Know this: when in prayer daily, I pray with you. I pray that you are in oneness with God, so that you are spiritually awake, happy, healthy, prosperous and freely expressive.
Discourse
As you can see, this message is about the few days we have left before we enter 2011. The message says we will have many memories of disappointments, sorrows, joys and bliss. It says, leave that behind and look forward to more bliss. At the bottom it says, ‘know this: when in prayer daily, I pray with you that you are in oneness with God, so that you are spiritually awake, happy, healthy, prosperous and freely expressive’. And daily I pray for each one of you hoping that somehow you become what is written there, what is noted there: spiritually awake. I think that is the most important aspect of this journey.
Everyone has a goal on this spiritual journey. Some people want to be transcendentally elevated, others want to find God Each one has a goal. And in 2011, let us start to realise these goals. We are saying over and over, ‘I want God, to feel God’. What is the self? We can only ask these kinds of questions, but if we don’t make the choice to more forward towards these questions, we’re not going to go anywhere.
Many have already decided to have a bad 2011. Let 2010 be buried in the cemetery of the past. Carry it not in a bin-bag as baggage and, if you can do that, your oneness with God, your spiritual awakening, won’t be a task - it will be like spreading butter on bread, as smooth as that. And always remember that when you spread butter on bread you have on one side a thick layer, and on the other side a very thin layer. What we are looking for is that thin layer. The thick layer is the physical body. What we are looking for is that One that diminishes with that tip of a needle. And once you find that Self, 2011 will be for you joyous, divine and spiritually enlightening, and you’ll be elevated continually. I’m going to try my best to give you the best in the next twenty-four months. Those who are here will attain, will achieve, be happy and joyous. Those who miss it will really miss it. Many things happen here. When you leave then it all happens. For those that have left, you have missed out. So, that is the importance of trying to be in this enclosure for as long as you can. You’ll enjoy every moment. You’ll enjoy this unique oneness with God. You’ll enjoy this beatitude of the Self … you’ll enjoy. And once you enjoy that, you’ll really need nothing else in this life. Everything else in this life, the end of it brings you misery. But by this, (devotion) you’ll be spiritually awake, and the end of it will bring you only joy, joy, joy. That is all you need.
Hari om.
Questions
Devotee: What kind of healing was Guru doing just now?
Swami: It was Hong Shong. It’s a reiki technique that masters don’t teach because it will be misused. If I have to charge I’ll have to charge, like 150 dollars, and it works instantly. But we never teach, it so don’t even think of asking me. If you know the Gayathri mantra, you’ll know the technique. Breathe in, hold your breath, breathe out, hold your breath, four breaths. Place your hand on the person’s head and do that four times. On the fifth time, raise your hands above the head, there should be an energy between the head and the hands. If there’s no energy you’re doing something wrong. That energy removes the headache. We don’t teach it because of misuse. By misuse people will charge money for it. All the masters in India teach everything they know and never get anything back for it. Some swami charges 510 000 dollars in India, just to teach you about death, a seven day workshop. Only when we are a hundred percent sure, we’ll release the knowledge. That’s why we like to teach children because we can teach them properly. Adults already have some other perception in their heads. When Yogiar was here he asked everyone to write what they are going to do with the yoga. One lady said she would teach the yoga and charge money. He told her to get out. He had charged everyone only R5.
Devotee: If masters charge an excessive fee, are there any karmic consequences?
Swami: Yes, lots of consequences. They charge cash and don’t pay their dues to the government. Karmically, it comes back. Many of you are telling me that I shouldn’t be paying SARS any money, but I still fill in my forms and pay. It’s my due. I drive on the same roads. I have all the facilities everybody else has. Why shouldn’t I be paying taxes? If you’re a politician, your karma won’t be finished in a hundred lifetimes because you’re always bluffing people, and every time you bluff somebody who thinks you’re going to do something you don’t intend to, the karma adds up. If you voted someone into government, and that person rapes somebody, it’s karmic for you too. It’s like when you steal something and sell it to a third person - the end-user. Karma works like that. You know, we were talking about the butchery. The karma is in the user because they create a market, a demand. Don’t think, ‘the butcher killed the sheep, I can eat here’. He killed the sheep for you. If all of you became vegetarian there would be no butchery, and no slaughterhouse. That is the big cycle of karma. We need to be guarded so as not to get caught in the cycle.
Devotee: What is the yantra that was being energised earlier when we were dancing? Does it lift the energy of the room, or heal?
Swami: That is a Sri Chakra meru. A meru is, basically, three-dimensional, not a flat surface – it’s a Sri Chakra pulled from the centre up. The Sri Chakra has the greatest energy in this material universe, and if you do what Sundrie and Nirvana did you’ll also fall down. What happens is that you become one with the meru’s energy, and the energy of the meru is dynamic. If you put the shivalingam there instead, you’ll merge with the lingam’s energy. The energy will be so much you’ll fall onto it. The body is too small for that vast energy. No matter how big the body is, the energy is too much. Size doesn‘t matter when cosmic energy takes you over. It just explodes within you and you fall. If somebody else came to dance and they were open, broadminded, they would also have fallen.
