1. UK 78-7 Questioner. Although when it came out last night I realised it’s a question you get asked a lot. Gururaj. I’m sure you’ve got your question written down in twenty lines. Questioner. Just about. Just about. If I counted them, I’m sure it would come to twenty. (Gururaj laughs). Sometimes when I'm with you, or around you, and even when I'm not near you physically, I get a very strong longing to melt into you. It is like a pressure pulling me into you and it draws me toward a feeling of blissful expansiveness. Yet I am afraid to surrender to it, in spite of the longing. It aches, because there is such strength and depth to the longing but I can’t quit e let go. It sometimes happens, but only fleetingly, leaving me with a taste and a memory of what it is like to feel no separation. My mind explains this with a feeling that if I do let go completely, I won’t be able to come back and find mysel f again within the boundaries and limitations to which I currently know myself. I pretend that I need to develop a stronger sense of myself and my work within time and space before I can safely surrender that part of myself to our blissful infinity. This situation seems a typical example of the small self and the mind being in control. Can you help me to understand and be patient with these fears and resistances to what is my natural birthright, to loving completely? Gururaj. A beautiful question. Now, the symptoms that have been described are the true marks of a novice. That's how everyone starts. That is the proper start, where in the beginning certain glimpses are received of how much one is capable of being, how much one could go beyond the limitations one is put into. With these glimpses there is always a dawning of light. And that light is the hope that shines eternally in the human breast, chest, whatever. So when a person develops this longing and feels at times a total mergence with any object not necessarily a guru, if one just lets go, if one just lets go, you will experience far greater bliss and a far greater one-ness, although to say a far greater one-ness is a contradiction of terms. Why we use, why we contradict these terms is simply this, that here an analysis is taking place. We are analysing the feeling that one has experienced. Good . Now, mental analysis of the feeling that one has experienced is always a post mortem. And these post-mortems could become very, very limiting. So therefore the next time when the feeling wells up again, you are reminded of the post-mortem more than of the experience. If you have enjoyed a certain dish, a dish of strawberries and ice cream, fine, you love strawberries and ice cream, fine when that is served to you as dessert, your mind will immediately associate self with the previous experience you have had, of the taste of strawberries and ice cream. Now, what will happen in that case is this, that you're very experience of the moment in eating the strawberry and ice cream would have a limiting effect, because you are comparing an experience that wells from deep within, with the thought processes of your own mind.

2. UK 78-7 Now, if we could live a life where every moment seems to be new, and that bowl of strawberries and ice cream is the first time you are seeing it, how much the enjoyment would be, because it would be devoid of all association of ideas. Now, the first dish of strawberries you had, those might have been very sweet. The second lot of strawberries might not be so sweet. So here a conflict will arise and that conflict will hold you back in devaluing, devaluing the value of strawberries. Then you will say that "Oh, strawberries are sometimes sweet and sometimes sour". Now if you had not known the sweet strawberries, you would enjoy the sour strawberries now. You will, because you would think that it is inherent nature of that strawberry to have that bit of sourness in it. There are people that enjoy sourness more than sweetness. It's just a matter of taste! Likewise when it comes to spiritual experiences, one should just enjoy them. Enjoy them, and not analyse them later. By analysis, to repeat again, we are limiting it. Now, what happens in this limitations is this, that this limitation breeds expectation, so the next time that you have a similar experience you would expect it to be of equal stature or even more. And man, with his inherent greed, will want to have more. Then you feel disappointed, then you feel cut-off, then you feel that why can this not a continuing permanent experience? So, as we have said so many times before, what comes between reality and your real self is the mind. What has recognised the experience? Has the experience experienced itself? Or has the mind experienced it? That is the question. Now, for any experience to be translated through the mind, you would not the full impact of the experience because it is being filtered through the mind and the mind is not pure enough or clean enough to give it, or put through it the total impact of the light that is supposed to shine through it. And this is, of course the limitation. Now, when a person experiences an experience for its own sake then what happens is this, that there is no experiencer. There is only the experience. And who enjoys the experience? The experience enjoys the experience itself. Now this is very difficult to understand with the mind. But it could be very well understood if one has experienced it. So, again to repeat, the limiting factor is the mind, because the mind tries to analyse. And as soon as it starts analysing the experience, the value or most of the value of the experience is lost. Why is it lost? Because the mind refuses to surrender to the experience. The mind is nothing but one's ego self. The totality of one's mind is the totality of all the impressions gained through various lifetimes. That is the mind, and the mind is the personality of the person and the personality of the person is his or her ego self. So here you find the ego self, with the analysis, cropping up, forever associating itself with other experiences, forever whirling around within itself. The mind is capable of very few limited things. The one thing it is capable of is whirling thoughts. It just whirls and whirls and whirls.

