or the children do not have that sincere call for God. But if the parents and children both have the same sincere call and care for God, then you will see: the moment you tell your parents about your spiritual life, they will run with you towards God. They will say, "My children have seen the Goal." Conversely, if your parents have seen the truth and they tell you about it, then if you are sincere, you will run with them towards the Goal. Now what is the thing that prevents both of you, parents and children, from being one, being united and running together towards your Goal? It is the absence of the inner cry, the inner hunger.

When you are hungry, you immediately eat. That is your outer hunger. But inside, if you don't have inner hunger, then you won't cry for God even for one second. When you have inner hunger, you have to feed that hunger, not with potatoes or tomatoes, no, but with inner Peace, Light and Bliss. Now you are all hungry, inwardly hungry. That is why you have come to this spiritual place. Whoever comes to any spiritual organisation, spiritual church, synagogue or temple, is considered to be spiritual. But again only his own sincerity can tell him whether he is really a seeker. Everyone calls himself a seeker. Sudha here is a seeker and somebody else is also a seeker. But between Sudha and somebody else is a yawning gulf. Similarly, when you are in a church, someone sitting beside you will pray to God, "O God, give me thousands of dollars." This fellow is sitting beside you and crying, "God, please give me thousands of dollars." And you are praying, "O God, please fulfil me in Your own Way. I want nothing from You. I only want You to utilise me in Your own Way." Look at your prayer and look at the other man's prayer. Both of you are sitting side by side. The difference between your prayer and his prayer depends upon where you stand in your inner, spiritual development. The difference in your status as a seeker depends on the quality of your inner aspiration.

Dearest ones, you have to aim at a certain goal and then only will you be really satisfied and fulfilled in your life. What do you want — the Ultimate or the mundane? If you really want the Ultimate, then you will realise the Ultimate. Then that Ultimate can function here on earth in the mundane world. A realised soul comes into the world, for the world. He is crying and begging you to also realise the Highest like him. Then only God's perfect Perfection can dawn on the earth and not one second before. Right now the perfect Perfection of God is only in our imagination. But it can be and will be a Divine Reality when we as seekers and all the realised souls make it so.