Just a few thoughts. The last day of 1995 brought a big loss to the Mission, because one of our very dear brothers, a preceptor in Madras, died in a bus accident. He was very close to us and many of you would have known him, because he used to take me up and down in his car to the ashram. His name was Mr. K. Vijarangan. Now why I am mentioning this is not to mourn him or to perpetuate his memory, or anything like that, but for some lessons it brings to us. The first lesson is, nobody knows when this life will end, what we call life. I think it is the most important lesson. And I have known many people saying, "Oh, Master is with me, I have enough time to grow, so why should I meditate today?" It is like a man who makes a resolution to clean himself, has a sitting just before he dies, to make sure that he is clean. But it's a stupid resolution because nobody knows when this thing is going to happen. So logic and wisdom dictate that we should be always clean, prepared for the event when it comes. Now, this is the second lesson. So spirituality is not something that we do at a stated hour or a stated time, but it is something which goes on moment to moment. Looked at in this way, time has no meaning. Because when we think of time, we think of yesterday, today, tomorrow. But when we think of the moment, every moment we lose is a moment lost forever. I think one of the very big mistakes that some philosophers have made in defining time - that it is the interval between two events - is responsible for much of our misunderstanding of time and its value. Events don't create time, but time permits events to happen in its stream. And we, as human beings, have the choice to allow time to create its own events, or for us to use our will to create those events ourselves. This is all the difference between an ordinary life and a spiritual life. So when we think of days, months, and years we are fooling ourselves. Even the idea that today is a New Year, because we are living in perhaps a futile hope - I should not say a futile hope - that the new year will be different from the old one. How should it be different? Why should it be different? Because we have to make it different. So all this celebration of the New Year, wishing each other a Happy New Year - in a sense they are signs of weakness, waiting for the new year to do for us something which we should be doing for ourselves. So if you want the New Year 1996 to be something glorious and evolutionary for you, you have to start working right now. In the ancient traditions, we have this idea that there's a new sun which comes every morning. Scientists spoiled this mystery and this romance of the sun by saying that it is the same sun which rises every day. Now you see how much we have lost. You wake up a sleeping person and say, "Look at the beautiful sunrise." They say, "Silly, it rises every morning. Big deal." Now if we know that it is a new sun which rises every morning, we would welcome the sun. If we know it is a new person we are going to meet every moment, changed in some way, mysterious, magnetic, capable of loving, we cannot have fixed opinions about people or places. We will not say, "Oh, the same person has come again to my house." So this sameness, this idea of a continuity of something from moment to moment, has destroyed what I should call the uniqueness of a moment, the uniqueness of its possibilities. And therefore our life has become very mundane, boring and, to most of us, with no possibility for change. So please remember that every person is a new person every moment. Whether you wish it or not. Because you either change willingly or you change in the way Nature changes you. Spirituality says, "Take the reins in your hands and change it, because you can change every moment of your existence." And it gives us this warning that if you are passive, you are not living. Nature is alive. So I hope and pray that all of you will take up this effort seriously and not wonder whether we are going to live today or tomorrow or not, because that, too, depends on us. One who is going to be liberated and immortal doesn't bother about this, because he has time as his instrument. One who is afraid of death and thinks that people die is a slave of time. So you have the chance, the opportunity, the choice, between slavery to time or mastery over time. So I recommend to you all a little wisdom in handling time because that is the secret to what we call immortality. I pray to Master to bless all of you and to grant us all these blessings by helping us to use our will in the right direction, remembering that, as sister Jytte said, "No life is an island in itself." We are part of an immense web of existence, and this mutual interdependence must be nurtured, nourished, and respected. Then we shall help each other by loving each other - instead of destroying each other by hating each other. Once again, Master's blessings. (Talk given at the Vrads Sande ashram in Denmark on January 1, 1996.) |
