Contents

Part II — Questions and Answers

7		Sunday, July 10, 1988
8		Tuesday, July 12, 1988
9		Wednesday, July 13, 1988
10		Thursday, July 14, 1988
11		Friday, July 15, 1988

Part I — Lectures

Education — Means and Purpose

West Point, GA, USA

Monday, September 26, 1988

Dear brothers and sisters, I had an experimental seminar in France, I think it was the third week of July or the second week of July. It was the mid-week of the thirteen weeks seminar, six before and six after, and this was the one week. Everybody knew about it well in advance. They had a lot of time to prepare themselves, to think about it. Yet, when they came to the seminar, I think we were about a hundred and thirty preceptors all together there, I could feel a good deal of resentment, considerable suspicion, a fair bit of anger, and in some preceptors a lot of resistance to the idea of that seminar. I could feel it. It was there, very palpable in the air. But of course, I was prepared for it. Anything new is always subject to resistance; that is a part of the human makeup. So I was not at all surprised, though I was a little surprised at the degree of that resistance, the scope of that resistance. Some couldn't care less. They came, but as very angry individuals.

Anyway we started off the first day and I do not remember whether I gave the practical work on the first day itself. I did. Of course that created a turmoil, because they all thought they were going to listen to a nice talk, or perhaps not so nice. But yet a talk is a talk, you know, you can listen to it and, in the good old biblical tradition, take it through one ear and throw it out through the other and go back home happy. But when I gave them the practical work I think nearly everybody was upset. Now that is not very surprising because when you think of adult literacy in countries like India and other backward nations, where adults have to be educated, it is very difficult to get them into schools. Because there is this crazy idea, you know, and the West is no less crazy than the East in this idea, that education is for the young. It is as if education starts at the age of three, three and a half, in the kindergarten, and ends with a college degree at, I do not know, twenty-eight years of age here; it is twenty-one or twenty-two in India. In India if you talk to a man about education after he has graduated from school he will probably slap you. They think, "That is enough," you see, "That is education. I am now educated."

So the most important thing to sort of get across is that education never stops. Learning may stop, you see, but education does not stop. Now we have to carefully distinguish between learning and education. We learn in schools, but education is a life-long process. We educate ourselves, people educate us, events educate us, the environment educates us. So the first crude understanding of education that we all have, that education should be confined to schools, is what you have to remove from your minds before you can be open to any system of education like ours. Education never ends. And it is wisdom to accept that one is not as educated as one thought, though one may have many degrees after one's name. And that aspect of the educational process must be understood: that it is like breathing, which never stops as long as we are alive. It is like eating and drinking, which do not stop as long as we are alive. Education too is a process, you see, which is co-existent with life.

So this, what shall I say, antagonism during the Courmettes seminar was quite a surprise only in its scope, though I was perfectly prepared for it, because I had been preparing for it for months ahead. Now, I gave them this first practical work session and all that was missing was screams. But it was there inside, you see, I could see it in their faces. I could see it in their gestures. I could see it in the way they looked at me, the way they stalked off with a hurt look on their faces. "You are testing me," you know, that sort of look. Anyway, I am happy to say they obeyed, you see, and went through the process on the first day. And then that evening they all brought their papers, which I refused to see. I said, "Sorry, it is not my intention to examine you like a child. This is a process. It is not for me to judge whether you are right or wrong. It is not that intention with which I have called you here and with which I gave you the test. It is for you to find out how well you know this job. So I will not look into your papers at all. But I would like to help you in this process of self-education by giving my own reading of the condition of these six or ten people I have given you as a panel for your study. And each one of you is welcome to compare your reading with mine and evaluate yourself." The relief was again almost palpable, visible.

Now this is a lesson to the educational systems of the world, that if you cannot educate a person without permitting the person under that process to retain his or her self-respect, the system will fail. You can see this in the success of the American educational system where students and teachers interact almost as if they are friends. I have seen sometimes the professor sitting like a student and the student sitting like the professor, behind the desk with his feet up on the table, "Hi, Prof." And I am surprised to see, that in this arrogant West these professors are able to tolerate this nonsense from the students. In India they would get a beating. But that is the success of the educational system here — that by treating the student as a friend, allowing him to put his feet up on the chair, with his Reeboks or whatever, muddying it perhaps, you are able to get his confidence. You see, why I am saying this is... education is a process of evoking knowledge from you, not giving you knowledge. So when we are able to interact with that confidence and mutual trust, where the student can walk into the office and say, "Hey, Frank, how about telling me how this darn thing works out." And he says, "Well, come along, let's look at it." And then you lead him step by step, not to an answer, but enable him to think for himself. "Oh, heck, I did not think of that," he says. Now he has learned permanently. 

So teaching is a process where you help the other person to learn. You do not teach him anything except how to learn. I would request all of you to remember this because you all are preceptors, and you have to teach abhyasis. And the heavy-handed, dictatorial approach to education never works. It only produces resistance, resistors, and eventually disrupts the system.

After that there was a sense of satisfaction, calmness, a sense of over-all relief, you see, that this guy isn't out to break us. He is only giving us an opportunity to learn. "Look at him, he does not even want to see our papers. That's great." Then matters went a little more smoothly, and day after day it was a bigger relief. Because I started off giving them a panel of ten persons whom they had to evaluate; next day I made it a little tougher by giving them a mix of advanced disciples, abhyasis, and not so advanced, and some beginners; they had no way of knowing. Next day I made them take preceptors. And then I think one day I said, "Pick out any one you want and give me a reading, even non-abhyasis." And I think the fifth day I said, "Pick out from a magazine or a newspaper any figure that appeals to you and give me a reading of that person." Some people even chose the Pope. And the sixth day was, of course, the final test. I said, "I would like you to give me a reading of myself." Now that reinforced their confidence.

The way the problem was approached, the educational scheme was outlined, the graded approach to the whole affair, and finally making myself a subject of their, shall we say, experiment, and all in a very anonymous setting where I never saw the result, contributed to the seminar's effectiveness. You could see, you know, some people beaming with satisfaction. Obviously when I gave them the reading and theirs had tallied, their self-esteem, more than anything else, more than even their confidence, their esteem was reinforced, you see, "I have done it." And when the seminar ended, it was only, you know, out of the hundred and thirty people, barely a handful of persons, six, seven, people, who never really made it, because they had no confidence. They never had faith in themselves. They started off with the idea they could not do it, and they never did anything. They did not work.

Why I am saying this is, at the end of the week it was very obvious that the failures were not those who had attempted to do something and failed, but those who never attempted to do anything and therefore were failures. They were not really failures, they were non-attemptees. This only goes to prove that those who attempt must succeed. If out of a hundred and thirty odd preceptors only six could not do anything, and out of the hundred and twenty-four, almost a hundred and twenty had, well, results in excess of eighty percent of success, it goes to show that native talent lies buried within all of us. We are all able to do it. And as Babuji said, "If you start off with the idea that you cannot do it, you will never be able to do it, even if God is inside you." Because it sort of punctures the will, you know. And where the will is lacking, nothing can be achieved. And then the most amusing part of this whole seminar was, I had a unanimous, I will not even say it was a request, it was not as polite as that, it was a demand, you see, that next year it should be at least two weeks, I mean the preceptors' seminar. 

You see the drama of the situation, starting off with near-total resistance, anger, annoyance, visibly written on everyone's face. I do not think there was an exception, perhaps only a few. And at the end of the week everyone was happy, everyone was satisfied, and everyone was telling me, "Chari, it is not at ll difficult, you know, this reading business," as if I had told them it was difficult!  And then clamoring for two weeks next year. Why I am giving you this background is that you should start off in an atmosphere of confidence that you are all capable individuals. The Master would not have chosen you otherwise. You were capable, your capacity was brought up to the level that was necessary to perform the task given to you, the service to humanity.

So let us not have faith in ourselves... but let us have faith in that old man's choice of us. That he did not pick duds, you see, he always picked winners. When we lose faith in ourselves and sit down and put our heads into our palms and weep in frustration, more than anything else it shows lack of faith in that old man, the Master. And that is a very sad thing, you see, that we should not have faith in the Master who picked us.

So ultimately, you see, when you have confidence in this work, it is not self-confidence that we require, it is confidence in the Master that we require. It is confidence in the powers of the Master, his wisdom, his grace, his mercy, his charity, his ability to raise humanity out of this world into the other world. And when we are able to do that and sit in the thought that he is working, his powers are working, his grace is descending, his mercy is flowing, his love is enveloping, then you find that He is there. Then becomes possible this miracle of the self-transformation process, that at least for the nonce, at least for the moment, we are not there, the Master is there, and his work is perfect. 

There is no use in saying, you know, "Imagine that you are not there but the Master is sitting in your place. If necessary think his beard is there on your face." Yes, that is as a start, you see, to help you come into that state of being, that the Master is there, not you. But if it remains an artifice and every time you have to feel your face to see if the beard is there and you do not find it and you say, "Heck, I am not even able to make that guy come here," you have started off on the wrong foot, as it were. This is not a system of supposition where you sit down and try to feel the beard on your face. I mean, no girl preceptor is ever going to find a beard on her face. And most men do not either. Because it is not the beard which matters, it is the beard as an aid to bring him here, you see, in your mental supposition, which must work to effectively place him there. And when you are able to do that you find now who is working — he is working. So what are we weeping about?

You see, this is the sense of confidence that I would like this process to instill in you. This is the approach with which I wish you all to start work today. I am not going to talk anymore; this is the only talk I shall be giving during this three-day seminar for you all. I would request you to listen to the tapes of the talks I gave in Courmettes first. There it was six days; here it has to be condensed to three days. The timing of it I leave to you to work out. It is a two-hour business every day. Because approximately an hour each day for six days, six hours, so you may have to listen to two hours of those talks every morning, or one hour in the morning, one hour in the afternoon. And in between I think you should take two hours off to do some reading, practical reading. And you are free to choose today a panel of ten abhyasis for your work. Not each one a different ten, but ten with whom you will all work, one after the other. And put your readings down on paper, please, and keep it. Tomorrow you will have six preceptors from among yourselves whom I shall nominate.  Put a little salt and pepper into the thing. [laughter] [he chuckles] And that will be tomorrow's. The third day you can either take a random choice, you know, your cousin if you have her photograph or the Pope again, I have no objection. He is a silent partner in this training program; or Babuji, or me, anyone you like. And if you do this with this idea that, "Master is sitting there, I am not there," surely you do not have to think of this thing again. The training is finished. 

