Create positive change!

Sometimes people find it difficult to understand or accommodate in their minds the word karma. Karma means the law of cause and effect. Every action has a cycle of reactions. There is nothing which does not react. I speak to you, and it’s a vibration that I am setting in motion, which is carried into the ether. It is registered as a vibration forever. It goes into the ether. Also, it has a bearing on the power and strength of that word I am saying to have an impact on your mind and it has a vibration that surrounds me as well. So I pick up this vibration and set it in motion, conscious of the vibration I want to create for you so that you benefit from what I say.

The power of love and harmony

That is the extent of cause and effect. Nothing is haphazard, everything has a vibration. That is why I say to you harmonise. Harmonise all the time, as you go along. You have the power.

If you make a mistake, or if you have done something that causes injury and a lot of disturbances in your relationships in life, you have the power to harmonise and change it and say, “No, no, I am not going to carry on in the same way. I want to change it. I want to create harmony.” Harmony and love are two facets of good spiritual conduct.

Love! Start with your family, start loving your family, your father, your mother, your brothers, your sisters, your aunts, your wives…did I say ‘wives’? (laughter), husband, many. You must learn to harmonise with every life. Create that love and power that you have inherited from your birth. You brought power from your birth [and past life], and that power is pulsating in your veins for you have immense knowledge. 

Access your depth of knowledge

I have read only one book in my life yet there wherever I go there I have pulsating in my veins the immense knowledge that I brought from one cycle of birth to another. This is proof of the immensity of knowledge you have inside. It is playing a part in your life.

You have wisdom and knowledge of the past inside. This is a voyage of discovery in this life, in this incarnation, to find out how you can use your potential to the best of your ability. You’ll be surprised that you don’t use that because you are not challenged in life. It is only when you are challenged, or when you feel that your back is against the wall, and you have to survive in life that slowly your knowledge and wisdom manifest to help and sustain you in your life.

That is why people who have been challenged, or artists who have lived from hand to mouth are good painters and good. Poetry, books, and literature, have all come when people are challenged. Their resolve comes about to write and create something worthwhile for generations to come.

That is why we put people through the third degree as it were. To make them go through hardships, and make them realise that through their adversity they will become spiritual. They will discover that divinity within themselves, and the immense reserve of power and knowledge that exists within. 

When you are sick, when you have a problem to overcome, or when you are challenged and the doctor says, “I am sorry I can’t give you any hope,” you must say, “Phooey to you! I have plenty of hope and desire for myself. I have the power inside me, I can live and I will live and prove you wrong.”

You have the knowledge that is inherent in you, you have the power there lying dormant within you to heal yourself. You have the power inside you to change whatever you so will for your benefit and for you to advance spiritually.

If you say “No”, no it is; if you say “Yes”, yes it is. But you must change the course of destiny by your awareness and heightened mindfulness within yourself.

That awareness says to you, “I have power, I have not used it. My brain is not functioning well.” Learn to concentrate and practice meditation, contemplation, bhakti yoga, and karma yoga – all of these are to improve your quality of life. For you to concentrate, and make your mind work like a shaft to penetrate whatever you want, and I promise you, if you start practising it, you will enjoy the joy of bouncing your mind into other people’s lives, homes, and lifestyles. Enjoying and understanding them. 

When I travel in the car, Swami always says to me, “Well, your body is here, but you are not here.” Yes, I tell you what I do, I regard it as a privilege for me to travel on a particular road or area. I watch every home and place that I am passing in the remotest areas. I go in zooming around in my mind, into their lifestyles, and seeing what I can do to help them. The very fact that the Divine Mother is taking me on a particular route, is for me to help those people and give them grace and the darshan of the Divine Mother on their journey in life.

That is the excitement I have when I travel on a plane. Everybody has been well-screened by the time I have finished with them, including the air hostesses, and the stewards, everybody has had a thorough good going-over by the time I get off the plane. “Bye!” “Bye” means I have given them some power and the same when I get into a car. I slowly sit there and stir people up inside, and then you get a little bit of shakti and the car zooms away. It’s fun for me. That is the joy. You must also think like that. 

Don’t allow a moment to pass you by. Be vital, be excited by life. How can you have power? Spirituality is power. If your strength and energy are depleted in your body, you can’t do anything with spirituality, it’s a fantasy world.

That is why we say to monks and nuns, “Abstain from sexual conduct if you want to set an example to mankind.” I won’t part with my energy to anybody, because the Divine Mother comes and gives me such grace and power so that I can use it for the wellbeing of people. I am not telling you all to be monks and nuns, but if you are going to follow a spiritual path, conserve your energy.

People eat caviar, salmon and all kinds of meat and drink champagne because they enjoy it but also because it is a form of stimulus for their activities sensually.

