Speech given by Rev. Master on 12th October 2008 at Hyderabad, India
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
My journeys to Hyderabad are becoming longer because now the airport is very far away—two hours! Anyway I am happy to be here to do what I can to help you in your spiritual progress.
There are two aspects to my work: one, I cannot do more than what the Master permits me to do; two, I must have the strength and will to do what He permits me to do. The third, and most important, is your cooperation in permitting that work to bear fruit in you. By cooperation I mean living a life according to the ten maxims of Sahaj Marg; regularity in practice; discipline—inside and out; discipline—material and spiritual; discipline—at home and in the outside world; and discipline, most of all, in regulating your thoughts, because that is where the origin of all problems lies.
Really speaking, as Babuji emphasized several times, it is easy to train animals. Babuji used an example of a lion. He said you can train a lion in a very short time to keep its mouth open so that the trainer can put his head into it and take it out alive. He said the human being is the most difficult to train, and that is a matter of experience.
We all know, all of you know who are parents, how difficult it is to train children. Most of the children go untrained. They may be educated, but they are not trained. Therefore, by the time they become adults, they have a fair degree of education, which means that their heads are crammed with facts necessary to earn their living, but their hearts are generally empty. They have no courage. They are bewildered when they are thrown out into the arena of the world. What shall I do? How shall I do it? Where shall I do it? All these traumas start from the time you send a child to school. Babuji Maharaj said this is because at home they are not trained at all. He said, “Really speaking, true training starts with the conception of the child.” But even after the child is born, there is no training. Children run wild. They neglect everything that they should do, and do everything that they are not required to do. Kabir has said this beautifully, “Our childhood we waste in play.”
The next stage of life—the stage of youth, we do even less because now we have schools, we have our education, we have our mark sheets, our grades. They are our certificates of, shall we say, advancement in the world, and parents are happy enough to have a look at your report card and be happy. What you do at school other than study, nobody looks into.
Today, in modern life, as it is lived now, in this year, I am told that school is really a school for scandal. (You know there is a novel of that name written in the last century by a fellow called Sheridan—The School for Scandal. It used to be required reading when I was in school. I don’t know how many of you have even heard of the title. Of course it has no connection to what I am speaking about.) The scandalous behaviour today of our young men, of our young men who have married and entered life with a seriousness that is not there, of a purpose which is not what it should be. Because grihastha ashram [life of a householder], properly speaking, is the union of two hearts who come together in marriage, the worldly purpose being to have children so that the parampara [lineage] can go on, but the much larger spiritual purpose being to help each other to walk the spiritual path with the guidance of a guru, so that in this life we can achieve what has to be achieved.
Parents are unable to do what they have to do because, first, they are too busy in leading their own lives. Mothers, poor things, are helpless; fathers too busy making their own money, making their own names, making their own reputation, trying to make for their children what they call a solid future, which means enough money to leave behind so that the children will have what we call an assured financial future—well, that is not all that matters. Children are expected to earn, have their own income, lead their own lives without depending on parental inheritance. But in India it is something of a curse that parents spend all their lives earning money which they never use for themselves, to leave for children to waste, to run amok with, probably to destroy themselves, too.
So, seeing this happening in our own satsangh—increasingly marriages are getting troublesome. People get married here by the grace of my Guru, my Master, and they run into trouble. Some of them, fortunately only a few, the marriage is finished on the day of the marriage itself. So far we have had three cases. But it is a tragedy for me because, as Babuji said, even one drop of poison in a big vessel of milk means a big vessel full of poison. Here we don’t judge spiritual progress by success, we judge it by failure. And in that sense our marriages have failed too often for my comfort. Though my boys tell me, “Only three, saab [sir].” Should not have been even one.
So you see, when our people don’t appreciate the sanctity of a spiritual marriage, don’t understand why they are marrying in a spiritual assembly under a spiritual atmosphere, with a spiritual purpose, somewhere the teaching has been lost. They have not imbibed it, they have not appreciated it, and, as in all things in India, all this is for the others, not for us! Satyam vada [speak the truth]—“Yes, that’s for the others. I am in business. I can’t possibly exist if I have only to tell the truth.” Dharmam chara [be righteous]—“Not possible for me. It’s for the others, because if I was to lead a dharmic [righteous] life, I wouldn’t exist in this world. I would have to beg.”
