What is Progress?

Sahaj Marg is a train. It is going to one destination and that destination is spiritual growth to the highest limits of evolution that is possible to humanity. But all the passengers have different destinations. Some want to grow physically; some want to make a lot of money; many want to find love; others come for health reasons, marriage of children and what not. How many people really come to Sahaj Marg for what Sahaj Marg promises, for what my Master promises, that is, spiritual growth and evolution? I think it may be one in a hundred thousand perhaps.

So, when we talk of progress we should first know what we really want; otherwise it is like planting a cherry tree and expecting a mango to grow out of it or buying a dog and expecting to get cow's milk from it. So the first thing we should know is, what are we here for? We are always talking of "Lakshya" you know, the goal. But how many of us really know what we want? Or knowing it, how many want it? Because, I know people who say, "Well Sir, I have come to the Master. Let Him look after us for the first ten/ fifteen years in our worldly lives. After all should I not have some measure of physical well-being, material well-being and prosperity, before I think of God?" They seem to feel that 'Unless I am well fed, well housed, well looked after, I cannot be expected to think of God, or of God Realization or of self-development." It seems to be some sort of leisure time activity, 'to look after me in all other ways, look after me in such a way that I shall have bank accounts and good houses and all these things, then I shall think of God.'

What is progress? Progress is upgrading ourselves, giving ourselves the capacity, progressively increased capacity, by which we can receive divine energy in its purer and purer ultimate form until we can be in touch with divinity. So this is true progress and nobody who is thinking in terms of getting and giving and all these funny things, has any idea of progress. So in Sahaj Marg, it is very necessary and most important to understand what we are here for. What do we mean when we talk of progress? Is progress something like a child growing into an adult, a physical growth, measurable, visible to the human eyes? You can measure that growth with a scale, in terms of length, breadth and height; you can put him on a weighing machine and weigh him and you can have his volume by immersing him in a bath tub and measure the displaced water and say, 'He is so many cubic centimetres or whatever it is.' That is not the growth we are talking of. Is it his growth from foolishness to wisdom? It is not even that. A man may be a Ph.D. and yet a fool in that which is vital to his existence.

We are all very funnily oriented in that we think what is vital to our existence is money, power, position, prestige - things like that. But what happens when a man dies? You know in the Hindu tradition, when we put a corpse on the final funeral pyre even the clothes are removed. You must go out of this world as you came into it; no clothes. 'I came naked - I go naked.' It also applies to the wisdom that you have garnered in this world by education. The soul does not carry wisdom with it. It also applies to your nationalities. You cannot carry your passport and say, 'I am an American Citizxen. I have free entry into Heaven.' There are no visas, there are no passports. So what are we carrying? Our samskaras; the impressions that our thoughts and our actions have made upon us which we have to carry life after life and which come to fruition in the next existence.

Progress is not something which we can just talk of. It is not just a mere 8 letter word, to say, "Well. I have made progress." How have you made progress? "Well, Babuji says, Your condition is good." It is not enough. Progress means so many things, you see. Progress means essentially that I must fit myself for the divine purpose for which divinity has created me. And what is that? To be that which I have to be. So you cannot even specify progress. You cannot say, "Well, when I have moved from the first point of the heart to second point of the heart, I make progress." Yes, it is for the moment. If I have to go from Ahmedabad to Bombay and my train goes to one station and it stops, what is the use? Either I have to find another train or I have to take another vehicle or to come back to Ahmedabad and go by another train. Very often we have such tragic consequences of a partially fulfilled life, where we make progress up to a small finite limit and then we slip back.

There is a mythological story about the man who climbs up three steps and slips back by three - he is doing it eternally, which means he is always at the same point. It can go on infinitely and if you are slipping back four every time you are climbing three, you are going backwards. If you are slipping back just one or two, at least you are going forward though in smaller stages. So progress means, not only moving forward but preventing slipping backwards. It is two actions simultaneously done - how can I keep moving forward without going backwards. This is perhaps a small variation from Newton's Law that a body in motion keeps moving, until it is stopped. It is true for physical bodies.

