1. ES 83 - 05 -1 Public: Guruji, it is often said what is past is past, it is also said that we should learn from the past. How should we best use the past to build a better future? Gururaj: Good, I think tonight we can cover quite a few questions together, is there another one? Public: Guruji, with the law of opposites state if we create one part, the other automatically comes into existence. I, by creating goodness, badness is also brought into existence. If we then strive too much to the light, the <0:00:55.8>, do we not then create the darkness <0:01:00.3>? Should we not aim to harmonise both forces in our being? And if so, how can we manifest this principle in our everyday life? Gururaj: Beautiful – beautiful. Good, we’ll combine both questions tonight. When we say, let the past be the past or what can we do to learn from the past? Now, when we say the past is the past, it contains a very great truth. What it really means is forget the past because remembering the past, you will be living in your mind in the past and by stirring up those old memories, you will only suffer in the present. The suffering would be in the present because you remember the past all the time. Some incident might have happened in your lifetime and if you keep on thinking about it, that memory is sure to bring about guilt in your mind, and I might have said this in England before, because I know I've said it somewhere that the greatest disease in the world today is not heart disease and neither cancer, but a sense of guilt. So in order to get rid of guilt, what do we do is while forgetting the past, not remembering the past, we analyse the sense of guilt. Now what makes me feel guilty? Because of some happening of the past, when the past is not here anymore, why am I feeling guilty at the present moment? But then as soon as you think of analysing the guilt, the past reappears again on the screen of your mind, what to do, what can you do? Now when we analyse the past, remember the word analyse and not live in the past. Analysis is something totally different than remembering the past for you know well that the greatest gift god could give to a man is to be able to forget, if we had to remember everything that has happened in the past, life would become miserable. So now here we’ve got to discriminate between remembering the past and analysing the past, because in analysis you objectify the past while remembering the past, you subjectify it, you re-live the past. Now in analysis you observe what has happened in the past, you try and analyse what were the causes of it? Perhaps you were not to blame for your actions, you were not to blame for your actions, you might have been in a certain mental turmoil, there might have been circumstances that surrounded you at that time that forced you to do the action that you did. You know the lovely story by Victor Hugo, Les Miserables where he was forced into the circumstances seeing his children starving, he went to seal a loaf of bread for which he

2. ES 83 - 05 -1 suffered a lot? Now did the character in Victor Hugo’s book do something wrong? Which was the lesser or greater evil which was darkness and which was light? Should he allow his children to die of starvation or was it better for him to steal a loaf of bread for them and not for him? So in life there are circumstances that one has to choose between two evils and you choose between the lesser evil. Now if that produces a guilt in your mind, then you analyse, “Why did I do this? What caused me to do this? What was the mental chemistry then that forced me to do this?” Because inwardly every person has that goodness and underlying the goodness, there is also darkness. But now every person having that goodness in him, you know the old saying, nobody is too good that has no little bad and no one is so bad that has no good in him? Fine. So remembrance of the past is not the answer that leads to greater misery and it leads to guilt. But analysis of the past means that we are trying to understand the past, we try to understand the motivation, what made us perform such an action and if you find that you were forced into certain circumstances which 99% of all actions would prove, then you do not need to feel guilty about it. I was invited to one of the biggest prisons near Chicago to give a talk last year, and as a matter of fact we have a prison’s programme going on in America for rehabilitation of the prisoners because a prison is not somewhere where you punish someone, a prison is a place where you rehabilitate someone, so we introduce this programme in this Chicago prison, one of the largest in America I believe, and of course from there it is spreading to various other states at the moment, fine, and I had to give a talk there, so I told those prisoners there, “You are in prison , why are you in prison? You might have been a rapist, you might have murdered someone, you might have stolen, you might have done one of so so many things, why did you do it?” It could have been due to many reasons, firstly force of circumstance, secondly through an imbalanced mind where at that time you could not discriminate between right and wrong and all your actions were regarded to be anti-social because of the social norm society has put upon us, but does that make you a bad person? You're judged by a society to be bad, but are you really bad? No, the spirit within you is forever divine and forever good. So do not think of the actions you’ve done in the past, better think to do is repentance and repentance itself has analysis built into it to try and find the cause. And when you find the cause, the guilt would disappear. So sometimes it is a fallacy to say that how can we learn from the past to build a future? Yes, you can, but it would become fallacious if you just remember the past, then you cannot build upon it. You see, so the secret there to get out of the darkness and into the light of life, how does one reconcile this issue? Firstly, by analysis; secondly, with the analysis you come to the cause of things and then you ask, “Was I forced into this? What was my mental condition?” I personally would love rapist, I love a murderer, I love everyone, the saint or the sinner. For who is a sinner? You're not a sinner, you

