To amplify what I said this morning, those of you who have heard the morning talk will recall that I said we have no choice in the matter of our personal evolution. We have to co-operate with it. All that we can do is to delay it a little here and there, and suffer by that delay. And I gave the example of a packet of seeds which we can keep without sowing, even for years, and think we have prevented the course of Nature, but all that we have achieved is to delay the process. What Nature cannot get by us, from us, by co-operation, it will somehow get by other ways. All those who have trained children, who have trained animals, they know that there are two ways of training-the way of love and the way of force. The way of force is obnoxious; we don't like it. No parent likes to train his child by force. No animal trainer ever uses force. It is the way of love. Nature, too, does not use force on us. It is a great misconception to think that God punishes or that God rewards. My Master has repeated, over and over again, that reward and punishment do not exist. Of course, religions have taught, all religions have taught, it is not special to any single religion, all religions have repeated again and again, that good action is rewarded and bad action is punished. For virtue we go to heaven and for sins we go to hell. All these sort of things have been propagated by religions and, as my Master said, the instruments of religion are fear and temptation. Religion has always tried to guide humanity into what the leaders of religions felt was the correct course, by tempting him with offers of heaven and salvation and by trying to frighten him with fears of hell and damnation. But Sahaj Marg, my Master's system, does not recognise the existence of either of these two. Man is not a child to be either tempted or to be threatened with fear. Nor is he an animal, though in every man and woman there resides childish tendencies and animal tendencies. So, if we suffer or if we enjoy, it is because of our tendencies manifested in those directions. The animal tendencies manifest, we behave like animals, perform animal-like actions, suffer the consequences of our own actions. There is no punishing agency. For the good tendencies similarly we have good actions, get self-satisfied, get the praise of our labour from the society, and feel consequently happy; we are rewarding ourselves. There is no god in heaven who is rewarding us or punishing us. So, in Sahaj Marg these two things are absolutely unrecognised. They don't exist for us. We don't recognise the existence of virtue or vice. In Sahaj Marg, the greatest teaching of the Master, what he says again and again, is that every thought that we think, every action that we indulge in, these leave impressions on our mind, which subsequently form samskaras, and which guide our future actions and thoughts. So, it is we who create our future. We suffer because we have acted in the past in such a way that we have created such samskaras which brought us into certain tendencies, the consequences of which are inevitable. So my Master says, "From now you start moulding your thinking and your action in such a way that you are able to live without the formation of impressions." A stage comes where we can think and indulge in action without forming any impressions upon our mind; we can act without forming any impressions because one who is born, who has been born in this world, cannot live without thought and actions. This is one of the truths that is said by the Lord Krishna in the Gita. "Even I am not free of action. But the difference between you and me is, Arjuna, that whereas you are bound by your actions, and bound by the results of your actions, I am not bound by the actions or by the results of my actions." He does not explain why. He does not explain what is the difference that binds one and does not bind the other. But my Master has said it. What the Lord did not reveal in the Gita, my Master has revealed and has said, "It is precisely, because a person can live without forming impressions that he has no more any sense of future. Such a person can be said to live eternally in the present." The future is right in my present or, if you like to think of it the other way, my present and the future both co-exist. I don't create anything for myself from such a moment. So, this is one of the greatest teachings of Sahaj Marg that it liberates us. We are talking all the time of liberation. Liberation from what? Liberation from myself. Liberation from my thought, liberation from my actions, which has hitherto, from aeons of time, through ultimate number of births and deaths, bound me to the slavery of my own self. I am the slave of myself-not of God, not of Satan, not of hell, not of heaven. If anybody has imprisoned me, it is myself. If anybody is making me suffer, it is myself. This greatest truth, unrevealed hitherto, hinted at perhaps in the Hindu literature but nowhere else, is that, "Friend, you are your own salvation or you are your own condemnation. Get rid of yourself and there you are." Many people ask us, somewhat naively, somewhat childishly, "Why do you want to participate in yoga abhyas? Why do you want to do meditation? Are you dissatisfied with your life? Are you frightened of your life? Are you frightened with the consequences of your existence? Why are you thinking to escape?" I must tell you most emphatically that yoga is not a means of escape from either this life or future life or anything. We are not escapists. If anybody thinks yoga is escapist, then he is equating yoga with things like drugs and drinks. We are not escapists. As I told you in the morning, and as I wish to emphasize again, we are not participating in the meditation, and in this process of Sahaj Marg, to escape from life. We are participating in it to make of life what it should really be, a divine existence, free of temptation, free of problems, free of worries, free of sickness, all of which we have caused ourselves. Any child knows that if it eats something wrong, or if it eats too much of something which may be very good, it suffers from its own misdeeds. Every drunkard knows that it is his drunkenness which is condemning him to headache, to liver problem, to cirrhosis and ultimately to his death. Do you mean to say that God has nothing better to do man watch the billions of humanity through aeons of time, looking into each one and seeing what he is doing and condemning us or punishing us? On one side we say God is Love, and on the other side we say He is condemning, He is punishing, and He is sending us to hell this way or to heaven that way. This is one of the most, if you pardon me for saying it and permit me to say it, one of the