When people come to Sahaj Marg, they expect experiences, "I have been meditating for three months and I have no experience." Now, we have to train people out of this idea that this is an experiential system. This is an evolutionary system. It is also a revolutionary system; but it is not per se experiential. Our experiences have nothing to do with our progress. If they have any value, it is in showing you what grossness you have had embedded in you, which is being released by the cleaning or the meditation process. To use a very crude example - when you vomit, you can see what you have eaten before you vomited. Nothing more. It stinks, because it has passed through your system. So the human system really makes everything stink.

If experience has any value, it is in showing you what has been in you, the original experiences that created an impression that is being released, very much like when a photograph is developed. The impression of the scene that is recorded on the film is released by the developing process. Here, with cleaning, it comes out. Some people experience, some people don't experience. I think it is morbid to try to look and see what is going out of you. I know some people who never bathe and suddenly one day they bathe and say, "Look how much dust I have got on my head." It is morbid. To know what is dirty in us, unacceptable in us, unnecessary in us, is a morbidity which we should avoid. That sometimes we have good experiences, like we are passing through a beautiful scene, is also similarly something we are throwing out of ourselves. Now, if either you hate this or you become attached to that experience, both are going to deepen until they form fresh samskaras. Now how to translate this into real experience? People say, "Yes, but you know I want some experience to prove to me that the system is really working." It is like a boy of 12 saying, "Daddy, let me vomit a little to see that I have really eaten." "But don't you feel in your stomach that you have eaten? Hasn't your hunger been satisfied?" So you see, many of these rather peculiar desires still rest in us, though we routinely say the prayer, "Our wishes are putting bar to our advancement."

The only value of experience is in showing you that something has gone. Like when I am moving in a train; a station flashing past me shows that I am moving in this direction. If the station remains static, it means that I am also static. And if the station goes past me in the opposite way, it means that I am moving backwards. These are only indicators of how fast I am moving. If you cannot see this then you will see nothing.

So this idea of seeing something, feeling something, is bringing the human perceptions to play on a state of existence which is beyond the human level of existence. It is like trying to measure air with a metre stick. So you see, we are trying to transpose one dimension of experience into another dimension of being, and suffering the consequences and saying, "I feel nothing, I know nothing, I see nothing, Sahaj Marg is a failure." Whereas the opposite is true: that so long as I can feel something, see something, I am at the lowest level of the spiritual ladder. So abhyasis should be trained to recognize this. And to know that when they continue to know, they are really only at the level of knowing. They have to go to the level of feeling. When they transcend that, they are going to a level where nothing more exists, either to be known, or to be felt. That is the real state of progress.

So, you see, when we go into meditation, we learn all these things: that I have to die in my meditation to be reborn in that meditation, and to come out yet the same Paul, and same Bill, the same whatever you are, you see. But with a very, very different outlook on life; with a very, very different inside that has now been opened, changed, cleaned up, refurbished in some mysterious way. Therefore, every time we sit in meditation and we go deep into it, we come out new - renewed, you can say. That is why meditation is refreshing. That is why meditation is never exhausting, you know, however deep you go into it you come out fresh. Pains are gone, aches are gone, more of the heart - which is a very great need. There is solace derived from ourselves, from within ourselves, by ourselves. So we see that, in a very real sense, we are becoming independent of the universe. We seek no solace outside, we get it from inside. The others take renewal from outside, we get it from inside. Then we find the ultimate experience, that within me is the universe. Not this which I see outside, however vast it might be: ten million, ten billion light-years big, so what? It is only a parody of what is inside. That has no limit that can be measured in terms of light-years. You cannot measure this at all: it is truly infinite.

We are always afraid of death. That's a very natural fear. But to be told that perhaps, my dear friend, you don't exist - even now - would be awful, wouldn't it? But when you plunge into yourself in meditation and, if, by Master's grace, by the solemnity of your experience, you are able to experience those spiritual states where you find first nothing, then you find yourself all alone, and then you find that the universe into which you are put all alone by yourself is really you ….! The universe is you. You are there as something experiencing yourself in a cosmic form. Then comes this, you know, really brilliant, fascinating experience that "I am the Universe." Which means you are part of me, everybody is part of me, you are me in a sense.

"God cannot be known. He can be experienced.
Experience is the only way of ascertaining
what Divinity is about."