GO

WITHIN

Series V

Ishwar C. Puri

GO

WITHIN

Series V

Ishwar C. Puri

Published by: ISHA

All rights reserved.

This book is published under a CC BY-NC-SA license, which means that you can copy, redistribute, remix, and freely distribute sections of the book, as long as any derivative works or new resulting creations are not used for any commercial purpose and as long as you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

License details: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Copyright 1986

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA)

Digital Edition 2016

ISBN: 978-0-937067-07-9

GO

WITHIN

Series V

Ishwar C. Puri

INTRODUCTION

The Institute for the Study of Human Awareness encourages individuals to know and understand themselves in the manner of the Socratic theme of “Know Thyself.” This knowledge permits us to better understand others and the world in which we live. The Institute provides resources which lead to the investigation and discovery of one’s real self.

These publications are compilations of taped lectures by Ishwar C. Puri. Due to the varied formats and lecture subjects, some information may be repeated. We hope that you would experience the love as if you were there, and we invite you to experience the reality of your true being.

Ishwar C. Puri is an international traveler and lecturer on a wide variety of subjects. Presentations by Mr. Puri include art, religion, human relations, science, philosophy, human awareness and consciousness, and many other topics. The lectures are motivating, enlightening, and reflect the highest flight of philosophy and human understanding.

Mr. Puri retired in recent years from his official duties with the Indian Government Services.

As founder and principle speaker for the Institute for the Study of Human Awareness, Ishwar Puri continues to donate his time and resources to others through this nonprofit organization.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

MARVELS OF THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS ENERGY CURRENTS

MEDITATIONAL METHODS

THE NECESSITY 0F A SPIRITUAL GUIDE

THE INNER JOURNEY AND ITS OBSTACLES

INITIATION - WHY AND WHEN

MEDITATION - CONTEMPLATION WITH LOVE FOR THE OUTER AND THE INNER MASTER

MARVELS OF THE HUMAN BODY

AND ITS ENERGY CURRENTS

The human body seems to be the most perfect thing that was ever created in this universe. When we look at all the wonderful things that have happened and that have been created, we cannot be left in any doubt that of all the wonderful things, the most wonderful is the human body. This is one piece of architecture by the great Creator which surpasses all others that we know of—whether by Him or by others. In a very compact body, He has packed the entire creation that we can see outside of the body. Whatever you can see outside, you can see inside.

The packing of such a huge macrocosm into such a small microcosm is a great thing. Many years ago when I first came to this country as a student, I had the occasion to visit a few computer centers. There they used to tell me of the large computers they had made. The computers used to take a lot of space, where now they have reduced it somewhat. But the largest of the computers would take in only about ten million bits of information for storage and retrieval. When I expressed surprise some years ago at the compact size of the computer—about the size of a table—the man who designed it laughed and said, “Do you know, sir, that in your head you are carrying a computer this size which contains twenty billion bits of information?” We may not be certain of the exact number twenty billion, but it is certainly not less than ten billion bits of information capacity—and that is at least a thousand times more information that is stored and used up in this little computer on top of our body. You can imagine what a sophisticated piece of equipment we have been given—and not only for its sophistication, but the best part of it is that it houses the observer!

I was once watching a videotape of a series of television programs on Albert Einstein. In these programs, Einstein made a point which is now being repeated by so many scientists—he said that the nature of time and space is related to the location of the observer. If you are observing from this earth, time moves at a certain pace, but if you were to observe from the edge of a black hole in space, time would hardly move—yet the time is the same. In one of the programs, I saw a man in a journey in space who sent a message to his twin brother on earth through radio-photo equipment which permits them to see one another. They have mechanical watches with them—both with the same mechanics and both moving at the same pace. The brother in space can see his nearly identical brother on earth and he is surprised to see the other fellow not moving at all and his voice coming very slowly when he speaks. Looking at his brother on earth, he sees him aging very fast. After a two month journey in space, he comes back only to find that his brother had died forty years after he had left for space. The watches were the same. They have conducted experiments now with atomic clocks of which they say they are certain that the error is not more than one second in one million years. With these clocks, they have found that if taken in planes to certain heights, the clocks slowdown time as you go away from earth and raise your speed; but for the observers on earth who are checking the time, the time works at the same tick-tock speed. It is not the clock that is slowing down in space, but time itself slows down. I was very pleased to hear in these programs that they had emphasized the real answer to the problem—what is the pace of time? How has creation come into being? It depends upon the location of the observer. Whether you are located on the earth, the sun, or a black hole in space will make all the difference.

If we just examine where it is that we are located on this earth and where has the observer who did the experiment been located? He was in the human body. It is a terrific place to be because this is the only place from which we have gathered any experience. Today, if we know anything about creation, it is from the point of view of the observer in the human body. It is a different matter that we have not spent time with the observer, but spent all of our time with the observed. We have not had the time to turn about and see who the observer is—to see who is sitting within the human body. We have spent all of our time—at least all of the time that we remember from birth until now—with what we are observing. We have been keeping ourselves outside. If we took a little trip inside the human body, we would be amazed at what it contains. I am not speaking of any subtle stuff at all; I am talking of this body in which we are sitting. We are familiar with this body in that we know its functions, but we have never been into it. One can ask a number of questions at this point—such as, “How can we go into a body when we are the body?” If you are the body, then why do you say, “It is my body”? Since what is mine cannot be me—I am not the body. We say, “This is my body. This is my hand.” Whose hand? Whose body? Who is the claimant? Where does this claimant go when the body dies? There is certainly something called consciousness—the ability to observe —which is the owner of the body, the processor of the body, and the user of the body. Just where is this consciousness, this user of the body, located? Where does it function from?

Sometimes people have asked me whether the talks that I give and the subjects that I cover are not just a set of assumptions. All religions and doctrines are just assumptions being made, and I am not adding to the list of assumptions. I tell them, “Yes, many things are assumptions, but I don’t want you to make assumptions. I don’t want you to give up the assumptions that you have already made. So you catch me if I make an assumption and tell me so. Stop me from making more assumptions.” Do you then have any direct experience which you can say is not an assumption? Suppose you say, “I am the body.” That is an assumption. You may not be the body at all. If you have the power to step out of the body, you are not the body at all and you never were. Perhaps then you might say that at least I am here talking with you. No, this too may be an assumption. It may be someone else talking and you are just listening, hearing. Is there any direct personal experience which you can call your experience and not just another assumption? I venture to suggest that the fact that you are conscious is an experience and not an assumption. In fact, I venture to say that it is the only experience of which you can be sure that it is an experience and not an assumption. I now suggest that you reject all other assumptions you have made and hold onto only this one fact—that you are conscious. Why? Because you are conscious. You are experiencing right now. You are experiencing all the time that you are conscious. Hold onto this consciousness of which you are certain and proceed to investigate the facts. The first fact is that you are a conscious being because you are conscious—you are aware of what is going on. It is your experience and you can be sure of it. Where is it happening? Try to locate it—to locate yourself. The easiest way is to pull back to where you are functioning and simply be there. You are certain that you are in the body; that this consciousness is not outside the body. You know, too, that your consciousness is not operating from the corner of the room. It is not operating from your hand. Your consciousness of these words is not sitting on the tip of a finger. You are conscious, but you are listening somewhere else. Ask yourself “As a conscious being, where am I?” In this present state of wakefulness, you will find that you are somewhere in the head. You should feel that this spot of your conscious being is somewhere just behind the eyes. If you close your eyes for a moment and withdraw the attention from these words, you can be aware of yourself. Don’t look at yourself as being behind the eyes or look at yourself as in the eyes—look at that who is looking. Just be where you are. Many people say that the spiritual journey is a long one—that you must go here and there. That is nonsense. You sometimes have another word for it, but I am not going to use it! You will know that you do not have to go anywhere to have the higher experiences. You have to stop going. You have to be where you are.

The secret of meditation is to remain where you are. You have noticed, no doubt, that it is difficult to locate yourself behind the eyes where you are. You are there and you know it. The only definite information that you have is that you are in the body—in the head and behind the eyes—and yet you cannot go there and remain there. The physical eyes become a wall, a barrier, and they won’t let you in. The eyes start seeing things and they pull your attention outside of your body. We have become so accustomed to identifying ourselves with the body that we have forgotten that we are just consciousness in the body—just using the body. If we can get back to where we are, it would solve our problems.

There was a man who was a mystic in India and this man heard a knock at his door. He said, “Who is there?” The knock came again, and he again said, “I asked who is there?” Again the knock came. “Who are you?” he shouted. Then he heard this answer from outside the door, “If I knew who I was, I would not be knocking at your door.” And this is precisely what we have come to find out.

We have been thinking that we were the body, but now we know that we are only using the body. It is not difficult to be where you are. Consciousness—which is our only sure experience—has been spread out all over; scattered through our process of attention to things outside of the body. This scattering of our attention has brought us into contact with experience and we have been so attached to the experience that we are unable to return to ourselves. We have thrown out our attention to the experience rather than to the experiencer. We attach ourselves to our experiences and now we will find it difficult to find detachment. All of the wise men from the East have said that without detachment, we can get nothing—no results—so we are trying varied methods of detachment and we find that they won’t work. That is why it is necessary to get back into the body and to be where we are. If you wish to study the human body in which you reside (it is the most beautiful, sophisticated mansion), you will get back within yourself. You will not be busy with the exteriors of other mansions. Unfortunately, no one yet has successfully practiced detachment. Some people, in the practice of detachment, attach themselves more. When asked, “How far have you detached yourself?” they can only answer, “Well, it’s very hard, you know.” Others would run away thinking that they must go somewhere. They go to faraway places, such as the Himalayas or they go to India or to Tibet and they sit on the mountain tops. They say that this is the way to detach because the things they are attached to are not there. But their minds are still on those things back there. When they feel hungry, the pizzas call them back and the strings which tied them before are now far stronger than ever. Now they cannot have what they have become attached to. The practice of detachment is a myth. The only way to experience detachment is to attach yourself to something else. The Eastern mystics say that if you attach yourself to a guru or Master, you can then detach yourself from the world. Only then can they teach you the art of withdrawing your attention to yourself. When you can bring your attention back to yourself, at least you will discover how you are conscious—and that will happen within your body, where you are operating. It is only in the wakeful state that our consciousness is located behind the eyes. As we sleep, our consciousness slips, below this level. Those who practice yoga, shift their attention from center to center within the body, of their own volition. They can travel over and explore the entire body in this way. Anyone can do it—all you have to do is to travel with your attention. If I raise my finger and ask you to put your attention on it, you can do it easily. In fact, if I said, “imagine that you are sitting on top of my hand,” you could easily do it without moving from your chair. And if I tell you to imagine that you are behind your eyes, with practice you can do that also. In this manner, you can—with reasonable proficiency in concentration —practice the withdrawal of yourself into small spots of concentration, anywhere you wish.

When the body is operating, it has so much energy of different kinds. We look … and energy flows out; we meet people … and more energy flows outward. We shake hands and there is an energy transfer. We find that all of the time, there is an energy circuit within the body, and we marvel at where all of this energy is coming from. Some people have their own auras of energy—some can feel them and others can see these auras. Many people know their own energy circuits and their flows of energy and where they are taking place. So, is energy just flowing haphazardly anywhere, or is there a method in its madness?

When we study the flow of energy in the body we will find that it has a very systematic arrangement of energy centers. When human consciousness—or the focal point of human consciousness with which we are becoming aware of anything outside—shifts in different levels of consciousness, it is really moving from one energy center to another. Consciousness is then not just scattering itself in any cells of the body, it is choosing those spots for making its focal point. These spots are the energy centers of the body.

At this moment, we are at the wakeful center just behind the eyes and that is where we seem to be operating from. The wakeful center is the one which yogis have described as the center where we discover the self because when we are there, we find out that this is where the self resides and that we are not the body. When they say that this is where you can “Know Yourself,” it is here behind the eyes. This is also the highest center that the yogis can reach through any system that involves physical yoga.

Below the eye center is the center in the throat which is called the Shakti center, where the goddess Shakti resides. Shakti means power and energies connected with power, will flow from this center. When your consciousness is centered here, you are operating in the power energy circuit. When we feel very powerful we can see that it emanates from this center.

Below the throat center is the heart center in the region of the human heart. The yogis call this, the center of the Shiva, the destroyer. The energy flow from this center is destructive. It can give you the experience of death or nearly like that of death. Many yogis have had that experience of death while living. This center can also provide you out-of-body experiences, or what is called astral projection in this country. This is the ability to let your body be here and you be elsewhere. What would normally happen by leaving the body at death, you can experience by using the energy of the heart center—the Shiva center.

The next lower center is in the naval or just around the naval. It is called the Vishnu center or center of the sustainer. This center is related to the digestive system and all the processes that sustain. This center gives you the feeling of continuation. The yogis, by performing meditation, have been able to locate their attention at this center and are able to sustain themselves far beyond what they would normally have been able to do. They are then able to stop their breathing and to stop their pulse and circulation and yet live many more days than they would have lived otherwise. This is the Vishnu center of energy.

Below the Vishnu center is the reproductive center in the genitals. This is the Brahma center, the creative center, and the pleasure center.

The last or lowest center is at the rectum. It is the Ganesh center—that of expulsion. All of these six centers are centers of energy, and in these six centers the energy flows go in rhythm with one another and the whole body functions as one unit with consciousness using the energies of all of the centers. By use of the yogic practices, one can visit these centers. One can concentrate upon these centers to awaken the energy of the centers to a great extent.

Behind the six centers is a main stream of a consciousness called the spinal cord. There is a method of traveling down the spinal cord with the attention in yogic practice, either directly or from center to center—level to level. The path behind the spinal cord has two routes, and you can go down one route and up the other. The junction of the two routes is located at the creative or Brahma center. Behind the creative center and in front of the spinal cord lies the coiled serpent, the main energy complex called the kundalini energy. The yoga that transforms these energies into useful power operating from the Brahma center is called the Kundalini Yoga. By operating through this yoga, you are able to get the effective power and energy harnessed to your awareness. These experiences are unusual and very different. Some people have been able to kick these centers a little through the use of drugs and then get these experiences and think they have found the answers. Others can do it and turn on the energies without the use of drugs. It is these centers that give you the unique experiences, but all of these centers and energies are physical even though the experiences look to be so weird. There is nothing in common with what is happening and what happens when the energies are awakened. They are still physical. Consider that after having had one of these experiences you will go and tell your friends of the experience. Some people call it an astral experience, but if you really had an astral experience, you would realize that the wakeful experience was like sleeping. We don’t go back to sleep to tell others in the dream of our experience here. We tell people in the wakeful state of what we saw in the dream, not the other way around. If someone tells you of their astral experience, they have had no such experience. The experience was at the physical level and, however unusual, it was experienced through one of the energy centers of the body.

These six centers in the body are capable of giving us the most unique experiences, the most beautiful experiences. Therefore the yogis that practice the yoga of the six centers remain in these centers. It is when they return to the center behind the eyes that they say, “Here we have found the self, and the self is God, and that is the truth.” They came back to where they were and found truth. The fact of the matter is that the best part of the body is not below the eyes at all. The real microcosm that holds the entire universe, the macrocosm, is this small section from the eyes up. It contains everything. It contains the six centers also. These six centers are only reflections of the six astral centers which exist in the forehead of the body. The six centers of the body are gross representations of what exists at the higher level of the eyes. To activate and experience the energy of these centers at the level of the forehead needs higher meditation—you cannot do it by yoga of the six physical centers. You can’t do it with Hatha Yoga or Raja Yoga or any other yogas that take you through the physical systems with the breathing of the pranas, body posture, or other physical methods. Yogas, by whatever name you call them, are confined to a combination of energy forces in the six centers of the body.

The yoga that takes you to the higher six centers, above the eye center, makes you unaware of the body. It is not a physical yoga. You must be unconscious of the body altogether before you can begin the first step toward the higher six centers. Then the centers start behind the eyes upward, not downward. The six centers above the eye level constitute the astral region, the astral experience. They provide the experience of the human self without the physical systems.