most childish conceptions of God. And unfortunately no religion is free of it. All religions have been uttering this foolishness from the time that man became conscious of himself. I cannot possibly conceive of a God who has no better business to do than to think of us, watch us and punish us or condemn us. It is we who suffer by our own thought, our own actions. Let this be clearly understood. And if I am thinking to escape from anything, it is from the consequences of my own foolishness, of my own viciousness, of my own selfishness, knowing that these are the causes of my bondage because they lead me to actions from which I can't escape the results of. Once we indulge in a thought, action follows, and once action results from that thought its result comes. Its result has its own consequences, and no external agency but myself is responsible for this. This is the most fundamental truth that we have got to recognise and understand. And when we know the true import of this it no longer becomes necessary to fear a God, or to approach a God in a slavish, beggarly way, seeking benefits which He cannot give. God does not want us either to be demanding, or to slavishly beg of Him. Because in His ultimate mercy and charity, Divine grace is flowing all the time everywhere. It is like praying to the sun, "Please give me illumination." Sitting in a dark room where you have closed the doors and windows we like to pray to the lord of the sun, "Oh Almighty Lord, bless me with sunshine." Could the sun speak it would ask him, "My dear boy, when did I ever stop shining? From the beginning of creation I am shining, and I am shining without prejudice. I know no caste, I know no colour, I don't know whether you are a human or an animal. I shine because it is my nature to shine. I don't shine for you. I shine because it is my nature to shine." Similarly God does not bless knowing that He is blessing. If He were to do that, He would be no better than human beings. It is said in a great religion, "Let not the right hand know what the left hand is doing." If that applies to man, to human beings, how much more should it not apply to God Almighty Himself! Can He be ever conscious that He is punishing me, rewarding you, condemning her? Then when God becomes conscious of His existence, of what in Hinduism we call the duality of existence, Dwandva, if He Himself is conscious of punishment or reward, of sin and virtue, where is His Divinity? These are our conceptions. These are concepts created by man to judge himself, to evaluate his neighbours, and to evaluate the behaviour of people in society. God did not create good and evil, God did not preach that there is good and evil, vice and virtue. In fact He cannot teach because He cannot know what is good and what is bad. Because as I said earlier, if He knows that there are these two things in existence, He ceases to be God. So this is something, you know, which is shocking when we hear it first. It may be very troublesome to understand, it may be very difficult to understand, that God can't be conscious of evil and that God can't be conscious also of good. God can't be conscious of darkness, He can't be conscious of light. It is alright. Religion has said, "God said let there be light and there was light." But that is what man said "God said". We have not heard God saying it. It was some man who said it. You hear that God said such and such a thing because it is the human endeavour to understand the mystery behind creation. It is the human mind which evolves a concept of God, an idea of God, because it requires something to aspire to, aspire for, something to reach up to, something ultimately to achieve, and to that we ascribe the doer-ship of everything that we see and hear and smell and taste and what not. So, I may even venture to say, as some philosophers have also said before me, that God is a human creation, because for those of us who have not achieved the divine state of existence, we don't know what God really is, who God is, whether such a thing exists. It is like a beggar talking of wealth. For him instead of five paise, if he gets ten paise it is wealth. What is the meaning of wealth? It is a comparative statement. If one man gets ten rupees, another man gets fifteen rupees, the man who gets ten rupees envies the man who gets fifteen rupees. So there is no absolute concept. So my Master says, "Wait till you are reaching that state. Then only can you know what Divinity is. And that is the way of knowing Divinity. Become divinised yourself. By knowing yourself at that level, you will know what He is." Till then God is an abstract entity. It is a mere concept about which we have no authority to speak, where we have never even experienced Him in our existence either as a punisher or as a rewarder. So all our statements about God, let me say all those who speak about God without having become Divinised themselves, well, your statement is as good as mine. So this is one of the most fundamental concepts of Sahaj Marg and the teachings of my Master, that God is an abstract thing and notion. That if He exists, wherever He exists, we have to find out by advancing on the path of divinisation by the help of a Master who took a human form and says, "My dear friends, now this is the state of God Himself. This is what we call the divine state of existence. Now you know it by personal experience." Can we see God? No, because there is no physical God to see. He is nameless-we cannot call him by any name. He is formless-we cannot see His form. He has no quality, therefore we cannot describe Him by any quality. And finally my Master says, God can have no mind, because when you have mind, you have consciousness. And when you have consciousness, the duality of existence is before you. He ceases to be Divinity-the Ultimate Divinity. He may be the son of God, but he cannot be God Himself! So I wanted to amplify my morning talk by adding a few more facets about Sahaj Marg to try and dispel this ignorant idea that people who indulge in the participation of self-evolution are running away from life. Let me assure you that in Sahaj Marg we don't run away from life. We are trying to break our way into real life, into the eternal life, into the Divine life, by leaving behind us all these foolish miseries of our human existence, of a merely human existence, by throwing off our chains of bondage which are nothing but our own creations, resulting from our past thoughts by our actions. This is the first level of liberation-that I liberate myself from myself. Then follows subsequent liberations from so many things which I pray my Master may bless us all with. Thank you. (Taken from Constant Remembrance, Jan. 1988, Vol. IV, No. 1) |
