I wish to thank all of you. I have not thanked you at all, all these years, because I think it is something artificial. And I am not going to thank you for your love or your kindness or anything like that, but for the element of co-operation in all of you because some abhyasis from outside have remarked on your growth here and that makes me very happy. So for that happiness I am thankful. This morning we had some excellent talks, valuable for their content but more valuable for the attitude that they showed. They were all speaking from the heart. I would like to, sort of, condense all those speeches and give you the conclusions which they were aiming at. I am sure you have all noticed it, the first is that the head blocks the heart and everybody who depends on their head too much, they are automatically blocking their heart. You know how easy it is to block the flow of water in a pipe, or of steam, because the subtler the thing gets, the easier it is to block it. And love is a very subtle thing. When we say love is God, so it is the most subtle thing in creation and anything can block it-suspicion, mistrust, anger, annoyance, lack of faith. So, why is character-making so important? For this reason! Because unless we transform ourselves so that there is a free flow of this subtle essence of existence, we are going to destroy ourselves. People who live in cold climates know that a little water in the pipe-when it freezes-it can burst the pipe. So when love freezes in the heart, that heart will surely break. So all broken hearts are the result of frozen love, it has nothing to do with betrayal by a friend or an enemy or anything like that. Those are excuses. The real truth is we break our own hearts and it is foolish to blame anybody else for breaking it. Therefore, the spiritual law says that the more we are betrayed the more we must trust, the more we must love. This is absolutely necessary even for your material welfare. If you close your heart because the first man whom you meet or the first woman you meet cheated you, you are lost. So please remember you break your own hearts. Don't blame others. I hope you have understood this. It applies to men, it applies to women. Because a heart is never a male heart or a female heart, it is a human heart. So we have to learn to trust, to learn to depend on others, to learn to give, give, give-unendingly. Because the most subtle is the most difficult, and to conduct it out of ourselves, to become a channel for the Divine essence, this must always be open. And when we think about this, we will be destroying ourselves without any doubt because the intellect and the mind can only give you all the reasons why it should not be open. The mind cannot give you a single reason why it should be open. Therefore, we have the conflict between the mind and the heart always. The second lesson is the white flag. People have been saying that we have to surrender to the Master, to God. All this is nonsense. But the fact of having to surrender is a reality. I would suggest that it is the first reality in our spiritual journey. Then to whom are we surrendering? My conclusion is that we surrender our lower nature to our own higher nature. So the surrender is to my own self. So why are we afraid of surrendering? It is only when we have these artificial ideas of a God, or a Master or an enemy that a surrender becomes something obnoxious, something like a sign of defeat. But when I surrender my lower nature to my own higher nature it is my victory over my lower self and such people should be able to walk with their heads held high in pride and with fearlessness. Now you must understand that I am not speaking of courage. Fearlessness is not the same as courage in my mind. Courage is something which comes in a particular situation. So courage is a response to a situation. Fearlessness is a permanent quality, because I cannot say what I am fearless about. Like a man or a woman must learn to become love, we must also become fearless. So love becomes a state of being. Fearlessness also becomes a state of being. Courage comes and goes but not fearlessness. Because fearlessness is not aimed at any particular thing. And now I come to the most important thing, that fearlessness cannot protect itself. Why? Because every protection we adopt is a sign of fear. So a fearless person has no protective devices, no protective attitudes, no protective character but is totally open to everything. So if a fellow has a gun in his hand and he says, "I am fearless", we should laugh at him. So fearlessness finally means the same thing as love because love must be open, fearlessness must be open, totally, at all times. Therefore, only one who has become love can be fearless. So I think this is a thing which we have to very seriously think over, understand, accept and use it to transform ourselves. So these are two important things I wanted to tell you from what these talks were about this morning. And so in our relationship between ourselves and in our relationship with the Master, with God, with anything, the base must always be of love, which must be reflected in an attitude of total fearlessness. Otherwise, we are reacting to every outside stimulus with an initial fear leading to protection of the self, which leads to our closing the doors against an enemy who may not be there at all. Therefore, our doors remain always closed and they are only occasionally opened. And it is a pity that for instance, in Christianity, Christ had to say, "Knock and it shall be opened unto thee." I think it is a great pity. It would appear that even God was afraid, the God of Christianity, that He had to close His doors and ask us to knock so that He can open the door from inside. This is why spiritual people, and I am not talking of spiritually realised persons, even the beginner in spirituality, even the newest abhyasi who has come this morning, must accept that unless the door is open, that subtle essence which we want to become cannot enter into us because it is so subtle, it cannot knock, it does not know how to knock, it does not know where to knock. Therefore, the emphasis in Sahaj Marg on vacuumization of the heart. Because now it must come automatically, it does not seek us but the vacuum inside us inexorably draws it inside. So this is the only way of attracting the Divine essence without waiting for grace to descend and all that nonsense. If we want God to come and help us out of His own volition we may have to wait for all eternity. In fact, to my mind, forever. Because God has no mind in Sahaj Marg. That is another reason why we cannot use our minds in spiritual life, because there is no parallel device to communicate with at the other end. You know the difficulty of telephoning a FAX machine, it has to be in the telephone mode. So you see, like can communicate with like. So before I can communicate with that blessed thing which we call God, I have to become something like Him. Therefore, this becoming in Sahaj Marg is one of the most important steps. Otherwise, we are like babies who are crying without knowing how to speak to their mothers. Therefore, babies learn to speak. If crying was enough they would be crying all their lives. Therefore, instinctively, intuitively, children learn to speak. In spirituality we have to learn the same lesson. We can start by weeping but we cannot end by weeping. So like children we have to learn the language of communication so that we become like That which we want to become. C'est tout. Merci beaucoup! (Talk given in Châtel-St-Denis, Switzerland on October 20, 1991. Reprinted from Constant Remembrance, April 1992) |