3. ES 83 - 05 -1 never have been a sinner, only society brands you to be a sinner, but in god’s eyes, are you a sinner? Do you think that god’s grace would fall equally upon those that are regarded to be bad and those that are regarded to be good? If you are a sinner, then divinity would discard you. But in his eyes no one is a sinner, everyone is equal, but it is your mind, conditioned by society that makes you a sinner, and because everyone around you, right from the time you are born and started getting some understanding, your parents force upon you, “Don’t do this and don’t do that and don’t do that.” Then you go to school and the teachers, don’t’ don’t don’t do this and don’t do that and that and that and that and then you grow up more and you mix with adults and they all have their particular norms. Something could be a sin in one country while it would not be a sin in another country. These are all moral laws and all morality is made by man and not by god. The thing to think about is purity, not morality. Are you going to go on – my ideas might be very revolutionary, but it is within the norms of god’s laws. Are you going to live your life according to man’s law or god’s law? That is the question one must ask himself. So going back into the past and remembering it and feeling guilty and miserable, that is not the way of progress, the way of progress is to say, “Okay I've done this, why did I do it?” And if I find that personally in my mind, if I find that I've done something wrong, then I would pray, meditate, become in a peaceful, quiet state of mind, meditate and then pray sincerely, “Lord forgive me for I did not know what I did.” Did Christ not say that on the cross? “Forgive them father, they don’t know not what they do.” You say that to yourself, you ask the father the same thing, “Forgive me father, I did not know what I do.” For if you knew what you did, you would have not done it, it was a mental perversion, a kind of madness that made you perform and act which is anti-social or if not anti-social, then harmful to others and harmful to yourself. Always remember one thing that when you harm someone else, you are harming yourself more because you will always remember that and there is the torture, there is the suffering for it. But now, after having done these things, what is the answer? What is the solution? The solution is to bring – to say again, mine to a quiet – mind to a quiet state and then in that analysis, repentance is involved and say, “May I have the strength not to do it again?” So at this present talk I gave which was televised, I said, I gave them hope, you are all children of the divine. Some little thing happened that put you here behind bars, but now look at from the other side when you were outside you’ve had so many million worries, you had this to do and that to do and that to do, but now you're inside, what can you do? Meditate, so we started teaching them meditation and spiritual practices. Meditate and bring yourself together so when you leave these iron gates, you’d be a better person and not repeat the things that you have done, but have hope, have courage that you are a children of god and here you have plenty of time to sit and think and analyse. Why don’t all of you go to prison? The prison of your little room? The iron bars, because then society will ostracise you. How many times don’t we find a person with a criminal record not being able to get jobs? You find that. So you see how society treats? It’s a cruel – cruel world, but I'm not gonna be cruel. Say that to yourself. I'm not gonna be cruel to myself by punishing myself, by

4. ES 83 - 05 -1 remembering over and over again the past, instead of analysing it. Because people say, “Oh forget the past, forget – you forget it, that could never happen. You can never forget the past. It will always come up in the mind and the only time we cannot come up in the mind is when you resolve the problem within yourself through repentance and say, true repentance, a sincere feeling within. So I've killed a man, why can’t I go around and try and save some people’s lives? Become a life saver or some other work you can do, or you can make people happy if you have made someone unhappy be fore. You see, so repentance which is a kind of self-analysis can also be put into action, and repentance has the greatest value if it is put into action. Say I've made my mother unhappy, you would say good. Are all the women in the world not your mothers? Make someone else happy, for example if your mother’s not there anymore to make amends with. So many old age homes, so many poor old women living alone, so lonely, because of your actions you’ve made someone blind. Go to some blind people or blind institution for example, speak to them, give some comfort, they can’t see, they can’t read. Spend an hour or two reading for them some book that they might want to –that are perhaps interested in, you’ll bring joy and happiness to other’s lives. And that is one of our principles in in our BMS, is to bring joy into the lives of other people and that is one means whereby we can