Latin America and Oceania Seminar, October 14, 2010, Chennai, India
Dear Brothers and Sisters:
I consider this is our mother house. You know there is a concept of the mother house, where the mother is, and where children go every year to meet her. Nobody speaks of the father house, it is only the mother house; always has been, always will be. So I consider, and I hope you will all consider, Manapakkam to be your mother house.
And I am happy that over the years we have had larger and larger gatherings, more and more international in scope, but they have not been nationally defined. For instance, Basant or Babuji’s birthday — of course, we have had abhyasis from all over. But, in this year, or commencing with a seminar for the Iranian abhyasis in Kharagpur, we have started having national seminars — abhyasis from one country all together. We have had one for the Iranians, we have had one for the people of the former Soviet Empire, now called the Republics, and now we are having [one] here. It is as if, to me, an albatross with its wings widespread has folded its wings and rested here. The two wings, extreme wings, what we call the Far East and what I would like to call the Far West, coming together to meet here and, I hope, resting permanently, to indicate this is your home, spiritual home.
So, how should I welcome you? You know, in school we are taught that our home is where our heart is. And spirituality deals, not only basically and essentially, but only with the heart. We have nothing to do with your brain or your intellect. We are not concerned. It does not matter at all to us whether a person is intelligent, he is wise, he has won a Nobel Prize. Power, position, money have no meaning to us. Our Mission has entertained very high dignitaries of the state, great scholars, and the average run of people: rickshaw-drivers, policemen, train ticket collectors, bus conductors, factory workers. Ours is a very broad spectrum of abhyasis.
So our production, in terms of what we have to say, is not scholarly. It does not merit attention of scholars or of semantics. It is for us, for people. In a sense it is like the vox populi — the voice of the people, being reflected back to the people through the heart. We are not here to produce intellectual genius or financial giants or great rulers or anything of importance in this world. Our abhyasis will shine only in the world where the heart shines and, as Jesus said, that kingdom is not here. It is another kingdom somewhere else. It is a spiritual world — what my Master has said, the Brighter World. Only in the Brighter World does the heart shine, and the heart not having power or position or wealth, all hearts shine together there, once the soul is emancipated out of this mundane and unfortunately sordid atmosphere that the world has become.
So you see the aim of Sahaj Marg is not to produce excellence in human beings. It is to produce or, shall we say, transform, what was a splendid, glorious, resplendent, human heart, which has become sullied, which has become covered with grossness, which has become hardened through selfishness, into its original nature and send it back.
So I want all of you to understand this because many people come here expecting that this is some sort of Lourdes, where you can go and have a bath and come out healed. We don’t do any healing. If it is in your samskara to be a healthy individual, Sahaj Marg will make you a healthy individual. It will restore you to such original nature as Nature intended for you when it sent you down here. Restore our originality — that is to make us happy inside and outside, to make us wise in our hearts, not in our heads.
Wisdom, according to my Master Babuji Maharaj is not here [head]. The wisdom is always of the heart. But we try to seek it here [head] and we give Nobel Prizes. And we have perverts, we have power-mad people, we have dictatorial people who have ruled the world, but they have slowly disappeared from the pages of history. Who shines in this world? Whose name is on all lips, whatever religion you may belong to? It is of the great saints of the past, whether it is Mohammed the Prophet or Buddha or Jesus Christ or Krishna in India — these are the names that are everlasting.
So you see, we come here solely to develop our hearts, clean them, refine them and restore to them the original nature when the heart was an instrument of love, and therefore could manifest the human qualities of compassion, mercy, caring for others, sharing with others, and living in harmony with others, all of which nowadays, virtually, have ceased to exist. That is why today we have powerful financial institutions and giants having to donate for things like AIDS relief — why, I don’t know. There should be money funded for moral welfare, to restore moral values, to restore human values. Because the human being, par excellence, is God’s creation, because we have the heart and we have the head.
