Preface

Actually I did not want to write a book of this kind. I am a person who is in complete joy of Divinity. There is the all pervading joy of Divine love and I wanted everyone to enjoy it. Specially in the West I have seen that there are many seekers of absolute Truth. There are many scientists who have written voluminous books about consciousness, about awareness. One can give a list of them. But all these books really weary you completely, because they do not emit any knowledge of the ultimate truth. I don’t want to criticise them; after all whatever they are doing constitutes honest research. But why not also give a chance to this new discovery which is being made? Why not humble down to see what is beyond this mind which gives you all this artificial intelligence?

It is extremely difficult for me to write about the problems of Western life. It is like an enormous tree which has grown outside. How to be pushed down now to the roots and made to grow inside. It is only by going deep inside that we can find out what the problems of Western civilisation are which have kept a Western mind away from truth.

This book is especially meant for the Western people who wanted me to write. Unfortunately I have never studied any Western language before. English is one of the blessings given by the British to India when they ruled our country. But there too, unfortunately, I studied in a vernacular school and later on in a medical college where there was no question of learning this language, English, which is today universally accepted, especially in the West.

This book is no way to show any flowery language or to show any literary talent of mine. It is just a straightforward statement of facts which I know and which I want to communicate with the Western world. I would request people not to waste their time in finding faults with my English because it is not my Mother tongue and I never studied it. Unfortunately, I could not get somebody else to write for me because it had to be written by me personally.

The most difficult part is to convince a human being that in the entire creation, he is the most highly evolved being; that he is capable of becoming a glorious personality, a beautiful, peaceful angel. To tell him about the problems of modern times is not a very good way of convincing him about what human beings truly are. There has been so much demeaning of human beings, so much of degradation in their value system that I thought that unless I go to the root of the problems, it won’t be easy to explain why they have to break away from their present shackles in order to evolve and ascend. One has to speak frankly about what the problems are and what the real solutions are.

There is no peace within modern human beings nor without. The poor and the rich alike are unhappy. Everywhere people are groping for solutions. At a limited mental level, the intellect can work out certain problems about things that we see around us in jeopardy. But while a few problems may be resolved in this way, others arise. The true solution lies not in the material circumstances outside human beings but inside the human beings themselves. True and lasting solution to correct ills can be found only by inner, collective transformation of human beings. This is not an impossibility. In fact it has already happened. There are so many thousands who have actually achieved this state. The reality of en-masse inner ‘transformation of human beings by self-realisation is the most revolutionary discovery of the present age. But so far, very few governments have accepted this discovery, especially in America, England, France, Italy and Germany. The Pope, who himself is supposed to be in charge of religion, meets all false gurus, but he will never meet me or talk to me, though I have met him before he was elected to this position of a Pope. This is not my job, this is not my work, but it is a spontaneous desire of the Divine that this should be brought in full light, so that human beings are raised to a higher state of consciousness by which they can realise what they are, so that they can appreciate and glorify themselves.

To me, most of the human beings are like the deities who are still in stone form and who can be transformed, with Kundalini awakening, into angels. I hope that with this book I will not hurt people. On the contrary, I hope to be able to get many more people in this great work of Sahaja Yoga, by which they can achieve the ultimate goal of their search. I have to use humour, because by nature I am very humourous and I see humour in every kind of incident, which people sometimes take very seriously.

It is too much for a Mother to talk about the ills of her children, but unless that is faced, I don’t think the children can ever get their benevolence and reach the ultimate goal, which is their self-realisation. So I would ask all of you not to get angry with me, but to understand that out of my tremendous compassion and love, I have written this book for the benevolence of the people, with whatever English I can use, with whatever literature I can use, with whatever style I could adopt.

Chapter 1: Modernism And Rationality

In the Puranas, the modern times we are now living in are called kali Yuga, the Age of Confusion and Conflict. Yugas are periods of time, thousands of years long, that recur in

a cyclic or spiral progression. Dwapara Yuga is the second age, when people begin to lose some of the great qualities they had in the first or Golden Age, Satya Yuga. Kali Yuga (modern times) marks the lowest point of moral and spiritual consciousness in each cycle. Kali Yuga is followed by Krita Yuga, the age of transformation or actualisation of spiritual experience, which leads finally to Satya Yuga, the age of truth or reality, in which the Golden Age returns and all man’s faculties of spirituality begin to manifest themselves in their full glory once again. Thus, according to the Puranas, humanity has great hope of enjoying Satya Yuga which will give peace, harmony and Divine love.

If we tally the description of Kali Yuga in the Puranas with very obvious observations of the present state of our society, it seems to me that the worst period of Kali Yuga started during the first quarter of this century. It is almost unbelievable how culture and thought have completely changed in such a short time, particularly in the West which influenced every other culture. In Kali Yuga, all traditional values are more and more undermined and destroyed and thus there is great moral confusion. There is also a restless seeking for new forms and new kinds of order. According to the Puranas, when the lowest point is reached, the people would have lost contact with their inner sense of Dharma (innate sense of righteousness). There will be confusion about right and wrong. Children will no longer respect their parents. Men will think and act like women and women will become like men. The lowest grades of human beings will take over positions of power and authority, and the higher, spiritual type of human beings will be neglected and despised.

However, about twenty-five years ago, marking the very first stirring of a new Satya Yuga, the transitional age called Krita Yuga started manifesting itself. Krita Yuga is a unique period of spiritual awareness, as the all-pervading Divine Power, called the Parama Chaitanya in Sanskrit, has become active at the level of ordinary human existence. It is predicted that this Divine activity will bring about the long awaited Satya Yuga, the era of growth and of spiritual ascent. All the signs show that it is the era of truth which is now advancing and we can see very clearly, for example, how quite ordinary people are becoming aware of absolute truth and reality through Sahaja Yoga. Sahaja Yoga is the spontaneous union of the individual consciousness with the all-pervading Divine Power through the awakening of the residual power of the Kundalini which lies dormant within all human beings in the triangular bone at the base of the spine, called the sacrum, the sacred bone.

Krita Yuga has another characteristic by which when this Yuga is manifested, the falsehood of all outside religions, all people in power who are unpatriotic and dishonest will be automatically exposed. All false prophets and cult leaders will be exposed and all organisations that perpetrate falsehood and hatred in the name of God will also be exposed because in Krita Yuga, the truth is spontaneously brought out. All corrupt entrepreneurs and false teachers will also be exposed.

A second characteristic of Krita Yuga is that whenever there is a falling away from Dharma, the inner Divine Laws of Righteousness which are innate and which regulate both human existence, the whole worldly structure as well as manifestation of the cosmos, will arise as a result with a corresponding, compensatory effect. This is called the “Law of Polarity” or in Sanskrit “Karma Phalam” (the fruits of action) which means in practical terms, that whatever you have done, you will get the fruits of those actions: “As you sow, so shall you reap”. So in this Yuga, all persons will get their Karma Phalam of present or past. If they have led their lives in accordance with the universal and eternal laws of being (dharma), they will enjoy an existence which is harmonious and fulfilling. But, on the other hand, whatever wrongs they have done, that is whenever they have fallen out of the central path of dharma, either individually or collectively, they will have to pay for that in this life time.

In Krita Yuga there may be much to suffer. This is very unfortunate, but it is simply the effect of our own actions which we have to face. Of course suffering can be avoided, if people achieve their ascent into what in yoga we call the state of spirit or Union with the Divine power. In Krita Yuga, this manifestation of exposure and punishment, through the law of polarity will take place as long as we do not accept the path of absolute spirituality, which is the only true and satisfying path for human beings .. The suffering that befalls people, both collectively and individually, will be nothing but their own Karma Phalam, the result of their own choices in the present times.

However, despite this aspect, Krita Yuga is also a very blissful era for those who are genuinely earnest seekers of truth. In Krita Yuga, there are unique opportunities for self- transformation and, with their ascent, these seekers will achieve a very high state of spirituality. But in this age of Krita Yuga, such is the all-pervading power of Divine compassion and love (the Param Chaitanya) that those who have made mistakes and are consequently suffering, are also redeemed of their sufferings by the blissful activity of this all-pervading Divine power. Furthermore, it is said in the Puranas, like Markandeya and many others, that the residual power (that innate energy which is always pushing us to seek something higher and which gives human beings their ascent), the Kundalini, will be awakened and will grant Self-Realisation (or knowledge of the Self) to the seekers. This power will also grant them physical, emotional, mental and spiritual bliss, and all the problems which come from our inner being, energy centres of the subtle instrument, will be solved through the spontaneous cleansing and harmonising activity of the Kundalini. In this way, all individual human problems, as well as those collective or social problems that have been created by human beings in this world will be solved. It is said that this state is meant only for people who, through their ascent, have achieved the state of Selfhood. These are ancient prophesies which can now be seen vividly.

The Indian sage, who may be called the pioneer in this field, was the first great astrologer, Bhrigumuni. In his book ‘Nadi Granth”, he made clear predictions about these modern times. He also specifically predicted how the Kundalini would be awakened spontaneously through Sahaja Yoga, that is, spontaneous union with the Divine, and become the means of both individual and collective transformation on a mass scale, through teachings and incarnation of a great Yogi. This Yogi would be an unparalleled master of the Kundalini and would teach all the people the ancient secrets of self-transformation. These are the times described in the Holy Bible as the “Last Judgement” and in the Koran as ” Kiyama” , the Resurrection Time. Astrologically it is also called the Age of Aquarius, the time of rebirth and of great spiritual development on the Earth.

Of course, this is also the age of science and technology in which human beings have progressed beyond the stage of blind faith. And in this great happening of the Last Judgement and the Resurrection Time, one need not, and should not, believe blindfolded in whatever is said about ascent or salvation, but should treat it like a hypothesis, and observe the facts with an open mind like a scientist. Of course, if a hypothesis is proved, then any honest, scientifically minded modern person has to accept it. The pure knowledge of the Divine, manifesting itself directly through Self-Realisation, will progressively lead to the creation of a new race for the new Age. This knowledge is not then for very few privileged individuals, as it was in the past, but for the benevolence of the whole world. In this way, the last breakthrough of our evolution will be achieved en-masse. The entire human race can be renewed and transformed. Dharma, righteousness, will once again be universally respected, and human beings will live in peace, harmoniously with themselves, with nature, and with each other. However, the manifestation of Krita Yuga may not yet be apparent to the majority of human beings since Kali Yuga is still manifesting itself throughout the whole world, but it seems more so in the West and in a much deeper manner. However, in India and in many other so-called developing countries where dharma is still respected, Kali Yuga has produced a style of life which is no longer so traditional and dharmic, especially in the cities. The Western, modern culture is very dangerously attacking the culture of the East and converting young people to a very cheap, frivolous, superficial and self-promoting way of life.

In the prediction of Nadi Granth, even small details are clearly described that people will start eating their food from steel plates rather than those made of traditional materials, or that children will start answering their parents back, etc. However, India has the advantage that faith in the Divine is not as strongly challenged as in the West, where many take to destructive methods which are anti-Divine. They are more prone to vulgar and immoral practices and accept anything that is Self destructive.

In India this faith, this innate respect for the existence of Divine laws and a universal harmony in the cosmos, existed in many people. In the unspoilt state of innocent childhood, practically every human being has a natural and direct feeling for the existence of God Almighty. But as time passes, this faith may be deflected and people start believing in other powers – political, economic or social. Pure faith in the benevolence of the Divine can also degenerate into destructive forms of religion like orthodoxy, fundamentalism, sectarianism, fanaticism, false gurus, black magic and witchcraft. As time progresses, persons may, for many reasons, even cease to have faith in anything at all, even in themselves. This is largely the case in the West today and it is only in countries like India, that we may find that pure faith in the Divine is still quite intact in the lives of the people, mainly in the villages.

It may, of course, be true that even in India the effect of Kali Yuga has penetrated upto a point. But it has not yet crossed that limit of innate righteousness, of faith in God, so that what Western people would call the anti-Christ style of life, is not accepted in the day to day behaviour of the ordinary people in India, as it is in the West. Of course, not all Indians have preserved their innate sense of spiritual wealth and many have taken to the Western style of life in the cities, even though they may have been born in India and imbibed some of its respect for traditional values and ancient wisdom.

It is ironic that what is so attractive about the West to certain Indian minds is its apparent affluence. India was, of course, herself once fabulously rich, but became a poor country as a result of foreign domination, and even after Independence has continued to be poor. The British left many legacies, some good and unfortunately many bad, but apart from the so-called intelligentsia which is Westernised, the ordinary people of India never recognised them. However, with the departure of the British after three hundred years of divide and rule policy, the country was partitioned on the basis of religion, and this created an atmosphere of anger and hatred in some areas, where fundamentalism and violence could easily take root. But despite all these set-backs, Indian society did not accept much change in the traditional way of life in the country. The traditional values continued to be respected, and faith in the Divine and in the innate righteousness continued to be very much accepted in post-Independence India as in the past.

However, since Independence, there have been many hypocritical and unpatriotic people who have taken advantage of the innocence of the simple citizens of India. They appear mostly in the bureaucratic, political and economic spheres. The lives of such people do not reflect in any way the general lifestyle of most Indians, which remains firmly rooted in traditional wisdom. One might well find that many of India’s problems arise from the actions of these impostors who are in charge of the country’s welfare. Fortunately, India has had very few intellectuals like Freud, Sade, etc., who could produce yards of mental projections to instigate change for the sake of change and defend the destruction of traditional values and the disintegration of society, as they have in the West. India also luckily did not face any major wars.

On the contrary, India has produced many great men and women of noble ideals, who have been upholders of truth and of traditional wisdom. The history of India has been made spiritually rich by saints, seers, great kings and genuine social reformers who are still deeply respected and venerated by the ordinary people. They were all men and women of great learning, of great character and of great spiritual standing. For example, Mahatma Gandhi, who was himself a realised soul, created a whole generation of very great patriots. Like Gandhi, they believed in the one universal religion, which encompasses all the principles of the great religions of the world. After Self- Realisation it is easy to perceive the truth that all these religions were born on the same tree of spirituality, but that those in charge of each religion plucked the flowers from the living source and are now fighting each other with the dead flowers of merely partial truths. Unfortunately, most of the patriots of Gandhi’s generation lived only for a short time and could not take their rightful place in the political life of India. However, since most religions are not organised in India and everyone is free to follow whatever faith he chooses, even Hindu fundamentalism is more of nationalism, and the traditional faith in the one universal religion is still very strong amongst the people. In this way, the values of traditional society have remained basically intact.

India’s main problem has been that of poverty and industrial and economic underdevelopment after 300 years of British rule. It is not like England, where the Church of England is the only real authority as far as religion is concerned. The worst is France, said to be the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church. Despite all the -illegal activities and horrendous crimes that are being exposed everywhere in the world, they have an organisation called ADFI which can influence the justice of most of the countries in Europe. Still, France is regarded as a secular state. Unlike Europe, there is no official religion in India which could then call any other faith a cult or sect, or brand it as undesirable, without finding the truth. People are allowed to follow any religion or ideology they choose. But the negative side of this open-mindedness and religious tolerance is that people can follow any nonsensical paths they like or take any kind of person as their guru. Luckily all those false gurus are very greedy, money-oriented people who get attracted to the West. That is an advantage of being a poor country. But in countries where there is an official state religion, the freedom of human choice is completely restricted, and people have no choice to think about the insights of other paths that might help them in their ascent or of gaining anything more than the official religion can deliver. Consequently they either stick to their blind faith or fall into some false path, cult or sect. The orthodox religions have tried to combat the freedom of the early agnostic tradition which did not care at all for official dogmas and creeds, but took to truth wherever it found it and aimed only at direct knowledge of Divine Reality. The gerund “gna” in Sanskrit means “to know”. There are other words like “Bodha” or “Vida”. They all mean to know the truth on one’s own central nervous system. From Bodha comes the word Buddha, the enlightened one, and from Vida comes the word Vedas, which are the ancient books of Divine knowledge.

Amidst all these double standards and moral impoverishments in the West, we can see the law of polarity at work. The wealth that was earned so easily, by plundering natural wealth and the ruthless looting and exploitation of the captive markets of the colonies, by the colonial powers, was assimilated into Western countries and resulted in tremendous changes in the West: great material prosperity, but also a gradual loosening of the ties of traditional culture that, everywhere, usually enables human beings to know easily the eternal values of dharma. These profound changes have seriously undermined traditional culture in the West and have even left their mark on the cities of many under-developed countries. This is because a very subtle undercurrent of materialism brought forth the gross Western culture of today.

As a result of the two World Wars and the conflicts of the Cold War period, there have been terrible attacks on the values that traditionally sustained the people. As we know from very precise historical studies, these have been specifically inflicted by the soldiers and sailors who visited or stayed in those countries. For instance, the American forces, who stayed in Thailand during the Vietnam War, have been largely responsible for undermining and destroying the traditional culture there and replacing it with the anti-culture of prostitution, drug trafficking and organised crime. It is also possible that the two great wars might have been responsible for the final shattering of the old value systems in the Western world. The dominating ego of those days in the West did not only over-power other countries, but also resulted in worldwide wars of white people.

America was invaded by Europeans destroying the peaceful culture of the natives. It is impossible to meet any native in a high position in society in North America. In South American states like Argentina, there are several German war criminals very comfortably settled down. They say the Falkland War was planned by them. I asked them: “How did you reach here all the way from Europe?” and they told me, very boastfully, ”It was the Grace of God which used the Catholic Church as an instrument”.

There are, of course, many other subtle causes of this new juxtaposed or parallel cultures that evolved in the West, which I shall discuss later.

In this book, we are concerned about dealing with the profound changes in culture and thought in Western countries in modern times. The concern is heartfelt. It is very important to know why these changes have been so evident and effective in the West in particular. In the West, people pride themselves on being the defenders of democratic rights and the champions of freedom. But if the Western world really cares for the benevolence of the whole world, it will have to turn to introspection. Due to their blessings of material prosperity and technological advancement which has gone out of balance, it is Western people who will have to take the responsibility for the creation of a new age and the transformation of human beings into a higher state. However, if the countries of the West try to solve their problems by indulging in a fascist type of re- organisation and limit their concern only to their stagnated own kind in the developed countries, then they will have completely failed in their duty to face up to their moral responsibility and one cannot say where they will finish up in destroying themselves from within and without. Materialism without any control cannot establish peace from within or without.

In my opinion, every Westerner has, as a matter of urgency, to understand the vital role he has to play in this great age of transformation and of the Last Judgement.

The Western mind has to realise the enormous responsibility which has been placed upon the West, and the Western people need urgently to find out how to achieve that balance, not in terms of money, but in the vision of their responsibility. This is very much required for the ascent of the whole of humanity, otherwise on whom will the blame of destroying the innate human culture by the dynamism of modernism lie, – the advanced or underdeveloped?

In these modern times, in the evolutionary process, we have reached the state of human awareness. This human awareness can work through its thinking, rationality or conditioning. Many modern poets have described them as “the walls of freedom of the Self”. But what if one can rise to a higher dimension of awareness? Why not open our hearts and minds to the .unique discovery that has been revealed for this vital ascent? “The Kingdom of God that we promised is at hand”. This is not a phrase out of a sermon or a lecture, but it is the actualisation of the experience of the highest truth which is absolute, now manifesting itself in ordinary people at this present moment. The truth which can be actualised after Self-Realisation is that you are not this body, this mind, this conditioning from the past, this ego, these emotions, but that you are the Pure Spirit.

Another aspect of this highest truth is that there is an all- pervading power of Divine Love which permeates into every aspect of whatever is created. This Divine Power does all the living work in this entire creation. We take everything for granted. We see beautiful flowers coming out of little seeds, we see big fruit trees growing from tiny seedlings. But however much scientists may dissect and analyse the living process, none of them can say how these miracles have taken place or what is it that directs and sustains the whole process of life. When they try to explain the mystery about what makes our hearts beat, they say it is the autonomous nervous system that runs it. But who is this auto, this self? Look at these human eyes which are such wonderful cameras,’ the brain which is such a grand computer. Scientists may analyse what is happening, but we never pause to question and try to find out why all these blessings have been bestowed upon us. But now, the time has come for sensible people everywhere to understand through their own immediate experience that we all have a purpose on this earth. The purpose of all our evolution and our development is simply that we have to become connected to this all-pervading power, so that we ourselves become Divine. This Divine process works spontaneously (sahaja). It can be proved and is absolutely tangible, much more than scientific findings and laws which can always be challenged and changed.

This process has now started on an en-masse scale and is the fulfillment of William Blake’s most heartfelt desire: “would that all God’s people were prophets”. In this age of Krita Yuga, through the compassion of the Param Chaitanya (or Divine Love), the Kundalini is being raised in countless human beings, so that it is actually happening: God’s people have become prophets and, what is more, they have powers to make others prophets too.

There is, however, one small problem. The modern brain is full of too many ideas. Not original ideas, but ideas which have been gathered through reading, through the media and through the surrounding mental atmosphere. Whatever may be the case, the brain is over-saturated with ideas which largely belong to others; This makes it difficult or very slow for people to accept the truth of reality. It is not easy to convince people that there exists the absolute truth which is beyond the mind, and also that reality is at hand and can be achieved by every human being. Jesus said “the meek shall inherit the Earth”. He did not mean the weak, but on the contrary, those human beings who are strong enough to put aside their egoism and their conditionings. But modern man is neither strong nor meek. On the contrary, he is too snobbish, too arrogant, too conditioned or too self- opinionated even to entertain the idea that there might be somebody who can actually tell him about truth or reality, and even show him how he can himself achieve it. For the truth which is absolute has to express itself in these modern times. And even if it is not accepted, it cannot die. On the contrary, if it is not accepted it will expose all falsehood and thus destroy it.

If the absolute truth is not accepted, it will destroy those very brains that reject it. Because they will take to other alternatives, in most cases they will have to take to self- destructive styles. They have accepted wrong ideas that originate from those many human beings who are teaching falsehood in the name of truth. It is an extraordinary thing to witness, that to approach the subject of absolute truth compassionately, one has to really beg people to listen, to hear about the truth that they all have their divinity intact and that it can manifest itself in the great event of their ascent through the Kundalini awakening. It is such a great pity, I must say, that this kind of convincing and cajoling of the complicated Western brain takes such an unnecessary long time. It is quite ironic that those leaders and teachers who are fake, who are modern anti- Gods, who are against the Divine, who are for the destruction of human beings, actually become very successful and achieve a worldwide following in such a short time. It is also true, however, because of the activity of the Param Chaitanya and law of polarity, that false teachers are revealed in good time for what they are doing and all the false ideas perpetrated by them are being exposed and destroyed very quickly. They appear and establish themselves easily, but in this age of Krita Yuga, it is only for a short time. The trouble is that after the exposure of one guru, people are so weak that some immediately start looking around for another one. When they settle down with one, they usually end up as lost, moneyless recluses. This guru shopping is now a common and fashionable lifestyle of the seekers in the West. It is the same with other kinds of ideology. Communism has failed in Russia, while fundamentalism and racialism have filled the vacuum and begun to prosper in the so-called democracies.

For those who are really in search of truth, it has to be accepted humbly that, so far, one has not found it and indeed cannot find it on one’s own. In the East, it is common knowledge that if you seek the highest truth, you have to become humble or meek, as Christ has said. This is extremely difficult for the Western mind to accept, because it means surrendering the Ego.

A Western gentleman who had come to me for the first time to learn Sahaja Yoga, found that it was very easy to get Self- Realisation without any effort and without paying any money. He was so filled with ecstasy that he went out into the garden shouting: “I have found it”. When he came back he was nearly dancing with joy and said: “Now I am going to write to all my friends who have been ardently seeking the truth for ages, to tell them that I have felt this all-pervading Divine Power as the cool breeze of the Holy Ghost on my fingertips. Now I know that the truth is, that one has to become the Spirit and that the all- pervading power of God’s love exists, which we all have to feel through this evolutionary breakthrough on our central nervous system. With full confidence, I will tell them that it is a living process, that you cannot get it out of books, and that you cannot pay for your evolution”.

He got very excited and wrote many letters to his professors, his friends and his colleagues who had all been discussing and reading books about seeking, day and night, for many years. To his great surprise and disappointment, the response was rather lukewarm. Some did not answer him. Others answered saying: “All right, we are happy that you have found it, but we have to seek in our own way. We hope that we will also find it, but in some other way”. Some could not believe that it was so easy. Others said: “You can’t lead a normal life and find it, because of one’s bad deeds one has to suffer and detach oneself from society, from all human ties, before one can even begin to find it”. No one would listen to him when he said that he had found out the truth by Kundalini awakening. With a typical twist of modern advanced thinking that never likes to arrive at any conclusion, they said: “Yes, this may work for you, but this cannot be the only way and there must be other paths”.

He was deeply shocked to see that these people who had spent hours and hours meeting together, talking, reading and writing to each other, discussing how to find the Absolute Truth, were not even willing to listen to him when he told them that he actually had found the truth. It is, after all, he found not everyone is strong and meek enough to face the truth. They all tried to wriggle out of it, to escape the truth, by giving some “Yes, but…” explanation or other. However, as people say: “the truth will come out by itself”.

In modern times, fortunately, someone who knows the truth about God and talks about it cannot be crucified and silenced. Of course, neither can such a person wait till these insensitive people are reborn with a more humble mind, because, “the Kingdom of God that was promised is now at hand”, and this is the moment when the truth must be faced. On the contrary there are some half-baked Christians like ADFI from France who are spreading stories against Sahaja Yoga through the French media without having any idea as to what is the truth.

Unfortunately for many, like the friends of the Western gentleman who wanted to shout about truth from the roof-tops, in Kali Yuga, seeking has developed its own momentum and people don’t want to give up the activity of seeking, even when they come face to face with what they are looking for. In the film “Modern Times”, when Charlie Chaplin has been working on a conveyor belt full of bolts, the activity of fixing the nuts created such an inertia in his body that even when he had finished fixing the nuts and the conveyor belt had stopped moving, he still performed the same actions of fixing something with his hands. This really is an analogy of those people who are running in the rat race of seeking and just” can’t get out of the habit. In this way, the seeking of truth has that inertia, which can no longer be controlled by putting the brake on, or pausing for a moment in order to listen to someone who really can say how one finds the Absolute Truth. But the knowers of Truth are always faced with blank incomprehension. As the poet Kabir has said: “How can I explain what I know and see, when the whole world is blind”. Of course, since Kabir’s time things have changed and at this present moment I cannot say that all the world is blind because there are thousands and thousands who have come with open minds to know about Absolute Truth through Kundalini Awakening. Surprisingly there are quite a number of these realised souls after twenty-five years of hard labour of Sahaja Yoga.

In this book, we have to discuss the profound changes which have taken place in the West during this Kali Yuga – both negative and positive. We have spoken about the decline of dharma, about the growing self-destructiveness of the West, but it is also a fact that many, many seekers of truth have been born in the West in modern times. The right conditions developed, especially after the Second world War, when Western society had lost respect for the value system of righteousness and honour that had previously existed. Even faith in the Divine itself was challenged and the seekers had to face a very confused and faithless society that began to arise at that time.

Actually, the natural basis of Western culture was challenged by a four pronged attack. One is, of course, science. The second, the intellectuals, heirs to the tradition of so-called enlightenment. The third being organised religions, fake gurus and cults. And the fourth one, the most powerful of all being the money-blinded media used or exploited by the entrepreneurs.

The consequences of the aggression which Western powers had indulged in through colonial conquest and exploitation, had eventually to be faced through the Law of Polarity, and the West has had to reap the fruits of its former, collective actions (Karma Phalam). This is another of the blessings in the disguise of Krita Yuga. Whatever wrongs have been done by one country to another, nevertheless, have to be faced and paid for collectively by the aggressor. Of course, one also has to face individually the fruits of one’s own actions. Many nations felt guilty about imperialism and colonial exploitations and admitted as a nation that it had been a mistake. But those whom they had aggressed and suppressed became vindictive, for violence begets violence. So the chain of aggression and exploitation caused a derailment of the whole world, leading to the so-called divisions; North- South divisions, the divisions of the world into developed and underdeveloped, rich and poor. How can Western nations, and indeed those they exploited, get out of this guilt-hate phenomenon? The vicious circle of aggression, guilt, self hatred is extremely destructive. It has to be said with complete clarity, it can only go when these nations know the absolute truth of Divine Love. Only the actualisation of their ascent can save people in the Western world from inner destruction through guilt and self-hatred.

People in the West talk grandly of spiritual life and of their ascent, but no one even knows what it is they are seeking. Thus, at the end of the “great” Age of Imperialism, around 1918, with the beginnings of what is called modernism, an ignorant society, thirsty for spirituality, started seeking and suffering individually and also in groups through the phenomenon of war, making every kind of effort and trying out all kinds of methods to break through to reality. Many seekers were born at this time, but were destroyed in their own ignorance after succumbing to false teachings which promised much and gave nothing in return, but financial ruin and psychological dependency. The Law of Polarity was at work here too.

With the re-establishment of the “pseudo-affluence of the sixties and seventies in the West, a few cunning people in India, hearing the news that there was a market for seeking, decided to loot Western people of their excessive affluence and many real “anti-Christs” came to Western countries, but especially to wealthy America. They set themselves up as very active gurus, offering false spirituality for sale and, anxious to exploit the restless, earnest seekers deftly stripped them of their wealth while destroying them in the bargain. To an outside observer, it is very surprising to see how such falsehood can so very easily be swallowed and accepted by the most educated and the wealthiest people in the West, as if they have completely lost their traditional sense of values and no longer know how to invest their minds and money wisely.

It has happened that it is the wealthy people who have invested their future spiritual life in the bank accounts of false gurus. Their naivety is not easy to understand unless we see it as a kind of concealed egoism, for perhaps they feel they can purchase their salvation without any further trouble to themselves by paying off the guru with their excess wealth or most of it. However, as Christ said: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the Eye of a Needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God”. And, of course, compared with the people of the third world, in the sixties and seventies at least, everyone in the West was a rich man. The fake gurus certainly knew how to pamper the egos or the weaknesses of the rich Western seekers, for, being money-oriented, these seekers had lost their sensitivity to the real riches of spirituality.

Most of the seekers that I met during that time told me that, although they knew they were looking for something, they were completely ignorant of what it was and had been mesmerised by these negative and false teachers. I have to say that it is truly lamentable the way earnest seekers have been exploited by these horrible so-called gurus from India. For seekers are a special category of people and as such, they are very precious. William Blake describes them as “men of God”. They are the ones who have been seeking in many life times to find the Divine and have often become lost in the web of words of false ideas (“Shabda Jalam” in Sanskrit, as described by Adi Shankaracharya).

I asked many who had actually starved in order to buy a Rolls Royce for their guru, what had made them do such a thing. They explained that they never minded donating money to buy mere metal, as their guru had promised them that he would give the spirit in return. Naive and unfortunate seekers, because in most cases, the guru took their money, and did in fact give them “the spirit”, a dead spirit to possess and mesmerise them and make them bankrupt recluses. You have only to look at the tired and blank faces of the followers of these false gurus, to know that the light of their spirit has been blown out and something horrible and destructive has taken its place.

Of course, sadly, what enabled these false gurus to thrive in the West was their cynical exploitation of the noble ideas of freedom of expression and freedom of belief. The problem is, of course, that the idea of “freedom” has become so corrupted, that it has come to mean a complete abandonment of wisdom and righteousness at the cost of common sense and reason. “Liberty” has become the abandonment of all life sustaining value systems and the freedom to go in for self-destruction, regardless of the cost. The so-called gurus knew that the most valued commodity in modern times was no longer real freedom (the freedom to live and reach our highest potential as human beings) but quite simply: money. So these cunning people freed the seekers of their wealth and also their health. There was a guru who used to send seekers to the Gobi Desert to find Nirvana. This is the surest way to get rid of the seeker and obtain all his properties and belongings.

Money in modern times infects all kinds of so-called spirituality and it has been claimed that even the Vatican counterfeited nine million dollar notes and distributed them through the Vatican Bank, the Bank of the Holy Spirit. Unfortunately, in these modern times, most religions it would seem, are being run on the same money orientation or power orientation. So now, let us look more closely at what these modern times have brought us, what they have changed in us and why we have accepted these changes.

Generally speaking, the present times are called modern times. It is quite a funny thing, but in modern times, it takes no time at all for anything to become out of date, old or antiquated. Thus, “modern” means presently new or new at the present moment, which means that whatever is modern has only a very limited existence and that the state of being modern is momentary. So the word modernism is very misleading. It seems to mean presently accepted theories or current world view. But in modernism, everything is in fact constantly shifting and changing. It is an unstable succession of fads and cults, that linger for a short while, then disappear, but which often leave very deep impressions or dents on the human psyche.

The sophisticated literary or philosophical meaning of modernism refers to the search for something new, or at least some diversion from the old, through mental projections (often of a most irrational and frightening kind), but disguised and supported by rationality or rather by rationalisations. When the stable world of traditional values is given up fully, only because it is out of date and thus despised, there is an experience of emptiness, of chaos and confusion. When all the well tried pointers and bearings have been thrown overboard, the assumption is that the human mental activity, either rationality or irrationality, is the only valid means of finding out the truth of reality.

Modernism has given rise to some very curious examples of the exploitation of irrationalism to find the meaning of life or the reason for existence. Psychology, Surrealism, Nazism have all risen out of the irrational side of human mental projections and have been dressed up with a veneer of rationality. But unfortunately, rationality, whether it is being used consciously to cloak irrationality or under the illusion that the linear constructions of human thought can lead to Truth, is only yet another mental projection with no substance behind it. And one can never find reality by rationality, supporting rational ventures.

The problem is that the human mind can use rationality to explain or defend any idea, (wild or profane, sane or insane, constructive or destructive) and develop it in any direction, for any model, any pattern or any construction it chooses. The responses to the great problems of human life provided by rationality are also extremely strange and, most confusingly, they differ from person to person because rationality deals only with the relative and not with the absolute. For example, by rationality, one cannot prove the existence of Divinity or of Divine Love, but in reality, one can feel it on one’s finger tips.

Surprisingly, if we consider how important rationality was for the so-called enlightenment of the 19th Century, when we try to evaluate the historical products of rationality, we find some which have proved to be disastrous. The most horrendous social models of this kind of rationality are provided by Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. If rationality ultimately is the only driving force behind modernism then, at the end of the day, one should not be surprised if it has to be seen that modernism consists of the limitless vagaries of the human ego, leading to sheer nonsense and idiocy and even to sufferings and catastrophes.

Rationality is most prized, of course, as an analytical and critical tool. But individualistic rationality can be extremely cunning and manipulative, particularly when it challenges the ego of another modern thinker through criticism. Truly creative writers and thinkers have always suffered at the hands of critics. The critic has no creativity of his own and perhaps out of jealousy, or a sense of inferiority, spends his time analysing, attacking and attempting to destroy what has been created by another. He thus wastes the energy of the other ego, and bloats his own ego in the bargain. However, even though the rationality of one person may not necessarily challenge the rationality of another person, and possibly it may not be used in an aggressive way, it can still never give a clear cut idea as to who is wrong and who is right. It is a common phenomenon. Some think that one particular system of government or one kind of religious belief is good, while others conclude that the system of government or of religion which they are following is equally good. This is why it is not good manners to talk about religion or politics in civilised company. Of course, in the field of science, criticism is a healthy phenomenon, obliging the scientist to provide proofs for his theories, thus leading to many new and useful discoveries. But even science is not conclusive about what is real and true. Furthermore, it does not, despite its practical value, even deal with the entirety of human problems, which, I have to say can only be solved through self-knowledge. Of course, scientists are suspicious of anything which sounds mystical or up in the air. But the self-knowledge that I am talking about is concrete, verifiable and is tangible like science itself and completely understandable in rational terms.

However, if one considers the absurdity and the implications and the aftereffects of many otherwise apparently rational conclusions, one has to say that rationality, though we are very proud of it and boast of it, is not such a responsible vehicle for wisdom. In view of the unreliable results of applied rationality, it is clearly wrong to have any such firm ideas and beliefs based solely on rational theories. There is no final answer to fundamental questions through the use of rationality alone, because discussion shows that each view may be partially right. One cannot definitely say that this one is fully right and the other is fully wrong. In our wisdom, we must understand that the truth in effect is absolute and not relative or variable as we commonly experience it, like the six blind men describing an elephant from six different angles: one, holding the trunk, says: “it is long like a snake”; another, feeling a leg, says: “it is massive like a tree”. Each has a very firm and indeed justified faith in the correctness of what he has found, but each contradicts the other, because each has only a partial and relative view.

Of course, rationality is not even as firmly anchored in reality as the blind man’s perception and who may not even be in contact with the elephant, but perhaps indeed the trunk of a tree, a piece of hanging rope, or a poisonous snake . Unless you have access to the absolute Truth, which is a totality, unless you can see the whole elephant, how can you decide whether your view is the right one?

However, there are many who may profess untruth with great confidence, proclaiming their authority with great pomp and circumstance, but they become aggressive, violent or even murderous if they are challenged by others, as the actions of many so-called religious fundamentalists amply demonstrate. Moreover, all kinds of cults which appear to be very benevolent from the outside, teach the seekers that this world is coming to an end. The disciples of these kind of cults may become fond of violence and start killing people outside the cult as the great warriors of the God of Destruction. Some of the fake gurus kill their own disciples to plunder the money which has been looted by the disciples who are expert thieves. Some of them who talk of the end of the world do not allow the disciples to marry; some rape women disciples who become pregnant and kill their unborn or newly born children secretly. Secrecy, is the key word of all such world ending cults.

On the firm foundation of Absolute Truth only, can one have complete confidence and an absolutely peaceful, non- violent stand in the face of the relative world of uncertainty, contradiction and confusion. Such a person, like William Blake, for example, is truly what is meant by the word saint – a person who states the truth simply as he sees it with his higher vision, and does not react vehemently or violently to contradiction and scorn, but pities his or her aggressors as blind and ignorant.

However, in modern times, what impresses one is not a simple and unassuming statement of the truth, but superficial showmanship and display. When I was on a lecture tour in the USA, the television interviewers in Boston asked me how many Rolls Royces I had. When I told them I did not have even one, they actually refused to interview me because I was not in the business. Of course, I do not blame the Boston TV people, especially as they work in a society in which the power of money is the ultimate criterion. This is how you have to survive if you want to get somewhere in the turmoil of modern society, where rationality and egoism have become like two fixed blinkers on a horse, whose body has no substance but money.

Now, because of the natural limitations on the power and scope of rationality, a person who can say with authority what is absolutely right or absolutely wrong has to be an enlightened person, because he transcends rationality and is in the realm of reality beyond thoughts. It is beyond the normal limitations of the human mind to say something about truth so emphatically. And if such a person not only announces but manifests that truth as reality, and expresses it in his life and work, then one should after all pay serious attention to such a personality. Such a person is a saint, or a seer, a greatly evolved soul, whose unique individuality is free of all taints of egoism or conditionings. He is, we might say, meta-modern and does not care for the limitations of rational understanding, for the norms imposed by the cult of money or the power of the orientations of fads and fashions in modern times. To a merely rational person, who thinks that all ideas are merely opinions, such a person may appear to be an egoist, but the test is that through his lifetime he will not do anything that jars or that is considered sinful or anything that goes against human benevolence. Nor will he create destructive ideas in the minds of the people. On the contrary, whatever he does is constructive and compassionate and creates peace over his entire area of activity. Because it serves the interests of a fuller and more perfect life and promotes human ascent, his work is of an eternal and absolute nature, one may condemn him as an idealist who is not practical.

It is important to verify exactly what rationality is, this vehicle and basis of modern life. If we can understand its value and its limitations, we shall be able to enjoy whatever fruits it can offer, while avoiding the pitfalls it puts in our way. Firstly, rationality is not necessarily empirical. It doesn’t necessarily conform to the facts of human experience. And if the beginning of the thought or theory is not rooted in reality, the end or the final results of such a thought or theory could well be disastrous in practice. When such rationality becomes collective, then it is extremely dangerous. Not only one person may be hurt, but many, and sometimes a whole nation or many nations can be hurt or even destroyed through the effects of such collective illusions. Rationality just creates systems that appear possible, without necessarily being true or real. Often, rationality could equally well prove the opposite to be true and that in turn may later be proved to be flawed or fraudulent. Rationality can make a man feel like a worm, or like a hero.

The problem is that all these manifestations of rationality are on the relative plane, created, as they are, by human beings who have no innate guiding principles of wisdom. Whenever they try to project rationality and construct a system, it is merely their conditionings or ego that they project. Far from offering something substantial and real, they are merely projecting themselves arbitrarily towards a goal of their own creation. Rationality moves in a straight line like a wild boar who cannot change his course once he has started charging. The wild boar, as often as not, misses the target and goes on until he is completely exhausted. This happens to many intellectuals, in the relative world, who pursue their ideas to the extreme without noticing that real life is fluid and always changing, as often as not, and the goal posts have been moved and they have missed the point. Being modern, always on the crest of the wave, they are caught in perpetual motion and they cannot slow down or stop to see where they are going or how they are taking others for a ride. Thus the rationalists’ notion of truth is normally a linear movement, or a mere mental projection, which takes an idea through to its logical conclusion. Of course, it may have some spark of insight in it, up to a certain point, but because it is not based on an absolute vision, it has no substance of truth in it and it starts falling and ultimately recoils, or boomerangs, on the person who has projected this idea or on the people who have accepted this system. It relapses and fails, because it lacks the strength of reality, and ultimately it cannot sustain its own random flight. This explains why so many apparently benevolent solutions, based on rationality alone, have often turned out to be full of destructive elements.

A very good example of this is Freud’s theories. Now, after such a long time, people have started to find out how distorting and fraudulent they are and how the psychoanalytic treatment propounded by him has turned out to be a mixture of hocus-pocus and brainwashing. It is now clear that Freud did not know what the Unconscious is. This was already apparent to one of his first disciples, C.G.Jung, who was later to describe the Unconscious as the source and matrix of all great creative ideas, as the basis of all reality and not just a sort of personal dustbin full of primitive drives, which was Freud’s limited and destructive view of it.

Psychoanalytic theories, far from helping people to lead happier lives as Freud claimed they would, have in fact done great harm and have been largely responsible for removing all sense of morality from the minds of Western people who have accepted Freud’s extremely undermining theories with complete naivety. They even congratulate themselves on overcoming their resistance, which is the natural revulsion that all normal human beings feel towards Freud’s central and favourite theme of the so called Oedipus Complex, and have swallowed Freud’s personal whole obsessions, without feeling sick. If Freud had come to India to propound his theories, he could not have survived the anger and wrath of the people, who have a great and deep sense of chastity, morality and understanding of what is good and true, and especially a very deep sense of respect for motherhood. Why did our Lord Jesus Christ say on the cross when he was dying: “Behold the Mother”, meaning look out for the Mother?

It is one of the main teachings of the profound traditional wisdom of India, that the Primordial Mother is the origin of all things and everything tends to flow naturally back towards Her. It is only in the great happening of Sahaja Yoga that it is possible to fully understand what it means to enter the body of the Mother again, the ocean of peace and compassion as the enlightened cell in the purest form, as the drop becomes the ocean, and becomes part of the Mother’s living body. Freud was a man with a very small, ignoble mind who tried to reduce everything, including these great truths, to the puny dimensions of his own perverse obsessions.