So the whole process must start with the self, with the lower case 's', and end with the Self, with the upper case 'S'. That is all there is to it. On the computer it is a single jab of one finger. [he chuckles] And here it is not even that. You do not have to jab a finger, there is no 'control-Y', there is no 'Delete'. All that you have to do is in your mind. Lower case 's' gone, upper case 'S' here — He is there. As Babuji said, "Think of Him and He is there." So this is the small exercise, sisters and brothers, that I would like you to accept and undergo, and choose your times, choose the people, on this basis for the three days. Put it all down in writing, do not show it to me, tell me whom you have selected. I will give you my reading on a piece of paper. You are welcome to compare it. And you will find that you will come out with flying colors because you went in and He came out. 

You see, that is the secret of the transformational process. In the ancient literature of the yogic tradition it is said that when you take a bath in a river, and if that bath has lasted twenty minutes, you come out a different person altogether, because most of the cells in your body have changed in that time. So if a mere dip in a river can change the physical human being and bring out a new human being, why cannot we enter the portals of the Master's temple and come out as Him? Here there is no question of my being changed into something which is still me. Every abhyasi must walk in as himself, and a master must walk out. That is our responsibility to ourselves, that is our goal, and it is also our duty to the abhyasis who come to us. Frank must come in and Master must go out. Debbie must come in and Master must go out. Bill must come in and another Master must go out. It is like a factory, you take in so many raw materials but the product is the same, which comes out. If the raw material went in at one end and came out as the raw material at the other end, what would you think of that factory? Or of those machines? So how can we accept here, you see, the truth, or the fact, that Bill went in and Bill came out?

So we are involved in a production process, which is a transformation process, where he who goes in never comes out again. Not because he has ceased to exist, or is dead, but because he has become transformed into the Master. I thank you all for your cooperation. Thank you.

The Master, The Mission and The Method

Courmettes, France

Sunday, July 10, 1988

Of course, it goes without saying we need your cooperation, Babuji always emphasized the need for cooperation whether we are abhyasis or preceptors or anything else, and he used to explain that cooperation is the first step towards the eventual step of surrender. And his one unfailing and often repeated advice: "How to create cooperation? Take interest!" You see, last night I was unable to sleep much so I had a thought which might appeal to businessmen. In business you put out capital to earn interest, here you take interest to build your capital. A principle of invertendo all over again.

So, the first principle of Sahaj Marg — take interest! As an abhyasi, take interest in your sadhana, in your evolution, in your ability to reach the goal. As a preceptor take interest in the work that you have voluntarily undertaken. I do not think it has ever been thrusted on anybody who was not willing to take it up. On the contrary it has been difficult to, sort of, dissuade aspirants to preceptorship from aspiring to it. I have always said, even to my Master, that had I had the choice I would never have been a preceptor. Because only when you get into it, and if you are conscientious about your work, if you are sincere to yourself, sincere to the Master, sincere to the abhyasis who come with so much longing in their hearts, demands, cravings, aspirations, then you will know it is perhaps a million times more difficult than a priest's job or a doctor's work. You see, in our society we are always praising the doctor and the priest. One as the doctor of the body, the other as the doctor of the soul. Unfortunately, today we are faced with a society where the moral degradation of these professions, because even priestcraft has become a profession today, where the moral degradation is almost complete. They are taking interest, but in themselves.

So please understand clearly what my Master, Ram Chandraji Maharaj, Babuji Maharaj, said, "Take interest not in yourself but in your work, in your responsibilities, in your evolution." Because when I take interest in myself as I am today, it is selfish. And I, by that very act of taking interest in myself, I put a bar to my advancement, because the interest is in myself as I am, and I will continue to be what I am. Therefore my evolution is stopped.  This is perhaps one reason why selfishness obstructs all growth. But interest in the work, interest in the Master, interest in the Mission, interest in the abhyasis' welfare, it takes away our interest or self-centeredness and projects it outside ourselves. And it makes for sincerity, for ability, for ultimately the Ultimate Capacity. 

So the first need, whether we are abhyasis or preceptors, and please remember we are both; for ourselves we are abhyasis, each one of us has to grow. And you know, in Sahaj Marg the goal is infinite. Towards infinity is the way. The goal is ever beyond. Ever in sight but ever beyond. So, the need for not fixing ourselves at one position, or in one condition, or in one state of being; and saying, "Today I have reached my destination in Sahaj Marg" — such a statement would be impossible. Even by the Master of Masters. Sahaj Marg knows no static condition. Sahaj Marg has no fixed situation. It is an ever moving, ever growing, ever expanding, not only concept, but a possibility and an actuality, as proved for us in the lives of our two great Masters, Lalaji Maharaj and Babuji Maharaj.

So there is no room ever for satisfaction. Babuji always said, "If you are satisfied, there stops your progress." And I do not see why this concept of an ever-expanding, ever-receding goal should prove either difficult to understand, or frustrating in our experience, because science teaches us that the universe itself is ever-expanding. We are not in a static universe. And if the physical universe — which we are so much in love with, which appears so glamourous to us, in conquering which so many billions and billions and billions of dollars and other currencies are spent — if that can be so attractive and so impressive, and so proven in our consciousness, I do not see the difficulty in understanding a similar, why only similar, an expanding concept of expansion itself in a spiritual environment, in the spiritual world. Because the physical universe only expands as we see it. The spiritual universe, maybe there are multi-universes, who can ever say where it is expanding, how far it can expand, where this expansion gets stopped? It cannot stop!

Therefore abhyasis should remember, and we are all abhyasis, we should first remember, you see, and convince ourselves, not mentally and intellectually, but in our hearts, that this is a road which goes on forever and ever. It never stops. It is a journey which will never end. In one sense, if you look upon it in a physical analogical way, of a way which must have an end and a destination, "Yes," Babuji said, "there is the goal. There is the destination." But he also said, "It is ever there. And at the Centre, there is only the Ultimate. We are ever approaching nearer and nearer."

So this is necessary that we understand this with our hearts, that we accept it with our hearts; and for me it is a very joyful, very exhilarating idea, a concept, a possibility, that for me this journey will never end. I will never have that frustration of coming to a point in space or time and saying, "Now it is over, what next?" People who have achieved something in life are very familiar with this frustration, "What next?" A ship owner buys one ship, "What next?" He buys another ship, "What next?" Third ship, "What next?" So this frustration of achievement which we find in the physical world, in our temporal lives, in our temporal existences, is an absolutely certain frustration. You see, nobody can escape it. The one who does not achieve is frustrated because of non-achievement, the one who achieves is frustrated because he does not know what to do next. He says, "What shall I do now? I have come to the top. I am now the chairman of the board of directors. What do I do now?"

So do not forget, sisters and brothers, that frustration is a fact of life, and to ascribe it to non-achievement or to un-success, excuse my playing with the English language, is a fact of existence, is like our shadow which will ever be with us. And if there is one certain way of cutting off that shadow from our existence, it is by axing this desire for achievement in any field, including the spiritual. Because as I say, as I repeat again and again, perhaps ad nauseum, the moment we have achieved, we are finished.

So this is the first thing about the method of Sahaj Marg, which our Master has bestowed on us: that the goal is a very specific goal, it is a very definite goal, it exists. Where? Can you give it a location in space and time? Absolutely not. Where then does it reside? As my Master said, "Within yourself."  So this is the logic for our meditation, that we do not adopt external symbols or objects of meditation, however exalted they may have been in the past or may be in the future, but we position it, we locate it, we identify it, inside the heart. 

Very often people are asked, preceptors are asked, "Why meditation on the heart?" And many of us say, "Well, because Babuji said so," or "Lalaji said so," but that is not the right answer, you see. Of course, that is part of the answer. They said it. But why did they say it? You see, it is like children, when they get curious about the fact of childbirth, "Mummy, where did I come from?" "Oh, you came from your mother." "And where did mother come from?" "From her mother." Ultimately, you have to say, "Darling, there is such a thing as a God who is the all-mother, you know, and from her, your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother came.  So that is one way of answering, for a parent who cannot answer and for a child who is too inquisitive.

So there is no use in saying, "Babuji said because Lalaji said." All right, why did Lalaji say it? There is a reason why they said it. And the reason is this — that in the heart is the goal of human existence, not outside but within. "Seek within and you shall find." "My kingdom is not of this world." I mean, all these things have been said before, you see, but we have just understood them either intellectually or emotionally.  And then we make the same tragic mistake of locating that Ultimate in a place of worship, and going there to find it, or in a place of pilgrimage and suffering the tortures of the body and the spirit to go there and find whatever you think you are going to find. And ultimately discovering that all these promises are like the fool's gold at the end of a rainbow — supposed to be there but never found.

Then the miracle happens, if you have the ability, if you have the genius, of acceptance. It is really a genius, you see, to accept what a master says, unproven by any logic, unproven by any substantiated body of knowledge, unproven by any systematic research, to accept it and to go ahead. And the proof of that master's greatness, the efficacy of his system, the verity of his words, the largeness of his heart, the immensity of his love, is that so many of us are here today.  Who could ever have dreamt that on European soil there would be so many preceptors! I do not think even in India I have had so many preceptors at a meeting. Last Basant, we had a hundred and thirty-three, I think, perhaps that was the largest number ever.

So you see, the proof of a thing is in the presence of something, not in the fact that it has been proved to be. Science proves by other means, you see, that a man was sitting here because certain infrared or whatever vibrations show that there is a depression which must have been pressed there by a certain body. It is verification, which is always after the fact. Science proves by verification.  Spirituality proves by the immediate presence of the thing, which must be, and which has been, and which shall eternally be there: myself, yourself, the Self.  So this is why we seek within, notwithstanding what the great religions may say.

Unfortunately, the religions have said the same thing, or at least the founders have said the same thing. But then, you know, the successors build temples and the temples become, shall we say, the abattoirs of spirituality — very satisfying, sometimes we can relieve ourselves of our loads of sin and guilt, which is a very temporary catharsis of the mind. As Babuji once said, rather crudely as he himself said... he said, "Forgive me, I am using a very crude and vulgar example, you see. But we should not use spiritual sadhana like we use a toilet, to relieve ourselves." As far as I know, all traditions have been such places. You go there, once a week, once a month or whenever you feel the need, say something, do something, give something, and come back feeling lightened.  Perhaps the lightness is real, perhaps it is ephemeral, perhaps it is illusory.  It does not last long in any case. That is why today we find this peculiar phenomenon that religions are failing in their ability to get people to come to worship, and all sorts of concessions are being made, to even morality, for instance.  So when that happens, and when the standards are lowered to enable people to come who are already of much lesser standards in their personal living, what is it going to fulfill?