The head is the instrument or institution which gives us the ability to think properly, decide properly: which is right, which is wrong; what should I do, what should I not do. The heart is that which gives us the power. It is like the engine of the car and the steering wheel of the car. One gives power, one gives direction. But we have stopped using this [heart]. The heart no longer features in our human equations — not even in the much vaunted field of love (l’amour). The heart has lost its place; therefore all the misery in the world, the divorces, repeated divorces, multiplicity of liaisons. The heart cannot be partitioned. Therefore, we say ‘broken heart’. When you try to partition your heart, you have to break it, and such a human being is only a partial human being. Therefore, one part may be human, the other part becomes, shall we say, a senseless demoniacal, self-seeking, terroristic, harmful, revengeful, violent instrument. You see this in all the manifestations of broken hearts today. You don’t have to name them or to list them.
Here if you come, you come — for those with a broken heart — to restore it, to know that love from the heart has its own way of finding its partner in life. The eyes mislead us grossly. Especially the Latin sentiment, very, very expressive — especially in Italy, [whistles] [laughter]. That is not where love is. It is not in the sweet voices that we hear, that we have seen in the tales from Greece. When you go between Scylla and Charybdis and you hear the voice of Circe, and people get off the boat and go there and they become pigs. That is where our eyes and our ears lead us — from human beings to pigs, lustful, not knowing with what we mate and with whom we mate. You have the story of the man who had a relationship with his own mother, in the Greek traditions, because he is blinded, his senses are blinded, his intuition is blinded, his thinking capacity has been killed. All that he seeks is the fulfilment of lust; as they say in the naval parlance, any port in a storm.
So these five senses are not there to guide us into the ways of love. That is the sovereign domain of our heart. A blind man can also love. He does not need eyes and nose and ears. He does not go sniffing for his love like dogs, not tasting it. His heart tells him. Because when all senses are closed, the real way of appreciating this world opens up to us.
That is what my Master said when we place too much emphasis, reliance, on our sensory mechanism: touch, taste, smell, vision, hearing, which are there like the headlights of a car to show us the way, not to lighten beauties on the road. When a driver looks at beauties on the road and forgets the way, he runs into an accident.
So we who have become senses-bound, listening to nothing but the senses, responding to nothing but the senses, we come down to the basic or most basic level of human beings, the animal base, and when we are able to overcome these things . . . that is why Jesus has to say in the Bible or whatever, “You have eyes but you see not.” Perhaps he should have said, “You see, but you see what you should not see and don’t see what you should see.” And you hear, of course. But what? The voice of the devil or the voice of God?
So the sensory mechanisms God provided for us, which are for direction finding, like a radar or the headlights of a car, they have been grossly misused. And so we are bumping into destructive things on the way, breaking our hearts, forgetting our direction, losing it, blinding ourselves. And then someday, if you are fortunate, a tiny voice in your heart says, “Don’t forget me, I am here. When all is lost, I am here to guide you.” And then perhaps for the first time we realise that the source of all wisdom, of true guidance which points us to the divine way we are to follow, is right here within us. All these [senses] show us the outer world; this [heart] shows us the inner world, which is the true way into liberation. If then we have the wisdom to listen to it, we learn to follow it, obey it, and be guided by it. And when we come to that stage when we are guided by our heart, it is a sort of first step in liberation. My senses no longer point the way. Everything is decided by my heart: this is it; this is not it.
There is only one right way. There are many wrong ways, infinite wrong ways. And the senses are adept at picking out all the wrong ways, because desire guides them. It is our desire which makes our sensory instrument useless, because instead of focussing our instrument in the right direction, we focus it in the wrong direction to see what we don’t have to see, what we don’t need to see. Therefore, in meditation we sit with eyes closed, ears (we try to shut out all noises unnecessary for us), arms and legs folded, so that we are self-contained. All the senses are pointing inwards if at all anywhere, and then we look to the heart which now begins to slowly, like the morning — slowly, the light comes on the horizon brightening the sky. So this is the course of meditation. It promises to us nothing except what you can get yourself, by your own endeavour, by your own effort, by your own focus on your goal. Therefore, my Master says, fix your goal.