Fortunately in India, not only the learned, but even ordinary people know what reality is. It is even described clearly in the ancient Puranas who is a false guru and who is a true guru, and what is right teaching and what is wrong. These are fundamental and eternal truths which cannot be changed or modified to fit in with some sort of a new diversion or a distorting and dangerous fad like Freud’s theories.

Reality and truth are not products of rational or linear thinking. They are derived from absolute wisdom as it manifests itself spontaneously, coming from the light of the Spirit. Prior to Realisation one mayor may not agree, but the truth is that the Spirit is the reflection of God Almighty in our heart. Only after Self-Realisation, and only then, is there a direct experience of the Spirit. It then manifests its powers in the human personality, and its light enlightens the consciousness into a new awareness. The Divine intelligence of the Spirit radiates on all sides. It does not have a linear movement like rational thinking. It is not partial, tendentious, or manipulative, but is simply like the rays of the sun. It enlightens every area of darkness and ignorance. The power of glowing reality radiates from the Spirit on all sides, and penetrates into all the deepest questions and problems. The power of the Spirit is unlimited and it continues enlightening every area, even the most difficult and obscure. There is no question of it reaching a point where it must recoil and lead the mind into confusion and error, as the linear consciousness inevitably does. On the contrary, it enlightens wherever one’s attention goes, and one sees reality with complete clarity in a balanced and tangible way. That is because reality is what it is. Unlike the limited ego (blind consciousness), the Spirit neither wishes nor needs to manipulate any idea to fit in with rational projections, to suit the demands of an argument or of some mental construction. The trouble is that truth cannot compromise. It stands on its foundations of deep, pure love.

This is why the one who knows the truth sometimes shuns other people because he cannot adjust his vision to fit in with the most popular, successful or fashionable ideas of others’ rational projections. He stands on the pedestal of the Absolute, and he knows that beyond the confusion and chaos of the rationalising modernisers is the realm of Reality, the Absolute Truth. He knows that this Reality cannot be achieved by rationality, within the limitations of the ego, but by our ascent. This is not something imaginary, but the actualisation of the experience of our soul or the Spirit. The Spirit is like the steady axis of a wheel. If our attention reaches the immovable firm axis at the very centre of the wheel of our existence (which is constantly moving), we become enlightened by the Spirit, the source of inner peace, and reach a state of complete calm and self- knowledge.

However, when our awareness remains attached to the ego on the periphery of the wheel, there is a continuous movement in the normal course of our lives and we live on the level of a merely relative understanding of the turmoil that surrounds us. Apart from this limiting effect of the ego, all kinds of desires, expectations and conditionings also affect and distort our consciousness, reaching our superficial physical or mental senses causing strain, stress and complete exhaustion. As opposed to this is the innate quality of the Spirit that raises us above all artificial, unrealistic chaos into the realm of Pure Reality, emitting peace, also outside, in the surroundings. This is not something which can be demanded or forced or paid for. It happens spontaneously through a living process of evolution. The consciousness, which is unsteady and relative, becomes, after our ascent, one with the all-pervading Divine consciousness. This is because through Self-Realisation the Spirit knows itself and is completely self-radiant, absolutely confident, and self-sufficient. One can say that the Spirit is complete awareness, and is therefore supremely aware of its own nature.

Now, as I have said, the nature of the intelligence of the Spirit is like that of a unique light which emits radiance on all sides and goes on emitting light as far as it can reach, without ever encountering any polarity effect as a reaction. The consciousness which comes from the light of the Spirit perceives, transforms and creates. The intelligence of the Spirit is thus neither simply and exclusively the cause nor the effect of anything, but it is cause and effect combined together. It is neither active nor passive. It therefore neither has to manipulate nor to take orders. It has the built-in quality, simply, to act in order to be effective. We might say: ”It is, therefore, it does”.

Take the sun’s rays. They just fall on a tree and create chlorophyll. This process does not require any intention or mental projection. This capacity to know the real and to be effective is simply built into the Spirit. The seed which is put into Mother Earth sprouts because both the seed and Mother Earth have a built-in quality to produce this effect. It is simply according to the nature of things that everything which is truly living works out in a very spontaneous way. Everything naturally tends to become what, in potential, it already is.

The mental process, on the other hand, does not have such spontaneous emissions of activity because it is not rooted in the creative source of all things, which is the Spirit. Whatever it does is deliberate, ego-oriented or conditioned and compulsive. It moves in a linear manner, which does not look back, nor from side to side. Ultimately it cannot sustain itself as there is no strength of truth in it, so it recoils and harms the original idea which was not expected at all in the beginning.

For example, take the extreme case of Hitler, who was so convinced by the operation of his own rationality that the Jews were destroying Germany, that he propounded a theory that the Germans were noble Aryans, the highest race, and that the Jews were racially inferior. This was a rational theory, but it was nowhere near the truth. How can Germans be the highest race when they killed human beings in gas chambers and enjoyed the horrible sight? There were also very sweet children among those who were being gassed. It is obvious to any human being who has not been blinded by rationality, that only the lowest primitive could do that. The final solution, of such a rational construction, was Hitler’s own destruction, because his idea of destroying the Jews was a mental projection, and all mental projections end up recoiling on themselves. The polarity effect occurs when one crosses a certain natural limit in one’s mental projection that is confined to the limited range of one’s personality and ego consciousness. It then recoils upon the one who started the process in the same way as an arrow which is shot towards the infinite, but is attached to a string pulling after it, will rebound and hurt the archer.

Even on a superficial, mundane level, our own daily experience should teach us that we should not pursue our rationality wherever it leads to, but rather watch and restrain it within its proper bounds.

Rationality has its usefulness, but one should not go to extremes without judging what after-effects the polarity of our excessive rationality may lead to. It is surprising, however, that because of the frantic power of the ego, no one finds this lesson easy to learn. Many people have come to me suffering terribly from the effects of their mental projections and, even as I try to cure them, they will justify the thing that is destroying them: “So what, if I have done that? What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”. This seems to be the mantra or the constant refrain of modern man. However, if one is ready to learn from everyday experience, and does not automatically chant, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong’!” one can achieve the practical wisdom of the middle path, avoiding the extremes. With practice, we can confine our rationality to certain clear limits and so attain our balance. In this way, one might remain a little more alert and unharmed and one certainly would not destroy oneself or others.

If one introspects, and says with humility of heart: “I do not yet know the truth, but I have to find it”, then, in time, this humility may be rewarded and one may achieve one’s ascent. If this happens, the person’s attention comes into the centre, neither on the left, nor on the right. That is, neither dominated by his conditionings, from the past nor the orientations of his ambitious ego. Such a balanced person is very well suited for Self-Realisation, by which he will know the truth in its absolute form.

So much for the problems of rationality and the way we can avoid the worst confusions of modernism, by experiencing and understanding what is meant by perceiving reality in the light of the Spirit. Another curse which has been predicted of these modern times (Kali Yuga or the Age of Conflict or Contradiction, resulting in confusion, “bhranti” in Sanskrit) is that people will very easily take to sinful and destructive activities. It should also have been predicted that those in power will permit and encourage these activities, as it suits them well. They will not try to solve the social problems that arise from this by going to the root of the self-destructiveness (which is at the heart of modernism) but will only offer piecemeal and short term solutions that will create more problems which may never be sorted out. For example, one Mr. Simpson, a precious hero of football, is accused of killing his wife. As a result several articles appear from American magazines arguing that we should not have marriages and families. The Americans have only a two hundred year old society. In these few years they have done everything to destroy their society. How can they be authorised to talk about society or marital life and to destroy other societies in the world with long traditions? But this means just treating the symptoms not the cause, by killing the basic roots of society. Governments will no longer be concerned for the real benevolence of their people and power will go into the hands of fraudulent financial interests, who will then be able to purchase votes by flattering the lowest and the most selfish desires of the people (particularly through the Press and other persuasive media like the television). What we actually see in modern times, however, is beyond any prediction and imagination.

The best example of the humility of intelligence is seen, not so much in the constructions of the intellectuals, but in those deep poets and simple artists who are meek in heart and who paint in sheer simple dedication to their Creator. In their mental projections, they see the world that the Creator has made in his own image. The spontaneous creations of these modest people are eternal reflections of nature and of the Divine. The exuberance and joy that pours through their paintings, in every stroke of their brush, opens our hearts like fragrant lotuses. There is a unique, silent inspiration that is emitted from their work. There may also be some so-called “naive” or “rustic” paintings that echo the same style of art.

Unfortunately, in these modern times, we are producing no great master’s paintings. At best, we copy the Old Masters or buy and sell their work at very high prices as an investment. In modern times we have given up the notion of eternal art and taken to so-called modern art instead, which is so subjective that it can only be understood by the artist himself, or requires him to give a big commentary to convince our rationality of the great value of his creation. And then, there are always the critics, who themselves having no sense of the eternal or of the Spirit, will praise to the skies any sort of nonsense that manages to look novel by going against all good sense and normality.

Of course, modern art can also have a very evolved manifestation if it is emitted from the formless Spirit. It breaks the lines and forms of conventional art to create a formless substance which is full of light and transparent meaning. But to achieve this potential, one has to be a realised soul, who can paint his formless joy in such a way as to represent and emit that abstract spontaneous enjoyment of the Spirit by the Spirit. Such art requires no commentary and no discussion. Only a poet can describe it. A poet like William Blake, who was a great evolved soul and seer, could also draw and paint the visions he describes in his poetry. The imagination of such poets touches all the beautiful heights that only an enlightened soul can appreciate and enjoy. All those evolved souls, whether they are sitting in a simple village weaving a shawl for the Goddess, or singing the praise of the Eternal and Everlasting in Divine poetry, or playing the Divine music, are all the Creator’s own Divine ripples. They may sometimes not be understood, they may be criticised by ignorant, blind people, but they work and sing and play for themselves and for those who have Divine knowledge and who can understand the world they portray.

To communicate this vision, it is not necessary to use any vulgarity or the kind of sensuous suggestions exploited in the modern age to express the artistic impulse. If it is pure art, then it is in itself, stunning and extremely joy giving. So much so that when you see or hear such a work of pure art, all thoughts stop and you just start witnessing the beauty of that joy, which the artist is feeling in his own heart while creating it. This finer perception of what is real and true is the gift of the realised soul and it is of an entirely different kind from the products of mere rationality.

Lacking this finer perception, the intellectual critics, who themselves cannot draw even one line, bring their ego-oriented and limited rationality into play, which gives them free reign to criticise and judge any budding artist, to kill his work and wound and numb his sensibility. For example, I heard a masterly orchestral piece, the other day on television. This music was composed by an 80 year old English lady. It was very beautiful and enchanting, but the next day, a half page criticism appeared in the newspaper, depreciating and degrading that masterly work. After that, the composer disappeared into hiding.

What is the driving force behind this so-called sophisticated criticism? Is it the jealousy of those who have no talent to create (I say it again) anything and have learnt the trade of being a critic instead? The problem is that one cannot learn in school to appreciate true art. It is not a question of merely mental understanding, but an innate spiritual experience. The merely mental appreciation of a critic is actually very dangerous because it may neglect or destroy what is genuine and real and give an artificial glamour and an air of value to what is meaningless and trite, or ultimately destructive. But why should they criticise? Everyone has his own way, so why mislead others by bombastic words with which the critics have trained themselves? In the same way, the journalist comes with a machine gun mouth to shoot down the ideas in his interview of the very humble and wise people.

If we look at its products, we see that modernism has principally and mostly created only works that reflect shallowness and confusion and has nourished only expertise in mental criticism. But fortunately, to all this there is a built-in solution. For, if all the great artists were to disappear (as we can see is actually happening because they have been criticised on account of their very creativity and their innate sensitivity have been shocked into silence) what would be the result? The Law of Polarity would act, and the critics would disappear, because who would be there for them to criticise? They would have to begin to criticise each other, which is exactly what is happening because they are like programmed machines which cannot stop spinning and churning out their endless yards of criticism. They would no doubt eventually criticise each other and go out of existence. Analysis is a poisonous attitude against the subtle beauty of a flower which has fragrance, but is broken into petals.

The problem with modernism is that it is always destroying and superseding its own constructions. Let us look at another beautiful example of polarity at work. From the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, it was considered modern to invade other countries. Rampant plundering and colonialism were fashionable and prevalent. In the Twentieth Century, it became modern to take an “enlightened” interest in other countries. But the Law of Polarity ensures that whatever new trend one may take to, the pendulum will swing back again, and we have already touched on some of the problems of the West that can be seen as the direct result, via the Law of Polarity, of those misconceptions of the past that had blinded Western countries.

In these centuries, rationality at its height worked through the medium of the white-skinned races who elaborated a linear area derived from rational thinking that all other skin colours were somehow not made by God, who it was tactically assumed, was certainly white and most probably Anglo-Saxon, and had bestowed a different colour upon other races as a kind of Divine punishment. This sort of ignorance may appear very funny to us, but armed with this special kind of rationality, or rather with the rationalisations of imperialism and colonialism, they actually killed thousands and even millions of people, plundering their land and making slaves of the population. As a result, one cannot find a single Red Indian in North America living freely and naturally in the traditional way, because they are all locked up in reservations “generously” given to them by the invaders. One has to go to the museum to see their pictures painted with the head dressed as of Red Indians but, strangely, with the faces or Anglo-Saxons.

Thank God some Divine providence took Columbus to America and kept him there, instead of to India where he thought he was heading. Otherwise, the “coloured” people of India, which was Hindustan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Nepal, Afghanistan and all other “sthans” with their ancient and sophisticated cultures, would have also been completely devastated and destroyed by the superiority complex of the Conquistadores, those bull fighters of Spain, whose great contribution to civilisation was creating the “peace” and the “calm” of the Catholic churchyard. But to make up for Columbus’ neglect, the great Anglo-Saxons came to India from England, did their best to neutralise the heritage and deep wisdom of India, and then gracefully left after 300 years of respectable hospitality from their unasked hosts. They left India peacefully, but with this great country disastrously divided into two, resulting into three different parts into which the seeds of violent destruction were already sown.

Now, despite the complete break up and demise of the plundered Empire which was founded so firmly on the rights of individualism and the rational theories of a “United Kingdom”, that rationality of colonialism has lingered on, with the same potent fire of polarity burning within it. The United Kingdom itself is now witnessing the stress between its different units, which are not only fighting with each other to defend their individualism, but are busily using violence in an effort to destroy each other. Until the recent peace process commenced, every day people were being killed in Northern Ireland defending or attacking the vestiges of colonialism, and at regular intervals the great and safe city of London was blasted by terrorists’ bombs. No one knows how long this peace before war is going to last.

Now let us try to clarify, how the polarity of this manifestation of rational, mental constructions acts. When the Anglo-Saxons were busily plundering those “inferior” cultures of the “coloured” races (especially in America), their ego developed to the extent that they were thoroughly blinded to reality and they began to think that their arrogance and their inhuman cruel behaviour, was perfectly normal and quite all right. They found, according to all the rules and logic of rationality and to their great satisfaction, that they had nicely plundered the whole world, crushed all the “inferior” races into submission and had now settled down comfortably, to enjoy the fruits of their arrogance. Of course, again polarity started manifesting itself. America, particularly, began to prosper and, despite the great idealism of the American Revolution against colonialism, the people gradually became slaves to luxury, and the victims of their own egoism. As time passed, they began to treat the non Anglo-Saxons, all the Jews, Hispanics, Italians and Russians, as inferior races and they tormented them as foreigners in that land of the Red Indians, which now they assumed was their own. Many, perhaps fired by religious zeal, claimed that it was their birthright and that they had been chosen and blessed by God to do the great work of destroying the Red Indians, who were “primitive” and did not have white skin, as God Almighty most certainly had.

Now the white skinned people have beautiful cities full of lovely houses and gardens. All the lush forests and fertile lands, that once belonged to others, are now their own and they have become the legal masters of those lands, and all that they produce. Those people who were killed or driven away, simply because they were living on their own lands, are finished forever. There is no need to think any more or to worry about them because everything can be explained and justified through the skilful use of self-opinionated rationality.

But unfortunately, this aggression has not in fact finished. By the natural Law of Polarity, when you aggress other people and destroy them, then that same aggression turns back against you as the aggressor. The same people who once prided themselves on being individualists and intelligent rationalists, with a highly developed cruelty culture, the same Anglo-Saxons and other arrogant colonising tribes, are now the first to take to all the collective, self-destructive ventures that are currently on offer by polarity. It is they who so readily indulge collectively in the use and abuse of drugs and narcotics. These drugs are flooding in from lands like Colombia and Bolivia, where the original inhabitants and owners of the land of America, the Indians, still exist, neglected and ground down by poverty. They fled into the higher mountains to save themselves from the attacks of the white-skinned people. It should not come as a surprise to us that their hiding places today are the nuclei of polarity in action. The drugs of the worst type, like “crack”, are made in these two countries and are then voluntarily smuggled into America by Americans in order to degrade and kill their own people, while the local people do not indulge in such dangerous drugs as Crack to kill themselves. They just make drugs and the white skins like Spanish, etc., export it to Washington. The results of drug addiction in America are not limited to anyone city or to any category of people. They are so widespread that you find indiscriminate killings in the busy streets of Miami or San Francisco or Los Angeles, as if the uninhibited killing of the Red Indians by the squatter whites created such a momentum that they are now killing their fellow Americans without rest. It seems that the “killing game” must be practised like tennis, in order to keep the talent for killing, exercised for so long against the Red Indians, nicely up-to-date.

Now they are mugging and even killing people who are more affluent than themselves. So, as these developed societies become richer and richer, by another action of the Law of Polarity, they also create increasing numbers of thieves and more and more sophisticated Mafias, who make money by kidnapping rich people who have made money and spread corruption and misery wherever they spring up. These alternative Empires of the Mafia cannot be controlled, but can (and do) themselves control everyone, even governments and politicians.

The modern Western world places such importance on making money that money has become a hanging rope around the neck of everyone born under the unlucky star of modernism. However, we should understand that all these thieves and the Mafias are there simply to give a counterbalance according to the Law of Polarity.

But theft is not confined to a criminal class. Every conceivable category of people, from the top to the bottom of American society, is either indulging in corruption, thieving and looting without any sense of decency or honour or silently suffering the atrocities of these thugs and vagabonds. They thrive and build up their tribal kingdoms. Violence has reached such a level, that if one has to travel to America one should not wear any watch or jewellery, not even a wedding ring.

The eroding and slow destruction of normal human values (the eternal dharma that all human beings spontaneously respect, if they are brought up in contact with traditional values) has reached a terrible peak in America, where it is fast becoming the norm that people indulge in excessive drinking and excessive drug intake, as a matter of course. Even in the most elite and sophisticated parties they discuss about drugs as they used to discuss the very sublime subject of French wines in the olden days. Even more serious is sexual abuse. Intoxicated by their so- called freedom, people have lost all sense of decency, natural modesty and restraint. More and more reports show that they even indulge in the abuse of their own children. Even animals mother their offsprings better than such brutes mother their children. It is beyond human conception and condemnation, but it seems that they have become collectively immune to all normal moral values in this violent culture which is covered in the garb of so-called fun. This “Coca-Cola” culture is full of Halloween style celebrations, drug-oriented discos and music full of bombardment of vulgarity and extreme indecency. How could a poor “primitive” Indian seer – astrologer envisage the future to predict this degraded immoral state in the modern era.

Now recently, we have heard the news that 200 children have been abused by the police in America, that is, by the very people whom they should trust for their protection and well being. In these modern times, children have suffered most horribly, but this is perhaps even worse than a gas chamber death for these abused children, because they have to go on living with such cruel damage done to their young lives. Many Catholic priests in Canada have been destroying innocent children. Recently it was shocking to hear that the top priest of the Catholic Church in Austria has been charged with the offence of abusing children. His dress was all red in colour. I wish he could enter into the arena of bull fights with a very deadly bull facing him. Even the children themselves might feel it preferable to die than to live a life of such devastation. It happened quite recently that a very young girl, who was pushed by her parents in the leading role in a horror film about demonic possession, committed suicide when she reached adulthood.

Because, perhaps, such heartless people who abuse the innocence of children by doing such heinous things, are not described in any predictions, so the West does not have any faith in any Indian predictions. They feel very strongly that the ancient Indian astrologers had no clear insights. What about Nostradamus? It is as if those ancient seers could not bear to relate such stark horrors that no one would have believed until this time, the lowest point of Kali Yuga.

When I read the news about the abuse of children in America in the newspaper, I was really shocked. An American lady in the next seat, who was also flying to America, was surprised as to why I should be so shocked. She said: “I am not at all shocked, because if you think about it rationally, you will know that similar things are happening all over the world. Only the American media aren’t afraid to print such news”. Individual rational justification has been taken to its logical conclusion in these new dimensions of collective thought, or rather of collective escape from introspection. Such careless, irresponsible thinking means avoiding the issue of dangerous, destructive earthquakes of humanity. Also, it means complete ignorance of the painstaking, respectfully preserved values of the traditional culture. If Abraham Lincoln were alive, how would he react to this kind of society? Thank God all these great souls are resting in peace. It is only we, the modern people, who have to be shocked all the time by the sensationalism of the modern life by very quick responsive ego, eager to shock most modern media, causing blood cancer.

Nowadays no one seems to be safe in any of these developed countries. This is because everybody is busy using their rationality to explain or justify violence like the American lady I spoke to on the plane. Or again, with the constant presentation of violence as entertainment in the media, films glaring through audio visual centres of all kinds, the public is being made shamelessly and inhumanely insensitive to such things. And, as we see, people are quite brazenly happy to make money out of all kinds of horrible things in proving their creativity. They have no time to bother about anything else. Even those who have enough money are so greedy that they want to have more, by hook or by crook, from those people who are supposed to have more than them and even from those who have less.

However, for someone from a different culture, it is a sin to speak about the public abuse of drugs, particularly of alcohol. Drinking alcohol has been elevated by the Anglo-Saxon and European races almost to a great religious practice. They do not discuss the religion, whether it is good or bad. Drinking is the sanctum sanctorum and those who do not drink are strange or weird. Even the spokesmen of their societies, the intellectuals and so-called higher echelons, are seldom models of sanity after getting drunk, leave alone wisdom. On the contrary, they are collectively drowned in barrels of lager, spirits and every conceivable kind of wine and intoxicants. Of course they have invented a thousand different justifications, and even collectively in public through the media, they show their brilliance in defending this self-destroying habit that blurs the clear vision of wisdom. Unfortunately this drinking culture has now spread to countries which traditionally have avoided alcohol like the plague.

Once I happened to stay with a friend. Her husband was a highly placed government servant, but both were habitual drunkards. I was surprised to see how lousy their home was, with nothing in it of any other use but for drinking parties. They did not even have a spare blanket for me. Such intellectuals and “top people” have made a whole Bible out of the culture of alcohol, thanks to the marketing genius of countries without any principles, advanced towards their destruction.

The French, who have made a very sophisticated culture out of rotten grape juice and rotten cheese, are now wondering why their grapes are becoming white and do not ferment and why the whole country is obsessed with their sick livers and lizard-like skins. Is it polarity acting on them? And is it polarity again that is giving them the great shock of economic recession? Another polarity that has appeased. After the election of Mr. Chirac, a long list of his colleagues in the Government appeared in the newspaper. They were arrested and jailed but if they have drink and drunkards around how can they do it with the pay they get? Also most of them are very fond of having keeps and appointing the keeps at very high levels in the French Government.

No one seems to know why recession is spreading like a disease in all the Western countries who boast so much about their economies and their economics. The subtle reason is their consumption of beer, wine and alcohol, which leads to the destruction of all real freedom and saps the power and the desire, both to work and to enjoy the pure life. In their lives there is an instant crisis if they cannot drink in a pub or cannot have a holiday, from which perhaps there is no return. Christ has said that alcohol leads to debauchery. I say that, in the modernist period, it also leads to economic recession.

Even in churches, for “holy” communion, they give the worshippers rotten, fermented wine for their spiritual welfare. Their explanation is that Christ made wine out of water for the wedding feast at Cana. Of course you can make grape juice out of water with Divine vibrations, but how could those Divine vibrations create something which destroys your consciousness and pulls you down to subhuman level? Logically, how can there be an instant wine? It has to rot for ages to be the “best”. However, for truly modern drinking people, there would be no “holy” Communion without vodka (the strongest Russian alcohol) so far known, because ordinary wines may not give the spiritual effect to a drunkard or the one who is used to very strong alcohol. In English language the spirit means Alcohol, dead spirit and also the Atma, the reflection of God Almighty.

I cannot understand how they can use Christ to support the use of fermented wine which goes against one’s awareness when, on the contrary, He came to help us to ascend above the common human awareness of rationality. Christ made the “wine” at Cana instantaneously. He did not allow the grape juice to ferment. All wines and liqueurs otherwise (even Benedictine, that “blessed” liqueur made so lovingly by the monks in France) are fermented, and the best wines are the most foul smelling, made from thousand year old, truly rotten grapes. Those who are “lucky” enough to taste them say: “Ah, heavenly!” Yes, it is true, they smell like nothing on earth and those who are drunk, smell worse than pigs because anyone who does not drink cannot bear to stand near them. And yet, in the developed countries, this is the state that everyone seems to aspire to be in. It seems as if they have lost their sense buds in their noses. As it is they smell because bathing is out of fashion in France. French bathing means sprinkling perfumes in alcohol and then feeling that French culture is the highest.

At a big reception, one has to shake hands sometimes with more than five hundred such people. Once they start drinking, they may go on till ten or eleven o’clock at night, even though the reception started at six and is supposed to end at eight o’clock. This is the only time when they are not always looking at their watches. The problem is that when they eventually do have to leave, they insist on entertaining their poor host or hostess who have been standing for hours with nothing to eat or drink, watching them slowly losing consciousness, by shaking hands, squeezing, pressing and twisting their hands, until they feel quite numb and faint. The poor hosts have been busy shaking hands with those who are arriving in a constant stream, and much before they are over with the incoming guests, before they can sit for a few seconds and revive themselves with some pure water or tea, they have to start saying good-bye to the ones who are leaving because they can’t even drink any more. Except from some Muslim countries where men are not allowed to shake hand with ladies, all the rest have different styles to shock the hostess who is freely available. This is one of the many aspects of glorious entertainment of Western society.

Of course, people rationalise this sort of crazy behaviour by saying it is not a modern system at all, but a traditional one and therefore, by my own argument, it must be good. But to anyone with an ounce of common sense, it is so obviously a complete waste of money and energy. At such gatherings you will seldom hear them talking about their work or anything sensible, but mostly about scandals and other idle gossip. But if you are in the position of having to hold such a reception, then beware particularly of the French, because they must kiss the hostess on both cheeks (if not the host as well!). In these days of all kinds of easily transmissible diseases, I think, at least, this horrifying “tradition” could be cancelled.

But there is a more serious side to all this. The drain on both private and national resources that such consumption of alcohol represents, is very significant. If such a thing would be possible, a statistical survey of the expenses incurred and the positive results achieved by such receptions and parties, as well as daily habitual drinking, should be made and discussed in the Parliament of every country. For the societies of the developed world to spend such a large proportion of their national income on trying to stay as unconscious as possible is a sign of great folly. For the developing third world to be lured into following their example and to spend so much time and money on diplomatic relations in this way, is unpardonable. Even Indian embassies seem to be well trained in alcohol parties. Thanks to the British training, the Indian diplomatic hosts or butlers, who all look alike in their tail-coats and bow ties, know all about scotch whisky and vermouth.

One must admit that England is, of course, steeped in the “traditions” of alcohol. The most beautiful and imposing building in any village is invariably a pub. “It’s the village social centre”, they say. But the people who meet in the pub are either already in a drunken state or they have gone there in order to get into one (usually as quickly as they can). Before meeting anyone, they must have a drink otherwise they cannot begin to relate to each other. They even celebrate the deaths of their relations with champagne. The point some of them make is that this is the only way to get out of your feelings. The more alcohol that is consumed, the less people have feelings for each other, and they start losing the moral sense of the nature and value of relationships. In a recent example from people who are part of the “alcohol culture”, an 80 year old grandmother writes love letters to her own 18 year old grandson, and they are published on the front page of the newspapers as if it were such a great happening. This sort of confusion about relationships is a direct result of alcohol which manifests in the dulling of the moral sense by the constant intake of what is actually a poison and which numbs and slowly destroys the moral sublime human feelings towards each other. And yet, alcohol is so respected in these countries that I have met, in Canada, a Doctor of Philosophy who got his doctorate in England by writing a very complicated account of how “spiritual ascent” can be achieved through drinking.

The effects of alcohol on human awareness and human behaviour are, however, far from raising the level of consciousness and refining the moral quality of people’s lives. As I have found in my work, it is very difficult to give Realisation to habitual heavy drinkers or alcoholics. Some of them have become so fed up with disappointment in their genuine search for truth that, in despair, they have taken to alcoholism. If by chance their habit is corrected by any means other than Realisation, they mostly fall immediately into some other habit, like gambling, chasing women or men or drugs. This is because alcohol destroys even the moral capacity and desire and balance for lofty life or ideas or for higher awareness, spiritual and moral growth.

In Western societies, people treat the consumption of alcohol like a religious ritual. But I would say that they are no different from the Rastafarians who have to take drugs as one of their rituals, who are rarely not in a state of possession. Most of the crimes committed nowadays may be in the state of drunkenness or in order to feed alcohol or drug addiction. But in the “Meta Modern Era”, the age that is now beginning, those who will be awakened will be freed from all such compulsive, destructive habits. I know so many would not like to give up this deadly addiction which is so sophisticated that you cannot invite anyone for dinner if you are not going to offer drinks, I mean alcohol. One has to study the Dictionary. A servant-cum-friend of Queen Victoria, John Brown, believed that if a man does not drink and has no such weakness, he is not a full-fledged man.

There is a saying in the Marathi language: “If the bottle (alcohol) enters through one door, Lakshmi (the goddess of wealth and prosperity) runs away through another”. When a human being is not in his senses, how can you expect him to have a sense of duty towards his wife, his children, the society or his country at large? He can neither work properly nor enjoy his normal human relations and responsibilities. His attention would be so distorted, his liver would be out and he will become a very hot tempered man.

What is true of one “drinking man” is, of course, true of whole societies in the West in these modern times. Apart from the recession (which has struck them as an even greater disaster) created by their drinking culture, is the complete undermining of the value system that traditionally supported and enhanced their moral and social relations. It seems, it is a very old custom to join drinking parties and to visit pubs, but even so, all this must have been in moderation. Even French writers like Maupassant, Moliere, Emile Zola, all have made fun or ridiculed this habit of drinking. In modern times, there is no limit to anything. This seems to be the real achievement for advanced modern people, to cross all the limits of decency and decorum and respect for life.

In such a society, people are constantly being desensitised, not only by alcohol, but also by the non-stop bombardment of their intelligence and their sensibilities by crude sensations. The media have now brought their skills to a pitch of perfection for creating and intensifying those sensations, with their endless parading of anything and everything that is an affront to normal human intelligence and sense of responsibility from the shallow gossip and the trite scandals of the columnists, through arrant falsehood and shameless vulgarity splashed across the headlines, to the unbelievable onslaught of sex, violence and horror. Uncontrolled and hardly noticed, it creeps through the familiar and trusted medium of the television into the very homes of the people.

Perhaps the worst thing to see is the way the women in these societies have allowed themselves to be portrayed. The sense of self-respect, modesty and meekness, that everywhere in the world normally goes together with the ones who have to be the mothers in Western societies, is here regarded as of no use or value. Of course, women may wear crosses round their necks and go to Church regularly, but they still have to be very arrogant and insultingly immodest or aggressive, otherwise they are considered to be weak, not good to progress. The traditional kind of woman may be judged as weak through the distortions of rationality, but she will be seen as wise when it comes to entering into the Kingdom of God.

Now, having seen all these things in the West, I can understand why Mohammed Sahib asked women to cover their heads and their bodies. Because he was a prophet, he must have seen the future of women in the West, where there are absolutely no rules of decency or decorum to stop women from doing anything and everything to get themselves looked at. In these societies, the designers of scanty fashions and the hairdressers, it seems, are the most prosperous. It is they who have killed the beauty of romance as people fall in love on account of some hairstyle or some revealing fashion, then fall out of love the next day, because their beloved has changed her hairstyle or bought a new set of clothes.

Now of course, the shabby style and the unkempt look, sophisticatedly called the “casual” or “in” look, is in fashion and the poor hairdressers and clothes designers are suffering for a while until they develop new styles of creating bald heads or dresses made of ribbons that can expose most of the body.

Women in the West, especially if they are intelligent, have to be aggressive as far as rationality is concerned, and particularly so if they are career women or politicians. In politics, they have to be dreaded like vampires. In social life, they have to be not only formidable but glamorous as well, which means competing with models who only stare and never smile, or mostly cinema stars who have to work out their careers usually no better than prostitutes.

In order to be considered attractive, (attracting what and who?) they must expose their figure and show off their legs, and so invite rape, because their faces are so expressionless. And after all, their logic seems to be in a moneymaking society, if they are no good for rape (attracting all and sundry can be a dangerous game), how will they get their publicity as attractive women or how can they “exploit their assets” and get their pay- off. When he insisted that women should dress modestly and decently, Mohammed Sahib must certainly have had foreknowledge of these kind of women, who have no respect for their chastity or for their dignity, and would tend to be like animals. They do not realise that animals mostly stand on their four and not just two legs to show themselves off.

Another curse of Western societies is the terror of growing old. Why do men and women try so desperately to look young? Their rationality tells them, or perhaps its the advertising man, that if you are old, no one looks at you and no one bothers about you. So, in exchange for a dirty look from a stranger, it seems that they are willing to give up their beauty of chastity. The prevalence of such superficial ideas does not allow the society to mature.

The members of such a society, who do not respect their private parts or their age, behave in such a manner that, to a sane visitor from a foreign culture, they look like idiots who are identified with artificiality and stupidity as far as their personal and social lives are concerned.

Decency, modesty, dignity and wisdom are all natural products of a traditional human society which is based on the eternal values or dharma. But in the West, such qualities are under attack and even despised because people no longer respect what is simple, natural and normal. It is a symptom of the decline of the natural and innate, but the corresponding triumph of artificiality, as substance like plastic that has crept’ into all kinds of materials and into every aspect of Western Society. Plastic is not something which helps to sustain a healthy life for existence. Its constant use causes all kinds of skin troubles and even respiratory problems, because it is not natural. Even the intelligence which was once the proud possession of our Anglo-Saxon brains (they tortured Italians in America, saying they were primitive) is now so perverted, that they do not understand why they are suffering from all kinds of incurable nervous disorders and mental diseases. They are spreading these diseases in Asia by visiting the poor countries and by paying lot of money for all kinds of physical indulgences. Because child abuse is a crime in their own countries, they go to Thailand and other Eastern countries to indulge in these absolutely horrendous crimes. If the work they did had been under the guidance of wisdom, which gives humility and respect for other human beings, there would have been a balance in their lives and they would not have succumbed so easily to physical and mental disorders.

The intimate connection between the moral quality of people’s lives and their physical and mental well-being will be discussed more elaborately in a later chapter when I shall be looking at the effects of the widespread materialism which first mechanisation, then automation and finally computerisation have caused in Western societies, and the problems which have arisen when industrial development has gone to extremes. As we shall see, the root problem is that mental projection has no inbuilt wisdom to limit itself, and there is no balance in its products. It goes on supporting itself until polarity manifests itself and makes it crumble. This is what is now happening in the societies of the so-called “developed” world. Rationality seems to be a curse of modern times, because all the decadence of society is a result of limitless rationality that creates it and later justifies it.

Chapter 2: Choices

If you ask an enlightened soul: “What will you like to have for yourself?”, he may start thinking: “What could I possibly need?” He already has every thing. On the contrary he

will think, “If I really have to go shopping then I must buy something by which I can express my love for others”. An enlightened soul will purchase something only if it is a thing of spiritual value because there are certain very beautiful things created by human beings, which do emit Divine cool vibrations and relax enlightened people. Alternatively he might support some artist, or poor person, who is trying to make a living by creating something artistic. So, underlying his purchase, there is not the principle that “I like it”, but there is the principle that “My Spirit enjoys it”.

But in those choices behind which the chanting of “I like it” resounds, one finds nothing more than a big collection of junk, that is, random pieces of matter. The cluttered accumulation of this junk makes you very upset and very angry with yourself, that you have wasted so much money on something you did not want and now you have to waste more money getting it taken away and thrown in some rubbish dump. The acquisitive instinct in human beings goes on acquiring things, but when the polarity of choices starts manifesting itself, the very same things, for which one has made all the effort and paid all the money, start haunting one. One does not know what to do with them. The things look so different to one’s mind and one starts thinking: “I didn’t want that, I don’t know how I could have bought this junk”. And you don’t even know whom to give it to, as nobody else wants it either because it has gone out of fashion already.

For, along with this freedom of choice, arises the idea of fashionable things and the idea of fashionable things allows one to tread and trample upon the freedom of others. For example, you might go to somebody’s house and, after having a nice cup of tea or some other drink, very nicely, you open your mouth and voice an opinion: “Oh, I don’t like this carpet.” or, “I don’t understand what you see in this painting.”, or, “I don’t really like your curtains.” or, “I don’t like this clock.” or “I can’t bear this flower arrangement”, “I just cannot stand your wall-paper!”, so on and so forth.

It is of course, quite fashionable to air your opinion in this arrogant way to hurt others. And yet, if we go by traditional values, it is actually quite aggressive and unmannerly behaviour on your part. Apart from treating your host to your opinion, you might even flash some witty remarks on the person who has bought it, confusing him completely.

While you are enjoying yourself in this demeaning way, you should just ask the question: “Who are you to say such things to hurt another person?” If somebody said the same thing to you, how would you feel? The fact is that, in your present Western human state, you cannot appreciate anything unless your ego plays into it. So every action of this kind, which is so arrogant and so hurtful, gives you the very great power of an egoist and you enjoy your ego to no end. The beauty of the ego is that the person who has it never feels it. He only enjoys his own arrogance and his own capacity to hurt others. But this ego goes on growing, till it becomes a sufficiently big balloon floating in the air, losing all grounds of reality; ultimately it suddenly bursts. One finds then that like Humpty Dumpty one really has a “very great fall”. The problem with the ego being mixed up in all this business of acquiring things, is that one has to have more and more choices, so that Mr. Ego can show what a clever, unique person one is.

To make things worse, everyone wants to have individual, unique tastes. If you are travelling in an American car, before you set off you should first find out how to open the door. Because choices are many, every American car can have a different kind of door fastener or handle which you could never work out without some special sort of training. If you are caught in any kind of accident, then unless the owner is alive and found, you cannot get out of that car, whatever you may try. The same thing is true of bathrooms in America. It is better to ask how they work before you go in, because every bathroom has its own peculiarities, and sometimes, if you just enter innocently through the door you may fall into a swimming pool. Sometimes you may find yourself in the middle of an explosion, like a watery firework display, if you switch on the shower by chance, while looking for the light switch.

The French have another most peculiar style of having their own individuality, because their sewage system often works the other way round and so it is rather a daunting task to find out exactly how to use French bathrooms, even though it is said that they have a lot of expertise in bathroom culture. When the French, of course, are working in another country, like India, they can make it so peculiar that no one from those developing countries can operate whatever they install. For example, the French have set up the telephone system in India and the way it works, only the French know how to operate it! Houses, for example, have to be different, but in functioning they should be of some standard design. Bathrooms especially, I feel, ought to have a very simple modus operandi, that is if you care for your guests at all. Also you must have consideration for those who are buying your house. I wanted to purchase a particular house in England which had five bedrooms and one large bathroom. The owner said: “If you want for four to five people, they can share very easily.” Once I had to visit a Georgian house made by Adam. I asked: “Where are the bathrooms?” They said: “In those days they used the windows.” Up till now I did not understand how. Those who live in one house all their lives can, of course, cope with a particular peculiar system, but it is no good for guests, or for people who have to travel all the time.

Of course, one can have variety in one’s dress, and only a handmade dress can give that variety. In Western countries, once the fashion starts, everybody will have a beard and a moustache, and they will all wear the same type of clothes. Of course, with class consciousness, some may only wear clothes from Saville Row or from Pierre Cardin and others will wear clothes from some other shops with expensive, trendy labels. I have seen many who put the labels of those expensive designers outside their attire. But the problem is that with so many people looking the same, it is difficult even to identify somebody who has been involved in a crime. They all look completely alike as they are red in the face or very pale. A whole regiment of different varieties of clothes have gone into it, and yards and yards of cloth, together with tons and tons of ingenuity have been spent, just to show how human beings can be absolutely identical according to the highest sartorial expertise.

To top it all, they now have unisex clothes so that it is becoming very difficult to make out a man from a woman. One may say: “So what? What’s wrong with that?” Well it is wrong: firstly, because it does not allow natural variety which is pleasing to the eye; secondly, it does not differentiate people which is often a practical necessity; and thirdly, it can cause terrible misunderstandings and confusion if a man looks like a woman. The original idea of homosexuality might have raised by some coincidence, where some man must have been confused for a woman by another man, as in the comedy ‘Charlie’s Aunt.’ There is a little joke about this. A gentleman was waiting at the airport. There he saw a young girl looking like a boy. In order to verify this he asked the person standing next to him, “What do you think? Is that a girl or a boy?” The person replied: “She’s my daughter”. Our gentleman felt embarrassed and he said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were her father”. The second person replied, “Well, actually I’m her mother”.

This is the way things are going into confusion nowadays. There is a complete confusion of roles and people are no longer sure what it means to be a man or to be a woman. God has created two sexes for good reason, and these two sexes I feel are like the two wheels of a chariot. Of course, there is a certain space or distance between the two and although equal and similar, they are not identical. One is on the left side and the other is on the right side. If you try to fit the left onto the right side and the right side to the left, it won’t work out. Apart from that, if you make one of these wheels smaller or less important than the other, this will prevent the chariot from moving forward and it will just go round and round in circles. So this differentiation of the sexes or of gender roles (as people now say) is part of the great variety that has been created by God. Every leaf is different from any other leaf in the whole world. He has made these minute differences in order to create the beauty of variety, while we, with our freedom of choice and our nonsensical rationality, are trying to make all human beings look alike, walk alike, talk alike – regardless of sex, culture and age – and all this regimental behaviour finally makes you absolutely bored with human beings.

Now, for example, women in India are taking to Western clothes. Instead of their traditional saris, they are wearing trousers made by fashionable tailors. These saris – each of which is an individual work of art of great beauty – are made in the villages by simple country folk who are free from agricultural work for five to six months in a year. In this way they can supplement their income from farming and balance their lives with two different kinds of work. If you really look at their weaving, you will find it is beyond your comprehension as to how they do it. Such things could not be made in any Western country. Nothing even approaching it is possible. In the so- called developed countries they are fed up of artificial products and these hand-made items are appreciated, but unfortunately the so-called modern Indian people who are copycats cannot appreciate them, because they have no depth to see the underlying principle of this beauty: they are created by simple ordinary farmers who depend on this craft for their living, and so put all their best skills and their most careful attention into it.