So the turn towards spirituality is, I think, inevitable. It is not something that we choose, or something which we want to do, or not want to do. It is absolutely inevitable. Because in the historical process of the development of cultures, of civilizations, of religions, if there is one proof it is this proof: that in all these fields where man, or the human being, has externalized the symbols of his power, his possessiveness, his happiness, his contentment, his joy, it is doomed to failure, it is doomed to frustration. This is the lesson that the history of civilization teaches us, the history of religions teaches us; or if it has not taught you yet, it should teach you. And what is necessary to accept that teaching? An open mind. If there is prejudice, and if you say, "Well, this fellow is a salesman you know. He is selling Sahaj Marg. That is what he will say. But my God has said..." and the moment he says, "My God", well, I would hear a groan from God, if there is a God to groan. He would say, "What is this 'My God'? Does this fellow have the temerity, the arrogance, the cheek, to claim me as his own?"

So putting it rather bluntly, we have to learn this lesson. I mean, if culture is there, it is to teach us something; it is to teach us to be refined. Culture is an emanation of human refinement. Morality is the actualization of a human being's moral standards of existence. We do not follow morality, you see. Morality comes out of our living, out of our behaviour, out of the way we handle our environment. So to look upon morality as a body of do's and do nots, rules, and then to be plagued by the sense of guilt that I have done something which a body of knowledge says, "Thou shalt not do," is stupid. There is morality because there were people who lived in that way. And we look at their lives and say, "This is worth emulation, this is the standard of... ideal, the ideal of perfection that I should follow." What did they do? We codify it and a body of morals, a body of teaching, emerges out of their existence.

So teachings are not created by human thought. Please remember this, because in the Occident there is this tradition that knowledge is taught. I would prefer to say: knowledge emanates. In the original sense, yes, everything is given.  But only in the original condition, at the origin of time, of the universe, of existence itself. Subsequently it is given to us. What my Master taught is my knowledge, where else could I get it from? I did not learn it in schools. Where did he get it from? It was given to him by the example of his Master's living, his Master's teachings, which he followed with an incorruptibility of the soul, with an absoluteness of dedication, with an unswerving loyalty to the goal that he had set for himself. And with, shall we say, a love which could not sway hither or thither. And therefore, his Master became for him, the ideal, the perfect God. Therefore he could write in Voice Real with courage, conviction, and say, "Which God ever took pity on this insignificant being? If someone took pity on me, it was my Master and my Master alone. And if I ever saw God, it was because of my Master. To whom should I therefore be grateful? To God, or to my Master?" Question mark — no answer!  Well, the answer is implicit in the question, you see.

One thing I learned from my Master, "It is only a fool who seeks an answer outside a question." Many of you who have been associated with him, Babuji, know that he always said, "The question contains its own answer." Look within the question, you see. But we have been taught by the systems of moral education, to look outside for things, including for answers to questions. Therefore, this ideal of a human who could be perfect, who could be Divine, emerges not from a body of knowledge which says, "There shall be" — it comes from one who is, whom we follow and we say, "Yes, this is for me the ideal, the perfect, none other than this do I know! None other than this can I ever know! If I ever know it, it is only through Him. Therefore, He is the Ultimate for me."

So you see, the search now becomes a little changed from the heart, where we had an abstract notion of Divinity, an abstract presence which we could never identify, a very real presence but which we could never feel, and a voice which ever spoke to us but which we never heard. All this we now transfer, it is a real transference of all these things, from one's heart into the person of the Master. Now, we hear Him as the voice of the conscience who should have spoken to me from inside myself. We love Him as the Ultimate, which I should have loved, within myself, in its Eternal Presence. We seek Him as the God whom I know has existed forever and anon in my heart, but whom I could not find.  So you see, it is an exteriorization of the Ultimate Principle which was ever in us, which is ever in us, which shall ever be in us, for the purpose of being able to grasp it physically with our understanding, emotionally with our love, spiritually with ultimate success.

So the Master is an instrument for our evolution. It is not something we should fantasize about, "What is a Master? Who should be a Master? Why a Master?" Why a Master? Because we need one! If I could have done this without the need for a Master outside myself, to speak to me from outside what he could not tell me from inside, not because he was incapable of saying it, but because I was a stupid deaf idiot! I need him to show me things which I should have seen with my heart, but which I was too blind to see until he showed them with his eyes through my eyes, the knowledge which I have ever contained within myself. Because if that knowledge is not ever within me, I do not exist. Please take this as a fact. I do not exist because I am, I am because I exist.  I'm always a little annoyed with this business of "Cogito ergo sum." (I think, therefore I am.) The man who said that was much less than wise. "I am, therefore I think." A corpse cannot say, "Cogito ergo sum." I mean, this simple logic seems to have defeated the occidental mind of those days. I hope it does not continue to defeat us! So you see, it is from this 'I am', you see. And who is the 'I'? Well, until I find Him inside me, it is the Master. Therefore it is the Master who is 'me'! "I am the Master." We cannot say that, but the Master is 'me'.

Therefore in our spiritual technique of meditation, Babuji has said, "If you find it difficult to meditate, think I am sitting where you are sitting and I am meditating." Everything becomes possible when you think he is doing it. And as a preceptor, when I was made a preceptor way back in 1967, the first advice he gave to me was, "If you find any difficulty in the work, think I am sitting there, make this thought strong, that it is conviction, not merely a thought. If necessary feel that there is a beard on your face, and you will find the work goes well." And it does go well. I have found that whenever I thought I was giving the sitting it was much less than what it should have been. And when I was able to remove myself, erase my presence from there, the miracle of Babuji's presence happens and the sitting is perfect.  You cannot categorize it as good, or satisfying. The only words that you can use to express it, "It is perfect."

So perfection comes through Him, you see, perfection can never be ours. Now, this is a concept which can be obnoxious to the European mind, where we are trained to seek perfection in what we do, "Yes, I want to do something which is perfect." The painter wants something perfect, the artist wants something perfect, the architect wants to build the perfect house. But when we think it is here in me, the perfection — we fail. Babuji always said, "Perfection is only in God." In the sense that He is perfect, everything that comes from Him is perfect, everything He does is perfect. In us, we are human, we have these limitations of the self, we have the limitations imposed on us by education, by culture, by nationality, so many things, you see. So when we think, "I am doing something," it is miserable. When we think, "He is doing something," with the heart, feeling his presence, it is a miracle.

So the need for the Master is the second need, you see. First, that he becomes the exteriorization of all the ideals that I should have, which are in me but which I cannot recognize, which I cannot find. It is like a man wearing his spectacles and hunting frantically for them on the table top, until his wife tells him, "Look here." [pointing to the head] So the Master here [pointing to the heart], we make him; we create the Master, you see. In a sense, the Master is a creation of ourselves. "He comes when needed." What does it mean? "Knock and it shall be open unto thee?" No! Sit in your house and pray with devotion, he knocks at your door. This is, if you permit a slight invertendo again, the invertendo of religion and spirituality. There, you have to knock and somebody says, "Entrez," you know, and you have to go in. Here I am sitting at peace in my house, awaiting my beloved and He comes. He knocks, and I have to open the door for Him. He is Almighty, He is Ultimate, He is Divine. Nevertheless He is courteous enough to respect my privacy, to respect my need for Him and says, "When you need me, call me, I shall be there. Think of me, I shall be there." I do not think there exists any human lover who could say that.

So you see, I am not in any sense trying to philosophize, or fantasize, or to play with words when I say, "The Master is our creation." Because if I do not accept him as a Master, to me at least he is no Master. Babuji used to live in Shahjahanpur, and even his neighbours did not know about him. For them he was an old man who was a clerk in the Courts of Shahjahanpur, retired on a small pension and, because of his age, they would say namaste when he came out, nothing more. So, that something is next to us, in front of us, staring us in the face, does not mean automatically that we are going to recognize its presence, accept it and use it. Acceptance is an act of the heart, not of the mind.

The mind plays so many tricks. It can ask, "Why a human being? Is not my Christ enough, or is not my Buddha enough, or is not my Krishna enough? Why a Ram Chandra?" you see, all over again. It can say, "Why an Indian, why not a European? I am German. Why not a German guru?" "I am Dutch. Why not a Dutch guru?" "I am South African, why not a South African guru?" We are Indians and South Africans, God is not Indian or South African. He is the Creator.  It is like asking the owner of the palace, "Majesty, where is your room?" He will say, "My friend, you are my guest, this is your room. The palace is mine, the kingdom is mine, the world is mine, the universe is mine!" So to have located such a person in a time/space framework is worse than stupid.  And what can be more stupid than even that? To demand that a master should come out of such and such a time and motion framework, or time and space framework, or such and such a geographical, national, socio-economic, political framework — this is the mistake that most people do everywhere in the world. Indians do it as much as Europeans, because the human temperament, the human nature is unchanged, you see. We are all human beings. Scratch us and we are human beings, it is only the surface which is black or white.

So this lesson, you know, that the Master is a person we need; he must be the exteriorization of all that we hold dear and divine within our hearts, but which we do not know anything about, and that I must accept him totally as such. "Love thy neighbour as thyself." Love Master as yourself, because if you love yourself you stop your progress for the reason I stated before, just as we started this talk. Love Him, the miracle happens that you still love the Self, which is in you, which is Him, and your progress is faster because now you love that which you want to follow, you love that which you want to emulate, you love that whom you wish to respect, to adore, who is your ideal, whom you want to become like.

So this is the subtle, you know, the subtle resonance coming from within.  I say 'resonance', because it is to the call of my heart. It is like an echo across the valley. My cry brings the Master to my door, not from outside, but from within me. This is the miracle of the spiritual Master in the Sahaj Marg system, that out of me comes my Master. And him I follow, him I pursue, him I adopt, him I venerate, him I adore, him I love, to him I surrender. And he says, "Look within," and there I find he had always been there, and it was His Grace, it was His blessing, that he was able to clear the rubbish from my vision, clear the wax out from my ears, clear the screen from my understanding, and I see him inside, you see, and the outside Master is only a reflection of what is inside. Now when I leave the mirror, and walk away, the image may fail but the reality is going. It cannot be lost! Even if the mirror is broken the reality of my presence cannot be lost.

Then comes this ultimate miracle, you see, that if in this process we have been successful — of total acceptance, total surrender, total love for him, and he creates this miracle of clearing my perceptions, spiritual, temporal, anything, you see, and making me see him inside — now the need for his external presence vanishes. I do not need a mirror any more to show me my face. I know my face, I know my Self, with a capital 'S'. I have seen Him outside so that I could recognize Him inside, the miracle has occurred, I brought Him out of myself, He put himself back within me and says, "Now, be happy, now be content, the way is within you, the Master is within you, the goal is within you. Pursue it unflaggingly, with determination, because all is not ONE yet." "Why?" you may ask, you see. "If He is within you — why?" Because, eventually, this idea that He is within me should also go. Because He is still a presence which is distinct from my own self. He is still something to whom I look as someone separate, other than myself, a voice from within me which is not my voice, you see.