But as far as we are concerned, we are a combination of the physical and the spiritual and here it is possible to go forward and go backward at the same time. You are going forward in material growth and going backward in spiritual values. You are going forward in happiness and going backward in moral values. One is illusory; the going forward is an illusory phenomenon. I am getting richer and richer by all the wrong means, therefore I am going backwards in spirituality. I am having more and more pleasure out of life but I am forgetting moral values which should be dictating those pleasure excursions; therefore I am slipping in spirituality.

Here, you see, we are dealing with a bundle of situations, not one situation. When a train moves, it is only a train which is moving and until it is obstructed it will continue to move - Newton's laws become operable and it is a very nice and simple universe. But when we come to living beings, especially to human beings, there are so many currents pulling us in different directions, emotion pulling you in one way, the dictates of life pulling you another way, duty pulling you a third way, responsibility pulling you a fourth way and these foolish desires for spiritual values we have, pushing you in another way. We are literally torn between opposing forces from various sides. It is not as if you are being pulled and pushed only in two directions. You are pulled and pushed by an infinite number of pulls and pushes from all around. It is like a ball suspended in space with about 270,000 wires strung on to it in different directions. And if it breaks apart, it is no surprise. So we break apart, you see.

And what is this breaking apart - we tend to live multiple lives; we are something to our families, something to our workers, something to our friends, something to our lovers, something to ourselves and something which we cannot even face within ourselves. And that is the ultimate tragedy that when a man becomes 17 men or 27 men or 47 men, he does not know who is ruling at that moment, because he has no control. Obviously if he had control, it should be one. When do we retain control over ourselves? When can we regulate ourselves into what we think we should be and what we really are? When all these multiple personalities become integrated into one, he is what he seems to be; and what he seems to be, is what he is.

Therefore, progress also means chipping away all these unwanted personalities within us. They fall off by cleaning. Sometimes it happens like my experience which I have recounted - fear leaving me in the form of a black face exactly like my normal face and it just moved away and it left me forever. Well, it was such a bad thing in me - fear at its worst in those days. I mean it was such a traumatic condition which I could hardly live with. And when it went, it was palpable, I could almost touch it and feel it. And that was Master's blessing. But what about the lesser things which we are not too much conscious of or cognizant of - our small hates, our small dislikes, our small jealousies. For instance pain has a threshold and up to that threshold, we can easily bear pain; beyond that threshold, Nature sees to it that we don't bear it by making us unconscious. But here there are smaller things which we think, "Oh it doesn't matter, you know, if I dislike a person in a small way, what does it matter? Or if I am a little dishonest, what does it matter? Or if I am a little foolish, what does it matter?" But there is no such thing as 'a little foolishness' and 'a little dishonesty' - there is only dishonesty, there is only foolishness, there is only loss of character. It is like saying, "this penicillin is 80% pure." The patient will be 20% dead which means fully dead. We cannot have a patient who is 1% dead or 2% dead. Either he is living or he is dead. Isn't it'? There is no gradation between life and death. There is gradation in health but not between life and death. So it is, with regard to spiritual life or spiritual death.

You see, this sort of rationalization is the enemy of progress. When we start nationalizing our own defects, we are doomed; because there is no punishment from God, there is no reward from God; we punish ourselves or reward ourselves. And when we justify our own mistakes to ourselves, we are condemning ourselves deeper and deeper. It is like a man who has slipped into some form of a quicksand and he is doomed, until he is pulled out. So we are all in quicksand. Therefore we need a Guru, you know, because every time you struggle in a quicksand, you are going in deeper. You cannot possibly come out of the quicksand, pulled by yourself. Therefore they try to remain inactive; so that they are pushed up, you know by certain forces like gravity and things like that. It is wise to remain without activity. Therefore we say in spirituality, "Be passive and let the Guru do what He wants," because if you are going to struggle, you are going to make His work more difficult. Be passive, at least you don't sink deeper into that quicksand. He can have time to bring a rope, throw it to you, pull you out; whatever He wants to do is His business. So once you have handed yourself over to your Master, there should be no more struggling with life. Do what He says. If He says, "Keep quiet" - keep quiet; If He says, "Don't do it" - don't do it. Therefore, to struggle even against our own virtues or our vices in some ways, is also anti-progress.