These handmade things made by villagers are a reflection of their enjoyment of life. If we know how to appreciate their deep feeling of harmony and joy, we will know how rich they are in their simple lives. These simple artists feel that whatever beauty God has created around them has nourished their minds with that beauty, and the natural world – the flowers, leaves and colours that they see around them – goes into the cloth which will be covering and enhancing the beauty of lovely ladies. They know that the body is created by God and that its beauty is to be clad and set off by the beauty of human creation. It is surprising how poetically these simple people describe their work when they talk about it. But such things also have their practical, functional value. The quality of beautiful, handmade clothes is much better and so they last longer. Also, the texture, as well as the appearance, of such clothes is very appealing and congenial to the human body. For example it is much more comfortable, in both summer and winter, to wear cotton and silk rather than polyester and rayon, which cling to the body and produce a sticky hot and unhealthy sensation.

Handmade clothes, made of natural materials, are easy to maintain and extremely economical. There is no need to buy replacements very often, as they get worn and torn only after a very long period. Actually, if you wear a sari you don’t have to waste your money on a tailor. It is a simple piece of material which can be arranged very quickly as a very beautiful and graceful dress, and which can be used for various other purposes as well. When it gets old, you can use it for a girls dancing attire. India is a country where chastity is regarded as the power (shakti) of woman. The women use the saris for bathing in the river or in the open so their sari covers them fully as a towel. It can be used for covering furniture or as a wall hanging and a room divider. In India they use saris to make cool awnings outside, as a protection against the sunlight. So the quality of the cloth which is made by human hands, and which is both beautiful and practical, is such that we may say it has something Divine about it. Unfortunately, however, the people who live in the very countries where these saris are handmade, are being fed with ideas from Western entrepreneurs through the media and are beginning to think that mass-produced nylon saris are better, because you can have ten of them instead of having only two nice silk or four cotton saris. In this way even developing countries, like India, are unfortunately beginning to be infected by the destructive idea that it is preferable to have many things of no value, than to have a few things of good value and great beauty. The consequence is that if we are not careful and we give up handmade things and take to mass produced labels, those farmer artists who produce these wonderful saris will die out and their creativity will disappear forever.

With modernism, we have created static forms made up of straight lines and stark contrasts in the design of our homes and in the creation of our dress fashions, calling them “simple”, “uncluttered” or “honest”. But all such creations are in actual fact so drab, so stark and so morbid, that after living in such houses, people develop psychogenic problems or end up in lunatic asylums. If not, they simply fade away into dullness and mediocrity from wearing these “fashionable” clothes in which only the label is to be looked at, and which nowadays is worn outside the clothes to show off their rich clothes.

The variety of materials out of which one can create handicrafts and furnishings cannot be rivalled by any machine. One can use so many different things like glass, clay, sandalwood, ivory, shell, coconut, wood, wool, cotton, brass, silver and gold. So many different materials can be used. Moreover there is an ecological “spin-off”. Because the things are handmade, they do not consume so much from Mother Earth. Since individual human labour is involved, there is a natural limitation imposed, which curbs the use of too much raw material and man-power. Moreover, the craftsman’s hands do not create fumes to punch holes in the ozone layer, which is a most vital source of energy conservation and protection for us. The only handicap in all this is that you might end up with too many lovely things. But it is such a beautiful thing if you can look after all these things and give them a proper place in your home, in order to beautify and harmonies your own life and that of all those who come to see you. Moreover, even if you were to buy some handmade thing that you find you cannot use, you can give it to someone else who will appreciate it and enjoy your gift much more than something mass-produced or made of plastic, because it is so substantial, because it is naturally individual and unique, and so beautiful in itself.

Nowadays, there is increasing criticism of modern architecture. In particular, that architects are not keeping in touch with the real needs of people who want to live surrounded by lines that flow and move and have shape, and not feel imprisoned and alienated from the real and natural world by the rigid lines of modern buildings. If you look at the house market it is very obvious that people like to have houses which were built by other people a long time ago, when there was more concern to create beautiful forms that copied nature. Every inch and feature of traditional properties has been preserved, and even if they are in the most decrepit state, they are highly respected and command the highest prices.

For example, it happened that I went with my family to a very famous European city which had a rich history behind it. There we were put up in a beautiful hotel, which was very expensive to live in. This hotel, we were proudly told, dated circa 1760. The only trouble was, it had such basic problems that we had to leave within two days. As soon as we opened the door the handle came off in our hand. We were quite embarrassed and we thought we would have to pay for a new one. But the gentleman downstairs came up and said, “Don’t worry, it can easily be fixed back”, as if every handle, hinge and nail in the place had fallen out and been fixed back in again a thousand times. The whole place is a museum of antiques, without any real purpose, but they are still using it successfully as a very expensive hotel. So after the drama with the door handle, we tried opening the tap in the bathroom. The tap came away in our hand and the bathroom was filled with water. Perhaps this has happened to every single visitor who ever stayed there, but still they continue with the same style and their guests keep going back, because people are willing to pay a lot of money to live in a place which may be very uncomfortable or with threadbare furniture or dingy decorations, but where, quite simply, they find more peace and tranquillity.

No one really wants to live in a museum, but if architects would just take some of the good points that we find in traditional architecture and use them to create modern but harmonious and natural homes, they would not only earn their living, but would definitely give a better deal to the owners who in this way could easily enjoy up-to-date comforts, as well as the variety and the beauty of a traditional abode. It is a well known fact that on a ship people get very bored because everything is decorated with the same colour and texture. The curtains are the same all over, and even the food is much the same every day. All these repetitions very quickly bore the unfortunate passengers. Of course, once you are stuck on a ship, it is not possible to do anything about your problems, as there are no solutions. But why should we who are on the shore, on terra firma, the restful and reliable Mother Earth, put up with the same boredom of living in houses which are mass-produced in a style that doesn’t enable us to relax and enjoy our lives?

So, on the one hand, we feel that we are free to make our own choices: the choice between baked beans on toast or fish and chips or maybe the choice between pizza or pasta. Of course, it could also be a choice between different types of biscuits or chocolates. Now, we should ask ourselves whether the quality of our lives would go down so very much if we always took the “dish of the day” and enjoyed the variety of biscuits that happened to be there. But, on the other hand, when it comes to the substantial things which are so important in our lives – like the houses we live in, the clothes we wear, the cities we plan – we will quickly perceive that all these things must have variety.

Take somebody who is constantly travelling. He may be in San Jose, California, and then the next day wake up in some place in Europe. When he looks out of the window or walks down the street, he cannot tell whether he is in San Jose or in Europe, because they both look exactly alike and in both of them, he has to make inquiries as to which place he is in. After some time perhaps, thanks to the labour-saving standardisation of the architects and planners, we might end up with all the cities of the world looking exactly alike and we will have to keep a diary all the time to remember which – in a whole series of indistinguishable cities – we are visiting. So much for the actual limitations imposed on real choice by modernist architecture.

As we have mentioned earlier, another area in which people have been very skillfully fooled by the entrepreneurs is fashion. For example, I saw a lady recently in Helsinki. All her clothes were torn and she had a very funny and embarrassing appearance with so much of her showing through. She had a primitive hair style with half her hair shorn off and the other half totally unkempt. Furthermore she smelled very bad. I thought that she was too poor to afford a proper dress and I offered her a good clean dress to wear. I felt that she must be ignorant and did not know that if you go to see a saint, you should be at least bodily clean. But when I asked her if she would care to have a bath, she refused and said: “These days having a bath is out of fashion”, The dress that I offered her was, according to her, absolutely out of date, while the dress she was wearing was absolutely ultramodern. Most of the girls from very rich families are dressed up like this or they are always in mourning black with their pale white faces, in the night you can only see their faces with their teeth if they smile, but in the day time they look like colourless witches.

I felt that this was where the law of polarity once again was showing its effect. I thought that this lady must have been trapped into slavishly imitating the fashion with her so called freedom of choice. She must have dressed up in all kinds of fashionable dresses at different stages of her life. And now she had reached the situation where she felt that all the clothes she had bought were of no use, because they had so quickly gone out of fashion, and that it was better to wear something which was so worn out that it had become antique and had formed its own torn patterns. But to my amazement, I found out that the clothes that she was wearing were sold in a very special boutique at a very high price, and that they were “stone-washed” designer clothes made threadbare and torn to order, and that were now being sold as something very unique and exclusive. Just like them, this lady from Helsinki was convinced that she was exercising her choice in the freest possible way, but in actual fact this is like passing from one kind of slavery to another kind of slavery. Her case is not rare and we see so many of these manifestations of creativity all around us who embarrass decent people with their aggressive behaviour and beggar’s clothes.

Not so long ago, the really ‘in’ thing was to dye your hair green and shave your head into curious patterns like an ornamental hedge, for which people had to pay heavily and often borrowed money for it. But now if you talk of punks, they say you are out of date. So what is the very latest fashion? It is actually impossible to say, as the entrepreneurs are producing new fashions with such speed. The modern generation is schooled to be able to keep up and to cope with that speed. If they cannot, they are quickly classed as out-of-date and discarded by the social group in which they live. What appears to be up-to- date, or “with it”, is nothing but the clever invention of the entrepreneurs that you must buy something new every day to keep their machinery going. What a blind-folded slavery.

The whole fashion industry is just a money-making racket. It is a wonderful way of pampering the ego to say that such and such a style has won the first prize in the fashion parade in Milan or Paris or Timbuktu. And you are so enamoured by this new chance of exercising your “choice” and of throwing out all the expensive clothes you have chosen before as so much out-of- date junk. Once you become addicted to fashion, you do not know how far to go with the entrepreneur who is thus so kindly giving a new dimension to your stupidity and your gullibility. With this kind of compulsion to change, we live on the cusp of superficiality and our attention is always caught up with deciding what new irrelevance to have, to buy, to own and to display.

Our unnecessary demands on raw materials to feed our “choices” has meant that we have started consuming excessively and depleting the Mother Earth, creating terrible environmental problems for both the present and the future. To cover your body you need something substantial and sensible. Of course variety brings beauty, no doubt, but only if this variety is created by artists, and not by entrepreneurs, who are on the look out for nothing but money-spinners.

This is another horrendous example of what happens to people who become slaves of fashion and give up their natural good sense. I have seen that when the fashion for tight clothes started, women who wore extremely tight fitting clothes thought themselves very beautiful, though they looked like mosquitoes (or one might say like tuberculosis patients). These uncomfortable dresses made them develop horrible varicose veins later on in life. Of course, in their vanity they never told anyone about it. It was a sanctum sanctorum kind of secret. After that, another fashion started for clothes which were manufactured with holes already in them, and they call them grandly “holey” pants. In the damp and windy climate of England one could see many people walking around proudly with these holey pants on and, of course, getting very severe types of problems in later life such as rheumatism or gout.

It is impossible to understand why we consume so much plastic these days. Our forefathers used to use only one brass plate or one silver plate, while nowadays in the West plastic affluence and polyester clothing have given rise to a balloon like existence. A balloon which has no substance, only some air to make it float wherever it wants to go. Those who are busy with the creation and manufacture of plastics are nicely developing and building up their financial image as multimillionaires. Meanwhile, mindless consumerism is creating mountains and mountains of plastic, so that one does not know how they are going to solve the problem of destroying these man-made mountains which are not only unsightly, but which might even be spoiling the atmosphere by their very existence. The overproduction of plastics and artificial fibers is, of course, a serious by-product of compulsive consumerism which is fuelled by the notion of fashion.

If you are a follower of fashion, how can you be a free person, because you actually become addicted to reading fashion magazines to find out what is most up-to-date and modern, as if you were running a race and it was desperately important to find out who has got ahead of you.

As children born in the West are left to themselves without any love or any rapport, they feel very lonely and lost. As parents have money they allow the children to get into the hands of entrepreneurs. The poor children are also constantly bombarded, via the television, with the ever increasing number of choices that they have. Now they have even come out with dolls with their own birthdays, bears with pedigrees, including their father’s name, their grandfather’s name, and their uncle’s name and their whole dynasty. According to the alluring suggestions of the advertising men, you are supposed to invite all the relations of these dolls or bears for dinner together. For these relations, naturally, they have to travel from place to place. If, as a parent, you do not agree to this, the children of these modern times will get after your life to such an extent that in the end you will- have to spend even more money organising these parties, every month, in some part of the city. Here the entrepreneur, through the medium of advertising, is creating totally unrealistic needs and false reality. Furthermore, it is he who enjoys the earnings of your labour.

Such children no longer have any relationship with their own parents or grandparents. They do not know very clearly who their own uncles and aunts are, but they do know by heart all the pseudo relations of these plastic dolls or bears. In the developed countries, people’s houses, nowadays, are full of these things, so that children are more attached to their dolls and bears than to their own parents. The other day I saw at the airport, the security people insisting that a little girl’s doll had to pass through the x-ray machine, but the child was so attached to the doll, that she wanted to get into the machine along with the doll. And when they did not allow her, she started to cry loudly and made everybody feel quite upset about the whole thing. How does it come about that children are so attached to their toys, when that is not their innate nature? Normally they play with their toys and then, when they are fed up with them, they give them up. But so many parents just do not have time for their children, because they also are so terribly busy with their fashions and their choices. In this situation the children transfer their affection to their toys which are all the time with them, and so give them some security and comfort. As parents have no love for the children, their love is transferred to toys which are bought in the market. Thus one can pay for LOVE.

Manufacturing output, advertising and consumption all go on with a kind of mechanical inevitability, but we have to realise that this machinery is not our master. It is we who are the creators of this machinery, and so it is we who can control it. Moreover money is created by man and how can money dominate man to such an extent? If you think that freedom means freedom to do anything according to your whims and fancies, then I think that the idea of freedom is absolutely naive. Actually real freedom is freedom from compulsion. But on the contrary, in these developed countries you are compelled. Compelled to buy things you neither need nor want. Compelled to live with all kinds of junk around you. Compelled in the end to spend your time and money to get rid of it all again.

Just think of the thousands and millions of families who are absolutely surrounded by, and dominated by, these products of modernism and are so desperately anxious to get rid of what they already have and swap it for something new. This is a problem caused by so many choices and challenges being put forward in a society of expert marketing.

The expertise of entrepreneurs at launching different varieties of unnecessary products is at its height in America. You can never buy two pieces of the same neck-tie because every tie has to be different. Every door fastener or car lock is different. Every carpet has to be of a different style. So far so good: there is a great range of choice. But this choice is illusory, because all this variety is basically made of the same thing. That is, the products that dazzle and tempt us surprisingly are mostly man- made, in the sense that only artificial material is used to create them. Sometimes if you walk on these lovely synthetic carpets barefoot, you feel as if your feet are burning. And some of the clothes that they create, can give you a rash all over your body. Oddly enough, people don’t seem to mind. I mean, after all, perhaps it has become the fashion nowadays to have a rash. The worst is when you are in a car which is moving at speed and you suddenly find the door lock has some unique quality or variety so that you cannot open it in case the car should catch fire or an accident; you get into a terrible shocking stress, if you are a foreigner, to such fancy whimsical choices.

All these artificially created and elaborately advertised variety just makes us feel more and more confused and alienated in our own world. It is better to be humble and not to feel shy about asking how to open the door of any car or a train before you get into it. In all probability, it will have an engine of a peculiar type which has suddenly come into fashion and everything else will be different too. Best is not to feel shy of your ignorance in this modern world. For example nowadays they are having very delicate small knobs near your seats in aeroplanes which are newly made. Especially in the first class a lot of old people travel. It is always better to ask the air hostess to help you with these very gentle operations though she may make fun of you, as if you are a naive person.

Where there is excessive choice and unnecessary variety, there is no standardisation and no one knows what is happening. Because, after all, some measure of standardisation is required for the security and the safety of the people. However, when they do go in for standardisation, they take it to absurd limits too. When, in a country like India, for example, they wanted to manufacture hinges, instead of using traditional craft skills they decided to make them by machines (all very expensive of course) and now it requires a wrestler to open doors with those hinges and two of them to close them again. It is impossible to understand why such stiff hinges were made for the use of ordinary human beings. The answer came that this was done to normalise manufacturing procedures and to standardise hinge sizes by using machines. In India, we have traditional hinges, beautiful ones made of brass at a much cheaper price and which open easily. Of course they do not have precise dimensions. But because doors are now being mass-produced out of artificial materials, there needs to be some limitation to what you can call natural variation, and in order to obtain the precision you need to fix the hinges by machine. So against our better intentions we have to take to these horrible machine-made hinges which can neither keep the doors open nor closed (unless you find someone who can pay a healthy wrestler to act as a helper).

So the reactive nature of these ideas – having precision in the wrong place and no standardisation in the right place – also comes from the confused minds of entrepreneurs, who must be going crazy thinking up new things every day. Thus, we end up with a great many people: the manufacturers, the advertisers and the consumers who are absolutely confused and do not know what two plus two is. The slow demoralisation of people and the loss of their capacity for the real enjoyment of things are the absurd consequence of the so called freedom of choice.

We have a huge variety of other unnecessary freedoms also. One of them is to have the choice of what we will be wearing when we get into our coffin. Also the choice of selecting our own coffins. This looks extremely ridiculous to any wise person, but it is yet another example of the freedom of the entrepreneur to make as much money as he likes, even out of people who are going to die.

However, the worst type of freedom we are suffering from in modern times is the freedom to lead an immoral life. You can marry one person, sleep with another, flirt with a third one and create children with a fourth. It is an amazing statistic recently published that on an average, in a particular Western country, a man sleeps with 6.9 women every year. This completely crazy idea also comes from the notion that you always have to be looking for something new. A woman who is old for one man becomes new for another and with this foolish idea, as one starts changing women as one changes one’s clothes, one falls into yet another trap. This exhaustion of your energy on the endless pursuit of the new, even in your most intimate relations, creates horrible problems: emotional, mental and physical. If promiscuity were a very natural, normal and good thing, then why is it that people are now suffering from life-destroying diseases which are directly due to this kind of lifestyle? Why is there jealousy? Every day the very newspapers that support and defend the freedom of permissiveness are full of reports of violence: of women killing their husbands, of husbands killing their wives, of lovers killing their lover’s lovers. This mutual destruction goes on and on and on. If promiscuity is akin to our nature, then why do we resist it with such violence? What sort of freedom is it to flirt with any man or woman, whether you are married or not, and to develop eyes which are lecherous and adulterous? With time these eyes cannot even perceive innocence when they see it, and now they are no longer stimulated by adults and have turned their evil gaze on young children. Today we have an almost unbelievable number of cases of child abuse, sometimes even perpetrated by the parents. This flouting of the well-tried moral conventions of centuries of civilised life is of course yet another very degrading low level aspect of modernism, and with it human beings have become worse than animals.

It is quite obvious that promiscuity leads to unhappiness, disease and death and that we have to do something to check its spread. But the problem is that legislation and even education can only achieve very little. People just have to know where to stop. But this control, this compulsion, has to come from within. This means you have to have a spiritual awakening. The light of the spirit has to come into your attention. A person who is a realised soul doesn’t like anything that takes him to extremes. A realised soul is actually a person whose personality is in balance. He is in the centre because whenever his attention gets out of balance, it is brought back to the centre by the light of his Spirit. And such a person has his feet on Mother Earth. Such a person by his very nature has to be practical, pragmatic, wise and detached. Such a person simply cannot form habits and cannot take to something that is stupid, idiotic and destructive. Such a person will not waste time choosing things. Whatever is available, the person knows how to enjoy it.

This “choice” business becomes particularly horrible and destructive when it enters into the area of marriage. Now marriages are arranged by the unleashed ego alone, unaided by any restraining or guiding influence traditionally provided by parents or the caring community. Now the choice of marriage partner is based purely on the whim of the ego, lust or greed. In these circumstances, any small difference of opinion can create a problem in a marriage. Families are broken, children leave home as soon as they reach eighteen to find their own house or flat to live in or they join a squat and occupy somebody else’s house.

As things are, children cannot tolerate their parents and parents cannot tolerate their children because their marriages are unhappy. In the name of developing their individuality and sense of identity, they make their children work very hard. I have seen a little girl of nine years coming every morning on her bicycle to drop the newspaper at our door. One day I asked her who her parents were and she named one of our neighbours, but she said, “I have to earn money for myself. I have to learn how to stand on my own two feet.” She was not yet grown up enough to stand on her own feet at such a tender age. And if such a young child is raped on the way or mugged and plundered, who is responsible for that? And will that help her to stand on her own two feet?

Marriage exists for creating progeny in a secure and balanced environment and to look after the children so that they become confident and decent adults. If you want to be a bride all your life (that is, on a perpetual honeymoon) it is better not to marry at all but to go to some place where you can earn some living out of your body and everyone knows what you are. Marriage is meant for women and men who want to lead a sane and sensible life, providing a harmonious environment for their progeny to come. “Romance” and the “roving eye” must end when the house becomes the home. There are so many things which can spoil married relationships. But who or what has killed romance in marriage? Many things, each more superficial than the last, can be blamed. If I tell you a recent one, you will be amazed. The hairdressers! I know of several fiances who left their women because they did not like their new hair style.

Marriage imposes great responsibilities and is meant only for people who have maturity and a clean personality. Otherwise, as the statistics for child abuse and juvenile delinquency show, it is not safe to place children into the hands of irresponsible, cheap or aggressive parents. Such people do not realise that to be a parent is a privilege that carries its own responsibilities and they should have no automatic freedom to produce children if they do not have any love for them.

As things are, this “choice” business, when it comes to marriage, can lead to the destruction and even the murder of many children who either die helplessly or fall into self- destructive habits because the parents do not want them and consequently have no idea how to look after them. There should be only one clear choice for them: whether to have their own- egoistical romantic life or to accept their responsibilities, which set a proper limit on their so called freedom, and have children and look after them.

The problem is made worse because the idea that you have a right to go on choosing your partner is continued even after you have chosen to get married. The law is supportive of divorce and anybody who does not want to go on with his or her marriage can have a separation or divorce without any problem. But even when they choose to stay married, couples in developed countries, tend largely not to stay faithful to each other. On the contrary, any man or woman who stays faithful to their wife or husband is regarded as out-of-date. You have to be “sexy”, to be attractive to another man or woman, not to your own partner, of course, but to others. Unless you are that, you are not considered suitable for this modern world.

This idea of sort of ‘official attractiveness’ is also very new and has come yet again from those evil geniuses, the entrepreneurs. It is they who create the sensational image of the woman who is “attractive” or of the man who is “good looking”. But why should every woman and man have to strive to be attractive like prostitutes? What is the need of wasting your energy trying to conform to the height, the waistline, the hips and the legs prescribed by those official image makers, the entrepreneurs? Have we not got our own brains to think about it and to make a genuine choice? If we have freedom and intelligence, why shouldn’t we think that whatever body God has given us is more than sufficient for our needs? And besides, why should we hanker for people to be running after us for our bodies? Of course for many the idea that we might actually not enjoy being pursued by every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to be very out-of-date because strangely they enjoy this kind of joyless pursuit.

The notion that you should have unlimited choice has most clearly gone too far in the rapid increase in the availability of pornography. I have seen books which even exploit children to satisfy the perverse sexuality of some people. Although I had no courage to read them, I understand that these books are very popular and are making a lot of money for the publisher and the writer. When innocence itself is used to satisfy the basest and most selfish passions, then that society has clearly lost all contact with the traditional values which allow any society or culture to survive. There has to be respect for marriage and for the innocence of children. Everyone should become alert and aware of the vital importance of finding out what the purpose of marriage is, which is to protect the innocence of little children and prevent them from being overpowered and exploited. But in modern societies parents have become no more than fierce, unreasoning bullies who shirk their real responsibilities of providing love and security or else they are like cabbages that children can eat them with a chilly sauce of cruel treatment. It is precisely the failure to understand the vital importance of stable marriages that has destroyed the .so-called advanced societies in which parents cannot give guidance through love to their children, because they are too busy running after artificial images created by the entrepreneurs. Children at a very young age are frustrated in their desire for love and affection and are driven to seek the company of other children. And in their desperate desire for love, they enter the mess of immorality at a very young age. Even the media, particularly the television, feeds their brains with all kinds of absurd ideas about the importance of sex. In a society where the media is not allowed to focus upon sex for children, there is no need to give sex education to children in schools. It is not done in India so far and will not be done (I hope) because it is not necessary. Why expose the innocence of children to these frightening ideas which (where a child has been deliberately saved not to be ruined by exposure to sex and violence on TV and videos) simply do not exist? It is a terrible misuse of this power of the educators to implant something so dangerous at such a young age, when they should just enjoy life and their innocence. At the tender age of seven or eight it is too soon to end these beautiful years of innocence and it is also cruel. Children are not naturally equipped to cope with the so-.called facts of life so aggressively thrust into their consciousness, in those beautiful days of playful, joyful, innocent existence.

In this way modernism has created a whole generation of human beings who have ruined their own lives, ruined the lives of their families, ruined the lives of their children and of their parents. All those sources which traditionally provided the nourishment of love and peace have been completely ruined. Now-a-days, a grandmother is too busy to look after her grandchild, because she “has to go to the hairdresser’s” because she “must look young”. Because if she does not look young, she is considered to be “over the hill”, as good as a dead person.

Nobody will allow you to go along nicely without putting your head into the dirty hands of hairdressers for example. I, myself, never go to a hairdresser. So many people have thought me to be a rustic woman from some sort of unsophisticated family. But when I now see those who used to think like that, at the same age as me, they have all become nearly bald or are absolutely grey with wrinkled faces. They have slowly lost all their natural smile, their sweetness, their soft expressions. This is the so-called gift of all those beauticians.

Also there is a choice for you: to get just your skin or your whole face lifted. But I have seen in one country a President’s wife who wears a permanent grin on her face. Try as I might, it was impossible for me to understand how this woman could have a grin on her face all the time, regardless of whether she laughed or cried. Later on I discovered that she had been through a very severe course of face-lifting treatment in Switzerland and had achieved this expression permanently.

A mature person understands that as age advances, you have no choice but to become old, but at the same time, may remain graceful, dignified and serene. But things have become so materialistic in the modern society that even when you have one foot in the grave, you have to be sure that you look all right and are playing into the hands of the entrepreneurs. Even your final gesture at that time is going to be watched by all the people to make sure that you have kept to the latest fashion and stayed up-to-date.

The great principle in the consumer society in which all your choices are carefully multiplied so as to drain you of your money, is that you should spend all your precious energy seeing and being seen. The code of behaviour is dictated before you even begin to choose.

When we first came to London we had no appropriate glasses or tumblers for wine or spirits. We were told quite clearly that nobody would come to our house unless we offered them a drink. Despite my uneasiness, and my natural disgust of wine and alcohol, I realised, I had to do it. So I requested my husband to undertake the responsibility for this aspect, as I would not be able to do justice to such a demanding task. He calls me an idealist and that I am not practical. First he had to get a dictionary to read up all the details about wine and alcohol. Then we realised that there were books and books written about alcohol and how drinks are to be served and what tumblers and glasses should be used. It was a regular course of study. Then we got hold of a friend and took him with us to buy the minimum number of glasses needed to entertain about twelve people. You would be amazed! It was in 1974, in England, and we had to pay more than 900 Pounds to buy that one set for twelve people, because it had to be very elegant and of a special style. I was amazed that there are so many expensive kinds of glasses needed for different kinds of wines and spirits, while in India, we can do with just one glass or silver tumbler for each guest for soft drinks. Moreover, for people who have had a few drinks and who cannot then see anything, what is the need of having such elegant artistically made crystal glasses? It was a nuisance to clean them, put them in the right order, and to remember which was to be used for what. In India, as we have servants, my husband had never known how to carry even a tray, but as I would not agree to do that, he had to carry tray after tray upstairs, where our guests were sitting and drinking. Some of the guests who were to come to our house lost their way and they arrived for lunch at four o’clock. After that, of course, we had to serve them. The more we poured, the more they drank (always from the right glass of course) and after an hour they were no longer in their right senses. They said the same things over and over again, but nobody was listening anyway.

I must admit that I come from a family which was always against drinking alcohol, but I did not realise how naive and unprepared I was to play the role of the kind of housewife I had to be in London, at that time. I did not know even the colours of anyone of these drinks. How was I to serve them? So I asked my husband to do his “religious” duty. In order to assist him in this great task, he got hold of two Chinese waiters who, as it turned out, came to us as a great blessing. They knew a lot about different types of alcohol and the manner in which they should be served. We had to pay them quite a lot for their knowledge and expertise. They looked at our stock of wines and spirits and found this to be inadequate for the number of guests who were coming for lunch. They also made a huge list of other requirements. My husband had to rush to the local market to purchase some bottles of ‘Chivas Regal’ whisky as well as some wines. The other requirements indicated by the Chinese waiters were also purchased. We now felt confident that we were well prepared. However, when the guests arrived and the drinks were served, we suddenly faced a problem which, due to our ignorance of drinking requirements, we had not anticipated. One of them had asked for an alcoholic drink with Worcester Sauce. As far as I was concerned, I had heard of a character in novels of P.G. Woodhouse who had the same name phonetically: Wooster. But not a sauce. In any case, for our Indian food we do not need Worcester sauce and we had none in the house. Even our experienced Chinese waiters had not included this item in their list. What could we do? My husband apologised to the guest concerned, but he was not amused. Eventually he accepted another drink rather reluctantly but as time passed, became quite genial. Sometimes I felt very much aggressed and disturbed by the insisting demands of these unmannerly guests in their choices, as if it was their birth right to ask for a particular type of drink.

It is so difficult for me to understand why so many people who are at the helm of affairs and who have to do so much responsible work for their country, have this horrible addiction. It has become the one and only culture of the Western countries, and unless you offer your guests this intoxicant, you cannot talk nor have any rapport with them at all. The trouble is, once the alcohol is there, maybe all that rapport can become so much disconnected nonsense, even in diplomatic circles. I feel that the spies and the traitors of every country must be cleverly using this choice of alcoholic drinks as a method of enticing people, dulling their senses and getting their secrets out of them. Even for simple bribery and corruption, alcohol is a very good vehicle. If you know a person in charge likes a particular type of spirit or wine, it is very easy to win him over.

Once we tried this experiment with the station master of our local railway station. He was a multi-purpose employee who served at the ticket window as well. Whenever I went to buy a ticket, he would behave rudely on one pretext or another. If I did not have the exact change, he would show his annoyance by gesture or words. Perhaps he could not bear the sight of a traditionally dressed Indian lady. We did not know how to make him kinder or to win him over. My husband suggested that as we would not need the left over Chivas Regal bottles, we might send a couple of them to the station master as a gift on the occasion of some celebration at our residence. The bottles were duly delivered by our domestic aide to the station master. He asked: “Was this some religious festival of yours?” “Yes, it was.” replied our man. The station master was delighted. He accepted the bottles of whisky with great pleasure and conveyed his profuse thanks to us. Next day, when I went to the station as usual, I was treated with very special courtesy and respect as if I was the local baroness. I was amazed at this total transformation. We continued to live in that place for four years and we thereafter had no problems at all. The extra bottles which my husband had bought had come in very good use after all. We were sending these bottles every year but the dates changed as we did not keep a record. He asked me how your festivals fall at different dates. I did not know how to answer. He then told me that an Indian friend told him that Indians follow the Moon Calendar and not the Sun Calendar.

The key idea in modern times is that every day one must have something new. There should be a change every day, perhaps even down to your wife or your children, because a modern person becomes bored so very easily. Perhaps he has to make up his mind so often between so many different choices that his brain gets exhausted and ultimately, when he gets what he thought he wanted, he finds that he is bored with that as well. This secret is well known to the entrepreneur. He first tempts your attention with a vast array of choices, and then he bores you stiff and creates more and more things for you to choose from, because that is how he can keep his machines satisfied, and these require feeding every day. He knows how to pamper your ego and to suggest that you have the choice to do something, or to accept something. For example, if you want to buy or sell some property in England, a house which is not decorated and is not yet attended to and has been left to its own fate, fetches much more money than a house which has been done up and is well decorated. The point is, the house which has not been done up – is the one which satisfies the ego of the purchaser, who would like to have the house done according to his own choice. So, personal choice becomes the criterion for deciding what is the best for you. But this choice is based on the play of ego and if some entrepreneur is clever enough to see how he can fool the buyers by advertising in the media or through window displays, he can easily make a vast sum of money in a very short time.

Now, if he, the entrepreneur, also happens to be a politician, then such a man can become an important person at the helm of affairs, simply because he has a sharp mind and knows everything you need to know to be successful. Meanwhile the consumer, of course, thinks that he has a great freedom of choice. He thinks, “Oh, I can choose this or that. What a lord I am that I have a right to choose”. But gradually he gets lost in the choices that he has and is very confused because he is living superficially on the cusp of all these choices. He cannot go deep into his being to understand what he actually wants. Just by saying the magic words: “I like it” he feels that he has an identity and a personality by which he can assert his own will and affirm his own self in the world.

When one plays into the hands of the entrepreneurs, one wastes all one’s labour and all one’s energy in consumerism. We start desecrating Mother Earth and creating environmental problems. Unfortunately, human beings, however highly they might think of themselves, cannot create matter. Nor can they create life out of matter. All they can ever do is to create dead things from dead material. Thus they exhaust Mother Earth in their frantic and endless rush to create new fashions, new things and new egos. One should buy no more than one needs. Even for daily use one should buy something substantial, sensible and artistic.

In their vanity, some ladies prefer to buy shoes which make them look six inches taller, with a pointed stiletto heel. They do not even pause to think that this kind of showing-off temperament of theirs will invariably lead to sprained ankles, or to sciatica, or to more serious troubles with their spinal column, so that they may not, one day, be able to walk and will have to lie down on their beds and make their choices from there. There is not a lot of sense in believing that you are free to do what you like and to choose what you like, when all you are doing is playing into the hands of unscrupulous entrepreneurs and spoiling yourself.

In modern times there is another way the entrepreneurs try to create problems for consumers. In Western countries there are very few people who can afford to own things made of gold or silver, but strangely enough in the developing countries every household will have something made of silver or gold. The reason, I have found, is that everything is seen in terms of its cash value in Western countries, so that everything you buy has to be re-sellable. If you want to buy a silver spoon, then it has to be hallmarked. If it is not hallmarked, then it cannot be resold. So the spoon is bought to use and later to re-sell. It is never thought that “this spoon could go to my children or to my grandchildren”. The hallmark is very important, and you cannot have silver of any other variety. For example, you could have cheaper silver if you mix it with something else, but such a thing would not resell.

On the contrary, as far as gold is concerned, it is the lowest gradation of nine carats which is used in all the Western countries. This ‘gold’ absolutely amounts to very little actual gold in the ornaments. But, you can resell it, because it is hallmarked. While in the developing countries, especially China and India, people use 22 or 24 carat gold, so that there is a substantial amount of pure gold in their jewellery. When they fall on hard times, if the jewellery cannot be sold for its workmanship, at least there is gold that they can sell or pawn and redeem later. So it is a paradox that when you buy some thing, you have to know what the substantial value of that particular item is. If it is silver, then you need to know the mixture, and the proportion of pure silver in it will indicate the real value. So whatever one buys, it has to be substantial and when it is to be sold, it is the material substance in it that should be seen. But because of these paradoxical markings, one does not know whether to buy these things or not. For, as traditional wisdom knows, silver is very important for a good heart, as it keeps the heart in good shape, and gold is important because it does not tarnish. If a little gold is used for daily wear as jewellery, it helps you to achieve some good results in a very subtle manner, which I will explain later.

So, in traditional cultures which have largely escaped the blight of modernism and consumerism, there is knowledge and a respect for the subtle properties of material substances. It is a paradox that in the so-called materialistic societies, there is no respect for matter.

If you go into any modern house in the West, you will find numerous things, some made of plastic. If you sit on a sofa, it could be among many made of plastic. If you eat at a table, it may he made of plastic. If you touch the window frames, they are made of plastic. Things which are made of plastic have a curious capacity to penetrate any natural material such as cloth or glass, or any other God-made material that is used together with plastic. So much so that the natural material feels debased and loses its own particular energy. Because it is cheap, you can go on buying plastic after plastic, and in any household, people have many disposable things made of plastic as well as durable things which are also made of mixtures of plastic. Even the dinner plates are made of plastic. Why don’t they prefer to buy one nice plate made of brass? Something hand-made, instead of a vast choice of plastic plates? Plastic is machine-made from the waste matter of the earth which has therefore got all the ingredients for our destruction within it.

If you have something made by hand and you use it without making a big fuss about it, you can enjoy it for itself, as well as for the usefulness that it may have. Even if you have only a few well made and beautiful plates, you feel so satisfied that you don’t want to buy any others and waste your time window shopping all the time. Then you are truly a free person. But if you follow fashion, you will be busy all day wasting your time. You will go to someone’s house and say, “Oh, he has got such and such a thing. It’s very good”. So you will go out and buy the same thing, because this is the choice you have made. But who is playing games with whom? Who is calling the tune? The entrepreneurs of course, and they are spoiling you and your children. Their alluring advertisements are blasted out of the television at peak viewing hours for children’s programmes: “This is a nice thing that has just come out. Dolls with birthdays, bears with pedigrees” But all this is simply to keep the machinery working.

By exercising our right to make choices and spend our money on what takes our fancy, we are simply playing into the hands of the exploiter, the entrepreneur. Please remember that he knows you better than you know yourself. One has to remember that the machinery is meant to serve us and that we are not meant to serve the machinery. It is not our genuine needs that are responsible for the over-production of consumer goods by this machinery. But it is we who suffer from the over-production of such goods because it creates the depletion of the Earth’s resources and the constant waste of money which is the product of our labours and which we spend so compulsively on things we do not want and which are usually not good for us. I have seen many houses filled with junks and the owners are suffering from heart attacks, those who worked hard to collect this junk.

This idea that freedom is just the ability to make pseudo and irrelevant choices is believed only by those people who are still naive and who are not smart enough to see the underlying forces that bring forth every-day passions and compulsions which masquerade as freedom. Of course, one has to be free to act, to express one’s freedom, but this should never be unbridled. You should know what to do and where to stop. If you have a car which has an accelerator but no brakes, then what will be the situation of the driver? In the same way if you have freedom, then you must know also that you have freedom to curb this whimsical freedom at a point.

Some people who still live under a Communist regime may of course be curbed, but that, of course, is a compulsory curbing. When they are let loose, you see that their desires are still unfulfilled and they emerge even more powerfully than the desires of people in a free country. So this curbing has to come from within and for that, one has to have spiritual awakening. That is, the wisdom of the Spirit must come into your attention. If you ask a gnostic or a Sahaja Yogi: “What are you fond of? Are you fond of hot things?” He will say: “To begin with, I do not like or dislike anything, except anything to an extreme. I just enjoy whatever is there. Who is going to waste time choosing things? Just enjoy whatever is available.” But, of course, if it is very hot or very sour or very cold, then he will eat only a little of that, because it has gone to an extreme.

Unfortunately this ‘choice’ business is becoming more and more of a very extreme nature (even, as we have seen, when it comes to marriages). However this urge to multiply the choices which the ego can make is curbed by the Spirit, because, when it comes to your attention, it enables you to understand the vital aesthetic dimension of your experience. So, instead of allowing the ego to manifest greed for material objects, it starts enjoying the Divine beauty of matter. Or else the self-realised soul knows that matter provides a most wonderful way of expressing your love, when you want to give some material thing to somebody else. So a joyful thought is inspired within you, when you see something beautiful, that this would be nice for such and such a person that you love. For example, once a gentleman went with a Sahaja Yogi to a shop and he liked something very much, a piece of art, but he could not purchase it because, at that time he had no money with him. So his friend, who was also a Sahaja Yogi, went later on and purchased that particular work of art, kept it for some time and, on his friend’s birthday, he sent it to him. This concern and this deep expression of love enchanted the other person and he was doubly happy to see how a beautiful thought was attached to that work of art.

So it is the attention in the Divine discretion of the Spirit on the one hand that curbs your greed, your selfishness, your acquisitive urge and your dis-satisfied mind. On the other hand, the knowledge of what you can do to make someone really happy with some material thing that is available for purchase, suddenly dawns upon you and enables you to understand the true value of matter and to exercise your freedom of choice, in order to express your love and to enhance the quality of someone else’s life.

Chapter 3: Democracy

It was the great advent of Abraham Lincoln which brought the uniquely true idea of democracy into reality in America. He specifically said that the government should be

“of the people”, yet today we find that most countries who call themselves democracies have been “demon-o-cracies”. They are ruled by people who are either money-oriented or power- oriented. Concern for the benevolence of the people, which should be the main aim of a democracy has become completely lost in modern times. It is simply no longer a matter of concern for those people who are said to be at the helm of affairs. Many people have claimed, and perhaps they are not entirely wrong, that America is nowadays no longer ruled by the people, but by the rich only, by big businesses, or by cinema actors and actresses. The rest of the developed countries nowadays, are also ruled by the banks, the entrepreneurs, the media and the underworld.

Thus, the idea of Abraham Lincoln, like the ideas of all great saints and prophets, has become completely perverted, as democracy has degenerated in our money-crazy, modern society. Whatever generous principles were announced at the beginning has vanished into the mist of violent, argumentative discussions at various conferences called throughout the world to solve the problems of democracies. The establishment of higher ethical values, which was originally meant to be the top priority in any democratic country, is now completely missing from the agenda.

For example, America, that great country of the free, will support, without any compunction or hesitation, any country that happens to suit the current policy of the current President. This is done regardless of the fact that that country may be ruled by a despotic person, who may not have the slightest respect for democracy. For example, it was America and most of the European countries that professed to be democratic, who manufactured and sold arms to Iraq which is ruled by Saddam Hussein. Thus, many democratic countries joined hands to make him very powerful and war-oriented, just because it happened to suit their policies.

Real democracy is only possible when people truly imbibe democratic principles and respect ethical values above everything else. People who are power-crazy and who want to make money by any means, cannot be said to have the right democratic ideology democracy cannot be managed by people who are greedy, of loose character and self-centred. Those who are womanisers, or who drink while they are working on solving the national problems are in fact the true source of their nation’s problems and of the whole world at large.

Politicians should be dedicated to the welfare of the people, but sometimes politics becomes like a game of chess, in which the sole aim is to stay on board as long as possible. The politicians do not want to leave their seats, to which they are glued, until they are forced to admit defeat. Until the last moment of their lives they want to be in a state of political intoxication. They only resign when one foot is definitely placed in the grave. Such low level people cannot work for a real democracy. For democracy you need very noble, honourable, learned and compassionate visionaries, who have only a benevolent attitude towards the people and total dedication to the ideals of democracy.

