“The light of love”, Evening before Diwali Puja, Lake of Como (Italy), 24 Ottobre 1987.

[After the chant.]
May God bless you all.
And all the blessings of Lakshmi, all the Ashta Lakshmi, is upon you. May God bless you

Today we have come here to celebrate a great festival of Deepavali, meaning the rows of lights, or the Festival of Lights. It was to celebrate the coronation of Shri Rama also, that is to say symbolically to celebrate the establishment of a kingdom which has a benevolent administration.
Today I find all of you here as the lights sitting before Me and with these lights I feel the Deepavali really celebrated; I see the twinkling of those eyes, twinkling in the eye of that light which is within you. In the lamp of light we have to put something that is soft, like ghee; that’s something very mild and soft, is the love of our heart. And that burns to give this soothing light of love to others.
Such a person who has this light of love loves himself as well and emits love for others. I’ve been hearing about the way people used to torture themselves to become saintly. There’s no need at all for Sahaja Yogis, at all, to torture themselves. But to be the light of a higher magnitude they have to be full of love and this love they get it from where? You may say it is from Me. It’s true but the sap of the tree flows all over and all the tree must live together. Any leaf that wants to separate itself will die out. So it’s the collectivity which is going to make you grow. Any ideas which you have, which of… keeping yourself out, or preserving yourself out, or having your houses separate from the collectivity may be dangerous. The houses may be separate but they must be the houses of all the Sahaja Yogis. Anybody who comes to your house who is a Sahaja Yogi is owner of that house. That sort of a feeling should be developed. When the light you take out from one room to another room, it does not say ‘This is my room so I’ll give light, if I go to another room I will not give light.’
Now, light is absolutely detached. If you do not look after your light it will extinguish. You have to look after it till it takes its proper stand and once it takes a particular stand then you are a strong Sahaja Yogi. Then they see the light on your face and then you manifest light in their lives. This light, if you put finger on it, it will burn but the light of love never burns. It dissolves all that is bad, it rejects, it turns away from whatever that is wrong. It has patience and it expels the darkness. Darkness within and without.
Diwali day is specially meant to celebrate with the lights on a day when Lakshmi was born. Now this Lakshmi came out of the sea, and even today there’s lot of Lakshmi lying under the beds of the sea. (Italian Sahaja Yogi has trouble translating and says “I’m sorry Shri Mataji I didn’t understand.” Shri Mataji continues…)
But when you do not understand the real significance of Lakshmi then it brings darkness and Lakshmi disappears. For example, somebody gets lots of money. Immediately he will have first class bar in the house. Then he’ll have his friends to come and have drinks. He’ll drink with them and suddenly he’ll find that Lakshmi has disappeared. So wherever there is wine there is darkness and that darkness which comes to you with the Lakshmi makes Lakshmi just disappear.
The whole of the universe, the whole cosmos, is so well-knit that if you try to do one thing wrong this side, everything goes off. It is so well connected, like one bulb fuses everything fuses off. In Sahaja Yoga also it happens like this, that a person who is enlightened and tries to be nasty, tries to create problem, can make others negative. In the beginning it used to happen very often, like one bad apple can spoil all the good apples but one bad apple cannot be corrected by all the good apples. One Hitler could make many Hitlers. But in Sahaja Yoga when you are grown up and established, then one bad man, if comes, either he has to run away or he has to get well. A person like that himself he’ll tie up all his luggage and go away.
But the main people, the people who are grown up and who are matured should keep their maturity and assert it. It’s in the form of light, again. Now if there are many lights like these are, and one of them goes out, doesn’t matter because its… there are so many others, like that. But if there is one light which is matured enough, even all of them go away, doesn’t matter. So the people who are half-Sahaja Yogis or quarter-Sahaja Yogis, quatro, have to understand that they play no important role in Sahaja Yoga. Everybody has to become a full-fledged Sahaja Yogi. Then it matters a lot if any such Sahaja Yogi is sick or is in problem, all the angels would run to help him.
So today is a special day to celebrate the Kingdom of God on earth. As we used to pray ‘Thy Kingdom come on this Earth’ and it has come today on this mountain and we are here to celebrate the coming of the Kingdom of God as we have been praying for ages. And the blessings of Kingdom of God is that you get drenched in joy – joy which has no duality, like happiness and unhappiness. Is an experience of absoluteness and just that joy is sufficient, you don’t want any food, you don’t want to sleep, you don’t mind where you are, just enjoy, drenched completely. There’s no place for unhappiness, you have no heart for it. Italians were known to be melancholy people but now I find all of them are so joyous that nobody can believe that they could have been melancholy once upon a time. Not only that but they are giving so much joy.
The program should open our eyes, of all the Europeans, to see how on the stage they were singing songs to Me and everybody in the audience was clapping and enjoying it. Because Italians are very humble people and it is the humble who will be entering to the Kingdom of God and not the arrogant. They’ll have to go to hell to get rid of their arrogance.
This is something, is very great that we are celebrating Diwali here, that in the place where people are humble and they have the right to be joyous. They have the right on their Mother, they have the right to ask for anything that they want. This is what is surrendering. Humble person means the person who doesn’t have ego. So to burn off ego and to burn off our conditioning we had this festival called Holi. Holi. But now we have a new festival which is a festival of singing songs of joy. And joy alone. In this Diwali day let us wish that so many people fall into this ocean of joy and the ocean of joy has to expand its borders, shores. A sea never does that but Sahaja Yogis can do it because they have ocean of love in their hearts.
So I wish you all a very happy Diwali in the sense that you will enlighten more lights, every Sahaja Yogi should enlighten at least hundred lights in this year. Every person you meet you can talk to them about Sahaja Yoga, not about Me. Later on, gradually. So I hope you’ll enjoy your Diwali here, all of you, and we’ll create an ocean which will expand, grow and engulf more and more people into this joyous company.
Today I don’t want to say that I am sorry because I came late, which won’t be good on a joyous day like this. But waiting has its own dividends to pay, waiting gives you another kind of appreciation of meeting.
May God bless you all!
So we should continue with music…