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The Soil  Before The Seed

The River Learns Its Name &nbsp; How the Energy of Fear Becomes the Ground of Trust Dear friends, Some years ago, a young woman came to me after a morning meditation sitting. She had been practicing sincerely for several years, and the changes in her were visible to everyone around her. There was a softening, a deepening, and a quiet that was an expression of presence rather than passivity. Yet her face that morning carried a particular confusion, the kind that comes from standing at the edge of something she did not yet have words for. She said, “Daaji, something strange happened in meditation today. My fear was there. I recognized the familiar tightening, but this time, instead of fighting it or trying to clean it away, I just watched it. And as I watched, I noticed that the fear felt like longing. It was like the same thing wearing a different face. Is that possible? Am I imagining it?” She was not imagining it. She had discovered in one quiet sitting what the ancient sages spent lifetimes articulating. She had found the secret that fear guards most jealously: it does not come from outside the soul but from the soul’s own energy, turned in the wrong direction. In the series of messages from the Basant Bhandara during January and February, we were asking a single question: What prevents a seeker from living the life that awaits? And we walked through seven shadows: desire’s division, purpose’s sleeping, doubt’s corrosion, pride’s invisible ceiling, envy’s borrowed wound, prejudice’s colored glass, and finally fear, which was hiding inside all the others, not as a seventh poison but as the first, wearing every costume in the wardrobe. Then, we ended at an open door. Before we cross the threshold into what grows, it is worth pausing here to understand what the young woman actually found. What she glimpsed holds the key that connects everything we identified as obstacles in the previous messages with everything we are about to cultivate. And the capacity she discovered is not new. It has been there all along, waiting to be recognized for what it truly is. The Word the Soul Already Knows In Sanskrit, the word that names this capacity is shraddha. It is usually translated simply as “faith,” but it is worth exploring the deeper meaning. The word comes from the combination of two roots. The first, shrad, is the heart’s inner seat of recognition, the place in us that knows something as real before the mind has finished deliberating. The second, dha, means to place, to establish firmly. Together they give us something that the ordinary understanding of “faith” does not reach: to place the heart somewhere, to establish ourselves in what is real. We do not choose shraddha the way we choose an opinion. Rather, it arises the way a compass needle finds north; not by argument but by recognition. It is not a belief we hold, but the ground upon which we stand. Fear Is Not the Opposite of Trust Let’s return to the young woman’s question, because she had found something genuinely important. She had noticed that fear and longing felt like the same thing wearing different faces. She was right, not metaphorically but structurally. How does fear operate? It arises when the mind treats a threat as real and inevitable, below the threshold of conscious thought. The body tightens and decisions are shaped by the imagined catastrophe. Energy flows toward avoiding, protecting, and defending. Now, this is similar to the structure of shraddha, which has the same capacity for deep inner conviction, and the same ability to make something feel real before it has been proven. The only difference is the direction. In shraddha, the heart places itself toward truth, while in fear, the heart places itself toward threat. Rightly understood, fear is not the enemy of shraddha, it is shraddha in exile. It is the soul’s capacity for conviction, turned backward, pointing toward contraction instead of expansion. This is why every genuine spiritual tradition treats fearlessness not as the suppression of an inner enemy, but as a homecoming. It is the return of an energy that was always ours, finding its rightful direction at last. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad offers a clue that fits here like a key in a lock: “Dvitīyād vai bhayam bhavati,” meaning, “Fear arises from a second entity.” The second entity here refers to duality, the experience of being separate from the Source. So, fear arises from the experience of being separate. When the soul forgets its connection to the Source, it begins to protect the small, isolated self. That protection is understandable, deeply human, and it is precisely what keeps the soul from finding its way home. It is like a fortress that in keeping out the wind also keeps out the light. Babuji spoke of this with the tenderness of a parent who knows that a child has simply lost their way home. The fear you have been carrying is not a flaw in your character, it is the soul’s response to distance from its source. It is homesickness wearing the mask of anxiety. And the cure for homesickness is not argument but the experience of arriving. Where the Heart Rests, Life Flows The Bhagavad Gita captures this with a precision that remains astonishing even after centuries of reflection. In the seventeenth chapter, Krishna says, “Yo yac-chraddha sa eva sah,” meaning, “Whatever a person’s shraddha rests upon, that they become.” I invite you to read those words slowly. They are not speaking about what you believe; they are speaking about where your heart is placed, and what your innermost being trusts. And the claim is radical: what the heart trusts at its deepest level shapes not just the direction of life but the very substance of the soul. This is both sobering and liberating. It is sobering because it means that the life we are living is the expression of what we have trusted most deeply: not what we say we believe, but what the heart has quietly and persistently placed its weight upon. And if shraddha has been resting in fear, life will be shaped around protection and avoidance. It is liberating because it means the change required is not the exhausting work of rewriting every action and every thought. It is the more fundamental shift of asking, “Where is my heart resting? And is that the direction I truly choose?” When shraddha shifts, so that the heart places its weight toward truth rather than toward threat, everything that follows shifts with it. It does not happen all at once, and not without effort, but it happens naturally, the way a river does not need to be persuaded to keep flowing once it finds the sea. The River and Its Name Do you remember <a href="https://www.daaji.org/daaji-messages/The-Divided-Heart" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Divided Heart</a>, the message from February 2, 2026? We complete it here by discovering that even the dividing force, fear, was never a foreign intruder, it was the river flowing the wrong way. And a river can learn its name. Our young woman didn’t learn something new, she remembered something old. The capacity she discovered had been there all along, but it was expressed as fear for most of her life. Now, it was beginning to find its true direction, quietly and irreversibly. All that was needed was what she did: to sit still long enough for the river to learn its name. Shraddha is not something to be generated by effort. In the deepest sense, it is the memory of the soul. Something within every one of us already knows the direction home. The longing we feel, the stirring that comes in the early morning, in the quiet after meditation, and in the inexplicable dissatisfaction with a life that looks complete from the outside, is the soul remembering. It is shraddha in its earliest form, not yet fully grown, but unmistakably alive. What it grows into, and what determines whether two people sitting side by side in the same meditation hall, receiving the same Transmission in the same silence, can emerge from that sitting as differently as a potato and an egg cooked in the same pot of boiling water, is the question we will turn to in the next message. With love and prayers,&nbsp; Kamlesh