get rid of our own karma and that is how we lead ourselves from darkness to light, “Asato Ma Sadgamaya,” Lead me from untruth to truth and, “<0:19:57.6> Jyotir-Gamaya,” Lead me from darkness to light. “Mrtyor- Maa Amrtam Gamaya,” Lead me from death, from mortality to immortality. It’s a beautiful prayer. So remembering the past all the time will not help you to build upon it into a better future. It is by resolving the past that one can build a better future, although of course you learn by your mistakes, but let the mistakes not be so dominant in the mind all the time, let the essence of the mistake I've done so much wrong by it, two and two made four, I'm not going to think of the two and two anymore, let me think of the four and how I can build it into five and six and seven and eight. You see, and that is how darkness and light could co-exist and yet the light could be dominant. Take a little flame like on our emblem. Little lamp – little lamp there, now when the lamp is burning, you will find under the lamp there would be darkness, under the bowl the light is there and there would be some darkness shade there. So what do you take notice of when you look at a lamp burning, do you look at the light or do you look at the darkness? You look at the light. For light and darkness will forever co-exist. Without darkness there cannot be light and without light, there cannot be darkness. We’ve put the lights on in this hall, do you think you have destroyed the darkness? No, no, you have covered darkness over with light. For as soon as you put these lights off, darkness is there. Now if it can return by putting off the lights, then how can you say you have destroyed darkness? It can never be destroyed, nothing is destructible, these forces will always be there, but where is your emphasis? When you look at the lamp are you going to look under the lamp to find the

5. ES 83 - 05 -1 shade, the darkness there? No, you don’t do that. So likewise in life when you look at the light only, some darkness does not exist for you, for you, not the darkness has disappeared. Now can darkness be merged into light? Yes, that is here and now because these lights are on, the darkness is merged into the light. So it’s a question of mergence and not of destruction. Like the individual mind which is so limited and limitation is darkness, it can be merged into the limitless which is light and yet, you can still preserve the individuality, it will be there, it is always there until you reach the totality, even beyond the god that we worship, even beyond that, the eternal essence. When I say god I mean the personal deities, the personal gods into the realm of the impersonal, then only everything is totally merged away and you are in the area of nothingness as I said the other day. The Buddhists call it Sunyata, nothingness. The nothingness that is the everythingness that empowers this entire universe, yes. But then as one progresses on, you rise above light and darkness, you rise above the law of opposites, for in relative existence, the law of opposites would always remain. So when you go beyond the law of opposites, then you are not conscious anymore of the law of opposites. So what is is – what is is, you cannot destroy relativity and you cannot destroy the absolute, but transcending the law of opposites, you become the observer of the law of opposites, then good and bad disappears. I think I have told you the story of the Tibetan yogi, Mila Repa. He says when I was young I did black deeds and when I had some more sense and grew up, I did white deeds, but now having reached the stage, I do neither. It means he have risen above them, and when you rise above the law of opposites, nothing can effect you for if you feel pleasure today, you can be sure that day after tomorrow you will feel pain, pain and pleasure, good and bad are two sides of the same coin. They're made of the same energy and they co-exist as light and darkness co-exists forever so. So the secret is to go beyond, to rise above and the only way to rise above is to rise above the conscious level of the mind, and through spiritua l practises, you reach the super-conscious level and then you are at a vantage point whereby you can observe all these happenings. You will find the shade, you’ll find darkness, you’ll find light, you’ll find night, you’ll find day, for after all what is the difference between night and day? Nothing at all. You know it – the sun is there all the time, light is there all the time. It is just the world rotating that's all, and the sun is hidden on the other half of the world and then this half seems dark, does that mean light has disappeared and darkness has come? Or darkness has disappeared and the light has come? No, this is the way the universe functions as it will always function and it has – as it has functioned since eternity. So in order to get away from our sufferings and miseries, we rise above it. so in the same way, the past must remain the past, the past is gone, the future might not come, but the present is here, and when you stand in the middle of the seashore that goes up and down, good and bad, past and future and when you stand in the middle of the sea-shore, the

