1. ES 77 - 03 -2 Amrit: In fact he was once on the Board of Directors of 26 different corporations at the same time and this include a different types of work such as films, finances, textiles etc. Okay, when guru – Gururaj also was married and raised a family of three sons. His eldest son presently is about 22 years old and his youngest son, I think, about 14. Now when Gururaj, in April of 1975, the time came for Gururaj to begin the real work for which he was born, which was to be a spiritual teacher in these very troubled times at the end of the century and the beginning of the next. Now for many years, whilst he was a business man and raising his family, he had been studying many many different forms of meditation and learning how to apply different forms of meditation to different individuals depending upon their individual requirements. During those years he had guided many many hundreds of people in meditation practices and – and gradually discovered how these practices could immensely help them in their own personal spiritual development. But starting in 1975, he actually began to apply his knowledge outside of just personal contact with people in South Africa, he began by opening up small centres in Japan and India and then next in England in March of 1876 and then shortly thereafter in a number of other countries including the US, Spain of course, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Rhodesia and so on. Now there is so much about a guru that one doesn’t know simply from seeing the guru for his surface value, and this is because, as I said before, on the surface a guru is just an ordinary human personality like anyone else. The real key to the effectiveness of a guru to the function and purpose of a guru is to be found in this capacity to be a kind of channel for spiritual energies and this is the basis of this concept of Guru Shakti which you’ve heard about so much since beginning your practices. Now would anyone here –would you like to hear me go a little more deeply into the concept of Guru Shakti? Shall we? Shall we talk about that more? Okay. Now I would like to approach this whole thing by considering a very simple analogy which I think will help you to understand the – what Guru Shakti is and what a guru is in relationship to Guru Shakti. First of all, let’s consider just ordinary physical energies of the kind which physicists study in their laboratory’s at the present time. Okay. Now ordinary physical energies are found everywhere in the world, everywhere in the universe, we don’t have to go anywhere to find physical energies. Okay, there's light energy, heat energy, sound energy, the kinetic energy of moving water, things like that. Okay, now the different – the one important thing is that energies exist in different concentration, in different places. For instance, there’s more energy at the centre of the sun then there is, say at the centre of the earth and the – and there’s more energy at the centre of the earth then there is somewhere perhaps in outer space. But nonetheless energy exists everywhere, physical energy. Okay. Now suppose we have a light or a lamp that we want to light. Suppose we have a lamp that we want to light. The problem then is a very simple one, what we want to do is we want to get enough energy that is a sufficient quantity of energy in the right form from where that energy exists to the light, to the lamp. So what we want to do basically is channel energies from

2. ES 77 - 03 -2 one part of the world to another part. Now the process of doing this is a three part process. First of all we have to have a generator. Now I want to ask you a question, does a generator create energy? No, no. what does a generator do? Okay, what a generator does is it takes energy just natural forms of energy which are flowing in the world somewhere whether its heat or light or sound energy, whatever and it just transmutes that energy into a useful form and concentrates it in a certain place. Okay, now the generator then is the first step. A generator simply takes natural flowing forms of energy and concentrates them in a certain area in the proper form. Now the second step is when we run a wire from the generator to the lamp, what is the third stage? What’s the third stage? To turn on the lamp, to switch the switch on. Now when we switch the switch on, what we do is we create a linkage, we complete a circuit and once the circuit is completed, then automatically the energy can flow to the generator, from the generator to the lamp. Now we could also use another analogy, we could say that the – that the energy in the generator is sent out through a radio – a radio transmitter, another analogy. We could use another analogy, we could say that the energy from the generator is sent out through a radio-transmitter in the form of radio waves and of course radiowaves are just another form of energy. Now if we want to actually hear the music in the radio waves, what do we do? What – we have to tune in the radio set to the right wave link. If we don’t tune in to the right wave link, the radio waves can be there but we won’t experience them. So it is we who have the freewill and the responsibility to decide whether or not we’re going to flick on the light switch or tune in the radio receiving set. Now the situation with guru Shakti is exactly the same as in the physica l analogy which we’ve just used. The Sanskrit term Shakti simply means energy or power and spiritual energies or spiritual power exists everywhere in the universe. This is because the universe, this is because divinity exists everywhere. We don’t have to go anywhere to find god or divinity. Divinity exists within us as well as without, it exists in this world and in all other planets scattered throughout the universe. So spiritual energies that is Shakti are simply emanations from divinity and since divinity exists everywhere, so do spiritual energies exist everywhere. Now in order for us to grow or evolve spiritually towards our destiny of unity with the divine, and more practically speaking, in order for us to become better human beings, to acquire a greater capacity to love, to be more – more stable, stronger, more capable of responding in a creative way to whatever situation we encounter in our life, in order for all of these things to happen which are all part of spiritual growth, it’s very necessary that we should make use of these universal spiritual energies. But we are the ones who have the responsibility and the freewill to decide whether or not we’re going to make use of those energies. Now through our meditation and spiritual practices, we begin to evoke and to make use of these universal energies. For instance, the vibrational quality of the mantra begins to illicit spiritual energies within ourselves that help us to grow. A nd it’s therefore very important that the mantra which one receives has a vibration which will illicit the right kind of spiritual