Daaji is publishing a series of messages for us to download, read, and contemplate.“Batch 2 - The River Learns Its name”

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The River Learns Its Name

Daaji Special Message Series – Available for Download, Reading, and Contemplation“The Unlived Life” &nbsp;

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The Unlived Life

Beyond The Walls You Cannot See When Openness Replaces Prejudice Dear friends, A man inherits a house with stained glass windows on every wall, and each pane shows the world outside in a single colour. Through the blue glass the garden looks melancholy. Through the red glass it looks threatening. Through the amber glass everything appears old and faded. He has lived so long with these windows that he has forgotten that they are coloured at all. He simply believes the world to be as he sees it. One monsoon evening, a storm cracks a single pane, and through the clear gap he glimpses colours he has no name for. Most of us live in that house. The stained glass we inherited was not installed by us. It was placed there by family, culture, community and our own experience. And its danger lies not in the colours themselves but in our forgetting that the glass is coloured at all. We look through our prejudices and believe we are seeing clearly. This is the condition that Babuji identified with startling precision when he called prejudice the deadliest poison to spiritual life. The Poison That Feels Like Wisdom Poison is an interesting word. It implies something that enters a living system and corrupts it from within. A poisoned body does not know it is poisoned until the damage is already done. And this is precisely what makes prejudice more dangerous than any of the obstacles we have explored so far. In <a href="https://www.daaji.org/daaji-messages/The-Awakening-of-Purpose" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Awakening of Purpose</a>, laziness was visible. In <a href="https://www.daaji.org/daaji-messages/building-a-strong-foundation" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Building a Strong Foundation</a>, doubt was felt. In <a href="https://www.daaji.org/daaji-messages/Reaching-For-The-Sky" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Reaching for the Sky</a>, pride could be detected by anyone willing to look honestly. But prejudice? Prejudice wears the robes of discernment. It presents itself as loyalty to truth, as wisdom earned through experience, and as the mature ability to judge correctly. A prejudiced mind does not feel sick; it feels certain. The great American educator John Dewey called closed-mindedness “premature intellectual old age”. The mind loses its suppleness. It can no longer receive, analyze or respond to what is genuinely new. Every fresh person, every unfamiliar idea and every experience that does not fit the existing frame is filtered through conclusions formed long ago. We stop encountering reality; instead, we encounter only our opinions about reality. And we mistake the two. The Chain It Strengthens Babuji’s insight reaches deeper than psychology; he identifies a metaphysical consequence. Prejudice, he says, adds one more link to the existing chain of egotism. Let’s consider what this means. Every act of prejudice is, at its root, a declaration: My view is the correct view. My group is the right group. My way of seeing is the way 4 of seeing. Even when it appears as a judgement about others, it is fundamentally a statement about the self. And each such statement thickens the shell of ego, the very thing that separates the individual drop from the ocean it longs to rejoin. This is why Babuji arrives at such startling logic: the realization of the Limitless becomes an impossibility. It does not become difficult or unlikely; it becomes an impossibility. You cannot reach the Infinite while building finite walls. You cannot merge with the whole while insisting on remaining apart. A consciousness that has drawn a boundary around itself and declared everything outside that boundary as lesser, wrong or other has structurally disqualified itself from the experience of vastness. This is absolutely logical. The Bridge That Became a Wall Perhaps the most sobering dimension of Babuji’s analysis is what happens to religion itself under the influence of prejudice. Religion, which was designed as a bridge between the human and the Divine, becomes a barrier instead. The very instrument