An Attitude of Holiness

Address to prefects from Iran, 15th March, 2010, Kharagpur, India

I welcome you to whatever you are going to feel after you hear me talk, because when we talk about spirituality, we are not expected to see whether it is good or bad but to remember that it is holy. You know one of the great problems of modern culture all over the world is that we have lost the idea of holiness.

I remember when I saw this movie Moses, and he goes up the mountain to the burning bush, which is supposed to be God; he goes with his shoes on, and a voice comes from the burning bush, “Moses, remove your shoes, for you stand on holy ground.” You see, people ask, especially from some countries, what is wrong if I go with my shoes on. It is a lack of holiness; it is a lack of the proper approach that is necessary in you. I mean God doesn’t care whether you are holy or not. God doesn’t want your respect or your prayer or your offering. After all, He who gives everything including your heart, your knowledge, is hardly going to expect you to give Him anything, isn’t it?

So the first thing to remember when we talk of preceptors’ work is to remember Babuji Maharaj, his definition of transmission. “Transmission is the utilisation of divine energy for the transformation of man.” When we remember this, I think that eighty per cent of our problems are over. It is holy because it is divine energy that is being used; it is not something like a matchstick to light a cigarette, or a gas fire to cook your food. It is divine, it is subtle, it works everywhere at all time, according to need.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we appreciate what sort of energy we are dealing with, and therefore we have questions, like Otto just answered, about therapies, Shiatsu, and what not. When I have the highest energy… I mean it would be foolish to think of lower energies, no? It is like I have a big gas fire and I am rubbing sticks together to create some more fire. People would laugh, “What are you doing?” Unfortunately, because we are all foolish, we don’t laugh. We say, “Ah so, that is also possible? Should I try it?” and we mess up; we mess up our work, we mess up our lives, and it takes us, perhaps, many lives to achieve what we should have achieved.

As Babuji Maharaj said, just turn your head from here to here and your job is done. He was talking about Mohammed the prophet and Allah-o-Akbar and the camel’s head: “God is closer to you than the head of the camel; why are you shouting?” If you have to shout for God, either God is deaf or you are a fool. Now I leave it to you to decide what we are when we shout! No?

And when we remember that silence is the language of God… silence is the only language which is common to all of life: the trees know to be silent, the birds know to be silent, the fishes know to be silent and, hopefully, we know how to be silent. And it is when we are absolutely silent that we are able to hear that — the vibration to which our heart responds, in its wave, like resonance in music, and we find that ‘I have received’. I cannot say I have spoken with God. God has no speech. In which language did you speak? Arabic? Farsi? Hindi? Sanskrit? In which language?

The beauty is that when this vibration comes and it responds, my heart responds, because it is silent; because it is clean; because it is not occupied with worldly affairs. That response I say, “I heard.” I did not hear with these ears; I did not speak with this tongue, but yet, there is a communication, you see.

So it is absolutely essential to be still, silent, in an attitude of holiness that this is holy energy, divine energy that I am dealing with. Therefore, what I am doing, whether it is in front of Master I am sitting for myself, or as a preceptor I am giving a sitting to somebody else, it is always holy.

And if I have this attitude, I will not think of it scientifically with my mind: should I divide it to two groups or three groups — it works! [Referring to dividing into groups for cleaning during group meditation when group is small]. Now we are sitting like this, I would divide into one, two, three, four, five groups. Why not? Or I could take each one of you and make you hundred and twenty-eight groups. Depends on me, isn’t it? Remember when you do radio transmission, the way it can penetrate distances depends upon its wavelength — short wavelength, shorter, shortest. Similarly our transmission: the subtler and subtler and subtler — like light coming from the sun to us. At least that takes time. We know that sunlight takes nine minutes to come from the sun to us. Transmission — you can transmit from here to Tehran, to Timbuktu, to Los Angeles on the other side of the States, to Tokyo on this side, everything takes the same time.

Even scientifically it was proved that thought is something that can go instantaneously from here to there. And it was when debating this point, when the great Einstein himself created an experiment called the EPR: Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen. He could not understand the implication of the result of his own experiment. And he made that very often-repeated statement that God does not play dice with the universe, because he could not understand what he was doing. It was his own experiment; he had designed it.

You take a plant and you say I am going to cut off this branch. And he had wired it to whatever specific apparatus he needed, you know, voltmeters et cetera, and the plant reacted instantly. Then he put the plant in the next room, and thought, and it reacted instantly. Then from one end of New York to the other end of New York, say a hundred kilometres maybe. Instant reaction. Then New York and London. Instant reaction. Einstein could not believe the result of his own experiment, and there he failed as a scientist, because he was prejudiced. His prejudice was that this must not happen; it cannot happen; therefore, it is not happening.

