October 2017, Kanha Shanti Vanam.
Tuesday, 24 October, evening after dinner.
Daaji continued with the Q&A session with abhyasis from Switzerland, Austria and Germany after dinner. In response to a question on wisdom, he said, “Let us talk about wisdom. Wisdom is something you cannot give to anyone. That’s why it is only talked about in the spiritual arena. Knowledge and information cannot give you wisdom. Partly it is earned through experiences, and yet most do not become wiser despite undergoing painful experiences. I think many things have to come together prior to one becoming wiser!”
The day’s group meditations and talks on Maxim 4 seemed to really inspire more and more questions in the charged atmosphere of the cottage, as abhyasis opened up to ask about the spiritual life. Here are a few of the questions and Daaji’s responses:
The soul
Q: In everyday life, I meet people who do not accept that there is a soul. They don’t feel they have a soul. What can I tell them?
Daaji: It’s okay. You don’t have to convince them, and there is no need to get into an argument. Rather you can say, “Let us not call this entity a soul, or a causal body. Let us instead call it something that gives support to the whole system or life.” It is something that manifests at the moment of birth, and if at that moment the baby does not cry, the doctor taps the baby on the back to stimulate the breathing. If the baby still does not start crying it means that the life force has not come along. So that life force is still along with us now, until one day, in its wisdom, it decides to kick the bucket and say, ‘Okay, I am going now.’
The soul won’t realise that it has gone. It won’t find any difference at all, nor will it be shocked. The soul will see that everything is in order. It is only the people left behind here who are shocked: “Oh, what happened to her?” So you can call it the life force, or you can give any name to it. Something is there which keeps us going until we take the last breath. What is it? Put a question to them?
Sometimes I joke when people say, “Why should I meditate on Divine Light, if I don’t believe in God?”
So I tell them, “The idea is to keep your thought on something, so you might as well put it on the Godly presence in your heart.”
“But I don’t believe in God.”
So I tell them, “All right, then meditate on no God in your heart.”
The main thing is not to fight with them. You can say, “I agree with you, but still let’s meditate.”
Creativity
Q: If we can say that before the Creation there was a state of perfect balance, is there any relationship between the Creation and when we want to be creative?
Daaji: There is a tremendous relationship, a powerful relationship. Take an example: if you are very restless, walking around in your room, can you be creative? You can’t. You need to be completely calm, peaceful, tranquil, poised and balanced to be more creative.
I have seen that when I am more peaceful inside, guidance descends on its own. When this happens, the world is talking to us, giving us a message.
Simplicity
Q: In the last part of Maxim 4, Babuji is asking us to try to reduce activities in order to become simple, but I find it is difficult to do this in family life, especially with young kids. There is always this level of activity – taking them to this lesson, this party, etc. If I try to be simple it feels like I am isolating them. There are not so many people around who have the same lifestyle.
Daaji: You only have two kids, right? Have nine and then see. Babuji had nine children. He had to work, and look after his mother, and his wife passed away before his mother passed away. So you can imagine the amount of work he had.
Q: It is the type of work.
Daaji: You don’t like the type of work because you have to run around – investment of energy is there. But let us say this investment of energy makes your children so good that one day one of them wins the Nobel Prize. If you could see that ahead of you, you would invest more time in them. We don’t see the results.
Our job, our duty is to do the best that we can, with a lot of love. A mature mind thinks of essentials. But if you start nagging your husband, “Look, I have been all day with the children. Please take me somewhere.” Will going somewhere change the situation?
Q: As an example, in winter we have ice skating, skiing, and the children ask, “Why are you not coming?”
I say, “No, I don’t ice skate, I don’t ski.”
Then in summer it is the ocean and the swimming pool, and they see other children with their parents.
Daaji: So take them. Teach them how to swim. These are good things for children. You have to think about the consequences. If you don’t take them to the pool, or take them for skiing, their mental development will suffer. When everyone is doing it, they also want to do it too. So we have to see the environment, why they want to go, and attend to their needs.
Q: You spoke about simplicity in the maxims, but on the contrary, we require a lot of time and discussion to really understand each maxim. So is that a paradox or is it because of our human brain, which always tries to make things complicated?
Daaji: Why do you make the assumption that the mind complicates things? Understand the words first. Take them to your heart.And if you don’t understand, don’t ask questions. Instead, pray to the Master, “Please help me understand.”