of connection becomes the instrument of separation. How? Because when we approach the sacred through the lens of “my religion is the only true religion”, we replace the living experience of the Divine with a dead allegiance to form. We worship the container and forget the water it was meant to carry. This is not a problem confined to any one tradition. It lives wherever human beings mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. It lives in the Hindu who will not sit beside a Muslim to meditate. It lives in the scientist who dismisses all spiritual experience as delusion. And, if we are rigorously honest, it may live quietly in us too, in corners we have not yet examined, in assumptions so familiar we have forgotten they are assumptions at all. What Dissolves the Glass Just as an empty cup has the capacity to receive, an empty heart has space for love. And love is not something we produce, but something that arises when the conditions are right. Prejudice is one of those deep roots that must be pulled out to leave room for love’s entry. And yet, beautifully, the reverse is also true: love itself is the force that dissolves prejudice from within. Fear contracts while love expands. And prejudice, which is ultimately a contraction of consciousness around a fixed position, cannot survive genuine expansion. This is where meditation becomes indispensable. You can neither argue yourself into loving everyone, nor can you shame yourself into openness. In the silence of deep practice, when thought settles and the chattering mind quietens, something remarkable happens. The boundaries we have constructed begin to feel like just that: our 6 own constructions. We realize that these boundaries are neither reality nor truth, but just habits of mind, patterns of reaction and inherited conclusions we never thought to question. Through pranahuti, divine Transmission, the heart softens through direct contact with something vaster than the mind’s categories. In that vastness, there is simply no space for prejudice; not because we have fought it away, but because we have expanded beyond the territory it once occupied. A river that has reached the ocean does not concern itself with the particular valley it once flowed through, as it has become too large for such small allegiances. The Crack in the Glass Prejudice not only damages the one who holds it but also radiates outward. Others feel it, children absorb it and communities fracture along its invisible lines. When Babuji wrote that India had achieved political freedom but not freedom of the soul, he was identifying something timeless: external liberation without internal liberation is incomplete. Each of us is responsible for examining our own inner atmosphere. There is no need to examine ourselves with guilt, because guilt is just another form of contraction. Instead, try introspecting with honest curiosity: “Where have I stopped listening?” “Where have I decided, without fresh evidence, that a person, a path or an idea has nothing to offer me?” “Where have I confused the comfort of certainty with the presence of truth?” That man in the inherited house did not need to destroy his windows. He needed only one crack, one small opening through which unfiltered light could enter. The crack is the beginning of spiritual freedom: it is not the accumulation of more correct answers, but the willingness to hold our answers lightly, to let the vastness of reality continually surprise and reshape us. The walls we cannot see are always the hardest to dismantle, but here is the quiet truth that makes this work worth doing: we do not dismantle them by force. We dissolve them by growing too large to live inside them any longer. And as those walls dissolve, a new movement begins to stir in the cleared space, where a presence has been waiting all along. We will explore this in the next message: the moment when love, now free of every obstruction, turns its full force toward the Divine and becomes devotion. With love and prayers, Kamlesh Message on the occasion of Golden Jubilee Celebrations of Yogashram Shahjahanpur Batch 5: 28 February to 2 March 2026

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Beyond The Walls You Cannot See

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Facing Your Own Horizon

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Reaching For The Sky

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Building a Strong Foundation