So when we work as preceptors and we do the work and we think it is less than holy, that it is mechanical, that it is capable of being spoken about in technical language and that it has results which I should see, I am bringing the system down from somewhere to this world, to the earth. You know, somebody asked Babuji Maharaj: “First when you come and you start off as an abhyasi, you transmit. Ten years later, I am a senior abhyasi, you still transmit. Twenty years later you are going to be the next guru (like Ajay), you still transmit. What is this? Babuji, should not there be a difference?” He said, when you plant a seed, you water it. When the plant becomes so big, you water it. When it is like a tree, you still water it. Does it not grow? Does the plant say, “Same water, same water, same water, no difference? I am such a big, beautiful tree, oak tree, hundred metres tall”? Nature says, this is your khuraak as we say in Urdu, your sustenance. It is not food. It is what sustains me throughout life.

Two things sustain us. What is it? What are they? What I take in physically and what I take in spiritually. If I take in spiritually what I should day after day after day—the physical thing may be anything—it will work. If that is missing, I can try everything in the world, whether it is medication or diet, vitamins, proteins, carbohydrates, et cetera — nothing will work. Because, in a way, when I think of food as just carbohydrates and vitamins and proteins and minerals, I am removing the divine element that is in them and treating them as mere chemical elements, and they respond as chemical elements. Therefore, Babuji says, before you start to eat, silently pray and offer it to the Divine.

What is the miracle? We talk of Jesus Christ turning water to wine, and Christians believe it. We talk of him feeding a multitude with two loaves and five fishes, and we believe it. But I have seen it happen. I have seen in Babuji Maharaj’s house in Shahjahanpur in the beginning of my association, suddenly forty people coming by bus from some nearby centres, and you know, they all have food! Where it came from, I don’t know. So I asked Babuji once, “How did this happen that at eleven o’clock at night, one o’clock in the morning, there is food for forty people?” He said, “This is something only my daughter-in-law can answer.” And when you go to the daughter-in-law and say, “How did you manage this?” she says, “It is all Babuji’s grace.”

It is happening everyday in our lives if you welcome with your heart the people who come to you. But if you say, “No, no, no, I can only feed two people, Chariji, no more,” you will have food only for one. So the miracle is not Jesus Christ’s god or your god or my god; it is the heart which responds. And the heart says, “Be” and it is. And what is it from the heart that works in this way? Love. Babuji said God is love. God does not love. When we say God loves me, I won’t say it is a lie, but it is not the truth. God does not know what is love. God knows nothing. He is. What we receive from God is always love and that love is translated in my being, in your being, as something that is essential for you at this moment.

You take the miracle of hundred and fifty people sitting here and somebody transmitting. There are people at different levels of evolution (spiritual evolution), and the transmission adjusts itself to the level of each abhyasi. The preceptor doesn’t do anything. He just transmits, and it adjusts. You are at point one — yes. You are at the highest level — yes. You are a saint— yes. You see, that is divine energy. Sunlight cannot do this because it is not divine energy, it is still material energy. It is physical. We don’t wonder at all these things; and [in] every preceptors’ meeting we are talking about dividing people and multiplying people and whether I should transmit in Farsi — I am talking of far-see! [Laughter.] Just a joke, with your language!

So please, if you all remember that this is holy, not because this is a temple or a church or anything, but because where holy work is being done, that is a holy place. I cannot create a building and say it is holy, go and worship there. That is okay for religion to say, you see. In spirituality it depends on what I do, or where I do it. If I sit here and I cook, it is the kitchen. If I cut vegetables, it is another part of the kitchen. If I sleep, it is the bedroom. This we understood in the days when we were not very rich people, we were average people and we had food cooked, we ate it, we cleaned up, spread our beds, slept there — my home!

A house is not a home. A house is a structure. A temple is a structure. A church is a structure. A synagogue is a structure. Has something holy happened there? Or, as Babuji said, if you go to a place where goats are slaughtered for meat, and you sit there in meditation, you will feel horrified by the energy that comes from there. Whereas if you go to a place where people are talking about spiritual life all the time, discoursing, you will feel a different vibration there. The place holds the vibration. That is why we are told, “Sit in the same place for your meditation in the morning — at the same time.” Because in a way your system gets adapted to that place and time and by the time you go there and you start meditating, your mind is already prepared, and continuously you are doing it day after day after day, that particular square metre of earth becomes a holy place.

I say this because when Babuji was in Switzerland once — very sick, he was sitting in a small place like this, and he said, “You know, I get here twenty-four hours of grace from Lalaji Maharaj, and it never happens.” He said, “Once a day, yes. But twenty-four hours!” I said, “Why are you getting it?” He said, “Because Lalaji thinks I need it, and he cannot be wrong.” That shows that those who are above us are conscious of what we are doing, conscious of what we need. And if we but remove ourselves from this scene (as Fausto suggested) and forget you are there, I don’t just get help from the Divine, the Divine takes the place and does the work.