Where is the so-called democratic country whose governing people have the character that can sustain a clean and a righteous democracy as envisaged by Abraham Lincoln? In the Third world, where politicians religiously imitate the example of these great developed countries, they degrade the democratic value system even more. In India, for example, the people in power may not want to eradicate poverty, because they can buy the votes of the poor by giving them a little money. Or else, they may support a minority and pamper it to use as a vote bank. Thus we find in these underdeveloped countries, poverty actually helps’ to maintain this type of “demon-o-cracy”.

Nowhere in the world is there a democratic government truly “of the people, for the people, by the people”. What one sees in reality is people in power have no sense of ethical values and no concern for the people whom they should serve. Political power is treated like an investment which is intended to generate much more money, as it does in business. Abraham Lincoln, like any other saint, had his eye on absolute values and he did not know that people were not yet ready for as great an ideal as that of democracy, and that most of them would develop a tendency to stray off the straight and narrow path of dedication to the collective well-being and follow the broader road of self- interest. Those people who are elected to power basically need to have concern for the well-being of the whole and the wisdom to function in a spirit of service.

A benevolent ruler, in the form of a philosopher king (as put forward by Socrates), is the ideal person to be the head of government. Such a person must be an extremely wise, detached personality, without any desire for lust, power and money. There have been such persons in the recent past, people like Mahatma Gandhi, Ataturk Kemal Pasa, Anwar al Sadat, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Ho Chi Minh, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Dag Hammerskjyld, Mujibur Rahman and many others.

To talk of political wisdom in these modern times seems quaint. Wisdom, it seems, is out of the question, because rationality has long since taken its place. Relying on the limited linear logic of mere rationality, purely egocentric solutions are put forward to justify the actions of those in power (which of course have a global mutual appeal to all the other egocentric people in power). In this way, there is a fraternity of negative thinking and they support each other in their parliaments, assemblies or senates. This is why nothing truly useful for the ascent of the people ever gets done. On the contrary, the politicians of these democratic countries use whatever means they can muster, for their own selfish purposes or to enforce their arbitrary ideas.

As this licence, which is what freedom has become in a democracy, gives them the right to enjoy their powers to the point of misuse, they have ‘carried their freedom unchecked beyond all bounds and natural limitations. So that, not only have such politicians made money, and so distanced themselves from the ordinary people they are meant to serve, but they have been publicly and admiringly described as extraordinarily rich personalities in the money market. One feels ashamed to hear such a thing about people whom one elects with such great hope.

However, the time of reckoning has come, and their criminality is now being exposed. These democracies and their politicians have perhaps already reached a polarity state in some countries, while others are as yet slowly moving towards it. The politicians may come and go, but there is always somebody queuing up to replace them. There is no way to cut short this process of people arriving at the helm of affairs every few years, who might well be infinitely worse than the ones who were there before. Thus, most democratic countries have become, with mutual consent, absolutely authoritarian, racist and materialistic. Those who have not yet managed are aspiring to become so. Money makes the whole concept of real democracy absolutely secondary. Those who have money power can rule without any feeling for benevolence and the value system of true democracy. It can be easily seen that when money becomes God, all moral values have to be put aside.

In a democracy, of course, people’s votes become important. For example, if women happen to be in a majority, their votes in particular become significant and the policies of the politicians, who are concerned only to get into power, will be adjusted to suit the egoistical ideas of that section of the electorate. Thus women have a legal right to walk around half nude in the cold climate of Switzerland, where common sense and decency would suggest that they should cover themselves up. And in other countries, like France, women have the glorious right to carry on with immoral behaviour, such as running their own prostitution business, with all the allowance and favour of the law. If they represent a large enough electorate, no one can influence or control them. It is they who make the laws. As soon as someone has a vote, he or she becomes a very important person to be flattered and wooed by the politicians.

The Socratic ideal of serving the benevolence of the people does not exist any more. On the contrary, they criticise it by insisting that Socrates was not a practical man. All the great saints and prophets were, of course, idealists and not practical people. Most of the democracies of today’s world are under the thumb of people who have no honourable or moral ideas whatsoever. They discover very fast that power can give them prosperity and that this money power can whitewash and obliterate all their misdeeds and conceal the dubious business they are up to. Unfortunately for them, this false licence has now gone into their heads, like a fixed idea, and they go on behaving immorally, without any fear of the Divine, ruthlessly destroying the entire value system of democracy. They may carry on for years, as they did in Italy, until, by the Law of Polarity or by Divine retribution, they are exposed. But before this happens, such rulers unfortunately become models for the people whom they govern and gradually moral degradation in day-today life begins to create a decadent or dying democratic society.

As I have said, those who are elected to serve the people’s welfare should be evolved souls whose ideas should be like Abraham Lincoln’s or whose ethical values should be like Mahatma Gandhi’s. Perhaps the cynical political strategy of modernist leaders is to let people ruin themselves in their private lives. Why would the government disturb people in their private life? This is because anyone who raises a question about private lives of the people will not get a vote. The modern politician says that if the people want to destroy themselves, they have the right and the freedom to do so. So why disturb such political thinking? The strategy is common in democracy and communism. As long as voters do not try to dislodge those in power from the comfortable seats (to which they are glued in order to serve their own self-interest) the politicians feel very re-assured.

As a result of this demonic money grabbing activity, many other dangerous activities also start. For example the French unwritten law, referred to earlier, allows a housewife to be a part-time prostitute. It can be rationalised that a woman has every right to make money in whatever way she can.

It is also said that France is the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church. How can we explain this strange tolerance of immorality even to the point of justifying it through rationalisation? Perhaps the answer is that the Law Courts know nothing of dharma, but blindly follow Freudian theories and obediently accept the opinions of psychoanalysts when it comes to interpreting the law. Even though Freud’s theory has been completely exposed and discredited, it is still used in most democratic countries in judging the crimes of patients with mental problems. But Freud’s subtle influence on the attitudes of ordinary people in the developed countries is vast and always destructive. It is impossible to tell how much damage Freud’s theories have done to Western societies as a whole, but the worst thing of all is the way people have lost all sense of self-esteem, because of their acceptance of Freud’s revelations as if they were gospel truths. Now, under the constant influence of the media, particularly of films and television videos, they either casually neglect, or actively try to destroy, all those natural feelings of modesty and chastity that, in traditional societies, provided the basis of morality and personal and family happiness and well- being. Developing countries want to take to all these destructive methods because some intellectuals are saying that if you want to have economic development, then we must go headlong in this go-go culture.

For example, I recently read in a newspaper report about a girl, hardly an adult, who was constantly going out to cabarets and discos. Suddenly, the parents found out that she had become like a prostitute. What a shock to discover that they could have no objection, as long as it was legal, and she was earning well and paying her parents for her keep. Later the girl died of some secret (that is sexually transmitted) disease at the age of twenty one. Such behaviour might theoretically be justified in a poor country, but in actual fact, parents in a poor country have much more control over the morality of their children. Their societies cling to traditional, ethical values, perhaps because they have real faith in the power of the Divine or maybe they have not yet fallen into the illusion of money.

But in affluent countries, as we can read every day in the newspapers, parents themselves are planning the destruction of their own children, by allowing them to drink and smoke, and encouraging them towards promiscuity by fuelling their interest in sex with advice on contraception at a very young age and allowing them to watch films and videos, whose sole aim is to destroy the natural respect that all human beings have for sacred things. In such societies, there is no growth of maturity and no respect for maturity.

In affluent families it is even worse. The young people want to enjoy their freedom solely in order to ruin themselves. There is no effective control by the parents or the state to stop adolescent girls becoming pregnant or contracting diseases through promiscuity. They start off as golden girls with no brake on their freedom, and they end up as squatters, handed from one partner to another or in the hell of a brothel.

If we dare to analyse clearly the real implications of what is going on around us, it is very evident that the deepest trends in these democratic societies are aimed at self-destruction. It is not only that in Switzerland, Norway and Denmark people are competing with each other to commit suicide, but in every developed country young people are taking to self-destructive habits en masse. One cannot understand why, in the highly developed democracies, young people take so easily to what are really false cults, fads or addictions, (but which are treated as if they were a Divinely implanted right) like alcohol abuse or homosexuality, and which actually ensure their self-destruction. Alcoholism and drug addiction are known to be a sure passport to hell. And yet more and more people are queuing up for them.

All kinds of indescribable sexual perversions are leading to AIDS and other serious diseases. But how is it that when people arrogantly cling to and even boast of their homosexuality or promiscuity, they are treated like some sort of heroes in the face of the threat of AIDS? Death from this disease is now being presented as a glorious martyrdom for those great people who are marching like courageous soldiers to their graves. Why is it that such intelligent people are not questioning the rightness of these destructive habits? All human beings know what simple and natural decency is and they actually need it and crave for it in their deepest selves. Is it only because people from the developed countries are so consistently frustrated of this basic need that they are so anxious to kill themselves?

Even when it comes to enjoying themselves, it can be seen very clearly, for example, in modern pop music, that people in these self-destructive times are expressing their insecurities and frustration through disrespectful behaviour towards themselves, as if they actually hated and despised themselves. Pop music is generated by entrepreneurs in order to make money for themselves. By skillfully flattering human weaknesses, they are constantly pushing young people to get into moods which cannot create peace, harmony and joy, but which lead to very great turmoil within and a great sense of dissatisfaction and frustration that they try to alleviate with the next batch of pop music, which the money-making brigades conveniently churn out. Such an immature, younger generation, whose inner balance is constantly being disturbed by off-centered emotions, can on the one hand only become depressed recluses, who cannot form any real relationships, or on the other hand, wayward and violent hoodlums who are intent only on destroying the tranquillity of others. Is this what we really expect from the great ideal of democracy?

Modern democracies began to emerge in the eighteenth century, but at around the same time, with the advancement of science, the industrial revolution began to manifest itself. What we call industrial and commercial values were also generated by the advent of the industrial or technological society. As it is, science is absolutely amoral. It does not conform to the rules and regulations laid down for the human value system. Science is the knowledge of matter and matter has its own internal regulations. Unlike human beings, matter does not have free will with which to establish any ethical value system for itself. In pure science, which is amoral, this quality has been carried- over, almost without anyone noticing, into the practical and applied field through technology. Thus, industry and (in close association with it) commerce have become absolutely amoral.

When work is done by human beings applying their own skills in a fully human environment, work and morality go hand in hand. But technology and what we now call industry (which used to mean dedicated and productive work for the benevolence of human beings) have no built-in ethical value system and so are not subject to any inner moral binding. But the Law of Polarity acts here also and industries of the developed nations have now swung to the other side of the pendulum. It is because of the unrestrained development of industry, beyond the humanising influence of the ethical value system or dharma, that we see all over the world, but especially in the highly developed democratic countries, that there is a deep and growing economic recession. It is as if the machinery in all these industries has gone out of gear, because no one bothered to make sure that it was running within its proper bounds.

Governments are now trying to revive their flagging industries by artificial methods, such as manipulating interest rates, but also by cajoling underdeveloped countries or Eastern Bloc people, especially Russia and China, with the full persuasive force of Western advertising propaganda, to purchase all the unsold surpluses from the industries of those countries which are suffering from recession. So the poor underdeveloped countries, once again risk being exploited by these so-called highly developed democracies. It is a sad sight to see all the so-called great leaders, the Prime Ministers and Presidents of the developed nations, scuffling around the world trying to sell their goods to those countries which are still under the spell of imported goods. This is gross moral and economic exploitation. In Russia, many unnecessary American or German goods are being sold to a people who have very little foreign currency. All the junk which has not been sold in these industrialised countries which are undergoing recession, is now being dumped and is finding its way even as far as India. There are pompous visitations of political leaders, as well as great captains of industry, to try to involve underdeveloped countries in their own recession crises. But how far are they going to get? They are all chasing after the same illusory thing. Looking at this from the outside, one wonders how this recession is ever going to be overcome, because it has deep historic roots and the Law of Polarity cannot be avoided. The best example is Turkey, which has the best foods, the best clothes, the best ornaments and the best carpets, and despite this, imports all these items from Germany. Somehow, the German entrepreneurs have made the Turkish people blind to their own hand made products and very tasty food. In Turkey people eat German bread and German sausages. As a result, the Turkish have become very poor and are wearing jeans in that hot climate. This has to be suffered.

Firstly, with the growth of imperialistic ideas, most countries went about shamelessly spreading their regimes all over the world. They initially became wealthy by plundering, cheating and massacring the countries they colonised and they enjoyed this ill-gotten money for many years. Later, with industrial development, they used their colonies as a cheap source of raw materials and labour and as a readymade and captive market for their goods. But now industrialism has run its appointed course and the industries of the developed countries have started overproducing goods. This surplus production cannot be consumed either by their own population or by their former colonies because, as an offshoot of the colonialist era, the newly independent countries (where local industries were originally developed in order to exploit their raw materials and cheap labour) are now equipped with machinery which can produce all these goods at a fraction of the price compared to those of their former colonialist masters. So who are the developed countries now going to exploit to get over their recession? There are simply not sufficient markets for the products of this fake and amoral industry. But much more has been lost than mere markets for surplus goods. The casual surplus dresses have entered every market because they need not be washed and pressed. In very hot countries like Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Malaysia and many others, these clothes are worn with great pride. Though all of them smell, stink and get rashes, they are very impressive and fashionable, according to the marketing people from the West.

How long can they fool the developing countries with their marketing? With the development of industries, in both the Capitalist and Communist systems, gradually human beings have become the slaves of matter which has started now to dominate them. The most serious effect is that the value system of the human level has also been reduced to a gross materialistic state. Although the human being is in fact the epitome of evolution and potentially the master of all nonhuman world, it is nevertheless apparent that modern man presents a picture of a new kind of human being, who is dominated by matter, by his body or by his animal instincts. Things have become so bad that anyone who even talks of human values, or of higher human values, is regarded, and sometimes treated, as if he is a freak or a lunatic. It seems that it is simply not possible for people to understand to what extent they have fallen into the clutches of matter and their animal instincts. To add to the slow domination of human beings by matter, we have had great thinkers and scholars like Freud who have reduced human-beings to a mere sex point.

Why is it that matter rules human beings? In the process of evolution we have passed through various stages and the truth is that our basic and first nature is matter. We came out of inert matter into the state of living beings and then slowly progressed through and out of the animal state. Many thousands of years ago, in India, human beings produced highly evolved and sophisticated works of spiritual philosophy such as the Vedas and Upanishads, and Geeta. For thousands of years, people lived according to their noble vision of mankind. What we see in the modern world is quite clearly therefore a serious regression, a falling back of human beings from the higher state they had already achieved through their ascent. There is a film called “Planet of the Apes” which clearly shows what would happen if evolution goes into reverse, that is devolution.

Moreover, in most recent times, the two world Wars killed enormous numbers of very peaceful, good and decent ordinary people. This gave a setback to people’s faith in the natural goodness of life and the existence of eternal values. With the horror of modern warfare, millions of women became widows and children became orphans and all these warring nations were completely paralysed, not just in their industries, but in their moral lives as well. In the aftermath of these destructive wars, their future lives became a barren land without any hope of recovery. For ordinary people it was thus very easy to give up all ethical values and to take to a cheap and superficial life, of the kind that we saw very much in the decades following the wars, the sixties, seventies and even today. In cultural life, these years were particularly marked by the increasingly destructive attack of the so-called modernist trend on all traditional forms and values. Slowly, over the last seventy years or so, the general level of people’s awareness has fallen below its ordinary potential. For anyone who looks calmly and objectively at the situation that human beings have got themselves into, it will be obvious that unless we have achieved a breakthrough into a higher form of awareness, a higher value system, we cannot come out of this mess we have created by subjugating ourselves to matter and to animal instincts, and therefore, to our self- destruction.

And yet the democracies, these countries where human freedom is meant to be in its full flower and glory, are full of terrible inner contradictions which make this evolutionary breakthrough appear to be very difficult. Apart from this, in democracies, the freedom to criticise and mislead others is a matter of fundamental right. The real meaning of freedom, however, includes a built-in or innate sense of responsibility, based on wisdom and sanity, which gives no license for immorality, competitiveness and hatred. Real freedom exists to enable us to recognise our highest ethical nature and to serve it and develop it for our own well-being and the benevolence of the whole world.

But on the contrary, modern democracies do not even wish to talk about morality and compassion, because, as they say, these concern the supposed private lives of individuals. It is by distorting the noble idea of the rights of individual conscience that governments in the democracies have shirked their responsibility for generating a sense of self-respect and righteousness, both in their own populations and in the relations between nations. Whatever their theoretical ideas may be, they clearly cannot believe that there is really one world and a single community of all human beings or they would not have abandoned any pretence to serve man’s higher nature, as they so obviously have.

Added to all this there is a great deal of hypocrisy when it comes to the notion of public morality. If a top Minister or Prime Minister of a democratic country has an affair with another woman, it is castigated as a grave misdeed on the part of a man in the public eye. But men in the rest of the country can have any amount of illegal relations with any number of women of any character. The common assumption nowadays is simple: that there is no way of correcting or even criticising it. Since Freud revealed his “gospel truth”, it is taken to be self-evident that the majority of human beings are at the mercy of their lowest nature. But even so, a Prime Minister or a President must be different. He has to be a morally perfect person. This expectation at least, we might think, is something valuable. But this last vestige of a truly moral viewpoint is really just paying lip service to a defunct ideal. All it shows is that the perfection demanded of this single person does not penetrate, nor is it really expected to penetrate, into the society. Out of a false sort of respect for individual freedom, which may of course cover their own desire to do what they feel like doing without unwanted advice, those in power do not want to interfere with the private lives of the people. Now, with the loss of all sense of shame or impropriety, all these private lives have become social and public lives and all those societies, which are under the guidance of democratic structures, are suffering from the pangs of polarity.

They behave as if all the morality in a democracy is only for those in the public eye and the rest of the people are free to go which-ever way they choose, so that it does not matter how they destroy themselves. In the democracies then, by the operation of the Law of Polarity, personal or individual freedom is going to ruin society by en masse mutation and no one seems to actually want to do anything about this by striking at the root causes. Compassion is something to be talked about only, by the money or power-oriented religions. There is nothing they can or even really want to do, to stop the rapid decline of their societies into moral degradation and economic ruin.

Now the elected rulers in the West pretend to be democratic, but having become racists or fundamentalists, all they will do is not allow any person to enter their country or any goods from the developing countries to come in, as they sell better, cheaper goods, even though they have exploited these poor countries for years together as imperialists. They are simply not interested in legislating to curb the downward spiral of their people’s lives .. Moreover, they are anxious not to provoke social agitation or demonstrations by the people, who have been flattered and spoilt in their so-called individualism to the point that all they want is to lead a universal life – a life of the mass media and the false models they offer to the people. Such people popularise themselves with verbosity and could be silenced by many modern tricks, but as long as their seats are secure, the politicians are not bothered about what the common man is doing to himself. On the contrary, by giving this kind of absolute freedom to look after one’~ own private life, they pamper the ego and weaknesses of the voters because they never legislate to preserve and encourage morality. They are sure they will never have to face the anger and frustration of immoral people.

Another product of this license of abandonment is brutal, mad violence, because people have no sense of what is wrong and no fear in their minds, even for a moment, of the possibility of retribution. In Los Angeles, the City of the Angels, I was travelling in a car once and the driver advised me to close the window and lower my head. Only a week before, he explained, eleven people had been shot down on this street. I asked him what the reason was. He answered in American English ”’just for the heck of it”. Violence which is “just for the heck of it” can only be explained with reference to what those people who perpetrate it have imbibed from the attitudes of their families, friends or the media, especially from television, videos and cinema films, and from concealed hatred or covert racialism in the media.

The democracies allow all kinds of horrible films and videos in the name of freedom. As long as those films do not criticise anyone in power, they can perpetrate whatever vulgar, demoralising and violent ideas they like. The problem is that such films become models for people’s behaviour, so that all these imaginary violent and cruel actions have become actual and contemporary in our societies. The nightmare and the horror scenes have become realities in our cities and private homes. Those who can reproduce most luridly the full horror of contemporary themes, are given the highest awards by the judges. For example, recently there was a film that really became a hit about a man who was psychotic and a cannibal. The film was meant to entertain people by showing how he killed human beings and ate them. In any decent evolved society, this film could never have been made, or if by some aberration it was, it would have been banned. But instead of that it has been applauded and acclaimed by the critics. They may say it is an uncommon theme, but what a rare depiction of a person out of the brain of some one who may know people who desire to eat the body of a human being, even when they are not starving as in Bosnia. It has become a very popular and influential film because it won an award as the best film of the year. This is not to say that the negative and destructive aspects of life cannot be treated by art. Producing something contemporary, showing up the modern problems of decadence and disintegration, is a good idea, but the creator should also give solutions to those key problems of the contemporary world. If they are good artists, they can show everything in relation to the world of true values which are conducive to the well-being and happiness of human beings at every time and in every country.

There is a further problem with this idea that art can reflect even the lowest and most degraded aspects of contemporary society. If you show an extreme case of perversion in your society, human beings, especially in the West, will only note the filth, the aggressive cruelty of the villain and, far from drawing the obvious and wholesome moral conclusions, will actually try to copy what they have seen. This has simply become a conditioned response and, worst of all, no one is shocked any more.

There is a tendency, built up in the West since the time of Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions of the 18th century, that we should be free to absorb all the unrighteous, unholy, inauspicious, filthy and destructive ideas that we can find in every film, every book, and every newspaper, whatever the source. Somehow people want to take up the challenge to become the evil force themselves. People have now to decide if they want to stop this democratic derailment by understanding what must be done. The progress that the West is proud of is towards complete destruction, as human beings have the freedom to achieve heaven or go to hell and also they have the tremendous power of rationality to justify their doom.

Perhaps at first reading, some of the Western fundamentalists may get a shock. Some may get a shock but most will understand the concern of the Divine force which is anxious to preserve creation by the all-pervading power of Divine love.

Chapter 4: Racialism

Racialism is the greatest curse of human beings that has been created by themselves. God Almighty has created this world with different varieties and different colours

to create interesting beauty but these varieties are only skin deep. It is said that a long time ago some prolific writers from Britain wrote horrible things against African blacks, and all this was so totally accepted that the people who called themselves white-skinned went all out to wipe out people who had some other colour on their skin. For example, Columbus sailed to America by mistake and the Spanish started spreading their own kingdom and most of the Indians were wiped out from their own country. Of course, some of them disappeared into the high mountains and saved themselves. It is difficult to understand why these people landed in a country which belonged to somebody else. It was initially a venture to discover new lands but these invaders then began to believe that this land was their own property. They thought it was their fundamental right to hate or kill people who had dark skin or skin which was not like theirs and to rob their lands forever.

Diversity of bodies, faces and skin created by nature is very important because otherwise everybody would look the same. It would be a regiment of boring human faces. Unfortunately the coloured people were called primitive, while the white-skinned were regarded as advanced. It is intolerable arrogance to discriminate between one human being and another because of the colour of his skin. They all have the same heart, the same feelings, the same expression of love and hate. They all smile the same way, they all weep the same way. The countries in which coloured people are born should have their own countries. They may be primitive or backward but no foreigner, not even a white man, has the right to occupy their lands forcibly by using guns and cannons against unarmed natives. Imagine the brutality when black human beings were treated as slaves. Although slavery was abolished, the colonial “white” powers continued to inflict unspeakable insults and torture on the poor and simple people of their colonies. If the history of colonial rule in Africa, Asia and Latin America were written truthfully and objectively, the enormity of the crimes committed by white rulers would shock humankind. I have myself experienced some of this during the period of British rule in India. The British arrived in India without an entry pass or visa and stayed on for nearly three hundred years. Now, when Indians travel to the United Kingdom with proper visas, their experience of “questioning” by the Airport Immigration Officers is generally horrendous. I was holding a Diplomatic Passport, being the wife of a senior diplomat, and yet I was asked rude and insulting questions-all because I was an Indian-a non-white. Once they subjected’ me to a body search for no reason whatsoever. This was nothing but blatant racism. The white races seem to believe that they have a Divine right to be rude and insulting to the “inferior” coloured races.

In America the biggest social problem has been racialism. The way the black people were treated by the authorities as well as the common white people was not only wrong but absolutely sinful. Great souls like Abraham Lincoln were shaken up by this sinister attitude and tried their best to remove racialism by law. But despite such laws being on the statute book, serious riots take place frequently between the whites and the blacks. This gangsterism has now permeated society and people in many urban areas live constantly in a state of terror. Those who have sown the seeds of racist violence are now themselves reaping a harvest of chaotic violence, in which even teenagers are participating brutally. As every action has a reaction, this reaction has reached its extreme all over the world in such an ugly and unjustifiable manner that it seems impossible now to reverse the relationship between the whites and coloured people. If the whites have any wisdom, they should know that black people are superior to them in many areas. For example the white skins cannot sing like the blacks. They don’t have the same natural gift of rhythm. I have seen even when the blacks carry their dead they play a band, while all the mourners move in a rhythmic dance-like way. To understand and appreciate them, you only need to be subtle, to become humble to realise how much they are blessed with gifts by the Divine. The talent in sports which the blacks have, cannot be easily surpassed. All the games which require vigour and agility are performed better than anybody else by the black people. In basketball and base- ball games, the blacks predominate and because of their proficiency and indispensability they are accepted by the whites as equals in their teams. Why should this non-racialist attitude in sports not spread to society as a whole? One has to accept that most of the great singers are black people. Of course some white people have been able to succeed but they cannot beat the black Western singers who are so melodious and beautifully rhythmic that they remind you of the cuckoo bird of India which sings to announce the coming spring. The cuckoo is also very black compared to all other birds. In spring, the cuckoo starts singing melodious songs. It even announces the arrival of spring in the garden. You cannot find birds having this kind of absurd complex about colour. They all live very happily with each other with all kinds of varieties in colours.

All over the world people know that all mothers get the same kind of labour pains whether they are black, white, brown or blue. It is a historical fact that this difference of colour and coloured people was created by the mental activity of the people of very low insensitivity. This mental activity has come from the whites who think they are very wise. This kind of stupid mental activity has been a very great problem for the whole world.

If we really watch without any mentally created complexes, it is very interesting to see how a mother produces her child with tremendous love. Some of them have a very hard time with labour pain, but as soon as the child is born, normal mothers, whatever may be their skin colour, are full of tremendous love and forget what they have gone through. It is not that the whites produce their children through their noses or through their mouths. It is the same style for all mothers. They conceive the same way, they deliver the same way. Unfortunately, the love a black family has for its own children is not evident in the white people. Especially the love Indians have for their children is not matched anywhere among the white people any more. Indians discipline their children no doubt, but their love for children is great. It reminds you of Father the God who loves us, His children, with great care and with constant attention.

I had a lady washer woman on my staff of domestics in Delhi. This lady already had nine children, and some of them had grown up and were helping her in her profession. Some of them were very small, and the last one was hardly about two years of age. This one could only crawl around in the house. He was no help to her. Instead she had to spend much energy and time for him. In the West, any such mother would have been fed up. One day this child fell into the broth which was boiled for preparing starch for the clothes that were washed by this lady and her husband. I was not in Delhi at that time. When I came back I heard the tragic story of this lady. When I called the washer woman she came all the way to see me. She was crying incessantly and she had become very thin in one month. Earlier she was a very healthy and happy woman. I made her sit down and caressed her and asked her not to cry any more because the child was already dead. A month had already passed but she only cried and did not answer nor speak to me. This went on for six hours, but she could not stop crying. Amazingly among all her children, this son had been the darkest child. Her elder children were much fairer, but this one had been extremely dark. When I saw this lady crying so much for this child, I just felt that our Primordial Mother who has created us must be caring and loving all her children with the same intensity, whether we are black, brown, white or yellow.

When I went to Columbia, I discovered that the people in Columbia are already aware of the subtle system which is responsible for our ascent. They found this out through the many excavations of clay pots and clay figures which lay buried in the earth. It is very surprising how symbolically they expressed their awareness of such a system and the energy that gives us this connection with the Divine. They cannot explain how they came to acquire this subtle knowledge thousands of years back. Though whites think they are primitive people.

The Condor bird is their emblem for shipping. When I asked why they had a Condor as the emblem for shipping, they told me to my great amazement that their forefathers had talked about a God called Vishnu, who came to their land from Bharat (India), my country, and he came on a Condor. When they told me this I was really stunned. My husband also heard it and he too could not understand how they were talking about our Indian God, Vishnu, who, as we know in our mythology, travels on a Condor. The one with whom we talked was not a very well educated person, but he knew a lot about his country’s philosophy and culture. I found these people extremely kind, very gentle and very cultured. It is the way they do things which reminds you of a very cultured society, long before the whites reached America. For example, when they give you water in a glass they touch the right hand with the left hand, as we do in India, as a humble gesture to suggest that the glass of water is being given with both the hands and not rudely with one hand. I discovered many behaviour patterns which we regard as extremely important cultural gestures in India. They are very simple innocent people. Because they have disappeared into the high mountains, their faces were more Mongolian and their gestures were beautiful without any artificial permutations and combinations. These are very pure and simple – hearted people, who live in the higher mountains of Bolivia. Luckily, I have become very close to some of these people who came to see me in order to gain knowledge about the subtle system.

In Los Angeles some aboriginal people were very harassed because they owned some land a long time ago and now wanted to get it back. I asked them: “What is so special about this particular land? In any case you have lost the whole of America. Why do you care so much for this particular land?” They told me: “This is our Holy land where Sage, which is the holy plant, grows. We have known for a long time that this is our holy land and on a particular date of each month we go there to pray.” And from all over America, Red Indians come there once a year to pray to God Almighty. This land was unfortunately grabbed by an Indian who belongs to a very money oriented society. They told me: “You are an Indian from such an ancient country and you will understand our feelings better. Can you talk to this Indian and tell him that this is holy land which should be just for the people who want to come and pray in thousands.” I was rather surprised to hear of their belief that this countryman of mine must be a religious person and that he would give back the land in question and restore it to the original owners, to whom this land was especially holy. Obviously these people did not know that many Indians living abroad have become worshippers of money only. They have lost their ancient roots and culture. They have become uprooted. For example, in Italy they do not even speak any Indian language among themselves. I knew this Indian would not give even an inch of that land at any cost because he had purchased it from the American Government. The story of the struggle of aboriginal people in America is long and heart-rending. They gather behind a big compound wall and pray, sitting there, thinking that this land which is so vibrant with Divine Blessings will act and listen to their prayers. I agree with them because I know the fact is that certain places are especially vibrant and if they believe that a place is a vibrant place, it must be the truth because they have no interest in all other lands which were stolen and looted by the white skin. They just wanted this particular land. I didn’t know how to approach the American government about it and how much they would understand because they are busy looking after other countries’ problems and wars. The aboriginals were all brown coloured people. I saw from their beautiful sensitive eyes the intense expression of their desire to get this land. I explained to them that I was in no position to get the land for them. So they said: “You are a saint and if you pray to God, we will surely get this land.” I felt deeply moved by the simple desire of these beautiful people which may not be ever heard by the ears covered with white skin. My heart wept for them. I very much desire that a day may come, when they get their land and the Divine vibrations of that land. They told me: “There are so many instances of people in ancient times who have been cured by coming to this place and praying to God.”

When I met the aboriginals from America I felt a tremendous love and respect for them. They came to see me in a very decent and dignified dress. Very simple hearted and with angelic behaviour, they sat on the ground with their hands folded. They were very peaceful within. Only their ladies spoke. The desire for their right on that holy land was in no way materialistic. I saw tremendous faith in the Divine in those people who have been made orphans on their own land. The way they were dedicated to this land was amazing. They were not asking for it to make an economic adventure or as some sort of a money making proposition. It was just an inner feeling as we have in India for the river Ganges. They felt this was the holy land which they should visit every year otherwise they would not consider themselves as people devoted to God. I was pleased to hear their ideas about the Divine. What they said was the absolute truth.

Racialism is accepted and is imbibed by people who think that they are superior to other human beings. By thinking in this way, they are just indulging in mental activity. With such ideas in their mind, there is no way of their understanding the reality. Once a group of people believe that they are higher than others, whatever sinful acts they do get justified in their own minds. They never look back to see that what they are doing is morally, absolutely wrong. This racialism comes from complete ignorance of reality. For example, in Europe if you wear long skirts up to your knee, they ask you a question and look down upon you: “Are you Turkish?” Only the Turkish people are supposed to have shame. But if you wear a skirt which is only six inches long it is regarded as very fashionable and sophisticated. Of course, with that attire you might get varicose veins, you might get chilblains, you might even get arthritis.

In Africa the people are very deep and subtle. They knew about a star which revolves around Jupiter a long time ago through their astrological knowledge. In India astrology is based on the moon and not based on the sun. Thousands of years ago it was predicted that a particular star would visit our world at a particular time. The time and course of the eclipses of the sun were also predicted very accurately. The after-effects of such eclipses were also very clearly described. So many other things have been predicted and prophesied with absolute accuracy. It is amazing to see how well this compares with the work of Western astronomers who have set up all the modern sophisticated machinery to study celestial movement. The Western scientists never showed any interest in India’s knowledge of astronomy. Now of course some false people have started a big market of Ayurvedic medicines which may not do any good because the vibrations of these false people may ruin the health of many in Europe. Still people are crazy about Ayurveda and play into the hands of these special marketing experts. I know of so many doctors of Ayurveda, the Vaidyas, who charge nothing for their treatment. They have the cures but they are never marketed abroad. In America according to law, no alternative medicine could be practiced. Our lord Jesus Christ would be arrested if he cured any American in America. Except for the medicine, the patient does not have to pay much to such learned Vaidyas who lead a very ascetic life. I met one in Haridwar who was a very learned man in Sanskrit. To my amazement I found out that he was a full fledged allopathic doctor. But somehow he took to Indian medicine and started researching about the old method of Ayurveda. He was a man of such understanding that only by feeling the pulse of a person he could diagnose and say what was wrong with that person.

When the white people get sick and have no hopes of recovery, only then do they start searching for new alternatives. Then they don’t think about what skin the doctor has. I have seen in England that there are many Indian doctors. In America also there are many Indian doctors who are very famous and extremely capable. So it shows that the skin whether it is brown or black or white makes no difference to the knowledge acquired by a human being. The Western doctors take no responsibility for their patients on Saturdays and Sundays or on holidays. For them holidays are holy days which they must celebrate by boozing and getting drunk. But even now, you can find Indian doctors dedicated to their work. Because of traditions of compassion the Indian doctors are very conscientious about their medical duties. Others are worried about their materialistic life because there are no traditions of compassion in their own country.

I have felt and understood the pain of the black people, the agony of those who have gone through such horrible experiences only because they had black skin. This discrimination according to colour is so common everywhere that one fails to understand how human beings even on individual basis are also so conscious of their colour and complexion. If anyone insults or makes fun of a person because he has black skin it is a very big crime against God Almighty. It is God who has created this variety and when people use this variety to create disparity and an atmosphere of superiority, they don’t know that they commit a sin which cannot be forgiven by the Divine. Nobody has the right to insult or to look down upon anybody because one has got a different colour of skin. As a result of this continual harassment, black people have become extremely violent. This violence can be justified but it is not a very good thing to have.

For example, Indians do not take to heart the racial insults which they suffer in the Western countries. They consider this to be a part of the game if you are an immigrant. They normally form their own groups and keep out of touch with the whites known as “Goras”. If one has to think of the future world and of the progeny we have to really go all out to end this hatred between the whites and the blacks. To cure this evil, I don’t know what is being done at the United Nations level. One has to realise that the biggest problems facing humanity arise from this hatred generated by racialism. Maybe one day the fundamentalists may be pacified and we may see the light of peace in their hearts. But this kind of cheap, superficial mental approach towards other human beings is very difficult to change. Once these whites are enlightened and are blessed by the light of the Spirit they will know that all human beings are the creations of God Almighty and there is no need to hate anyone because God is Truth and God is Love. It is a very immoral thing to hate someone. In India, we do not say to another person: “I hate you.” Speaking such words would be very unmannerly and unsocial, even immoral. In the Western societies there is no objection to the use of any kind of language. Whether they are Ambassadors, Ministers, Presidents or the Prime Minister, some of them use very low level language without any consideration as to what is inauspicious. In every day social life, people say to each other: “I hate you, I hate you.” In the beginning all this was .really shocking to my Indian rustic mind. Hatred because of the colour of skin is not only an evil in itself. It can also bloat a person’s ego and lead him on to violent crime.

I know of a Secretary General who was harassed and thrown out by some developed countries who had used their cunning ways of finding faults in him. The allegations that were brought against him were so low that anybody could see that there was a plot behind the whole scheme to get him out. He was definitely a very large hearted Muslim. He translated many Indian scriptures into other languages and this definitely brought Indian wisdom to the notice of the whole world. Though he was a Muslim he respected all the great books of literature and. of religion. One of the allegations was that his wife went to Belgium in the official car. I have learnt that the Ambassador of the Secretary General’s country posted to Belgium died suddenly. The wife of the Secretary General had to rush from Paris to Brussels. As no plane was available at that time and as the lady had to go without delay to console her friend (the late Ambassador’s wife), she took the office car for this journey in an emergency and she informed the office accordingly. I don’t know, what the objection was but they would have stooped down to the level of saying that she should have taken a taxi.

Racialism has brought slavery to many countries. So many people were carried from Africa and sold to people to serve as slaves. This slavery prospered greatly a century ago. They say that the Bermuda Triangle is a very dangerous area to navigate ships and several ships have sunk there. It is said that in this area so many slaves who were brought to America committed suicide and they are the ones who are haunting all the ships that pass through that area with their tortured spirits. It may not be true, but one thing is true that if you subject any person to extreme torture, such torture itself, in an abstract way, takes a very destructive form and is responsible for atrocities which are not normally done.

For example, I had to deal with some people in Europe, especially in England, who were “possessed”. These people were crazy about hot Indian food which even we could not eat. In America, we found that people who followed transcendental meditation were, surprisingly, also very fond of Indian food and they used to visit Indian restaurants at least every week. Their language also had some Indian words. It was very amazing. I felt that those Indians who had been massacred by the white skins in the political and economic empires, must have possessed these white people otherwise it is difficult to explain why the white skins have taken such a liking for very spicy and extremely hot Indian food.

The other day I was in Chicago and the head of the Hare Krishna movement came to see me. It was a very cold day and I was amazed that he was wearing a dhoti which was very thin. Dhoti is a piece of cloth that we Indians use for covering our body below the waist. He was completely shaved and had one pig tail coming out of his shaved scalp. It was very cold and while everybody was shivering, this person was wearing an Indian dhoti which was not suitable even in India during winter. He told me that his Guru has said that if you wear a dhoti, it is much easier to get to heaven, and that you must shave your head so that the angels will recognise you and take you to the heaven of Nirvana. I told him that, in our country, eighty percent people live in hotter areas and wear dhotis. We have been wearing dhotis from ancient times. According to the Hare Krishna theory, all these people must have already got their Nirvana!

Then I turned to the question of shaving the head to get salvation. The great poet Kabir has said about this: “If by shaving your head you get Nirvana then what about the lamb which is shaved twice a year.” Hearing my comments, the Hare Krishna leader got very angry with me. I said: “Why are you angry with me. I am your mother, I am just asking you not to wear this dhoti in such cold weather because you will have problems with your legs.” He said: “I am angry because you are criticising my Guru.” I said: “I am not criticising him, but I am just asking you a logical question.” It is very surprising that these naive people are advised by their gurus to wear clothes which are suitable for the hot climate of India but totally unsuitable for the cold climate in America. This gentleman was very intelligent. He had read the Gita very well and he talked about the Gita. But I told him that in the Gita it is not written anywhere that you should wear a dhoti or shave your head.

It is very amazing that these Western people have taken to Indian dresses suddenly. Is this the reaction of racialism? Is this the generation of ideas of reaction to racialism which are released in such a manner that people want to do something that is not done by the normal white skin people. Or is this a symptom of anti-culture movements which spring up from time to time. It can be easily noticed that because of hatred and lack of a peaceful existence, people in the West are very confused. Anyone can fool them. An entrepreneur can start any fashion in Milan or Paris which is adopted religiously and changed every year as the fashion changes.

In the beginning, I worked with seven hippies in England just to try to make them understand how to achieve their ascent. For four years I struggled with them. I found that they had developed a kind of culture of great aggression, out of great unrest. These people were all white skinned but the hatred for blacks still lingered although they had revolted against the system which was regulated by strict Western norms.

For example, in England you are supposed to wear a tail coat when you attend the Queen’s party. The Queen’s party is a unique function which is regarded as very prestigious and people keep the invitation of the Queen as a precious souvenir for their progeny to see. I was amazed that for this party, the guests were expected to wear a tail coat. Thank God, that when we went there we were allowed to wear our national dress. As no one can afford to have these tail coats stitched except for very rich Ambassadors, most of the people hire it from a shop known as Moss Bros meaning Moss Brothers. Hundreds of these tail coats are hired every year. Some of them fit the one who hires, others are usually too tight or rather too loose. People who wear them have an antiquated or anxious appearance. The people whom I knew otherwise could not be recognised because their gait had changed. They were walking with either a very funny tight gait or with a loose gait like Charlie Chaplin and some were getting worried about the wear and tear of their worn out dresses.

Actually this tail coat was a sartorial trick to cover the back hump of one of the kings, perhaps of the sixteenth century. I could not understand how to control my laughter when I saw this kind of nonsense accepted even today. Thank God all nationalities were allowed to come in their national dress. I really enjoyed the way the people of Congo, Ethiopia and other African countries came in their dress, which I had never seen before and which really gave a very beautiful variety to the whole event. And those people who came in their national dress were extremely relaxed and enjoyed all the music, but those who were in those odd uniform from Moss Bros were very self- conscious and it was impossible to talk to them in a normal way. Perhaps they thought that they were already Lords of ancient times or were very nervous to talk to ladies.

Another problem akin to racialism is class consciousness in many Western countries. Upper class people in England are very conscious of their status. They do not mingle with the “lower” class. Surprisingly the same is true of Germans. They also believe that they are the masters of the art of high class living. Nothing less than gold ornated Rosenthal or Kaiser crockery would do for them. The consciousness of higher classes cannot be understood easily because you see that their children cannot even pass easiest “0” level examinations even if they try for years together.

The French who think that they are the most sophisticated are now learning that their culture has brought them nothing but disaster as far as diplomatic society is concerned. There are books and books written about drinking in French. Except for four or five very great writers like Emile Zola, Maupassant, Molier and some others, it is difficult to find -any writer who has taken any notice of the self-respect especially of women. Once upon a time the French were regarded as the most sophisticated people among the diplomatic services. I don’t know how people discovered that this sophistication was extremely superficial and non-functional. The French themselves now criticise their own culture which, as we know, is very sex-oriented, shameless and alcoholic. I have heard that the French show not only nude women, but also nude men these days through their media. Of course all French films have bathroom scenes without fail. The French men sometimes look upset about their skinny pale bodies being shown naked on the video, cinema or television screen. Thanks to the new President, Mr. Chirac any revival of diplomatic authority can be achieved by the French as he is trying to establish French superiority by exploding Atomic bombs in the Pacific. In France there are many coloured people, mostly Muslims from the former French colonies. Because of the torture they suffered in the past, they have become fundamentalists and are attacking French “cultures”. This is the ultimate result of racialism. Same way Hitler gathered his forces over a period of years when Germany was openly very immoral. Also he was the product of racialism. The atrocities and the cruelties in which he indulged must have been justifiable by him, otherwise, how could he go on with his devices to destroy human beings. He was worse than a devil, as many describe him, but one should know how people get lost in their own ideas of superiority. These ego- oriented people want to show that they are in charge of the whole world and think that they have every right to be cruel to other persons under some pretext or under some sort of justification. Hitler himself did not try to find any reason why he hated the Jews. There is no evidence in his own life to show that he was tortured or even harmed or hurt by any Jew living in Germany. He took full advantage of the German situation which was very immoral. In those days the people of Germany lived in a very decadent and vulgar way. One can understand that the revolt in his heart was against the society where people used women for their pleasure. On the other hand, women were very willingly available to the best of men who had money. Jews were known to be very religious and moral, but also very greedy. They always lent money on exorbitant terms and then pursued the borrowers all their lives, often causing distress.