The Awakening of Purpose &nbsp;Two Questions On the first evening of my arrival at the Shahjahanpur Ashram, a young lady approached me, along with twelve abhyasis. She began almost urgently, “I want to become deeply spiritual, so, so badly, but every time I decide, I fall apart." &nbsp;She continued, “I know exactly what I should do with my life. I have the skills. I have the opportunity. I even have a plan. But when morning comes, I can’t get up. Something inside me simply won’t let me.” Around her, others nodded in quiet recognition, including her father, who has been a trainer for nearly two decades. With visible frustration and a trace of pain, he added, “What can I do, Daaji? I find myself in a similar situation.” After listening carefully, I proposed two questions to her to seriously ponder over: 1. Do you love where you are going? 2. Are you dissatisfied with where you are? The young lady didn’t know what to say. And the whole diagnosis was hidden in that silence. Love Versus Pain&nbsp; Are these two questions asking about the same thing? No, they are referring to two entirely different&nbsp;engines. The first is pulled by&nbsp;love.&nbsp;It has a destination. The energy flows toward something luminous, and the body follows because the heart has already arrived there. The second is pushed by&nbsp;pain.&nbsp;It has no destination, only an escape. The energy moves away from discomfort, and the moment the discomfort eases even slightly, the engine dies. This is why so many of us fall apart every time we decide. When our fuel is dissatisfaction, not love, we give up too easily. This dissatisfaction burns hot for a moment, then grows cold, because the mind adjusts to discomfort and stops running. Purpose Versus Laziness We don’t understand laziness very well. We see it as a flaw in character, a lack of discipline, and a weakness that can be overcome with force. But laziness is not the same as a lack of energy; it is energy without a goal. When something really interests a so-called lazy person, watch them; they never tire, they don’t eat, and they work all night without complaint. Energy was always there, but the flame was missing. In a well-known animated film, a seemingly lazy panda discovers that the power he seeks is already within him. The protagonist, an overweight panda, appears to be the laziest creature in the peaceful valley. He can barely climb the palace steps. He falls asleep during training. The Kung Fu Master and other students consider the panda hopeless. By every visible measure, he is the embodiment of&nbsp;tamas. But then comes the pivotal moment. The Master discovers that when the lazy panda is motivated by something that genuinely ignites him, he becomes a different being entirely. In the famous kitchen training scene, the panda performs acrobatic feats, splits, leaps, and moves with breathtaking speed, all for a dumpling. The same body that could not do a single sit-up in the training hall is suddenly capable of extraordinary agility. This shows that the energy was always there, but the&nbsp;flame&nbsp;was missing. When something really interests a so-called lazy person, watch them. They never get tired. And the Kung Fu Master’s deeper insight brings the lesson full circle: the mysterious Scroll, when finally opened, is blank; it is in fact a mirror. It proved that there is no secret ingredient; the power has always been within. The fire was never extinguished; it was only sleeping. The Will to Eat an Icecream! Ask a young boy, “Would you like some ice cream?” What do you think his reply would be? Would he need to summon willpower or struggle to persuade himself? Of course not. When there is genuine interest, energy flows naturally toward it. &nbsp;<figure class="image image_resized" style="width:100%;"><img src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/The_Fire_That_is_Sleeping_32cc994203.jpg" alt="The Fire That is Sleeping.jpg"></figure> The Weight Of Unlived PurposeSpiritual traditions do not regard laziness as a disease in itself; instead, they see it as a sign. In the yogic framework,&nbsp;tamas&nbsp;is the quality of inertia and heaviness. How does it arise? It arises and settles gradually into a life that has lost its reason to move. For example, when a river loses its slope, it does not cease to be water; it just turns into a swamp. The life force remains the same, but its direction changes. What has shifted is the pull, the downward gradient, the quiet call that once said, “Come this way.” What about ambition? Ambition is not the same as greed, as some people assume. The soul does not easily accept a life that is smaller than what it knows is possible. When true ambition fades, it does not disappear without consequence. It leaves behind a heaviness that may feel like tiredness, boredom, or even depression. But often it is something else. It is the weight of purpose left unfulfilled in a life that has stopped stretching toward its own potential. Babuji said that the soul wants to be free from its chains. That desire is a form of ambition, the highest kind. We&nbsp;want&nbsp;to become what we already are but have forgotten. His third maxim makes this unmistakable: “Fix up your goal, which should be complete oneness with God. Rest not till the ideal is achieved.” Notice the verb: Rest not. Not “try not to rest.” Not “hope you don’t rest.”