Today we are having eyes to see, ears to hear, a nose to smell, and hands to feel with, and all the other senses. We are operating the senses through our physical bodies and therefore, we think that the physical body has these senses. If we are unconscious, we can keep our eyes open, yet we have no sensation. Sensation is not coming from the body; it is coming from the same sense perceptions in consciousness. When we are conscious, the mechanism that triggers off the sense perception operates—but it does not operate in the body at all. In fact, it is quite surprising that this body is not an aid to perception. It is an obstruction to perception. That which we could really see is reduced by what we see only with the eyes. We see only what the eyes can see. The capacity to see is not in the eyes, but is in the consciousness. If we could see without the eyes, experience walking without the feet, experience touching without the hands, etc., we could experience sense perception without the body and have reached the astral level of consciousness—because then we are doing what we ought to do without the body restrictions upon us. The ability to have sense perception is the astral ability to know, to perceive without linking it with the human body. There is no yoga of the body required at all. The yoga of the higher regions of consciousness is distinctly different from the yoga of different levels of body energy. All you have to do is to withdraw your attention from the body to where you are, and then move upwards using the sense perceptions without the body.

The astral region is but the beginning of the story, though. The story of discovery of the self only begins at the astral level as you have only thrown off the physical body. The astral body with the senses is also a body. If you can see even without the eyes, you still see with what you think is your body, and it is not you. Even when you see imaginatively, you are seeing with your imaginative eyes, and you are not really seeing. Experience is still broken up into functional pieces—seeing, feeling, tasting and touching. It is not necessary to break up experience and, even in the astral body with the senses, you are breaking up experiences. The capacity to have sense perceptions only reveals that this is not the only body that comes your way. Before you can go to that consciousness that is your self, you must also overcome the astral body. The process continues to be the same if you withdraw your attention from the senses as you did with the physical body onto the self, you can find that the senses were never required for being aware.

The human mind has the capability of mental experience which takes on the total experience without having to break it up. This mental experience is a direct experience of our own mental self, awakened from the astral level which is merely sense perceptions. This mental level is but one step removed from the astral body in the sense that it also is obstructing you from being yourself. You are not the mind. The mind, if you recall, is doing three things: sensing, reasoning, and creating. These actions of the mind are being performed in time and space, and they obey the laws of causation. This, then, is not you, but merely another body of time, space, and causation which you call the mind. When your experience is put into a framework of beginning, middle and end, the framework is called the mental body—and it, too, is an obstruction to your reaching your own self, your being. However clever the mind may be, it does not have the capacity to survive without time, space, and causation. Indeed, Immanuel Kant was right when he said that there is no mind—only time, space, and causation. Therefore, this mind which creates experience in time frames is called the causal body or the causal mind and is the cause of all things as we know them. This causal body is located just above the forehead.

If you can retain awareness of the body in meditation and also the awareness of where you are, you’ll be there. There are centers in the body which trigger the experience of being only in the mental body. Again, the mental body is another obstruction to your functioning in your own self and can also be transcended. Function in your own self, in the spirit, the soul. The system is the same; just withdraw yourself from the mind. Function in the three functions of the soul, live in them. The three functions of the soul are beyond the mind and are intuition, love, and beauty. These three functions of human consciousness which we are experiencing even now in this body do not require time, space, and do not obey the laws of causation.

The intuitive flash that comes has no duration. Similar to love, neither requires time—they are just suddenly there where they did not exist before. There is no time involved, and it is only afterward that any thought is involved—and that is the mind coming in. Both love and the intuitive flash occur instantaneously. Joy and beauty, too, are possible only in that sudden flash. They don’t come with analyzing. Thinking about it, then, can destroy the experience. These are the functions of the human soul. Live in these functions and you will destroy the wall of the mind.

So, in fact, what we are doing is going within a body. We thought that this was the only body, but it appears that this is not so—the senses themselves constitute another astral body. The mind then constitutes yet another body called the causal or mental body. And it is yet another body in which the soul resides—that is ourselves. To find ourselves and know ourselves we must go beyond the three bodies—give up the three bodies. Because we cannot discard these physical bodies, we must use the system of human attention to go within. It is the same system the yogis used to go into the lower stages. We can concentrate the human attention and reach one center and excite the energies there. In the same way, we can use the attention to withdraw from the body. If you are listening to music and are interested in one particular instrument playing in the orchestra, you can place your attention with concentration on the one instrument and make the other musical sounds become dimmer. The other instruments are silenced from your attention. This is the secret in meditation—the capacity of attention to pick out one thing and become unaware of another. To reach higher regions of consciousness, this ability to blank out is more important than the capacity to pick up something with attention. This capacity to concentrate attention on your self behind the eyes where you are, will gradually help you to become unaware of the body. To be unaware of the physical body is as good as leaving the physical body, because then you are experiencing conscious self without the physical body. Progressively, you realize your own self in this body. It is in this process that you see experiences which will surprise the most skeptical people in this universe. You will find that the astral body is not a body, but that it’s the creator of this physical body. This dream is being created by another wakeful state. In this present dream, we can say that it is a dream and that is the truth. But making a truthful statement does not give you knowledge. This is what we are doing all of the time here. We are stating the truth without having knowledge. There is only one way to know of the dream and that is to wake up. We cannot cross-check a dream from within the dream itself. You will have raised your consciousness from the dream state into the wakeful state and discovered that, not only was it a dream, but also that the dream had occurred in your brain and there was nothing outside! The experience was generated by you—by your mind. There is one other matter of proof for you of the waking from the dream level. It seems that everybody wants proof of an awakening to higher levels, yet in this present state we don’t ask for proof upon awakening from a sleep. Nobody’s testimony is required in the morning—the proof is that we remember that we had gone to sleep! What comes back to us is the continuum of the previous wakeful state which renders the immediate experience a dream state. This continuity through memory of a previous wakeful state is the ultimate proof that we have awakened from a sleep or dream state. The quality of proof obtained at the astral level is the same. When we raise our level of wakefulness to the astral level, we recall having been there previously, perhaps for a thousand years; and what we regard as human life was merely the dream from which we had awakened. We did not go anywhere, we simply return to a former wakefulness, a continuity we have known.

The shift from the astral state to the causal state is identical in terms of levels of consciousness and so it is to the soul. If we can then move from the individuated soul into its own totality, our reality, we discover that we were always there, we never left. People are worrying about having to go back to the home of their father—as if He were far away. We never left it; we left only the awareness of it. We have to get back the awareness of it. This is why I said that it is an illusion that we are here. It is an illusion that lasts as long as the awareness of the body lasts. It is an illusion, also, where we will be in the astral body, so long as our awareness of the astral body exists. When all illusions are shed by withdrawing attention to our real self, we will find that we were always where we were. We were with ourselves. We were the Creator. We were God. This is the drama of the Creator, the Game, the Grand Illusion through successive levels of consciousness. Our discovery comes by going back to our own self. All of this that you are experiencing is in the human body. Look at the marvel of the human body and all the things packed into it. You will find all of the hells and heavens that you have ever heard of, are existing at the astral levels and sub-astral levels also. In fact, whatever you have heard of came from there. The causal direction was from consciousness outward, not the other way around. We created, but we didn’t sit down to make things because that would have been too difficult. I don’t think a good and wise Creator would sit down with wax models when He could make things as simply as was done. Creation is so simple—just project it outward in a dream and then become a participant in the dream to make it real. Become a participant in the dream and the illusion is perfect. There is a book called THE CANTERBURY TALES by Geoffrey Chaucer, which illustrates the point I am making. In this book, a group of pilgrims are going to Canterbury. Chaucer wrote this book in the 18th century and, in the book, he becomes a party to that pilgrimage. Chaucer goes to Canterbury with a baker, the wife of Bathe, a lawyer, and so on. He describes all of the people of English society of those days going to Canterbury in coaches and walking, just passing their time. Chaucer writes, “I was also going with them.” Here he creates an illusion of a story and then becomes part of it. As the travelers go along, they tell stories and recite poems to keep themselves busy, as it’s a long journey in those days. Chaucer wrote lovely poetry and characterizations—in literature, it is considered a classic. In the middle of the journey, one of the characters says, “Chaucer, you are such a good sport, tell us a poem.” And Chaucer says, “But I don’t know any.” The one who has written all of this—and he doesn’t know any! Then the others insist, “No, no, you must come out with something. You are a good poet.” And so Chaucer comes out with a doggerel rhyme which is the worst in the whole book—not that he didn’t know it. He is immediately criticized by all of those other characters that he has created. They say, “Oh, we never expected such rotten stuff from you.” Why does Chaucer, the author of the book who could have taken the best role for himself, participate in the role and get criticized and rebuked by his own creation? Some people have likened this to the crucifixion of Jesus. Why did He, the son of God and who was One with God, come amongst His own creation and get crucified by His own creation? Why? One answer applies to both questions. Why did Chaucer get crucified by his own creation? Why did Jesus get crucified by His? The answer is simple—He was aware that He was the author of the entire thing. The best poems were also Chaucer’s along with the worst and he knew it. This awareness made him take on any role that he liked. But in the story, he loses that awareness by becoming a character. Such is the nature of this creation also. The Creator has created all of these parts and has become a participant as the self. The role that we, as the self, are performing. And we are willing to be crucified. Why? Because we have blocked the awareness, deliberately, to make the illusion real. The awareness exists, the potential for awareness exists. How can we be sure that it exists? That we are the author of all, that we are all of the parts? Supposing that we have locked ourselves into illusion forever—it is terrible. The Creator would not take such a big risk—to create an illusion and lock himself out from His own home. How could He do that and never find His way back? He must keep some connection between the illusion and the reality. This connection exists within the human body, an amazing structure. What is this connection? What is the connection between the dream that you see when you are asleep, and the you, that is awake? Just suppose that in a dream, you thought you were a bird that flies out of a window. Now, there is nothing of a resemblance between your body and that of a bird, yet when you wake up, you would say, “In last night’s dream, I was a bird and flew out a window.” Why wouldn’t you say that you dreamed that you thought you were a bird or that you saw a bird fly out a window? You would have to say that you didn’t see a bird, but that you were a bird. How are you sure that it was you? You don’t have feathers. Again you say, “I know I flew out a window. It was my experience.” Now what is the link or connection that asserts the “I” that was a bird and the “I” when you are awake? The link is consciousness. If you did not have that connection or link of consciousness of the self, of which you are certain, then you would be lost forever, unable to return from the illusion. This link which connects the self in whatever form it takes (or formlessness) is a continuation of the same self, asserting the self. It is the experience of the self. Do you know now that you can have no other experience except the experience of the self? There is no other way of knowing any other experience. When you see someone, that is you that you are seeing; and when you hear somebody, you are hearing the self. Is there any possibility of experience except through the self? There is none. It is the experience of the self, the assertiveness of the self, and the continuity of the self. This continuity of consciousness from level to level has sometimes itself been called the Creator. The continuity creates the lower level and has been described (for lack of other words) as the Word or spiritual force. Religions all over the world have referred to it as the Word, the link which helps us go back to our reality; therefore, the ability to get back to higher levels of consciousness exists. To return to where you are, you must wake up when the sleep is over.

The ability to wake up is within this marvelous human body. Sometimes it is nice to wake up earlier, especially when the dream is a nightmare, but there is no way of voluntarily wakening yourself. There is but one way to wake up at this time, and that is if someone who is already awake gives you a nudge. When nudged, you will wake up earlier than you would have otherwise. Get nudged by someone who is already awake and you are awake. In our system, the person who gives us the nudge is called a guru or Master. He wakes us up early and we get to the next higher level of consciousness. This practice of nudging is very interesting because if the dream is very absorbing, even the nudge won’t wake us up and He will have to keep on nudging us because we are still holding onto something. If, in the dream, I am holding onto something very important to me—say a video recorder—then when I am nudged, I will say, “But what about my video recorder?” There is no video recorder, but the guy who is nudging me will say, “Look, I will take care of your video recorder for you, just get up.” On that assurance, I get up. Upon awakening, I don’t ask the guy, “Where is my video recorder?” The one who is awake must participate in the dream of the other person and speak to him in the dream sequence, which is not real, for the purpose of waking him up. This is precisely what the Masters do—they participate in our physical level of awareness. We hear them and they nudge us and wake us up. I have told you that everything that anyone can ever experience is within the human body. Anything that you can ever reach is within the body—the highest creations and the loveliest places ever made in this universe. The Creator of all these things is also in the human body. What more can I describe as the marvels of the human body?

MEDITATIONAL METHODS

Much like you, I am only a student. I am like one of you studying yoga and meditation. As I have been able to understand it, yoga and meditation are the same thing. They are the practice of the art of being yourself. It sounds very simple, but when we look at our own lives, we find that we are not ourselves. We have been living through our eyes, ears, the perceptions and minds of other people. We do not seem to have the time to look at ourselves and to be ourselves.

Yoga means union and it is the capacity to get back to oneness within your own self. There are many methods in yoga. Differing historical records and writings do not change the objectives of yoga. The objective has always been to be yourself, to discover the oneness of yourself. We are so scattered in our attention—in our awareness—that now to pull back that scattered awareness becomes a big task. It is strange that we don’t find it a big task to go out from the self, but we find it a big task to cancel the trip and return to the self—to be at home. Yoga is the art of canceling the outer trips that consciousness makes and staying at home. All of the methods involve effort and all effort is directed to relaxation. Yoga is the only effort that I am aware of, that leads to relaxation. There is no contradiction in terms when we say that the yogic method leads to relaxation. If we can withdraw our attention back to our own self and we are relaxed, it is because we are no longer outside and tense. I would like to share with you my thoughts and ideas based upon associations with yogis and practitioners of the art of being themselves. We can learn from some of their techniques and methodology and about some of the obstacles that come in our way. These are the same for all of us and so is the method of overcoming them.

When we want to be ourselves, the first things that we notice are the physical body in which the self is present—in which we sit in a little bit of space upon this earth. We have occupied this space and we are conscious of it. We occupy space in this particular room or area and we are conscious of it. We are aware of the floor and the walls of the room and we know we are there. Put the question to ourselves, “Where are we?” and we easily become aware of our location. If our attention were outside of this room, we would be nowhere near ourselves; but when we bring our attention within the room, it becomes easier to locate where we are sitting within the room. In terms of consciousness, of awareness, we are using this body—which becomes the self within this room. Much like the room, our body too, houses our awareness. Our consciousness is being embodied in this cage—in this room we call the physical body. Just as we can experience ourselves sitting within the room, conscious of the floors and walls, we can also develop the consciousness of our being sitting within this body and experience life within itself. Unfortunately, we don’t do it. Our natural situation as conscious beings is to be in this body; but the fact is that we live unnaturally by scattering ourselves in the process of scattering our attention and we don’t come back to where we are, to where we belong. We must first withdraw our attention and come back to this physical human body from the experiences outside of the body. It is not easy, and we have to do many things in order to train our scattered attention to come back. We have to unlearn the lessons we have learned in extending ourselves out into the world. It is the association of ideas with experiences outside that keep our consciousness moving to the outside. If we lie down and go to sleep, we sometimes feel that we have forgotten the experiences of the world; but, unfortunately, at that time we also forget the experiences of the physical body. Otherwise, it would be easy to withdraw attention from the world by going to sleep. If we are to develop our awareness to come back, we must remain awake. The physical body must adopt a stance or posture that would enable us to come back to the same body with our awareness. This training of human consciousness in collecting its scattered thoughts and bringing the attention back to one’s self is called yoga. Yoga has many steps and some of the more important preliminary steps in this process are the do’s and don’ts of our external, social life. Unless we follow a correct process with the do’s and don’ts of the external life, it becomes very difficult to pull back the attention. Yoga has established the practices, rules of behavior, conduct and performance which tend to make it easier to facilitate the control of attention from the external world of experience. When these behaviors have been practiced and the attachments to external experiences have been reduced, we can practice the art of using attention to discover our own physical body. The whole process takes place in awareness.