This is another type of cruelty where the money that one accumulates in a society of decadence is spent extravagantly for the so-called pleasures of life. In a society where lust becomes the life style of people, greedy people just come up like mushrooms to take full advantage of the weakness of others. As a result, people become very money-oriented without any consideration, love or compassion. At the time when Hitler grew up, the Jews were making a lot of money in Germany out of people who borrowed from them for their bodily pleasures. Hitler had a strong feeling for his country which he felt was in dire trouble. He reached the conclusion that he had to destroy these greedy Jews who, according to him, were sucking the blood of the foolish immoral people. He decided to weave this theme of hatred in his mind and to develop it into an effective design by which he could destroy the Jews. He got hold of German young generation. All such people play on the idealism of the young generation who have no sense of discretion. The youth of Germany did not understand the true nature of the ridiculous plans of Hitler for these highly ego-pampered people. It was very easy to mould the minds of young people who already had an obtuse angle in their brain to hate Jews. They never realised that violence begets violence. Instead of killing the Jews, why did Hitler not think of improving the society which was so decadent and immoral? Unfortunately, such ideas which are constructive can never come into the mind of a mega ego-oriented person.

Firstly, they think they are the ones to save the whole world or to save society or to save the people who are dependent on them. Such a mind can never see that this thinking is dangerous for their own country and for others. Hitler had no right whatsoever to kill anyone in order to regain the morality of the society. It is said that he had his guidance from Dalai Lama of Tibet who was selected as the spiritual head in those days.

The selection of these Dalai Lamas is very mysterious. These days Dalai Lama has a special technique of asking for money, all over the world, all the year round. Also Hitler supported the Catholic Church who in return supported Hitler. The Jews according to him killed Christ two thousand years ago; so he had to kill the Jews. As a coincidence, at this time most of the European nations were undergoing the pangs of recession which gave them a kind of numbing indifference to what was happening in Germany through the efforts of Hitler. It took many years for Hitler to build up his movement through his ideas. It is very surprising how human beings take to hatred so much easier than to love and understanding. He built up German boys through the propagation of strict discipline and morality. Firstly, they had to shave their heads. Even today we have many skinheads in America and also in Europe. Perhaps the idea is that by shaving the head, a person tries to disfigure himself so that he becomes a moral symbol and then seems to attract people who are lost and destroyed, who suffer from lust and who indulge in immorality. This is very true about false Indian gurus. I met one fellow who was a smuggler and was arrested. When he came out of jail he became an instant “saint”. He shaved his head and began to wear saffron coloured clothes.

In India most of those who were “seekers” and who wanted to become saints used to shave their heads and go to the Himalayas where they stood on one leg in their efforts to achieve Nirvana.

It seems that some people use their shaven head or hair style to distract or to attract the attention of the opposite sex, when their purpose is immoral. Men and women both use their hair to be attractive to the opposite sex. You can see even today people spending so much of their money to go to the hair dressers just to look attractive through their hair style. One may say that there are two extremes of personalities: those who indulge in all kinds of pleasures which are physical or mental, while the other kinds deny them and become dry, hot tempered and aggressive. It is not necessary that a person who is very dry and aggressive outside may be a very moral person inside. In achieving this morality by shaving their heads, or by standing on their heads or by doing all kinds of rituals and penances or tapasyas, people may be covering up their immoral activities or using all this as a camouflage for their secret life of corruption and immorality. We have had so many false Gurus who have tried these tricks on simple people of faith and who were found to be very cruel and immoral.

Now, to all the critics of Hitler he looks like an idiotic foolish and maniacal type of a person. Actually if you listen to any ego-oriented person or see him, you will definitely witness the idiocy of his talk or of his behaviour very clearly, of course if you are not ego-oriented yourself. If you are an ego-oriented person then you will protest against him by saying he is trying to assert his ego. An egoist can always find the ego of another person very easily. But if you are a person who is afraid and frightened of egoists; you will either accept his value system or accept the tyranny and subjugation of such a tyrant. An evolved soul would witness the babbling of an idiot and may get into enjoyment of humour of this stupid drama.

Hitler’s ideas impressed none of these two types, but he captured the minds of a third kind which was innocent, simple, raw, and absolutely immature: the young teenagers whom he groomed for years. For these people, killing became a great natural enjoyment. In the olden days people used to go to forest to kill animals, especially tigers. As a result the tiger became a man-eater or a lion attacked human beings, and this killing had to be accepted. Even when eating the flesh of animals when sufficient food was not available was quite justified. Most of the people, who went to the forest for hunting did it just for the pleasure of killing. This horrible desire can lead to a very dangerous ending. A horrendous war in Germany broke out against the Jews who had to die in gas chambers, because they were very greedy and cruel and had, according to Hitler, killed Christ. There are so many ways by which one could have controlled these greedy people.

After gaining complete control of the young people by the Nazi movement, the only solution Hitler announced was to kill the Jews. One cannot see how these Germans became so blind. People like Hitler develop a special fire in their speeches. Whatever they say explodes in the minds of people who are already filled with hatred. Moreover, it is a very contagious disease. Once it moves it progresses in such a prolific way that one cannot have time even to think. The speed with which the power of hatred spreads is very remarkable compared to the power of pure Love.

Further, the people who thought they had every right to occupy all the territories of the world under their own country’s name believed that this was their duty to their country. To fly the flag of their country became a symbol of sacrifice for patriotic endeavours. Hitler also gave the very deep colour of patriotism to his devilish work. It is surprising how he was born especially in Germany where he could get such a decadent society to work with and to influence the young people who were open to his tactics. All ego-oriented people develop their I.Q. very fast. They know how to work out their plans by dominating others; how to justify their behaviour and how to propagate their own ego-oriented thoughts to the multitudes. Thus their I.Q. develops tremendously like a monster which cheats their innate intelligence. As one starts cheating oneself by self-justification, the person glows with great fiery radiance of reddish colour due to the burning heat of his own ego.

An example of this can be seen from the people who live in Dharamsala, India, as refugees from Tibet. They follow Dalai Lama who goes begging for them all over the world. Their faces are flushed and they look extremely happy. Most ego-oriented people are mega happy but some of them through their cheated intelligence can devise a life-style which is hypercritical showing that they are extremely unhappy. Most of them will read great tragedies or songs of separation, or enjoy some stories which would make anybody cry and weep. It seems as if they are melting their tears under the influence of alcohol. They show they are very miserable and they are very fond of sad poetry. To give them the benefit of doubt, one can say perhaps their ego swings them like a pendulum towards being miserable or may be their heart is weeping without understanding that they are crying due to emotional disturbance. Actually they are the ones who make others cry and weep much more. They are the ones who plan misery for others, if they see a film in which a person is tortured and made miserable, they never identify themselves with the villain who causes all the trouble and pain. On the contrary, they begin to feel that their fate is the same as that of the victim of oppression in the film. They entertain the illusion that they are the sufferers and the most tortured persons. In North India many people enjoy “gazal” music. Gazals are Urdu poems which describe the feelings of heart-broken persons, their pangs of separation and the pain caused to them by hard-hearted women. Such music is enjoyed by persons who are usually drunk and who live in their own make-believe or imaginary world and show no love to their legally married wives. One can explain also the Greek tragedies of the ancient Greeks who wanted to rule the whole world, once upon a time.

Human beings are a great mixture of subtle contradictions, otherwise they cannot live on this earth if they get to know how cruel they are. This is the same kind of pattern that they follow all their lives, even when they grow old without being conscious of what they are doing. The idea of superiority judged by I.Q. test has now proved to be wrong and they are talking about E.Q. the Emotional Quotient, without which I.Q. has no balance and is very dangerous.

In India we had a king called Ashoka who indulged in wars and killing people. But when he saw a river overflowing with the blood of the people who were killed in the war, he was shocked at himself and surprised at the way he had been going on with this destruction. As a result, he took to Buddhism and tried to spread this religion of compassion all over Eastern Asia. Such transformations are very rare but they are so historical and so blissful for the future. One can hope that a day will come when all such horrible people who are mercilessly killing each other will get transformed into angels on a mass scale. Though violence was raging like a fire during Hitler’s time, today the fire has subsided. You can see that this fire is not really extinguished fully but is still burning under the ashes. Sometimes you see the effects of this so called dead fire all over the world. How can we completely end this fiery nature of human beings individually or in the masses where it builds up in flames of destruction? Is it possible to end this kind of eruption all over the world? It would be possible if human beings could understand and know that there is cosmic Divine love which permeates all over the creation and which works through human beings through their evolutionary process. If their attention is enlightened by the Spirit, they will enjoy their compassion and higher values of spiritual life. This is the eternal joy which surpasses all pleasures of violence. It may not happen today but the message of peace has started rolling among masses all over the world. It cannot be consummated by peace foundations or peace awards. Those who run these institutions or receive these awards must introspect and see whether they have the requisite “light” within themselves. What is needed is the complete transformation of a person into a Divine personality which knows forgiveness and finds solutions for other’s problems. When people see this transformation in thousands of seekers of truth then many individuals in masses will take to this last evolutionary break- through. They will follow the evolved souls who will inspire them and kill the Hitler in their minds. We do not know that basically our pure desire seeks to attain the higher awareness of blissful existence.

The violence of killing is a big problem in many democratic countries. If the governments are lenient and democratic and the laws for the well-being of the people are based on individual freedom then such democracy is never followed by many individuals who have no idea of the responsibilities which are attached to the concept of freedom. All kinds of chaos start in democratic countries, and one starts wondering what sort of “demonocracy” it has become. By merely identifying it as some great symbol, one cannot solve the problem of this inner tendency to violence. If we are worried about our future, if we are concerned that our innocent progeny are going to be fatally affected, then we must seek the right solution, the right path.

There is an eleven year old boy in America who is regarded as a great hero for killing people. He has killed several people at such a young age. This killing can also become very subtle in different ways. For example, in the Islamic countries, as in the Northern part of India, you see very clearly the effects of this kind of ego-oriented superiority of men, where they think they have every right to dominate over women and torture them. Especially in the North of India the people are sometimes absolutely wild and extremely cruel to their women folk. They go on justifying their behaviour and divert all their attention away from what they are doing to their own wives. The atmosphere is full of insecurity for married women. These men consider themselves to be superior beings who have the right to suppress the legitimate feelings and aspirations of their legally wedded wives who are tolerant and who have to suffer in silence their cruel life of torture and suppression. They may be men of very high qualifications or may be in charge of national affairs. They lead a double life. In their public life they try to demonstrate a very diplomatic understanding of the whole world and in their private life they torture their wives, have no regret. They kill all their aspirations. When they treat their wives with disdain, it has an adverse effect on their children who then show no respect for the mother. The father has no time for the children as he is very busy with his ego. He gets all the respect from his children but the children become wild like the father or worse than him. A good mother is the one who creates good citizens for society. There are so many laws in the West to protect the rights of women, but in so many developing countries there is no such protection. As the women in the West have not shown much responsibility towards their family or the society, their protective laws are also challenged by the fundamentalists.

The situation is beyond redemption in individual cases. But in the North this is an accepted pattern of life. It was worse in Japan but in recent years the position of women in Japan has improved very visibly. In America, however, the family culture has gone to the other extreme. There women rule the men and make them crazy. In India there have been many social workers of great integrity and character who have tried to emancipate the situation of women, but still it is pathetic and pitiable that women who care for their self-respect, the name of their family, the welfare of their children and the name of their husbands are greatest sufferers of these ego-oriented cruel husbands. There are so many cases of inhuman brutality to women all over the world. I have known so many women who have told me how their husbands have been behaving like Hitlers in their lives, but they dare not talk about it openly else they would be tortured much more everyday. It is not killing in one shot but gradual destruction of the human personality of a wife. The children of such families also take either to the mother or to the father. If they take to their father they become agents for future world dominating people. Thus a society gets filled with people who are dominating, not necessarily men, but also women as in America. Obviously the better way for human beings is to have a very balanced society of husband and wife. This is only possible when we have leaders, politicians and bureaucrats who are in complete balance. It is only possible when all those in charge of public affairs ascend in their evolutionary process and respect each other. If there is the Spirit in every person which is the reflection of the Almighty, it can shine into the personality of an individual and it can change another personality with love and compassion. If an aggressor realises after his ascent that he was behaving like a brute, he will just give up and become a beautiful personality of Divinity. ‘The story of Dr. JekylI and Mr. Hyde is the story of a man of split personality with two different attributes – the evil in the shape of Mr. Hyde and the good in the shape of Dr. Jekyll. Mr. Hyde dominates Dr. JekylI who gives up and Mr. Hyde takes over completely. A person who has bad tendencies becomes worse and in his old age he becomes ghastly.

This transformation is easier in younger ages. Often older people become hard-boiled crooks, unwilling to be transformed. Such persons abuse saints, calling them by funny names. Evil persons of this kind could be the head of a mafia or the head of some global organisation or even the head of a state. Such persons feel they are the modern saviours. They do not know they will also fall into the trap of polarity.

We have a very good example of Valmiki the great saint who wrote the epic, the Ramayana. He was a dacoit and a very aggressive person. His profession was to loot all the travellers on a lonely road and to feed his family with that loot. One day he met Narada another celestial being whom he had captured and whom he was about to kill. Narada asked him: “Why do you commit such heinous acts. It is a sin to kill somebody like this for his money.” Valmiki answered: “I have no way of feeding my family which is very large and all are dependent on me.” Narada asked: “What will they do for you?” Valmiki replied: “Anything that” I ask them.” Narada said: “Will they die for you?” And Valmiki said with great confidence: “Of course. They will all be willing to die for me.” Narada told him: “You better pretend that you are dead and I will prove it to you that nobody will die for you because they are all very selfish people. They want to live on your ill-gotten money” The dacoit agreed. And Narada pretended that Valmiki the dacoit was dead and carried his body to his family. To the grieving family members of Valmiki Narada said, “Anybody who is willing to die for him should come forward. I can give life to this dead person in exchange Valmiki, who is so concerned about you all. He killed and looted people and thus he committed many sins just to fill your bellies.” All persons gave their explanation as to why they could not agree to die at that juncture of time and they could not, therefore, accept Narada’s proposal. Valmiki who was lying still pretending to be dead, heard all this. He got up from his pretended death, gave up all his family which he renounced, and took to a very pure spiritual life.

If this could happen to one person, it can happen to thousands. Saint Valmiki actually possessed dormantly a very great soul within. Unfortunately in present times we have no Narada, nor do we have a Valmiki these days. But through the advent of Sahaja Yoga this transformation has taken place in thousands. If it happens to even one percent of the population of the world I am sure it will have a very big impact on other people who are oppressed and then it will spread even to the people who are the oppressors. Ultimately the oppressors will find that oppressing others is not a very joy-giving process. On the contrary in modern times it boomerangs as a result of polarity law.

The acquisitive instinct, the desire to possess many things also leads so many human beings to violent crime. It is the possession of land, possession of property, possession of money and possession of human beings. Individuals, societies, states and nations fight among themselves because of this greed, this stupid idea of possession. It is said that when we come on this earth our hands are not open, they are closed like a fist. But when at the end of our lives we go from here, our hands are open. This might mean that you come to this earth with the idea of grabbing whatever is possible, but when you go, all that you may have grabbed is left here and you have to go to the other world with an empty hand. I don’t know how many will go to heaven or to hell. There is hell and there is heaven on this earth only. When a person tortures other persons and creates a hell for them, actually he falls into hell himself as he becomes a cursed person by circumstances. If he understands that his situation is the result of his doing, he can be saved on this earth.

For example, a man who is a free person can allow all the birds to walk in and all the animals to graze on his property, without thinking that he is thereby suffering a loss. But supposing he becomes extremely possessive of that land he will construct a big compound wall to keep animals and other human beings out. Such a man may start becoming a very narrow- minded, selfish person. He may not even allow his own father, brother, sister or his childhood friend to enter his property. Of course he will hate all foreigners, even foreign children. This kind of selfishness can go to an extreme in an individual man or even in a nation. Then it becomes a national idea, sparking violence. Again there is a big craze in all the Western countries that immigration should not be allowed to their countries from the former colonies which they possessed, dominated, ruled and looted. They are now trying to stick immigrants label on people who had to come as a result of their association. They were living for ages in those countries. Now they have become very holy, pure people. They cannot have any foreign blood on the clean clothes of their lives. I cannot understand why so many Indians want to settle in Western countries. There, it is a life of humiliation, a life of a very different culture where no one respects anything whatsoever, unless you are an official holding some high position or lot of ill-gotten money.

India, on the other hand, offers a far more congenial society. People in India are much more religious and respect Mother Earth and all creatures as a tradition. But still there are so many Indians who are suffering as immigrants everywhere. Instead of enjoying a free life in India, they just get entangled in the web of money-making and also of feeling that they are superior to Indians living in India. Very few Indians are really rich in England or America. They are mostly indebted to the banks and have to pay heavy and crushing interest charges. Sometimes interest rates rise to the point where mortgagees cannot pay the high interest charges. The banks then close in and take over the mortgaged property.

Indians in Italy speak only Italian and live in the same modern style of Italy. They have accepted the restless life-style of the Western people. It is a crisis for them if they cannot go for a holiday like all Italians. But I must say that in general they have not taken to the very licentious life of the Western people. On the contrary very traditional North Indians now living in Italy torture their wives and ill treat them just like their counter-parts do in India. In Canada there are many Gujaratis who have openly accepted that they are homosexuals. They form big processions to compete with other homosexuals of America. This was advertised by the media as a very great advancement of the Indian people in Canada. These immigrant Indians have no self- respect. They have brought great shame to other Indians. They have no sense of decency and prestige. When all these non- resident Indians come to India, they look down upon their parents and their countrymen because India does not have the same facilities of good bathrooms or clean roads and clean houses as they have abroad. Instead of dominating people with their false ideas, they should identify themselves with the Indian problems and try to help them by presenting the right example of cleanliness to their families who are still in India. For example a man told me that India is full of corruption and also of great violence especially in Punjab, so he does not want to go back to his native land. lf everybody runs away from the problems of his country and escapes the responsibility of looking after his own country, he will surely have no respect in other countries.

People talk of global peace. But we have to understand that so far people have not developed any sense of global awareness. Regarding United Nations assembly, one has to understand that it has its limitations. It is not a global government but an assembly of many representatives of ever growing number of nations. Will it be too much to see a vision of global govt. at this juncture of time when we are entering from second millennium into third millennium?

Of course if we are thinking of global peace generated by this govt., it has to enter into a new realm of spirituality. The representatives have to be spiritually equipped who would be selected because of their reputation of being people of very beautiful, pure personalities of compassion. Their character should be vibrant with Divine light. Naturally they would be spirit-oriented, not power and money-oriented. Already there are many of this type and many more to come. The Divine Power will bring them on stage destroying all negative forces. The fundamental right of every human being is to have joy of peace within and without. All peace loving nations will give up their ego and will welcome the will of the Divine.

Chapter 5: The Culture In The West

Culture is the outcome in any society of its history, its faith, its thinking, its emotions, its aspirations and its ideals. It is revealed in the behaviour of people among

themselves and in interaction with people of other cultures. Culture shows the social heights in serenity, wisdom and morality. The innate culture of innocence and spirituality creates peace, honesty and moral sense. On the whole, a good culture gives a sweet and good language and a peaceful existence of family life and society.

The perils that we, of the “modern” age, have gone through and the shocks that we anxiously anticipate are all inherent in the value system of “free” democratic societies. The culture of this permissive society makes the human mind react in an imbalanced way. As there is no importance allotted to the quality of private life or inner self-development in the core of domestic life, the private sphere is looked after by people who, in the name of freedom, have abandoned all the strengths and disciplines which were constructive, nourishing and conducive to ideal culture. Thus, people in the West have lost respect for each other, for themselves, for their body, for their mind and for their life as a whole. There is no respect for the private parts or for the private life of human beings. Very modern people are taking to nudism, showing off their bodies with all kinds of funny fashions, taking to all kinds of strange behaviour, dancing like primitives and also taking to all kinds of idiotic cults and sects.

It is important, to realise that modern aesthetics are devoid of any sense of decency, and any feeling of self-respect and it is not difficult to understand why this is so. It is terrible to see the way we treat ourselves by becoming part and parcel of some sort of shameless, stupid organisations like those created by false gurus or by engaging in fads or foolish festivals like carnivals and halloween, or by chanting meaningless “mantras”. Modern people show no consciousness of the value of or respect for their human personality. The way they give vent to their lower or beast-like qualities in public (such as we have seen in many satanical explanations that the cults give for encouraging this sort, of low and primitive behaviour) is basically the same as theories pronounced by Sade or Freud, that human- beings should face up and indulge their lowest nature and not be hypocritical.

But what is the goal of human life? No one seems to be concerned any more with the really most important subject. All these extracurricular activities of human beings have gone to such a limit that it is even becoming impossible for the family to control children who, at a very young age, are indulging in all kinds of destructive, self-demeaning activities.

Ten years ago, I happened to visit an exhibition in Rome where modern artistic endeavours were being exhibited from both the developed and underdeveloped countries. When we reached the British pavilion, we found that they were selling punk colours, punk hats, punk dresses and punk head gears. There were many Italians standing next to the pavilion and laughing. I asked the lady accompanying me: “Why are they laughing?” She said: “Italians still have a great sense of the ridiculous”. This modern notion of punks is ridiculous to so many, no doubt, but later when some punks came to see me at one of my programmes, they complained that their eyes were losing their sense of vision. I told them: “Don’t use these dyes on your head. Maybe they are affecting your vision”. They answered: “What’s wrong? At the most we may become blind. So what does it matter?” I was really surprised to see at what terrible cost they were indulging in the cult of these practices just to establish their so called ‘identity’. I felt like telling them that the identity of every personality is within, and not outside in your dress or hair style.

Unless you do not know yourself there is no identity whatsoever. Whatever identities you may have without self- knowledge are just artificial and they drop out as soon as you take to some other style of life. Even Mohammed Sahib has said in the Koran that without knowing yourself you cannot know God.

It has to be understood that freedom which democracy has given to the people is not for ruining their private lives and then the life of the whole society. Ruinous and destructive behaviour in private trickles down into society, to seek sanction from the society. Thus the destruction that has started in these democratic countries is not from outside but from within. People in these countries have no respect, no personal relation, no understanding of their own being which is so glorious, which is so great and which, when discovered, gives you the whole vision of your own greatness. First of all, there is a terrible problem created in family life because there is freedom to go on choosing partners even after you are married, freedom to divorce and there is freedom to marry even without much cause, nine or ten times. They want to break the record to boast about the maximum number of divorces they have had.

I have read in the newspaper about a case in America when a lady had married eight times and was going off on her honeymoon with a very much younger person. There were four thousand people in her garden to watch her departure for the honeymoon. Apart from that, there were ten helicopters hovering over the house dropping parachutes over the guests in the garden. Some even fell over the trees. What stupid behaviour it is for people who are no longer children. How are they grown- ups because their attitude towards life is so childish and superficial? They have no values, no respect for their own time, even in the way they pay attention to something that is totally stupid all their lives.

There was a terrible spectacle of adolescent behaviour from people who were all over eighty years of age, on the television the other day, when a group of actors and actresses came to a party for a shake dance. When they got out of their cars they were already shaking with their sticks. There was no need for them to organise such a pompous shake dance with all these dilapidated bony people, only covered with some sort of modern dresses, exposing their wrinkles and shaking their bones.

The race is how to become young or to look young. At least to know how to behave like young people. Actually, to be old is to be in a state of maturity and wisdom. One should be proud if one has achieved old age and is full of common sense and knowledge. The eminence and dignity of old age will definitely save modern youth. But even if old people want to join the modern, maddening society, one can only say that maturity has been missed out completely as people have gone sliding down the hill, down the slippery slopes which are offered at every turn by the freedom of today’s permissive society.

What is most evident amongst the old is not wisdom, but senility. Its manifestation, even in people in responsible positions such as politicians, can be explained by the voracious effect of rationality.

I read in a magazine (Photographers Journal, July, 1994, “A Great Message”) that ladies should wear dresses which can sell sexy editions, but first they must expose their legs, their shoulders and wear dresses which expose their bodies the most. All this is to attract men in the street or in a party. Why do so many women in the West accept these ideas which show no self- respect? Why do they have to be slaves to men’s mad passions like prostitutes? Have they no wisdom and respect of their personality to protect their chastity? This culture may reduce such women to the level of prostitutes. Some type of media act as pimps and have made them so body-conscious: this body which is the temple of God. Is this body to be utilised for exploiting women to excite men’s weaknesses? Exploitation of women’s bodies is the greatest business going on in the West. Prostitutes say that they do it because they have to make money. But what about respectable ladies?

Married women, mothers, daughters and grandmothers have lost their position, as well as their dependable personality, for any role in life. It is to be admired how cunningly the women are placed so low to create a dependent society of these women, who have to work hard to preserve their seductive bodies till the end of their lives. They have to come together, not to fight men, but themselves, to settle down as moral good family creators. They have to prove themselves by becoming family promoters and preservers. They have the responsibility to create and nourish a beautiful society. By becoming nude, even partially, in public, they are only losing their holy powers which are innate.

Of course, on the contrary, the Islamic attitude towards women is extremely dangerous. The benevolent ideas Hazarat Mohammed propounded to protect the women and give a chaste life to them, have been worked in the opposite direction by the people who are in charge of religions. The message of Paigamber has been absolutely misinterpreted. All the goodness and chastity has been practised by women but not by men. Mothers or sisters are the feminine force of the family. They live in fear. This is a situation where the mother has to be the guiding, controlling power because the men are busy in their work. They have no time to watch and guide the children. So many women are killed by stoning for their bad behaviour in the Islamic countries.

Women, if respected, become respectable. Those who are compassionate could be a great asset to the society. Such women are the preservers of society. Despite all odds, they maintain the family in its proper shape. Also they have a very soothing effect and their patience can create men of quality out of their own sons. On the contrary, the women of the West boast of their immorality. They boast of their licentiousness; they boast of how many men they have been able to hypnotise. It is not realised that they themselves are trying to get into the hands of men. They ruin themselves as well the men.

I knew of an American lady who came to London and asked me if I visited the pubs. I said: “I don’t drink, so I don’t visit any pubs”. She said: “I have a list of pubs. Which is the best pub in London? Do you know?” I said: “I don’t know”. She said: “There is a pub here which is called the Harrowich Pub where a man died and he still lives there and all his things and cobwebs are well preserved except for his body. We visited that pub and really I enjoyed getting drunk very much”. But then she told me that she is a very open-hearted woman and she allows her sons to drink. “Why don’t you drink? You should be drinking. I have two sons, one is fourteen and the other twelve. They drink and I help them especially for their birthdays”. Later on I heard that the younger boy was celebrating his birthday with his friends and she must have given those lots of alcohol that day. The parents were sleeping in their bedrooms when the boys spilled some alcohol and the whole house caught fire. All of the family was burned to death and many of the boys, friends also died and suffered. This is such a sad example of what we are doing. Why should we do it?

The most successful culture has to express itself in many social ways of morality, maturity and a wider vision. Nowadays, there are no good manners and very nasty language is used all the time. In the elite parties the jokes told are so cheap, of such a low level, that one feels that they must have got these words from the brothels. Even in the films they use horrible words that can shock any decent man. These words are not used by people who are rustics or by people who are primitive but by people who hold very high positions in life, as politicians at the helm of affairs, or as bureaucrats and specially diplomats. Even in law courts one can hear very vulgar abuses. Literature, which is the mirror of society, is full of obnoxious material in modern times. Even small children want to read pornographic magazines because they want to have knowledge of the great science of sex. This is the result of curiosity created by schools giving sex education openly.

Somebody asked me to give a novel for adolescent children. I happened to go to a shop where I found a book with nice children’s photographs outside, but when I started reading it, I was shocked because the book was written about a lesbian relationship between two ladies, watched by a small girl through a keyhole.

These authors are regarded better than the others in bringing out ideas from hell and printing them in black and white. Surprisingly, most of them get awards and a lot of money. If one can write a book for a Mafia chief, justifying his life and glorifying him as a man who does everything for his family, one can get money in millions.

When I wanted to know what these writers have to say about romance after marriage, the people who conducted the research said that there is no such book in the English, Italian, Spanish or American languages, even among the sensible novels. If you buy Barbara Cartland’s romantic books they end up before the marriage of the hero and heroine.

The crux of this civilisation is that money is what matters. In England there was an underage girl who was performing the cabaret, nude dancing and was arrested by police. The parents did not mind at all and they also watched her on a video they produced with all the family. “As long as she earns money, why should we have any objection?” They accept it. In America especially, much younger men marry very much older women, may be who have put one foot in the grave already but have lots of money. If these women advertise that they have some fatal but not contagious disease, so many compassionate boys apply to save their souls. They can get divorced if the wife does not die, get the alimony and become rich. And so many young girls marry old men so that their old husbands die and they get a very large estate, legally.

The falsehood lies in believing that money is the source of joy. It can give temporary happiness and then unhappiness when it is spent. But without achieving eternal life one cannot even sleep well. The whole night one thinks of how to save money from robbers or from the sophisticated robbers, which are the banks.

The money one gets as a blessing is for enjoying charity, for enjoying generosity, for enjoying art, of creative artists, writers, poets and for helping genuinely those who are in need. This kind of expenditure can achieve a world of joy, while greedy, rich people go down in history as hounds of society. As they are sinful in their life, they fall into dissolution and displeasure. In India the politicians have so much greed that they want to fill their walls with paper notes.

What is this culture of sick and decadent people in modern times? If some people get out of this blind rat race, they would be able to see that all societies are going to hell. They have to think of what lies in the future for their progeny, who have to get out of the clutches of this culture. As it is, most of the white skins do not have children so their growth is minor. So what are they going to do with the money that they have accumulated? At the most they can enter into destructive habits to ruin themselves and the nation as a whole.

In reality resides the totality. So many beautiful and constructive visions. But if one is fond of filth and vulgarity, one cannot be saved because human beings have the guaranteed freedom to ruin themselves in the realm of blissful democracy.

The greatest flaw in the brain of the Western men and women is that it has no Divine discretion, so it will accept anything that is well marketed. About twenty five years ago, nobody knew about a seaside holiday. But these days they save all their money to go to the seaside to get the sun, when already in their own countries they are boiling because of the Greenhouse Effect. One need not go very far to talk to people who are convinced that they are doing absolutely the right thing. One cannot approach the people with this gross kind of understanding. They get bored very soon if you try to talk of their benevolence but they enjoy if you talk of about their destruction. This is second nature for modern people.

Moreover, as a result of such dwarf personalities, because of the great accent on sex life, there is no scholarship exhibited nowadays in Western literature. On the contrary, even the so- called quality newspapers are indulging in sensational journalism. Also there are many books written which are definitely created by some kind of satanic people from hell. How people have taken to all these destructive things, and are even enjoying them, is difficult to understand. There is no moral sense or moral discretion as to what is good or what is bad for human life. Many authors of Somerset Maugham and Cronin’s generation have written beautiful and very decent books. Even before them, we had Bernard Shaw, Russell and many others, describing the beauty of human dignity and purity of life. To begin with they desisted ideal heroes then described heroes who were very immoral but who pretended to be good, but now they write about very bad heroes, become successful and glorified.

Modern schools have started in real earnest an onslaught on children’s innocence, with sex education at the early age of seven or eight. This sex education we are talking about is of no avail to children who are abused, raped or subjected to some sort of sexual perversion by people who are in authority. The reason is this: education cannot control aggressive passion which is constantly being stimulated by the churning out of sex and violence by the television and the media. What is needed is a profound change in the culture which is proud to call itself modern. Actually children should be talked about sex by the parents privately after puberty in a direct way. One lady wanted to buy for her daughter some sort of protective pill as the girl had reached puberty. I asked her to send the girl to me who had received her self realisation and then I told her the dangers of sex. Without taking a pill this girl and many girls I know are virgins. In India most of the girls are naturally virgins before marriage because the parents talk to their children privately. If the sex education is given openly it becomes a subject which children discuss and want to know from each other. They have no other topic but sex. Their innocence is lost completely.

Chapter 6: Religions

All the religions from ancient times have said that a man or a woman has to cleanse his or her mind through religious activity, with righteous life. The aim of every

religion was to establish balance in every way to make way for the ascent of the seeker. The second birth, walihood, selfhood, Buddha’s state, Jaini state, Gnostic, or Atmasakshatkar, are all names for self-realisation. It was all right in the olden days, where people always wanted to be honorable and good to ascend higher in their awareness. They obeyed and tried to do whatever was asked for by the saints, prophets or incarnations.

In India, in the sixteenth century, we had many great saints who were poets. Even in the twelfth century, we had some very great writers about spiritual life. The main theme of all these saints was that we must cleanse ourselves for our ascent. We must purify ourselves. So the greatest thing we have to achieve is our second birth, our Self-Realisation, the salvation. This was the accepted goal of human life.

I have read a book about Jesus coming to India in Kashmir and meeting one of the Kings called Shalivahana. The meeting is quoted from an ancient book of Puranas, in Sanskrit, which perhaps, the writer did not know. It is written that King Shalivahana asked Jesus his name, and he said his name was Isa Masih and he asked him: “Why are you here in this country?” He said: “I have come from a country where people are ‘Mlecchas’. Mlecchas are the people who have a desire to be only filthy or to be vulgar and immoral.” In those days, foreigners were all called “Mlecchas” in India because Indians believed that they had no idea of purification or transformation. Whatever may be the case, this was the conversation between Shalivahana and Lord Jesus Christ. So Shalivahana asked him: “Why you do not go back and cleanse these people and teach them about Nirmal Tattwa?” (means the principle of cleansing). Thus, I think Christ went back and was crucified within three and a half years by the Romans who were not keen about their salvation. Now the way the Church of England is trying to support immoral lives and illegal marriages, etc. of the priests taking the support of the gene’s theory shows how the Indians were right in calling the Westerners “Mlecchas”. I have dealt with this gene’s theory in the chapter on Meta science.

The French were called Firangis by Indians, which means, “Changing many colours” or “of artificial behaviour for satisfactions of licentiousness”. Later on, the British were called Sahibs, meaning, “proud of their dress”, “Egoist without any spiritual sensitivity, but thinking they are God almighty”.

According to the Bible, Shariyat is written in the chapter of Jeremiah. These laws were given by Moses to the Jews, whom he found to be in a very decadent state when he came back with his ten commandments. So he thought these people required a very strict kind of conduct by which they could reach a certain moral discipline and cleanliness. Otherwise such immoral people could not attain spirituality. Shariyat was not accepted by the Jews but was taken up by Muslims later on because they found the Jews were not able to accept it, but they thought they would put it down for people who wanted to follow Islam, meaning surrender to the Divine. I feel it is a misinterpretation to say that Hazarat Mohammed Sahib said it. Mohammed Sahib could not have done it. He was himself preaching about “Rahmat (compassion) all his life. How could he talk about such strict rules for women?

As it is, all these religions are very difficult to follow. Christ has said that you have to cleanse yourself, you have to control your attention and you have to see, through your introspection, what is wrong with you, and try to cleanse yourself. Otherwise, he said (in the chapter written by Matthew, in the Bible) “that if your one eye does the sin, (even if you look at a woman twice) you better take out your eyes. If your hand does anything wrong, anything sinful, cut out your hand.” He said, “if somebody slaps you on one cheek, turn the other cheek to that person”. Imagine Christians tolerating even one slap on the face?

When you see the Christian people in the Christian nations, the way they killed people all over the world, one wonders, by what yard-stick they call themselves Christians. One can very well understand that these are all absolutely impossible rules and regulations for the advanced modern persons to follow. These hard rules may not have been propagated by Christ, but may have been introduced by Paul who was a squatter in the Bible and who edited it. He was epileptic according to the principles of Sahaja Yoga. He was possessed and wrote all kinds of lies through Peter who was the weakest disciple of Christ. How could Christ give him the keys to build a Church on seven hills? On the contrary, he said: “The Satan will take you over”. Who is this Satan? The anti-Christ.

It’s not possible for anybody to be worthy of the Christian religion because they have to be extremely sensitive to sinful actions like saints or angels. I haven’t seen anybody with a cut hand or with eyes missing in the whole of the Christian kingdom. This proves that their belief in Christ is followed only up to the point of going to the Church, listening to the sermons preached by a person who is not even a realised soul, and who has not had his Divine baptism.

It is very surprising, because our mayor in Italy asked me: “How is it there are so many people attending your programme for hours together. They never get bored. While when we are in the Church, after fifteen minutes, we start looking at our watches, and after half an hour, we just run out of the Church. It is just a social event but it so very boring that after the lecture we feel like going to the pub, otherwise we start fighting with each other.” After the blessing of the Trinity, why should they be so anxious to drink and get lost?

Thus, we find that, in the Christian countries, people are behaving in an absolutely opposite manner to what Christ had asked them to do. He had gone into a very subtle side of purity that says, “Thou shall not have adulterous eyes” while in the ten commandments, it was only said: “Thou shall not commit adultery”. If you are observant, you will be shocked to see that it is very hard to find any man or woman in the Western countries who does not have adulterous eyes. Of course it is different, if they are blind, or too old to flirt with their eyes. They are always moving their eyes from one person to another person with lust or greed. It is impossible to understand how they can move their attention so fast from one person to another, unless some screws are loose in their brains, like a doll, which has screws that control the eye balls. The eyes start moving very fast when they flirt. They might become mad or get obsessed by one thing or another. In fruitless pursuit, how can the human attention be so mobile?

After Christ came Mohammed Sahib, and perhaps he felt that if all these rules and regulations were written down they were only for men. But what about the women? So he said something should be done about the women. Of course not what Muslims believe that women should be debarred or tortured. He must have said that if the women follow an absolutely moral path, then men will also be automatically moral, because women create the men. He respected holy women. He had great respect for Christ’s Mother and also for women as a whole. In the Bible she is called as an ordinary woman may be by Paul, who was hater of women. The idea of Madonna came from the Pagan religion which existed before Christ, and not from the Bible, which was edited by Paul. Mohammed Sahib, who was the incarnation of the primordial master (Dattatraya), knew who was the Mother of Christ. In Sahaja Yoga She is worshiped as Mahalaxmi. He did not want women to be immoral and take to prostitution. In Islam for a married woman, there are very strict punishments. It is said that in the Koran he said: “Any woman, who is immoral, must be buried in the sand half way and should be stoned,” (sometimes, she could be dead.) I wonder if he said such a thing, or if it was Muvayya who edited the Koran. But the way they follow it in the Islamic countries is really sinful to give this kind of punishment to all those who are considered immoral women. Whatever it is, it is very difficult, in these modern times, to find really moral people after the pattern that Mohammed Sahib thought. Only with fear mostly, the Muslims appear to be moral.

Mohammed Sahib accepted many marriages because he didn’t want women to have relationship without marriage. In those days, there were many women who survived after the death of their husbands, in the wars they had among the tribes. There were many young girls who had no chance of marriage, as many young people were killed in the wars they had in the different tribes against Mohammed Sahib. Whatever he did at that time (Samyachar), was very essential to create a new generation of very pure and compassionate people. Both Jesus Christ and Mohammed Sahib were not only Divine but they were incarnations who had a special mission to come on this earth for purification through surrendering their ego and conditionings. All these fundamentalists are extremely egoist and are blindly conditioned when they think they are in charge of a religion which is the best. They proclaim but are no where near any religion.

These very great Divine souls, who came on this earth could not, perhaps, really understand the kind of people to whom they gave these precious warnings. Afterwards, you see the reaction in a very different way, of the people who said they followed Islam or Christianity. Actually, to a modern man, is it possible to say that he should keep a control over his attention or control over his mind and also to find out through introspection, prayers or Namaz what is wrong with him? This becomes a mechanical process which has developed through ages. They don’t understand why it was said and why it should be done, that one has to understand God Almighty and to try to be good reflections of His kindness, His greatness and His Divinity. The prayer said without the connection (Yoga) with God is like a telephone without connection. Namaz is the way a realised soul can cleanse his Chakras only with Kundalini awakening.

Now we see a very different type of human beings who have come on this earth in these modern times. Those who are blindly following the dictations of a blind religion are called fundamentalists, without knowing the fundamentals of the religion. They have to know themselves, as to what they are and what they have to become through these religions. They have to see what sort of society they have achieved so far. If they try to follow anything so ardently blindfolded, then they are a problem for themselves and a problem for .the whole world. They have brought such shame to all the incarnations and all the great religions.

For example, if you have to master your attention, if you have to understand your mind, and if you have to introspect yourself, the vehicle that is to be used has to be an egoless personality, which can definitely give strength to a person to control himself and to cleanse himself. But in these modern times, people are very busy with their ego ventures or conditioning. Their ego is very strong, and once they start controlling all their attention and their mind and also religiously following the rituals (which are supposed to be religious) they become more egoistical because all these things are done by the ego or conditioning. That is why fundamentalists are self- centred and extremely aggressive. Mind, which is an illusion, creates the ego and conditioning which tries to control the mind in the reverse direction. Ego tries to control the attention. As a result, one develops a bigger and bigger ego. Now this very big ego makes one blind. Also the conditioning does the same, they don’t see as they get lost with their ego or conditioning, and start thinking that they are the highest, they are the chosen ones and that they have every right to bring everyone to their own level of madness. This ego created by conditioned mind cannot be seen. It only hurts others but doesn’t hurt the person who has the ego. The pampering of the ego starts when this ego becomes successful, and later collective. Such collective people’s ego is very dangerous for the realisation of Divinity. They do all things against Divinity in the name of religion or God.

Now, in Islamic fundamentalism, the main problem is that they say they are fighting the Western culture. Firstly, we must understand that Western culture, which today is nowhere near what Christ has talked .about. Immorality has become the life style of human beings in the West, but what about the immorality the Muslims are indulging in secretly whenever they get the chance? They can be worse than Christians.

If you visit anyone of the Christian nations, one is shocked to see that, though they call themselves nations of secularism, they all follow one particular type of Christianity. For example, in England, the Church of England is the only accepted religion. France is the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church. In Italy, one can understand, but even parts of Germany, Spain, Austria, Portugal, Belgium and Ireland are politically dominated absolutely by the Catholic Church which has given no Divinity to anyone whatsoever. Even the idea of Divinity is confused with money. Please read the book “In God’s Name”. The way France is trying experiments of destruction in the Pacific Ocean shows how they have practiced Catholicism. This country I visited very often because I felt the gate of hell from where all the immorality is pouring is in the city of Paris.