&nbsp;Rest not.&nbsp;When this goal is alive, laziness can’t get a grip. When it sleeps, there is no way to replace what is missing with alarm clocks, motivational speeches, or productivity systems. Finding Your Purpose If being lazy is a sign, the cure must get to the root of the problem. And the reason is always the same: not being connected to a purpose. The Japanese have a word for this connection:&nbsp;ikigai, which means a reason for being, a reason to wake up in the morning. In Okinawa, where some of the longest-lived people on earth reside, researchers found that elders who could name their ikigai lived longer and more vital lives than those who could not. The body that has a reason to rise does not need an alarm clock. The soul that knows why it is here does not negotiate with the morning. Purpose is not an idea; it is something you&nbsp;feel. When you meditate and feel something in your chest, like warmth, a pull, or a quiet insistence that there is more to you than what you have been living, that feeling is purpose announcing itself. It doesn’t have to be dramatic, and it need not come as a voice or a vision. It might come as a whisper that says, “You weren’t made for this smallness.” At its core, the Heartfulness practice of morning meditation is a daily meeting with purpose.&nbsp;Pranahuti, the yogic transmission, does more than calm the mind when it enters the heart; it changes the direction of the inner compass. It reminds the system, on a deeper level than thought, where it is going and why the trip is important. This is why practising regularly makes both the meditation and the day that follows better. Someone who is truly open doesn’t need to make up reasons to be motivated. Motivation arises from a brief encounter with the rationale for existence. It means that we feel motivated when, even for a moment, we remember&nbsp;why&nbsp;we exist. There is also the issue of companionship. Satsangh, the company of truth, works on laziness like sunlight works on ice. When we are with someone who is on fire with purpose, we remember our own flame. The fire spreads, and it moves from one heart to another without words or instructions, just by being close to each other. This is why the traditions stress the importance of getting together, being part of a community, and being with people who are awake. It is not because we can’t walk alone, but because walking together reminds us&nbsp;why&nbsp;we do. Take The First Step The wise people have always known something that the productivity experts often overlook: you can’t think your way out of stagnation. You have to move to get out of it. The movement doesn’t need to be dramatic; it simply needs to be real. Babuji once made a distinction that cuts to the bone:&nbsp;“People try but do not attempt.” Trying carries within it the permission to fail. It keeps one foot on safe ground. Attempting is something else entirely. It gathers the whole being into one direction. But what do you do when the whole distance feels impossible? Sometimes, when I have to walk on the treadmill for thirty minutes, my mind resists. Everything in me says, not today. In that situation, I say to myself, let me not bother about thirty minutes. Let me do it for just two or three minutes. And then the magic happens. Two minutes become five, and five become fifteen. Before I know it, the thirty minutes are done. The body that refused to begin now refuses to stop. This is the secret: you do not need to conquer the whole distance. You need only to take the first step. Once the action begins, a force larger than willpower takes over. The unfinished walk becomes harder to abandon than it was to start. One action done with full attention breaks the spell of&nbsp;tamas&nbsp;more quickly than a hundred plans made while lying in bed. The Bhagavad Gita does not say, “Think great thoughts.” It says, “Do something.” It also does not imply “do the right thing” or “do very impressive actions,” but simply “Do something.” The body is moving, the hands are busy, and the will is focused on something, anything, that matters. This is the hole that lets light into the dark room. You never have to ask yourself if you have the energy. You do. The question is whether you remember what the energy is for. And remembering is not a mental exercise. It’s a habit. It’s meditation. It’s transmission. It is the daily, patient, and unglamorous act of sitting with your heart until it tells you what it has always known:&nbsp;tadap, a deep longing, an inner ache, a yearning. Your laziness didn’t kill your drive; it just buried it. And what is buried can be found again. The fire is still there. It is only asleep. One breath of purpose can awaken it, not for those who merely try, but for those who truly attempt. Rest not. With prayers. Kamlesh 12 February 2026&nbsp; Message on the occasion of Golden Jubilee Celebrations of Yogashram Shahjahanpur, 12 February 2026

