What Is Our Role In The Process Of Change?
Raja yoga uses the mind to train itself, to regulate
itself. And here the grace of the Guru, or the Master is necessary,
because however much we may use the mind, and however we may
perfect it, if the human tendencies we have brought into this
birth are not changed, then the mind continues to work in
the same way as before, only more powerfully now. So one of
the fundamental techniques of Sahaj Marg, perhaps the most
important, is what we call cleaning. It is my Master's teaching
that, by our thoughts and actions of the past, we have created
impressions of those thoughts and actions upon ourselves.
And when these impressions become very strong they become
the cause of action in a similar repetitive pattern, very
much like a gramophone record plays the same music again and
again.
Now, my Master says, "To correct this way of living, this calamitous
situation, the heartbreaking society today, change cannot be brought by
legislation or by preaching." It is not necessary to tell you that
governments have failed, the church has also failed. Because both have not
been able to touch the heart of the human beings. And unless there is a
change of heart, and change in what the heart says is right, and our willingness
to accept that voice from the heart, we are like automobiles going downhill
faster and faster. We can only crash. The change of direction must come
only by refining the tendencies of the heart, by purifying the heart, and
this is what we are attempting to do in our yogic technique of Sahaj
Marg, recognizing that the voice which was inside the heart, known as
the conscience, has virtually ceased to exist. Fortunately it is still there
but so weak that we cannot hear it. Because the more you disregard it and
push it back, the more it subsides.
Now the only way of bringing it out again into the open
and making it an effective instrument for guiding our life
is to purify the heart, listen more and more to it, and
guide your lives by the way the heart wants you to go. The
need to accept that we are going wrong is of paramount importance.
Because so long as you think you are right, even God cannot
change you. And God is not necessary. We do not call God
to change the direction of our cars. We can do it ourselves.
Here too, it is possible for us to do it ourselves. And
to be able to do it is what we try to teach in our yogic
system.
To face change, which means to face the future, one requires
courage and faith. Faith that change is inevitable, faith
in the fact or acceptance of the fact that change cannot
be avoided. When you have to stop motion - it is like that
famous story about the man who made the Earth stand still
and there was such violent storms and natural cataclysms
that all life forms and everything on the surface of the
Earth was destroyed. Because when the Earth is moving, the
envelope of the atmosphere moves. When you suddenly stop
the Earth, it is like when you are in the bus which is moving
very fast. The driver brakes and you all hit your nose against
the front seat.
Now, to change myself, again we come to this problem of
attitudes, desires, likes and dislikes, all because of Samskaras.
So Sahaj Marg says, "clean it out." But people
want to clean out selectively. All or nothing is the formula
for success or failure in spirituality. I want to remind
you that there is no success or failure attached to the
Master. He is doing his work. Success or failure is yours.
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