In these nations, in their private life, or in society can one find that they try to imbibe the great qualities that our Lord Jesus Christ has taught? Only in name are they followers of Christ; for political control, they use religions without any substance of these great religions. All of them are making money and are not willing to accept the universal pure innate religion, which is the fountain-head of all these religions. Their own standard of understanding moral life through Divinity is really very shocking. For example, they believe in heavy drinking, because they say that in the Christian religion, drinking is allowed as Christ went to a wedding and there he made wine out of water. The word “wine” is used in the Hebrew language, only for grape juice, or for the creepers of grapes. How did they interpret that he made Benedictine, French wine or Scotch Whisky? It is very simple to understand the logic that you cannot create alcoholic wine in a short time spontaneously. It has to ferment, and then it becomes a very good, expensive alcoholic wine that can cause intoxication. If it is a very, very old smelly, made rotten for ages, one can sell it for a very high price. This is not the same wine that was created by Christ at all. It is very easy to understand that he was constantly preaching for a higher awareness. Therefore how could he try to subscribe something like alcoholic intoxicating wine, which is anti-spiritual in nature and which reduces awareness to nonsense.

In Canada, I met a scholar who had a doctorate from some English university. To my surprise, he had written a thesis on how alcohol creates more awareness for Divinity. Moreover, many people in Europe believe that by taking drugs they can get a very high awareness to achieve their Divine ascent. It is all absurdity to the last limit, but who can tell them. They can’t talk to you after six o’clock anyway, especially in France, as they all start drinking quite early. It is impossible to understand why all these people have taken to drinking in the name of religion and even when they give the communion of God, which they call in their language, Holy communion (it is given with wine and some sort of rotten bread). How can anyone believe that this wine and alcohol, which makes a person so sick and causes so many diseases and which is so dangerous for children to consume, has something to do with the Divine ascent, because it is the blood of Christ, our lord. What an insult to the great life of Jesus, who was a pure incarnation for innocence, Logos or Aum.

Somehow, my luck has been to have a residence very near pubs and Churches when I was in London. I saw people going to the pubs and coming out, absolutely falling down, and others making a queue to go inside to take the drinks and come back in the same manner as the previous persons who had emptied their purses. Moreover, in the back yard of the big Catholic Church, lots of beer barrels come and go and that is the only activity for the whole week, except for Sunday. On Sundays, lots of drunkards men and women, sit on the stairs of this particular Church, with the bottles in their hands, begging from the generous Christians who want to pay for the alcohol the drunkards consume. All this is in the name of God. Some of the drunkards said they are in communion with the certified Saints and Bishops who were buried in the Church. This is why they stick to the Church and also mug the passers-by as these buried holy men come in their dreams and forgive them. “With the permission of the Bishops who also drank like us we go to rob others to drink”. Here one has to say with great regret that many great saints and such were never recognised by the Church and were despised and tortured instead, because their Divine light exposed the Churches and the Bishops.

Islamic religion is against alcoholism, but if one Muslim gets a chance he can drink much more than an Irishman, Scotsman, Australian or Russian, who when they depart from an official reception where free drinks are given, squeeze the hostess with hand shaking who had to intoxicate herself to completely numb sensation. Thank heavens that some Muslims, though drunk, remember not to shake hands with a lady. In many parties, we found my husband and I were the only people who were Islamic, while all the Islamic people were drinking. It is amazing how secretly all these people drink. They perhaps believe if someone does not drink, or if they don’t indulge in women hunting, they are no more manly. But when the women drink, they end up by fainting, talking about their own self, and the way they are tortured as Muslim women. I do not know if there is a fatwa sent for all such women. In India, a Muslim woman can be divorced after eight children without any proper provision. If some men do not drink, and control themselves with all efforts, they become abnormal. They think they are the most religious Muslims and have a right to kill everyone. They talk of hatred and violence in the name of Islam and suppressed morality. This has not helped anyone because suppressed morality is a poison for those who think they are pure and moral. These people become very hot-tempered and cruel and jeopardise the lives of others who are saintly and Divine.

The Sufis in the real sense were realised souls. In Turkey I met many who are seeking the truth. The poetry of Yunus Emre is absolutely heavenly. How could he speak about the global religion and about Divine Love? He described man as the most elevated creature created by God in his image. In India we had Nizamuddin Aulia, Ameer Khusro, Moinddin Chisti, Kabirdas, Shri Sainath of Shirdi, Kanifnath, all saying the same truth about global unity.

The other day, I was listening to a lecture of a Muslim Sudanese gentleman, who was speaking from Mecca Medina where they had a very big conference of Islamic people who have gone for Haj. I was really frightened that this orator who was showing his feats preached that the whole world should be forced to become Islamic. His face burned with rage and such fury emitted from his body’s gestures. I had a friend who was very good at Arabic, luckily who was next to me, who translated him. This Sudanese spoke as if he knew absolutely what was right, as if he knew he was the master of the ceremony of salvation and as if this saviour of the world knew that he had a right to dominate the whole world with his poisonous ideas. About two days later we heard of the stampede, where thousands of people died in that holy place, just after his lecture. I hope this self style saviour is safe again to pour greater poison of hatred.

I went to Turkey, and then to Tunisia, and I found two types of people living there. In Turkey, Ataturk Kemal Pasa, who was another great soul, had brought freedom for women and a complete new vision of life. But as a result, the women who were educated or of rich families, and men of the same kind, were trying to get into the image of a German person in Turkey. They were so impressed by Germans. The reason they gave was that there are lots of Turkish people in Germany who praise the Germans for their skill to make good machines, and that is how they have imported this kind of new life-style. On the contrary, I feel the Turkish are very capable in every way.

A long time ago when invasion and occupation was considered a great achievement, the Turkish were ruling half of Europe. In art they are very deep and they are masters of ancient Moghul art even today. They are excellent cooks and tailors. They have all the talent, so it is very surprising how German culture which has no talent for art, even appreciation, has impressed them so much. They produce carpets called Hereke which are the last word in art as far as weaving is concerned. Their silver-ware, ornaments in gold and diamonds are beautiful copies of ancient Kings and Czars of Russia. The women whom I saw in the hotel had come for a wedding party. They were all dressed up just like very modern German elite ladies who are anxious to show their body as much as possible. It is the main principle of Western culture that the women should show their bodies as much as possible and attract more men. In simple words, it is a prostitute’s profession to do such a thing to attract men and to get favours from them. What is the need to attract men and flirt with them? What is the need for men to flirt with women? There is no commandment in the Bible or the Koran or anywhere to that effect. Flirting is sinful and creates a confused personality. Most of them get a very disturbed attention.

As a result, the fundamentalists are opposed to this kind of Western infiltration into the culture of their country. I talked to these ladies and I told them “Why don’t you dress up like your own people? There is no Purdah in Turkey, but fundamentalist women wear Chadder or Burkha-Iike a shuttlecock. The Westernised women are afraid of them. They think they carry a dagger or maybe a gun hidden inside their dress. The religious ladies look also quite blood thirsty. There is no peace in their faces. Why don’t you take to the culture of your own people? The fundamentalists will be finished the day you give up this Western culture.” To my amazement, I discovered that not only do they get their clothes from Germany, but also their cakes and food, while Turkey is the place where they make the best food and the best clothes in the whole world. It is some sort of slavish mentality that these women and men feel inferior and try to make up by copying the Germans, so called superior race of Germans who have no E.Q. no emotional quotient. They can flare up anytime. I don’t think there is anything to copy in their culture. Once I went to Munich and I saw a garden and told some people that I would like to visit that garden. They said: “Mother you can’t go there”. I was amazed, why shouldn’t I go to see that garden. They said: “Because it is an open bedroom for so many people in the day time and also in the night. It’s a collective operation going on there and you won’t be able to stand it, you will just vomit”. Thanks to the warning I didn’t go inside that garden called the English Garden, because I would have been sick for days.

The culture of the West is very sex-oriented. For example, I went to Switzerland and we were going for a picnic on Lake Lauzanne, when one of the boys came running to me, “Mother don’t go there”. I was surprised why he said so and I wanted to see what was happening. They said, “Mother all the women are half naked”. In Switzerland, imagine, it is so very cold and they were half naked. In England (Brighton) they started a Nude club or something like that, and the women. entered without any clothes inside the water, which was very cold. A television man asked them: “How do you feel?” They said, “We feel very warm, very nice, very good”. I was surprised. How could these women, who were nude, tell such lies by saying that is very warm and beautiful? Maybe to spread their cult of nudity which they believe is the only way to Salvation.

On the whole, if you see, Western culture denies Christ who sacrificed his life for the sins of the people. Those who call themselves Christians indulge in all kinds of activities which are anti-Christ. When Christ came into this world in the realm of Divinity, one had to go through penance (Tapasya). Buddha and Mahavira had to do the same at that time. Christians do not know what is penance and they cannot sacrifice even a pin for others. They are very good at lip service and grabbing. Big conferences are held in the developing nations for monetary help. The developed countries pass resolutions, who pay for these conferences and the outcome is that nothing can be done for the poor countries, while Westerners spend their money to enjoy the hospitality of the poor nations. Only after realisation does one feel the collectiveness of the world, otherwise money is the only religion that is worshiped. It is the money that matters for itself. It is full of sensationalization, domination by the entrepreneurs. It is also evident that people have no brains of their own. For example, twenty five years ago, nobody used to go for a holiday. Now during the year, they will earn all their salaries, slim down, make their bodies look very attractive and move to the sea shores. Northern people in England go to the South and Southern people go to the North. It is the same with France. France is the worst. If it comes to shamelessness, no one can beat them. The south of France is something special. People really go amuck. They come with a hired lady friend from some school or college and, under the open sky, they insult the ocean, which is unfortunately being polluted by oil spills. This is another story, where many ships carrying oil deliberately wreck to create an accident, to get a lot of money from insurance.

It is a common practice that you cannot travel on Fridays and Sundays anywhere, because there is such a lot of traffic on the way of these mad people running away from home, going to the sea and sitting in the sun and consequently developing skin cancers. Christians are supposed to attend Church or at least pray at home for the well-being of all human beings or at least for the well-being of Christians. But they carry bottles of alcohol and sit in the sun the whole day. Nowadays, the Germans run after the sun and travel even to South Africa. I am sure that one day, they will come to India to sunbathe and then develop cancer of the skin (a good income from the tourist for Indian doctors who treat them). All this goes on very well in the West, and there is no limit to what extent the hankering for shamelessness, the vulgarity and prostitution works.

All people from the developing countries who go abroad, first feel amused and then extremely interested by these gimmicks of lifestyles of the Western people. Even in India, the curse of modern culture is evident in so many cities, with nudity and immorality which are against Divine culture, already well planted. The Indians are taking to the bathroom culture of the West, where people only bathe with perfumes. Indians have a great sense of personal cleanliness. If those people, who cannot even keep their bodies clean, how can they even think of keeping their mind and their hearts clean. The whole trend is towards getting more dirty, more vulgar, more shameless and behaving more absurdly towards the Divine. As a result, they are suffering from mysterious and incurable diseases and they do not want to accept the basics that their culture is of anti natural living style.

Ego is anti-Christ. As they don’t respect themselves they also do not respect others: Thus, the people in the West are extremely egoistical and arrogant. They feel that if somebody is humble, he is a weak person, while Christ has said: “The meek will inherit the earth.” They advertise openly about their ego and what things can please their ego. I have seen advertisements about smoking stating that it makes you look egoistical, handsome. The training of children in the West is to develop the ego. Also, very surprisingly, children are told to grab things from others rather than to share with others. I am talking about democratic countries where there is no understanding of compassion and humility. Although they are Christians, they do not practise Christianity at all, that Christ our saviour taught.

So the fundamentalists of the Christian religion have now become a new type, those who believe in a new culture of people. They go to Church with their skin heads and on their return they kill Hindu ladies who wear Kum Kum (mark of marriage). They worship Christ and call themselves “dotbusters” and look like lousy vagabonds. They never wear any suits anymore, neither do they have any proper dresses. They wear the same clothes for the whole year and hold very high positions in the media or in other organisations. People laugh at a person who is not in this kind of lousy, shabby, repulsive attire. One has to appear rustic and innocent like a primitive villager, while the brain is ultra modern. Islamic fundamentalists believe that they are fighting these Western modern fundamentalists, who believe in all kinds of absurd modernism.

Even in art, in writing and also in expression in different types of literature, you find that books which are popular are usually very grotesque, extremely vulgar and full of filth. One has to be very careful not to read those books because one may end up with nervous diseases.

France is full of these ideas and perhaps all these ideas really come from France, where the politicians, at a very high position, have keeps who can become Prime Ministers. There is no ideal for the people to follow. Idealism ended with Marie Antoinette, who was killed by the public, who themselves, had become bourgeois. All their lives have changed and they have taken to all the mannerisms of the bourgeois which they condemned and therefore hanged their king and queen. Thus, we have a society of very licentious and vulgar people. The qualities that were very important in the West were given by Christ, but nobody cared for them. Some frightened French Sahaja Yogis wanted to save their children from the immoral society of France and they send very few to our school of Sahaja Yoga, where children from all over the world come. But the Catholic Church had a blind folded organisation called ADFI who gave the school too much trouble for one boy. As a result the school has no French children. They were afraid these French children might become moral and maybe absolutely misfit in the Catholic traditions.

It has become a very immoral society all over the democratic Christian community. The effect of this Christian culture is worse I felt, in Tunisia, because I saw the ladies of Tunisia dressed up just like French women with very scanty and transparent clothes. And they told us that the Muslim fundamentalists are constantly threatening them. I said, “Why do you follow these cursed French women? What is so great about French culture?” It is said that in France the housewife is allowed to have a profession of a part time prostitute. If this is so, why should you take to a culture which is absolutely against your religion and against your country. The Tunisian ladies really understood this. I said, “If you dress the way Tunisian ladies dress and behave with culture, then the fundamentalists will have no grounds to fight.” The Fundamentalist Muslims have certain grounds to say that they will kill anyone who takes to this culture. But they have also to understand that the stand that they have taken of forced morality is absolutely absurd. With this kind of stand, they cannot change the onslaught of Western culture. They themselves are secretly leading a very licentious and perverted life. The yoke of morality is only on women and not on men. This lady Taslima Nasreen, I was surprised to see wore jeans and smoked. Is this the idea of freedom she has about women. Her superficial transformation cannot justify her stand against the atrocities on the Muslim women.

Everyone knows very well that Muslim women are under great financial pressure. Once I was going to Aurangabad, and on the way my car failed near Daulatabad, meaning the city of wealth. Here there was a crowd of Muslim women. They were filling water from a tap which was broken and I got down from the car and started talking to them. They were all Muslim women who were divorced (Tallaq) by their husbands. Each one of them had seven to eight children and very very little Meher compensation was given to them. They were just starving. They were taking the water from the tap and they said that sometimes they got some work on the roads, when they were being repaired or some new roads had to be made. They lived in some sort of a shelter which had broken tin pieces or some dried leaves covered with tins and stones to hold the tin pieces together. Some houses were made of ordinary mud – worse conditions of living. They said that in the rainy season they slept under railway bridges – absolutely the lowest and the poorest women trying to live with their children, half naked and starving. They told me that some of the children had died and they could not get any money from their husbands. The husbands say ‘Tallaq,’ ‘Tallaq,’ ‘Tallaq’ three times and they are left absolutely alone on the streets and they have to go on like this till they die. There were so many women there and tears started coming down my eyes. I just couldn’t bear it. Even when I think about all of them, I wonder what this religion of compassion and love, of Rahim and Rahmat that Mohammed Sahib had talked about, really is. It is a furnace of fear and constant torture leading to death. Who will save these women?

So many of these Muslim children are dying because their parents are divorced and they don’t know where to go. But there is no way of getting out of this miserable existence. There was one very important case, the Shah Banu case in our country where a lady said that she should get some money from her husband for her maintenance. In this our country there has been a big problem because the people at the helm of affairs are constantly trying to appease the minorities. They call it secularism. The party in the majority is ruling in this balancing way, by appeasing them all the time and agreeing to whatever atrocities they commit. We have Muslim law and Christian law, separate from the general law. The Christians cannot get divorced according to Catholic law. In the Shah Banu case, though the Supreme Court had said that this lady should get money from her husband for her maintenance, the then Prime Minister, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi, refused to accept the verdict of the Supreme Court saying that Muslims had to agree. Unless at least one Muslim man supported this, he would not accept this verdict. No Muslim came up to support the verdict. Are they so frightened of Fatwa from Iran or from the Indian Muslims? Why, do they not think that this problem which their mothers had faced may have also to be faced by their own sisters and daughters. This is the limit of things that are happening in every country. We find the fundamentalists torturing their women and using Koran in a very wrong way. They themselves are very licentious and aggressive and big drunkards. It is unbelievable that they do not know what they are doing and continue to degrade their womanhood. So women will, if there is no fair play of justice, take to Western life-styles. They think that is the only escape. I met a Russian who asked me why the U.N. was helping the Muslims in Bosnia. He said that Russia had problems from Ajarbaijans but had managed them, and also controlled matters in Chechenya. The U.N. does not know about Muslims because they have many Muslim nations as members. Once they get hold of Serbia they will convert the country into Islamic Fundamentalists as they believe it is Jihad time. They produce many children to increase the population in a democracy. Now Russia is a democracy and how can we have a nation based on religions in a democracy. I was shocked at his perception of Muslims. I have such respect for so many Russians. I wish they could accept that this is not Jihad time anymore but Kiyama time, the resurrection time, the blossom time. Are they going to miss it?

Both things are wrong, one has to understand that all these religions were born on the same tree of spirituality and that people have plucked the flowers and are fighting with these dead flowers. Of course, there are some absurd things which grew with misinterpretation and interference from unholy people, which are common in these religions, which are like orphans in the hands of anti-God people. For example, Jews, Christians and Muslims believe that when they die their bodies will come out of their graves and they will all be resurrected at the time of resurrection, at the time of last judgement, at the time of Kiyama. It is so illogical to think of what will remain inside those graves after five hundred years. Nobody wants to think and understand that it is not the body but the soul that will come out of these bodies, be born again as human beings and be saved through Kiyama that is the Resurrection. Who will tell them? No one can talk to them. As soon as one wants to talk, they react and one can be killed. That is the only thing they know how to kill to stop all the real knowledge to understand. Mostly they are uneducated, those who are educated also try to influence them because they get the power over them. The greatest problem with the fundamentalists is that they have no compassion because they do not understand and love Mohammed Sahib, as to who he was and why he came on this earth. They do not know the reality. They just think that they are right type of people and that they can kill as many human beings (Kafirs) as they want, and they can create as many problems as they like, and they can destroy the rest of the people who do not follow their fundamentalism. We find that fundamentalists do not know the fundamentals of religion, on the other hand the people who think they are very modern also don’t know where this modern mind is going to take them. What a shock is awaited for this modern man who has lost faith in God. Both ways they try to do things which are in no way helpful for global peace or for the ascent of human beings, by which they will have their own peace within their heart. The reason is that mind is an illusion, the brain is the reality. The mind creates ego and conditioning which in turn controls the mind.

Actually Hazrat Mohammed never made Islam an exclusive religion in the Koran. He very respectfully talked about Moses, Abraham, Christ and his mother, one after another. Even so Muslims believe they are exclusive. Jews and Christians also believe theirs are exclusive religions. There is another problem they believe that Mohammed was the exclusive messenger of God and Christians believe that Christ is the last word, while Jews believe that their saviour has yet to come. If these incarnations were the last ones why did Mohammed say I will send you the twelfth Mahadi? Also why did Christ say that he would send the Holy Ghost? We cannot say how long the Jews are going to wait for their Saviour to come. They are wailing and crying before the wailing wall wearing the Torat in small amulets, but actually the most important thing for them is to collect the money that they have lent and buy diamonds at any cost.

Muslims who are not educated enough to understand Koran in original believe that they are the soldiers of Jihad which is led by some very clever ego-oriented educated people. They have not even read the Koran which was edited forty years after the death of Mohammed Sahib. The editor himself was the most cruel man, who killed Hazrat Ali, his two sons and two other Khalifas. It is said that the mother of this fifth Khalifa ate the raw liver of the fourth Khalifa. In this Jihad, how many Muslims are going to die? On one side they produce more children to create a Muslim majority and on the other side they are getting killed in thousands. The Jihad has become imminent and the Muslims are a real threat to peace and progress of every country they live in. Mohammed Sahib has already said “If you do not know yourself you cannot know God.

The only way to get over this brutal image is to become a wali or a real Sufi. This is what Muslims need: the achievement of peaceful existence through self-realisation. The same is the case with Jews and Christians. They believe in the same Bible, Muslims believe in the Old Testament as well as the Jews, but they nevertheless kill each other. It is painful and extremely heart wrenching that when in the whole world people have been able to enter into the Kingdom of God as promised, all these fundamentalists of different religions are killing each other. May God bless them with sanity and wisdom. They should get their second birth. “Know thyself” is the beginning of the ascent.

One can understand why Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all these three religions, became extremely aggressive. In the beginning when they started, there was a lot of turmoil, disturbances and aggression to the point of destruction. As a result, to preserve and to protect themselves, they started a religion based on war. They talked of love but revenge became the hidden main stream of their religions. Moreover they follow “a Book” each separately. They are lost in the web of words (Shabda Jalam).

There was a development in India also on the same lines. When the Hindus were oppressed by the invading Muslims, the need arose for a new force to fight this scourge. As a result the Sikh religion emerged. Every Hindu family in the Punjab was asked for a son, perhaps its eldest son, to join the Sikh religion and to fight Muslim aggression. The rest of the Hindus remained passive and in the pursuit of their ascent. There are other religions like Buddhism and Jainism. These religions believed in suffering and in tolerance. They also believed in compassion. Despite this, gradually some of their followers who had become very mentally equipped by reading books or ritualism went into many divisions. Some Hindus formed a new religion called Arya Samaj against the orthodox Hindu ritualistic religion, believing in the formless power. The people of this religion are extremely aggressive in their arguments. They are another type of people who believe that they know everything about spirituality. It is difficult to talk to anyone of them or to convince them that they are still on a mental level. The Hindus believed in tolerance. But after some time they too became very oppressed by the Muslims and Christians and started to take to a very defensive attitude of fighting.

Then there are the Chinese religions which believe in non- violence more to animals than to human beings. So all these religions, so great, so sublime were brought to some sort of a new form which had aggression built inside it. These conditionings of religions have separated human beings. The only way to solve this problem is by understanding that all religions in their essence are the same and all the religions must be respected. One person should not belong to one religion but to all the religions or to the religion which is within himself, innate and enlightened. And this religion is in everyone, so we can call it a universal pure innate religion. This will give the real meaning of Gandhian secularism which is not for votes as in India presently practised, but for establishing inner innate unity.

In the Hindu religion it was believed that every human being has the reflection of God in his heart which is the Spirit, the Atma. If that is the case, how could we divide Hindu society into different castes? In the beginning of civilisation in India for thousands of years people followed caste according to the nature of the person. This is called as ‘Jaati’ meaning the aptitude of a person. A person who has an aptitude to achieve the Divine was called ‘Brahman’. These people had to be absolutely pure, totally away from power and money. The second group of people were called ‘Kshatriyas’ who were power oriented and were responsible for protecting the people who were innocent, religious and oppressed. The third caste was called ‘Vaishyas’ and had interest in business and in money making. The fourth one were the people called ‘Shudras’ meaning people of the lower awareness who just wanted to serve other people for money by very menial services. But this was according to the innate aptitude and liking of a person and never according to the birth.

Later on Shri Rama who was one of the incarnations on this earth, showed in his own life that he respected people for their aptitude. For example when Shri Rama was exiled and went to a forest, he met there a poor old woman called Shabari who was of tribal caste. She offered some berries to Shri Rama with great affection and devotion. She said: “Please eat them because they are not at all sour. I have already tasted them.” The food or fruits tasted by somebody else are not to be eaten. If someone has bitten off even a part of a fruit, that fruit is no longer pure and cannot be offered to another person, certainly not to an incarnation. But Shri Rama was greatly moved by the love of the old lady. He accepted the berries with much joy and ate them. He praised their taste and gave some to his wife, Sita. His brother Lakshman, felt rather jealous and asked for some berries for himself. There are many incidents where Shri Ram gets very friendly with people who were not of very high castes. Also his own Ramayana, his life story, was written by a fisherman who was a dacoit. This fisherman was transformed into a saint by another heavenly minstrel called Narada. Of course an ordinary fisherman who was also a dacoit had such respect for Shri Rama that he wrote this beautiful epic, the Ramayana.

Then came Shri Krishna who was also born in a family not of Brahmans and not of Kshatriyas but of the milkmen who were not of high caste. Shri Krishna himself from childhood performed so many miracles. His life displayed that the birth of a child in a particular family was not the determining factor as far as his ‘Jaati’ or his caste was concerned. He used to go to Hastinapur and there instead of eating food or residing with people of high caste, he would live with the son of a maid servant who was Vidura, a realised soul. Vidura was a low caste person but Shri Krishna would always go and visit and stay with him and have food in his house and not with the kings of Hastinapur.

Later on the caste system became based on the birth of a person because selfish people wanted their children to have the privileges of a higher caste without any aptitude. So the caste of a person was determined by the caste of the family in which he was born. Identification of a lower caste or a higher caste by birth was never the initial idea. Also the Goddess Durga knew two classes, Asuras or Rakshasas (Satanic) and Bhaktas (Devotees). It is difficult to say when Hindu society accepted this destructive caste system by birth. Perhaps also some fanatic priests introduced this curse through religious books by their own alterations. This is a very common phenomenon in all the religious scriptures where some fanatic or woman hater has put his own ideas. How can we take these scriptures as pure or fundamental and follow them word by word? They were not written or edited by the creators of those religions.

In India we have had many great poets and saints who were realised souls born in a very low caste. We also had great poets and saints among the higher castes. This establishes the fact that caste based on birth does not determine the spiritual quality of a person. All these poets and saints respected each other and cared for the upliftment of human beings. These saints never felt that they were of a very higher sophisticated class or that they belonged to a lower caste. The Hindu religion is not exclusive and that is a great blessing. It does not have one book to follow. There is no organisation of the Hindu religion. There are Shankara-Charyas but they do not have powers like priests or Mullas. Moreover, it seems that Hindu people worship anyone and accept all the saints, whether Hindus or Muslims.

Today, the Brahmans have become power-oriented and Kshatriyas are of course power oriented; so they are constantly fighting for power. All of them are definitely money-oriented and they make money, by hook or crook, in whatever positions they are. This was not allowed even for Vaishyas. They had to have a proper demarcation of right and wrong and they were not supposed to grab money from people and to make money out of poor people. I am sure the law of polarity will act and all those cheats and exploiters will be very soon exposed.

The word Hindu was coined by Alexander the Great who came to India. He had to cross the great river Sindhu, meaning ocean, and he could not pronounce it properly so he called it Indu and thus Hindu became the name of the religion that Indians followed. While the English ruled they called it Hindu- Stan, but after Independence it was called Bharat in Indian languages and India in English. The Portuguese and many African countries like Eritrea call it Hindu.

Despite all the regulations of Dharma (religion) society became very caste conscious and it lost the basic principles of the caste. Thus in India elections are now held according to caste and this caste system is very powerful everywhere. Even the people who made the constitution at first tried to exclude the minorities from the majority laws and gave them a special concession for forty years. But still this concession persists, and as more people become conscious of these concessions, they try to dominate the higher classes and thus a funny type of society has come up which acts the other way round. Short-sighted politicians are taking full advantage of the caste system to keep the people fighting for power. It is difficult to see how these people will get back to normalcy and understand that they have their own aptitudes which have nothing to do with the caste of their births. In Sahaja Yoga we have solved this problem. In Sahaja Yoga one loses the sense of caste into which one is born. Sahaja Yogis become realised souls transcending all these like saints. The false categories of castes and religions disappear like darkness after the sun shines. They marry among themselves without any conditionings of caste, race, nationality or religion. It happens automatically, spontaneously and these marriages are 95% successful. They are models of very good happy family relations.

Now, a few words about Buddhism. Lord Buddha talked about compassion, compassion and compassion. He bore all the troubles of those days and at the end of his life he was in a very bad financial condition and ultimately he died in a very remote corner of India. Lord Buddha’s life has been really ideal but people believe that you cannot attain spiritual ascent unless and until you suffer like Him and give up everything the way He had given it up. The ascetic concept is that one has to give up the family, one has to give up money, property, all possessions, one has to give up the normal life that one leads and has to be an absolute celibate in order to move on the spiritual path. But there are Buddhists and Buddhists. Most of their different forms are lost in ritualism or mental meditation. The Japanese follow the Zen system without understanding anything about it. They have built a beautiful temple of Buddha in Bodhi Gaya where Buddha got his Nirvana. When Genghis Khan invaded Bihar, the Buddhist monks did not resort to violence and died. Another style of Buddhism is that of the Japanese who had to learn a lesson through the extreme suffering of Hiroshima.

The Dalai Lamas preach non-violence, but they have been very money or gold-oriented people. In Beijing, one can see thousands of gold plates and gold beer mugs with pali inscriptions in the secret vaults. It is said they were rescued from a river by the Chinese soldiers who went after Mr. Lama and his followers who were running away to India and who dumped part of the gold they were carrying in the river. This was rescued and put in the museum. They wear saffron clothes to show that they are Sanyasis but live like lords in Dharamshala. I met such a Canadian sanyasi in Canada and he told me that he had no other clothes but these. He said he lost all his property to Dalai Lama who begs all over the world. In Dharamshala, there was a great protest against these very aggressive Dalai Lama’s people, but many Governments have sympathy for this money-oriented (gold-oriented), spiritual head, so to pacify these ignorant Governments, who do not discriminate between truth and hypocrisy, the protesters had to ask for forgiveness. Actually Budhism is like a private business of Dalai Lama.

As it is, India has a large load of refugees and they cannot afford to have these gold-oriented Sanyasis which have created a diplomatic rift between China and India. There are Buddhists in Nepal who believe in black magic. Many seekers go to Nepal and get lost. Buddhist Lamas are of many kinds. Some of them have monasteries where to raise the Kundalini the seekers are beaten on the spinal chord till their backs are broken. In China they also worship Mother Mercy, Kwan Yin, who was a Chinese incarnation. Lord Buddha has given three mantras to chant: These are the Mantras used by Sahaja Yogis to surrender to Lord Buddha or a realised soul; surrender to Dharma (morality); surrender to collectivity. They use a noisy wail to chant mantras. Like all other religious incarnations he has talked of “Maitreya”, is a future Buddha who will give liberation. “Maitreya” means that three Mothers together will incarnate to give Nirvana.

This kind of ideology is also prevalent among Christians especially Catholics where young women become nuns and where young men become Priests. These methods are extremely unnatural because human beings are human beings and if they are forced into this kind of absurd system, they somehow try to escape it and secretly live another life. That is how one can explain why some priests and nuns become so enchanted by sexuality. So many of them have somehow managed to live a very celibate life but were so suppressed that many among them became extremely hot-tempered and had no love and affection for anyone. They were just like machines. They are the ones who helped the war criminals to escape to Argentina from Germany.

It is amazing how the Vatican printed nine million dollars counterfeited money to be distributed through their Banca Di Ambrosia. Their connections with Mafia and the Christian Democratic Party are challenged every day in Italy by a very good magistrate. In Canada many children were abused by the Church authority. In Austria many priests kept married women as their mistresses. Some of them secretly live with wives and have children from them. They are fathers in the real sense of the word. The argument is that the Church does not want to pay for the widows’ pension, so they cannot say they have wives.

If you see them and know the kind of persons they really are, you will be amazed at how they are also given peace awards. I know a lady who has been given peace awards and is one of the most hot-tempered persons I have ever met in my life. Once we were travelling to Calcutta and this lady walked into the aeroplane with an odd-looking thing in her hand. She wanted to sit in the front seat. But the purser told her that the first seats were reserved for some infirm people and they could not be transferred to any other seat. They had to sit in the front seat reserved for them. The lady then declared arrogantly that she was a very important person and that she must be given the front seat. She literally started fighting with the staff of the aeroplane. In the small little space in front of the door, she danced from this spot to that and this dance continued for about half an hour. Eventually, this lady was asked to get out of this plane. Actually I could not bear it any more and I went to sleep. Of course, all this happened before she was given this award but if she had already received the award, then I cannot guess how many people from the aeroplane would have been sent to jail. Unfortunately, such arrogance is common to all such people who think that they are performing a great sacrifice for God or for national work or for any other global ideas. They become so hot-tempered that to approach them you have to use a barge. They are nowhere near God and nowhere near any religion of compassion.

The Christians are converted in India. They usually come from very poor backgrounds. Perhaps many Indian Christian believe that Christ was an Englishman born in Buckingham Palace. There is a joke about a villager near Allahabad. He was converted and given the name Sikander (Alexander), so he became Alexander Bhura. Bhura was his own name meaning BIondy. Every time he came to Allahabad, he would go for a dip in the holy river, the Ganges. The missionaries who converted him said that now that he had become a Christian he could not worship the River Ganges. He was amazed at this absurd proposal and said in his village language: “I have become Sahib (Englishman), but how can I leave my religion (Dharma)?”

It is the curse of democracy that to have a majority vote is important, so both Muslims and Christians are working hard to increase their votes by converting people or by producing many, many children. It is said that Muslim women are like factories producing children.

The Pope is also very deft in political business and is not in favour of abortions but he did not mind sending weapons secretly to Poland, to fight communism, thereby killing thousands of innocent Polish people.

So now we come to Jainism which has very amusing practices. First of all they want to save the lives of, in any case, all the worms, all the mosquitoes and all the bugs. It was said that they would take a hut and put a Brahmin inside that hut and they would then gather all the bugs of the village and put them also inside the same hut so that they might feed on the poor Brahmin who would suffer bug-bites· for quite a while. When the bugs had completed sucking the blood of the poor Brahmin, they would get full with the blood and fall on their sides on the ground. Then only could the poor Brahmin come out of that hut. And he is given a lot of money for performing this sacrifice. I used to wonder why they used a Brahmin. Did they want Brahmin’s pure blood to give spiritual life to the bugs as well? One notices so many things which are ridiculously absurd. How could they show Lord Mahavira like the way they show him, nude all over? Actually the story was like this. Shri Mahavira was in meditation and when he came out of that meditation, half of his cloth was wrapped in a thorny bush (Kunj). But he still had half his cloth upon his body. Then Shri Krishna wanted to test him. He came as an ordinary beggar and asked him: “Why should you carry this piece of cloth on your body. You are a prince while I am a poor man. Why don’t you give it to me?” Shri Mahavira, in his generosity, gave the remaining cloth and walked into his palace which was very close by, covering himself with leaves. It was hardly for a few seconds when he had no clothes on his body. But he covered his private parts with leaves and walked inside his own palace. Now we find statues of nude Mahavira everywhere, with his private parts shown meticulously, as if Mahavira was nothing but his private parts. This really irritates any sensitive person. Why should they insult Lord Mahavira like this? If you notice the work of Michelangelo who has done the Sistine Chapel so well, he did not show Christ or Mother Mary or the Father, God without clothes. He showed other people, but never them. So it is very insulting to see a great incarnation like Lord Mahavira exhibited in the nude all over in India.

Two years ago, in India, the mayor of Bombay sent somebody to consult me on a very serious problem. The problem was that the Jains did not want to destroy even the worms in faeces. So they used to collect, in a pitcher, all the worms from their faeces and put them on a particular hillock, which therefore became very dirty and filthy after the rains and the mayor did not know how to solve this problem. Actually I was quite lost as to why these Jains wanted to save bugs and worms. Can we give realisation to mosquitoes or to chickens or goats? Whom are they trying to save with their ideology of non-violence, the animals? First of all you have to be non-violent to human beings, which they are not. Most Jains are very rich people in India and they are also very immoral. I met a very rich Jain lady who had brought another rich and sick man, who was her lover, for treatment. Her husband. who was a media tycoon, had a love affair with the wife of the sick man. Absolutely mutual understanding of Jainism. Some Jain doctors are very money- oriented and have no ethics. Some of these doctors are, despite the religion they follow, extremely crafty and cruel. Even otherwise, Jains all over are very money-oriented. They always try to show Lord Mahavira as a naked person without any clothes. It is beyond any reasoning that nudity will lead you to God. All over India you find the nude saints of Jainism going about naked on the roads shocking the modest Indian women. Once I found myself in a very awkward situation when I went to Hastinapur with my husband, who was a collector of the Meerut district. There was some sort of a dispute between the two wings of the Jain religion. One is called Digamber, where they need not wear any clothes nor believe in saints who wear any clothes, because they are clothed by the directions like north, south, east and West. The second one, Shwetambar, believe in wearing white clothes, but cover their faces with a piece of cloth to prevent any germs from entering their mouth and then into the body so that the germs may not be killed. Unfortunately we first went to the Digamber Temple and sat in the front row with all the paraphernalia of the collectorate, when about 40 absolutely nude saints came and sat on the platform. It was a rude shock to me! I just put down my head and my husband went into a rage. These men were plucking their hair from their head and everywhere that was possible. For this the great poet Kabir has said, “By plucking your hair if you think you can go to heaven or by shaving your head if you feel you are going to heaven, then the sheep which is shaved twice a year will arrive in heaven much before yourself.” So what is the use of trying these tricks. It is very interesting that they believe that if you go on plucking your hair then you attain the complete form of Jainism. All this drama really made my husband so furious that he got up from his seat and, holding my hand, walked out of that hall with all the paraphernalia of the collectorate behind us. My husband pushed me into the car and then got into the car. One man came running and asked him: “What’s the matter. Why are you angry Sir?” My husband said: “I cannot stand this unmannerliness, vulgarity, this insult.” The driver had already started the car when he looked down and asked me: “Why did they do this to us?” I was already speechless with shame. I just said: “I did not know that the followers of the Great Lord Mahavira do this. I must, therefore, leave immediately”. He said: “You know about religions and how do you not know about this kind of horrendous shock they give to others?” I confessed: “I know about religions but I do not know about their followers, who are just the opposite of their masters who started those religions.”

Jains also have a system of nuns (Sadhwis), perhaps only not for women as they also have celibate fathers. (Sadhus). They praise nudity and usually have shops of clothes, especially Western clothing. They have cotton cloth mills and all kinds of industries which are creating ecological problems. They are good at feeding Jain Sadhus, but nobody else. There is an auction of a ticket for a person who is allowed to move a fan called Chavar (made of Yaks tail) in front of the photo of Mahavira in the procession of millions. One has to buy this privilege by paying thousands or millions.

There are ten essences of religion as valences for human personality, which are like ten commandments. When they deteriorate the human being becomes confused or aggressive. Many incarnations of primordial masters came to this earth to correct the balance of human beings by preaching love and moral discipline. The followers have made a mess of their teachings. With Sahaja Yoga, the innate universal religion of Divine Love is enlightened within and the seeker becomes spontaneously, truly religious, righteous, moral, peaceful, compassionate and a powerful, enlightened personality.

Chapter 7: Peace

Ego and conditionings are created by mind, which is a myth. As we create the conditionings with our mind, it later controls our mind. In the same way the ego and

conditioning control the mind. Ego is a very dangerous disease with us. When this ego is inflated, a person feels as if he is on top of the world. One actually floats with this inflation of ego and never feels the pangs of unreal existence. This ego is very happy to hurt others and to say things that will make others absolutely miserable. It makes you do things which are very, very inhuman. Unless people introspect they cannot see the villainous character of this ego. If somebody suddenly gets rich, his ego gets inflated further. Any kind of achievement or recognition can blow up this balloon.

There was a lady tennis player who was not confident at all of winning a forthcoming match. Her boy friend gave her courage to overcome her diffidence. He went with her to England, to be with her and to help her to play her match, for which he had to borrow money. Throughout the match he would encourage her by clapping and shouting. Ultimately she won the match and got lots of money, but in the heady moment of triumph, she ignored her friend and even insulted him when he tried to talk to her.

If one has some property one thinks no end of oneself. We used to have many landlords who were known to be great shouters. They would shout and raise their voices so much that one would feel that the world was coming to an end. These landlords are now without lands because of the new laws introduced forty years ago, but still their shouting life styles are very much alive. If he gets a beautiful woman, married to him or not, it does not matter – this ego gets inflated. Intellectuals, scientists, professionals, bureaucrats and politicians specially are all very prone to this inflationary process. They feel all others are fools. There are certain cultures which also create these ego-oriented personalities. Perhaps such men and women do not see that their behaviour is very ridiculous and that the rest of the world just laughs at them. They don’t realise that their stupid conduct under the influence of the ego is beyond human wisdom.

It is very clear that when you try to resist something which is patently absurd, this ego business starts growing into an encounter. The ego very intelligently explains rationally all misidentifications. It prevents people from understanding that there is something wrong and totally out of the ordinary. Such persons may even say that they accept a particular behaviour or attitude because it is new.

They lose their balance of sensibility. It is an experiment of something new and they are very open to new ego ventures in stupidity and idiocy. Once I was talking with a senior diplomat and the conversation turned to Freud. He asked me: “Why do you not like Freud?” I said: “Because he is wrong and he teaches immorality. I like Jung who was sensible in revolting against Freud and following a sensible line of understanding.” He said: “What is the greatness of this Jung, who said the same thing that has been said in the traditional way. What new thing has he said? Freud said something new and that is why he is great.” I was rather undiplomatic. I told him: “Sir, you have eaten all this food all your life, you have never eaten this table. It is a new thing, why not try eating this dinner table?” Of course, he was quite shocked at my remark which I had made very gently. This gentleman was a very intelligent and well known person for his writings. I was amazed that he betrayed such a lack of knowledge of the fundamentals of life when he talked in such an irresponsible manner. To others he would appear as if he was very tolerant, balanced, imaginative and normal, if they were of the same wave length.

In the West, the first Sahaja Yoga meeting brought me in touch with seven hippies. They had no earnings that time but had hair like nothing on earth. I am sorry I cannot recall for comparison any animals or even birds who have knotted hair of that kind. Their hair were full of lice and they scratched their knotted hair- styles all the time. When I asked them why they styled their hair like primitive persons, the answer was that they wanted to become primitive men who were peaceful. I had to tell them: “You have very modern brains under your hair.. How can you change your knotty brain?”

Ego wants to move faster than others. To keep peace with it the whole trend of modern literature and art expression is full of speed. The faster the speed, the greater the popularity.

Literature that has to have attraction in it has to be extremely fast. Even films are made of very fast themes, so much so that one loses continuity with the speed of the theme. Also most of them are very haphazard as the creators are confused. This speed does not allow the theme to touch any viewer deep into his being. It does not touch emotions, nor does it touch that area which will bring peace or which will create pure joy.

