Shraddheyji: The Eternal Energy “Beyond the Microwave World” - Helen Clapham (best books to read for beginners TXT) 📗

and removes that poster? Then I will not have the experience of God. That means God is taken away from me if the poster is the only way to Him.” He and his wife were saying that they were searching for more than 30 years for the true path. So it was incredible meeting them, because they were the first people who realised that satsang, or talking about Knowledge, is not the same thing as Knowledge. I went all over the world, many people came and listened to me and they thought that was it! They thought they had done their duty, they’ve come and listened and that will bring about change. We don’t know, they are just words and we will forget them also. With time we forget so many things, with time so many other questions come into the mind that need to be answered.
When you are dependent on external factors, you will always be limited. When you are dependent internally, internally is where the Satguru lives. Satguru – not the guru – means ‘beyond time’. When the Satguru is manifested internally, all questions are answered internally, there is no need for doubt to arise, because we meditate, we focus, we concentrate inside ourselves and the answers are given to us.
It has happened so many times that we when are in doubt, we look up and pray and we have this feeling manifest inside of us, ‘God, please help me. Show me the way’. It won’t happen instantaneously, but in two or three days we suddenly get what we call a brainstorm, or like a light bulb switching on above our heads, an idea of how to look at our problems. At that point of time we might think this is coming from us, but we don’t realise that it was our prayers being answered.
There is a story about this Irishman who was driving along and he was getting late for an appointment. He reaches the parking lot and all the spaces are full. So he’s driving around and around and after some time he prays, ‘O God, please help me find a parking space. I’ll give up drinking for the rest of my life!” The moment he says that, a car a few spaces ahead moves out and a spot becomes vacant. The moment he pulls into that parking spot he says, “God, God, don’t worry about my prayer just now, I’ve found one!”
It’s a joke but the reality of it is that this kind of thing happens in all our lives. When we ask and we receive, we think it is all our own accomplishment, not thanking God for granting our wishes.
What is important for us to understand is, when you perform perfect karmas, when you are in touch with your Self, when you have removed the doubts, everything happens in your own way, in your own perspective. See, all of us are different in many ways, different experiences have influenced our lives, different feelings that we attach ourselves to, different thought processes, different schools of thought that we follow in our day-to-day life. That’s how there are so many differences in the world. People believe something to be right, other people believe that same thing to be wrong. So there are differences in each person’s spiritual experience, so each spiritual experience is unique and personal for you, when you set out on the path, there can be no common denominator. When you read the scriptures, they show you the path; they are not showing what exactly will happen to you.
Over here in the ashram I hear many people talk. For example, there’s a person who may have had Knowledge a long time, he will sit there very proudly and he will say to a couple of people who haven’t been meditating as long, “Okay, tell me your experience.” One person will say, “When I sit in meditation after some time I experience a flow of yellowish light that comes slowly inside of me.” Another person says, “I experience reddish light,” then the older person says, “You both are wrong. The light has to be blue!” So those two people will think, ‘We have been trying so hard and everything we have been doing is wrong!’ But instead of encouraging those two to meditate and go deeper, you know, he is confusing them. Each experience is unique and in its own given time, when you are ready, the experience will manifest for you. If you are not ready for it and the energy surge comes, you cannot handle it, you have to be prepared for that. That happens and people have gone mad. That is why the kundalini should rise from one chakra to the next. You should not be so proud that you miss one chakra and you go up, that is what happens when you are impatient and you want to do more. Hatha yoga is not a very practised form of yoga. Why? Because it accelerates everything very fast in your life. It is for those people who want everything in this lifetime, but it has its negative repercussions, because if you are not strong of mind you can have surges of power come inside of you and you do not know what to do with that power. The kundalini will rise too fast and it will damage your nervous system. That’s why people go a little unstable, I mean they will talk funny and they will do things strangely. When you come to the Kumbha Mela you will see a lot of people like that. You will experience firsthand how such people are. Not all schools teach this, there are certain schools, certain followers who do that.