So that is why we have this teaching of the ultimate state of spiritual fulfilment, which is called mergence with the Master. Thereafter there is no Master within, there is no Master without. He is. You cannot say what He is, you cannot say where He is, you cannot say why He is, you cannot even say when He is. Was He in the past? Nay, He is in the future.  Not in the present? Of course, in the present too! Therefore such a person becomes eternal, his presence becomes eternal, he is ever and always.

So this is a broad sort of sketch of what is meditation, why we meditate, what the heart is, why we should meditate on the heart. And the need to transfer our allegiance, spiritual or emotional allegiance, from externalized symbols of divinity, to a living, pulsating thing, you know, which can be brought out from a living pulsating thing into the outside, put back again. It is not that there is no God outside, you see. If God is infinite, if God is immutable, if God is all-pervasive everywhere, He must be everywhere, outside too! Spirituality only says, "When He is inside, why do you look for Him outside?"

So we have no quarrels with religions, you see. Religions say, "He is here." [pointing outward] We say, "He is here too." [pointing inside] They say, "Come to me for worship." We can say, with confidence, with candour, with absolute truth, "I prefer to worship Him within myself. Here He is ever mine, ever inseparable from me, my existence, the source of my existence, the source of all benignity, beatitude, that can possibly be showered upon me, showering from inside." Why should I seek Him outside? In seeking Him outside, I live a lie, I deny the truth of spiritual existence, I deny His presence within.  To seek Him outside, such a God will say, "Well, go ahead, the universe is vast! When you have searched for Him everywhere and you have not found Him then come back to me in your own heart and look for me there, there shall I reveal myself to you."

So it is not that spirituality denies religion or negates religion, it only transcends religion. It makes all those expensive troublesome journeys avoidable.  It says the same truth I am telling you, you see, what they are saying I am saying. If God is in every atom, He is in every atom of your body. If He is everywhere, surely He is in you. If there is a temple for Him, surely your heart is a temple too. Why do you not worship Him in this temple, within you, which you carry ever with you, which you do not have to look for, where no doors have to be opened, no priest has to officiate, no offerings have to be made, no sacrifice is demanded? That is all that spirituality says, and that is enough that should be said. What more should we say? And when we do this, people often ask, "What are the socio-political, economical benefits?" Well, if I can find Him in my heart, what more do I need, if I find existence itself embodied in myself?

It is like asking a pregnant woman, "Yes, you are pregnant, what have you got?" She says, "What have I got? I have my baby! What more do I need? Something I have been longing for, waiting for — it is mine. I created it, it is mine!" Fortunately, even the men can say now, "This is mine, you see, this is my God, I created Him, I found Him, I structured Him with the help of the Master whom I created from myself out, and whom I put back in.  He is my God; He is a God of my creation; He is my creation itself." Now, you have to understand the two senses there, you see. That He creates me and I create Him because I lost touch with Him, lost sight of Him, lost the knowledge of His presence, the experience of His presence; and therefore the spiritual journey has to be made to find Him where He was always. So if you understand these things, again I say, "with your heart", you will find, you know, we have no quarrel with any convictions, or with any bodies, or systems of knowledge, or truth, or worship, or philosophy. We only say, "Friend, look inside."

I do not know if I am following the agenda but [he chuckles] [laughter] it is a bad habit of mine. The Master, the Mission, the Method, you see, I seem to have covered it, [laughter] knowingly or unknowingly.  Then, we have to come to the basic elements: prayer, meditation, cleaning, constant remembrance.

I am rather averse to mechanical interpretation of the system, and I think in our books we have dealt sufficiently with prayer, meditation, cleaning, and constant remembrance. And if you now understand what I have been saying for the past, well, a little more than half an hour, you will understand one thing, you see, that prayer is also addressed to the Self, here [pointing to the heart].  When we think of a God outside, somewhere in heaven, somewhere far off, who has in His hands the unfortunate power of dispensing justice, or denying it, or withholding it, the power of punishment and reward, we feel frustrated as human beings, and rightly so.

I rebel against a concept of God who can run me like a horse, holding the reins in His hands you see, and the rowels plowing into my sides. I absolutely rebel at such a concept. Because on the one hand we say that God is love, and on the other we say he has condemned us to twenty thousand years or two hundred thousand years, or the millennia to follow in hell. You have only to read Dante's Inferno to see the horrors of the diseased mind that could conceive of a justice so inhuman, leave alone divine. I do not uphold such teachings as anything except that of a diseased mind, excuse me, when to even conceive of a hell is difficult.  When human beings are so merciful that they weep when we see other human beings suffer, when our justice is there which says, "Until a criminal is proved to be a criminal, he shall not be punished," when we are so generous that we are willing to feed stray cats, stray dogs, sparrows with broken wings, how is it possible that God can be so inhuman and create infernos and hells and, you know, all these despicable, dirty, nauseating things? I cannot imagine it.

I have had discussions with Babuji about this, and much to my surprise, he said, "Yes, hell does exist." I was shocked. Even more shocking was his statement that he has never been able to find heaven in spite of all his searching throughout the known universes, in plural! This was a very devastating shock to me, you see. Here I am denying the concept of a hell, of a God who can create a hell, who can be so inhuman as to create places of punishment, and my Master says, "Yes, it exists." Of course, for some time I was very upset. I could not even ask him, "Where is it?" I was annoyed, you know, with Master, that he is sort of trotting out old fears of fire and brimstones and pitch. It may be in any other modified form, you see, but it is something which I could not bear, it is abhorrent to me, you see. But later on, when I discussed with him he said, "Do not think of all the molten tar that they poured down your throats, and the spears that they put through your eyes for seeing the wrong things. And the molten wax they poured into your ears for hearing the wrong things, it is not like that. It creates a state of giddiness, you see, vertigo." And then he said, "It is not a god which creates that vertigo. Do not think that because there is a hell, there is a god who sends you to hell. It is you who put yourself in that situation and suffer that, which you are, in your ignorance, and in a certain way, in a self-satisfying way, ascribing to a God, because it relieves you of the responsibility for being responsible for your own punishment."

You know, the human mind has an absolutely fascinating capacity for self-deception.  Anything which I do not want, God has done. "What can I do, I have tried anything, you know, but God is blind. This is my destiny. Therefore you know, I do not go to church, I do not go to temple anymore. Why worship a God who is so inhuman?" But my Master told me this absolutely fascinating truth: that hell exists, it is our creation. We create it for ourselves, there is no such thing as a hell where all condemned souls are sent, you know. It is not a prison, it is not like the Chateau d'If outside Marseilles. It is within me. Why is there no heaven? It is not necessary, you see. I asked Babuji this question, "What about the heaven? Should I not be able to create?" He said, "Not necessary, because when God is within you, you are heaven yourself, why do you need another heaven?" You see, a hell you can create, but a heaven you need not create, for it is unnecessary. It is within you. "Seek within and find your heaven which you have been searching for."

So you see, the spiritual truth, the greatest truth of my Master's teaching, that there is no heaven, because heaven has always been, it is part of me, it is me. Therefore we say, "In him, or in her, I found my heaven," or, if you choose, "My haven." "You are my heaven," you see.  Why? Because, in you, I find that manifestation of the heavenly divine qualities, the divine effulgence, the divine nature, the love, the generosity, the kindness that we associate with it, and you say, "She is my heaven," or "It is my heaven." Heaven does not need to be created. Hell is created by our own wrong thoughts, wrong actions, grossness. So if there is a hell, and Babuji has said there is, it must be, it is a creation of our grossness. So when people come to me and say, "Oh, I am suffering the tortures of hell." Of course, we cannot be unkind and say, "Yes, suffer it! Because you have created it." [laughter] We cannot.

To my mind, hope is a heaven in itself, because there is this old English saying, you know, that, "Where there is life, there is hope." Life without hope would be meaningless, it would be a hell in itself. A hopeless life is not a life, it is a stagnation, you see, it is a cesspool, it is a mire in which we have got mired, into which we are sinking deeper and deeper — the quicksands of the negative side of existence. Into that we sink by our own foolishness. We did not know where we were going, we stepped into it, and within ten minutes, the last strand of hair has disappeared, and we are just bubbles, you see, being laboriously released by that sand. So, where is heaven, where is hell? Again, they are within us. You see, hell is within us if God is not within us. If you go through the English countryside, you find hunting lodges, old cottages where the kings slept, "Here slept Louis XIV," or "Here slept Henry Tudor," whatever it is, you see, I do not remember the names. And the old saying, "Where the king is, that is a palace! Where God is, that is a temple." But we make a temple and look for God there. And we build a palace and look for a king within and we find a fool occupying the throne — it is not his fault!

So spirituality says, "If there is the Divine in you, and if He is everything, for heaven's sake, how can that which is inside you not be the God, and therefore that which is in you not be heaven itself, or the Heaven of heavens?" I contain heaven inside me. I mean we should all have this capacity to say this loud and bold, you see, "What are you looking for ye people of the earth?" You know, in a sort of spirit of conversion, if you have the gift, soap box opera, the Hyde Park, you know, stand on top of a packing case and shout, "Where are you looking? Look inside!" Nobody will listen to you. "Look inside for what? My heart? Yes, I know, the poor thing is weak, you know. It won't even beat properly. What do you expect me to look for? I am going to my doctor." Yes! Who made it like that? Who put grossness, who covered it with an alligator-tough skin so that it cannot even... blub-blub properly? Because it has lost that elasticity, you see. Doctors ascribe it to cholesterol, or some such other idiosyncratic principle. What about the grossness which creates cholesterol, that creates fatty acids, that creates all the things that are lining your tubes and vesicles? This we forget, you see, and then we go to doctors, dietitians, homoeopaths, quacks, astrologers, I Ching, Tao, Tarots. What for? Again we are looking outside for the knowledge that we have within us, and we suffer because they do not have the knowledge that is within me. In me is absolute knowledge. They speak from what knowledge they have derived, faultily, incompletely, through education.  Education never completes our education. It is a well-known truth, you see.  I mean, it is an education in itself to find out that education does not educate, not completely, by any means. So what are we going to them for? So spirituality says, "Even for that, look inside. You cannot find out, go to the Master, he will tell you what is wrong with you." And you go to Babuji, you know, expecting volumes of truth to spew out of his mouth, and he looks very profoundly at you for a few seconds, and says, "I am telling you, it is all grossness." [laughter] This happened to me the first time I went to Shahjahanpur, I had been used to some other gurus, you know, who could speak, like I am speaking now, for hours at a time, [laughter] talking a great deal but saying very little.

