Pleasing God in His own Way⁷

“Master, something happened yesterday.”

“Tell me, what was it?”

“Master, yesterday during your talk, you said that if we first please God in His own Way, then God will please us in our own way. Master, do you remember saying this?”

“Yes, I remember, Rohina. I did say it.”

“Then, Master, I take this as your promise to mankind.”

“Certainly, you can take it as my solemn promise to mankind.”

“Master, now I have to tell you my secret hope.”

“What is your secret hope?”

“Master, for the last ten years I have been crying and crying to marry Tanka, but you have not allowed us to get married. Now I have decided that we shall please you in your own way by not getting married. So I am sure that the day will come when you will be pleased with us and then you will say, ‘All right, go and get married.’ ”

“Foolish girl! When I say that only when you please God unconditionally in His own Way will God please you, how can you take it in that way? When will God please you in your own way? Only when you become an unconditionally surrendered disciple, only when you please God unconditionally and constantly, only when your way becomes His Way.

“Today perhaps you can please God unconditionally for one minute. But after that minute is over, everything is conditional, conditional, conditional. Now, why should God care for the fulfilment of your teeming desires? You entered into the spiritual life with the idea that God would give you Peace, Light, Bliss and Power in infinite measure. God promised that He would definitely give you all this because you wanted to give up the life of desire and enter into the life of aspiration. But now, in spite of the fact that you have prayed and meditated for so many years, you still want to enter into the life of temptation, the life of vital pleasure, the life of possession and bondage. You feel that once your Master is pleased with you he will allow you to go your own way. This is a serious mistake.

“When the Master tells you, ‘Please God in His own Way, and then God will please you in your own way,’ you have to know that when you become unconditionally surrendered to God for your whole life, there comes a time when your will and God’s Will become totally one. When you become totally one with God, your decision and God’s decision are the same. A child does not know what his father’s will is. But when the child grows into a mature man he becomes totally one with his father’s wisdom. He knows perfectly well that he has established his conscious oneness with his father. And naturally, if the son has to make a decision, his father knows that he will do the right thing.

“What I said about you pleasing God and God pleasing you applies to the time when you have established constant, inseparable and permanent oneness with God. At that time, whether you tell God to do something or God tells you to do something, it is the same. At that time it becomes impossible for God to refuse you anything, because His Will and your will have become totally one. On the strength of your surrender you have become one with Him. And on the strength of His Wisdom-Light He has become one with you.

“At the time of your permanent unconditional surrender, if you want to maintain your individuality, you can say, ‘God, this is the decision I have made.’ But your individuality has already entered into universal unity with God’s Reality. So there is still no difference of choice or will between you and God. This is what I meant when I said that if you fulfil God in His own Way, He will fulfil you in your own way.

“Suppose you give me a glass of water and then, because you have pleased me, ask me to buy you a gun so that you can kill your enemy. Shall I allow that? Similarly, at this point in your spiritual life, you want to marry a particular person whom God Himself does not want you to marry. Will God allow you to do something which is not right for you, even if you have pleased Him? It is true that sometimes God does want a seeker to do a certain thing at a later date. God may feel that now is not the right time for something — that you should make considerable progress in your spiritual life and then, later on, He will consider the case again.

“But if the Master once tells you that God Himself has said that this union cannot take place because He feels that the two souls do not go together, this is a categorical statement. Once the Master has made a categorical statement, if the disciples still cling to their own hopes and attachments, they are making a serious mistake. They may think that if they please the Master in his own way for a number of years, then naturally he will try to please them, but this is wrong.

“Suppose you have an innocent desire: you want to become a good singer in a short time. But circumstances and your capacity do not allow you to become a good singer. Now at this point, if God’s Compassion enters into your limited capacity, He can easily expedite your singing capacity. He will do this only if He sees that the fulfilment of this particular desire will not eventually lead you to a life of destruction. God may fulfil an innocent snow-white desire if you truly please Him, but He will not fulfil your damaging and destructive desires at that time. God gives us what we want if He safely can so that our hearts will gratefully offer the Supreme what He Himself wants: our eternal, unconditional surrender.

“Naturally, even if you have just a little aspiration God will offer you His infinite Compassion. His Compassion, which is Power, will expedite your spiritual progress. Without God’s Compassion, it would have taken you hundreds of years to make the progress which you have made since you entered the spiritual life and began consciously pleasing God — in your own way, of course, and according to your own capacity.”