At
around ten-thirty this morning there was an angel among all of you. I hope you
had the experience. Only one other person saw it, and I saw her reaction. Once
again, we are blessed: we’ve have the divine blessing of the Mother. This is
why we have such good energy here today. I hope you take it home and enjoy it.
I hope you don’t go home and become your miserable selves. That’s what many of
you normally do – become a miserable person as soon as you go home. Just enjoy
this energy, keep it and see how you feel the whole week. And next week Friday
come for another top-up, your once-a-week fill-up. That’s the way it should be.
Coming
here once a month, or once in a couple of months, won’t help you. The energy
depletes. You don’t have within yourself the intelligence to create energy. But
you have the ability to absorb energy. And that absorbed energy is what
resonates within you throughout the week. And when you come back next Friday to
top it up again, you’ll find that life will be good. If you don’t believe me,
ask Radhika. She comes for a top-up every Friday, she’ll tell you.
Somebody
said to me: ‘Theres two people you’ll never get into the Gayathri Peedam:
Donovan Nair and Kriba’. And when I see both of them sitting here, I think
about how much power the Mother has that she can draw them to Her. Donovan
leaves functions just to be here on Fridays. He doesn’t go to functions because
he wants to come to service on Friday. Bhakti yoga works like that. It is very
subtle. It works so well that you start to have a luminescence within you.
But
some people won’t come to temple, they’ll go to Tongaat for breyani instead.
They are very sick but they can go to Tongaat for breyani. And I asked the
person, ‘But you didn’t come temple, why you went to Tongaat?’ Her husband
said, ‘The food is good there’.
Somebody
asked me what is so unique about Good Friday. Everybody prays on Good Friday.
In the early days, all the Indians lived in estates – not in Umhlanga or
Brindhaven, but in the tea estate, or the Klipfontein Estate (where we pull the
chariot to). And in the estates they had a temple. What used to happen, because
it was a long week – and they were labourers – and it’s the most auspicious
time in our calendar, according to the panchang – is that they would thank the
Mother Earth for whatever she had given them. The North Indians did the dharad, put hardi stick in water, did a
prayer and poured it on the ground to cool the ground. The Tamil people said, ‘Let
us grind the rice and make rice flour to make porridge to offer to the Mother,
then pour some onto the ground and drink the rest’. So it’s not a prayer just for
the people in Brindhaven; it’s a prayer for the people in Tea Estate, in
Redcliff, in Buffels Drive. It’s a prayer for farmers to thank Mother Earth,
which is modified to ‘porridge jol’ in modern times.
Why
they say that is very simple. Nowadays what happens is that they slaughter. And
because they slaughter, they have to have alcohol. And they’ll say the alcohol is
there for Mutharveeran – it means 'the bully in the city of madurai'. He used
to bully everyone and upset everything when they were doing prayers, and
everything was negative. He would ask for alcohol if they wanted him to stop,
so they used to do it for him. Anyway, this filtered out as the people moved
out of the estates and into their own homes, and they started doing it at home.
So the slaughtering
prayer is the lowest form of worship. You go to any book in any Hindu scripture
and it will tell you that, including all the South Indian books, because the
greatest teaching of Hinduism is that of ahimsa
– which means non-killing and non-injury to animals and people. So if we are
Hindus and we follow the first code of conduct of the ten codes of conduct – it
is ahimsa. That is why the
slaughtering prayer is the lowest form of prayer.
I’m
going to tell you how you are affected by meat-eating. The highest karma goes
to the consumer, not the abattoir, not the butcher, but the consumer. Why? It’s
because they are creating the market for those two to exist. If everyone became
vegetarian there would be no butchery or abattoir. When we do these prayers we
shouldn’t be eating meat.
In
the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, in niyama, the second step, one of the
items there is ahimsa – non-killing,
non-injury. And the ten Hindu commandments come out of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. So now, if you all want, on
this auspicious weekend, you can all go to Mount Egecombe temple after I tell
you this, and sit in your car, then go to the Hari Krishna temple, but please
carry some hardi water with you. Hindus have a method called ‘drink manjal
water’, which is hardi water – and your karma is gone. If it was so easy then
we would all be there in Vaikuntha – we could just drink manjal water. So slaughtering is not what we should do.
Becoming a vegetarian is the ideal Hindu way.
Hari Om.