3. UK 78-7 Now, each and every one of you here have experienced this. You have a thought in mind in the morning and the whole day through the same thought will whirl around in the mind, whirl, and whirl and whirl. What has the mind achieved? Nothing at all. It is like as if the mind is in a whirlpool. It is in a whirlpool, therefore it whirls. (Gururaj laughs). Yes, right. The other thing the mind is capable of doing is association of ideas, and you would be surprised how it runs away, how it runs away with you, that you will start thinking of one object and you’ll land up somewhere far away. You will start thinking of an apple. From the apple you start thinking of the colour then that colour, the redness of the apple will start making you think of the red dress you bought. And then that red dress you bought will start making you think of the shop assistant that served you. She was nasty. And then that nastiness would be associated with the hurried kiss your husband gave you and just ran off to his bus. And then, and then from there you will start thinking of buses. ‘Why must I travel by bus? My husband should buy me a car’. (General laughter) And once you start thinking of the car, then you start thinking, ‘Now, what kind of car? Look a Dodge is no good because Mrs Jones next door has a Cadillac.’ You see how the mind works? From the apple, you have reached a Cadillac. And that is what the mind does, what the mind succeeds in doing all the the time, without fail, is wasting time. (Gururaj laughs) Yes, that is what the mind does. So you can see how limited man's mind is. Man's mind, or the ego self of man is keeping one away from one's reality. Now, when one has this experience of being drawn to an object, say to a guru in this case, so deeply drawn, what yo u are doing is this, that you and not drawing yourself out of yourself that you are drawing yourself deeper within yourself, by using the outer object. It is like a child that learns adding and has the little adding thing with the marbles on it. What do they call that? Abacus. Okay. So it uses an outer object to count, but the counting goes within himself. That is only the outer object. So, likewise, when you feel so closely drawn to the object of one's adoration or love or whatever the case might be, one is in reality going deep within one's self because you can only express that which is within you. You cannot express any more and neither any less. So the love a man feels for his wife or the love the wife feels for the husband, is just an expression of how much there is within that person himself and that person uses the wife or the husband as the object to express that which is within oneself. Good. Now this applies to all emotions, not only love, it applies to hate and it applies to every positive or every negative emotion one has. There too one is limited by the mind. Now there are moments when the husband could feel so, so tender to his wife and yet a thought just crops up in the midst of this tenderness, in the midst of this beautiful tenderness, a thought crops up about something at the office. How disconcordant it could become. It only shows, it only shows that that tenderness had been on a very surface level. It had been some tenderness, yes, but on a surface level because if it was at a far deeper level all the thoughts of the office or the work or the business or whatever case might be, or the car

4. UK 78-7 that has to go for service, that would never to crop up. You would be totally lost in tenderness, not because of the wife, and not because of your self, but because of tenderness itself. You are not there, the wife is not there, only tenderness remains, only that love remains. Likewise in the spiritual experience when the person is so drawn, and if he should just let go. Let things happen as they would want to happen and stop trying to save one's self from the experience. You are actually missing a wonderful opportunity of experiencing your real self. Holding, the horse is running so beautifully what a lovely run, trotting down the road and you are pulling the reins so abruptly. Now, that must be avoided. That must be avoided at all costs. Go with the experience, flow with the tide. Flow with the current. And that current is very, very sweet. It is very sweet. And it multiplies. As it flows, greater and greater, momentum is gained, until the river merges away totally in the ocean. It’s like the example which Ramakrishna gives of the salt doll that dived into the ocean and melted away in the ocean. Where is th e doll? It merged away in the waters of the ocean. Now that is the experience one has to have and you can only gain that experience if you lose the ego, if you stop clinging to the little self which seems so important. Why is the little self so important? Why, why? Because you have lived so many lives and you have identified yourself not with reality but with unreality and that which is unreal has become real to you. So, nobody wants to be devoid of reality. Everybody wants to be real, but what they have taken to be real is unreal. And so the ego, which is just a mass, a concoction of various impressions that has been gained, has become so real to us that we cling to them. And do you know that every experience man has gained has always been pleasurable? Even the severest pain has pleasure in it. Did you know that? Here is a new proposition. Write it to all the Psychiatrists in America. They need to learn this, that behind every pain, there is pleasure and behind every pleasure there is pain, always. A woman goes through hell giving birth to a child. The pain to her is so unbearable, and yet after the baby is born, the pleasure that is brought with the creation of this lovely life, pulsating there in the arms, what great pleasure. How does it not nullify the pain? And that pleasurable impression outweighs the pain that was felt that is why in a year or two, or three or four years later she would not say no to having another baby. What does she remember? What impression has been left strongly? Not of the pain but the pleasure of having the child. If the impression of the pain was more strong than the pleasure attained then a woman will never have another child again. Likewise in every circumstance, even if a person is ill in bed for a few days, and when you get better - do you know how beautiful you feel? You feel beautiful because that beauty, that nice feeling has now been accentuated because of the pain you went through so there too the impression of the pleasure is stronger. In every experience man has, there is