6. ES 83 - 05 -1 seashore stands still because no pressure is put on either side, you are standing in the centre and the sea-shore stands still for you, although either end still exists. So to stand in the centre of light and darkness, past and future, you have to stand in the centre and where is the centre? The centre is there within yourself. So to be rid of all these things in the world, one reaches the centre of one-self, the kingdom of heaven within. One reaches the centre, and that is the aim and goal of all life, that is where evolution is pushing us onward and onward and onward and we are – we are, our minds are the block in the path. If I can’t see the truth in anything, there is nothing wrong with the truth. If I can’t see the goodness in any man, there’s nothing wrong with the man. What is wrong is with me, I am the stumbling block, I am the block that prevents me from seeing the truth or prevents me from seeing goodness in man. If I see anything bad in anyone, then be sure to know that it is my own limitation and my own mental projection which I am projecting on the other person because, who can judge who? You're only judging a person by his outward appearances or his outward action, what do you know of his spiritual self? What do you know of his real self? How good he is? The thief, smash and grab thief, he broke into a window and as he was running away, he heard the police whistles, but as he was running away, he found a small child on the road and a car was coming fast. He stopped, while running away, picked up the child and brought it to the sidewalk, the pavement we call it in England, in America you say sidewalk, is it? yeah, and took the child to safety and still started running away. Of course he was caught and he paid his just dues for what he did, so which is the greater good of the two? Stealing the few tins of can pieces of beans in the shop or saving the child? Isn’t he good? Aint he good? (Laughs) Yeah. So we could never judge a man’s action. Did I tell you the story of this guru? He always – he spend so much time in jail, good man, people thought he was mad. When he saw a policeman nearby, he used to pinch a sweet of – from one of the shops or something and the police were called and he was arrested and – and he would do some little petty silly things like throwing stone into the glass window and be caught and this that, so one day his chelas that couldn’t understand him approached him and says, “Guru, this is not right, you landing up in jail all the time doing these things.” So the guru says, “Do you know I am so much needed inside the jail than outside the jail? Here outside you can have so many teachers to teach you, but who are going to teach those poor beggars inside there? So therefore I go and so many of those people there have become better people. Then the chela’s eyes were opened, “Ah, how stupid of us to think so badly of the guru, because we did not understand the guru. How can we understand the guru’s actions when we are not gurus ourselves? He might do damn silly things, but for a purpose.” Can you understand the purpose of a guru? If you can’t understand the motivations and the purpose of – of your friend that you know so well, or your wife or your husband or your children, how dare we presume to understand the doings of a guru or even of god for example? How many times don’t we have thought

7. ES 83 - 05 -1 in our minds and say, “Oh what a god that is! I'm suffering here and this is going through and I'm having a hard time” – we blame him, what kind of god is that when he is supposed to be all loving and all merciful? Why doesn’t he have that love and mercy for me instead of making me struggle and suffer so much? So we have the habit of judging our wives, brothers, sisters, children, our friends, our gurus and even god with our little mind. Isn’t that stupid of us? So all these goes into the framework of the past because it is the past that has conditioned us to think in that way, but now we have the chance, the opportunity to – to gain a greater awareness so that our whole perspective and viewpoint and angle of seeing things is totally different. See, so you cannot forget the past, but because of those experiences with proper analysis we can modify our future behaviour. If you have to judge, judge yourself and no one else, judge yourself and judge no one else. Judge ye not that ye be judged. Who are we to judge? Because everything in this world is doing good to me. The rain is doing good to me, the sun is doing good to me, it makes the foo d grow so that I can survive and eat. The air is doing good to me so I can breathe and live, look around, everything. Look at the meadows and the fields and the hills and valleys, they're all doing good to me, they're filling my heart with their beaut y and in looking at that beauty reminds me more and more of the essence of the beauty that created that beauty. Do you see? Everything, a child’s little gargle, child’s little smile, how beautiful, how innocent, how much that little child is doing for me? How much? A suckling babe at the mother’s breasts, how beautiful the gargle there, it reminds you how the lord eternally feeds us, even before the child is born, that divine energy puts milk into the mother’s breasts. So these things, the greater awareness we can observe and see, everything is light, everything is beautiful, good and bad are but in the eyes of the beholder, paradising the beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but good and bad too is in the eye of the beholder. If I was not bad, I could never see bad, if I'm good I can only see good. Right, love thy enemy. It’s easy to love thy friend, but thy enemy, then you're a man – then you're a man! Yes, yes, come on. <0:40:03.7> let’s hear some jokes. You know this guide, an English guide was taking some visitors around and they took them to a castle so this guide explains the castle, he says, “This castle is 600 years old and not a stone has been touched and nothing has been altered. It’s exactly the same as it was 600 years ago.” So the visitor says, “Oh, <0:40:39.9> must be having the same landlord as mine.” (Laughs)