What is awareness? Awareness is part of our consciousness. In order to communicate with you on this technical subject of methodology, I will first define three terms we use: consciousness, awareness, and attention. Consciousness is capacity to be aware and includes a potential awareness. It also includes the subconscious, memories, forgotten events, and super-conscious feats. It includes any potential conscious experience. Consciousness, then, is potential awareness. Awareness is contemporary consciousness. Awareness is that part of consciousness which we are experiencing here and now. Whatever comes into our awareness at this moment is awareness—what can come into awareness at this moment is consciousness. Awareness, then, is just a small portion of our human consciousness. Attention is a part of awareness. It is that part of awareness that has been specifically focused and intensified. Imagine that we are now conscious of the whole world, families, friends, our business, and our problems. We are aware, though—at this moment—only of the room and our present surroundings. We can recall other experiences from outside, but our awareness is confined at this moment to this room. Within this awareness, you can attend to a certain one object or person. Your attention will then be upon the object or person. Attention is like a small probe. It is like a small part of your contemporary awareness and your attention moves about from one part of awareness to another area of awareness. Attention intensifies that part of our awareness to the object or person. We cannot change awareness—it is simply there—but by attending to one part of awareness with our attention, we are able to focus ourselves, able to experience in the self an intensified experience of which we are aware. This capacity of our awareness to use attention enables us to manipulate awareness. There is no other part of awareness or human potential that we can manipulate in the methodology of meditation. Meditation is the technique of using this potential. When we want to be ourselves, we will withdraw attention from the non-self to the real self. When we wish to be our physical body, we will withdraw attention from the experience around us to our own physical body. This is our conscious potential. This attention is scattered at the moment, as we don’t focus it on anything. By being scattered about, our attention gets so entangled, so knotted up in many things. It then becomes very difficult to bring it back. If we examine our daily lives, we will notice that our human attention is locked up, knotted and tangled in so many human situations that we can’t pull back. Some things we would even like to forget, but we cannot because we are so involved in them. Our human attention is caught up in many things and becomes scattered. There are some functions we perform because of this scattered attention, which scatters it even more. Consider when we lose our temper. When we get mad, we can see the attention being scattered. When this happens, our capacity to concentrate or focus our attention becomes lessened. To learn anything, we use our attention. What happens when we concentrate attention upon a book? We become more intensely aware of the contents of the book and more unaware of our surroundings. Both things happen together.

Now when you read a book, depending upon your speed, you will read several pages in ten minutes very easily. When you have hard words with somebody, lose your temper and become mad, then come back and try to read the book. Your speed is greatly reduced. Why? You could not cover the same number of pages even if you tried. What has happened? You have impaired your capacity to concentrate attention by scattering your attention. These processes which occur in your awareness in relation to the external experience of this world impair your capacity to concentrate. There are many such events. One important thing that impairs the capacity to concentrate our attention is the subconscious involvement in a feeling of guilt. When we are feeling guilty, we scatter our attention even if we are not conscious of the guilt. The fact is that none of us likes to feel guilty. We even try to forget that we are guilty, but the guilt consciousness comes back over and over again. Guilt can remain hidden in the subconscious, in a state of forgotten consciousness, ready to come back into awareness or recall. From there, guilt will cause an impediment to the power of concentration.

One of the things that has bothered mankind throughout history has been the feeling of guilt in extinguishing life. We have been unable to accept the fact that because of what we are, to extinguish life would be a good thing. The extinguishing of life has led to a feeling of subconscious guilt—and yet the strange tragedy of the human situation is that life subsists only upon life. Life grows by extinguishing other life. If you look at any living thing upon this earth, you will find that it lives by extinguishing other life. We are extinguishing life in order to feed ourselves, in order to grow, in order to live—and this has an effect upon our subconscious. It is clearly reflected in the impairment of the power to concentrate.

Those of you who have practiced the art of meditation, of concentrating your attention, would notice that if you were to kill a man, you would not be able to return to the concentration for a long time—perhaps for as long as three months. If you kill a dog and come back, you would recover in much less time. You would have killed life in both cases. The reason being that guilt arises from the feeling of life within this your body. The extinguishing of the life in relation to the feeling of life within your body causes the guilt complex. In terms of consciousness, when the life taken is further removed from that of this body, the effect is lessened. If we kill a human being, we feel that we have killed ourselves and the impairment of concentration ability is greater. To kill a dog causes less impairment because the dog does not come up to our level in terms of awareness. When we pluck an apple from a tree, the recovery time is even less. It is very little because the degree of life in terms of level of awareness is so much less that it distracts us only to a limited extent. This is of great significance in the art of concentrating attention. If we have to subsist by extinguishing life, we then must subsist by extinguishing that form of life that creates the least impairment of our power to concentrate. That is why the yogis of India and in the Orient have insisted upon foods which involve the lowest extinguishing of life.

Consider that in the methodology of meditation, the kinds of food we take is of great importance. I would recommend a very simple, light, strictly vegetarian diet to be the least detrimental to our capacity to concentrate attention. In past years, I had the opportunity to meet the Dalai Lama, the temporal and spiritual God of the Tibetan Buddhists. I spent two years with him, and we had wonderful discussions on meditation. He had had two tutors—a senior tutor and a junior tutor—and both believed that killing impairs the capacity to concentrate. But they did not believe that the eating of killed food could possibly impair the power to concentrate. They thought that so long as somebody else had killed the animal, the guilt and the impaired concentration then belonged only to the person who had killed and not to the person who had eaten of it. Of course, I tried to use many arguments, but generally, arguments are of no avail to knowing the art of meditation. I have discovered that through long years—you don’t learn about yourself through arguments. The Dalai Lama was remarkable in his knowledge and experience. His scholarship was immense and he had often demonstrated his knowledge in discussions of the nature of the human mind. The extent of his knowledge is so remarkable that it seems impossible to put it into words, and yet he had a hard time accepting my suggestion that vegetarian food was necessary in order to regain the power of concentration. I suggested a very simple experiment: I suggested to him that he practice his meditation for one month on strict vegetarian food—the kind that I am suggesting to you. I suggested to him that he then practice meditation for one month with meat foods. He was then to tell me if there was a difference. He ate meat and he also tried the strict vegetarian foods. Meanwhile, I was transferred from that position to the State capital of the State of Punjab in India. After more than two months, I again visited with the Dalai Lama, and he informed me that he had become a vegetarian! He said he had become a vegetarian purely out of experience. He had discovered that he could have concentrated much better with the time he had given to meditation if he had learned this fact sooner.

The Dalai Lama used to meditate for eight hours a day. He was a young man at this time and had been exiled from Tibet. He had to flee his home country and so he came to India. I happened to be a government functionary at the time and it became my duty to help arrange asylum for him. That is how I came to spend a couple of years with him.

The power of concentration is very important as we would begin our meditation. When we seek to go within in meditation, at the third eye center, we will have a difficult time enough to withdraw our attention from the outside to ourselves. We will find that in our meditation, the verbal thoughts come across to take us out and our attention will be scattered again. Do not chase these thoughts—just be the listener inside at the eye center and let the thoughts go by. Maintain your attention on yourself at the eye center and listen to the commentator within. This is your mind commenting and it is you who are the listener. The commentator speaks to you in a communication channel. Sometimes when you have your attention focused upon yourself and control the commentator, you will become aware of a second voice or commentator observing the first. The scattered thoughts jump up to the next higher level or channel and become commentators on that level. Many try to control even that channel or thought. Up to eight channels or levels have been identified by sensitive meditators, but not more than three or four will bother the average practitioner of meditation. So how do we control this business? How do we bring our thoughts back and what is the methodology? When you are given a mantra—a series of words to use—the mantra will focus your attention. The words will be those selected to have no meaning for you, no association with thoughts. Now, the mantra will be repeated in your mind at one level, and you may hear a second voice or commentator jump up at the next higher channel of the mind. The methodology here is to repeat the mantra in courses. Use each channel of the mind and don’t worry about the commentator. Don’t start all over again, but ask the commentator to join in with the lower level where you are doing the mantra.

There is another stage in your meditation that requires not only your concentrated power of attention, but also your relaxation. When you try to control all of these channels of the mind, the mind will assume another distraction. Your wife, your husband, your friend, someone will likely come into your mind. This image will begin speaking in yet another voice and you might think you are doing a pretty good job in maintaining the mantra while someone else is there speaking. It is your mind that brings that form, even though you have been able to control it in strict discipline. The technique for dealing with this situation in meditation is to let that figure join you in the meditation. The whole business is to have a course of repetition so that the sounds of the mantra become so loud, so full, covering every channel, every figure or image, and then the thoughts are squeezed out. It takes time and practice, but it works.

At the higher levels of realization of the self, you discover that this process of concentration is no longer necessary. You become so aware of that conscious experience within you that it sets up a new experience which will hold you inside. The holding of your attention within yourself, being yourself without an aid, is called the art of placing the attention upon the self. This capacity to listen to the self inverts attention to consciousness. You will then have the capacity to see and feel your vibrations without the use of props and aids. The external props and aids of mantras and repetitions will bring you to the center of the self, where you will know your own resonance. Even now we are basically listeners, and the listening part of consciousness rather than the speaking part of consciousness becomes the basic instrument of your meditation.

Let us look and imagine just how we perceive things now. You see nice flowers, and you say that you can see these nice flowers. How do you see these yellow flowers? When your eyes see the flowers, your mind says, “These are pretty yellow flowers.” And you listen to the mind—these words—and you perceive the flowers. Suppose that your mind did not comment upon what you are doing in terms of self-perception. It is a strange but true thing—basically, consciousness is a listener, and when it listens to itself, it listens to its own resonance, its own vibrations. At this stage, you begin to discover that the repetition of the mantra is not being done by you. It is only when we are pulling ourselves from the outside to within ourselves that we have the task of repeating ourselves. As we grow in this experience, we discover that it is our mind which is the entity within consciousness that repeats the mantra and it is we who are the listeners. The expert meditators sit quietly and listen to the mantras—they don’t have to speak or repeat, they simply listen. Ultimately, when the greatest realization of the self comes, it comes through the art of listening to one’s self. Either listening in words to begin with, or to our essential reverence or vibration that comes naturally—and the distractions that occur in the earliest part of meditation disappear.

The capacity to listen to one’s self generates the further capacity to love; the capacity to feel oneness. It is now, for the first time, that you will experience oneness with your self. This part of the self is consciousness. Having experienced it once, you open your eyes and see the world and how the world is being sustained by the same consciousness. You can see then, that if you were not conscious, there would be no world. You discover the creative power of consciousness. You see the entire world and you feel as one with the world. It is then that you love the entire world thereafter, and you cannot do otherwise. One experience of being with one’s real self gives you the everlasting experience of being one with everyone, because now they all seem to be and look like the experience of one. Everything is part of your consciousness.

This then is your approach to meditation. I have not covered the subject exhaustively because each step of meditation involves different methods and techniques for each individual. The general techniques change as we change in our level of awareness, until finally we find that the only technique left is the technique of the oneness of love, of human unity.

THE NECESSITY 0F A SPIRITUAL GUIDE

When we want to go on the spiritual path and explore experiences and levels of consciousness higher than our present physical level, we need a spiritual guide. It is not possible to have those experiences and explorations without a spiritual guide because the human mind does not help us to have these experiences. The mind has the tendency—by habit developed not only over years, but over centuries and lifetimes—of drawing the attention out from within through external stimuli of experience. This habit of the mind to take the attention outside has become so strong that whatever we might do, the mind’s tendency persists; therefore, the mind is not a good guide for us on our spiritual journey. If we do not like to have another human being as a spiritual guide, we can have recourse to some inner guides, some inner voices and visions. However, if you actually analyze those inner voices and visions or images that come, you will find that they are created by the mind. Therefore to listen to an inner voice without being sure what inner voice it is, is to listen to the human mind. Many people get onto the wrong track by listening to the human mind.

Some people say that they need not bother about the inner voice nor do they have to look for a spiritual Master. They feel that they have enough evidence of God’s presence and existence in nature. Why not go to the plants, the trees, the birds and the beasts? Why not sing the praise of the Lord and take a spiritual lesson from the birds, bees, plants, and animals? When you would go to the animals, birds, bees, and the plants, you would find that they do not speak to us in a language that we can understand. On the other hand, if we acted good to them, certain languages or meanings of what they are saying is again our human mind. Sometimes people think that good books are good enough as a spiritual guide—after all, these great Masters and founders of religion came and have left sufficient record in writing for us to use as a guide. Why not rely upon these books and they can guide us and show us the way? Here again, we find that when we read the books, they mean one thing today and another thing tomorrow. The book remains the same and the words are the same, so how can the meaning of the book change over time? The reason for this change of meaning of the words in a book is that our mind is reading it and the mind is interpreting it. One interpretation of the mind may not be the same as another interpretation of the same mind at a different time, or as another mind. So when we read books written down in choral language unrelated to our current contemporary situation, we again run into the difficulty of being caught up in the snare of our own mind. Some people wait for inspiration and intuition to teach them, but unless we are familiar with our own self within, it is very difficult to judge when the intuitive message will come. In any case, we have not trained our intuitive sense to recognize the message of knowledge; therefore, we wait indefinitely and we may not get the message at all. Similarly, inspirational messages that come to us are generally created by the mind. What do we do then? We want to have spiritual guidance because our attention is going outside of the self. We do not know how to look inside. We do not want to have a man, another human being, as a teacher because he is like us, so how can he teach us? And yet the birds and the bees and the beasts—they do not teach us. Perhaps angels and gods and goddesses might be able to teach us. We have received them. They do not speak to us. When they speak to us in a séance or in a dream, it is our own mind speaking to us. Again and again we find the same difficulty that whatever spiritual guide we try to choose, it turns out to be our own mind—and the mind then eludes us, takes us off the correct path and we will never get spiritual enlightenment. How do we overcome this problem? The only alternative left is to choose another human being as our guide. Why should one human being choose another when people are talking of equality of rights, democracy, etc., and human rights dimensions have been set up? All human beings are equal. How can one human being claim to be better or higher or able to guide the destiny of another human being? Why should we in this modern age accept the Mastership of one human being over another? The truth is that, as a human being, the person we select as a guide or the one who becomes our Master is just like us—there is no difference. I have sometimes given the following example: If there were a large number of television sets placed in this room, but none of them had a connection to a power source and were not even connected to a battery, we would not be able to see the news of the world. But if one of them had a connection to a power source, then on that set we could see the news of the world and be in touch with all things outside. Similarly, when we talk of an enlightened person—one who is a Master—although he is human like the rest of us, he has established in his consciousness a connection with the powers that matter—that give him the secrets to all the higher regions of existence and experience. Therefore, the man with the connection is the Master. If you find such a man who has a connection within—in spite of his otherwise complete human likeness—he is completely different, because through him we can have contact directly with the higher regions and the higher worlds. How do we know which human being has such a connection with the higher worlds, especially when there are now a large number of human beings coming forth and claiming that they are the Masters? When we are getting such a large number of fake Masters, how do we discover who is the real Master? I have been drawing your attention to some obvious ways to check for the real Master. I will repeat the criteria again. When you have more than one Master before you and you have the problem of choosing which is the real Master and who is the fake Master, please apply your mind to the following five-point checklist.

The first checkpoint is that if the Master is real, he will have his connection established at the highest level of consciousness—with God Himself; therefore, he will be merged in the consciousness of the Creator of this universe and he will love all the people of this universe. He will not love but a few people and disclaim the others. A Perfect Master does not come for some people—He comes for all and is open to all. He does not discriminate on the basis of sex, past creeds, religion, nationality or citizenship. For Him, all people are the same; therefore, you can judge that if there is a Master for only a particular group, he is not a Perfect Master. If there is a Master giving a message for all humanity, this would satisfy the first criteria.

The second checkpoint would be that if he is indeed a Perfect Master who has raised his consciousness and has a connection with God consciousness, then He will treat all creation as His own and, therefore, He will love them all. You will find such a Perfect Master overflowing with love. You will find that in His presence, everybody gets affected by that love and they respond to it. He is overflowing with love for everyone and not for any particular persons. He will have no hatred for anyone. Such a Perfect Master will love everybody from every country, any community, any color or any caste. He will love those who love Him, as well as those who do not love Him. The Perfect Master will love those who hate Him and He will be a personification of Love always.

The third checkpoint that you can apply is that if he is a Perfect Master, he has established his connection with God the Creator, and he will not come here to break the Creation that he himself has created. He would not destroy what he has created. He will come to establish the will of the Creator in what He has created; therefore, He will not perform such public miracles as to destroy the properties of nature and the laws of nature. The Perfect Master will not be a street magician to show His magic and draw crowds or say that He has come as a Master to give enlightenment. He will perform private miracles to encourage help and trust in our hearts. And those private miracles will be such that we will think they are miraculous happenings but when we share those happenings with a friend, that friend will likely say, “Oh, that’s not a miracle or anything magic—it was only a coincidence or an accident.” Most of the private miracles could be explained away as accidents or coincidence.

The fourth checkpoint will be that—since He has become One with the Ultimate Truth and the Ultimate God—He will prescribe meditation and systems of going to God from within ourselves. He will not draw us to any rituals, ceremonies, or exercises and activities outside of ourselves. He will keep on pushing our attention back within ourselves and will continue saying, “Go within, go within. The truth is within you. God Himself is within you. Your own reality is within you. Whatever you are to find, please find within yourselves.” That will be His message at all times—to go within.

