An auspicious occasion is one, which is filled with opportunity and promise. The life of my great and benevolent Master affords a perfect example of how opportunities, properly grasped and utilized, can take an ordinary and humble human being up to the highest and loftiest pinnacles of divinised humanness.

Master's Birthday is Our Birthday
It is a day on which we remember the Master, the person, the great soul, the Mahapurush, the Special Personality who came for our sake and who founded, not only the Mission, but founded, shall we say, our hearts also, on the day He came. So it is a day on which we should remember Him with great love, great reverence, not that we should not remember Him and love Him on the other days. We have an ironical saying in Tamil that somebody bathes very regularly on Diwali day you see. Once a year on Diwali day he has an oil bath and that is enough! But we are supposed to be in constant remembrance. If we are in constant remembrance, what is the significance of a special Master's birthday? It is not that we don't remember the Master on other days or other moments. We should remember Him constantly. After all, He is, or He should be our innermost existence, that which makes us exist. So this is only a special occasion on which there should be intensification of the act of remembrance. That is, our longing for Him, to be united with Him, to merge with Him, should be so intensified, that it comes to a peak on such occasions. On the other days, it is there as a subtle stream, underlying our consciousness.

So let us not think that we can remember Him on the birthday and forget Him for the rest of the year. He is to be remembered with every moment of our life, every breath of our existence, because we understand that hitherto, i.e., before we came to His Divine feet, we were just like dolls, which were put into motion by the samskaras which bring us here, and it is the samskara which was alive, we were not alive. So we were born because of our samskaras; we exist because of our samskaras, and because of the bhog that we have to undergo we create more samskaras. So life goes on almost endlessly you see, life after life, death after death. So, we could not call that really a life.

Therefore, our life began actually, effectively in a very true sense, on the day we received our first transmission at the hands of our Master. So it is in a sense our birthday that we are celebrating. When we are here on the Master's birthday and we remember the Master in a special way on this day, it is our birthday we are remembering, it is an offering of our gratitude, our love - "Master, you made me alive on this day. I am eternally grateful to you for putting me alive, when I was just an automaton which was running around on wheels, run by an internal motor, which I called foolishly 'my heart'. You made that heart come alive, by coming into the heart and becoming the heart of my heart. You made my life come alive, by becoming the life of my life. You gave meaning to my existence, by giving me a purpose." Before that, there was no purpose. It was like a toy train going round and round on its small tracks, which has no meaning, no purpose. So our life was like that. It had lost purpose; it had lost meaning; it had lost joy.

So this birthday should not only be our birthday on which we express gratitude to the Master, "Thank you for becoming our life," but it should also be the day of our final extinction in the sense that, on this day, we should lose our personal identity and say, "Master, thank you for bringing me into existence. Today I cease to exist at your holy feet. Take me and release me from this bondage of 'I' and 'mine', and put me back into that grand, original home of which you have talked about so much and let me become part of that grand, fundamental unity of which I was part, from which I foolishly separated myself by an act of thinking that 'I am." Now I am not. Take me and put me back." So this is the purpose of Master's birthday, as I understand it.

When we celebrate our Master's birthday, we offer gratitude to Nature itself, to God Himself. "Thank you my Lord, for bringing this Soul into existence here, into this corrupt world, into this downtrodden world, misery-filled world, disease-filled world. Thank you for bringing Him here, so that He could raise us up." How could He raise us up? By giving us life!

Significance of the Message
My Master was always trying to delicately hint to the abhyasis that while a message may be given on an important occasion, its relevance or its applicability, was something universal and the meaning of the message had to be understood with one's heart, and put into daily practice if it were to have any benefit in the abhyasis' growth in the spiritual sphere.

The Master is the messenger from above, from our original home, who brings us the glad tidings of the opening of the door by the divine father to receive us back - after all the wanderings that we have indulged in, over incalculable aeons of time. His divine message is His own life. By being with Him, living with Him and observing Him minutely and by trying to emulate Him, one can become like Him, by His Grace. He is therefore both the message, and the messenger.