Devotee: Is there a way to expand the body so it can hold more of that energy?
Swami: You can’t expand your body, but you can know the Self which has the ability to contain all the energy. The Self has the ability - the body doesn’t, so you need to start to know the Self and absorb the energy to the Self more than to the physical body. And you must be able to see a body. Last week Sunday I had my body in five places here and I was seeing it in those places. That is what you must be able to do with your body. Then you become free. But we only want to get involved with this gross body, this matter, this mass. And as long as we are doing that we’re going nowhere.
On Wednesday I had a massive angina attack. I couldn’t breathe, was coughing, had hiccoughs. I was scared and I told Tarryn that I was having a heart-attack. I was really scared - not to die, but that I wasn’t near home. If I die I want to die with my masters around me, in this kind of environment - in my kripa. But I took my pump and everything, and was ok. I still went to Stanger but it was bugging me the whole time. Because I enjoy watching Yamaraj (the lord of death), I sat up until two o’clock thinking he’s coming. I enjoy him because he’s one of those few divine energies that people are terrified of, and yet he’s full of jokes. He plays a lot of jokes with you when he comes. He’s not as bad as people make him out to be.
Devotee: Gurudev, you said earlier that when we know the soul we can utilise that energy from the meru to direct it to the soul. How?
Swami: You can contain it using the soul, then you won’t fall. Chaitanya Mahaprabu did that across the whole of India, just singing ‘Hare Krishna’. So we all, some time, must want to become Chaitanyas, not Mahaprabus - that’s the greatest title, greater than mahatma even. ‘Mahatma’ means ‘great soul’, but higher than that is mahaprabu. His title is mahaprabu. If you go to the Hare Krishna organisation they call everybody ‘prabhu’ - it means ‘soul’.
See, our problem is, if I told all of you all seated here, no exceptions, to come here (to the ashram), get dropped off here. Send your cars back, right now and, for the next twelve months just follow me – and whatever I ask you to do, you do with me. If I’m walking around the world, you walk with me. But you’ll worry about your mother-in-law smashing your car, or your wife using your credit card. All those thoughts will stop you. The mind works like that. After forty-four years, I can safely say that I’m ready to walk - but it took forty-four years. From the age of fourteen I’ve been battling with this stupid life. It’s the greatest battle. All great people come and say that the highest birth is the human birth. I say that the greatest curse is the human birth because the want doesn’t stop. We don’t know what enough is. There’s never enough in the bank account. If you’re poor you’re striving, if you’re rich you’re striving. Retirement means you’re closing your eyes and going to bed. When you die, you expire – your last breath leaves you. So we can’t do that, we’re not ready. In twenty-four months time I don’t know if you’ll be ready. I told you just three weeks ago, until now I’ve had not one person approach me and ask, ‘Where do we start? What do we do?’ We start at the beginning. But what is the beginning? We don’t know the beginning. If we knew, we wouldn’t be here. That’s why we’re here but we can’t keep saying ‘where?’ We’re trying to see the beginning with our physical eyes and it’s not going to work.
You know, we all have instinct, somewhere in our system, and we also have spiritual instinct from childhood. Many of you say you don’t know how to get there, ‘We don’t know the way, hold our hand’. Let’s take a child for example. A child is born. The mother places the mouth of the child on her breast. Does the mother have to show the child how to drink, or does it come naturally? It comes naturally. Spirituality is like that. It’s a very natural process learned from your last lives and it will be there in your next life, and the next one. It will only not be there when you stop it - when you realise that this is where you want to go, and this is how you’re going to get there.
Don’t set goals you can’t attain. Set realistic goals. Have two sets of goals, long-term and short-term. In 2011 you may want to learn the important verses of the Bhagavad Gita. That is attainable. Once you start to mentally recite the Bhavagad Gita, and to energise yourself in that manner, then your long term goal is possible because the Bhagavad Gita is only a manual for mankind on how to live in this state of dharma. So if you can learn how to live in this state of dharma, then your long-term goal is nothing; you can even bring it forward. But for many of you seated here, your long-term goal is death because only upon death will your kundalini move. You’ll kick three times then gone, finished! Those three times you’re kicking, you’re sending the kundalini up your spine. You’re not going to say, ‘wife, son, baby, lovey, darling’ – you’ll be in a state of fear that you’re going to leave all that. Your soul exits your body according to your attainment, through your third eye or your crown chakra. Some people think the soul exits through the birthmark. What if you have a birthmark on your bum, does your soul exit through your bum? Then, if we believe the birthmark is from a wound that killed you in your last life, you must have been running away from the cops and they shot you in the bum. Birth marks are just samskaras from your last life. Some people don’t have birthmarks. Others have one over half their face. Maybe that person was weak in school and the teacher slapped him and he died.