We have nothing to do with changing goals here — one morning, power; one morning, lust; one morning, money; one morning, beauty — no changing goals. One goal forever. Fix, and then be in tune with nature — very simple. Our ten maxims are enormously simple, unlike most systems which say don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it. Our ten maxims say, do it. Do what? You know the ten maxims. Arise before dawn with purity of body and mind. Sit in meditation in the same place, so that it becomes a habit. The moment you enter that place your mind takes over, your heart takes over. It is like the pretended holiness that we all pretend to have when we enter a church or a place of worship. It is an artificially adopted atmosphere, like putting on a scarf or a hat, or taking it off for men; the sanctity is in the hats and the scarves, not here [heart]. Excuse me, this is my observation.
Here we do not worship. No need for sanctity. Purity — yes, not sanctity, because love must be pure, isn’t it? So we enter with purity. And, what is it that replaces worship? Because worship creates fear. We are afraid of the object of our worship. And where we worship, we have only desire, needs to be fulfilled. In this, there are no needs to be fulfilled. We don’t go begging for something. We approach the inner Master in the heart whom we think of as the divine light, to make us like Himself. “Lord, let me be like You.” What does it mean? I don’t know, and these are not qualities I can enumerate. I cannot say, let me be great like you, or rich like you, or powerful like you. Because, in the Ultimate, there are no riches, there is no power, there is no greatness, there is not even wisdom, He is. I also want to be.
So you see, this sort of sympathetic vibration between two can be created only by love. Like children when they are young, they say they want to be like Dad, or like Mummy. The human being starts with a great deal of aspiration, the truth. Because they see Mummy as a goddess and Dad as a god, something like that, you see. And by the time we are ten and twelve, Mummy has become a mere woman, Dad has become a mere man; and by the time we are sixteen and eighteen, we recognise all the bad points they have, their bad tendencies, their egos, their acquisitiveness, their shamelessness in acquiring, their killing spirit to dominate, to go over somebody else to achieve something else, and then you have that famous idea of the god that failed.
Our parents are gods and goddesses who have failed us. Today’s world is full of children who hate their parents. “I hate my Mummy. I hate my Daddy.” Why? Because Mummy and Daddy are not Mummy and Daddy; they are just sex partners who have produced me and have left, so that we have these beautiful institutions called single-parent family. How can a child have a single parent? So when you break what should be whole, you have destroyed. So you see, everything follows from love which has become degraded, de-humanized, and become merely an animal thing; of couplings producing unwanted babies, who at best are left on the church step for adoption, and at worst become children of parents who are not their parents.
All this we have to learn through meditation. No mea culpa — I am not culpable in that sense. It has happened because I trusted the wrong instruments which nature has given me. I chose the wrong indications. And therefore I suffer, everybody suffers, my family suffers, my culture suffers, my nation suffers, and we have the very sordid and sorry mess that the world is in today. And there are small pockets like Sahaj Marg, which in their own humble way are trying to blow the fire up a little into the reality that it should be, put that back into the heart which has gone — left behind far away, long ago — by heating up that spark which is there. Fortunately, for us, that divine spark is never extinguished; fortunately, for us. It is there through all eternity — but inactive, subdued.
What does it require for the human being to say: You are there, please help me, guide me and lead me. So this is the message of our Sahaj Marg spirituality, and this is what you should all learn to assimilate. We are not trying to preach what is wrong or what is ungodly. We are only saying, go to that God who is inside you, always, eternally, whether you are in this form or in another, and who, because He is inside you, He is your friend. Outside you, He is a judge. Which would you prefer — the God who is a judge and who says I condemn you to hell and I elevate you to heaven? Or to a God who is inside you and who says, “Come I will take you where you belong, and I will be with you. Don’t be afraid.”
So that is all that Sahaj Marg promises — not good health, not beauty, not wealth, not power. If you are looking for those things, you will surely be disappointed. But if you are looking for your heart to become light and to be enlightened from inside, I believe Sahaj Marg is the right way for you — one of the right ways. And whether we have stumbled into it or come here purposefully, it is like the old saying, ‘Having gone to the well, take a drink. Don’t go away thirsty.’
