Visit to the Temple on the site of Jnanesvara’s Samadhi at Alandi, Pune.

Gregoire: Dnyaneshwar was the foundation. Of course, what was meant at that time was to establish dharma above all, was not to give realisation, but establish dharma by expressing human values in the perspective of the spiritual absolute, so that should every human behaviour should be kept in check by the spiritual finality.

Now, Saint Dnyaneshwar is an absolutely extraordinary person. He died at the age of about 21 years old and after having left behind him a book which is called Jnāneshvari, who is basically a commentary of the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit. He – I want to go quickly through the family story, but again, they were really treated as outcasts because his father had left his wife to take to Sanyaza and his guru sent him back to married life. So after that, the Brahmins didn’t want at all to have anything to do with a Brahmin who had gone back to family life. So they were treated like dirt by all the Brahmins, but they were, I don’t know, three brothers and two sisters, and they were all very highly realised souls, and actually his brother got his initiation and gave it to him.

Now, there are many miracles in the life of Dnyaneshwar, which are famous. For instance, while he was arguing with a couple of learned pendants saying that God is everywhere and in everything, then they made a fool out of him, and they said, well, if God is everything and if the Vedas are everything, can you make this cow say the Vedas? And he went to the cow, and buffalo, I don’t know, started reciting the Vedas. And so, you know, I mean, he was rather good, huh. We can’t do that yet. Try on any buffalo, it won’t work.

So another example, which is very sweet, there was one of these big ascetic, which came down to their place because they started being famous, of course. And he came on the back of a tiger trying to show off. And Dnyaneshwar was sitting on a rock, like on a little wall with his brothers and sisters, and he said, oh, here’s the great saint. I don’t know what he who is coming to visit us. Let’s just pay our homage to the saint. And then the rock flew and they all flew on the rock to meet the saint. And then when the saint on his poor tiger looked at this, he was completely, you know, ruled over, I mean. He realised it was rather smarter to move on a on a wall than on a tiger. Then he prostrated himself before Dnyaneshwar. And Shri Mataji, when she commented on this, she said, this is Shri Hanumana who is playing this trick. He carried the wall because Shri Hanumana is the master of the siddhis. That is, he’s the master of all the magic magical powers, as you know, as he brought back the whole mountain to cure Lakshmana. 

Now, just after these few biographical notes, he died here. This is the place of the office, what we call Maha-samadhi, when he departed his body or Chaitanya Samadhi, because he left in meditation. He was deep into Nirikalpa Samadhi. And in that consciousness, he left his body. So it’s not when we, like when we die, we are kind of thrown out of our body by Yama, the God of death but these people, they just leave the human kosha, the envelope.

Now, just one thing you need to know about his message. It’s, I mean, of course, his treatise of the, of the Gita has helped extremely to understand what Lord Krishna wanted, the message Lord Krishna wanted to pass. There is something very beautiful, which I mentioned at the… Sahasrara Puja in Vienna. And this is the following thing. As you know, Bhagavad Gita explained how Shri Krishna showed the Virata to Arjuna. And then when Arjuna sees whatever was contained in Krishna, he panicked completely. He said, I mean, sorry, I really know. I mean, please forgive me for calling you my friend. Forgive me for joking with you, for eating with you, for, I didn’t know. Please forgive me. He got seized by this all. And yet, in his commentary of the Bhagavad Gita, Saint Dnyaneshwar says that in a way, the daily form of Shri Krishna was greater than his Virata form, which contains the whole universe, because only thanks to this daily form of his could he have this relationship of friendship with his devotees. And the beauty of all this is fully realised when you know that Shri Jnaneshvara was nobody else, but an ancient incarnation of Shri Vishnu. An ancient incarnation is, you know, if this is an incarnation, okay, this is an incarnation, then an ancient incarnation is this. I mean, it’s the same stuff, but not the whole thing. But Shri Jnaneshvara was an incarnation, an ancient incarnation of Shri Vishnu himself. So it was the same as Lord Krishna. So not only Lord Krishna gave the Gita, but he came back as a Jnaneshvara to give the commentary of it, which is really sweet. He didn’t trust us. Rightly so, I suppose. But this is just a comment in the Jnaneshvara, which I feel personally is beautiful, because it’s absolutely actual for us Sahaja yogis, that Shri Mataji is here. She is Viratangana. She contains the whole deities, the whole lokas, the whole universe, the whole Rudras. And yet she comes as this extremely motherly form with which some of us feel that they can jest and joke sometimes. And you saw it at the puja in Nasik. I mean, she wasn’t just chatting with Warren, putting the plan for our moving. And this is that human form which allowed us to be so close, which was praised by Jnaneshvara. So I don’t know whether I can render the whole sweetness of the story this long. It’s a long love stories between God and His devotees. And the Jnaneshvara explained it.

So now Jnaneshvara means Jnana is knowledge. Ishvara is the Lord. So His very name means He is the Lord of knowledge. He’s the absolute Lord of knowledge. And you know Jnana, yoga is on the centre, Kriya yoga is on the right and Bhakti yoga is on the left. So this is really the yoga of the Sushumna, the yoga of knowledge. And He’s the master of it. So while meditating or while praying for His blessings here, we can address Him as the master of knowledge. And that He should give us the true knowledge of the unconscious. That is not an accumulated knowledge which is just a spontaneous intuition brought in us by Shri Hanumana himself of what is the right thing to do, what is the right thing to know at the right time. And I’m very happy that you all have the opportunity to visit this place because like the ashram of Tukarama, it is one of the milestones of spirituality in Maharashtra. For the reasons I just explained to you.

So now what I suggest that we do what we did the last time and this is [UNCLEAR aproduction].

[UNCLEAR Aproduction] means that I don’t know exactly where the main entry of the temple is, I think it’s on the other side. But we start from here and the production means that we walk one after the other in silence three times around the temple and then we’ll gather in the temple and we’ll visit the place where it took Maha-Samadhi. So you know to walk around is just a kind of you can say it’s another form of expressing an artist. It’s a form of expressing respect. All right? All clear? So we just walk one behind the other, we just walk around the temple and everybody counted from this tree, walked three times around it. All right? Jay Shri Mataji And we do this in silence.

Gavin: Where the imagine of Shri Ganesha has appeared out of the earth. As a Swayambhu for by itself. And this village is called [UNCLEAR Taywa] And these swayambu rocks have the pure coefficient of the deity of Sri Ganesha. And they have great protective powers, because as you know, he is the one who overcomes all the obstacles. So these eight swayambus give the protection to the spiritual quality of Maharashtra. And make it a place of pilgrimage. So we are going to go into the temple in silence. And we take a few of the names of Shri Ganesha and ask for that innocence in its pure form to come as a swayambu within each of us. As you know, one of the commandments given to Moses was not to make any graven image of God, nor to worship anything that had been made by human hands. This image has been made by the creator herself, the Mother Earth. And because of that, it gives the real vibrations of pure innocence. And that is what we have come to worship here today as another manifestation of Adi Shakti’s great love for her children. Jai Shri Mataji. 

Yogis: Jai Shri Mataji.