I expected something like that with my Master and I had spent nearly two hours next to him. All that I heard was the beautiful, delightful sound of his hookah.  I think he smoked the hookah just to lull us into thinking that we are hearing something. [laughter] You see, this is not a joke. I mean it in a very real sense. Because to most human beings, silence is intolerable. We cannot be silent, we cannot 'be in silence' — two things which we have to learn.  And this again, the system that my Master teaches: close your eyes, close your mouth, bring your limbs together so that they are not active, sit in a comfortable position, look inside, try to hear His voice. And Babuji has said, "That voice is so feeble now, because we have never listened to it." It is like a dog which barks and barks and you never listen, it lies down and goes to sleep.  And we try to remove all the impediments to that hearing, like you close your doors, draw your curtains when you are listening to music, so that there should be no outside disturbance. Here, we have to close the doors of our senses, bolt them securely, look inside.  Still we do not hear. Why? As Babuji said in one word: grossness. You see, it is like a lamp, the glass chimney of which has been coated with soot from inside. The lamp is burning but there is no light coming out. So this is the thing of which Babuji used to say, "Even criminals have this light within them." We do not see it because they have enshrouded it within that enormous solidity of the grossness that they have accumulated. When you clean it away you find the light is still within them, too.

Therefore in Sahaj Marg we are taught, I mean, Babuji insists, that while we can hate what a man does or a woman does, do not hate the person himself or herself because the person is always divine. For the nonce there is something wrong with it, because it is covered over with slime, with mud. Clean it away and it is as pure as you are. I remember a great statement attributed to Swami Vivekananda, that, "Every Buddha is a worm evolved, and every worm is a Buddha involved, in itself."

So this generosity, you know, of conception, that criminals, prostitutes, philosophers, saints — in essence they are the same. See, this question arose when Babuji said... I asked him the question, "What is the qualification to be an abhyasi?" He said, "Your willingness." I said, "Not my qualities?" He said, "Well, if I were to tell you the truth, you would be shocked." [laughter] I said, "Yes, please tell me, I wish to be shocked." He said, "There is very little difference between the highest evolved human being and the lowest human being." I said, "Very little difference? Then what am I coming to you for?" He said, "For that very little difference, [laughter] without which you are what you are, but with which you shall be what you have to be." So for that little difference, we are working so much, you see. And what is that little difference? One is gross, the other is not gross; one is gross, the other is subtle; one is human, one is divine — the essence is ever the same.

So you see, this generosity, this magnificent open-heartedness, where a Master can say, "My heart is the playing ground for all of humanity." Religion does not say it. No religion has said this. They say, "Come to me, worship me, follow me. I am the truth. Me alone shall you find!" Isn't it? At least the two great religions have said it. Hinduism has escaped because it was like the amoeba, which absorbs everything into itself — a very intelligent way of doing things. But this magnificence, this generosity, this love, you see, this humanity — that we are essentially the one, though there are differences in the way we manifest ourselves, you see.

What is behaviour but the way in which we manifest ourselves? What is knowledge that we speak about, but the way in which we allow the inner knowledge of the Ultimate to manifest itself through our mouth? So when these are limited, the Infinite within me I limit in its manifestation by my sensory instruments, by my desires, by my conception of what I am. If a doctor thinks, "I am a doctor," well, he may be a very good doctor, but it is a limit. My profession is that of a doctor, you see, but I am a human being. I am a Sahaj Marg abhyasi, I hope to be perfect. Yes, we have to be something, we have to earn our livings, one is a doctor, one is a banker, one is a hawker — why not? But these things should not in any way negate or stultify the inner thing that seeks to express itself through me.

And if spirituality ultimately achieves its objective, it is precisely this miracle of total expression of my inside through my outside, you see. What Babuji meant by living a balanced existence — "What you speak you shall mean, what you mean you shall speak." What does it mean? Now, we intend to say something, we say something else. We desire to say something, we say something else. We have to be polite, we have to be courteous, we have to be civilized, you see. Therefore, spirituality says, "Beware of this civilization." Civilization thrusts hypocrisy upon you in the way of culture, in the way of manners, in the way of behaviour. These are veneers you are putting on to yourself, they are masks, they are not yourself. Does it mean Babuji had no value for civilization? Not at all, you see. He had the highest value for civilization, but a civilization which flows from inside. Not as a veneer imposed upon you by society, by knowledge, by education, by culture, but something which springs out of you like the spring waters come out from the bowels of the earth, you see, spring, crystal clear source. I must allow my source to flow out of me, you see. Which means, when such a man speaks it is divine, when he says something it is divine, when he talks it is divine, when he walks it is divine — everything that he does. Because, it is not he who is doing it, it is the inner spring in him which is welling out through him. And this is possible only by cleaning away the samskaras, and transmitting to him the essence of the Master, which we have all been permitted to do.

So you see, the essence of spiritual existence is this: the ability, or acquiring the ability, to erase, to efface myself, so that that which is within me shall flow out of me in all its effulgence, in its divinity. So what is it that you are talking of becoming and achieving and getting and grasping? All this becomes senseless, you see. That is why perhaps in one of my talks in Vorauf I said, "Evolution, it has no meaning, you see, I am not evolving into something." Perhaps I should say, "I am devolving from that which I have become into that which I was." That would be a greater truth, a more acceptable truth. So this is what we try to do.

And now, we have the Master, we have the method. What is the Mission? Well, it is an organized body, which can offer the Master's teachings, his practice, to what Babuji always referred to as a 'suffering humanity'. We need something, you know; when you wish to speak to somebody, you need a telephone — it is an organization. When you need to go somewhere, you need a train or a plane; it is an organization. It is an organization which runs these benefits for our use: services, utilities. But when it comes to spirituality, people argue, you see, "Oh, why an organization? Why an ashram? Why a Shri Ram Chandra Mission? We do not like organization in Europe, because so many organizations..." Yes of course, but your body is an organization! You have a heart, a pair of lungs, the liver, the stomach, the large intestines, the small ones — I mean, Gertie can run through the list later. [laughter] What for? It is an organization, you see.

If you study the body, it is said that every cell has its own independent existence. It comes into being, it dies. But my existence is independent of the millions and billions of cells which have their own independent existence within me. 'I' am one, I say. But I am also billions of things, which are growing within me, dying within me, are being born within me. If you look at it that way, each of you is a universe in yourself, you see, and there is a ruling God within yourself; and perhaps, the organisms which are within you, growing and being born, and dying, loving, hating, all this phenomena of existence, perhaps they look to you, inside you, as the god who is ruling them! So we are cheating those billions of things which are within us too, you see, when we deny its existence. Suppose you worship a God and God was to come and say, "My dear, you know, I am no God. Forgive me, you see, I've been this, that and the other." You would be shattered! What happens to my organism when I deny God? I suffer, I die, not because 'I' die, but because all that which constitutes me dies. Because their god is being destroyed in the process.

So you see, an organization must exist, and the organization must have a presiding deity. My heart is the presiding organism for my body. That which is within that heart is the thing which governs. If I deny it from outside, I deny it from inside, my organization collapses. 'I' really die then, you see. Perhaps you can use this analogy to see why we need an organization like a mission.

I have said in the past, I repeat it again, a mission is not a structure of brick and mortar, it is that which we adopt as the purpose of our life.  "What is your mission in life?" you are asked. "My mission is my Master's Mission." "What is his Mission?" "His Master's Mission." "What was it?" To offer to humanity, in words of my Master, 'suffering humanity,' a simple, universally acceptable, easily practicable system of practice, which, in a short space of time, will enable them to find within themselves what, they have been desperately, stupidly, unsuccessfully seeking outside.

So that is all I have to say for this morning. I hope I have covered something of the agenda. But you know, I am like one of those Indians who find it difficult to stay on the road [he chuckles] [laughter] and keep veering from the left to the right and the right to the left. But it is fun while it lasts. [laughter]

The Role of the Master

Courmettes, France

Monday, July 11, 1988

I will start off with something about prayer. I think way back in 1972, in the days of brother Andre Poray, we had a meeting in Sanary, Jean-Michel Piquemal will remember it, and the others of you who were members then. And there was a great deal of discussion about prayer, not because people did not know what prayer is or they did not want to pray, but out of a feeling of revulsion from the traditional church. 

Now that was something which was, at the same time, worrying and amusing.  Because it showed a certain lack of ability to judge the merit of a thing in itself for itself. That religious systems have misused prayers or prayer, does not mean that prayer is by itself a bad thing, or an undesirable thing, or a corrupt thing. And we must also remember that it is we who prayed, whether under the overall tutelage of a church, or of a lesser entity of the family.  And when we prayed, we prayed because we needed to. We must always remember why we pray. Then only can we understand whether it is necessary in our existence or not. 

Babuji Maharaj was quite, I would not say confused, because he was never confused, but he could not understand the then European attitude to prayer.  He said, "Why are they so upset about prayer? What is it that they object to?" I said, "But Babuji Maharaj, you also say prayer is begging." He said, "Yes of course, in the normal way, when we do nothing but ask, and ask, and ask. We certainly have a right to ask for that which we need, not which we want." You see, Babuji was very specific in drawing a very subtle, very fine, but very deliberate and necessary distinction between needs and wants. His philosophy says that we have a right to the needs of existence.  The wants are created by us. And it was his very forthright, downright, unambiguous, oft-repeated statement that we never pray for our needs, we pray for our wants.  And he said this is why it is called begging. And he used to elaborate, I mean in a semi-humorous way, semi-critical way, semi-caustic manner, that God, who is characterized as all love, merciful, compassionate, He does not deny the basic needs of existence to any of His creation. Water, air to breathe, the basic necessities of life as we call them, these are assured whether we are animals, birds, insects. Of course, somebody who wants to be rather dogmatic and argumentative can say, "What about the Sahel and the Sahara and places like that? Where is God's mercy there?" It would be well to remember that those deserts are largely the creation of human cupidity, covetousness, avarice, greed, selfishness. 

So, prayer as something we indulge in, the word indulge I deliberately use, is something which Babuji looked upon as obnoxious, in the sense that we are asking for more and more. And you all know his story about the great Moghul emperor who was praying in his private prayer house, and a saint wanted audience with him. He was stopped at the gate of the palace. He said, "I am a holy man." The doorkeeper said, "My Master, the emperor, is praying." He said, "Well, he is involved in a holy act, I am a holy man, so I do not see any objection to going there." He was permitted to go. When he came into the prayer chamber, he found this great Moghul emperor asking God for more territories, more victories, more of this, more of that. He must have been nauseated. The greatest emperor of those times, begging on his knees for more.  As he got up to go away, the emperor turned round and said, "Wait, I am just finishing, I will attend to you as soon as I finish my prayers." The saint said, "No! No! You see, I am building an ashram, and I thought I would come and ask you for some financial assistance, but I find you are yourself a beggar. What can I beg from a beggar? And if at all I have to beg, I will beg from Him, from whom you are begging." I mean it is a point with a great moral behind it, that even emperors are beggars. 