And finally, the fifth checkpoint. To be a Perfect Master, He would be at one with everyone. He will not be separated from people. He will regard that He is in everybody; therefore, He will not have to say that He is a Master. The Master will never say that He is a Master. In His humility, He will never let you know that He is a Master, and His actions and His life will be such that you will never get a direct affirmation from Him that He is a Master. He will even say that He is no Master, and that He is not even a good disciple, but that He is the servant of the Masters. Such humility these Masters show us!

Apply this five-point checklist if you have two of these Masters before you and you will find that, after checking, only one would be left before you. So, we find that it is quite possible to find out who is that human being who has established the spiritual connection and can serve as a spiritual guide.

What does a spiritual guide do? The spiritual guide teaches us not only by words through lectures and discourses what the truth is. Any books could have done the same thing. The guide guides us from within ourselves. If the guidance of the spiritual Master were confined to His lectures, speeches, and discourses, our minds would interpret those speeches and discourses in the same way our minds interpret books. It would be no different than reading the books; therefore, He does not guide by only giving lectures, but by sitting inside us. Such a Perfect Master takes responsibility for our inward growth and our ascent to higher realms of consciousness by initiating us.

What is initiation? Initiation is the process by which the Master establishes Himself in His real form inside our consciousness, behind the eyes at the third eye center so that when we see Him there, we can talk with Him and walk with Him. We can ask Him questions and get answers. Our guide can be a permanent companion, dispelling for all times the loneliness through which we have passed. Therefore, initiation by a Perfect Living Master is much more than merely learning a mantra or learning a mechanical system of meditation or learning some words that can be found in books. He gives personal guidance by establishing Himself personally within the consciousness of the disciple. In addition, He takes us from that point onward throughout the spiritual journey to the total consciousness. In fact, these Perfect Masters, when they guide their disciples, tell them, “Look, we are going to proceed on a long journey. It is a beautiful journey and there are many stages on the way. We will pass through the physical, the astral, and the causal stages. We will fly to the pure spiritual regions and we will see what we are as souls. We will see light unknown to the physical world and we will ultimately go and reside in the house of our own Lord. We will visit the home of our Father, which has always been our home but we have forgotten it.” He gives us a beautiful picture of the spiritual journey and He says that we will go together. He does not say that He will send you there or that you can go there with His guidance. He says that we will go there together. Indeed, the Master and the disciple undertake this journey together. The Master puts forth only one condition. He says, “I will take you from the railway station on the entire journey. Up to that point, you must come on your own—to the railway station. When you reach there, I will also reach there; and I will do all the bookings, the reservations, and all the accommodations. I will make all the arrangements for the trip and for the food and the necessities. Here are the guidebooks and time schedules for when we can leave. You read these and come to the railroad station—we will leave from there.”

Our tragedy is that we do not reach the railroad station and He keeps waiting for us. The railroad station for the spiritual journey is the third eye center, behind the eyes. When we withdraw our attention and take it to the third eye center, we find our Master there waiting with all the arrangements made for our spiritual journey. We, instead of going to the station, start reading all the books about the journey. We read everything about the journey, over and over again. We read all the time schedules and we see all the routes and trains available. We read these books and, eventually, we get into the habit of thinking that reading the books is the same as taking the journey. That is our plight today. We are reading the books which contain descriptions of the journey and give us distractions and obstacles in getting on to the real journey. The books tell us how to meet the obstacles instead of starting the journey and going through the experience. We are reading the books and getting more and more information without starting the journey. We cannot get this spiritual journey undertaken merely by reading about it. It is like a person who gets very hungry and finds a good cookbook and begins reading all the nice recipes. His hunger will not disappear. Like this, we continue to read and we say that reading is going to give us the result. Reading will not give us any results and will not satisfy our appetite, our hunger. It is acting upon what we have read practically that will satisfy our hunger and make this journey start. The Living Masters keep on telling us, keep on urging us to move on to the railroad station from where the journey will be taken jointly by the disciple and the Master. The Master, in fact, initiates us at the railroad station. When we are initiated, we are already there and the Master connects our inner attention to the sound current—the real railroad track within. The sound current is a continuous railroad track that begins behind the eyes and goes right up to the highest levels of consciousness; therefore, when our attention is connected to the track, we can go to the highest levels with the help of the Perfect Master who travels with us.

When we talk of a spiritual guide, we are really referring to a perfect physical form of the Master, who gives us assurance and personally takes us to these regions. We are not talking of one who merely gives us instructions or promises that something will happen in the future. Sometimes doubt creeps in. Some would ask, “What will happen if we suddenly die? We have not done enough work to reach the railroad station and the Master is waiting. Will we just die and our life be finished? What will happen?” The experience of those disciples who have been initiated by the Perfect Master will be that they can speak together at the time of death. It has always been that at the time of death, the Perfect Master appears—irrespective of whether the person has done all his homework or not. Whether he has done the meditation or not; whether he has prepared himself for the journey or not. At the time of death, the Perfect Master appears and takes charge of the disciple and helps in the preparation of his next life when the Master again helps him to meditate and reach the railroad station.

People are afraid of death, but there is an assurance. Two things happen; one is the assurance that the Perfect Master will come at the time of death, and the second is the ability to die while living. If you can experience these two, the fear of death disappears altogether. Therefore, it is a very pragmatic past transaction that you have with the Perfect Master. It is not a transaction that is in the future—that of the next life. Getting a Perfect Master is a very great event in the life of a disciple. To be initiated by the Perfect Master is truly the greatest think that can happen to a human being anywhere in the cosmos, in any lifetime.

How can a human being be initiated? First, he must find a Perfect Master. However, we cannot find such a spiritual guide because these guides act and appear so much like ourselves that we cannot see anything special in them. We cannot simply look about and find where the physical form of the Perfect Master is. That is why it is said that we can only allow ourselves to be found by the Master. We should be in a state of readiness to be found. That means that we should be in a state of seeking. We should seek and He will find us. We should knock and He will open the door. In this context, I might mention that if we had the power and ability to find the Perfect Masters, then we would not need them. If we had those eyes open and able to recognize the Perfect Master, we would not need a Perfect Master. I have sometimes used the example of a roomful of blind people. The blind group knows that there is only one door to the outside of the room, but the door is flush with the wall and they can’t find the door. They grope about in the room. Then a rumor goes about the group that a person of sight has come into the room. This person knows where the door is located and he can lead them out of the room. So all of the blind people say, “We are going to find the man with eyes.” They run about the room, each looking for the man with sight. Now, the man with sight is watching all of this because his eyes are open. He sees the others blindly searching for him. How can they find him without eyes? They still believe they are searching for the man with the eyes. Now, the man with eyes has compassion for the blind people, and he sees that they have gone around and around so many times, and yet cannot find him nor can they find the door. He steps forward and comes in the way of one of the disciples going round and round. That blind man catches hold of the man with eyes and says, “I have found you. I knew that one day I would find you.” He still believes that he has found the one with the eyes opened! It is always the other way around—the man with the open eyes could see the whole show. If he had decided not to be found, he would never have been found. When he had compassion and Love for the blind man, he saw to it that he was found. These Perfect Masters who have their eyes open to the higher regions of consciousness act in much the same way as this man. They appear before us and guide us when we are ready to be found. Therefore, the method of finding a Perfect Living Master of the kind I have just described is to prepare for being found by the Master.

How does one prepare to be found? One prepares by having an intense longing and a seeking for the Lord. When one wants to go within to the Lord, the Lord has compassion on His Creation and sends His beloved sons in the form of the Perfect Masters—in the physical form of this universe. They then appear and guide the ready disciples back to the home of the Father. A spiritual guide is a must because we don’t want to be misled by our minds. We cannot find Him, but He will find us if we prepare ourselves. And once we find Him, He does not leave us alone again. He takes us on the spiritual journey in His own company, and He promises to keep this company right until we reach the Father’s home. We will not be left alone at any time. There may be several Masters living in the world at the same time, but each has His own marked sheep for which He has come. He may also put many others on the Path. The chosen ones are taken to the home of the Father. Many are called, but few are chosen.

THE INNER JOURNEY

AND ITS OBSTACLES

The inner journey refers to the inner spiritual or mystical journey into one’s own self. I have previously exhorted you to go within and to discover the self. On the assumption that you are convinced that one has to go within and that you have started the inner journey, I am going to take you along and relate the accounts which have been given by Eastern mystics and philosophers about the inner journey and the various obstacles that come in the way.

First of all, let me make it clear that the words “inner journey” are misleading because when we go within ourselves, the experience of the journey is still outside of us. One might say that one has a dream in one’s own mind, but the fact that one has a dream in one’s own mind does not make the dream sequences appear inside the mind, but instead outside. One of the mystic adepts (in a poem) has said that it is wrong to confuse inner and outer, as they are the same. It is wrong even to try to discriminate between the inner and the outer experiences because there is no outer experience except from what is happening inside of us. The outer expression is of an inner experience, so when we talk of an inner journey, we are talking of a journey to higher levels of consciousness. This does not mean that the journey takes place in a very confined area inside of the head. The focal points of consciousness which are awakened during the course of this journey are, of course, inside—but the journey appears to be just like the journey outside. When we start the journey, it is like starting any other journey. If we want to take a very long railroad trip, we go out and get all the information about the trains. When we get that little booklet, it tells us what kind of dinner service is available, what snacks are available, what station stops are made along the way, what we will see outside, and where the baggage will be handled, plus all the possible destinations. All of this information is available and is handed to us while we prepare for the journey. Now, if you read that information and go on reading it, you will get all the facts on what will happen if you go, but you will still remain at home. You can read that booklet a thousand times over and get more information about the journey, but you remain at home. I am making this point because many of us who are keen to go on the inner journey keep on reading about it and thinking that we are on the way. We don’t even start the journey if we keep on reading. We think that this is a spiritual matter and we keep on reading and believing that we are up there. How can we go anywhere just by reading? The journey has not started. The reading of books—even the most holy books, scriptures, literature, and even the Perfect Master’s material—will not take you anywhere. If you keep on reading, you remain where you are.

We sometimes take a book and go on reading, thinking that the repetition of what is written there is then leading us on to the journey. We have gathered information but we haven’t moved. The gathering of information is quite different from going on the journey. When I say a thing like this, it looks so simple. Quite naturally, how can you presume that you have gone on a journey when you are merely reading books? Yet we are doing this all the time. We read books and other translations and we think that we are going ahead.

The first obstacle on the inner journey—a very major obstacle—is that we don’t even start the journey. This is the biggest obstacle. We get confined to the books which describe the journey. It would surprise you to see just how many of us are stuck on this alone. Suppose that we understand that the reading of the books, however sacred and holy they may be is not the commencement of the journey but merely the gathering of information about the trip. Suppose that we make up our mind to start the trip. Who is going to buy us the ticket? Who will show us the way? We do not even know what is the price of the ticket for boarding a train like this to higher levels of consciousness. Surely someone must get you the ticket and assist you along the way. Those who have taken the journey and the Great Masters who have taken people on the journey have revealed to us that for going on a journey such as this, a Master is absolutely necessary because He alone can get you the ticket—He alone can help you board the train.

So when a Perfect Master initiates us, He has done nothing more than buy us a ticket with a reserved space on the train and accommodations made at our destination. All of this is taken care of on the day of initiation. That should simplify matters. Simply finding the Perfect Master should be the end of the story, because He has prepared the way and bought the tickets. Because He doesn’t want everyone to take the trip but only those who want to go; He tells us that we will not be alone and that we will need some company. The Master says, “I will come along with you on this journey. I have the tickets so why bother—just come along with me. Just do this one thing—come to the railway station by yourself and the rest of the way we will go together.”

The second biggest obstacle to our journey is that we don’t want to go to the station alone and so we become stuck there. Even when everything is ready—we have been initiated and the Master is waiting—we won’t go to the station and get our pass which takes us all the way to the highest levels of consciousness. In terms of practical spiritual development, when we are outside with our attention in the world, we are in the city around the railway station. The railway station is this place just behind the eyes which is the focal point of the wakeful human being—the place where the Master asks us to come. The rest of the journey He will be with us, He won’t leave us alone. When we are not sure that He will be there or that He has really got the ticket for us, we don’t have faith. He could take us from here, from where we are now, but since the journey requires that you build up your faith, He asks, “Come to this point on your own faith and the rest of the journey we will go together.” This, our second biggest obstacle is that we don’t trust, we don’t recognize, we don’t believe even the Master who has initiated us. I am talking of one who has been initiated. He doesn’t go to the railroad station, but waits for the journey to start, and he says, “One day the train will come out of the station and take us from here. One day, we will go from here by His grace. We will wait for the Master’s grace and when He extends the railroad track outside, then we will go.” This is precisely what we are doing. We are not willing to go down to the station to commence the journey. This is the only area in which the Master can ask, “Do you have faith? Do you have belief?” Because after this point, the Master will never again be able to ask. And it is in this area that we fail because of our lack of faith and belief, and we do not commence the journey at all. If we believe that the Master in His astral form is waiting for us right behind the eyes, we would run to Him. I tell you, we would leave all of the jobs we are doing and run to Him if we really believed that He is sitting inside, shining, waiting, and saying, “Come, I am waiting for you.” But we don’t believe. We are willing to do most anything else, but it is so hard to do two and one-half hours of meditation out of the twenty-four hours. Two and one-half is nothing out of twenty-four. We are still putting twenty-one and one-half hours to other things, including sleeping and doing nothing. One would put twenty-one and one-half hours to meditation if one knows the Master is waiting there to take us up. Some people ask, “Why can’t we go straight up?” Of course, He will take you straight up, but at least go to Him. This is the only area where we can develop faith and belief. These words are more easily said than practiced: faith, belief, love, devotion, meditation with love and devotion. You love somebody in this world and you will do anything to reach them—you will make any sacrifice. Yet we talk of love for the Master who is waiting inside! Who are we trying to deceive? Who are we cheating? Only ourselves! We are cheating nobody else. By not believing, we are cheating ourselves.

This is a very great obstacle and we have yet to overcome it—but once we are there, we can commence with the journey. When we can withdraw our attention through a faith and belief to the point behind the eyes, the Master there will welcome us. The difficulty of meditation arises from our lack of belief that He is waiting there; lack of love and devotion for the Master. When we do manage to get there, for every step that we take to reach Him, He will take ten steps to come forward to us and we will see that. Every step that we take towards building up our faith, love, and devotion for the Master, is reciprocated ten times over. You get all of the indications even before you close your eyes. You will see that every step that you take in this world toward believing the Master is reciprocated by coincidence and other happenings in your life ten times over. When you reach Him, the Master says, “Come, I’ve been waiting for you.” By that time, you have already become unaware of the body—you will have shed your body awareness. You will then have had an experience of having crossed a heavenly sky, of crossing the sun, the moon and the stars, and you will have seen the radiant form of the Master. The Master will be all shiny with light, convincing you that He is the same Master who initiated you. The Master within is our own higher self; but since we never look for Him inside, He has to come to us on the outside. And since He came on the outside, He took a human form that we could recognize; therefore, when we go within, we see the same form—the Master is the same, has always been the same. There is only one Master and that is our higher self. That is the totality made individual inside of us. It is this Master who takes us to totality. Since we have been guided to the Master within by the image of the Master outside, therefore the same form which we saw outside is seen inside. As we go along the Journey, we discover that the Masters form is something more than what we saw. For instance, the Master says, “Now you are in the astral plane, you can see and look around, but don’t waste too much time here. We have to go further.” And He shows us the great splendors of the astral plane and we can see the reality of this universe. We come to see that all of these people that we saw in the world are only images of the real people who live in there in the astral level. We then see our counterparts at the astral level—the real people of whom we are only dreaming about here.

We meet these real people and they are luminous, they are beautiful. Things are lovely out there with all things working automatically. So many centers are operating; people are working getting their desires fulfilled—all wishes being fulfilled. The strangest kinds of vegetation and trees—they are all there and we would like to stay there. We say to the Master, “Master, we have come to the end of the journey, this is heaven. Where else would you want to take us? We are content here where you have brought us.” The Master says, “But wouldn’t you like to meet the Lord of this region?” And you say, “Well, certainly, if there is a Lord, we would like to meet the Lord.” So the Master would then introduce you to the Lord of the region. This is the God who has created all of that universe and the universe below. He is the Creator of this universe that we have been seeing as well as the one that we now see on this journey. The Master now says, “Let’s go ahead.” But we say, “There’s nothing to go ahead to.” Now, going to the railroad station was our problem in the past. Going to the astral form of the Master was very hard. Taking us further along the journey is now the Master’s problem. He will have a hard time convincing us that this is not the end of the journey. He must persuade us to go even further. The Master says, “Look, you are still in your astral form. You are still subject to all of the laws of sense perceptions, and these senses are going to hold you down. You are still within the laws of karma. You are still within the law of birth and rebirth. Don’t you want to get out of it? Eventually He persuades us to go along and our journey commences again above the astral level.