So, you see, satyam vada, dharmam chara—all this is gone. Even in spiritual life today in Sahaj Marg, over the past twenty-five years, there has been a steady fall, a decline in values, in goals. Our published goal is the goal of realization, of perfection as a human being. But all of us have other goals: make money, have a good reputation, enjoy life, so many things, you see, very many diverse goals.
So, it is sad for me to be asked to talk because if I am to speak to you all, I must speak frankly, which means bluntly, but unfortunately not effectively, because it doesn’t take me anywhere or you anywhere. You all listen; you don’t apply. A hundred times in these halls I have requested that in Sahaj Marg there are only human beings: there are no Reddys, no Naidus, no Iyengars, no Iyers, and please drop all these suffixes to your name which are meaningless and, much more importantly, they still serve to divide you by caste, by surname, and so on. How many have done it? How many are willing to respond again to my reminder of my appeal to you today and say we are no more Naidus and Reddys? How many of you will be willing? I don’t find any answer, you see.
So, these are too deep in you, even deeper than samskaras. Samskaras the Master can clean, but these silly, meaningless, self-destructive, socially destructive cultural norms that we have created for ourselves, we don’t want to give up. Therefore, we continue to fight. Naidu votes, Muslim votes, Christian votes. Where is the vote for the right man? In India it doesn’t exist. First of all, there don’t seem to be any right men and, much more importantly, the vast mass of humanity that is India doesn’t want right men. We want our man. ‘Our man’ means what? “Naidu, sir! Manavadulu. [Our man.]”
So, you continue to be misruled by your people, and you pride yourself, you know, and saying, “Oh, we have a Naidu to rule here, we have a Babu to rule here,” et cetera, et cetera. Nobody in India can today say we have the right man at the head of affairs, or the right men. At least when India began its journey as an independent, free nation, we had idealists leading the country, people with high ideals. Today we have no idealism. We have only narrow sectarianism, parochialism: Telengana for Telenganas, Maharashtra for Maharashtrians, Bengal for Bengalis. You see, what has happened—a beautiful car project has been thrown out of Bengal for no reason, just because one politician said, “I shall throw it out.” She has proved that she is right. She is powerful enough. But what happens to Bengal? What happens to the Bengalis? What happens to industrialization in India?
So, you see, it is sad that in all the world today there is corruption, there is degradation, there is fall in values. It is sadder that in India it is happening, where it is supposed to be a land with the culture of our ancient rishis and traditions, and saddest that it is happening right here in Sahaj Marg.
So, what you are going to do about it, I don’t know. Because for me, I daily pray that I may not live much longer to see this degradation going more and more, and affecting my heart. I am happy as I am now and my ardent wish is that now I should go after I finish this speech. But you are still there. What is going to happen to Sahaj Marg, to Shri Ram Chandra Mission, to all of you in your thousands? What is going to happen? Nothing can happen except what you make happen. Only what you want will happen. Do you want something noble, something wonderful, something glorious to happen? Or, do you want to continue in this degraded misery of politics and money, priding yourself like the bandarlog in Rudyard Kipling’s book, “We are happy”? The choice is—it has always been and will always be—yours.
We have a great parampara of Sahaj Marg. You know, the gurus. We only know about Lalaji and Babuji. But from Babuji’s messages you must have seen that there is a hierarchy. Where it begins is only with God, with that enormous parampara through time, through space, through eternity, helping us, wanting to liberate us, to raise us. If we do not succeed, it only shows that the human will is more powerful than the Divine will.
So, I can only say, dear sisters and brothers, with a view to correcting all this, trying to correct it, I have put out a message in Sahaj Sandesh a few days back. I don’t know how many of you have read it, how many have had access to it. Please read it, not once or twice. I would suggest that you give up your paaraayana [recitation of scriptures] of whatever you are doing, Hanuman Chalisa [verses in praise of Hanuman], Ramayan Kambha [story of Rama by Kamban], whatever it is and read Sahaj Marg literature, read this message, and realize that without you trying to help yourself, nobody can help you, not even God.
I pray you will awaken now, because it is never too late to wake up, but if you continue to sleep this dreadful sleep, this slothful sleep, this, shall we say, unwillingness-to-awaken sleep, you are at the misery of your own destructive self.
Thank you.
