Becoming spiritually mature

In order to love, great power and energy must come from within yourself – you don’t want it to come from outside. You have all your senses. Initially, you will begin to use your senses in order to love. People get together, express their love, bring up a family with love, and transcend that physical love to selfless love.

First, learn to love each other

Divine friends, you will not know what spiritual love is until you have learned how to interact with your fellow human beings with love. That is the cornerstone of life. If a person hasn’t got that interaction of love with another, then they will not know divine love, selfless love.

You know, young people coming to our community say to me, “Can I become a monk or nun?” The first question I ask my mind is, “What do you know about your interaction of love with humanity?” If you do not know or have that interaction with love, how can you serve God with love? Then I send the person back into the world. I say, “Go on, you spend some time [in the world]. Never mind what you do. You will make mistakes but you will learn through that love and experience.” That love is very important.

Devotee: You told us to discriminate, and to look for things that are valuable to us. What is valuable to us?

Guru: That which will enable you to distinguish the Paramatma in you. Now until you grow up as a young man you are literally crawling on the ground trying to evolve. To stand and then grow up you need the assistance of your mother and father.

When you grow up, you throw away the things that you played with as a child. What matters then as you advance spiritually is that all the things that other people are attached to, you will soon push away. You think, “They are not for me. What satisfies me?” Why are you here? Why are you feeling within yourself a sense of satisfaction to come and have this interaction with me? Why?

Because all the material things that you have achieved for yourself in your life, and your family and your children now, whilst they are important and necessary, have taken second place in your life.

Life is impermanent

What matters to you most is that you want something worthwhile because you know the impermanence of life. You know inside you time is running out, and you have to say to yourself, “At the end of this journey what have I got?”

Isn’t that what made you come and sit before me?

Devotee: But how to develop it? How to get to the point where you can feel satisfied with the belongings you have.

Guru: You have already developed it, purely through your evolution in this world at the moment. You were a young man. You got your job and got married and had a family, you looked after them. They are all on their feet, and about to fly high. All these things teach you an element of detachment, of fulfillment.  

You’re fulfilled inside you, seeing your little chicks have flown out of the nest. And once they’ve flown the nest, this is the true moment when the person says “I have time now to think. I have time to consider the things that really matter because I know full well that none of these things that surround me in my life I can take [with me] when I go.”

Then your values begin to change. You alter them and this is why I say to people don’t give up anything, please don’t. You must not want it.

If you give [something] up Divine friends, that means you’ve given it up because I’ve told you so – but I’ve never told anybody to give up anything. I want you to say through your own intellectual examination, that you do not want any of these things and they are of no consequence.

People ask me, “Guruji, do I have to give up meat?”

I say, “No, don’t give up meat.” If you have given it up because I told you so then what you will do is whenever you go to a restaurant or you are invited by your friends, they will be eating a nice rump steak and you will be standing there googly-eyed, thinking, “Why on earth did I promise Guruji that I should give this up?”

You may as well eat it because [you’re thinking about it] but if you say, “No. Through my own reasoning, I do not want this, because it excites my body and my mind. This brings out my aggression and I have no control of my senses.”

This is a good reason why you have said to yourself, I am not eating it because it gives me indigestion. It causes a lot of emotional stress.

I want you to use your mind, not to tranquilise your mind. I want you to reason within yourself, and that is vital. Giving up is easy in words, to sustain it is almost impossible.

 

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