Then the Master takes us to the Trikuti stage, the second stage of the Universal Mind from which everything is created. Here the record of all creation is available. The Master takes us to this grand area and shows it to us. It is much bigger than any universe that we can ever imagine—one in which billions of universes like ours could fit into a small corner. You will be amazed to see that you can travel at unlimited velocities to any part of that grand universe and any other universe that will ever come into being in the future. There will be no doubt in your mind that this is Sach Khand, the final stage, and there is nothing beyond this and you are content to be there. It is here that your mind merges with the Universal Mind and acquires all at once the knowledge, information and awareness of all of the minds that ever were or ever will be. You then have access to the thoughts of all human beings that have ever existed and you, yourself, become the Universal Mind. You cannot possibly imagine that there can be anything more than that. You will be convinced that the drop of the ocean that had separated, now has merged with the ocean and that this is the end of the journey. So now the Master again has a hard time—another obstacle to persuade you to go along. The beauty of that area is so great in the eternal light—like a sunset. It’s a sort beautiful, lighted orange sky—it is so beautiful there that you will not like to go anywhere else. So the Master has to help you to go on with the journey. Very often, He puts on some blinders so that we don’t see. The Master says, “YOU will have plenty of time to see all of this on the way back, so why do you want to see it on the way up?” Of course he knows that on the way back, we won’t be interested in seeing this because of what we have seen further up on the journey. But it is an obstruction, obstacle to the inner journey. But the Master takes us still beyond. He tells us that this is not the end of the story; this is only your mind that has merged with the Universal Mind. You are now the Universal Mind, but your soul continues to be hidden within this Universal Mind. You have not discovered yourself. How can you think that this is the end of the journey? Many people do not realize that the Master’s real job of persuading us to go in starts within and not outside; therefore, by telling us the truth and reality about ourselves, He persuades us to go along to the higher region beyond the Brahma, beyond the Creator and into the Par Brahm, the realm beyond the mind. He takes us into the realm beyond time and space, into a region where for the first time we see ourselves as soul. Until then, we have no concept of what the soul is; we identify ourselves with the mind. For the first time, we see ourselves, and Master tells us, “Now you are yourself. Now the journey will begin.” We will ask, “How can that be, Master? We have done everything. We have left our mind behind. The journey must be finished.”

The Master will tell us that we have only now become ourselves and that the journey will now start. We can’t believe it. How is it that we start the journey after we have already become ourselves? The Master will show us. He says to us, “Look, you have been brought from a world of pairs of opposites. Until now and even now, all experiences that you are having are experiences in pairs of opposites. This world and all of the other lower worlds below are subsisting through pairs of opposites and without these opposites, there is no world. I want to apply the same principle of pairs of opposites to what you have been through. What you have been through was the world of opposites and the opposite of this is a world without the pairs of opposites.”

So in consonance with this principle, the Master takes us through the dark stage which completely shuts off all reliance for experience on pairs of opposites. This stage is called the dark because it is completely the opposite of what we are used to. The experience thereafter is not based upon the pairs of opposites. The concept is very difficult to explain intellectually, but just take the statement for now and keep it in mind for understanding the obstacles on the inner journey. This shift from using awareness in pairs of opposites to using awareness in a world without opposites is the biggest shift that takes place in the spiritual journey and it is the hardest part. It reminds us of the stage where we sat at home and wouldn’t go to the railroad station. We can see nothing beyond because we are used to seeing the opposite of what we have seen, so we see nothing beyond and it looks like the great darkness.

The fourth stage in which the soul gropes for the other side of the darkness is in terms of the obstacles to progress and it is most difficult. Unless the Master is a Perfect Master and has a direct link with the destination, He cannot even take us across. Even a Master cannot cross the great darkness from the pairs of opposites to the non-pairs of opposites unless He is a Perfect Master with a direct link at all times with the destination beyond the great darkness. Presuming that we are being guided by the Perfect Master who has direct access, He will take us to the beginning of that darkness. From the top of the third stage, He can give us a peep into the destination, a look into that area in a corner of Par Brahm. The topside of Par Brahm is known only to the Perfect Masters who have a continuous link with Sach Khand, the fifth or final stage. Some people have crossed the third stage; some have gone to the fourth stage and come back without having a peep at the fifth stage which is available from the top of the third stage. This is available only to one who has a continuous link with the fifth stage. Master convinces us that He has the destination in His view, so He will take us along and then we can proceed in overcoming this obstacle.

When we reach the final destination, we find that it is the totality—the level where the Universal Soul resides, of which the individual soul was an illusion. We go and we are greatly overjoyed to be with our true source—with our true, grand totality. It is the greatest joy to be in that area with many souls like ours who have reached there and are dancing with joy, pleasure and happiness. There are many souls there who were always there and did not come to the world of the pairs of opposites at all. They will look very curiously at us wondering who are these souls who come with the Great Master and are dancing and so happy? And they marvel—why are they so happy, these souls that have come with the Master into the realm of unchangeable truth which does not dissolve even in the grand dissolution? These souls have never left and we ask them, “Aren’t you happy?” They answer, “Yes we’ve always been happy. We are living in bliss, joy, and happiness; but you seem to be dancing with joy. Why are you so happy?” The souls who have come with the Perfect Master will say, “We have crossed the great darkness from the illusory world of pairs of opposites. We have come to the truth. We now know what truth means and we are overjoyed at this truth.” And those souls who have never left cannot understand it because, although they were lucky enough to remain with truth all of the time, they never knew how to dance with joy for having discovered truth. The Master will say to us, “See, you are lucky to go away from here because by coming here, you know that you have discovered truth and you will be far happier in the truth than those who were always in the truth.” Then for the first time, it dawns upon us—it wasn’t so bad after all to be away from this home. We tell the Master that this is a great place that He has brought us to. The Master will likely say to us, “Now you must meet the Lord of this region because He is the Lord and Creator of everything.” We can only say, “Quickly, let us go and see the Lord and Creator of everything, for this is the place that we have to stay.”

This is where He has allocated space for us and given us a beautiful island in that grand sky full of light. Each one of us has our own island of light and we can move to other islands. We can make the social calls, meet people, meet other souls, and have a great joy there. The Perfect Master leads us to the Creator, the ultimate source of all creation, whose name is Sat Nam. He will take us to the Lord of Sach Khand, the true area—and this is the greatest surprise that we get at the end of the Journey. For indeed, there is no one else sitting there on the throne of the Lord of Sach Khand, the highest truth, except the Master Himself! In the same form—if there be a form—which we saw as His human form before we started the journey, before we even went to the railroad station. It is the most amazing experience. We turn to the Master and ask, “Master, why are you sitting here? Why didn’t you tell us along the way? You went on telling us that you were taking us to the Lord of the highest region, that we will meet the Lord. Why did you not tell us in the astral plane? In the causal plane? Why not tell us that you were the Lord of even Sach Khand? That you were the Ultimate Creator?” The Master will say, “Would you have believed me there?” Knowing us as we are, we would not have believed. It is only when He takes us to the highest point of the journey and our journey ends that, by direct experience of the Lord, we discover that He was the Master of all time. If He were not the Master, we would not be there. There is no other Master who can take us there, unless the Lord of this region Himself comes. There is no possibility of our going there. Therefore, a Perfect Master is none other than the Ultimate Creator, who comes in disguise to take us even out of our disbelief and on to the highest region of which He is Lord. Thereafter, we are so happy at the end of the journey. We are allocated our islands of light and we have the grand experience of becoming One with the Master.

We become the Lord and the Lord is One with all the individuals together. There is no difference left. It is like the ocean in which all of the drops are there, but they are never out of the ocean. The ocean is a drop of the ocean as you look at it, as you experience it. The same Lord experiences the self, the same Lord experiences the totality and at the same time. Having experienced the grand experience of being One with the total Lord, the total Lord says, “I am not sitting here bored, doing nothing, we still have journeys to perform, you and I. Though I am you, it doesn’t mean now that there can be no more journey. You have seen me as the truth; you have seen me as the permanent, unchangeable truth—the truth that creates all the truths. You can see me now as that which can’t be described.”

And the whole of the Lord transform itself into the truth that creates truth and beyond description and it is again a journey into another form of the Lord. We sometimes refer to that as the journey from Sat Lok, where Sach Khand is. Sach Khand is the final level or stage and it is here that Sat Nam exists at Agam Lok, the inaccessible area of the Supreme Lord. Then the same Lord in His still more beautiful and higher form—if you can call it a form—of truth can be seen in three final forms of truth. We go to Alakh, then Agam, and then Anami. All of these are three forms of the great Lord—and they are not separate Lords, but the same Lord in His final forms. The form that can be seen, the form that cannot be seen, the form that cannot be heard, and the form that cannot be named. These are the forms of truth that are beyond all description which, with the best of intellectual grossness, I cannot put into words.

Here the journey ends and the major obstacles which I have described look like no obstacle. We would then marvel at why we thought that they were obstacles at all. During the inner journey, the obstacles are seen from only one side—this side. The obstacles exist only from this side, from this world, and when we reach the other side, there are no more obstacles. It is then a surprise that we did not run up there at once. We could have. The Lord, having taken us to the final end of the journey, says, “Now you will reside in totality—which does not mean that you will reside only in the islands up here. In totality, you will have the consciousness of Alakh, Agam and Anami, of Sach Khand, Brahma, Par Brahma, and of the astral form of Niranjan and of this higher world and this body. You will have the consciousness of All because All are One.” You have not reached from here to there, you have reached from One to All.

The real end of the journey is when from a part we become the whole. From one end of the journey to the other end, we go and then occupy the entire part of the journey. When we are total, we are at the same time a human being and at the same time Satpurush and at the same time Anamipurush. There is no difference then left and all experiences are held together. This is the inner journey and these are the various obstacles that we encounter when we start from here. The only thing that takes you to the higher regions and to the experience of these regions—whether or not you have seen it—is love and devotion for the Master. Sometimes the Master will deliberately shut down our seeing to hasten our spiritual growth. It has happened to people—that they haven’t seen anything, yet their faith grows. Even the mechanics of meditation can take you nowhere. Love and devotion are the only things that take you up. Meditation is a good measure of how far you have gone. When you do meditation, go within with love and devotion. Therefore, the secret on this path, the secret of success on the spiritual journey, is the experience of love and devotion. Once you experience that, whether you have seen it or not, you are having the experience of the higher worlds and you will, in due course, see why the Master closed your eyes for a short while.

INITIATION - WHY AND WHEN

The word initiation is used very often all over the world when one is brought into a new discipline. We often use the words “Initiating into the new discipline.” The spiritual initiation that we talk about in relation to the work of Living Masters introduces us to higher awareness and takes us to higher levels of consciousness. This is not really an introduction into a new discipline. So, initiation in that sense does not mean merely an introduction into a new subject—it means much more. At the outset, I would like to clarify that a large number of initiations taking place are not the same kind of which I speak. You can, today, buy initiation into many cults and disciplines and new kinds of practices. You can pay a fee and get initiated. Now this is not initiation that we speak of when we refer to initiation by a Perfect Living Master.

In the case of initiation by a Perfect Living Master, initiation is not at the physical level at all. There is no such thing as an initiation at the physical level as far as a Perfect Living Master is concerned. The Master operates at the higher levels of consciousness and expects that we will attain that higher level ourselves. Therefore, when He initiates us at the level higher than our existing wakeful level we are ready and prepared to go into the higher levels of consciousness. He does not believe in the necessity of teaching us any new rituals, ceremonies, practices, experiments, or new ways of prayer or worship because we have known enough of these already. We have known them for thousands of years and we have been using them. The Master says, “Use them as you like.” There is no harm in praying to the Lord in any way that you like, because the Lord is only One and you also are only One. The relationship is direct and free between you and the Lord; therefore, it makes no difference whatsoever in what way you pray, remember, and worship the Lord. You can do it in any way that prayer is valid, correct and direct.

When the Perfect Master initiates, He is taking you to a realm better than simple prayer or worship. He is enabling you to reach, personally, a level of experience which is at the level of consciousness higher than even the wakeful level to which we are now accustomed. It is not something connected with religion and does not affect you in that way. Initiation by a Perfect Living Master does not require that you change your religion, change your practices of worship, or change your concept of God. Initiation does not require any alteration of your lifestyle at all. It requires only your change of attitude. An attitude of one who says, “I know it all” to an attitude of “I am a seeker, Lord, only let me seek.” To become a seeker is the only qualification necessary for initiation. There is no other change required for initiation.

What is initiation? Before I speak of initiation, it will be necessary to tell you of the states of wakefulness at which initiation takes place or those which are within our own experience. The present state in which I am speaking to you is called the physical wakeful state. We are aware of our own identity as physical bodies. We give names to ourselves, which are really names given to our physical bodies. We have not given names to our spirit or to our soul. None of us can do this because we cannot see it, we do not know it, and it does not have a form. We give names to forms and since we have a physical form, we give it a name. This is Ishwar, this is Barbara, this is Pat, and so on. Given to the physical body, these names are not given to the self—the conscious self that develops in this physical body and operates to make it a living body. Now there is a statement in the English language which makes a lot of sense when we repeat it—the statement says that “Whatever is mine cannot be me.” The statement is so obvious that sometimes one misses the meaning of it even after using it once. You just have to repeat it to come to know that “Whatever is mine cannot be me.” The one who claims the body is “me.” If one says, “These are my senses through which I see, hear, taste, and touch. These are my ears, nose, eyes and hands—my senses of perception—then they cannot be me. I cannot be the senses. I am only using the senses.” Further, if I say that “This is my mind,” I cannot be the mind, but I am only using the mind. Then who is the “I” that claims these things? Who is the self that asserts all these things? This question has been asked by philosophers end leaders of religions through the ages. When they said, “Know thyself,” they wanted you to discover yourself, to find an answer to the question. Who are you? Who am I? The “I” that says, “my Lord, my soul, my body, my mind”—who is claiming all this? It is belonging to me, so who is that me? It is the finding of that “me” that is the real spiritual object in this exercise. The body is not me. Think of it. The body has a very short life. The spirit could not be so confined to a short period of 50, 60, or even 100 years. The spirit that would pervade through the entire creation could not be set up only to have an experience of 50 to 100 years; therefore, the spirit of the human being must be transcending beyond the physical vehicle that has been given to the spirit. But we get into illusions of identifying ourselves with this body, and we begin to say, “That is me, that is my son, this is my daughter, my father.” These are not correct statements, actually. The correct statements would be, “This is my body, this is my body’s son, this is my body’s daughter, my body’s father.” Who is my father? I have not yet determined that because I have not yet determined who I am. If I can find out who I am, then I can talk of who my father is. Therefore, these external forms from which we operate as conscious beings hold us down to these forms. The real reason for our staying on to the lower forms of consciousness is our sticking to that particular identity as our self. In truth, I am saying, “This is my hand; I am this body.” Then I will remain the body, and there will be no other scope in which to know anything more about the “I”—the self. Now, if I begin to question: this is not me, then who am I? I will find the answer.

Now look at this lower form of consciousness, the wakeful state. I am giving this example because we recall that we go to sleep and have dreams. In this dream, we take on a different body. Our physical body is then lying on the bed sleeping and we are unconscious of the body. Then the dream comes into being, and we begin moving about in the dream body—and the dreamer “I”, the same self, begins to claim that this is the “I”. So much so that if that dream body did not have a form like the form of our physical body, we would even then accept that new form as ourself. Supposing that in a dream, we feel that we are a bird. I am a bird flying out of a window. I flap my wings and I fly. Now, when I wake up from the sleep and I realize that it was only a dream, I might say to a friend, “In this dream, I was a bird and I flew out of a window.” The friend will likely say, “What are you talking about? You don’t have wings or feathers. You don’t look like a bird. Why don’t you say that you saw a bird in the dream?” But the dream was very real. I did not see any bird—I was the bird—I actually flew out of the window. This means that this “I” can be so excited, regardless of the form it takes so long as it feels it is using that form and is the center of that form. Because the bird has the “I” inside of it, the wings then are flapping outside of the “I”. Even the bird’s beak was in front of the “I” awareness and the bird’s tail to the rear of the “I”. I then became the bird and flew. The person who dreams that he was a bird will never say that he only saw a bird. He will say, “No, I was the bird.” There is an “I” which persists irrespective of form, so when we wake up, the same “I” seems to be locked up within this physical body and we say that this is “me”—I am talking now. I had the dream. I went to sleep. This cannot be true. The body slept.

