Hari Om.Before we continue with the hawan, we have three people here who have travelled all the way from Port Elizabeth to be here just for guru pournami. I think when you have that kind of dedication you really need to be applauded. They run the Gayathri Peedam Jadatharaya Institute Meditation centre for us in Port Elizabeth, and they travelled fourteen hours just to come and sit here for three hours. That is real dedication.
How nice it would be if we could have this many people every pournami. Each pournami I wish you all happiness and joy. What are the signs of happiness and joy? A smile, and my willingness to share with all of you. I welcome each of you with a smile. Don't fill your mind with past issues. Don't fill your future with events that carry pain. Keep tonight to unlearn the past and move on. I divinely ask you all to free yourselves from greed, hatred, jealousy, from any imperfection you might have accumulated. Anything that effects you negatively from the past - undo that.
This pournami is very special as the gurus have come to bless us: great gurus like Kriya Babaji, Agasthiar, and if you have the eyes you'll be able to see this in the agni burning in front of you - that the presence of the guru is so strong. And they have chosen you, each one of you, to be part of this energy, this cosmic energy that you can go home with tonight. We should not carry in tonight issues of the past, nor flip through the chapters of the past. We should look forward into the future, and in that future find God. Unfortunately for many of you, you have God with you but you don't recognise Him. God is the eyes through which you see, the tongue with which you taste, the nose with which you smell, and skin by which you touch. Only a guru can make you, the seer, and the seen one. When the seen and the seer become one then you have a unique moment of union with God and God alone.
This guru pournami I wish for every one of you to somehow find this divinity, this divine intelligence within you, and take that to another level, a level of union with the Supreme. That is the main purpose, the goal for each one of us here. Krishna said in the Bhagavad Gita, “Surrender everything to the lotus feet of the guru”. By surrendering you are actually earning, attaining and perfecting your life to be a better life with the supreme intelligence we call God. Each one of us has that energy. It is the most unique energy that any being can have. We are very different. We can recognise other things so why can't we recognise God? The very speech that you are listening to now, the very moment that you are in now is His moment, God's moment.
As I always say not a blade of grass or a drop of dew is possible without that supreme intelligence. I'd like for all of you to recognise on this night that the masters have made this possible for each one of us. You are no different from the masters who you see on the wall in front of you. The only difference is that you have not attuned yourself to find the Self that these great masters have found in their practices. As you can see there, it's unfortunate that there's only one female on the wall there: Anandamayima. A great, beautiful individual who walked this earth. She's the only female saint under the lineage of Paramahansa Yogananda. Why? Generally women work by emotions and when their emotions get the better of them they can't be saints. Men have less emotion, so there are more male masters. But Anandamayima had the same qualities that the other saints have. The reason I point that out is because women think they don't have the ability to become saints. They do.
Let this guru pournami be an eye-opener for all of us to realise that God is not sitting in heaven somewhere. There's no such thing. This is all that we made up. Think of the energy. If we are thinking we're going to go up there and have tea with Parvati, you're wrong. Parvati and Shiva are here. You create heaven and hell right here. Let's live sanatan dharma, not Hindi, not Tamil, but sanatan dharma.