5. UK 78-7 always an over-balance of pleasure. There is always that little bit extra on the credit side of pleasure and that is why you stick to your ego. That is why you do not want to lose the ego. But it is like a fish that swims in the river, he’s thirsty. Or you standing at the riverside and dying of thirst thinking of these little pleasures when there is bliss there for you to attain, to have, which is your own nature. What a great sacrifice? Actually it is foolish sticking to these little pleasures and then forgetting or ignoring the great bliss that is there because all pleasures and all pains are temporary and they are temporary because they are of the mind. And the mind is temporary. That which is temporary could never produce anything which is permanent, while bliss, that is permanency. And once one tastes of bliss, once one has the taste of permanency, then who wants to be impermanent? Then only does man realise that ‘Ah, I have been chasing rainbows’. Then only does man realise that, ‘That which I took to be real is in reality unreal’. Then reality is known not by the mind but reality is known by itself. Good. You feel it. To feel Divinity is an experience and not an analysis. But man has the gift within him that at a certain moment he becomes so centred that mind body and spirit is in such wonderful alignment, even momentarily, then he feels this yearning, he feels drawn, he feels this bliss. He feels it, and then, after a feeling that he would start yearning more and more and more for it. Good. Now that kind of yearning is justified, yet the yearning stems from the mind. But it is, although it stems from the mind it has a deeper quality to it, because that yearning does not analyse. Although it is within the framework of the mind, it is beyond analysis. A man loves a woman, he is away from her, and he yearns for her. He is not analysing why he is yearning for her. He just yearns. He wants to be with her. He wants that togetherness with her. So that yearning is an experience in itself although it emanates through the mind. That experience is self-existing, self-subsisting. So, when we make post-mortems on our experiences, we lose a lot of value of the experience. This is necessary in the beginning stages. It is necessary to analyse in the beginning stages when one has genuine experiences. Good. But let the analysis be such that it leads to greater yearning. Let the analysis be such that ‘Let me have that experience for the experience itself’. Then the ego starts fading away. Then the ego has no reason, rhyme or reason to start interfering and when the ego stops interfering then you are really you. Then you have known, in spite of what the outer object has been. And that is how the external guru awakens in you the internal guru. As I always say, housewife goes to the supermarket, makes up a list of the things she wants to buy and after having purchased she throws the list away. It is not necessary. I want you all to discard me if not in this lifetime, next lifetime, another two hundred lifetimes. But you must! You must all reach the stage where a guru is not necessary any more. Yes, yes. Oh, you can think back, ‘Ah, he was a good old chap, you know’ (General laughter) that's fine. Yes. Good.

6. UK 78-7 So I don't know how the educational system works in America but in South Africa you have standard one, the child starts off, Kindergarten, Standard one, two, three, four, five, six up to ten which is Matric, and then from Matric he goes t o University. Right. Now he would have his teachers in all these various standards before he goes to University. Now, he does not need those primary or secondary school teachers any more when he goes to University but he remembers them. We all remember our teachers, don't we? When we were in standard two, or three, or four, we remember Miss So- and -so and Mr So- and -so, you know, that was our maths teacher or geography teacher or whatever. We remember them although they are not needed now, but we remember them. Now that is what should happen. That the stage must be reached that you have discarded those teachers up to standard ten, discarded but not forgotten. You see? And then there develops a new set of values when the internal guru is awakened, when man starts knowing himself, his real self. And then the external guru, too, becomes unreal. How does theme external guru become unreal? How does the external guru become non-existent? Because he has merged with the internal guru. And in the mergence, there is no externality. And then there is a step further. There is no internality either. There is nothing external and nothing internal, it just is. Where is the outside and where is the inside? It depends where you are standing. So looking through this window, those trees might seem outside to you. Those trees are outside to you looking through this window, but if you stand at the tree, this would be inside, or this would be outside of the tree. It depends where you stand, and this spiritual life, being totally merged or merged within one's real self, there is nothing outside there is nothing inside it just all is. It all is. There are no squares, no triangles, no rectangles and no circles. What a beautiful feeling. That is bliss - how to describe it: there are no words? We can only talk about it, but we got to experience it. So when we have these glimpses of being drawn, of being drawn by an infinite force, which the teacher represents we shall not resist it. We shall not resist. But be drawn to that force because you are not drawn outside yourself, you are, in reality, drawn within yourself. For where does the real teacher exist? Where does the real teacher exist? The real teacher exists within you. The one sitting in the chair opposite you is only a projection. It is only a projection. And his body, mind, the bag of bones and skin and flesh is just as unreal as yours. So the real teacher is existing within you all the time, and the external object is there in the form of the teacher to make you realise that I, in my own right, am a guru. I, in my own right am self-subsisting. I in my own right am self-existing”. For the true teacher teaches you independence and never dependence. Yes, in the beginning stages, for the novice, a bit of dependency is needed, where the little school ma’am will guide the infant in the A B C's. That is needed. So the child is dependent to a certain extent on the teacher for the guidance. But after the child has learnt how to read it will read on its own. Then the