It is very important that, when we are doing the right action, we should do it according to our own capabilities. Plato said that when setting goals it is very wise not to set impossible goals for yourself. Don’t say, “This is my goal and I will do it” when you know you cannot achieve it. Set goals in your life which are possible, which you know you can achieve, once you move higher. Then you will move on higher. During the day you don’t need headlights because you can see where you are going, but at night you must switch on your car lights. Why? Because you can’t see where you are going. Now, the light is not illuminating the whole road from your point of origin to your destination, is it? It illuminates what needs to be seen 10 feet, 20 feet in front of you. But you won’t say, “I can’t see my destination, so I won’t start my car.” You do start your car, and you slowly move forward. The moment you reach the point where the headlights reach, then you move forward, and the next 20 or 30 feet are illuminated. Your whole way does not have to be already shown to you, but eventually you reach your destination. If something happens and your headlights go off, you won’t travel further. You will stop your car and stay there or call somebody and then you proceed.
Knowledge is also like that. It will illuminate the goal that we have to reach. See, the ultimate goal is far for all of us, the ultimate goal is very very far, but to reach there we have to move forward. You have to move in steps, so when we are trying to change our lives the first change is internal, but we have to fight with our mind, we have to fight with temptation, we have to fight with greed. We have to fight the negative aspects of human nature which all of us have, which are pride, arrogance, hate and lust, predominately negative human nature which is always binding. But this human nature is also the creation of the mind. If your mind is happy there is no hatred, while if the mind is sad, there can be so many things that will manifest. When I see someone who has something that I don’t have, what is the problem? That I am envious of my neighbour’s happiness. That root cause is a problem that manifests inside you, it is not that somebody externally is telling me to be jealous of that person. It is all internal. The first fight is internal. When we sort of level our playing field, when we know that these negative attributes are there and they influence us, we remove them from ourselves. Remove them how? Stop listening to those influences. When I am getting angry and I know I am getting angry and I know that this is a part of me that is not right, then I can control my anger, I can choose not to be angry. I can choose to be forgiving, I can choose not to hold onto hate. See, the mind is so tricky. It will hold onto something that has happened in the past so that it influences us to the present day .
For example, you all are sitting here and I start scolding this person here right in front of everyone, out of the blue, for nothing. Now we meet after a year, same program, same place, and he remembers that Shraddheyji scolded him in front of everyone. That’s something he held onto which is past. Past is nothing but your memory. Does it have any significance for today? It doesn’t, but the mind will hold on to it. And all that year he keeps on thinking, ‘Shraddheyji scolded me in front of everyone, it was not good, it was not good’. That hate or that feeling has influenced his life for a year, whereas it is only a memory that he is holding to. It’s not real. Reality is the present, and today when I meet him and I am smiling and go to say hello to him, he’ll say, “Shraddheyji, you scolded me last time.” Then our meeting is automatically soured, you know. So we limit ourselves from experiencing what is now, because of a single memory.
Now there are so many memories, so many experiences that we tend to hold in our lives. ‘This happened, then that happened, then this person did this to me’, that is how we choose between our friends and our foes. We will say, “This person is good”, because he has done good things for us, so we go around telling everyone how good he is; but if some person has done something bad to us, even once, we will go around telling the whole world that this person is bad and you shouldn’t have anything to do with him. In the same way, the mind also holds onto the past like this in the form of memory, which taints the present, the current experience, and it also holds to the future. How? We are always constantly planning for the future, not focussing right now. You have limited days left in India, but you have already started making plans about what you will do this day, that day. You think, ‘I will see Agra, I will see Jaipur, I’ll see this, I’ll see that’. You are imaging you will go there, and you haven’t seen anything of it yet, but we waste the present on only the imagination of the future or the memory of the past. The mind moves in both these places. That is why the mind is unstable, that’s why either we live our lives in regret, or we hope for something good to happen in our life, not realising that if you perform action now, if you perform karmas now, understanding the nature and essence of karma, then the past and the future influences in your memory and your imagination have no say in your life today, but we still