We will further wake up beyond this level of wakefulness and discover this physical level is much like that of the bird’s body. Indeed, it is possible to make a bird. The only proof a person gets that he only dreamed—and I underline, the only, is that he wakes up and comes to know that it was only a dream. In wakefulness, he says, “Yes, I dreamed that I was a bird.” And if he never wakes up, he cannot say that he dreamed that he was a bird. He continues to say that he is a bird. He would say, “Of course I am a bird, just ask anyone else in the dream and they will say that I am a bird.”

Similarly, in this life we take a form and we want proof that this is real. We can ask other people of the same form in the same level of consciousness, “Is it not true? Am I not real?” And we find that some people with great empirical knowledge and evidence will come and say that they can see. “Yes, yes, we can see that you are real. We see through microscopes and we use all the scientific equipment to prove to you that you are the real material.” We don’t realize that the scientists and their equipment that we are using are made of the same dream material as ourselves; of the same material as the physical body of ours. In fact, they are made of one degree less than us because ours is a direct experience of being in the body and theirs is only a visual or sensory experience. Yet we rely upon that secondary evidence to verify that this must be real. There is, therefore, no way for the dreamer to know that he is dreaming except to wake up, and upon awakening, he needs no proof of the fact that he is awake. But today people are asking me for proof. What is the proof that there is a soul? What is the proof that we can further awaken to another level? What is the proof that this wakeful state is a superior state? I asked of them, “Did you ever sleep and dream? When you awoke in the morning, did you know that you had awakened?” They answered, “Of course we did.” I then asked of them, “How did you know that you were awake? Did you pinch your body? That is not good enough. Give me proof that you knew you were awake.” What is this knowledge that they have that they are so confident about? For everything else they want proof, yet they need not even open their eyes or move their bodies to know that they are awake. What has happened to give them such certainty about being awake? When they wake up, they discover that the previous dream experience was only an interlude between an earlier experience of the same type of wakefulness as the present wakefulness. This means that they remember that they went to sleep. If a person upon waking forgets that he went to sleep, then he would not know whether he is awake or not. The real proof is the remembering our previous state and our familiarity with the wakeful state. It is the memory or the recall of having been there earlier.

The Perfect Living Master, who has experienced higher levels of wakefulness and consciousness at will, can teach this method of attaining the higher levels of wakefulness. When the Master asks you to believe the knowledge of wakefulness, He does not say, “ask for proof.” He will say to ask questions. If you have a strange dream or experience and don’t know whether it was a higher state of consciousness or not, be sure that it was not a higher state of wakefulness. Many people have strange experiences and float away to the heavens and see great lights and great colors. Then they come to me and ask me if that is how it feels to reach a higher level of consciousness, or were they just dreaming. I must tell them that “Because you have asked the questions, it means that you were only dreaming. Because when you truly wake up, you would never have to ask the questions.” The proof and certainty of wakefulness is carried in the wakefulness itself. The entire memory of being in that state comes back. Then this body which looks like the only identity of the human body does not remain the only form. The real form comes when we awake to a higher level of wakefulness. We then discover that this body experience was a temporary experience like a dream. We come to know that the entire experience of this world, relationships, jobs, pain and pleasure came as an interlude, sandwiched between two levels of wakefulness through which we have passed. Now when that happens, then we have no doubt left that we are awake.

What happens when you wake up from the body experience? When you wake up you discover that your real body is quite different from this physical body. It is very light and it has an illumination, a radiance. The real body can move much faster because it is not tied down to the weight of matter that our bodies are now associated with. Yet, it can see, touch, taste, and smell. It has all the senses and can think. It has all the capabilities except the gross weight and heaviness of this physical body. Sometimes this body is called the astral body or the subtle body. Sometimes we call it the body of the sense perceptions. What is that body? It is nothing else but ourselves minus the physical body! The whole of ourselves is still there. That means that all the sense perceptions are there. The mind is there, the soul is there, ourself is there, our God is there, and totality is there. Everything is intact except the cover that we have created by this level of sleep which we call wakefulness—that which created the physical body. So, it is not a very strange experience. You feel very light and you feel very happy. You awake to that level of existence and it is not for the first time that you have that experience. When you awake to that existence, you find that, that is your reality and this is an illusion. This physical body was an interlude, and therefore it is in this new body that you are given initiation.

Initiation by a Perfect Master is always given at the astral level and not at the physical level, because the physical body has too short of a life span for initiation to be of much value. It is long enough for worship, for prayer and meditation, but the physical cycle is not long enough for initiation to get out of the cycle of birth and death. It is not long enough to get out of the cycle of pairs of opposites, of unhappiness. That is why initiation takes place always at the astral level of awareness.

Some would ask, “Can we, by our own will, wake up and have a look? Do we have the astral body? Are we initiated? If a physical Master in physical body tells us that we are initiated, are we initiated?” There is no proof that a person who claims to have been initiated is indeed initiated unless he is at the astral level of consciousness. The question is very relevant. Can we wake up to that astral level of consciousness by ourselves? If that is our reality, then we should be there. It should be easy.

Put the same question to yourself when you are sleeping in the dream state. Can you wake up when you are sleeping? It is very difficult to do so at will. In the dream, if you want to wake up, you run about finding out where your body is. In the dream—even if you come to know that you are dreaming—you will run about telling others in the dream, “I have found out that this is a dream and I am going to look for the body when I wake up.” But neither you nor the others are real persons. And when you wake up, you do not tell anyone that you are running about to wake up. There is no way to wake up on your own, at will, while you are sleeping. The only way to wake up from the sleep is to have somebody who is already awake nudge you and wake you up. That is a possibility. If you are sleeping and another person is awake, then that person can nudge you to get up and you will wake up in the middle of your sleep.

Since there is a Living Master who is now already awake at a level of consciousness higher than where we are, He can give us the nudge to awake us from our sleep. How does He give us that nudge? Let us imagine a person is sleeping and he is dreaming that he is taking his car from the garage. Then he gets the nudge and someone says, “Wake up, wake up.” Even in the dream sequence with the car and the garage, he says, “But first let me back out my car.” The person who is awake then says, “Come on. I’ll move the car for you. Get up.” Then this man wakes up and he finds that there is no car. Was the man who was awake and promised to take care of the car telling a lie? When the man who is sleeping wakes up, he does not say, “You said you would take care of my car. Where is my car?” Upon waking, he discovers that the statement of the man awake to take care of the car was not real. It was meant to be a statement in the dream sequence of the sleeping person so that the person sleeping may be enabled to wake up. Once awake, there is neither car nor any taking care of a car.

In the same way, the Living Master who is already awake, can come to us in our present so-called state of wakefulness and participate in our dream. They talk to us as if the dream were real. They will take care of our problems in this dream of ours. They say, “You have this problem. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. Don’t bother about it.” Their purpose is that you awake. When you awake to a higher level of a consciousness, neither your problems nor the bother about taking care of them is there. Their purpose in participating in your dream sequence is to wake you out of the dream. Although the Living Masters are fully aware of and live in a higher state of consciousness, they live in all states of consciousness simultaneously. They have a physical level of awareness, an astral level, a causal level, and a level of totality. They have this awareness, all of the time and they can, therefore, operate at any level. And they operate according to our needs. If we become stuck at any level and don’t know what to do, they talk with us as if they are now at the same level as we are.

The Masters participate in our problem and we feel very good. Here is a person who knows what my problem is, He understands it, and He can help me. He talks as if He knows already—He’s the right guy. Thereby, they take us towards themselves, towards wakefulness. When we awake, we find the illusion of our problem. But the problems are not real nor are they really interested in solving unreal problems here. They are interested in taking us above the realm of these problems. Therefore, initiation takes place with the Perfect Living Master at the level of wakefulness higher than this present level. It is then that we know the spiritual journey we are to start, is not a journey into a life simply more pleasant than this world. It is a journey out of this world into reality. It is a journey into greater and greater wakefulness.

It is not that once you wake up from this physical level that you are completely awakened, although it looks real! The spiritual Master sometimes tells us that the reality of each wakeful state is so convincing that a person does not want to wake any further. Similarly, when you wake from a dream in the morning, you can’t imagine that there can be any more wakefulness. You think this is just fine, there can’t be anything more real than what you have now. When a person rises from this level to a still higher level of wakefulness, he thinks, “This is the end. I have finally found it. The radiance, the lights, the spirits—and we are all spirit.” Then the Master will tell you that these are not spirits, but they are also bodies. These bodies are also not real, but only radiant astral bodies that are so light. You see that you fly with these bodies anywhere you like. At this level, you can read peoples thoughts using telepathy. Even then, you have not reached your goal. You have not yet awakened and are sleeping, but at a higher level.

Sometimes the seeker will argue with the Master saying, “Master, you have given me what I wanted, what I have sought. I don’t want any more as this is reality. I was mistaken and all my life I thought that the physical body was real. Now you have given me the real body, the real spirit. It is shining and I am in heaven. I know that there cannot be anything more.” And the Master has the same hard time convincing us that there is something more, just as He had a difficult time convincing us here that this is not real.

But when we awaken from the astral body, we find that even that beautiful body wasn’t real. More real than the physical body, perhaps, but less real than the still higher states of wakefulness, the wakefulness of the spirit mind stage, the causal body form.

At the causal level, all events and experiences are caused. You will see the entire pattern of our lives—the entire pattern of our experience that is generated by the causal body. Here, we make reference to the fact that our minds create our own experiences. Although we don’t understand it, we create our own universe out of our own minds. Sometimes the mind has a sudden attitude that we don’t like someone and we start hating. We are then creating our own role. We also create our love for beauty and we can see the beauty in everything. That is how the mind is creating our role. This is not really so in our physical realm, but we believe that people and situations that came to us are already there and then the mind has to create something above them. We don’t believe that the people and situations are being created, generated by us. We create these by the mind in the same way the mind creates a dream when we go to sleep. The people are not real, the mind only creates them for its own experience. When we rise above the astral body and wake up into the causal form—the mind form—then we see how we are already creating our own worlds. We have been creating our own relationships and situations in the world. From here, the world looks like it must have been going on for millions of years and will keep on for many millions of years more—infinite time and infinite space. We have created this! How, you ask, can we create this? It is all so big and we are so small. We are but a small speck in this world! Don’t we realize that when we go to sleep at night and we dream that we see a blue sky with clouds and stars in an infinite sky, that we have gone to a new place which we have never seen before? In the dream, we can see an old castle made of bricks that we have not seen before. The guides there tell us that the castle is 1400 years old. We can see the castle and the bricks and see the age of the building. We are convinced that it is 1400 years old. Now in a few minutes when we wake up, do we think that it is now 1400 years later? Earlier when we went to sleep, the castle wasn’t there. In just a matter of a few minutes, we have created an infinite sky, a depth of time of 1400 years, and we have created a past and a future in space. How have we done this? It did not exist before and it does not exist afterward; but while it was in existence, it was infinite.

In the same manner, when this present experience came into being, we created infinite experience. Every time we wish to be there, it is an infinite experience. If somebody were to ask a simple question of us, “How far away is space? How much is the dimension of infinity?” What then is our creation? Is our infinity millions of years away? How many light years away is this space? One person may say it is a billion light years, while another believes it is a trillion light years away. Whatever that person says, that is the size of his space and it is not more than that. If a person can only see for 100 miles—has only a 100 miles scope—so then is his space. He has created only that much space for his experience. We have the capacity to go on creating infinite space. As we continue to put objects and events into space, our space grows in size. This capacity for us to create an experience of infinity in time and space also makes us aware of the infinity of the cosmos, but the actual experience we have created is only as real as we need it to be. This looks to be a common sense view, but it is now a physicist’s view—a scientific view. When Einstein asked, “What is the dimension of time and space?” he discovered that as much event as you put into time is the dimension of time. As many objects as you put into space is the dimension of space. If you place more objects into space, space increases, expands, and a new concept begins—but the concept is actually very old, as the Spiritual Masters have been saying this all the time.

This is the real nature of time and space that you have created for your own experience—they are as large or as far away as your own experience requires. It is when we are in the causal body or pure mind level that we come to a certain knowledge that we are creating time and space and we are using it to place events into it—and that it is we who are placing the events into it. We can then realize that we are the creator of our own life. We will know this when we are rid of the physical body experience and when we get rid of the sensory body—the astral body. When we are at this state, we can then see for ourselves and experience how we create this universe.

Even at the level of pure mind we will likely say, “Now we have come to the end, this is the real creation. We have found the Creator, and the Creator and I are One. I have discovered the truth.” Then the Masters must again remind us that this is not the end—that we are still sleeping. You will say, “But how can I still be sleeping? I have found the end of creation, the very origin of creation. Do you still say that I am sleeping?” And now it is even harder for the Masters to give us teaching and to wake us even further to the higher level of awareness. There are some people who say that there is only one step—that once you see the light, it is over. It is never all over—there is so much more to see. So much more reality to understand that there seems to be no end to it. And every time it becomes more difficult for the Spiritual Master to tell us more about the reality because what we are experiencing is so real that we can’t imagine that there can be anything more real. The field of imagination stops at the causal level, so if you were to try imagine anything further, you could not because the imagination originates from the causal level. How could you imagine anything more than that? And yet, with persistence, the Spiritual Masters know how to further enlighten their followers, students, and disciples. They teach them further wakefulness—even beyond the realm of the mind. The Masters know and can see that it is the Universal Mind. Please try to understand this question, this entire world, time and space plane. You have created it with the mind, but it is not you. Wake up and find out who you are. Until that time, we are so unconscious of the distinction between mind and soul that we don’t know that we have a soul. Now we believe that what thinks inside of us must be the soul. It is not—the soul never thinks. It is the mind that thinks. The soul makes the mind conscious. The soul listens from the ports. Thinking is a mental process, not a spiritual process. Yet, we continue to say—when any thoughts come into our heads, “That is I, thinking. Those are my thoughts, this is me.” It is not you, but only your thoughts. Even this is not correct, for this is not your thoughts, but your mind’s thoughts. When the mind is at work, you can sit and watch it work. In much the same way, the Masters can wake us up. The total wakefulness is beyond the mind. Awake to the pure spiritual regions of consciousness. There is no mind, no time and space. It is the same moment of eternity in which the entire pattern of creation is encapsulated in one point. It is with us in the energy of life, where we can spin it out into time using the mind of the lower bodies.

Totality is there in one moment and that is the soul—that is ourselves. It is pure consciousness, the ability to be conscious, the ability to create any experience of which we can be conscious. That total consciousness is within the self and we discover the self—who we are—for the first time. We see, too, how difficult it is for us to be there and how difficult it has been for the Spiritual Master to persuade us to go to this point, where we discover ourselves for the first time. Indeed, if there is a spiritual journey of the self, it starts from there. It doesn’t end there—nothing is then ended.

Once we have found our own spirituality, our own wakefulness, we are very pleased with the little shine of our bodies as astral beings without physical form, but with the sensory form. We see the shining light and we are very happy. There is a light, day-to-day, that creates a radiance from the self without time and space. If you could compare it with the light and time and space we know now, your light would be the equivalent of the light of 16 of the solar suns together. That would be the light of the soul emanating from each of us when we are here in the spiritual—rid of our bodies, minds and senses. If we are unaware of our mind, body, and senses, we can see that radiance of our own self with so much light—yet we do not know that it is our self. We don’t know that it is the self which has to travel on a spiritual journey and find its own creator.

In our present form, we are making efforts to take our bodies on the pilgrimage. We are really telling our bodies to go and have a pilgrimage. We don’t go in this way! The first stage is when we know who the pilgrim is—who is the seeker and what does he seek. We must first know what is the soul, what is reality, and that the truth never changes. We must go beyond the realm of time, space, beginnings, middles, and ends. Where do we then go? What yet must be uncovered to reach our goal? There is another level beyond the region of pure spirit, and that is the cover of individuation. Not ego, but separation from the totality. It is permanent, pure beautiful spirit soul, but still not total. What makes us still not total is again an illusion, again a dream.