3. ES 77 - 03 -2 energies for any specific individual. Otherwise one’s development can often be distorted and unbalanced. This – this is the reason for our policy of always choosing mantras on a very personal basis. However in addition, there’s another great – another immensely powerful means for making use of this universally existing spiritual energies and this way has been acknowledged and used since the beginning of time. And this way simply involves the putting of our attention upon some individual who has achieved a very high level of spiritual realisation. Let’s return to our analogy for just a moment. A spiritual teacher is like a generator, he does not create spiritual energies. The energies simply exist, but the spiritual teacher within himself is a – is a very strongly concentrated channel or conduit for these spiritual energies. Therefore the spiritual teacher is like a very powerful generator, one that can channel tremendous amounts of spiritual energy in the same way as a powerful generator can channel tremendous amounts of electricity and remember it’s very important to remember that all human beings are channels for spiritual energy. Which means that each of us is like a generator of different strengths depending upon our individual level of spiritual evolution. The more we develop through our meditational practices, and our attempts to live a better life, the more powerful the generator will become automatically. The ultimate goal of every human being is to achieve complete union with divinity and when we have achieved that state, we have the same capacity then to channel spiritual energies as a guru, as a spiritual teacher. Okay. Now when the spiritual teacher has achieved this state, he concentrates within himself the spiritual energies, but he is constantly radiating them from himself and when we simply put our attention on the spiritual teacher, then we are automatically tuning our individual wave links with the universal wave links of these spiritual energies. Just like tuning in the radio set. And then we receive directly within our self these spiritual energies and this is what is meant by Guru Shakti. Now since the beginning of time, all spiritual teachers, all of them that we know about and many hundreds which we don’t know about today, thousands even, which we don't know about today, have helped individual human beings to grow through the imparting of these energies. But it’s very important to understand that it’s not the personality of the teacher which is – which is doing this, it’s rather that the personality is just a channel for these spiritual energies. This is why, for instance, when Christ would do something such as a healing, for instance, and people would try to give him credit for it, he would always say, “It wasn’t me, it was my father in heaven.” So it’s very important to understand that it’s part of our teaching that in no way are we involved as – as guru worshippers, in the sense the we do not worship the guru’s personality, what we worship is divinity and we recognise that the spiritual teacher is a very profound channel for divinity. Now this often has caused confusion in the history of many teachers that the disciples of the teachers have confused the personality of the teacher with the divine energies which flow through the teacher. So it’s always important that we should not make that confusion.