Speed is another way for people to develop a very, very big ego like the Grand Prix. They have accepted that the Grand Prix is a very good sport and people enjoy it very much, but to be frank, it is very bad for the ego, which then bloats up. The person who wins becomes egoistical and those who support him also become the same. When a participant crashes, the viewers get the thrill or sensation of a life time. One can see that this fellow who is burnt in the Grand Prix could not have been specially chosen by the Divine to be burnt like this, but to shock the people who are enjoying this Grand Prix. Another example of this kind of lurid excitement is the bull-fighting in Spain. The Spaniards are very fond of bull-fighting. Six times a year bull-fights are arranged and a large stadium is completely filled with people. This art was introduced by the Turkish people when they were ruling in Spain. The Turks were very harsh with the local people. Then came Franco. He too was a very harsh dictator and as a result people developed a resistance. This resistance ultimately evolved into an inhuman type of ego which gave them sadistic pleasure when they saw a bull being killed by the Matador. When I met some of the Spanish ladies I found that they were very egoistical. I asked them: “What are you doing? What is your job?” They told me: “We are trained as Matadors”. I just kept quiet because what can one say to such ambitious women. If women start learning wrestling or this Matador business then what will happen to them. They will be some sort of identity which is neither man nor woman.

I once visited America and was in Los Angeles. I was surprised to see many women at the airport with sleeveless blouses having tremendous muscles. First, I could not understand this phenomenon. These persons looked like women with long hair, but had bigger muscles than normal men. Later on I was told that there was a movement of women wanting to develop their muscles to out- shine the men. So on a very subtle level violence between men and women still continues. What is the need to fight the opposite sex because the two sexes are absolutely complementary. I do not know when they will realise that this is all absolutely futile. If we have men and women competing with respect to their physical achievements and not their moral achievements, children will learn the same thing. The women don’t have to be so body conscious unless they have to sell their bodies to earn some money. In the same way the men do not have to spend so much time building up their bodies unless they have to play rugby. It is the fashion now also to become very thin, just the opposite of what the body-building society seeks to achieve. They go to the other extreme of starvation and sometimes suffer from anorexia and all kinds of diseases. By becoming thin it is surprising that you become much more egoistical. A thin person is much more hot-tempered than a fat one. This is caused by a bad liver. The person is so exhausted that he becomes thin on one side and on the other side he becomes extremely hot-tempered. I know people who tremble because they are so thin and cannot control their temper. While expressing their temper they really shake like bean-stalks. This can frighten anyone because they grow so pale as if they have seen death.

There are many innate misidentifications which bloat the ego. One gathers identification as he grows in a particular country. It is an old habit of human beings to club together under some sort of misidentification. Ego especially expresses itself in a very crude manner. When people say: “I don’t like this, I don’t like that”, it shows a very low upbringing. It is also a style of politicians to say: “I believe”. Now who are you not to like something and who are you to believe something and spread that belief everywhere? What is the proof that what you believe is the truth or whatever you like is something “very rare” or something very extraordinary for a connoisseur like you.

I have met many people who cannot accept the truth because of their ego. Once a very rude and arrogant interviewer from the television came to interview me. Of course, most of them are brought up that way so one should not criticise their stupidity. Now this one was very special. He asked me what was I doing in London or England. He said I should help my own poor, India. I told him: “I am not here of my choice but as my husband has been elected to a U.N. post with headquarters in London, I have to be with him. But I am in India every year at least for half the year”. Very humbly I asked him: “Who is responsible for India’s poverty? If a country has “guests” for three hundred years without any visa or immigration, how can you expect such a country to be rich? While all the wealth is sucked out of India without any consideration, to create a nation known as welfare State, where lazy people live on dole for all their lives. A fellow once boasted after our first meeting, “Thank God I am jobless now”. Many others joined him in great jubilation saying they have been jobless since eternity. Imagine these Oxford Cambridge students boasting like this about their freedom after graduation. From this lot we have now thousands who feel ashamed to take the dole, I asked him who will become poor and who will become rich? He felt quite upset with this answer from an ordinary Indian house-wife. Then he asked another question: “Why do you have such a large population in India?” I said very calmly: “Sir, I may say that for this over- population also perhaps you are responsible.” The ego explosion of this English interviewer was really worth viewing in silence. He jumped with temper: “How do you put the blame on us for your mad population?” To this I answered with great peace. I said: “Sir, I read in the newspaper that in England, sorry, in London itself, two legal children are killed by their parents every week. So sir, please tell me which sane child would like to be born in a country where there is not an -atmosphere of love for the children. Even the neighbours do not like children. If one has children one may not get a flat on rent. Perhaps children are very happy to be born in India to loving and caring parents and neighbours. Children do not want to know what bank account one has. They want love which is the most valuable thing”. All this answering made him mad with fury. So he attacked me: “I am told you do not take any money for self-realisation work. This no Anglo-Saxon brain can understand.” I answered him very politely: “Sir, how much can you pay for Divine love? How much did you pay to Christ? By the way can I now ask you a question?” He said: “Yes, go ahead”. I asked: “Will you tell me which God has made this special Anglo-Saxon brain?” That settled him. He walked out with his gear and camera man who never took any photographs. Later on people told me about him, and that he is called a Bulldog, even in the media. I felt why insult the Bulldog who has never even once barked at me.

It is alright if they don’t want to accept the truth. It is alright as far as I am concerned, but actually a person who denies the truth ultimately lands up in the problems of a confused personality. I try to tell people that you should not take to drinking, as alcohol is not a good thing. Many persons come to me with diseases which are caused by alcohol. A businessman who was 80 years of age and used to drink came to me and said: “I am 80 years of age but 1 am not a human being any more.” 1 asked: “Why, what has happened?” He said: “I cannot sleep so I drink and then 1 sleep well but next day 1 get a hangover. Then I start shouting at all my servants, my wife, children and, they have all run away from me. Now it happens that when I get up from my bed nobody is in the house. They are all out; they have all run away. This, plus bankruptcy, is what I have achieved by drinking indiscriminately but now I think that at this age I cannot change. You just bless me so that in my next life I should not take to this horrible thing called alcohol.” This old’, man was so desperate but I met many young businessmen who adored him as a model of greatness, because he was very successful in his business despite his very heavy drinking habits. They all thought they would be very successful businessmen at 80 years of age because of drinking. When you do something wrong, you develop a very big ego else how could you justify the wrong things you are doing. So it is a constant feeding of ego when you are doing wrong and you want to believe and want to prove you are doing the right thing. Once a drunkard in drunken state told me that he was a teetotaller. I did not dare to challenge his statement.

These days it is remarkable that even small children in the Western countries are extremely rude and violent. You just cannot control them. One day I was travelling from my house in Surrey to London in a lonely first class compartment. On the way there came into the compartment twenty children from eight to twelve years of age studying at a very good private school. They were wearing monograms on their blue uniform. They entered my compartment and with a blade and a small knife started cutting all the cushions of the seats in the compartments. They told me collectively: “Please do not worry, we will not touch you, but allow us to do what we enjoy”. I asked them: “Why are you doing it?” They answered: “Because we like it, What is your objection?” I just kept quiet because I thought that if I said anything they would put their knives on my throat. I got down at the next station and told the station master about what the boys were doing. Some older boys who were supposed to be looking after the younger ones came to take the situation into their hands. But these older boys were themselves drunk and were sleeping after drinking when these younger boys took over the charge of my compartment. Even when they were woken up, they were half drunk. I wanted to tell them that this was not the way to look after these younger students of their school. But the station master advised me not to say anything because these were very unruly boys. They had threatened to beat the station master when he asked them why they had got drunk. They had also warned the station master of dire consequences if he made any report to the school authorities.

I was shocked at this situation in England. How could a lady travel alone in such a place? How could anybody be safe in such an advanced country? But much worse is the situation in America where on the road if you get down after eight o’clock from your car to buy some cakes, there will be four or five very muscular people nearby and they will snatch all the money you have and if you resist, they may even kill you. This violence is not only for money, women or land, but it is violence for the sake of violence, because people now want to be violent. If somebody is not violent, they think that such a person is weak and he should be really ridiculed and laughed at.

Violence to people who are physically weak, violence to people who are mentally retarded, violence to people who are uneducated, violence to people who are not of the same race, violence to people who have immigrated into your country legally, violence to women, violence towards wives and children is also very common. This is what some “strong” human beings are doing to others who have disadvantages and belong to the weaker sections of the same human society. Wherever they could assert themselves they have enjoyed that violence as if it is the most beautiful thing to do. In the olden days people were violent to holy saints. Saints being very tolerant and truthful, but outspoken, were not appreciated by people who were evil. Evil people exist today also, in the form of religious organisations which are very dishonest and violent, preaching falsehood and making money out of simple faithful people. Namdeva, a saint, said that an evil person will always be evil, always anxious to torture like a f1y. Even if it goes in your stomach and dies, it makes you so sick that you die of vomiting.

On the other side there are people who are intellectuals and have no idea about reality. They try to form a forum to be politically in the field or to support some political party. We had a very bad group in Maharashtra. They call themselves: “the people who will remove the shackles of blind faith”. But they themselves are not aware of reality. They have got no spiritual authority as saints. A few people have got together and have become a self- appointed group to cure the “blind faith” of other people.

Those who are themselves blind and who believe blindly in their own ideas cannot remove the blind faith of others. It is only a real saint who can do this work. In India there have been many saints who have talked against blind faith and false gurus. I have myself, from the year 1972, been warning people openly against blind faith, false gurus and their cults. People warned me that I was very outspoken and that I should be careful as these evil people would try to kill me. Nobody tried to kill me nor did I stop saying that one cannot purchase one’s guru or master.

People who have come to Sahaja Yoga have got rid of all extreme ideas of blind faith, customs and misidentifications which had conditioned them earlier. This happens spontaneously once you get the light of the Spirit within you. Then only can you see the reality which is so nourishing and joy giving. There have been many false charges levied against me, but none of them has any substance because those who are themselves making billions of dollars want to justify themselves by calling honest people money-oriented. Those who think that they are in charge of a religion should also open their eyes and try to understand what is reality, what is benevolence for the people who follow their religion. As they are not nourished by truth, people ultimately end up being violent. It is easy to prove that Sahaja Yoga is the way to achieve your selfrealisation. It has been proved in many countries. Even so, in Maharashtra which is known for its saints, some misguided people have taken a malignant pleasure in attacking Sahaja Yoga and disturbing our seminars. The worst event happened in a remote village, where they got hold of small primary school children and asked them to throw about 500 stones at the people who were trying to listen to me. This caused many injuries to our people. Now, of course, they are all cured. Everything was done to file a law suit against the blind organisation which was so violent. These people bribed the police and tried to establish that they were the ones who were really beaten by us! They have no certificates from the doctors that they were injured. The case has been pending for the last five years in the courts and no decision has been taken so far. This is the plight of many truthful people even in the twentieth century.

The reality must be brought to light for the benevolence of the whole world. This must be done in a country like India where so many saints have been born. Unfortunately, even in India, a number of saints have been troubled and tortured while those who are dishonest, who are good talkers, like Rajneesh, are very popular socially. It is amazing how people don’t think of their progeny and don’t want to give reality even to their own children.

In my next chapter, I will tell you how much good Sahaja Yoga can do. It is not a claim, it is the truth, but I am happy to say that those who have come to Sahaja Yoga have become absolutely non-violent, absolutely loving, compassionate people and by the grace of God, no one dare touch them. Even if they try, Sahaja Yogis can get over all the problems created by these negative forces. It is remarkable that since the day the seventh centre was opened in the brain, things are working out in such a way that silently this movement for peace is moving inside the being of people, through their hearts.

I have been really so lucky to see, in my life-time, that people from sixty five nations gathered together in thousands at our seminars. There is no quarrel or fight. These seminars last for more than a week in a remote sea-side village. There also some greedy villagers who tried to spoil the water by throwing dirty things inside the well, but small little children, all hardly five years of age came and told me, like angels, that we should not drink any water from this well. It is very surprising how help comes, despite these powerful negative forces who believe that they can do whatever harm they like. These are very blissful times and those who want to take advantage of this can easily achieve the real meaning of their lives.

Only in the light of the Spirit we see and feel, on our central nervous system, that we are part and parcel of one primordial father and mother. The cells in the body act collectively. If one part of the body is hurt then the whole body looks after that part. The whole body itself is co-ordinated and acts in an extremely co-ordinated manner. We need not go into the scientific aspect of this matter. However, it is obvious that every part of the body is somehow connected, through the central nervous system to every other part of the body. The reflex actions which take place in the body are exactly the same as those which happen spontaneously to people who are together in Sahaja Yoga. If one person is sick the whole body of Sahaja Yogis rush to his help. If one person has a genuine problem, the whole organisation which is a living organisation, acts spontaneously to solve the problem of that individual person. In the light of the Spirit one becomes completely integrated and extremely aware and wise. The greatest achievement is that he becomes joyous and instead of finding fault with others, he becomes sensitive enough to enjoy another’s personality. The only way we can bring peace on this earth is not by talking or by organising, but by transforming people to this new awareness, of the fourth dimension where they become the Spirit. But what are we to do about people who are violent? How do we protect ourselves from them, is always the question put to me. The answer is that we are now in the realm of God Almighty.

We now belong to the Kingdom of God and He is capable of arranging our protection and nourishment. But first we have to enter into His kingdom with humility and with readiness. lf somebody does not want to have self-realisation, no one can force it. It is not possible to force a seed to sprout. Unless you put the seed inside Mother Earth and pour the water of love on it, it won’t sprout. In the same manner it is not possible for us to be disturbed, upset, worried or tense if we are standing in the light of the Spirit. The dreams of all the people who are seeking the truth can be easily fulfilled if they only have pure desire to have reality and not falsehood.

World peace can be achieved only when people in charge of world affairs get their self-realisation. They are leaders of different countries and through a Sahaja relation they will respect and love each other. They will be like benevolent kings described by Socrates, who will think of global peace. Today it seems as if the whole world is ablaze with war or preparation of war.

For example, the war in Bosnia is the misidentification of Croats, Muslim and Serbs. They follow the Christian and Muslim religions. The Croats are Catholic Christians but do they follow Christ? What about Muslims who believe in the formless God and despite this, fight for land? Actually, Mohammed never talked of an exclusive religion. He talked about Abraham, Moses and Christ in a series and the fourth was himself. Even Christ talked about Abraham and Moses. Why do people who follow Moses, Christ or Mohammed fight? They have the same roots. At least these three religions should produce people who understand the oneness of their religions. Of course, the Hindu religion is not exclusive. It accepts all the religions but even Hindus at the helm of affairs have made different laws for different religions. They are taking advantage of the minorities for votes in the democracy.

The human mind is always bombarded with thoughts. It builds the ego and it reacts with it. Those who are conditioned are frightened people. These thoughts come from the past or from the future, but reality is in the present where we achieve peace.

The mind creates all the problems for an individual or for the collective. One has to go beyond the mind into thoughtless awareness, where there is peace.

A new race of these peaceful warriors is already created. Only thing I hope it expands to such an extent that many people become peaceful and emit peace through their personality and saintly work.

Chapter 8: World Peace

We have to get awakened to the fact that in recent decades, great destruction has been caused to our moral values as a result of our children, parents and families,

getting influenced by the chaotic conditions of modern times.

In order to secure a peaceful social and political order, it is essential to make every endeavour to resuscitate moral values. For this purpose we must begin at the roots. We must give the greatest possible attention to our children, to their proper upbringing. For the children of today are the citizens of tomorrow. Today’s children will constitute future society. It is not an investment in armaments which will secure a truly peaceful future. It is the investment in our children which will yield invaluable dividends in the shape of a peaceful and moral society in the near future. First of all we have to look after our children and this can be done well only if the parents understand how crucially important this responsibility is, in introducing spirituality to children.

The parents owe it to their children, to their society and indeed to their country, to give special attention to the upbringing of the young ones of the family. Looking at the way things are today, it seems necessary to educate the parents themselves about their responsibilities and spiritual duties in this regard. To begin with, the destructive knowledge bequeathed by Freud must be thrown into the sea, once and for all. This can be achieved by keeping Freudian psychology out of the syllabus of studies in schools and colleges. Parents should spend time with their children instead of leaving the house with their swimsuits for a holiday. Life is fun but spiritual discipline is absolute. A complete check, of course secretly or sweetly, must be kept as to where the children go, when they return and who their friends are. Parents should keep very pleasant company with their children. If this is done, children will look forward to the pleasure of spending time with their loving parents, instead of roaming around as street urchins. The aptitude of children should be discovered and encouraged. Children’s company provides a great deal of innocent joy. Talking to them is such a pleasure.

There was a young little boy Akshaya, who fell down and broke his skull but he recovered with Sahaja Yoga. One day I called him and he started talking. He asked me: “Mataji, do you know how to make biscuits?” I told him: “I do not know.” So he started educating me: “First you ask your Mummy to clean the tray. Then ask your Mummy to make the dough. Then ask your Mummy to make balls of the dough, then you can flatten the balls. Then ask your Mummy to put the tray inside the oven. She just uses gloves. Then ask your Mummy to take out the tray when the biscuits are cooked. When they become cooler, you can collect them in a cake plate and eat them with your friends.” I told him: “Akshay, I have no Mummy.” So he said: “Where is she gone. Better call her.” I told him: “She has gone to God, she cannot come.” He really felt sorry so he said: “Then you cannot make biscuits, I will make some for you because I have a Mummy.” What a sweet dialogue between two friends. I have stores and stores of such beautiful stories. I can write a big book with these experiences.

All entrepreneurs’ efforts to spoil the innocence of children has to be attacked collectively by the parents. Films and video cassettes, which seek to put indecent and immoral ideas into the innocent minds of children should be banned. Parents should launch a campaign against such videos and films. The education and training of children should create respect for elders, respect for their teachers, respect for each other and respect for society. Respect for the country and respect for all the people of the world, as we are expecting a Global Transformation. They should learn and assimilate the concept of one human family, global peace and global religion at a very young age. They should know through their caring parents that pure and selfless love is the most important thing in life and that morality is the most valuable virtue, far more important than money. By reading well-selected stories and novels, children will take to a righteous life. Their language should be sweet and respectfully humble. They must be made aware that as members of the human race they are at the apex of evolution and they are born here on this earth to ascend even higher.

The curriculum of studies for children should be developed with utmost care. Instead of selfish exclusivity, children should experience the joy of sharing. They should be given truthful information about people in other parts of the world so that they respect all peoples regardless of their colour or creed or nationality. They must be made aware of the society that they are going to live in the good part of it. There should be conferences to discuss what could be done to adjust these innocent children into chaotic modern society. They should never be forced to believe in any exclusive religion which creates problems and leads people to fight in the name of God. Moreover children in the family should be encouraged to avoid hatred and possessiveness. If they are told from childhood: “You should possess all the things that you have around you”, they will develop a terrible ego, even about all the useless toys that they have. The toys for children should be selected with utmost care. They should not promote or glorify violence, nor should they have violence as a theme. The children could have very beautiful or creative toys just to make them feel the beauty of creation. Toys in the shape of the horrible creatures of the past or of the present which have been made in an ugly way should not be given to the children, and should not be sold. Indeed such toys should be banned. If some good toys are produced and all the dirty, bad toys are banned, children will definitely develop a keen liking for toys which are creative and beautiful. When my daughters were small, I made it compulsory, in a way that they should only see films made on the Ramayana or the Mahabarata or the Gita or the Bible. Surprisingly they grew up with a taste for such movies, so much so that when I sent them to my Mother’s house, my sisters wrote to me that they (my daughters) did not want to see any film which did not have a traditional theme or was not based on stories from the Puranas. Now my daughters are grown girls and they are so different from the rest. This is just a way of developing a taste for good films.

The children then don’t like to see a film which is ugly. In my own experience I have seen that children are basically very innocent and pure. Of course, if the mother and father quarrel all the time or they read dirty books or see filthy films when the mother is pregnant, it has an adverse effect on the child. The parents must have complete rapport with their children and spend more time with them in handling them in a very loving, delicate manner. If instead of fighting with each other in the presence of children, the parents spend time in talking to children in the house, keeping them company, they will definitely create very good children and a great asset to society.

Even when they take the children out, they should not take them to vulgar places. Children absorb everything good or bad. They also learn to gamble. I knew of some children who used to bet on anything and fight. On the other hand, children who are brought up by their parents with loving and caring attention become such beautiful, lovable sweeties. Gradually such children start losing their sense of possessiveness and acquisitiveness. We have two children from America who came to our school and they became very thin. When I asked: “Why are they becoming thin?”, the school authorities said: “They are only asking for Macdonald’s burgers and things like that and in this school we don’t have that provision”. Gradually the children changed their taste and acquired a liking for home-made food. Next year when they went back home, the parents were very surprised. They asked them: “Would you like to go to Macdonald’s?” The children said: “No, no, we don’t like it. We don’t want to go to all these fast food shops. We will eat whatever is cooked in the house.” The parents were very pleased with this transformation. In order to display their happiness and love, the parents told their children: “Now we want to buy something of your choice for you as you will be going back to school”. The children thought for a while and then they said: “Can we have your photograph for our school friends?” These children were so sweet and are now doing well in the class. They have again put on weight and are looking very normal.

I have noticed that if a house is clean, neat and tidy and if a lot of love is used in arranging the house, children don’t like to spoil it. They like to keep it clean all the time.

I remember that once my grand-daughter came to my house and started cleaning one spot on the carpet. Normally in England people are so particular about keeping their carpets alright, because everything is to be sold later. I was told that this little grand-daughter of mine had been working on the carpet for one hour at least. So I asked: “Why are you cleaning it yourself? We can get it cleaned later.” “No, no” she said, “Grandma, your house is so beautiful and so clean that I must not spoil it with this spot which looks so ugly.” I was amazed at her understanding and the way she felt responsible. So if children are made responsible for making things beautiful, and for keeping them clean and tidy, they would certainly do so. We have seen this works very well in India and children immediately take to something which is creative, artistic, beautiful and which has some message in it. This is how we can develop their deeper sensitivity. The idea that let children do what they like is just a labour saving device. The children are born to parents, they do not come down from trees. So who is going to help them to shape themselves. Even the teachers have to help the children in the right manner.

Some of these ideas have really created very unruly children who get into violence very early to attract the attention of the parent or the teachers.

In schools in Western countries, great emphasis is being laid on teaching about sex, even to children of a small age. This creates curiosity in immature minds and results in all kinds of sex-related problems among children. Most young children’s minds are like clay. They can be moulded very easily into beautiful shapes. But if handled carelessly, the shape can be deformed. They have no pornographic images in their innocent minds. If they are bombarded with constant images of sex and violence through schools, media and books, as their minds are like a photographic camera, they retain these impressions and in their leisure time all these pictures dance before them. At that age there is no need to talk about sex openly because in the countries where people have not talked about sex, the children don’t know about sex until they are quite grown up and they just keep out of it until they have to know, at the time of puberty. In any case sex education is provided best by parents – father to the son and mother to the girl. Sex education in an open class room has the effect of exciting the children and inducing them to experiment with sex at a very early age. Uninhibited and excessive indulgence in sex at an early age causes serious health problems and creates a permissive society. The children lose their sense of shame about sex which is an exceedingly private matter. In India, if one start such education in any school, parents will withdraw their children immediately from schools of this kind. Those parents who send their children to Westernised schools are themselves under the influence of Western values. Most of the schools in the West are flooded with this kind of sexual perversion, because children already know what sex is and they want to indulge in it. The teachers have to teach the children how to love in the pure sense of the word, how to be compassionate, how to be detached and how to be useful to the society. That is the first lesson that has to be imbibed by the children. Other things like arithmetic and spellings and all that can follow, but the main thing for the teachers should be to instill all these qualities in the children firstly by their own high standards and secondly by teaching them through good books written by great souls, as well as books which show how a person suffers if he does not have these qualities or does not – heed the commandments which have to be followed.

In India, when people dine together, no one passes salt or a salt container by his or her hand directly to the hand of another person at the table because of the belief that the person giving the salt and the person receiving it by hand would tend to quarrel. The moral of this practice is that nothing should be done which tends to promote a quarrel. The feeling has to come first, that we don’t want to quarrel with anyone because it is against human dignity. Children should be made aware that human beings are at the epitome of evolution. They have to know that we should be peaceful, friendly and please others. We cannot be like animals. To please others is very important and this should be taught to children by every possible method. The children should know that avoiding quarrels is not a sign of weakness in personality and that living together peacefully, and happily is glorious. One must forgive and forget; that is a virtue. Once the children start enjoying virtues they will not take to foolish things.

In India, a few years ago, some Westernised people started a newspaper for teenagers. We never divided our lives like adults or teenagers. This was a modern idea. They came to meet my elder daughter when she was just thirteen years of age. I was asked to leave her alone. They asked her very odd questions, one of them was: “Have you got a boy friend?”. So she said: “I have many girl friends and I have many brothers (cousins)”. In India, cousins are brothers in every sense of the word. The next question was: “Do you not want to be free like a bird to fly in the sky?”. She responded: “Let my wings grow first” Then attacking the mother, they said: “Does she control you?” She said: “She loves me and I do not want to do anything to displease her. She knows what is good for me.”

A strong sense of self-respect must be inculcated in the children to such an extent that they should not go on asking for things and demanding things and quarrelling about things. This can be done by talking to them and telling them stories of self- respecting people. Once we had gone to Brighton and my two grand-daughters were with me. They went on a ride on a small, little railway train. When they came back the younger one wanted to go back on the same train and she started crying. Suddenly she felt: “What am I doing?” Her self esteem came up and she just hid her face and said: “I’m sorry, Grandma, I’m sorry.” She kept hiding her face for quite some time and so I asked: “Why are you hiding your face?” She replied: “I feel very ashamed about the way I behaved.” Children can mature very well and very fast in their innocence if we give them a chance and develop the proper attitude to understand them and respect them. By positive reinforcement of their virtues and their little, little attainments, they are encouraged and they learn what is good is always appreciated.

I have another very good memory about my second daughter. She stood first in the Master of Arts Examination in Bombay University. Before that in Mumbai (Bombay), she went to a college which was rather westernised. One day she asked me whether she could wear sleeveless blouses as many girls were doing. I told her: “Now you are grown up. You can decide for yourself.” Then she asked: “Mother, why do you not wear sleeveless blouses?” I said: “I do not want to expose my shoulder joints, because if I expose them I may develop some pain. Moreover, I am very traditional.” She thought for a while and then said: “There must be some deeper reasons.” Then I had to tell her that both the shoulder joints have the most important chakras named as Shri Chakra and Shri Lalita Chakra which must be covered. She was very shocked. She said: “Mother, then you should not permit me to do anything which is wrong. You are my Mother, much wiser. You should have just said “No” and should have saved my Chakras.”

Films for children should be previewed by parents and sponsored by a parents committee, and all other films which are not meant for children should be shown on television only after nine o’clock, when the children should be fast asleep. All films which show monsters, dead bodies or spirits and all sorts of things which frighten the children should not be shown. Once they are frightened at such a tender age, they carry the memory of that fright with them. We have treated many children for having fears about the moon or a tree or a dog. All these fears are caused by some persons who narrate frightening stories to little children. These fears are very persistent and can be removed only by persistent and patient efforts to demonstrate to the children that there is no truth in the frightening stories narrated to them.

I have found out that one of the causes of psychosomatic diseases like cancer is the built-in fear children imbibe in their childhood. Sometimes such fears make them behave in a strange way. They even devise ways of secretly destroying others of whom they are afraid.

People who get married should have a clear understanding as to why they are getting married. If they want to have children, they should know why they are having the children. The code of conduct for married people should be such that it brings forth the best in them and enables them to realise their dreams of a happy married life. There are many couples who live together without being married. When they do get married, usually in the West, they get very upset with each other. The reason is that the law provides that if a married couple divorces, then the money is divided in half, the house is divided equally, and so many people are afraid of that. In a country like America, I have seen women who could be called princesses, because they have amassed a lot of wealth by divorcing ten times and taking half the wealth of each divorced husband. Some of these ex-husbands of such women are eventually left behind as paupers. This is a common disease in that country where women have got such rights under the law to protect them. They are turning marriages into business enterprises, so much so that people have to say: “Now, protect us from these women.” This kind of a law was alright a long time ago but now it is very dangerous and something should be done to change it and to stop this kind of divorce which is only a money-making endeavour.

The films that we see these days are no way near what used to be produced in earlier times. First, the language is not understood by anybody but Americans if they are American films. If they are English films, they cannot be understood by anybody other than the British. In the olden days pronunciation in English films used to be very clear. Now things are very different. Now English is pronounced in an Americanised way. Even television news readers are not as careful about pronunciation as they used to be, but they are very speedy and fast. At the same time the pronunciation of some people who have left England or who have left America and are settled in India, Hong Kong or Japan is much better than those of the people who live in England or America.

What is most disturbing about the present day films is the fact that most of them are full of nauseating sex and terrible violence. There are no events, no story, as if there are no more good writers, who had such creativity that every film was a film of eternal value. They have a very evil influence on the society, especially on the young. These films must be censored by very idealistic people. There should be rules and regulations prescribing the parameters within which films may be created. Much of today’s films cannot be described as art. In fact they are grotesque and vulgar. If it is pure art, you do not need sex and violence to impress people. Art itself is most impressive. But nowadays, to suit public taste, all kinds of low level films are created. Despite all the development in the film industry the film produced are very insipid. They are going from bad to worse and there is no effective censoring. There should be a censor board of people who are known to be very good morally and who can correct this kind of production. Children films especially should be pre-viewed and censored most carefully. They should aim at enhancing the children’s moral and compassionate value system. Films should not be money- oriented, but culture-oriented. The policy for education should be same. Children should be encouraged to read good books written by great and noble men of the whole world, not only of their own country. They should develop a great liking for books which are biographies and autobiographies, rather than science fiction which is imaginary or some sort of a warmonger’s life story. If you put before them all these horrible characters, the children absorb easily the qualities of bad people. Older boys and girls could read books which demonstrate how an immoral life is ruinous and dangerous.

The theory that there should be absolute freedom for children is also very dangerous. Their real freedom can be given later when they understand the meaning of freedom which can be benevolent if they are wise and mature. Parents should take pride in their age and not be crazy like the younger generation in their stupidity. Once I had gone to America, Santa Monica, accompanied by an Indian lady. One morning she knocked at my door and said: “Get up soon. Get up soon.” I couldn’t understand it. I just came and opened the door and asked: “What’s the matter?” She said: “There is an earthquake coming.” I said: “What makes you think that?” She said: “All the people are running on the road.” I said: “Where?”, I came out and I saw all the people running, no doubt, because they were going for a jog and I told her: “This is an exercise they take early in the morning called jogging.” She said: “No, no, but there are many old women and men running also. So how can that be? How can they behave in the same manner as the younger people are doing? Because they are very thin and old they might get a heart attack.” I told her: “You don’t know, this is America. Here older people have not yet matured enough to understand that it is wrong for them to run, in the way the young people are running. In America the old people still want to do everything which young people are doing. They have no wisdom, so the young people do not respect them”.

Let us now move from the family to the society. The society in the West surprisingly is not at all individualistic or traditional. Whatever is the fashion, they take to it, and sometimes it is impossible to understand why they are trying to copy these new fashions every day, throwing away all their old clothes every year and buying new ones, allowing the fashion designers to exploit them. The old people are not living with the decency and dignity their age demands. If we teach children how to respect themselves and also how to keep their esteem intact, they will not take to these expensive ways of the West, but they will take to decent, respectful living and will grow up as responsible citizens and good members of the society.

My grandson, when he was young, told me: “You must get me shoes like those worn by Grandpa and I would like to have a dress like that of Grandpa.” I said: “They are very old.” He said: “It doesn’t matter. 1 don’t want to wear a dress like a person who is mod.” I was amazed that he wouldn’t wear anything untraditional. Gradually as time passed, you see, he came in contact with other children and he started accepting the Western clothes, which he had earlier considered to be very ugly and had felt strongly that there was no dignity about them. Nowadays even very small children wear “mod” dresses which does not give a personality any dignity from the very childhood.

The society of modern ideas is nothing but a collective, accepted, shameless expression of their weaknesses. There is an annual carnival in Rio. People strive to save money to attend that stupid, vulgar exposition. We have things like Halloween celebrated everywhere. I wanted to purchase a house in New York. When we went to that house, we noticed that it had a horrible face of witch with a broomstick, symbolising Halloween on the front door, because it must have been the month of Halloween. Seeing that my grand-daughter said: “Better not buy this house. It displays a witch in the front. What’s the use of going inside the house?” It is very true that these days there is no distinction between the witches, the good ladies, prostitutes and the actresses. There is such a mix up in these modern societies that you just don’t know whom to call what.

For example, I have seen that in social parties the ladies come funnily dressed in the sense that they are quite nude, according to any standard of formal dress. And they try to flirt with men, and they smoke with such pride and look at people with such lusty eyes. It is the same with the men. Both men and women come to parties mainly to flirt with each other. It is amazing how people indulge in these activities in such a shameless way. Fairly old men have no shame in marrying young girls, one after another. I have not yet seen any old man flirting with a very young girl in an open garden. This means that there is some shame about it. But marrying a girl who is thirty years younger is not considered to be objectionable in modern societies. Even the Prime Ministers of some countries do that. Some time ago, we noticed that a particular person coming to the conferences in London brought a new wife every time he came. Once he brought a girl of about eighteen years of age. My husband whispered in my ears: “It is his new wife, don’t address her as his grand-daughter”. I was shocked. He was an old man of about sixty five years and he had a little eighteen year old girl as his bride. I was told that these young brides called their old husbands sugar daddy, or something like that. Of course they have their own boyfriends and just use the money of these old Johnnies as they live in complete sin, marrying a good for nothing old man and living with young people. Some men bring models or prostitutes as spouses. It is ridiculous the way people have accepted this kind of thing. Even officially such spouses are invited and their travel expenses and hotel charges are paid for. Why not change this word “spouse” and make it “legal wife or legal husband?” It will cut down many embarrassing events.

One of the curses of these modern times is that people go on accepting all that is destructive, all that is vulgar, all that is shameless, one by one. There is no resistance of any kind, and if somebody resists then they think that the person is absolutely not “in”. If the older people like to lead an immoral life, how can we grudge the younger generation.

Newspapers and media are another species of present day monsters. They destroy and devour all that is sweet and beautiful in the society. They believe in sensationalism. Some of them delve in character assassination and wild allegations. Anybody can go and complain to them about anybody. They will make little effort to find the truth and will publish whatever they have heard from anyone who might well be a very unreliable source. There is no way that you can stop them from doing that because they have freedom of expression. Whether it is correct or incorrect, they will publish it. And people have hardly any redress because legal proceedings are very expensive and can be ruinous, at least in the West. In India, the situation is not quite the same and an inexpensive legal redress is still possible.

For example, three foreign journalists went to India and trespassed into our school and made all kinds of false statements about it. A complaint was filed against them and the Court has decided that these foreign journalists would be proceeded against if they ever came to India again. For this, the Embassy concerned was not very happy, though their journalists have used this news against us all over Europe, especially in Belgium, France and also in other countries where some people of the Catholic Church are disturbed at our success. They have an organisation called ADFI which is constantly prying into the activities of the religious and spiritual organisations and maligning them by describing them as cults. I do not know if the Catholic Church is not the greatest cult. If the definition of a cult is an organisations that indulges in violence, or has illegal weapons, or makes tainted money, then the Catholic Church could itself be called a cult because all these things are happening in the Catholic Church as well. They call us a cult even though it is well established that in Sahaja Yoga we have no secrets, underground or clandestine activities and that Sahaja Yoga is a purely spiritual organisation working for the benefit of all people of the world.

Furthermore, which of the Western countries are supposed to be secular? I am sorry to say that in England, only the Church of England is the state religion, all others are not. In Spain, in Italy, in Germany, in Austria, and in France especially, it is the Catholic Church which is the recognised religion and everything that is not Catholic is always treated like a cult.

Apart from maligning people and assassinating their character, some newspapers and magazines play another very dangerous role, that of giving very scandalous information to people. They are so poor in quality that they have to use the photographs of half nude women to attract readers. Their whole intelligence is devoted to selecting the most exposed photograph. These newspapers have no real concern with regard to the problems that are facing all the countries of the world today. They are interested mainly in publishing salacious stories, catering to the worst element in human nature. Or they start campaigning against some persons in important positions out of mischief or prejudice. This is what they did in France to a former Secretary General of UNESCO. It is difficult to understand how one could be involved in such acts of complete degradation. Frivolous allegations were made against the then Secretary-General. One of them was that his wife had used the official car to go from Paris to Brussels to attend the funeral of the wife of an Ambassador. The lady had informed the office before taking the car and had done so to reach Brussels in time for the funeral as flights were not available at that time. Various other allegations were also made, indicating a desire to malign an outstanding Secretary-General who had served the Member states with great devotion. He had arranged for the translation into different languages of a number of great books of different countries. He had also helped many countries in preserving their ancient monuments which culturally were the common heritage of human kind. UNESCO cannot be an organisation which can make money but as soon as some white skin has become the Secretary-General it is all quiet on the Western front.

Western people are so impressionable that they tend to accept as truth whatever the newspapers publish. This sensational trend is going from bad to worse. For example, they are so scandalous that they wrote gleefully about the price at which the undergarments of Mrs. Kennedy were to be sold. So filthy and so dirty is the mind which writes about such things in the newspapers. Surprisingly, this trend has also now impressed the people who are at the helm of religions. For example, in England some eminent leaders of the Protestant Church are now adopting an attitude of “understanding” and “tolerance” in respect of men and women cohabiting without marriage. This was regarded as a sin. But no longer.

Since much of the Press and other elements of the media have abused their freedom and have become a menace to children, to families and indeed to society, it is now necessary to bring them under proper control. I am fully in favour of the freedom of human beings and also of the Press. The Press should have sanity to know its responsibility. It is for giving news that would bring benevolence and security. It would have eternal value to the readers. We do have laws to control human beings and to prevent them from killing or raping. or robbing. Why can’t we have laws to control the media which is running amuck? These days anybody can start a newspaper. Only those who have a proven sense of responsibility and dignity of morality and some sense of understanding of other countries as well, should be allowed to start newspapers. All the editors must first be examined by a group of eminent persons to see if they are unbiased, honest and noble people. Newspapers should not get into the hands of crooks. Once a paper gets into wrong hands, it would be impossible to stop all kinds of horrible, sensational, nonsensical rotten news and editorials from being published. Of course, one must acknowledge that some of the newspapers have done a good job in finding out and exposing grave misdeeds of men in power. But there are not many instances of this kind despite the fact that the media is very honest and powerful. On the contrary, the power of expression is so highly misused by newspapers that at present one cannot do anything about it. Clearly then, there is the need for a high-level Board or Committee which should intervene and punish severely newspapers which engage in publishing palpably wrong or scandalous stories. No scandals should be allowed to be published in the newspapers and this will be the best that one can do for public life and for family lives.

The newspapers should be children proof, so that even children can read them. What is the use of giving all the filth of hell as an announcement in the newspapers. It is just money- making by giving false but sensational news. Once the newspapers start sensibly and with a sense of responsibility I am sure they will make much more money, because so many people who have given up reading newspapers because of their filth, will resume reading them.

Apart from this, newspapers like to give distressing and shocking news all the time. The front page is nearly always full of stories and pictures about war and killings, about disease and starvation, about natural or man-made disasters. It is much too much to begin one’s day with disturbing and upsetting news of this kind. It is essential that so much importance should not be given to such horrible scenes or to such horrible happenings. A serious effort should be made to give prominence to good happenings, to instances of people being helped, to events which influence people and transform them into good, honest and chaste. human beings. But presently there is no way of expressing such ideas through any media. They only want to know how many people died, how many were killed and how many disappeared.

In the films, as in the media and the newspapers, nowadays there is a trend towards showing very intense vulgar romances and love affairs for which the lovers or their opponents engage in awful violence and even in murder. This really creates an illusionary world of love and family life. It is not yet understood by the film makers and also the media and the newspapers that they are responsible for ruining society and all that is good. They do not try to put more accent on the goodness of life. They are very money-oriented. They also have so many great plans to make pornography legal through newspapers; or by joining hands with wrong people, they produce their glorified images.

For example, some of them project a kind of missionary in a developing country who collects money by showing off Christ’s compassion, etc. all the time. Substantial donations are collected and these are perhaps shared with the media. Altogether, this seems to be a profitable business. The media can build up even a Peace Prize-winning image. No one knows where all this money is going and what is happening. There are no properly audited accounts. People who are sensitive, especially those in the West get very impressed by such persons. Once a missionary came to a conference and started saying: “You must think about the poorest of poor, you must take something out of your lunch for the poorest of poor” and so on and so forth. All the Western people in the audience heard these three or four sentences and, to our amazement, they started crying. They donated so much money to that missionary, and it is said that this missionary collects people from the streets, baptises them, and converts them into Christians. Those who fall sick and die are buried or cremated unceremoniously. The media are promoting the images of such missionaries practically in every developing country.

Actually the media people work according to mental processes and the mental movement is always linear and proceeds only in one direction. Presently it is purely money- oriented. There is another serious problem relating to the media. In the olden days, news was regarded as completely objective. Comment was free but it had to be made on objective criteria. These impeccable principles of journalism have now been thrown overboard. The same event is reported in one way by one newspaper and in quite a different way by another. And comments? Far from being objective, they are, in many cases, brazenly biased. If you read Rupert Murdoch’s papers you will know what I mean. No wonder the reading public gets totally confused. Thus we remain attacked all the time, facing the horrible newspapers, which, according to Sahaja Yoga, can give us blood cancer. I would blame the media the most for shattering the readers’ value system and bringing such disaster to this world.

Religious fundamentalism and fanaticism have already become a threat to world Peace. We had a discussion with some religious people in Italy and they refused to accept a religion which was global. They wanted to have exclusive religions. In this way they promote conflict between the followers of one religion and those of another. They believe that killing others in the name of religion is their duty. On the other hand all the great philosophers, incarnations, prophets and Sufis have never talked about any exclusive religion. Confucius first talked about humanity, but then came Tao of Lao Tse who tried to bring the subtle side of humanity. This Tao is something like the Kundalini of Sahaja Yoga. I have travelled through the Yangtze River. This voyage on a boat gave me a unique experience and enabled me to understand Lao Tse very well. This river is a very dangerous one in the beginning for boats to pass through. There are lots of currents which flow in different directions. But along the side of this river there are beautiful manifestations of nature. The very steep, rising mountains that we see in the paintings of the Chinese are all to be seen there with rivers flowing between them. It is very beautiful to see the bank of the Yangtze River. As Lao Tse had said: “It may be very beautiful and attractive outside, but you should keep your mind inside and ply through the Yangtze River”. This is very significant, but how many understand what he has said? How many have tried to follow him? In China many people do not seem to care much for Lao Tse and his Tao, but there will come a time when they will realise that, that is the subtle side of humanity.