The final wakefulness arises when we transcend the dream of individuation, of being separated. When the feeling of being just a drop of ocean disappears, we become ocean. Then, indeed, we discover there was no drop. The truth is that there never was a drop. The ocean has always remained an ocean. There is only the illusion that it is a drop, much like the illusion that the drop had become a mind and senses. It is only a further, deeper dream or illusion that we have got a physical body. The further dream is that of our imagination being used to go about creating our worlds. So, the process of wakefulness through which the Perfect Living Masters take us does not end with the showing us some light and sound here and there. They take us right to the final, ultimate single Creator, who alone exists and without whom nothing else exists. It is the totality of consciousness that is the appropriate definition of the final God-form where everything that we have experienced has been created, including all the pairs of opposites that we have to go through while we are in the mental realms. In our present realm, we cannot have any experience except through opposites. We are living in a world governed by pairs of opposites. When we transcend the world of opposites, there is yet the grand illusion of opposites and no opposites. The Spiritual Master wants us to travel this long journey up to that totality, rather than a short, easy journey for some kicks, adventures, and experiences. It is the purpose of an imperfect Master to provide these kicks, new experiences, psychic powers and powers over people. It is a power in an ugly sense. These are not the Perfect Living Masters we have talked about. The Perfect Living Master who initiates us is the one who will raise us above these powers into oneness. It is only oneness that is the truth. Only Oneness has never been subdivided.

In the concept of the drop being separated from the ocean, it is only a way to illustrate our state of individuation. As spiritual entities, we are part of the Lord, but not separated from the Lord. Not even at this time. It is an error to believe that we ever left the Lord’s home and came away. Even if one small speck of totality leaves totality, it no longer remains totality. If I speak of a total ocean as the Lord, even one drop taken out does not leave it the total ocean anymore. God is all-encompassing and has never been subdivided. He has never had anything to send out. It is just an illusion created within Himself that allows us to think we are like a drop from the ocean. It is a play, a drama, His creation—He is doing everything. Nobody else can do it because, in reality, there is no one else. Therefore, when we talk of the analogy of a drop having left the ocean and trying to come back, the fallacy is that the drop of ocean ever was outside of the ocean. It has always been inside and part of the ocean.

I have often said that if you look at the ocean, what is it except so many drops of water? How big are the drops? As big as you make them with your awareness. You restrict your awareness and they become small. Expand your awareness and the drops become very big. If you expand your awareness of totality, the whole ocean becomes one drop; and the single drop, the whole ocean. There’s no difference between the two, and this is the similarity in consciousness, in the ocean of consciousness. There is only one totality and it has never been divided. It is only the dream sequence, the illusion, the creation itself that we call creation.

What then is Creation? Creation is the development of new dreams of experience. These dreams and experience have been developed by one consciousness alone in order to create the illusion of the more than one. One has created the illusion of many, but it has not created the many. When you awake and that illusion disappears, one alone remains.

The truth of the self is that there is only one self, and that is the total consciousness, or God. That self function through the many covers and looks like the many—looks separated. The truth is that we have never been separated. When we have a feeling that is I, it will be that this is my body, my mind, my soul and God, that one consciousness that is all consciousness. The “we” will discover that “we” are One.

Therefore, when we talk of initiation, we are really talking of the great and grand journey back to that Oneness—not to a new place, but back to an old place. We travel back to the place we have always been. This is the only place, it is the reality. So, initiation takes us back to reality, from the unreality which has appeared to only be there sometimes. Where we are now is changing. What does not change is only the real. You can easily apply this test for yourself. Whatever changes cannot be real. The One Consciousness never changes, it remains total. This is the reality, the consciousness to which we have to go.

Why does a Perfect Master then initiate us? He initiates us because of our seeking and because we are lonely and seeking totality. We are all lonely. Anyone who has experienced a little bit of the vibration of the soul is lonely. You can sit in a crowd and if you are conscious and human, you feel lonely. You can have company and good friends, but even in this companionship you will be lonely. What makes you lonely? This loneliness comes from the seeking of the soul for something better—for its totality. Loneliness is a sign that we want the spiritual journey to commence. Loneliness is the beginning of seeking and the preparation for the journey is when we become real seekers. So, the Lord through His own drama has given us experiences of loneliness and of creation at this level. Through His own experiences and His own drama, we are given visual images of Himself in the form of what we call the Perfect Living Masters. These Perfect Living Masters are as unreal as we are. They are made of the same physical stuff as we are, and we can see them; but they are connected in consciousness with the totality. Thereby, they work as the instruments of the Lord. They work, not of their own; they do nothing of their own. Not a single step does the Perfect Living Master take except for the step taken by the Lord Himself. That is the nature of the physical form of the Perfect Living Master. They may look like us, talk like us, worship as we do, do things as we would, but not a single step do they take which is not a step taken by the total Lord Himself. It is the Lord’s plan that when, in this illusion created by Him, He finds those souls which are lonely, seeking, and He takes them back. He comes and saves them and makes them One with Himself again. He does this because He wants us to have the experience of totality once again. It is in this form in which we are today that God has created for Himself the experience of loneliness. We are both of these experiences, but this illusion makes us feel that we have become separated and cannot see totality, that God has become separated from us. We want to seek and the seeking makes us qualified for initiation. It is only when the seeking is strong enough that we are ready for initiation. When does the Perfect Master initiate us? He initiates us when we are ready—ready to be seekers and nothing else. When we seek the Lord in earnestness with all our heart’s desire, when we cry out in our heart, “I can’t stand anymore, Lord”—then He will initiate us.

How does He find out that we are seeking? He does not make us run about to find out, because if we could run about and find a Master, then we would not need the Masters. We need the Masters because we don’t know who the Masters are, we don’t know where the Lord resides, we don’t look within ourselves and see the Lord; therefore, when we seek, He presents an image. He presents this image where we are seeking. If we sought Him in our hearts, then we would see Him in our hearts. If we sought Him in our heads or thoughts, then He would present Himself in our thoughts. But we don’t ask, we don’t seek there. We are seeking outside, through the senses, through attention, and we run around.

We run from church to church, denomination to denomination, from book to book and from temple to temple. We run from one house of God to another, from one lecture to another, and from place to place. We run everywhere except where the Lord is telling us He is. We run about everywhere except the place where both the seeker and the Lord are residing. Because we run outside, He has no option but to come outside. Even though as an image, the Lord comes outside to push us back to the correct place. This image is called the Perfect Living Master and is only a form to push us back. It is the physical form of the Master who is always within us in the same core of consciousness from where the seeker is operating. The seeker and the Lord don’t live separately, but together in the same core of consciousness—but since we operate like this, He too operates like that. When our seeking is strong, He will appear and show us the way.

In India, we say that when the chela is ready, the guru appears. We say that when the disciple is ready, the Master appears. When the seeker is ready, the guide appears. So, it is not for the seeker to search around for the guide. He should not seek the guide, should not seek the Master, but should seek the Lord. When you seek the Lord, the Master appears. The Master then gives sufficient proof through private miracles that He has come at the right time. These look like miracles to us, but when shared with others, don’t remain miracles. They become coincidences, chance happenings. It is through these means that He convinces us that He has come at the right time. So we say there is a right time for us. What is the right time? When are we ready? Many of us claim that we are ready, but are we really ready? We should just pause when we claim that we are ready and ask, “What have we done to be ready?”

Here in this world, if we have a little infatuation with somebody, a small love affair of a temporary nature, we are willing to jump walls, leave our jobs, give up our money or do anything to go with a beloved. Just for this simple thing we would do so much. And then we say that we are ready, prepared, and seeking the Lord? What sacrifices are we willing to make? We will think about that—about what we will do. Are we really ready? People are not willing to make simple sacrifices. If the Master says that you can be on a vegetarian diet, it is not the diet that is important. God is not hiding in food. It is not that if you eat a particular food, you will find God. But if a test of our readiness is asked, what sacrifices are we willing to make? The Master may ask if you are willing to give up alcohol, give up a diet that you are taking and get onto simpler vegetarian foods. Are you willing to do this or that? Are you willing to give a certain amount of time to meditation? Even a little amount of two-to-four hours? We are given twenty-four hours in a day; can we give just a little time? Ten percent of your time? We say that this is very hard, even half hour is very difficult. Lord, please exempt us from this meditation and accept our seeking. What seeking is this? Are we ready?

When we claim we are ready, we should look closely at ourselves. If we are in a state of readiness, the Lord must appear—and the Master inevitably comes. When we are ready, that is the time when we are initiated. When we are truly ready, that is the time when the Lord provides us the Perfect Living Master—out of the blue, as it seems. Again, using the same coincidences, principles, and chance, we are changing our plans and we don’t know how it happened. Why? How is it the time? You are prepared, you are becoming the seeker. The right time for contact with the Living Master is when you are ready. You are ready when you are intensely seeking and when things become of no consequence to you except for your loneliness and the desire to fulfill it. It is the Lord who can wipe out that loneliness—it is the Lord alone who can do it. You can sit in a crowd and not get rid of the loneliness if you are a seeker. For when you are in a state of readiness, that is the time you get it.

What happens when the Lord initiates us through the Perfect Living Master? What does He do? We say that He does something at the astral level. What does He do at that level, and why at the astral level? If the Lord takes the trouble of coming all the way down for us from totality, through the mental and sensory levels, why not come just one more step? Why not‚ just one more step to our level of physical awareness to take us home? There is a reason for this. We have an experience, a form, and an expression of Creation. Similarly, we have an experience, a form, and an expression of the Creator. There cannot be a Creator unless there is a Creation. If there were no Creation, we would not call Him the Creator. When we have a Creation, we also have a Creator. Creator and Creation—they are together always and forever, a permanent arrangement. It is not for only one time. The Lord did not say, “Let me create.” No, it is always there and it continues. He may create at different levels. His Creation goes on all the time, again and again, and Creation repeats itself. Whenever there is a Creation, there is bound to be a Creator. We know Creation because we are living in it. Everything you are seeing, everything you are perceiving through the senses is Creation. We can hear the sounds of Creation and see the colors of Creation. We can also touch, feel the texture, the softness and the fluidity of the Creation. Do we not also smell the Creation? We use the five senses for Creation and we can use the intuitive senses for the abstract nature of Creation, such as jealousy, hatred and happiness. We experience these, too. We have all the capabilities of the mind, the senses, and the body to have experiences of the form of Creation.

How do we experience the Creator? What will be the form of the Creator? How do we experience the form of ourselves? How is it that we can experience the self that is within us? We can experience these things because the self has the same expression, the same permanent expression that Creation has. And the self resonates with the vibration, with light and sound. That is why there is a great importance on these two expressions of light and sound. As Creation has a form which can be perceived, the Creator, too, has a form which can be experienced. Similarly, like the experience outside that can be seen, touched, tasted, and smelled, the experiences within can be experienced from the vibration of its light and sound. The self shines within like a light we see outside, except that it is much brighter. When we go within ourselves, we just breathe within ourselves. When we close off the thought streams, the attention that is going out then returns to within the self and the light shines and we can see it. The whole body fills with light. When we get back to ourselves, we do not use the two eyes—just the third eye. When our eye is single, the entire body becomes filled with light.

Similarly, when we are within ourself, the whole body resonates with the music—divine music which is the expression of the self. People have often wondered why music has played such an important part in the lives of not only ordinary persons, but the divine and holy seekers. All seem to want to go into music. This is because the natural expression of the self is of light and sound. There is a divine music that flows constantly through each of us. Now, the point is we listen to all of the sounds outside and see the sights, but what about listening to the sound and the music of the self within? In each of us without exception, the music is resounding all of the time, day and night, and it is so lovely. To hear the music within, we need only to be quiet. Anyone who wants to hear the music within—the sound of the self—can do so just by being quiet.

What is the meaning of keeping quiet? It is letting the mind be quiet. It is the mind that is constantly speaking up and it takes us out all the time. It is the thoughts, the steady stream of thoughts which is the speech to which we listen. The self listens to the mind’s thoughts. This distraction does not allow the self to listen to the self. We are listening to our minds; therefore, if we can quiet the mind and these distractions, we can be free to listen to our own music.

This music has such resonance that it rings like bells from heaven. It is actually a sound that compares to or resembles the loud gong of bells. When you first turn your attention to within, the first sounds of the self are like the bells, and on each peal of the bell, you can rise to higher sounds. Then the sound of a waterfall begins. It passes over stones and begins a different sound as it cascades and ripples quietly. In the same way, the consciousness of the total self changes as it flows through different levels of Creation, changing as the sound changes. It is not really changing, but seems to be.

There is, then, a way to listen to oneself, and that is within. There is a resonance much like the bells, and a light that shines so brightly. It is no wonder that every temple, mosque, and church of the world uses light and sound. They are also designed to look like the head, the crown or other headwear. It is sometimes surprising to look at all the places of worship we have created, saying that the Lord is there. Where is the Lord? The Lord is within each of us—within the head—and that is where we find the lights and sound. We, of course, want to create it symbolically outside—we then create a dome or steeple designed much like the caps or headgear that we wear. We put them on the buildings and then put bells and gongs in there. We add the light in the form of candles to these buildings also. But these are only meant to remind us that the real church, the real temple, is within each of us. Do not forget the real temple of the Lord. These are only symbols to remind us to visit the real church, where the Master speaks to us 24 hours a day. We don’t have to go anywhere at a time given on the notice of worship. We seem to have been caught up in these reminders and have forgotten to go to the real church, where the bells sound all of the time. The inner bells peal all the time not only when they are rung. Why should every religion of the world have the same symbols, but completely different teachings? The symbols are the same because all of the enlightened Masters who came gave the same message—that the Lord is within—the Lord resides in you.

The sounds and light descend to the astral level and the moment we awake to this level, we get them. It is at this level that the Master operates and performs initiation. Initiation by a Living Master means connecting us and our attention inwardly at the astral level with the light and sound so that we will never be separated thereafter. The greatest event that can happen in the life of a seeker of the Lord is the event of initiation. Initiation by a Perfect Master at the astral level provides that our attention of the soul is fixed permanently to the light and sound of the self within. Thereafter, the journey merely means going around the light and sound to all of the higher realms of wakefulness. This indeed is our real form within the light and sound of the self. This is nothing more than our expression of consciousness, shining, radiating and vibrating. Within the core of that consciousness of light and sound lies the real form of the Master. He remains in there and operates from there. Once He has initiated us, He never leaves and is in us permanently. He then remains available to us each and every hour of the day. We don’t have to go and look for Him physically after that.

Meditation is our practice by the external means available to us to put the attention back on one’s self to discover the Master. There you will find Him because the Master has taken on a physical form which attracts you outside—from where He tells you to find the real form inside. When you find the real form inside, it is the same form—the radiant form of the Master. He is formless and He has been the same Master from age to age since eternity. He does not change. There is only one Living Master in all of time, but He must take on a physical appearance. For those who are initiated by such a Master, He then gives the same physical form and appearance in a radiant way within. So, when you go and listen to the music within, you may ask where is this subtle music coming from? Within. It is there within you in its light shining form. When your attention is drawn to the music and sound within, you will find in the midst of this the same form that initiated you. And you discover, “Oh, this is the real form of the Master—not the outside form.” But then you find that the outside physical form was the one upon which you relied to reach that point within. Therefore, initiation by a Perfect Living Master is the process of establishing a permanent contact at the third eye center where the astral plane begins. Whether initiated or not, when you reach that center, you will get proof and experience of it. When you hear the sounds and see the light within, then you will also see that you were initiated. You will greatly rejoice because, until then, you will not even know that you have been initiated.

Some people think that filling out an application form and its acceptance is initiation. That is not initiation. When the Lord decides to initiate you, He does so without an application. When the Lord decides that you are not yet ready, He will give you an experience instead. He will teach you. He will let you know that you are not yet ready and will ask you to do a little more homework. When you get this message, you go and do your homework and come back again. When you are ready, He will initiate you. Initiation is an internal process. The rest is for the records of people who wish to keep some records outside. It is not material whether a record is kept outside or not, nor is it a sign whether or not you were initiated. The real initiation is within and takes place when you are ready. It is then that the physical presence of the Master appears and confirms that you were initiated and that you have been accepted.

MEDITATION - CONTEMPLATION

WITH LOVE FOR THE OUTER AND

THE INNER MASTER

We have been talking about the nature of the path of realization and about the nature of God. The seeker is only a form of His consciousness and the whole game is played by the total consciousness. I would now like to tell you how we should proceed to approach the Living Master if we should happen to run into Him and He should find us.

