Our path³

I wish to say a few words about our path. Our path is basically the path of the heart and not that of the mind. This does not mean that I am criticising the path of the mind. Far from it. We feel that the path of the heart leads us faster towards our goal.

Now, each individual is sincere or has to be sincere. And at the same time, each individual can be wise, too. Along with sincerity, if we have wisdom, then we can fulfil our divine task sooner than otherwise.

So when we follow this path, we feel that the thing we constantly require is love. Love, Fulfilment and God always go together. God will never be satisfied with something incomplete, unrealised, unfulfilled and unmanifested. He wants from us realisation, revelation, manifestation and perfection. If these things are not done in this lifetime, then we shall have to take many more incarnations. But God will never allow anybody to remain unrealised and unfulfilled. Today it is time for you to realise God. Tomorrow it will be the time for your friend to realise God. The day after tomorrow it will be the time for somebody else to realise God. There is an hour which we call “God’s Chosen Hour”. At God’s Chosen Hour all will realise God. All are bound to.

Suppose I want to go to a place and my destination is 300 miles away. I can reach my destination either by walking or by flying. Undoubtedly, I shall reach my destination infinitely faster if I fly in a jet plane. Similarly, if we use the aspiring heart and not the doubting mind, we shall reach our goal much faster. Our heart is all love. Our mind is quite often all confusion. Our heart is strikingly significant and important because inside the heart is the living presence of the soul. True, the consciousness of the soul permeates the entire body, but the actual location of the soul is inside the heart.

The soul has everything — Peace, Light and Bliss in infinite measure. Now, from the soul we get these divine qualities inside the heart. From the heart, again, we can bring them to the mind, to the vital and to the physical proper.

Our path is the path of the heart and inside the heart we see nothing but Love. When we say our heart, we mean our spiritual heart, which is flooded with divine love.

Whenever we think of God, we think of Him as something divine, vast and boundless. We think of God as the Omniscient, as the Omnipotent. These are our feelings about God, our conceptions of God. But when we go deep within, we come to realise that God the Omniscient and God the Omnipotent do not entirely satisfy us. God is Omniscient. So what? Somebody has more vision than I have. That does not mean that my life is totally doomed with disappointment. Somebody is stronger than I. So what? His strength must not torture my heart. He has his own capacity. I have my own. His capacity far surpasses mine. Nevertheless I shall stay with my own capacity. I shall reach my goal according to my capacity at God’s choice hour.

Now, apart from having omniscience and omnipotence, God has a quality which transcends all His other divine qualities. And this quality is Love. Love is a divine magnet. It always pulls us.

Mother has love. The child runs towards the mother. The child has love. The mother runs towards the child. Love is the magnetic pull between the child and the mother. Similarly, God pulls us with His magnetic Love and we pull God with our magnetic love.

We think of God, pray to God and meditate on God because we need fulfilment, we need the feeling of inseparable oneness. And it is only God's Love that gives us fulfilment and the feeling of inseparable oneness. Again, inside Love all other divine qualities, such as Peace, Light and Bliss grow. Love is the strongest force. That is why inside Love everything can grow.

We feel that our path is easier, more effective in this sense: here we don’t have to read millions of books to know what the Truth is. Here we don’t have to exercise our mind day in and day out to know what the Truth looks like. No. Truth is inside us. It is crying to come to the fore. But unfortunately, we have kept the door shut and we are not allowing the Truth to come out. Now, how can we bring the Truth out of its prison cell? Again, I have to say it is through Love. Love for whom? Love for God. And who is God? It is the highest illumined part in us. God is not something else. God is not somebody else.

I have a head and two feet. Let us say, my feet are in ignorance and my head is above ignorance. My head represents the highest in me and my feet represent the lowest in me. I know that the highest and the lowest are mine. The lowest has to enter into the highest in order to be transformed and fulfilled.

In our path, the sense of identification is absolutely necessary. The highest has to feel his total oneness with the lowest. The lowest has to feel his total oneness with the highest. Needless to say that the highest always feels his oneness with the lowest. It is the lowest that finds it extremely difficult to be one with the highest because of his fear, doubt, jealousy and so forth.