If all these little, little, little truths are appreciated, our life can become very simple, our work becomes very effective, and we are very happy without knowing why we are happy. That is called bliss. Bliss is not something that you get today by Lindt chocolate, tomorrow by something better, day after tomorrow by something better or some nectar of the gods. Bliss is a feeling of the highest level of happiness and contentment, without knowing why I have it. I have not done anything for it. And all this is the result, merely, of my feeling in my mind, in my heart, that “I am not a holy man, but the work I do is holy. Because I am handling divine energy, I am permitting it to go through me, because divine energy needs my permission to use me as a conduit.” The preceptor has only to say, “Yes, my Lord, I am your instrument. You know what to do, go ahead.”

So, you see, whether these exchanges are good or bad, whether preceptors’ meetings are necessary, I don’t know. I remember reading that the great saint Maulana Rumi was locked up with his Master Mushid Shams-i-Tabrez. They were together for three days and all the disciples were jealous — “What are they doing inside for three days? Why am I not there?” And the story goes (this is what I read in one version), that when Shams was finally going, Rumi went up to the door, saw him off and came — Shams disappeared. Nobody knows whether he disappeared, whether he died, or whether he was murdered. Of course, tradition also says he was murdered, and his body thrown into a well, somewhere very near Tabrez where he was born. And there they have a mosque or something put up.

So, as Babuji said, what is divine energy, you cannot say. Does it come from God? You cannot say. Because, of God Himself it is said that you can neither say “He is,” you cannot also say “He is not.” To the believer, He is. To the un-believer, He is not. If you accept that He can work, He works. If you say, “No,” He cannot. God is powerless in the literal sense that God has no power, God has no wealth, God has no intelligence. Yet from Him everything comes. So how can I say God is great? You understand? All this shouting, frenzied shouting so many times a day, whether it is the bell tolling — Babuji Maharaj lived near a temple and it was ringing all the time, toing, toing, toing, and he said they are spoiling God’s atmosphere. Temple! It does not matter who makes the noise. It is anti-nature in the sense that it is against the language of God. It prevents those who can hear from hearing. It is like somebody is speaking and all of you are speaking in multiple languages. Tower of Babel, isn’t it?

So, if all of us are here to listen to the same voice, all of us have to be silent. Therefore, it is a satsangh, to be together in the Truth — of what? Of that which I am seeking. We are all seekers of the same thing. We walk together, we sit together, we laugh together, we eat together, and, to use a famous, oft-repeated phrase in your countries ‘Insha-Allah’, we shall all feel the vibration in our hearts, which should be translated as love. If God does not love, I too don’t love. Love comes from me, you feel it. And you say, God loves me, Murshid loves me, all blah, blah, blah.

Therefore, Babuji said, you cannot love each other in this world. It is not meant for human beings. It is divine. When we receive it, we think that God loves me. God does not love me; I receive it. It is like saying the sun is shining for me. It is shining and when I receive it, I say it is shining for me. Similarly when I am open, my heart is clear, it has no difference of anything in this world, I receive it. I don’t know what it is, but I am happy, I am content, I am in bliss, and for me life is a joy. What will happen when I die? It will also be a joy. Because where God is, there is no life, there is no death, there is only eternal existence. So in life we are content, in death we are content, in every situation we are content, because that which I receive here is divine.

So, this is spirituality. Spirituality is not a technique or a language, or a practice. Spirituality is the ability to receive only to give. If I try to keep anything for myself, that will stop. Babuji said, even the best preceptor retains twenty per cent of what he receives in his heart — he cannot help it, and he says that is his reward. And he used to ask laughingly, “Which business gives you twenty per cent commission? [They give] two per cent, three per cent, half per cent.”

So you see, in receiving and in the giving, there is something left in me through which I grow. Therefore, Babuji said when I asked him, “Why do you make preceptors? You are capable of doing everything yourself,” he said, “I make it for two or three different reasons. One is, I see that this abhyasi will not develop without being given some work. So I give it to him.” I said, “But don’t you expect he will work?” He said, “It does not matter. His being a prefect will help him. Number two, there are those who are real good conduits for the work. To them I give because they help me in my work. And three, He chooses — and I get instructions from Lalaji, ‘Make him a prefect,’ I do it.”

So you see, this is not fun and games or something like that, promotion like in a structure of, shall we say, corporate structures. Everything is for your own benefit. You work for your benefit. You meditate for your benefit. You transmit knowingly or unknowingly for your own benefit. And very soon you find — what? That when I am not, He is there, and if He must be there, I must not be there. That is surrender.

Thank you.