We cannot find the Master, but the Master can find us. When He does, we come to know within ourselves that He has found us. It is then that we can direct our questions to Him as if He were the Master and not the man we knew earlier. As it is, the Master comes and lives here exactly like us—like an ordinary human being. He will not perform public miracles but for those for whom a miracle is performed, it is so miraculous that they marvel that the whole world is not coming to see it. For others, it will remain only a coincidence.

We will find the Masters living in such a way that they subject themselves to the laws of the universe in which they operate. If they are operating in their physical body, they will operate under the same laws of health, sickness, sleep, the eating of foods and doing other things much like everyone else. They have children, raise families, fall sick, take medications, and finally experience physical death. Their bodies are subjected to the same laws which the bodies of any other human beings are subjected to. But there is a little difference, of course, in that they have higher awareness; therefore, what their bodies do in relation to their higher awareness is something quite unique. For instance, they can eat much less and sleep much less than other people. They can work much harder because they do not operate at earned energy levels, nor do they require recharge of energies for their work. They use the power of love. Their main work is done through the power of love, and love is born from them and we feel that it has come into our hearts.

These Masters play a lot of games with us. Being One with God Himself, with a total consciousness, they are not bothered about what is going on because they have already set up the game. They are playing within that game. They also allow themselves to be maligned, insulted, tortured, crucified, and killed by their own creation in order that the passion of their message goes home to those who are watching them. They are not concerned with this because they know that what they allowed to be insulted, attacked, humiliated, crucified and killed is only one of their illusions, much like the other illusions watching this happen. It doesn’t bother them because they know the difference.

Earlier, I have mentioned the story of Geoffrey Chaucer and his book Canterbury Tales, in which he tells of the pilgrims going to Canterbury. In that book, the various pilgrims amuse themselves along the route by reciting poems and telling stories. The poems are so good that Chaucer has often been called the “father of the modern novel.” In this classic Chaucer describes a lawyer, and he says that “a busier man than him there ne’er was.” A busier man than him there was not and yet he seemed busier than he was. It is a beautiful book and has some lovely poems in it. Most of the characters are called upon to recite poems, and they do a very good job, but Chaucer has introduced himself also as a character in the book and recites a terrible poem for the pilgrims. He is the author of the entire book, but when he becomes a character, he allows himself to be humiliated and attacked by the others in the group. They had asked him to recite a poem, insisting that he was a great poet and he comes up with the most unworthy poem in the whole book. His characters—his creations—then attack him saying that they expected something far better from him. So why did Chaucer allow himself to be crucified by his own characters? The answer is that he was not being crucified by his characters. It was only another of his characters being crucified. The characters were all Chaucer—he wrote the part and he also crucified himself.

In the same way, when the Lord sets up this play of illusion and takes a role in it, He becomes just like one of His creations. He then plays the games like everyone else, and when He is crucified in the process by His own creation, it is part of His game. Therefore, He remains unconcerned with what is going on. In this set up, it is sometimes difficult to even recognize a Master. The characteristics of the Living Master will include boundless love for everybody. It is His own creation, His humanity. It is His world, as all worlds are His, and He knows it. He will watch the play with total consciousness. He will know that He is the Lord and also one of the characters in the play.

We, with our minds, prepare an image of what a Master should be like. We like a Master to be spiritually high, all shining and full of seriousness. Often, people see the Master as sitting on a pedestal giving sermons and talking down to us. If such a Master were to come and you were to put Him on a pedestal, you could then worship such a Master. You could be struck with awe and you could admire Him, but you could not love Him. You can only love a living human being like yourself. We cannot have love for human beings who are not human. Love in the human body is the highest experience the human body can have. And so long as it is in the physical plane, it has to be between two people who are human, with all the human flaws. Therefore, if a perfect human being comes and were otherwise, it would be difficult to love Him. He would be too perfect. It would be difficult to talk with Him as one would be afraid even to talk with such a perfect person. The Master, therefore, takes on the imperfection of the human life and form in order to be just like us; and He walks and talks among us as if He were just like one of us.

There is another reason for Him to do this. In His purpose, He has not come to spread the message all over the world in order that the whole world should go to His path or His way of life and get out of the system. He has come to pick up His marked sheep. He has not come to spread a mass awareness, but comes only for those who are waiting for Him. He comes for those who have prepared themselves to receive a Master. When His marked sheep are ready to receive Him, the Master then appears to them. He may walk in the midst of thousands of people and only a few may see who are prepared at that time for the Master to find them. It is only those who are wise and who are prepared—the others will just pass by and not notice Him.

If the Master were to do extraordinary things, He would come to be noticed by everybody. He is not interested. He is not concerned. He is not selling guru-ship. He does not sell His discipleship or His message. The Master is not concerned with how many customers there are. His interest is that the marked sheep for whom He has come to gather, do receive His message. He wants them to receive Him and find out that He is there. The Master wishes them to know that they are not lost and that they will be taken back to their own real homes, back into reality. So the Master works in a very personal and private manner. For each disciple, the Master acts differently. He will act according to the needs of the disciple at that particular point in time.

Sometimes, when the Master is building up our faith in Himself, He will show a little evidence. By some strange coincidence, a person who is coming around to see the Master may get a message before actually meeting Him, advising that he is to meet Him. He gets surprised, and then goes and meets the Master. And the Master looks at him, gives him a smile, and that person is convinced that He sent for me and received me. The person will likely say, “Master, I am so glad you received me. I got your message.” Even then, the Master might say, “What message? When did you get a message?” Then the person again becomes surprised. It is a little game that is being played to build up the faith of a disciple. If the Master were to reveal Himself fully, He would not be able to develop the faith of his disciple.

Faith is so necessary. It is faith that overcomes the mind and the mental doubts. If we don’t have faith, we cannot overcome the mental doubts. And what is faith? Faith is not seeing something, yet believing something which you cannot see. If you see something, it is experience. When you cannot see and still believe, it is faith. Therefore, the Master wants to build faith in us, so He then gives us a little evidence and leaves the rest, so that we keep on building up our faith gradually. He alone knows best what is happening. He knows every thought of ours and every action. He knows exactly what we are doing, how we are doing, and how we are reacting. The Master knows exactly when He should intervene and help us and in what way; but He will act in such a way that we will have to gradually build up our faith in Him.

In the beginning of our relationship with the Master, we begin to find that He is very good for us in our material achievements and our material acquisitions. We then feel that He is such a good Master because we got a better job or more income. He is a really good and benevolent Master because since we met Him, we have been able to do so well. At this point, we are not likely concerned with the spiritual teachings of the Master. We want only the material satisfactions to come through the Master because He has spiritual powers. There is a poem in one of the Master’s books in India which is very relevant at this time. I will translate it for you.

In this poem, there is a gardener who looks after his garden and is working in it. He is planting a little seedling and is watering it. He is carefully tending to the plant with food and loving care while a young man watches from nearby. The young man says, “Old man, you are wasting your efforts upon that small plant. You are giving all this water and food to the weeds. Don’t you see that your plant is so little and there are so many weeds around it? You are just feeding the weeds.” The gardener looked up and said, “Young man, I don’t think you have ever planted a plant such as this. If you had, you would not say what you have just said. I have planted this plant several times before, so I know that when I am putting this little plant in here, I am feeding the weeds also. I am feeding both the plant and the weeds, but the weeds will remain the same size even after they are fed. This plant grows and will eventually become a very big bush which spreads out. Under the shade of this large spreading plant, the weeds will die. This I know because I have done it in the past.”

The Master who had written this poem explains that the gardener is the Master and the little plant he places in the soil is the plant of love. It is the same plant of love that the Master puts into the heart of His disciple. In the heart of the disciple, there are also many weeds of desires for worldly things. They want worldly satisfactions. They want progress here in the physical plane, and they wish to serve the people here. In the midst of all these desires, He places the plant of love. And He knows that, although He feeds all of them in the initial period and world prosperity increases and things are successful, after awhile the love plant becomes larger. And when the love grows, the disciple says, “I don’t care what I get. I only want you, Master. I want your love and I no longer wish for any of these things.” And this is how love grows. You see, the Master plays all kinds of games to see that our love and faith grow. God-realization is, in fact, a part of love and devotion.

I have used many words in the course of this lesson—many techniques of meditation, the withdrawal of attention, and taking the mind away from things. I have said all of those things, but none are practically possible unless we have love and devotion. When the mind seeks external pleasures and attachments, it is the love and devotion for the one Master that brings the mind back. If we do not have love and devotion, the mechanical meditation cannot take us anywhere. The mechanical act of meditation cannot take us to the railway station I have spoken of, because the mental distraction is so strong and so subtle that it will keep us away from the railway station at the third eye center.

So, the real secret of God-realization is love and devotion. Meditation, about which I spoke, must also be undertaken with love and devotion. If meditation is done with ego and effort, it does not work. It is with love and devotion that humility automatically comes. How can you do meditation with love and devotion? Meditation with love and devotion has sometimes been described as effortless meditation. When you put in an effort to do meditation, you are then doing it with your ego. Do meditation with love and devotion and without effort. It is when you put effort into your meditation that you are building the very wall that you want to remove. If you do meditation with love and devotion, you are removing the wall that you want to demolish. It is therefore important that meditation should always be done with love and devotion. Even the repetition of the mantra must be done with love and devotion. And you cannot have love and devotion unless you are really in love with the Perfect Living Master.

The Living Master can draw your love out to Him by His own ways. We cannot force the pace nor can we say that we will decide when to love the Master. It doesn’t happen that way. He draws the love from us at the right time and enables us to do meditation with love and devotion. In fact, if there is a problem of effort in meditation, then one can overcome this by doing service. Service to the Master also includes meditation. Service is higher than effort because in service, we are not doing something to get results. In doing service, we are simply making an homage or an offering.

If you recall, there are three kinds of service. The first is the lowest kind of service and that is with wealth. If you give part of your money away, spend something on the Master—on His works—or on disciples of the Master or even upon the general public welfare, then you are reducing your ego. If you are willing to share part of your wealth, then you can reduce your ego to some extent, and thereby, you are doing service with wealth. It is in this way, in the service to others, that we can overcome these problems which would otherwise occur if we did meditation with effort. So, meditation without effort comes with the spirit of service.

I mentioned earlier that in meditation there is an important role of contemplation; the contemplating of the Master’s form. Now, this contemplation is not only so that we are able to remove the images from our thoughts in meditation—this contemplation also increases our love for the Master. The more we contemplate upon His face, the more we recall the various little incidents that happen with Him. The more we remember the several incidents of laughter and humor we have shared with the Master, the more we have love for Him. So, love and devotion can grow through the process of contemplation of the Master. When we contemplate His form and recall these incidents with Him, we get into the mental imagery and memory and our longing for the Master increases. Our love increases and our meditation improves and we are able to go within. The secret of contemplation with love and devotion and of meditation with love and devotion has been known to disciples who have made progress. The others are doing a mechanical effort with ego.

Some would ask how much of this contemplation and love and devotion should be for the inner Master and how much for the outer Master? The point is that the only Master is the inner Master. Our spiritual journey for which we are preparing is undertaken in the companionship of the inner Master. The Master is inside of us and has always been inside, but we have no contact with Him. It is the outer Master that comes to us because He provides us with the key, the link to the inner Master. The role of the outer Master ends when we have found our inner Master. The inner Master then takes us to the home of total consciousness of our Father, our God.

The inner Master is the real Master, and the Master’s real form is consciousness—total consciousness, with its resonance and music. We can hear the inner Master in all stages of ascent. At the point of our journey within, behind the third eye center, we are in the company of the inner Master whose real form continues coming to us as pure consciousness. It is this audible consciousness that is the real Master within. Therefore, when we speak of love and devotion, we are talking of love and devotion for the real inner Master. However, as I have said earlier, unless we have seen the Living Master, unless we have contacted Him, we cannot have true love and devotion.

The outer Master like us is a physical being, an image, a reflection of the inner Master and we have to accept Him as the Master. He continues to be our Master until we meet the inner Master, the real Master. What happens when we find the inner Master? When we have fallen in love with the outer Master so much that He has taken us to the inner Master, we find the inner Master was the same as the outer Master. The outer Master had only taken that form of the inner Master to bring us there.

Some people are saying, “OK, Master, we accept you temporarily because, as you have once said, once we are with the inner Master, we can say goodbye to you. Then you can go and do your job with others.” The Master will agree that it is His job to bring them to the inner Master and, once there, they will go on with the inner Master. But do you know that when we reach the inner Master and find that He was the same, our love for the outer Master increases. We might ask, “What kind of tricks are you playing on us? You have told us of an inner Master and of yourself, the outer Master. And then we reach the inner Master and find that it is you.” They are the same and as our love grows, so does our love for the outer Master. The truth is that eventually, in the spiritual journey, we find that these are all matters of illusion. There is no difference between the inner and outer Master. In practice, we find that because we cannot reach the inner Master of our own accord, we have to start with the outer Master and by the time we reach the inner Master, we have found that we have so much love for the outer Master that we cannot leave Him upon finding the inner Master.

Of course, the outer Master is less communicative than the inner Master. When the Master is part of us, we know Him. As the Master, He doesn’t have to play any hide and seek. He does not have to follow any laws of this physical universe nor does He have to fool other people. He just picks up His marked sheep. Within ourselves He is there to give us all the answers, to solve our problems and to accomplish all of our jobs. It is only the outer Master who must play many games in order to keep up the appearance that He is an ordinary person and not a Master. By the time we reach the inner Master, the games of the outer Master are understood by each of us.

The real, inner Master not only takes us on the spiritual journey, but becomes the guiding power for all the work to be done here also. In fact, at the third eye center and just beyond, there is what can be described metaphorically as a market place where a bargain can be struck. There is a nice market place where a bargain may be struck with the Master. Some disciples have been very clever to strike a bargain or agreement with their Masters. For instance, you can agree with the Master that He should do all of your work, all of your job during this life. This includes doing the job that you are now doing in your business. You can sit quietly and give all of your worries and unhappiness to the Master. He is quite willing to accept a proposition like that. After this kind of a bargain has been struck at the third eye center, all of your work in this world is done by the inner Master. Nobody will know who is doing the work and they will give credit to you when, in fact, your Master is doing it from within yourself. This kind of relationship with the inner Master increases with the love and devotion for the Master and the journey becomes very easy.

So there it is: the path to God-realization is that of love and devotion. We start with the outer Master and move on to the inner Master. All questions which we have are answered satisfactorily at the third eye center by the inner Master. The outer Master may still play some games and make us wait for certain answers and sometimes not give us the answers we seek. But the inner Master gives all the answers. It is the inner Master you can retain with you for company day and night and hold that consciousness whether you are in meditation or not. It becomes a new way of life and you then have the power of the inner Master to get your work done. But when the ego comes up and wants to do it, the Master will say, “Yes, yes, go ahead. You try to do it and I will help you.” But when you leave the task to the inner Master, He is willing to do it Himself.

It is a beautiful relationship, and the secret really consists of establishing the relationship with the inner Master. If we follow this path with love and devotion and do our meditation as a service to the outer Master, we will then find the inner Master and turn our attention backward and overcome the mind and ego. It is then that we begin the great spiritual journey to the highest awareness—total consciousness.

For a list of further publications, recorded lectures, or for more information, contact:

Institute for the Study of Human Awareness

PO Box 991

Palatine, IL 60078

Email: Isha.info1@gmail.com

Website: www.ishanews.org

Ishwar Puri has lectured throughout the entire world on a very wide variety of subjects including: art, human awareness and human relations, morality, science, philosophy and religion, health and wellbeing, human consciousness, plus a long list of other subjects which cover the entire scope of human experience. The delivery of each presentation is eloquent, motivating and enlightening. By them, we are encouraged to know and understand ourselves in the truest sense of the Socratic theme “KNOW THYSELF.” And the higher knowledge, which results from self-realization, permits us to better understand other people and the world in which we live.

As founder and principle speaker for the Institute for the Study of Human Awareness, Ishwar Puri continues to donate his time and resources to others through this nonprofit organization.

Table of Contents

MARVELS OF THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS ENERGY CURRENTS

MEDITATIONAL METHODS

THE NECESSITY 0F A SPIRITUAL GUIDE

THE INNER JOURNEY AND ITS OBSTACLES

INITIATION - WHY AND WHEN

MEDITATION - CONTEMPLATION WITH LOVE FOR THE OUTER AND THE INNER MASTER