First you should know what you don’t understand. The moment you know what you don’t understand, understanding becomes very easy. Often we read something and we don’t understand a passage, so pinpoint what it is that you don’t understand and then tackle it. Becoming aware that you don’t understand something is itself a big step.
More on the soul
Q: In Truth Eternal, where Lalaji talks about the soul, the atman, I understood that he says it is composed. My understanding is that the soul is also a vehicle of something that is beyond, as the body is a vehicle for the soul.
Daaji: The soul is the vehicle for carrying our subtle bodies and our physical body. The soul carries with it all our subtle bodies when it departs.
Q: Is the soul not also a vehicle for something higher?
Daaji: That is already there in a limited way – jivatman manifests in this life from Paramatman. But atman can also be there in unmanifested existence. For example, the atman that supports our existence here, upon death will not be recognised as jivatman. When it is in a body it is jivatman, but when it passes on it becomes atman. Both are part and parcel of the bigger thing. That is why Kabir simply describes it as a drop becoming one with the ocean, for the sake of understanding.
Both have the same potency. Lalaji analyses the two words, atman and Brahman, by breaking them down into their components. ‘At’ is to move, ‘man’ is to think. Brahman is derived from ‘bruha’ meaning to expand, ‘man’ is to think or contemplate. So it is all about the degree of growth. At the level of the Pind Pradesh, atman is thinking and moving; when you advance and enter the Cosmic Region, the Brahmanda Mandal, the atman has evolved to that level where it can think, contemplate, move and expand, When you go beyond the Cosmic Region to the Para-Brahmanda Mandal, you are going beyond thinking and contemplation, you are going beyond moving and expansion. Then it continues on and the nature of atman becomes more and more difficult to describe. There is no thinking involved, no contemplation, no movement, and no expansion. The atman simply remains contented within itself.
But there is also restlessness to reach the Source. It is a subdued, very refined kind of restlessness that remains inside. The soul recognises its own limitations, when it perceives the highest with some faint perception and wants to achieve that. So there is still some level of ‘I’-ness that wants to achieve, and that feels the difference between the self and Him. Then, as you become less and less, and the Lord becomes more and more in you, a time comes when you enter chakra 12. It just happens.
This process is triggered from chakra 9 and unfolds between the 9th and 12th chakras. More of ‘me’ is there in the beginning, and as you progress there will be less of ‘me’. There is less about ‘myself’, and more of the Maker. In the most natural way you fall in love actually. Then you remain in this state of insignificance for a very long time, until he decides that it is time to take you further beyond the Super-Mind of God to the Centre. Then the true journey begins.
Let’s look at all these junctures we go through on the journey. To move beyond the five elements of the Heart Region, the Pind Pradesh, where there is the duality, the opposites or the dwandwas in Sanskrit, you need tremendous generosity of the heart to reconcile them within. To settle down inside and move to the Mind Region, you have to make peace with all these opposites. It happens naturally during the spiritual journey – you don’t have to try to make exclusive efforts to move into the Mind Region. Then the next juncture comes, where extreme humility must take over by chakras 11 and 12 if you want to go beyond chakra 12. Without humility it is not possible to enter the Central Region, although Sahaj Marg Masters can transport people to the Central Region through an indirect method that Babuji called the reflective method – in modern terminology we would call it the virtual method. We can have a virtual tour of the Central Region!
Babuji would write to his associates also, saying, “I have given you exposure to the 17th ring. Please write it in your diary,” but in many cases it was only virtual. I am very confident that the moment you make a true journey, not a virtual journey, you cannot fall.
The true journey of the Central Region
Q: What do you call the true journey?
Daaji: A true journey is when your efforts match His. Your devotion matches your efforts. You are authentic. So when the Master takes you there, you walk like father and son, and when you are there you are obedient enough not to move.
There is something that I missed for many years in Maxim 3: His divine help is really able to come when he feels that he can trust us. I was able to recognise this truth because Babuji once wrote to an abhyasi that two things are required for spiritual growth: the first is restlessness and the second is the trust from the Master, not trust in the Master.
Some abhyasis may say, “I have restlessness but I am not progressing. So does it mean that he doesn’t trust me?” Please think over it.
Q: Is restlessness when we receive blessings, because when we are restless we pray for help?
Daaji: When you are restless you do not care for blessings. You are restless to reach the destination with or without blessings. It is his business to give you blessings. Our business is to create a vacuum inside us so that he can pour himself in us. When he pours himself in us we become a replica of the Master.
To be continued …