Golden Jubilee Celebrations of Yogashram Shahjahanpur Daaji Special Message Series – Available for Download, Reading, and Contemplation“Batch-I: The Awakening of Purpose”“Batch-II: Building a Strong Foundation - Commitment, Purpose and Trust”“Batch-III: Reaching for the Sky - How Humility Breaks the Ceiling Ego Builds”“Batch-IV: Facing your own Horizon”“Batch-V: Beyond the Walls You Cannot See When Openness Replaces Prejudice”

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The Awakening of Purpose

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The Divided Heart

To achieve the correction of gross tendencies, Point A of the Heart Region is used for meditation and Point B is used for cleaning. It is highly effective in correcting self-indulging tendencies.&nbsp;<h2>Locating Points A and B</h2>Points A and B can be located by actual measurement. The heart lies in the left part of the body, near the lower part of the left lung. If we measure two fingers width straight to the right of the left nipple, and then proceed straight down, up to three fingers width, this is the position of Point A. Now proceed two fingers width straight down from Point A to find Point B – the measurement to be taken with your own fingers.<figure class="image"><img src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/Finger_3564363631.webp"></figure><h2>Meditation on Point A</h2>To achieve the correction of gross tendencies, Point A of the Heart Region is used for meditation. It is highly effective for correcting self-indulging tendencies as well as promoting a feeling of universal brotherhood and, in turn, creating unity amongst all. Fix your attention on Point A, with the thought that all the women and men of the world are your sisters and brothers. Hold your thought on this while you meditate on Point A, believing this to be the reality. This is a really short but extremely effective practice. If practised wholeheartedly you can see its effect immediately, and this effect will be permanent. This meditation is to be done before going to bed for not more than ten minutes.Sisters are advised to follow the process with a slight modification. Instead, think that all divine gifts are available to you, and that all men and women of the world think they are brothers and sisters and your thought is one with theirs.<h2>Cleaning on Point B</h2>Fix your attention on Point B and imagine that all impurities and grossness are going out from Point B from the front of the body. Imagine that as this process is going on, the glow of the atman, the soul, begins to appear from behind. This process is to be done before beginning your morning meditation, but never for more than ten minutes.<blockquote>BibliographyEfficacy of Raja Yoga in the Light of Sahaj Marg Complete Works of Ram Chandra, Volume IV A Preceptor’s Guide, Volume II</blockquote>&nbsp;<h2 style="text-align:center;">CHARACTER FORMATION SOME JEWELS FROM REVERED MASTER’S TALKS</h2>Spiritual practice must lead to character building and development but, as my Master has emphasised again and again, while he gives spiritual wealth to us, we have to use our willpower and our intelligence to mould our character to conform to our spiritual level. The conscience is only like a thermometer to judge how good or how bad one is. In spirituality we do not think of good and bad but of samskaras, and they are to be avoided. Sahaj Marg will surely work for social transformation too, but the effects will not be visible so soon.If people are coming to the spiritual life only to change the world (please listen to this carefully) – if people come to the spiritual life only to change the world, they will not achieve anything. I assure you. If you come to change yourself, there is a guarantee of success provided you apply yourself to changing yourself.…Therefore, brothers and sisters, here in this Mission, in our practice of spiritual life, the total responsibility for your welfare, for your happiness, for your growth is, bluntly, entirely on you – on nothing else, nobody else. It is not with the Mission, it is not with the prefects, it is not with what we teach – it is with each one of you, for yourself. You live by yourself; you work on yourself; you grow. You are the experiment; you are the object of the experiment; you are the experimenter. And when this combination is successful, you will be the result of that experiment.Meditation is the only way of building your character, which is only trying to make goodness in yourself, restore human values of friendship, brotherhood, companionship, love, compassion, forgivingness. And the first need is to forget everything that can make you different from others. Everything that points to you as something different in society must be dropped.But I tell you one of the most important things which Babuji Maharaj used to emphasise: the most important point of character is not to hurt anybody else’s feelings, and the most important is, never to hurt your mother’s feelings.The problem with human development is always the gap between aspirations and character building of the person concerned. Application of one’s will to character building is all that is necessary, remembering that the Master’s help is always present. I am happy to see your progress and pray for faster progress with time.Personal discipline goes a long way in spiritual progress. Personal discipline shows an inner discipline – that you are balanced, that you don’t put your needs before that of others. It shows itself in courtesy – you give way to others, let them sit first. You will let others eat first, don’t rush. If there is no sitting space, you allow older people to sit and you go and sit outside. All these must come from inside you. We cannot say, ‘Place reserved for old men’, ‘Place reserved for handicapped people’, and things like that. Inner discipline must show first of all: concern for others, willingness to help others before you help yourself and, in general, courtesy prevailing under all circumstances.

Messages

GIVEN BY DAAJI ON VARIOUS OCCASIONS