That's why my Master used to say, I mean, excuse me for repeating it; sometimes the rich people get annoyed that I appear to make them the targets of my talks; it is not so, you see. It is a philosophy. There is a moral to be drawn from these stories, which I heard from my Master. He said, "It is an amazing thing, Parthasarathi, that the poor do not beg. It is the rich who beg. And the richer they are, the more they beg for."

So this is another principle of invertendo that the needy do not beg, they just surrender to existence, you see. You find them in the poor countries of the world, they are lying by the street-side, too poor even to beg, too weak even to ask, even from God. They say, "Well if this is your will, so let it be done." It is therefore in the poor of the world that you find this attitude of surrender. You may say, "Well, it is an enforced surrender." Why not? Surrender in whichever way it comes is desirable. And if you have to be poor and made to suffer before you can surrender that is also one of the ways of God, one of the ways of destiny. In fact it is one of the ways that the individual soul has evolved for itself from its experience arising out of its previous life. Because this is the great truth, that when a soul leaves this embodied existence... Babuji used to say, "The moment we die, we become all wisdom," because in that state in the hereafter, the limbo between two lives, there can be no foolishness. It is all wisdom, all love, all clarity, divine, just. There, the soul which has just left its embodied existence ruminates on itself, you see, meditates, "What have I done? What is the negative? What is the positive? What are the plus points? What have I now to do to evolve further on the path of evolution?" And there it decides. You know, there is no God who thrusts it into hell or heaven. As I said yesterday, it is right here in us. This soul decides, in its absolute wisdom, in that limbo of disembodied state: as such and such, in such and such a place, will I take my next birth.

Therefore please remember, that if there is a beggar, that soul which is in the body of the beggar chose to be a beggar, knowing in its wisdom, in its prenatal wisdom, post-mortem wisdom, that in that state only it could evolve. Unfortunately, once we are here our wisdom is clouded, the original wisdom which dictated that I have to be born in such in such a situation out of such and such parents, in such and such a linguistic area, is forgotten. The need for it is forgotten. We get sort of buffeted, you know, by desires, by the environment, by culture, by tradition, by religion itself. Then we lose this purpose and we start begging. 

So this is a very necessary thing to remember, that we are not punished or rewarded by any god in heaven, or by any devil in hell. It is our own doing.  And it is not a foolishness that we do, it is not something stupid that we are doing. It is out of that immense wisdom of accumulated existence of umpteen lives that we have led, which are summed up in that moment after death, and which dictates my next life. One who is able to retain that wisdom, albeit in a subconscious or super-conscious fashion, he makes of this life what it should be, the last step on his evolutionary path to the goal. Otherwise, it is but one more out of many steps. So you see, if that is the case, what is the logic in my asking or appealing to any god? Or, for that matter, to any demon or devil, selling my soul to the devil? Both are impossible, you see.  Because at least in the East, in India, it is a firm conviction, it is not just a belief, it is a conviction arising out of the personal experience of the saints, that I am the destiny maker for myself. There is no use appealing to an external agency, even to Divinity itself, because I have chosen my destiny. I have chosen my existence, and it is for me to use this existence to further my interest. 

So you see, prayer becomes meaningless if you view it in that larger context of how we are born, why we are born, where we are born. That is one way of looking at prayer. The other thing is, notwithstanding Babuji saying, "Prayer is begging," he still advocated prayer. We have a Mission prayer, you see, which everybody is supposed to repeat once in the morning, "Oh Master, thou art the real goal of human life," you know, in various languages.  So I asked Babuji, "Why this prayer? If prayer is begging?" Then, as I told you, I think, last year in Vorauf, perhaps, it is also printed in one of the books, I do not want to repeat that all over again here, there are three statements contained in the prayer. The first line states who and what is my goal. And it is the real goal, you see, there can be so many spurious goals, false goals, temporary goals, glittering goals. What is my real goal? "Thou art the real goal of human life." The next line is an illustration of what I am at this moment. "We are yet but slaves of wishes putting bar to our advancement." The third line makes a statement: by your grace alone I can reach it, "Thou art the only God and power to lead me up to that stage." So Babuji said, "Do not misunderstand this prayer, it is not asking, it is not begging, it is nothing of that sort. It is you reminding yourself every morning, of your goal, of the purpose of your existence, of your present condition, and trying to remember Him who alone can lead you to that stage which you want to achieve. It is just a statement of fact, it is a remembrance."

Then the next question: "You tell us to pray sometimes. Somebody is sick, you say, pray to Master. What should we do?" He said, "Pray," I said, "In what way? Pray means again it is a begging. Even if I should ask for the life of somebody dear who is dying, is it not a begging?" Then he enunciated that famous principle, you know, to me at least, that when you ask for yourself it is begging, when you ask for somebody else it is never begging.  We have a right, I mean it is a right, perhaps even a duty cast upon us by love itself, that when we love we have to ask for those whom we love. We are never allowed to ask for ourselves. So you see, there is a fine distinction between praying for oneself which is begging for oneself, praying for another which is a prayer to the Almighty, "God bestow your mercy on him," or "Master bless him, or her." There is no difference, you see. So that is another aspect of prayer. 

Then why pray before meditation? I mean it is neither this nor that. He said it is the way of connecting yourself at one instant of time to the Almighty whose guidance, whose help, you are seeking. And if that is done effectively your meditation becomes something sublime, something effective. 

So this is a broad summation of what prayer is. And we should try to give up, either our love for religion and our inability to get out of those traps which religion has laid for us — very emotional, very demanding traps — while we should also learn to give up our hatred of those things: revulsion for church, revulsion for the church rituals, revulsion for the church itself, because the church deserves neither. It is an organized institution founded for a certain purpose, like a telephone exchange. If I want it I use it, if I do not I do not use it. I cannot say, "Take out this telephone exchange because I do not use it."  It is for those who need it. It has a purpose, it has a place in existence.  All are not so evolved that they can come to the feet of the Master. 

In fact Babuji once explained to me about the role of the temples in India.  You know, you may have a few churches here and there, scattered in Europe.  We have hundreds of thousands of temples. I mean you stumble and fall against a temple in India. So I asked Babuji, "What about these temples?" He said they had a purpose. You see, a temple, according to Babuji, was a place where a man could go and worship God, whose evolutionary level did not qualify him for the grace of a master, who could never reach a master, who could never approach a master because he could not even know what a master is. His evolutionary level precluded the possibility of either knowing, or understanding, or seeking out a master. So the great saints of the past, in their immense generosity, mercy, love for humanity, they created this system of temple worship, put a form there and charged it. It is that charge which comes out of the temple idol. 

And the next great truth which I learned from Master was that this charge has a specific life, lifespan in time, depending on the spiritual approach of the original saint who charged that form of worship, or idol. Obviously, you see, like you have your pencil torchlights, four hours, then you have to recharge again. Suppose a man in the African jungles, you know, a Voodoo worshiper, puts that battery and says, "This is the source of all power," what will you get after four hours? Nothing! That is why you find in India this enchanting spectacle, that on one side you have temples where millions, literally millions, of people worship every year; and there are temples almost next door to such temples where the inhabitants are only the owls and the bats. And Babuji said, "This is the proof of what I am saying. There is nothing left there.  Human beings have at least this much sensitivity not to go there, because there is nothing there, the charge has become exhausted."

Then Dr. Varadachari further explained from the theory of atomic disintegration, you see, where we have the half-life periods of certain atoms which can run to thousands or millions of years, and certain which disintegrate in millionths, one millionth of a second. So like that the charge is there. When it is there, there is some purpose in worshiping because you get something in its presence.  You have to be there to receive the charge, obviously. So temple worship had a meaning, had effect in those days when these saints were able to charge the idol. Today perhaps nobody exists who can do the charging. So that is why temple worship is as useless as worship in church. I do not know if at any stage in Christianity's history there existed someone who could charge a cross, for instance. So you see, if there is a charge there is some meaning in going there.  And that too for whom? Only for one who has no guru. 

The guru is the living God. This is the concept of guru in the Hindu tradition, in what we call the sanathana dharma tradition, in the yogic tradition.  Beyond Him there exists no God. He is not only the object of worship, He is the object of everything. Therefore, Master said, if at all one has to pray, and one has a Master of calibre who is serving his needs, there is some purpose in praying to that Master.

 You see, I was asked a question some time last year.  Babuji himself has written that ultimately He [pointing upwards] is the real Master, you see, and all the human Masters who come on this world, on this earth, are His representatives. If that is so, then why do we address the prayer, "Oh Master" and not "Oh God." Now today I am giving you the answer for that. Because God, it is a living God who is before you in the form of the Master; not that God is dead elsewhere, but this is an embodied flesh-and-blood divinity, you see, who can understand our needs; who can understand our temperaments; who can sympathize with us, being human himself; who can accept our failings, perhaps having failed himself in some way.

 You know, it is like in a school, the brilliant teachers are generally tyrants. They petrify the students. But the teacher who has himself stumbled and fallen on the way before he graduated and did his PhD, he is generally very sympathetic. He says, "Yes, I did this same thing, you know, I also made this same mistake of making 4 + 2 = 5. My son, it is not like that, do it this way." So you see, the failures are always more sympathetic, more loving, more compassionate, because they have needed that love and sympathy and compassion themselves, and know the value of that love and sympathy and compassion. 

God unfortunately, or fortunately for us, has no mind. This is the great teaching of my Master. God possibly cannot have a mind, because if there is a mind there is consciousness. If there is consciousness, there is consciousness of good and bad, of life and death, of myself and yourself. And the duality of existence takes birth in his mind and He ceases to be God at the instant he is born.  So Babuji's greatest research, I would say, is this finding that God can possibly not have a mind. Therefore He cannot even know He is God. How can He therefore answer your prayers, you see, coming back to the question of prayer. Which God? Where? How will He recognize that He is being addressed? "Oh God!" I shout in the wilderness you know. Yes, but who is to listen to me? Therefore, you know, in His ultimate mercy, compassion, He sends Himself in another way.  You see how it is done! It is a miracle, it is a mystery.

 Perhaps, as Babuji once told me when I asked him, "How does this happen?” he said, "You will know it on the day you achieve that state yourself." It is like parentage for children, you see. A little girl wants to know how children are born.  When she gets married she knows by personal immediate experience. She does not have to be told anything, you know. What is love? Well, when you fall in love with someone you know. Isn't it? What is a plum? For an Indian who has never eaten one, well, you eat it and you know. Isn't it?