7. UK 78-7 teacher does not need to stand behind his back and watch him read. No, and he will read everything that he wants to read according to his understanding, right from James Hadley Chase to Socrates and Plato. You see? So, the real teaching is to teach a person to become independent. Now, do not take this literally because only those that are strong enough to be independent be so. But those of us that are not strong enough to be independent, let us be dependent. Why not? What's wrong with that? We have been dependent all our lives through. Weren't you dependent upon your mother to change your nappy for you? Weren't you dependent upon your mother to give you your food? Weren't you dependent upon your father to earn the bread and beans to feed you or to send you to school? Have you not been dependent upon your teachers? Are you not dependent upon your boss to earn a salary? So why not be dependent upon a guru who teaches you the path to independence? Does it make sense? You see? That is the teaching, that is the way. That is the way how to live the life and that is the truth and the truth can never, never be changed. But, coming back to the question, when that arises, that overwhelming feeling arises, do not stop it. Flow with it, because you can never lose yourself. And if you can lose your ego, that is the greatest blessing you could ever have, to be able to lose your ego, because you regarding yourself as the ego is nothing else but false identification. The real identification should be with your real self, your inner self, your permanent self. The immortal soul the Scriptures talk of all the time, over and over and over again, that is your real self. Not these puny little beings that walk this earth and fight and squabble over nothing. Absolutely nothing, really. They do, they do. Yes So, to find this independence, be dependent. You can never be a master unless you have learnt how to be a slave. That's a very old saying. I think it was an old Egyptian saying. You can never learn to be a master unless you have learnt to be a slave. If a young man comes to me and says "I have ten thousand dollars, or a hundred thousand dollars to start a business" - let us assume it is a clothing business - and he comes to me and says, "I have got a hundred thousand dollars and I want to start a clothing shop." You know what I will tell him? I will say "Sorry, you don't start the shop. Right. Put that hundred thousand away in the bank, fixed deposit so you can't draw from it, and go and work in a shop that sells clothing for three years", or whatever the case might be, depending upon the capacity and the ability of the young man. "Go and gain the experience. Become a servant of the boss, and learn. And when you have learnt enough then go and open your shop otherwise not. And if you do it without having the necessary experience, you will just have to, you will land up in the bankruptcy courts".

8. UK 78-7 So, you need the dependence of the experience to become independent of all kinds of dependency. Now, how, what is the primary requisite in this dependency? Surrender. That is the primary requisite. It is a passing phase. It is not something that is held on to permanently. It is something temporary. It is something temporary to be used so that we could rise from dependency to independency. And all forms of dependency has as its ingredient that which is called surrender. Now, what do you surrender? What do you surrender, that is the question? You have movements in the world that demand all kinds of surrenders. Our movement does not. Our movement requires one thing only. Surrender of the heart to that which is truth. Other movements might require you to surrender all your estates and your fortunes and I don't know what all. Cut off your hair and put on orange robes and .... all kinds of things like that. And they say, "Oh, well this is a mark of surrender". We don't want marks - that you find in Germany. Here we find dollars. Ah, the American people are supposed to be such brilliant people. Such brilliant people. No wonder all these movements flourish here so much, and they become multi-millionaire movements, and Americans are such brilliant people. What our organisation demands is surrender of the heart, surrender of the heart in love and devotion, not necessarily to the guru, not necessarily to the teacher but to the teaching. Is that clear? Yes, sir! (Gururaj laughs). Not to the teacher, to the teacher, okay, if you wish to , that’s your choice. It is not a demand. It is not a demand, and neither a request and neither a suggestion. That depends upon your heart. So, the best you could do is surrender to the teaching. If you find any one bit of truth in the teaching, surrender your heart to it, for that will lead you to greater and greater truths. For in reality all truth is one. If you know a bit of truth, you are on the way of knowing the totality of truth, for the totality of truth is contained in that bit of truth. Do you see? So when the question talked about surrender, surrender the ego and here what I mean is surrender preconceived ideas. Have an open mind to accept what seems truthful to you for the moment. At least that is a start. Surrender to that teaching by having an open mind. An open mind is always a non-conditioned mind. An open mind is always an unbiased mind. Good. Have no bias. I know the contents of your heart, beautiful, beautiful heart, beautiful. I am happy if you are happy. Your happiness is my happiness always. Yes, that is why I have stopped or otherwise I could have gone on another hour. Yes, by all means. END