If you want to control your sensual activity, then learn to choose the food that you are going to eat. You must understand what sort of food stimulates your life, and your body and you’re the best judge. If you eat something and it stimulates you, and you find you cannot handle the amount of energy that is generated in your body, then you are the best judge to say to yourself, “Gosh, when  I eat that it makes me quite hyper, and I cannot cope with myself. It makes more demands of me than I am willing to cope with or that I can handle.” Then cut down on that particular type of food.

There are many categories of food – tamasic, rajasic, sattvic. Rajasic food means the food I was just talking about earlier, which stimulates your activities in life that heightens the use of your senses.

Sattvic gives you a nice quiet mannerism in your conduct, hence a lot of yogis and a lot of people who are following a spiritual path, such as the Hare Krishna movement, never allow their sannyasis to eat garlic, onions, and so on because they say, “It is too stimulating.” But it has done nothing to me at all!

I am only going to open the door to you to choose if you want to eat garlic. I prepare a lot of food with lots of garlic to stimulate your appetite and heighten your consciousness a little bit more and make you feel high by the time you leave this place. You will be on cloud cuckoo land. But the fact of the matter is if you find something overexcites you, then be cautious. You are the person who is going to handle the situation. You must be able to say to yourself, “Gosh, this is driving me quite nuts, I better cut down my diet.”

What is the life of a monk or nun in Skandavale like?

Now, I can talk about the life of the monks and nuns in Skandavale because it gives you a good example. All the monks and nuns do a full day’s work. We get up at half-past four in the morning every day of the year. We have devotions and then work. Devotions and work. Devotions and work and if you crawl to bed on two legs you should be very happy.

Karma yoga means you have to use all the resources of your body to push the boundaries of tolerance, as you work to the edge, to your breaking point. Then you will see how you are going to cope with your mind.

This is to make sure that you can handle any situation that arises in your life. That is the training for a monk and a nun in my community. Any of you who have the idea of joining it can see the regulars there and they will tell you that is how it is. You get discipline and orderliness from that, and people who are dedicated to serving humanity.

There is a marked difference between Buddhism and other faiths. Buddhism has a rule that the monks are served by the public as a must. They believe they have the power to liberate human beings just by getting food and luxuries that are given to them. I don’t believe that at all. I believe that whether you are a monk, nun, guru, or pope, you need to do a day’s work to pay for karma yoga. To serve humanity, to go to the assistance of people, to go to the people who are sick, who are dying. We have a job to do. That is the training of karma yoga in the monastery. To make the monks and nuns serve all life, including animals, birds, human beings, every life, and the environment and society.

Karma yoga means that we must grasp the opportunity to pay the karma that we have created from one cycle of birth to death. This life is not the beginning and end, it is a continuation of cause and effects that we are setting in motion. You are the person who is going to reap the harvest of your sowing, of your actions. It is only you who will suffer the consequences of your actions and also influence other people.

Serving others

You have the power to change through your positive dedication and service to life. Don’t waste your time. Grasp the opportunity. If you are inclined to do a professional job, get a job that will be of service to others. For example, handicapped people, children of varying groups, and people who need help, counselling, advice, and consoling. Go to people who are dying, or who are lonely. Today is the most important ingredient in life, in an affluent society. We are creating places where people are lonely. That is the greatest luxury now waiting in an affluent society.

People are isolated and when they have a problem there is nobody for them to interact with and relate to. We must create the opportunity for people to have that interaction and relationship. That is counselling. Counselling means healing, understanding, and listening to someone’s expression from their heart.

Having all the money in the world doesn’t solve your problems. Having all the money in the world creates a gap in your life, which requires you to have somebody or some interaction with people. When there is a pressurised moment you can have a point of communication. Nowadays luxury means having an interaction and hearing the pleasing voices of other people. 

You can go to a shop and buy what you want. You can go to a shop and get what you want and feel, “Ok, I can eat what I want, and drink what I want.” But when there is pressure, and every human being has pressure from time to time, you must create in your circle of friends people who can come together. You can talk about each other’s lives and problems and have honest and truthful interactions. That is invaluable, that is what spirituality is about.

If you want to create a society where you are caring and understanding, that form of life is very important. Whilst you can be successful and make a lot of money, and I want you to make an awful lot of money, what you do with that money is very important. You can’t take a farthing, not one penny of what you have made with you when you go.

You must create for yourself and for the society in which you live a place that is of beauty, love, service, and compassion. That is what you must do in your life, that is spirituality for me.

That is what I want you to take with you when these three days of activities with me here [are finished]. For you to be so generated with a desire to serve the community in which you live, to make it a better place for the next generation of people who come. Be caring, always consider not yourself, not ‘mine’’. We are growing into a very successful society in Europe. As we grow, there is a trend towards being isolationists.

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