So this is the value of direct perception, personal experience, which is the only recognized form of knowledge in Vedic science. No doubt we have books, but the books were written by those who had this direct personal experience of the Ultimate. They did not theorize, they did not philosophize. They wrote out of their personal experience. Now the wise should seek that personal experience, not that knowledge which has come out of that experience. Unfortunately that is the tendency, to read what they have written, not to do what they did and to become what they became. 

Therefore coming back to prayer once again, you know, I go wandering here and there a bit. Coming back to prayer again, Master said, "If you pray to God, I mean I have no objection, how will such a God answer you when he has no mind, no consciousness, no sense perception? Therefore pray to the Master." And when we pray to the Master, even this element of begging, perhaps sometimes, you know, he condones. Because of his sympathy — he is a human being — he says, "this guy has come to me in his suffering, in his anxiety, I have to do something."  So when we pray we do not draw upon the goodness of the Master, we draw upon the love of the Master, and the sympathy and the compassion which flows with that love. Therefore he is able to assist us, whatever, however stupid our request may be. 

So prayer to the Master has some meaning, though I personally have said, several times, that to me that also is a little obnoxious. Because when we claim he is divinity in human form, he is the all-knower, the all-wise, the love-personified, to pray and to remind him, "Babuji, my son is sick," or "My wife is sick," or "My business is failing," seems to question his divinity a little, you see. Of course I can understand that in our misery of the moment we have only him to fall back upon, and therefore we do it. Every one of us does it and I do not think, at that moment, it is wrong. Because, if I knew it was wrong I would not do it. But in that moment of sometimes terror in the middle of the night, somebody is dying, there is the death rattle in the throat, you do not know what to do, you pray to the Master. 

And very often, most often, the miracle occurs that something happens and a person who is literally dead is taken up again. Let it not be thought that Lazarus was the only instance of a dead person being raised by a superior being.  It is happening again and again. I mean, you see, it is like these books of the existence after death that we read. It can be written only by one who has had that experience. So the true testament to such experience is the one who has undergone it, and I know there are several in our Mission whom Babuji has thus blessed, not with just gifts of happiness and joy and health but with life itself. That is why a Master is life-giver, you see. And a life-giver can be none but God Himself. So I am trying to come to the divinity of the Master in the sort of invertendo form. You see, the logic of it? So to pray to such a one, well, that is why the prayer is addressed to, "Oh, Master!"

So why should we pray? You know, very often abhyasis ask, new people ask, "You too have a prayer like Christianity? Oh, I do not want prayer. I do not want a system which has a prayer." They do not know what they are losing.  So it is the duty of preceptors to understand what is prayer, why it is advocated in Sahaj Marg, and explain this. Because, otherwise it is like, you know, for a small black spot on the moon, I would not see the full moon at all. "Oh, it is blemished!" So this is why I have gone, rather into length, on prayer. 

Then we come to meditation. Meditation has been defined as thinking constantly about something. Rest, you all know why we meditate. But please remember that meditation is only a technique. It is not an end in itself. And this is exemplified by the often-repeated fact that many people just go into meditation and start snoring and, you know, they are not aware of anything else. It is done in a mechanical way. And they enjoy the meditation rather than do the meditation.  And Babuji used to say, "This is a mechanical thing and they have no progress at all." Because when we meditate, it has to be a dynamic process in which the goal is always in our view. That is, a movement towards the goal is involved.  Otherwise it is like sitting in a static train. Even a TGV, you know, if it is drawn up in the yards of the Paris stations, and is destined to go only tomorrow morning, if I sit in it, it is not going to take me anywhere. It must move. 

So meditation is a process, it is not an end in itself. I say this because I find often preceptors say, "Meditate and everything is solved." Nothing is solved by meditation. By meditation we meditate. What do we achieve by meditation? Then if people ask, you see, by mastering the ability to think continuously of something, I gain a regulatory control over my own mind. I have now the possibility of applying that mind where I choose. It is able to reveal to me the truth of whatever I seek. So at its peak, meditation can do nothing but serve as an instrument of revelation, because the mind is perfected, the mind is regulated, and the mind becomes one-pointed and now I can use it for everything except to know God. Because God, not being an object, cannot be the object of concentration. Therefore, no concentration can ever reveal the presence of God, notwithstanding that even yoga abhyas, yogic science says, "concentrate", it is a misnomer. Unfortunately, in the English language it has been, I think, mis-translated to mean concentration. Concentration can do nothing but reveal that which is, in its true colours.

Constant remembrance — what for? Because meditation is very clearly defined in its scope, in its function. Meditation by itself cannot take me anywhere. It can only give me a mind which is in my control, an absolute mind.  Now comes the role of constant remembrance, because Babuji has said, "If you are able to remember the Master continuously, constantly, the need for meditation drops off." Why? Here is the great difference between most of the yogic systems and ours. Because here the foundation of a spiritual association with the Master is love. And to create love there is no other way but constant remembrance.  Babuji has said, I mean all of you know it, again and again we have spoken about it, that we remember that which we love. Therefore if you want to love something, reverse the process and remember it. By remembrance we learn to love that which we remember. And therefore when love begins to grow in the heart of the abhyasi for the Master, remembrance also in a way ceases. I would not say remembrance ceases, it ceases as an activity.

 Remembrance now is very much of an activity! We try to remember. As people say, "I remember him often every day," you see. And as one American boy put it, "I practice constant remembrance several times a day." It is an effort at the moment, you see, remembrance is an effort. But when we are perfect in it, Babuji once told me, "If an abhyasi can practice constant remembrance for just one week, he cannot stop remembering after that." Because it becomes the sort of, the riverbed on which the river of consciousness itself flows. It becomes the substratum of our existence, as an act of remembrance, as an effort. So we have to bring this remembrance to the subconscious level where it becomes the foundation on which every existence was built. And then when that love is perfected for the Master, as Babuji said, "When your love is strong enough to knock on the door of His heart, and He condescends to open the door and see who is there, and He sees you, your job is over." So, constant remembrance is also a practice, is also a step. It has no meaning in itself, it has no efficacy in itself, except to lead to a condition where we love the Master totally, continuously. 

So prayer, meditation, constant remembrance. I think that finishes the list which I had not tackled yesterday. And now perhaps we have to come to today's topic [he chuckles] rather tardily I am afraid. what is the topic for today? Yes! One thing I have left out, very important, cleaning!

Now cleaning. It is a very obvious thing we all know. As I have said so many times, if I have stored gasoline in a bottle and I wish to buy milk in it, I have to clean it first. So when we are trying to put something into us which is of the highest order of existence, the divine essence of the Master by way of his transmission, we have to make ourselves fit to receive it. That is the cleaning process.  

So the preceptor's work in cleaning is a very vital component of the spiritual work of the Master. Let us not belittle it to ourselves by saying, "Oh it is only cleaning, you know, I am not a sweeper!" Remember with how much love you used to prepare Babuji's house before he arrived in Denmark.  Days and days given to washing and cleaning and painting, redecorating, putting candles on the steps, giant candles by the door. Beautiful new bedspreads, carpet, costing, I do not know, 50,000 kroner, and to serve as a jumbo ashtray that big glass tray with the brass rim. A jumbo ashtray, because the hookah used to be positioned in the centre of it, to protect the carpet. How much love you lavished, how much money you spent, how much time you devoted to the purification of a mere house for His presence, where he was going to stay a few days and left. How much more time you should devote to this house where he is going to be eternally present?

As I said in one of my last year's talks, that physical living Master is ours for a few years — no more. You see, we have that unfortunate tragic experience in our own lives. All of us felt we had the Master forever and now feel we have lost him. Both are wrong. We never had him forever because that forever was a physical forever which was stupid. The feeling that we have lost him is even more stupid, because how can you lose a Master who is eternal? This feeling comes because of that fact, I spoke, I think, in Chatenay-Malabry, the only talk I gave in 1982, that unless you bring the Master into your heart, in His spiritual essence which is carried through from life to life, if he does not leave you behind, you are going to leave him behind. You know, it is like a parting at a railway station, whether you are in the train and your lover is on the platform, or whether your lover is in the train and you are on the platform, the parting is equally, what shall I say, sad, miserable. So who goes first, who goes last?

I said this because at that time many young people asked me, "Chari, what will we do when the Master is dead?" I mean a very crude question, but nevertheless a question which showed their anxiety for their future. What would they do if they were left orphans on the spiritual field? So I told them then in that talk, "My dear friend, this question everyone is asking. What would you do if you died first?" I mean, many people have died before the Master. What would you do?

Therefore, the imperative need, you see, to carry him in your heart in his spiritual form, from which he can never leave you, from which you can never be parted because it is yours through eternity. Therefore, when such a miraculous possibility exists and we in our sadhana have made the heart so pure that we do not have to inform him, he comes himself. He says, "Ha, ha! That is my residence, there I go." Nothing can stop him you see. And once he is there who can remove him? He is not a tenant who does not pay his rent and you can go to the court and evict him. He is the Master of that residence and all that you have done is to have purified the place of the Master and invited him. He has accepted and he has taken up residence permanently, eternally. 

Babuji has always said, which was a great satisfying thing to me, he said, "From my preceptors I expect work not results." Very canny old man he was, you see, because when you work the results must be there. But when he made this statement, "I do not expect results from you," it relieves us of a tremendous burden of responsibility, which we stupidly impose on ourselves thinking that we are responsible for the result of the work. It shows an ignorance of the principle of surrender. When I surrender it means I surrender the result of my work to him. It is his. I work. What he wants, he will establish. You see, it is like a Master who says, "Build a house." Then he says, "No, no, you know, I want this door knocked out and put here." The builder cannot say, "I spent twenty-four hours on building this door. "Okay, I am paying for it." So you see, at one stroke, this statement by the Master, that I want your work not your result, relieves us of ninety-nine percent of our problems. Because most of us, when we sit down, we are worried about the result. When we are worried about the result, we weaken our mind, we weaken our will, ipso facto inevitably our work is going to fail. I mean, Master or no Master, we are failures because of our own expectation of failure when we start the work. Therefore, it is necessary to sit with absolute confidence. And how can this confidence be built up? Well, if you have it already, very good. If not, the technique that my Master taught to me, "Think the Master is sitting there. If necessary imagine his beard on your face and the problem is solved, now it is not you, he is sitting there."

So you see, all this is very important for cleaning, for ourselves, for the abhyasis, to be faithful to the Master in our performance of the duty we have voluntarily accepted from him, to be faithful to the abhyasis whom we have taken responsibility for, who come to us with tremendous longing, yearning, faith in us. 