The possessor of light is not afraid of entering into darkness because he knows that as soon as he enters into the darkness, he will be able to illumine it. Now, in this room there was no light before. I come now with a bright lamp. Immediately the room will be lit. Likewise, in the spiritual life, when we have inner light, we are not afraid of outer darkness. We know that we shall be able to transform and illumine it. You will be happy to learn that it is darkness that is always afraid of light. When the light comes in, the thief in you will be caught red-handed. A man of darkness fears, “Oh, I will be exposed. I have done many things wrong. I have told many lies. I have cheated so many people. I have misbehaved hundreds of times. The best thing for me is to hide." Unfortunately, a man of darkness does not understand that the light comes in only to illumine his age-long darkness.

So this is what is happening in the modern world. In spite of the fact that men need light, they are afraid of light. They think that they will be exposed. But, no. That is not the thing that you can expect from light. Light comes to illumine and transform us. Again, where is this light? In the mind? Never. It is in the soul. The little light that we see in the mind can never guide us to our destined goal. The goal is very far and to reach that goal we need abundant light. The mind's light is no better than a candle light. The storm of doubt can easily blow it out. Then, again, we fall into the same darkness. We become beggars, spiritual beggars.

But here inside the heart we have the soul. The soul has an endless and continuous flow of light. It neither ends nor stops. You will always be able to use it. You can never run short of it. God will not tolerate the doubting, suspecting and unaspiring mind for good. The soul will bring light to the mind through the heart and transform the mind at God’s choice hour.

I wish to come back to our path — the path of the heart, the path of love. When we really love someone, we give him all that we have and all that we are. God really loves us. That is why He is more than ready to give us His infinite Peace, Light and Bliss. Unfortunately, we do not have the power of receptivity. That is why we fail God. What is worse is our suspicion. We suspect ourselves: “We never prayed to God. We never thought of Him. We did so many things wrong. Why should He come to us?” Human beings judge God in a human way, but God, being the Divine, His ways are totally different from ours.

In the spiritual life, when we meditate, the first thing we do is conquer doubt. If I doubt myself, who will be the loser? I will be the loser. If I doubt you, who will be the loser? I will be the loser. God has all divine qualities in boundless measure. If I doubt God, God is not going to lose anything. He will remain with His own divine infinite Peace, Light, Bliss and Power. It is I who won’t get anything from God. Further, if I say that I am not meant for God, I am not meant for God-realisation, then it is I who am not getting what God wants to give me. But, if I have real love for God, like a child for his mother, He will do everything for me cheerfully and unreservedly.

Our path is the path of acceptance. We have to accept the world. If we enter into the Himalayan caves or sit on the mountain tops, or dive deep into the blue vast ocean and cry for our personal achievement and satisfaction, then we are not going to do anything for the world.

It will be like this — I shall eat food to my heart’s content and let my brothers remain unfed, let them starve. That is not good. If I am a real human being, I have to see that my brothers also must eat along with me. If we eat together, then only we shall get real satisfaction.

Similarly, in the spiritual life, real Spiritual Masters feel that is their bounden duty to eat in front of humanity and share the food with humanity. Naturally, all will eat spiritual food. Now, if humanity as a whole does not want to eat as it should, then what can this Spiritual Master do? But, if there are a few sincerely hungry, the Spiritual Master tells them, “The meal is ready. Let us eat together.”

In our path of acceptance we have to know that the earth is far from perfection. Unless we accept the earth-consciousness, how are we going to perfect it? If someone has some pain, I have to massage him. Then only his pain will go. Similarly, earth is defective at a particular place. I have to touch it with my aspiration and concern. Then only I can transform it. If I really love mankind, then I have to be with mankind and for that again, what I need is love. As long as the earth consciousness is not fully realised, I will try to remain with my inner consciousness on earth to be of service to mankind.

To conclude, our path of love is the path of inseparable oneness. On the strength of our love, we dare say that God is ours. On the strength of God's love, God claims us as His very own.