4. ES 77 - 03 -2 Now would you like to – there are several ways in which we ourselves as individuals can experience Guru Shakti, would you like to talk about this? Would you like to get into this at all? Okay. Now how we, as individuals, experience guru Shakti depends upon our own personality. For instance some people tend to be very much centred in their feelings, that is some individuals experience deeper, more abstract things mainly through the sense of feeling. Other individuals tend to experience things more concretely through one of the senses such as the sense of vision. This means then that when Guru Shakti is flowing to us, we might experience – experience the Guru Shakti in a way which is individual to our own individual nature. For instance, in England we have a number of individuals whose sense of vision or sight is quite highly developed. These individuals have experiences periodically where they actually see Gururaj at various times in their lives, sometimes at night in sleep, sometimes during meditation or sometimes just in the flow of daily activity. For instance we have a man in England who very often when he meditates, he will shift into another dimension and in this other dimension, Gururaj will come to him in a visual form which is just as real as you and I sitting here and talking together. In fact he says it seems even more real and he, we have long letters in which he describes in great detail all of these series of lessons which he learns in this way. Now this is because this particular man has a highly developed visual sense and therefore he experiences these universal spiritual forces in terms of the visual sense. Now it’s important to understand that the actual lessons which are being taught come from a deep universal area of our consciousness which we could call the universal mind. They don’t come from Gururaj as a physical three dimensional personality, so what – when this in – when this individual puts his attention on Gururaj, when he thinks about Gururaj in his daily, when his awareness is on Gururaj, when he looks at his photograph or something like this, then these devices for putting his attention on Gururaj, Gururaj becomes like a symbol for this area of universal mind and it’s through this symbol that the individual tunes in to the area which is the universal mind. And so also, the form which comes to the individual, which they see and interact which is not Gururaj’s physical personality, but it’s the symbolic concrete form through which we experience the knowledge coming from this deep abstract level. This is because all of us as human beings needed concrete symbols that we can focus our attention on which are representative of universal truths. For instance it’s very hard to do complex mathematical reasoning which is very abstract unless you use actual symbols that you write on paper. So the experience of this man was the symbolic form of Gururaj which represented this universal truth. Is this clear or am I being too much like university professor? Gururaj as the other night. Is it clear? You see? Okay – okay – okay. Okay. Now many – many other individuals have reported feeling a sense of some kind of strengthening or sustaining presence at various times in their life since they became involved with Gururaj’s practices. Okay, I bet I'm – I'm sure that it’s the case that there are dozens of people on this room who have had that kind of experience that maybe at a certain moment they have been tired or they’ve been in unhappy situation or a difficult situation and they put their attention on Gururaj for

5. ES 77 - 03 -2 a few moments and there’s been a sudden or a gradual feeling or a sense that there's a sustaining presence there which is helping them in that difficult situation. How many have had that kind of experience? Quite a number. How many have had experiences where they seen or heard Gururaj in some way? Okay, several people here. Now it’s more common for people to feel the sense of that presence rather than to see it but both are possible. Now there's another way that we can experience this that sometimes we will be in a situation where we need a certain kind of knowledge, certain information to help us through that situation and suddenly will have – yes, and suddenly there will be a point where we will recognise or we will see, we will get an insight where we understand exactly how to deal with that situation. It’s called spiritual intuition yeah and this is also can be a manifestation of Guru Shakti and some people will experience things in that way. So it could be through a sense, through feeling or through intuition or even all of these things put together. Okay so this is Guru Shakti. Now is it time for our practices? Translator: I don’t know. Yes, he says that in 15 minutes you have an appointment with somebody who is on the list. Amrit: I see – I see, I don’t think there's anyone for tonight. Okay. Now does anyone have any questions they want to ask? Question right over here. Translator: He says that you have an appointment at 7:00 o’clock. He sent the list. Amrit: Okay, why don’t we do this? Why don’t we all stand up for just a few minutes and have a good stretch because we’ve all been sitting for so long and then maybe for 10-15 minutes we could have some questions and then after that we’ll do our group practices? Okay. – They won’t be done in time for dinner. Okay. So it’s been lovely to be with you and I’ll see you later this evening. Okay. Translator: They say what about family and marriage who was the original topic. Am rit: Oh God! See I just felt it’s very difficult for Gururaj to talk about himself understand? In other words, a guru can’t talk about what it is to be a guru, only someone who is not yet a guru can talk about what it is to be a guru and I thought i t might just be useful for you to have some of these information in more detail so you'd know you had more understanding of what was happening here at this course. Now I’d love to give the talk on marriage too and if you can find any room for it in the course I’ll do it. I do have this lecture on tape and anyone can hear it on tape, it will be translated into Spanish. Also, by the way, it’d be nice to start out Gururaj with that question tonight about marriage yeah? Okay?

6. ES 77 - 03 -2 Translator: Amrit, he wants to know – he wants to know if you have reached already the Samadhi state and how long have you been in the meditation practices? Amrit: Tell him I've been meditating for eight years and I'm not – I'm not in Savikalpa or Nirvikalpa Samadhi but I've had some glimpses of Samadhi, nothing permanent – nothing permanent. Okay? So each individual has to awaken the internal guru, the external guru is an aid to us to awaken the internal guru. Once the internal guru is awakened, then we are a guru unto ourselves. And remember that Savikalpa and Nirvikalpa Samadhi are permanent states, once they're gained, they're never lost. We may have glimpses of those states before they're achieved, but until it becomes permanent, we cannot rightly say we are enlightened. Is that clear? Okay. Okay five rounds of --