Preparing the body and mind to receive divine energy

Guru: The body is the dwelling place of the Lord. What does that mean, the dwelling place for the Lord?

[The body] is an instrument with which we work to discover the potential within ourselves, which is Divine. Your eyes, ears, voice, actions, and energies – all are but instruments with which to discover the highest embodiment within yourself.

Now people have the most amazing concept that you can do what you want with the body and then allow God to come into it as well. You must prepare the body to receive the energy of the Divine – Shakti.

That means you must find out what you put inside yourself. Whether it is injurious or harmful to you, where it is grown, and how it has come onto your plate. Be intelligent enough to question all that surrounds you in your life, to find out whether it is harmful or injurious.

Everybody’s talking about ecology, but what is ecology? Ecology means that you want a better lifestyle in the environment in which you live, [to know if] the water you drink, the air you breathe, and the food you eat [is natural]. Also, to find out whether the food that you grow in terms of vegetables is grown naturally or unnaturally.

Whether the element that is introduced to the growth of life, and to the grass that you grow, is a chemical. All of these create an imbalance in the body and eventually an imbalance of the mind. Ultimately the human being finds it difficult to cope with those imbalances.

But fortunately, the EEC has been making it a must that all chemicals and whatever is introduced into food is well catalogued in the sale of the food.

We have to question all of these things.

Consider what you eat and where it comes from

You know you eat cheese. Have you questioned how that cheese was made? There are two substances you use for the making of cheese, rennet, and renelazy. Now rennet comes from the extract of calves’ hooves and stomachs. Renelazy is a chemical [that is] produced [and then] introduced into making cheese.

The vibrations of those two are distinctly different. You always have to ask yourself how it is made. Nowadays there are more and more shops selling vegetarian cheese. Vegetarian cheese is cheese made out of renelazy, not rennet. They have introduced it more and more because people are saying, “No, I don’t want this.” (cheese made from rennet)

We have to ask ourselves what has been introduced into the food chain that is going to interfere with our lifestyle.

I was asked a very important question – is wine good or bad for you spiritually? You know, if you drink five cups of tea, it’s bad for you. If you drink ten cups of coffee, it’s bad for you. If you drink anything in excess it’s bad for you. If you eat everything in excess, it’s bad for you.

You must monitor the amount of drink whatever it is and say to yourself when I take too many glasses of port, gin, or alcohol, it interferes with my clear thinking and the alcohol in my blood has some adverse effect.

You must have the ability to say to yourself, “Right, I will have one drink and that’s quite enough for me.” If it’s not harmful, maybe two. By the third, you’re getting into the nice, happy stage. After four you see butterflies!

You are the best person [to decide] whether you want to see butterflies or have a nice drink.

I am not going to tell you not to drink. But if you drink, be wise about how much you’re consuming, and whether or not that can be tolerated by the body. Be the judge of it and assess it for yourself.

I said the body is the dwelling place of the Lord. You must prepare it. When the Divine comes to you, you must be ready to handle the power and energy of the Divine in your body.

If there are any impurities in that body you will really find a reaction that absolutely blows your mind. Hence, there is a safety mechanism within the body that stops you from advancing to the Divine until you’ve prepared your body. This safety mechanism in the body is there for the evolution of the human being spiritually. In other words, until you’ve prepared the ground and the dwelling place of the Lord, you have no accessibility to the total energy of the Divine. Slowly we are growing up. The world is growing up to discover this. Hence, you will find that great yogis and rishis and a lot of masters abstain from things that disrupt the body.  

We overstimulate ourselves. You don’t have to overstimulate yourself. Anything that is unnatural [such as] drugs – no way! I’ve heard young people say to me, “But yogis smoke hash.” They are bogies that smoke hash. Yogis don’t need hash. They are stimulated by divine power. They don’t need any foreign material in their brain.  

The brain is an amazing mechanism. You want it to function without any interference or foreign substances going through your brain because it’s an impediment not to get it functioning at its best. You want it to be alert.  

What does the brain do? It is like a receiving station collecting all the impulses around you. To discover those impulses you must be heightened in your awareness. Any foreign matter that goes into that disturbs your equilibrium, your mind, and the proper functioning of the brain.

All the senses must be able to send impulses to the brain that are registered in the brain and your reactions must be very swift. We want our reflex actions to be so swift that [for example] I can put my hand like this (Guru puts his hand near a devotee’s head) and go ‘zoom’ and I have a feel of you, with my fingers like that. Hence, I can feel you and get you in my whole system and it registers in my brain.  

Cultivate a heightened awareness

This is how you were in your early, what you call primitive, state when your survival depended on heightened awareness and consciousness. That heightened awareness and consciousness diminished as you called yourself civilised. You became uncivilised really.

What happened was that your heightened awareness and your sense of preservation diminished because you became complacent. The mind was tranquilised with a sense of security. But you need to survive in the world you live in by heightening your senses and awareness.

If you pick something up in your hand, you should be able to feel how it has come about, the way it has come about, and the whole story about it. You must feel. Look at the young bird flying underneath the hovering hawk. Its survival depends on its alertness and awareness. If not, it will be killed.  

We are destroying ourselves by tranquilising ourselves from being receptive to the vibrations that exist around us. We have put a lot of substances and vibrations into the mind that impairs its proper functioning.

That is why we say to people, “Look at the food you eat. You are the food [that you eat] and that which you have put into your system. Then you manifest it. Your aggression, your fear, and all the vibrations that stimulate you in your life you have put into yourself. The environment you live in, and the water you drink also affect you. 

When I go to London, I always drink bottled water. Because when I see the water flowing through the taps I say to myself, “Five times recycled.” You may have been able to get the impurities out of the water but you have not been able to take away the vibrations. You want purity in your bloodstream, not a vibration. Vibration cannot be analysed through this process of eliminating the bacteria. That vibration comes from how it came through the tap that you drink it from. You must be conscious of all these things. This for me is spirituality. 

Use your awareness to change your life

Spirituality means [being aware of] what you eat and drink, and the way your lifestyle is. Spirituality means the vibrations and calmness that exist inside you, the power that you have in your mind, and the functions and faculties of your brain. The totality of that enables you to discover your divinity – the power within yourself. That is what yoga means to me. Yoga means par excellence in every single thing. I want you to be able to say to yourself, “I’ve started a journey on the spiritual path. Let me examine the causes and effects that are set in motion. I want to improve the life-cycle within myself and my surrounding environment.”  

Live in a place that isn’t crowded [if you can], and have accessibility to pure air. We call it ‘prana’. Prana means the oxygen level that is coming into your bloodstream that enables you to combat any impurity that exists in your body. All the cells of your body need oxygen and if you live in an area close to the mountains, or you go regularly to the mountains, you will feel much better inside and you will be able to combat any problem that the body has to overcome.

Nobody is going to live indefinitely. But whilst we live, let us take advantage to improve the quality of our lives and the lives of our fellow beings. [To improve] the air we breathe, and the environment we live in. Let’s improve the quality of food we have and the sort of relationships we have with other people. [And to understand] that the amount of pressure that is borne by us stops us from having time to truly relax and discover our own power.

In the silence of your own thoughts, you will discover God. It is not in the hubbub of activity that you will find God. There must be a time for every human being before they go to bed at night to withdraw for at least five or ten minutes. Reflect on your day’s activities, and your lifestyle, and then say to yourself, “I have made these mistakes.” Have the courage of your conviction to change it. Nobody else can do it for you. You must say to yourself, “I want to change.”  

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