No sight-seeing after Utsav
If you want to go sightseeing, go before. After that, stay here throughout the three days of the Utsav(Celebrations) and go home straight. For those who are orthodox and have been following the ancient principles, even for temple worship this thing has been said again and again, "You may go anywhere before you go to the temple but once you have gone to the temple and had the darshan of the Lord, go home straight."

Babuji Maharaj used to say, "Look here, what foolishness they are committing. They come here, I clean them, purify them, fill them and when they go home they should go home straight. Instead of that they are going sight-seeing, they are going to Patna, they are going to Kathmandu and Banaras and they are spoiling their condition even before they reach home. Please tell them that at least if they want to do all these foolish things, they should do it before they come here, so that I can clean them and they go home clean."

Always it has been my experience that, in the final sitting of an Utsav, a celebration, the transmission is full of love. It is something always very unique; the final sitting is very unique. I have seen this through my almost twenty-seven years with Sahaj Marg. It is as if the Master is giving us a promise: "You are going now, the celebration is over, but my love for you continues." Celebrations end, but love does not end.

Importance of Celebrations
My Master has said, "A memory, even of reality, is only a memory. It cannot be reality itself." And if history teaches us anything, it is only that history itself is a memory of the past. And what we have to do is to create the future by living correctly in the present. The purpose of spiritual gatherings is precisely that we meet to bring into the present what should be in the present, and that is work, work and work. In my understanding of the spiritual life, there is neither a place for memory nor a place for expectation of the future. This is the teaching of the Master, who said that we tend to live in the past or live in the future, but we don't live in the present. If we wish to honour the memory of the Master, the only possible way is to live the life as he wanted us to live it, reach the goal which he wanted us to reach, by practicing the method which he taught us.

I have attended the Basant Panchami celebration at Shahjahanpur as often as I could. It is the birthday of Lalaji, and the celebration is spread over three days. I have found that the atmosphere in Shahjahanpur is something out of this world during those three days. It is quite different from the normal atmosphere. Master confirmed this. He said, "You will not find this atmosphere when the Utsav is over. I tell you, during those three days it is as if a blanket or covering is put over this house. And at the end of the celebration, Lalaji seems to catch one corner of the blanket and whisk it off. It is a divine atmosphere during those three days. It is Lalaji's grace. It is so pure and so highly spiritual, it is like living in another world."

My Master said it is like bathing in the most fragrant and cool waters of a sarovar (lake), which makes possible a spiritual renewal of the abhyasi bathing in it, indeed drowning in it, if that can be made possible. "What is the use of coming out of such a sarovar? One who comes out of it may be definitely cleaner and cooler too. But it is the one who drowns in it, who continues to enjoy the bliss of immersion in it!"

This Utsav is one such sarovar for us, and those who come to participate in it must not go back. Their bodies may play their part in continuing the stream of existence which is mundanely called 'life,' but the inner being must remain ever immersed in the bliss, the purity, the eternity of the sarovar which is what the spiritual bhandaras, the spiritual gatherings, should be.

We are coming to the concluding part of a most auspicious, most spiritually significant and what is most important, a most spiritually elevating and ennobling experience that has been the substance and the essence of these three days that we have been together here, where we have tried to offer our humble homage at the Holy feet of our Divine Master by celebrating his birthday. Such occasions are extremely important: and when we come to such celebrations of unbelievable spiritual magnitude, importance and value, it is essential that we understand how we should comport ourselves, how we should behave generally, what should be the way of life that we should adopt not only during these three days but throughout the rest of the year so as to draw from the Master, the very essence of existence itself which Master calls 'Life in Life!'

So I personally consider these celebrations as something of a retreat into ourselves where we establish contact, through Master with the inner essence, with His own inner essence which he has implanted in us and thereby seek and receive the spiritual revival, the Grace. His wisdom-filled illuminating words help us to carry on for the rest of the year till we come again for the next Utsav.

Such auspicious celebrations are therefore designed to expose the abhyasis to the divine atmosphere of His presence, so that we immerse ourselves in it, never to come out of it again. I pray to my Divine Master, Babuji Maharaj, to bless one and all with such a consummation.