So we have to know that progress is not just a mere eight letter word! It is not just a mere growth from first point to second point to third; point 3 to point 4, point 4 to Brahmand mandal. These are too simplistic, too facile a way of putting progress. It is like saying how to go from here to Bombay and you trace your route on a road map and say, 'This is the way,' and you think you have gone to Bombay. Going to Bombay is not just tracing the route on a map. It means moving. It means facing the problems on the journey - no seats, no water, troublesome companions, insults by other wayfarers, cheating by porters, cheating by taxi fellows, I don't know what else. Every one of us knows what a journey in India is like. But can we stop at home because of that? Or can we have the equivalent of the French TJV - no dust, no noise, no movement, nothing and yet we get there. So progress means all the associated problems with progress, like copper has to be smelted from the ore, refined, then drawn into a wire through a die. You know it has to be constricted and pulled through a die and then it becomes a conductor of current. So this is the process to which we subject ourselves to ourselves. Please bear this in mind. There is no man with a hammer who is pounding away as we ourselves are trying to shape ourselves to what we should become ourselves. The Master is only a catalyst in the process.

So it is a stupid thing to say, it is too simplistic to say, "Oh! Master will do everything for me. He will do everything for me provided I am prepared to do everything for myself, which is some sort of a conundrum which intellectuals can try to figure out. But there is also the same feeling "God helps those who help themselves." If I fall and I cannot rise, but I try to rise, somebody will pull me up. But if I am just lying on the street, nobody will pull me up. So the trial to rise is all that I have to put in. There should be effort to make that trial - if I fall into a well, at least I must shout.

You know one night in my house, we all woke up thinking there was a burglar, because there was a lot of splashing - water splashing. And I thought somebody had fallen into our well. True enough, when we went to the well, there was a cat! Somehow it had jumped and fallen into the well, and it had made such a tremendous splash. we heard it in our bedroom, probably 40 yards away. And then of course, we put in a rope and a bucket. It took us half an hour to pull that poor thing out. Now what happened you see; the cat was suspicious of the very rope and bucket that was let in for it and it would not scramble into the bucket. So like that, we are suspicious of the Master. What is this fellow trying to do to us? Why is He talking of morals? Why is He disciplining us? Then with the bucket waiting for the cat, the cat is splashing away and trying to jump up 14 ft of wall, which it could not possibly do. So we had to push the bucket into the water, fill it and then maneuver it under the cat and pull it out. Even then it made frantic efforts to jump out of the bucket. See this is the situation we are also creating for ourselves - suspicious of the Master, suspicious of being pulled out. Where is he taking us? Why? Can I not do it by myself'? So we rebel against the very force that is going to pull us up, rescue us first from this mire, from this sand into which we have sunk and make us into something that we should be.

So progress means, (1) willingness to become what I have to become, (2) subjecting myself to forces that are going to help me, (3) avoiding all that is going to pull me back. Progress is not as simple as we imagine it to be. In short we have to work upon ourselves through ourselves, to change ourselves. 'I am the artist, I am the material upon which I am working, and I have to become that on which my mind is fixed.' It is very much like a piece of marble shaping itself into one of those brilliant sculptures of Michelangelo, for instance. What is the help that we receive? It is the Divine help from within ourselves, which gives us the greater energy, greater confidence, greater trust, all from within ourselves. This happens when we can put the Master into ourselves, not treating Him as some sort of external source of all benevolence and beneficence.

So, spirituality must give us discrimination - viveka. It must help us to leave, go off everything - vairagya. It must help us to surrender at the feet of the right person - samarpana. Viveka, vairagya, samarpana - without these three things, there is no spiritual progress.

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