So we must find the soul and start to live in the soul. That is called self-realisation. Realise the soul, and then from there you’ll attain. It’s not difficult. We only make it difficult. It’s so simple, it’s unbelievable. But because it’s so simple and because we live a complicated, advanced life, the simple things seem difficult.
Devotee: Do our past lives catch up with us in this life? If we reach a certain level on our journey in our last life, does it affect us in this life?
Swami: You can miss a complete lifetime and continue your journey in another lifetime. Let’s take a simple example. Let’s take Yogiraj. First of all, before he was born, I knew already. I gave Deeps and Praths a prediction of his life. He’s born to them for a specific reason so. I already know why he’s born, why we gave him such a unique name, what his purpose is. So as he grows the intensity of his spiritual journey is fluctuated by his parents - they can change it. Slowly, they can decrease his eagerness to follow the journey, then he loses out and lives his life. After twenty-five or thirty years, the realisation hits him and he’s looking for a guru all over the world. Eventually he comes back to where he was asked not to go. As much as he has a past life with me, as much as I know the life he has with me, I have to start him from the beginning. So there’s two chances: first is that I might live for his full lifespan and teach him properly. The second chance is that five years into getting to know the guru, the guru leaves him because of his karmic consequences of not following. But the intensity of those five years are the same as a whole lifetime. This is not the first time you and I are in a musical association. Other lifetimes we were doing the same thing: singing His name, and you were playing behind me. Play the flute and see if anything happens to you. Blow it and see what happens to you. Automatically, the soul switches to where the flute is and you’ll want to play the flute only. Understand? That is the intensity. It can mess up your present life as well. That is why I don’t get you involved. I avoid telling you who you were. Last life’s ownership starts in this life. For example, ‘Oh, Guru, since I was your wife in the last life, why am I not your wife in this life?’ Trouble and jealousy starts. It’s the same with Deepak, the same with Suren. Everyone has some association. Right up until now, many of you have not tapped that association yet, and I’m not going to show you how. You need to live your own life. When you tap into that, then I’ll take it further. It is a very difficult and slow process.
Somebody asked, not so long ago why some people come to the ashram so late in life. Everything has a specific reason. If Shobha had not known my guru, Brother Haridas, she would not have known me. Just before he left his physical body, in the astral plane he put her hand on my hand and told me to take over from where he left off. He set the energy for that in the astral plane. Some of you were carpenters in your last life. If I point out who you are, you’ll believe you were carpenters in your last life because you’ll find in this life you’ll be battling. There’s a curse upon carpenters because they made the cross upon which Jesus was nailed. You look around you and see carpenters. They always battle. Can’t change this life – and if you married a carpenter, even worse … so we can’t say that about I.T., about computers. They weren’t sending messages with computers in those days. They used to use pigeons; no telephone.
Devotee: What relationship did our children have with us in our past life?
Swami: It’s not about the relationship you had with them, but what karmic consequences you have with those children. For example, if you have XYZ as karmic consequences, you’ll find a child with X, Y and Z to work through the karma, and most of the time it is somebody you knew in another life. For example, take Dean and Jo – they are extremely close to me. Ashok – close to me. Deepak, Suren, most of the yoga students - very close. We have different relationships but my relationship with Dean is not the same as that with the yoga students. My relationship with Ashok is not the same as with Dean. So if someone comes here with an AK47, shoots us all and we’re all born again, we’ll meet under the same circumstances where we’re sitting like this having a discourse and listening. Deborah and Andre are not here by chance. The soul understands what is happening, the body doesn’t. Andre brought Deborah. Do you think she’s here by chance? Do you think she knows Andre by chance? No. Everything is a sequential event that happens.
You are all like pegs on a huge wall. This peg says ‘Andre’, this one says ‘Deborah’, this one says ‘Tarryn’. This one peg says ‘Guru’, and around Guru there are a lot of pegs. Then one peg is pulled out moved. That is how it works. It’s like the old telephone exchange. You ring, ring, ring, and they ask you, ‘what’s your party line?’ Then they’ll call you back with a special ring so you know it’s for you and you answer the phone and they connect you. If they connect you in the wrong place by accident, you’ll talk to the wrong person. Same with life, you can be the father, mother or child in the wrong family. Therefore you’ll find sometimes that among a violent tribe, you’ll get one person who’s calm, honest doesn’t want to steal, who doesn’t eat meat. Why? That’s a mistake - wrong plug. And that mistake happens.
When my youngest brother was born we moved into a new house in Stanger. The people who moved out moved nearby. When my brother was a little baby, maybe four or five days old, all of a sudden everyone started screaming in the house. It was about ten o’clock. I must have been about nine years old. We all got there and the baby was dead, not breathing. My mother was crying, father was upset and shouting at God. Then all of a sudden my brother was alive again. So, just after he came back to life, we heard screaming in the neighbour’s house. The next morning we see lots of cars there and find out that the man in that house died. We did some homework and found out that he used to sleep exactly where my brother was sleeping. So, mistakes happen.
IMAGE: Yoga students dancing around Sri Chakra Meru