You see this is the most terribly responsible job a person can have. All the rest, you know, people come and say, "Oh, I could not get a holiday because, you know, I have a conference to attend. You feel responsible for conferences and seminars which any other stupid fellow earning your salary could do. A teller in a bank says, "I cannot leave my counter." Why not? Counting dollar notes, any fool can do it. Though you are highly paid for it, it does not mean it is an important job, you see. But this job which is vital to their existence, the thousands we have accepted, to ourselves, we do not understand its importance, we do not understand its vital significance in our existence, that it is not for today, it is for the immensity of the future which we call eternity. If only we would understand its significance, there would not be these foolish excuses, you see, "I can attend for two days; my wife is troubling me; my son is sick." So what? If you believe in the Master do not you think he would look after your wife, change her attitude, look after your son who is sick?

And when the Master came to you for three months in 1972 at the age of seventy-three, did you ask him, "Babuji, your sons are there, your fields are there, your house is there, who is going to look after them in your absence?" Did you ask him? "No, no, Babuji, please stay one more week." So why this dual approach? You know, one for ourselves, and one for the Master. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If he can leave his family and his home and his farm and his estate and his work, and come to you for three months, can you not go to him for three days when he is there? Or six days which he wants?

So you see, all this is the need of the hour, to awaken within ourselves the truth of what we are doing, the vitalness of what we are doing, why we are doing it. Why are we here? What on earth are we doing this meditation for? Why am I associated with a master? What for? Because something in us tells us that without this we cannot exist. At the same time, we think it is bread and honey and, you know, baguette and fromage which keeps us alive. This is the duality of our misconceptions. "All this, and heaven too!" And as I said in one of my first talks in 1972, "You want heaven and all this too?" When we believe, as Christ said, that not a sparrow shall fall, you know, all those stories: the two loaves and the five fishes which fed the multitude. Well, if he could do it once, he could do it eternally, always, for everybody. But we trot out these stories, you know, as a proof of our faith in the Almighty or the Christian tradition. And when it is applied to ourselves we say, "No, no, you see, today if I do not go to work I will lose my job." Where is your Christ now? Or where is your Master now?

So you see, we should not have this flippantly dual attitude, that I am an abhyasi and this, I am a preceptor and this. I am a preceptor! I also have to do something to earn my living, the minimum necessary, you see. Spiritual law says, "Yes, you have to exist, you have to eat, you have to do it by your own labour." But how much? Now if a man is earning, let us say $80,000 in the US, it is a fat lot of money, you know, by any standards. And when they are hankering for more money, more promotion and they are giving their life to that job, from eight hours to ten hours, to twelve hours, to fourteen hours, and neglecting a half hour meditation and a 10 minutes cleaning, are they stupid or are they wise? And when they die, where are they going to leave all these $80,000 multiplied by so many years, minus what they have spent? Where are they going to leave it? Are they going to take it with them?

So spiritual science says, this is all your stomach, you know, one span out of seven and one half, less than fourteen percent. That much time of the day, if you give to it is enough, fourteen percent of twenty-four hours is all that you need to earn your living, if you do it rightly. I mean every farmer does it. You see the poor people on the streets, they do it. They are not dead; though by your standards they are as good as dead. But they say, "Look at me, I have no responsibility, you know. I have my food, I sleep on the pavement, I am happy, I have no house to lock up, no wife to protect, no children to send to school. Look at these rich people, you know, they come in a car, they have to lock the expensive thing.  They have to take their briefcase with them. When they carry the briefcase they have to carry it like this, so that somebody does not pull it away. The wife wears a necklace round her neck, which is worth a couple of hundred thousands and she has to wear the sari over it so that nobody pulls it away. Why wear a necklace which you are going to cover up? [laughter] And why millions of dollars worth of jewelry in bank vaults, you see, and wearing artificial jewels to a birthday party or a wedding?" And they are right, you see. How right they are, we do not know. Because in our misery, we seek protection from that wealth. "Oh, I have seven million in the bank, Chari, I can never be in trouble." And along comes a nice tidal wave, Mary III, which sweeps the coast and your three million dollars is gone. And you are worse than a beggar because he knows how to exist from day to day, you do not. See, this is the misery of richness, and the beauty and, shall we say, sublimity of poverty, if you would only like to go a little beyond the skin depth of appearance. 

So why faith in the Master? For this reason you see: that by meditation I clear this instrument of my perception, "The ultimate instrument," as Babuji said, "for your destruction, and for your elevation." Nothing can destroy you so totally as your mind if it goes wrong, nothing can serve to raise you to divinity as your mind can. Therefore, in the raja yoga technique, it is the mind that we use, it is the mind that we master, it is the mind that we apply. But having done that, the entire thing is transferred to the heart.  As we say in yogic psychological terminology: the heart now becomes the mind.  We think with the heart, we see with the heart, we hear with the heart, we speak with the heart, the heart becomes me. And that is why in our, shall we say, native latent human wisdom, we always categorize a person by his or her heart: cold-hearted, warm-hearted, cruel-hearted, stone-hearted, iron-hearted, soft-hearted. You do not say, "He is a soft-brained fellow." It means something else, you see. [laughter] Soft-hearted, yes; soft-brained, no. It is the heart by which we describe a person. "What a lovely heart!" Even a lover you call a sweetheart, you see. Though you do not chew it up. [laughter]

That is the miracle of spirituality you see, that we make the entire existence by regulating the mind. By gaining the absolute control or regulation of the mind. We are now able to recognize the wisdom of having to transfer the entire cognitive, perceptive apparatus into the heart. Then begins true spirituality. 

So I think perhaps you are all a bit tired. Not yet? So that is cleaning.  [he chuckles] Now I think I should take up today's work. [laughter] Role of the Master, I have covered, you see. If you put it in one word the role of the Master is total, is absolute. 

For one who is dabbling in spirituality, we have several Masters. For a man it is the wife. The first master of a male is the wife. I mean all married men will agree to this. [laughter] Unmarried men stupidly imagine it to be otherwise and they find out when it is too late. [he chuckles] [laughter] But then we have other masters, you know, the master in the office, the master here, the money-lender who is plaguing you for the return of his money. They are all our bosses, our masters. But the spiritual master has an absolutely total role.  You cannot say that anything is exempt from him, or out of the purview of his regulation of your existence. As Babuji says, and used to say very often, "I cannot even breathe without Lalaji's permission. I cannot even drink a glass of water without his permission." That is the extent, or shall we say, the completeness of the totality of the Master's all-embracing purpose in our existence. But unfortunately, you know, till we come to a state of enlightenment, perhaps wisdom, we think a master is only for meditation, for cleaning and occasionally to answer our phone calls when somebody is desperately ill. But that is a very, I would not say it is wrong, but it is a limiting way of looking at the Master, because he can only respond in the way in which we accept him.  When we fragment him, and accept him partially, he can only respond partially.  When we accept him totally, his responsibility for us becomes total. This is why surrender epitomizes the absolute acceptance of the Master. Then, because we are totally his, he is totally ours, he looks after us totally, every aspect of our existence becomes his responsibility and we can live in that sublime innocence where we are desire-free, where we are fear-free, where we are even need-free because he is looking after us. 

So, how to achieve that state? There again, the miracle is only by love we can surrender, not by fear. Of course, in the armies we surrender, to a thief on the streets we surrender our belongings. But between two human beings surrender is an act of love, not fear, not temptation. So if there is a failure, by and large, in human beings to surrender, it is because of, again let me say, religion's misuse of the powers vested in it to tempt and to threaten: fear of hell, temptation for redemption, for heaven. There was no evocation of the love principle in the heart of the devotee. Such stray cases as evolved into love, it was more their effort than the church's effort or the temple's effort. 

So the role of the Master must be absolute if we are to benefit. Of course, if you think it is enough to go and sit before him and have a sitting once in a way, it is as good as going to the dentist once in six months, or to the bank once every Saturday to draw your money for the next week. No more than that.  And now perhaps some of you understand it, I hope most of you understand it, and I wish all of you will understand this. Because for your existence it is enormously important that you know the role the Master plays in your life. Even more is it necessary for you to tell the abhyasis who come to you, what is the role that the Master has to play in their lives. 

Therefore, Babuji said in that famous sentence in Munich, "Attach your heart with that of the Master and your mind with that of the preceptor." Preceptor is a guide, you see. Listen to him, obey him, practice what he tells you to practice, but love the Master. And you know, he was such a shy man, my Master, who could never talk about himself, who could never ask for anybody's love. I mean, I have never seen him asking for anything. And for him to make such a statement showed the enormity of the ignorance prevailing among abhyasis, preceptors alike, which had to prod him into making this statement, you see, "Give your heart to the Master and your mind to the preceptor." What torment must have been in his heart, you see — not that he was not loved; why should the Divine be loved, you see? It is a stupid thing that Divinity should ask for anything from any of us, but for the enormity of the loss that it was occasioning to the abhyasis who were being misguided by preceptors who in their, perhaps, pride, arrogance, or their need to be loved, diverted the abhyasis toward themselves rather than toward the Master. Now, this is a direct implication, a direct result out of this conviction, that the Master's role is absolute, not the preceptor's. 

Now we have to remember a very important thing. Babuji told me very early in my life, "Remember, a preceptor serves the Master."  We do not serve abhyasis. Very often we find, you know, when an abhyasi comes and says, "Oh, I am very happy, Mr. So-and-so, you have served me so much," And we say, "Yes, yes, I have done what is possible," — we slip one level. Because if the Master says, "No more transmission," we have to stop. If we do not stop, he will stop it himself. Because the main switch is there. Therefore we serve the Master. He says, "Take up this person and give him sittings," we do it. If he says, "No, this person is not for you," we stop. 

This is especially essential in the western, occidental society to understand, where, if you will permit me to say so, you have these funny conceptions of compassion. "Oh, this poor man, he has got cancer, why should I not take him and give him some cleaning?" No. You have been given a specific job — do it! See, it is like a carpenter and a mason and an electrician working on a house. The electrician sees something wrong going on, or maybe he thinks it is wrong, you see, and he wants to do the carpenter's job. The boss comes and says, "You do your job, my friend, this is not your job." "No, no, but this is your house he is ruining." "Well, that is my look out." "When I am here to look after the cancers and the, whatever it is, AIDS, and leukemias, and what not, why do you bother about it?" You see, if the Master had the normal arrogance of the human being, the pride in his position and the need to protect himself, he would say it. He would say, "Look after your work, these are your abhyasis, you transmit to them, clean them, make them evolve. Why are you worried about him and her and that?" This is very necessary, you see, because in the West, though we revile Christianity, we have attached ourselves to this concept of compassion in a very wrong way.  Compassion is for Him, not for us. I told you a few days ago when you read, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord," compassion is also His. We are servants, we obey, you see. He says, "Do this," we do it. He says, "Today you sleep," I sleep. 

People in Denmark will remember, occasionally I used to be overworked and Babuji said, "Today, you sleep, no work."