In Japan we had another great master whose name was Vidhitama. He was the disciple of Lord Buddha and he went to Japan and started the Zen system. Zen means meditation – dhyana – and he wanted people to become “thoughtlessly aware”. He found out many ways of making people “thoughtlessly aware” – the tea ceremony and the temples that they have, are all meant to create thoughtless awareness. I was amazed that none of the Japanese knew what the purpose of these gardens were. There is one garden which has some moss on top of a hill in a very small area and it is very interesting. You have to see the flowers and other foliage there through a magnifying glass. All this should amaze a person and one should become thoughtlessly aware. That was the idea of Zen, but surprisingly, few understood Zen. Then there was a prophet, Zoroaster, who was born five times in his country, Persia. Ultimately Mohammed Sahib had to come to say something very clearly about religion. But the people who followed Mohammed Sahib, never realised the oneness of his preaching or that of Zoroaster, and they made all the Persians run away to all the other countries and so many of them came to India.

Mohammed Sahib has talked about Abraham, Moses, Christ in a series as they came one after the other. He has talked about the Mother of Christ especially with great respect. In the Bible she is not given so much respect because of Paul who edited the Bible. She is just called “the woman”. But Prophet Mohammed says that anyone who talks against this Holy lady will be punished, or something to that effect. So one can see that Mohammed Sahib never talked of “Islam” as an exclusive religion (“Islam” means I surrender to God Almighty). But so many followers of Islam are fighting the followers of other religions and even amongst themselves.

The worst part is the practice of conversion. People are being converted from one religion to another not for faith but for non-religious reasons such as matrimony or monetary gain. Bitter fights are going on in different parts of the world between followers of different religions, all in the name of God Almighty! This cruel phenomenon is not understood by any saintly person. Groups of people claiming to profess the Islamic religion are in the forefront of these fights. The Sufis amongst the Islamic people tried to tell them that this is not the way to behave if you are a follower of Mohammed Sahib, because this brings a bad name to Mohammed Sahib and to Islam. There are some people who believe that Islam should be spread by Jihad. This was never the idea of Mohammed Sahib. At the time when he was here on this earth, the people were facing a very difficult situation because there were lots of tribes, and these tribes were fighting and killing all the people who were taking to Islam. That was the time when it was alright to talk about Jihad, but today there is no such problem. Moreover by talking incessantly of Jihad, they are becoming very unpopular. Not only that, actually, they have achieved nothing. By doing all this have the achieved their self-realisation? Have they attained their Kiyama and have they found the truth? Nothing of the kind has happened to them. They are diverting the attention of people to wrong things and are trying to do something which is absolutely no good for the peace of the world. It is because of them there are many cold wars going on in so many places. In Chechenya there is a war going on. Wars are going on in other countries as well, where the Muslims are thinking that they are the chosen ones and that the whole world should become ‘Islamic.

The other day, I met a very important man from Russia and he said: “Why is the UN helping these Muslims?” I said: “Why not”? He replied: “Muslims who have been a part of our country now want to separate their territories and thus break the integrity of our country. They believe that their religion is the only authentic one. They want to propagate Islam by their swords. Not only that, but they want to produce as many children as they can, treating their women as children-producing factories. Their idea seems to be to increase the number of Muslims rapidly and thus to change the pattern of population in favour of Islam in a democracy. And thus they might eventually rule every country.”

Now, one has to understand that any democracy should not allow an exclusive religion to be the basis of the state. Religion is a personal matter and every human being should have the right in each and every country to follow the religion of his or her free choice. Single religion states are an anachronism in the present age. When a country is declared as Islamic or Christian or Jewish, the followers of that one particular religion become superior citizens and others have an inferior status. This is totally contrary to the accepted concept of equality in a true democracy. These exclusive religions are absolutely blind-faith oriented. People believing in them follow their religious injunctions blindly and divide themselves into antagonistic groups.

In England now some Church leaders have proclaimed that all kinds of people who are supposed to be living in sin according to the Christian religion can attend and join the Church. They have done so because attendance at the Churches is very thin and they want to attract larger congregations, even by diluting and downgrading religious and moral values. The number of practising Christians has decreased sharply, to the extent that they cannot run their Churches, nor pay their Clergies properly. So they have put this big liberal project before the public as a report. They say that if people have got genes of the wrong kind how can they help it? This is now an open invitation to immorality and getting away with it by blaming it on one’s genes. This is also a very dangerous postulate, because it suggests that inherited genes determine the character of a person, which cannot be improved by education or religion or spirituality. The truth is that the characteristics of inherited genes can be altered. It has to be understood that we can change our genes all the time.

For example, after transformation through Sahaja Yoga, the peoples’ genes get restructured and they become righteous, loving and powerful people. This shows that the genes absorb impressions from our day-to-day life. Also we see every day that all the children of the same parents do not have the same nature or characteristics. One child of the same father and mother may be brilliant and angelic. The other may be stupid and devilish. It can be seen very clearly also that if genes are what we have inherited then there is no need to have a Church, nor is there a need to have any congregation. But one must know that if our Churches had done a sincere job, the genes of the Christians would have changed as they have changed in Sahaja Yoga, where Jews worship Christ and Muslims worship Shiva.

So people are fighting in the name of God and there is no world Peace. Behind all these activities there is also powerful money orientation and when it comes to economics, the people of the highest order in a religion succumb to compromise, however immoral it may be. They have neither character nor courage nor real faith to resist fashionable trends of money business. In fact they allow their followers to swim with the evil currents of the day and thus lead them into hell from where there is no return. These religions inject fixed ideas into the brains of people. These fixed ideas start developing in a collective way and this can produce a very big, collective monster which can believe only in killing others and pushing its own ideas.

Hitler had fixed ideas, and he believed that the Germans were a superior race. The idea that the Germans were the highest race was the greatest absurdity. The Germans killed children in the gas chambers and devised methods to have en-masse killings. How could they be people of the highest race? The highest race is that of saints. In their life, compassion and love are the only drink they have and which they enjoy. To call the Germans the highest race is to degrade the rest of the human race and brand it as inferior or even primitive. This is racism of the worst kind. I have heard that in Germany they had a very great saint in the thirteenth century, who is highly respected even today all over the world. Surprisingly Germans have been claiming that they are the ones who wrote the Vedas. This is another extreme of false notion about oneself. How could these people who are always thinking that they are a higher race and that they have a right to kill others, write such advanced, philosophical treatises like the Vedas. Though Hitler is dead and the Second World War ended fifty years ago, we still find that a new type of fascism is coming up in the world. It is emerging in Italy, in France and indeed all over Europe. You find this type of neo-fascism all over the European continent. Even the extreme right wing in politics is nothing but fascism and this fascism is seeping smoothly into the minds of the people. They have even voted for the right wing in so many countries in Europe, especially in France. It is amazing that after being subjugated and dominated by the Germans for three years, the French still have these ideas about right wing fascists. Perhaps the French have been contaminated by this trend from the Germans who lived there.

A lady who ran away from France and built a house very near Switzerland because her husband was a Russian, told me that the French always believed that the Germans were a very great race and a very powerful nation. I was surprised at such French people who believed in such fascist ideas. The results of the election in the year 1995 have shown that the French have voted for a right wing man who is known to be completely bureaucratic. As soon as he was elected, he declared that he would have a nuclear explosion in the Pacific. What was the need to have this kind of explosion in the South Pacific at a time when we are talking of destroying all atomic or nuclear weapons. Does he want to have another war with some other nations because the power of Russia does not threaten them anymore? And of which country is Europe now afraid? Why should the French test a nuclear weapon in the Pacific, torturing nations like Australia and New Zealand? It looks like a political trick because the French have lost their diplomatic status through their alcoholic philosophy, so they want to create a nuisance to impress the Americans.

Sometimes I feel that Hitler is born again and again and shows his deeds all over the world. How can people succumb to his racist, monstrous ideas even today and vote for such people? It took nine years for Hitler to cause the Second World War. He was very much against the Jews and the atmosphere in those days in Germany was extremely decadent and immoral. He took advantage of both these things and tried to poison the minds of young people. For all those nine years, what were the European countries doing? Were they sleeping or were they busy fighting the recession so much so that they did not even notice the rise of Nazis in Germany and Fascists in Italy? After all the destruction done already through the mental idea that those who have a higher I.Q. are superior, now the new theory of E.Q. has established itself. If there is no balance between emotions and intelligence, then a person becomes a brute.

There are many people even today who do not want to know about Emotional E.Q., who believe that they belong to a higher race and that they can destroy all the rest of the people because they don’t belong to that race or maybe that religion. All such fixed ideas constitute a grave threat to peace in any country and indeed to global peace.

For example, the Muslims believe in a formless God. It is a religion which teaches absolute detachment from worldly things. But what are they doing? They are fighting for a piece of land here and there, and troubling everyone and torturing so many. They themselves are also being tortured. They call this Jihad and they believe quite stupidly that by getting killed in a Jihad, they will get their resurrection. All these fixed ideas can be neutralised only through self-realisation, because through self-realisation one knows the reality. The reality, the truth is that this world is one, that nothing belongs to anyone in particular, and that there is no need to fight for any territory or for land whatsoever. Of course, for protection from blindly cruel aggressive nations, people should form boundaries around their country and try to protect themselves. It would be unwise to ignore the fact that there are so many destructive people who are trying to destroy the peace of the world. We must be vigilant against them. But that is no reason for promoting quarrels and fights everywhere.

Another problem is that the U.N., as it is today, is trying to maintain a balance among different powers and groups. In this process it makes great mistakes. Sometimes it supports very negative people who are barbaric, who are violent and who are terrorists. Before taking any decision as to what other countries should do, the U.N. should have a full idea as to the motives of aggressive countries. Sometimes these aggressive countries sound extremely reasonable and logical and create such an image that all the negativity of the rest of the world is drawn towards that. First the U.N. should find out what the purpose of these people is, what their background is and what sort of ideas they have. Only then they will not be deceived by the tricks of aggressive people like Sadam Hussein.

In some countries there is a decline in the economy or great social turmoil caused by unemployment. In order to distract the attention of the public, the rulers try to start a war with another country. This is how a number of wars are started in this world. Once a country becomes powerful, the corrupting influence of power makes it frightfully ambitious. Such a country thinks nothing of interfering in the affairs of another country, or even attacking it regardless of the misery which a war causes to the people. If a country is attacked, it has to defend itself. This sets in motion a chain reaction and a wider conflict may arise. Look at the situation between Iraq and Iran or between Turkey and Greece. As we all know, wars start in the hearts and minds of military and political rulers, who are power and money- oriented. The only way to prevent wars and to promote global peace, is to work for the transformation of people in power, to go beyond their minds so that they take to the path of righteousness, rather than that of aggrandisement. The mind is a myth, the brain is the reality.

I have written a lot about racialism earlier and you can see the primitiveness of these racists and how they try to kill each other like animals. Mahatma Gandhi says that Ahimsa, Le.non- violence is the only way we can get rid of war. It is true that Indians fought the British with non-violent methods to achieve their freedom. But non-violent methods to gain freedom may sometimes result in the sacrifice of great lives for the country, when the ruling power uses brutal methods. This is what happened in India in several instances. Fortunately by Divine Blessing, a Labour Government came into power in the United Kingdom immediately after the end of the Second world War. This Government initiated a process voluntarily which resulted in India’s independence. Unfortunately, not all countries have the same good luck. There are numerous instances of dependent countries having to sacrifice a great many precious lives to gain freedom.

Sometimes people whose countrymen suffered atrocities in an earlier period begin to think in terms of revenge. For example, those whose forefathers were tortured and ruthlessly killed by Hitler’s Nazis in Germany, constantly think of taking revenge on the current generation of Germans. This is totally wrong. The present day Germans had nothing to do with the Nazis. No guilt whatsoever is attached to them. They are a new generation and they are peace loving, good human beings. For example, in Germany now, we have lots of Sahaja Yogis and they are so beautiful and so gentle that you can’t believe that they could be the descendants of the followers of Hitler. In Austria, again the Sahaja Yogis are great seekers and they are full of humility and goodness. They are also German speaking people. There is no trace at all of any harshness in the character of these people. On the contrary, they are a model for other Sahaja Yogis, in their kindness and good behaviour. The first time I went to Russia, these German Sahaja Yogis came rushing to help me. I asked them: “Why did you come all the way to Russia?”. They said: “Mother, this is a country that was really harmed greatly by Germans, so we must make amends for what our forefathers did.” With great love and such compassion did these Germans work for me in Russia, that whatever success Sahaja Yoga had in Russia can be credited very easily to them and to the British. The British have a small country but in the preceding centuries, they conquered many other countries around the world, so that once upon a time they said, the Sun never set on the British Empire. In this process, the British committed many atrocities and killed many people. But that is all the past. The present generation is a new one which cannot be and must not be blamed for the past. These two nations, the Germans and the British have given great Sahaja Yogis to work in Russia. Now I have discovered that the Sahaja Yogis from Austria are working for the benevolence of the people of Israel by promoting Sahaja Yoga in that country. They are sending people to Israel. Could this have been possible without Sahaja Yoga? The Germans who fought the Jews and killed them and tried to destroy them, are now going to Israel to tell them about Sahaja Yoga and. to help them to attain the bliss of self-realisation and transformation into spiritually evolved human beings.

It really touches my heart to see that in these modern times such beautiful people are born, who give their love and attention to those people who are victims of the cruelties of their forefathers. The so-called advancement of different countries doesn’t give any kind of evolutionary push to the people of those countries. On the contrary, they get very money-oriented and go on working hard to get more and more and more. If this advancement doesn’t give a person any inner satisfaction and peace, then what is the use of having this unlimited greed generated by advancement?

Another big problem arises because of the existence of “haves” and “have-nots”, the rich and the poor. This problem is one of the biggest threats to world peace. The rich countries have to do a lot of re-thinking. They have to understand that poverty anywhere is a threat to peace and prosperity everywhere. The rich countries have to control their greed for more and more for themselves. They have to give serious thought to the idea of one world, one human family. Environmentally, the world is one. Should we not begin to think in terms of one world economically and even politically? With some restraint on consumerism and with a determination to have only so much and no more, the rich nations can assist the poorer ones to rise above the poverty line and to lead a reasonable life. Such a compassionate approach will give enormous joy and inner satisfaction to the rich. It will at the same time promote a better social order and world peace.

Now in Sahaja Yoga we have solutions for all these problems which constitute a grave threat to world peace. First of all we have to deal with fixed ideas. All such fixed ideas come from ignorance. They just vanish when you become a person who sees the reality and understands that this world is one. Those who believe in grabbing land under any pretext must understand that this land belongs to God Almighty and that they are here just to enjoy it and not to fight for it or to grab it from somebody else. Even a small piece of land can be enjoyed by a Sahaja Yogi, because he is so much at one with nature that he enjoys the produce of even a small plot of land, which he can properly cultivate and do justice to Mother Earth.

The state of self-realisation is like the state of a King who has his own kingdom. He enjoys his domain of spirituality. He doesn’t care for worldly possessions. He enjoys giving all that he possesses, and that is the greatest enjoyment he has. He wants to give his love to everyone and he loves his Creator. Some saints have also shown in their lives how much importance they give to love. Once a great Indian saint was taking a pitcher of water to be poured on a deity of a particular temple. For this he had to walk for a month with this pitcher in his hand. But when he reached the temple he saw a donkey who was very thirsty and on the verge of death. Immediately he gave up the idea of going to the temple and instead gave that water which he had carried to this donkey to save his life. All those who had carried the same kind of pitcher were amazed at him. How could he give this water to the donkey instead of taking it to the temple to pour over the deity, asked his companions. He answered in a very simple way: “I don’t have to climb up all these steps to go to the deity. The deity has walked down here already.” They were amazed at his understanding which was so subtle. But that is what it is. For a spiritual person the highest thing is to spontaneously sacrifice everything for spiritual joy, because it is the most precious thing. Some people behave atrociously to grab the land of others and they commit all kinds of sinful acts, impelled by greed. But if they pause for a moment and think about what the ultimate purpose of life is, they will definitely change. The ultimate purpose is to achieve happiness and joy. But there is no happiness and joy in gathering all these material things. The greatest joy is in being one with the Divine.

Most of the people lose their values because of wars. They lose faith in God Almighty. God has given freedom to human beings which he would not wish to take away. Only through freedom can we learn about the Absolute. In a school a teacher teaches students that two plus two is four but when the students go up to the level of college, they are given freedom to find out the solutions themselves. In the same way, today, the human race is on the brink of that jump, where through its freedom it must know that the highest thing is to achieve spiritual ascent.

After every war there is a so-called peace time, but during the peace time people are preparing for the next war. The reason is that they cannot forget and forgive the people whom they have fought or those who killed their kith and kin. It has to be realised that for the maintenance of world peace, we have to have some sort of a global organisation. We have established the U.N. organisation, but basically the U.N. cannot effectively fulfill this peace mission because it has no effective power of its own, and is dependant on the wishes of its Member States who do not always act in unison. They all put forward their own individual ideas and their own demands to the U.N., which is always dominated by America. Americans are not the right people to dominate the world, because they are very immature and very sex-oriented.

We have to have another higher house for the U.N. We can get very well known judges like those of the world Court at the Hague. These people should be elected by the whole world and should not come from anyone particular country. They should have the necessary detachment and wisdom as well as a great understanding of the problems that affect the peace of the world. This new body of the most distinguished persons on top of the U.N. can manage much more than the U.N., which is absolutely under the thumbs of the countries which are governed sometimes by very odd governments. There is then the problem of getting adequate financial resources for running this new body as well as the U.N. Considering that Governments are not willing to contribute large sums of money, it is extremely necessary to reduce the total number of U.N. employees and also to scale down their salaries. If the salaries are not as high as they are today, those who are purely money-oriented will not be attracted to the U.N. In that situation only the public-spirited people will join and work for the world body. Every effort should be made to secure the services of people of global eminence, possessing higher ideas and idealism to work in the true spirit of service. They should be persons of great intellect and high and renowned moral character. In particular they should be very mature and highly experienced so that they can clearly and properly understand the problems of the world, especially those affecting global peace.

If persons of high eminence, integrity, wisdom, character and intellect are elected to the proposed new high body to direct and guide the entire United Nations system, the people of the world may have a new chance of seeing the world governed by righteousness and dharma and not by narrow selfishness, greed and immorality. In that case, world peace and a good social, political and moral order may yet be established. Such a high body which we may call the Supreme Council, will not be dominated by anyone country, not even by America. I sometimes feel that on the whole the Americans are still very immature people. There have been very great Americans like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, but what one sees in America now is that people need to become mature, and this maturity will only come if they take to Sahaja Yoga and not to some sort of evangelists or false gurus.

We cannot say with certainty that this Supreme Council which will be created to control the U.N. will be absolutely perfect. First of all, they will not be paid very highly, but an honorarium would be given and they may try to do something which is not honest if they are by any chance, money-oriented. So the only conclusion one can reach is that this Supreme Council should be constituted by the election only of excellent Sahaja Yogis. They have all the requisite qualities in abundance they are selfless, they are compassionate, they are devoted to public interest without the slightest bias on grounds of race, religion or nationality. They will thus always make sound and proper decisions. Most importantly, the Supreme Court consisting of Sahaja Yogis, will spread the message of Sahaja Yoga throughout the world not merely by words but by deeds which will inspire all the people and thus ensure a new peaceful and just world order. Sahaja Yoga is thus the only solution to world problems because it will ensure the transformation of all human beings and thus create a new highly evolved human race.

Chapter 9: Evolution

It is very interesting to see how we have become human beings in a relatively short time, through our evolutionary process. The time taken to create human beings is

really very short. Some people may call it a chance but by the law of chance we could not have achieved this creation.

Actually our evolutionary process is based on the same principle as that of a spacecraft. The spacecraft has several sections, one fitting into the next in a series. When a spacecraft is launched from the ground, after some time, the lowest or outermost section blasts the rest of the spacecraft which then acquires a much faster speed. If the initial speed was say X miles per hour, then after the first blast it becomes X2 miles per hour. Through a series of such accelerating blasts, the spacecraft goes outside the gravity of the earth and proceeds towards its object which may be the Moon or Jupiter. That is how our evolution also takes place with as great a speed. Life is first created at the stage of amoeba. After an explosion, life reaches another stage – that of an ape or other intermediary stages. After a series of such explosions, human beings are created.

At the human state also, in the beginning, our attention is only on food and some protection from nature, like a house or a hut. After achieving that, once a certain stage of higher development is reached, we suddenly get exploded into a state where we become mentally very alert and intelligent. Thus we take to science and develop technology, by which we could go to the Moon or Jupiter. Then with some other blasting different from mental achievement, we develop an emotional state in our being. When we see the whole world burning with hatred and competition, a new state is achieved and this is a state of hankering for great compassion and love and peace. At this stage, or even much before that we start seeking something beyond human understanding. We then turn ourselves to another internal blasting, whereafter we take to religion and God. This is also not the final stage in evolution because soon people find that religious practices are mere rituals which do not touch, much less transform, the inner self. It becomes apparent that we have to seek something beyond our minds.

When the seekers of truth start seeking – seeking honestly, deliberately but blindly, at this stage, they are misled very badly into the clasp of false gurus, who actually are like thieves taking the dress of a king. It is described in our scriptures that man has to rise to a realm, where he achieves the fourth dimension in his awareness (Turiya). Scientists like Francis Crick are working on the subject of awareness, specially the awareness of vision. Turiya stage is the state of total subtle awareness. Scientists should reach Turiya state and then discover the higher awareness which guides and promotes all worldly human awareness. Sometimes I find that scientists are lost in their blind alley and do not want to accept Divinity which gives them a complete vision of reality. We live in three dimensions normally. The saints achieved their fourth dimension and through this ascent, they reach a state of complete tranquillity, complete integration and total awareness of reality. These efforts of their ascent have been described in different languages in different ways. The three dimensions in which we normally exist are physical, mental and emotional, and the fourth dimension is spiritual. Now by intensely using the first three dimensions we come to realise the futility of our lives and we then start seeking the absolute truth, as we are not satisfied with whatever we know that can give even a tranquil mind.

We had a saint called Markandeya, who they say lived fourteen thousand years ago. He has written about this fourth dimension and has described it as the blessing of the Primordial Mother. The second person who was very well equipped with this knowledge, was Adi Shankracharya who has written many books. The first book he wrote was Vivek Chudamani, in which he describes this fourth dimension and explains why we should try to attain this fourth dimension. An intellectual, one Mr. Sharma, challenged him and told him that he could not do anything as an ascetic and win over my intellect. Thus he felt that for the common people all this discussion might just seem to be mental acrobatics. So he decided to write books just praising the Primordial Mother, especially in Saundarya Lahari, where he described all the Divine vibrations as the vibrations of the loving beauty of the Primordial Mother. At that time all this was written in the Sanskrit language but the common people did not understand this language, except for a very few learned people, who also did not want to go into the details of this exposition.

Then came, in the twelfth century, a great saint called Gyaneshwara in Maharashtra. It was a tradition of his time that one master of Nath Panthis could give realisation only to one disciple. This master was not supposed even to talk about the fourth dimension to normal people. They were only told that they should remember God and should sing the praise of God. But he, the great poet and a very great saint, Gyaneshwara, felt that it was time that the subject of spiritual ascent should be made much more clear to people.

In Gita there is no description of the Kundalini or of the awakening, though Shri Krishna, at the very outset, has said that a person should achieve the state of ‘SthitaprAgnya’, which means, the one who is balanced, through enlightenment by Divine knowledge. All this was a description, but he did not talk about how it is brought about.

It was Shri Gyaneshwara who wrote a treatise on Gita called as Gyaneshwari. In the sixth chapter he very sweetly described the nature of this fourth power, called the Kundalini which rests in the triangular bone and the way it is awakened by some great soul by which one gets his fourth state of awareness. He did not take permission from his guru to give realisation to others but he only asked that he should be permitted at least to write about it. Later on, this sixth chapter was not understood by the people who were in charge of religion (dharmamartandas). They said that this sixth chapter was not to be read (Nishiddha) and thus this great chapter was completely neglected by the people and they just tried to follow the path of bhakti, which means devotion to God by chanting the names of God or singing the praise of God Almighty.

There were three types of movements in our country. In the first one, people wanted to know about matter, the origin of matter, the origin of this world. In this quest they came to know how our right side is built up and what the elements that build our body are. The advancement on this knowledge led to science as a new field of study. Another aspect was constituted by people who were absolutely dedicated and were singing the praise of all deities who were created by Mother Earth (Swayambhu). They sang praise of God and prayed to God Almighty in the way their gurus told them. There were also people in the middle path who were called the Nath Panthis, specially in Maharashtra. These were realised souls who had received their realisation through the “one guru, one disciple” principle. Saint Gyaneshwara was also from the Nath Sumpradaya, meaning the Nath cult. He was a great exponent of Kundalini awakening in his book.

Later on, in the sixteenth century many saints existed who started talking and singing about Kundalini, the channels and the subtle centres. All over India all these saints talked about self-knowledge, Self-Realisation (Atma Sakshatkar). Some of the saints tried to give Self-Realisation to their disciples but they actually gave it only to very few persons because they thought that the world was not yet ready to receive Self-Realisation. As Kabira has written: “How am I to explain to these people, who are blind, about the light, mostly who are blind?”

Most of the saints were tortured by people who were intellectuals and who thought that the saints were all bogus people trying to mislead the public. They are all, I think, coming back on the stage in these modern times, and, without finding out the absolute truth, are just creating a platform against true seekers and also against real, holy saints. But at the same time there have been so many false masters and many women teachers as well, that it was hard to make out who was real and who was not. Firstly, the test is that anybody who takes money from you for giving you Self-Realisation or knowledge about God or any kind of higher awareness, is a man who is a thief of the worst type, who is trying to exploit people and who is a very low level money-oriented person. But even before all these appeared, a lot of money used to be given as donation to keepers of Churches, Temples, Mosques and also Gurudwaras. So people did not know how to discriminate and they thought that for God one has to give money. God does not understand money, he does not know any banking, he has not created money. It is a human headache. The awakening of Kundalini was done by people who were very few in number because there were very few real seekers.

When I was born, I saw people taking to a new course all over the world not to believe in God or spirituality, but to believe in money or power. At this juncture, I must say, my father, who was another great evolved soul, came to my help and he told me: “You know what is your mission in this life”. I said: “I know that.” Then he said: “You are standing on the seventh floor of a building. From there you see many who are on the ground floor. How will they believe that you are on the seventh floor? If you could raise them even up to the first or second floor, then they may start thinking that there is a higher state which they have to achieve. So the first slab of physical achievement is over, the second slab of the emotional is over and the third, the mental, also will be over. But now they have to go beyond this mental and, that too, not individually but collectively.” I knew my mission very well of collective awakening, but I was born in such a blind world.

My father continued: “Any discovery which is individual has to be brought to the collective, otherwise it has no meaning, it does not serve any purpose.” I told him: “I know my job is to find out a method by which we can really give en-masse Realisation.” He was overjoyed to hear that, and so I started working on many human beings. My life with my father was full with a lot of social contacts because he was a great freedom fighter and later on he became a member of our Constituent Assembly, the central assembly. I met lots of his friends, their wives, children, and I could see, through my own subtle ways, what problem was responsible for their static state. I started working and finding out, researching what the problem of human beings is.

At the end of 1946, I reached the conclusion that I had to do it in a very deep silent way, and through the inner movement of my being I had to find out what was so problematic about human centres and their three channels.

Ultimately in the year 1970 I had to go to a seminar of one of the so-called masters because he requested my husband, who had his friend staying in that place, who arranged my visit. I was amazed to see this man, who was ten years· younger than me, looking at least twenty years older than me. But he mesmerised all the people and they shouted and screamed and some barked like dogs. Just by mesmerising, he was taking them to their past.

This really shocked me. I was sitting under a tree to watch what he was doing. At night I went alone to the seashore, sat there alone meditating about how, somehow or the other, I could use my own Kundalini for the en-masse realisation of people. That was the moment when it worked, and it clicked. I was surprised, that with a little deeper penetration, I could work it out. The experience was like this. I saw my Kundalini rising very fast like a telescope opening out and it was a beautiful colour that you see when the iron is heated up, a red, rose colour, but extremely cooling and soothing. The Kundalini went’ through my fontanel bone area (Brahma Randhra) which was open from my childhood and was pouring out Divine vibrations (Purnabrahma). But this new experience gave me a new dimension of understanding of my Divine force. It came like a very promising reality that it was time for me to start my collective work. I found that the whole of my being was filled with great peace and joy. I opened my eyes, went to this false master and told him: “Now the last centre can be opened for everyone”. I was amazed to see that he had no idea about the centres, or about the three channels which I knew from my very childhood. I found out that there were so many of them who were very false masters and were just money-oriented, working through mesmerism by encouraging anti-Christ activities of immorality or by saying that this world is coming to an end.

I started my work with one person and I was amazed how she reached her fourth dimension in no time. She was a very old but a very nice religious lady who achieved this state in no time. Another one was younger lady who also was very easy and in seconds she received her ascent. Since that day she has got her vibrations. Then I took some twenty five people to the same seashore and I was surprised that twelve out of them felt the self- realisation. From that day this work started working en-masse. Of course now even if there are 18,000 to 20,000 people almost all can get their Self-Realisation, especially in Russia. So many people have been cured in these conferences. I must confess that I am lucky. I am being used as the desire of the God Almighty to emit these forceful holy vibrations to give realisation to thousands and thousands of people very happily. In my life, to my amazement, the time has come – the blossom time, where there are so many flowers on this earth who are seekers of truth and they can easily become the fruits.

I had to move to London because my husband got elected to the post of Secretary-General of the International Maritime Organisation, and there I started my work with seven hippies who were very difficult people. I found that in their escape from the Western culture to anticulture, they had become extremely arrogant, possessive and aggressive. I started to work on them and gradually they became aware that they were not in the fourth dimension (in which they always felt they were) and that they had no right to assert their so-called higher state existence on others. After four years I could manage to get these seven hippies to come around. In between I kept coming to India and had a great response in my state of Maharashtra, where thousands of people started getting Realisation.

Chapter 10: Message Of Meta Science

Science cannot answer many questions. So many have tried now to reach, in medical science, the minutest thing, called genes. But the scientists are frustrated because they

cannot go any further with the help of these genes, to really overcome the complications created by modern life.

The conclusion they have reached that genes are only inherited is absolutely wrong. Actually genes also reflect our personality that we create in day-to-day life. All our sympathetic activity is reflected on our genes as well.

It cannot be explained in the science of medicine why acetylcholine or adrenaline, two chemicals, act in a very different manner in the body when they are a fixed chemical formula. Also, it cannot be explained why a child, which comes as a foetus in the womb of the mother, is not thrown out by the body as all other foreign materials are rejected and thrown out according to the nature of the body. But this foetus is preserved until it grows up to a point and then when it is ready it is thrown out. The labour pains start and the little child is born in this new world, out of the womb of the mother. Who does this timing? There are many other cultural questions which cannot be answered through science. As science deals with only matter or the human body, it cannot solve the problems of modern times. It cannot discover the subtler or wider problems of life. For example, what is the purpose of evolution and meaning of human life? What is the solution for getting out of this mess of modern life, which is very confusing and full of violence? What is the way we can achieve global peace? All these questions should be asked but science has no answer for these questions, which are extremely important.

Now we have to know that the answer lies within ourselves and not outside in the world. Sometimes scientists also reach very wrong conclusions. For example, in the biological deduction, it is presumed that our genes are only genetic and inherent and they determine our character. Firstly, genes are not only inherent because sons of the same parents could be in juxta positions in their characters and behaviour. Many parents who were very good and very honest people get children who are monsters. Parents who are drunkards have children who hate drinking, etc.

Let us see how the genes are placed in our cells. When the ova and sperm meet, they form a zygote. The cells pass through four phases, Prophase, Metaphase, Anaphase and Telophase. There are 46 chromosomes in the human cell. These chromosomes which are 46 in total in every cell have two types of chromosomes; Autosomes are 44 and for sex there are two determinants, they are x and y. 2x is a female, while xy is a male. From ova and sperm we get 22 chromosomes each which come through diploid, haploid division into cellular division. They join in the shape of a spindle when they meet. They grow into a zygote which starts the cell formation. These chromosomes contain millions of genes, which have D.N.A. in billions. D.N.A. is Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid, which is the life’s code. The D.N.A. has a unit base of three: Nitrogen, Sugar and Phosphates. Nitrogen are of four types, Thiamine, Adenine, Guanine and Cytosine. The genes are like spiral threads, which overlap each other forming loops. Always Guanine faces Cytosine or Adenine faces Thymine.

To begin with, we have sugar for nourishment in the chromosomes. Carbohydrates like sugar are made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The Carbon is from the Mother Earth, hydrogen and oxygen from water. The evolution has passed through first phase of hydrogen + oxygen = H20 (water) + carbon = Carbohydrates. Then nitrogen joined to form amino- acid which brought in life in the carbohydrates. The D.N.A. has a unit base of nitrogen, sugar and phosphates, so when their series change position, the cell denotes the change in the character of a person. To reach a conclusion that these genes are inherent is very dangerous, because that means anybody can get away with any unholy, cruel or criminal lifestyle. This is an escape and suits people who are at the helm of affairs of religion and are teaching a sinful life, which is not according to the scriptures. This false scientific conclusion can cancel all religious or federal laws. The great victory of science over religions and pure morality can be announced by the scientists but reality is very different. Actually, data base is made of phosphate, nitrogen and carbohydrates. When the water in the cell dries due to right sided action, the phosphate becomes volatile and a person become violent. When a person is very docile the carbohydrates make the person lethargic and submissive. Right sided in its extreme becomes sadist and left sided become masochist. Nitrogen gives the balance and when the inner energy of evolution emits Nitrogen to the cell, it achieves a new shape of a evolved self (explained later).

There is another way of understanding this problem. Every cell has a receptor which looks after the internal atmosphere of a cell. To go a little subtler, one can find out that there is a very perfect mechanism placed along the spinal chord like a remote control which has seven loops which is called as SOUL in the scriptures. The SOUL is responsible for looking after our well- being and innocence. It protects the righteousness and goodness within the human mind. It saves us from our destruction. This controls the inner atmosphere of the cell through the control of the receptor. When this SOUL is challenged by the wrong deeds of a person it acts on the receptor of a cell which ultimately disturbs the inner atmosphere of the cell which changes the series of the data base units of the cell in the D.N.A. Thus from the genes one can know the character of the person which is very much acquired. Even the chromosomes which are called as autosomes which are for physical aspect, can get into change, like the Kobe steaks or a broiler chicken. Even in human beings it goes into shapes of body which can be acquired by physical, emotional or mental activity. These genes could be partly inherent and could not be in proper series before birth according to the nature of the mother and father. Because of our day-to-day life, specially in modern times, it will disturb the inner atmosphere of the cell. Thus disturbances change the series of data bases, indicating the total character, which is genetic, is inherent or acquired by the person.

The people incharge of the religions, if they had practised from the understanding how important it was to make one wise, balanced and compassionate for the last breakthrough of our evolution by manifesting spirit-oriented religions, even the wrong doers would have become good normal people and deep seekers of absolute truth. But the people at the helm of affairs of religion are themselves money or power-oriented and not spirit- oriented. They can poison the ignorant minds of the simple faithful and mislead them into hell.

The evolution to human level has taken very little time, if we consider the law of chance. The evolution can be compared with the construction of a spacecraft capsule, which has built in it a multistate, many inner layered capsules. At launching the capsule with all the others inside it leaves the earth with speed and when an explosion takes place in the outermost capsule, after some time, it throws the spacecraft with a much greater speed, discarding the extra burnt part. In the same way our evolution to human level has taken place. First the physical stage, then the mental stage, then the emotional stage, then the spiritual stage leading to human awareness. This has now exploded in the modern times and spiritual seeking has started. All this development takes place inside the Central Nervous System, expanding our awareness.

This sixth achievement of self-hood is achieved through Sahaja Yoga where we are aware of self (Atma). We achieve self knowledge through the Kundalini. Now the journey starts towards God knowledge. Without self knowledge one cannot know about God as actualised knowledge.

The truth is there is a dormant residual power in the triangular bone Sacrum, called as the Kundalini. She is a dormant inner energy for our evolution. She has the power to bring forth the complete nourishment and adjustment of the disturbed genes. Whether they are genetic, inherent or acquired. When She is awakened, She changes the series of genes. Not only that She corrects the gene’s data base but She breaks through the fontanele bone area and connects the seeker to the all-pervading power of Divine Love. She is also called as the cool breeze of the Holy Ghost, Ruh, Ritambhara or Parama Chaitanya. Thus one, by this second birth, becomes a realised person as actualisation of Baptism takes place. The light of the Spirit which is the reflection of God Almighty in our heart enters into our attention and enlightenment. The seeker is really born again, not just a certificate but he changes as the transformation takes place within. There is a vast difference between an ordinary seeker and a realised soul (Yogi).

He becomes his own master full of Divine Love. It is a resurrection process, like an egg becoming the bird. Maybe this is the reason eggs are presented as a symbol, reminding, that one has to get resurrected. The genes change and complete transformation takes place. For some people it takes time if they are sick or egotistical. Also some of them who feel guilty or cannot forgive others are rather difficult to perfect their state of self-realisation. If they have a problem from false Gurus, cults, or fanaticism it also takes time, but can be established in Sahaja Yoga. People have given up even drugs overnight. They never had withdrawal symptoms or any other trouble. Self realisation as a result of Kundalini awakening has exhibited fantastic results. It brings forth new creativity; many people have become poets; musicians and artists have achieved great heights in their talents; financial problems are solved; the problems of psychosomatic diseases get cured, like cancer, myelitis etc. Many incurable diseases also get cured without any medicines. The seeker becomes the witness of the drama of life and establishes an inner peace. He respects all the religions and belongs to innate Universal Religion which encompasses all the religions of the world. Morality becomes innate and spontaneous. After the complete transformation he is averse to do any immoral acts. In the light of the Spirit he knows exactly what is wrong or right and he is also empowered to stay clean and holy as he discards all that is destructive. He enjoys his virtues which he respects and without any doubt he becomes a moral human being. First thoughtless awareness is achieved and later doubtless awareness is established beyond the mind. At this stage the Sahaja Yogi can give self-realisation to others. The ageing does not take place; on the contrary, the Sahaja Yogi becomes and looks at least twenty years younger than his age. They become universal beings. All human enemies of lust, greed, anger, possessiveness, jealousies, attachments just disappear. Thus a new race of saints are created who do not have to give up anything to show off their detachment or asceticism.

You cannot pay for Divine Love which is absolute truth, which the Sahaja Yogi feels on his finger tips as vibrations of the cool breeze of the Holy Ghost. The finger tips are related to the energy centres (the chakras). The chakras are responsible for our physical, emotional and mental being. If the Yogis can correct their chakras, they can also correct the chakras of others. Thus all the physical, emotional and mental problems are solved. Those who are pure people have the necessary balance of moral life which ensures a widening central channel (the Sushumna Nadi) of ascent for the Kundalini.

In this chapter we have to now understand that there is a subtle system in every human being, which is fully developed during this evolutionary process to reach up to human awareness. For example, in the animals, there is no awareness of sin, dirt, filth, art or poetry. But among human beings, these sensitivities are manifesting very clearly as we appreciate and enjoy the birds, fishes and animals as well. Do they also see the beauty in us? This question can be answered this way; human beings are at a higher level of evolution than all the animals for whom we care so much. We love the birds and we enjoy the fish dancing, but the best thing is really to have respect for ourselves, love ourselves as we should keep our body clean, our mind and our heart should be open and transparent. Because we are the highest evolved beings in this world it is our birthright to get our self-realisation.

Instead, thanks to writers like Freud and Saad, we have reduced the human being into a sex point, even worst than beasts. It is such a contagious, demeaning disease that if a cell of a perverted sex is introduced into any animal, they also become perverted. Now this disease has contaminated societies in the West that by the end of this century we may have statues raised in memory of these new moralists who have shown the way to our adored destruction. The things which are to be discarded as useless evils in our ascent, are the ones we have sucked in our societies as great venture.

Now, whatever I am going to tell you has not to be accepted blindfolded but treated like a hypothesis. Again and again, I would request you that you must keep your mind open like a scientist. If whatever I am saying is proved then, as honest people, human beings have to accept this beautiful discovery about yourself because this is for your benevolence, and for the benevolence of your family, benevolence of your society, benevolence of your nations and benevolence of the whole world.

The theories created by current scientific conclusions and also the mental projections are not by any means eternal truths. To know the reality one has to enter into the realm of Meta- science, beyond mind, which is only possible when we enter into the collective super-consciousness through self-realisation.

Mind is an illusion and the brain is the truth.

The Divine energy ‘A’ flows through the brain, to begin with, when the foetus is formed. The human brain is like a prism with an apex, while the animal brain is flatter in shape. The Divine energy goes into refraction due to the double layer of the brain and goes out as ‘R’ energy, crossing each other. The part of ‘R’ the resultant is sucked as ‘X’ in the Nervous System and remaining ‘V’ energy goes out of the brain. This ‘V’ energy is the one that reacts to everything, creating ego and superego (conditioning) balloons. They cover the limbic area and create the bubbles of thoughts in the mind, which control us with thoughts – keeping reality beyond the mind.

Chapter 11: The Subtle System

In the triangular bone, called “Sacrum”, there is a residual power of pure desire. This bone was called the “sacrum”, by the Greeks, which means that they also knew that

it was a sacred bone. This power is termed as “Kundalini” in the Sanskrit language.

At this time, I would like to say very humbly, that one should not discard this knowledge as useless because it is coming from a developing country (in the Western terminology) like India. The Western culture has now advanced greatly as far as outward scientific life is concerned. Western civilisation is like a very big tree which has outgrown its own size. But one has to find the roots. If the roots are in India, or any other country, why do we not accept the knowledge of the roots. A tree cannot exist without roots and roots have no meaning unless they nourish the trees which are about to fall.

This power of pure desire is coiled in three and a half coils. Coil, in Sanskrit, is called as “Kundal” and, because it is a female energy, that is why it is called “Kundalini”. This Kundalini is the one which is like a primule sitting in this triangular bone which awakens and passes through six centres (chakras) which are our energy centres in the spinal cord, and pierces through the fontanele bone area (Figure at the end). One has to accept the truth, which is absolute, which is that we are not this body, this mind, these emotions, this intelligence or ego and conditionings, but we are beyond all that, the Spirit.

At this point I must confess that this knowledge is open to all through Sahaja Yoga, still many are using it at a mental level because they read books written by saints who were not realised saints. They are completely lost in the web of words (Shabda Jalam). They do all kinds of rituals, fasting, (Japas and Tapas) penance act. They leave the families and society and try to be celebrate, which is an unnatural existence.

Also almost all of them are money-oriented people. They have organisations where all falsehood is taught. Someone also started a Sahaja Yoga centre to launder money to Switzerland in my name. But what is the minimum proof required to judge what you get without paying for it? Firstly you must get the experience or actualisation of Self-Realisation. The cool breeze of the Holy Ghost must be felt on the finger tips. One must get cured mentally and physically. One must get the power to give realisation to others. One must know what is wrong with his chakras and of others, which one he can correct in both cases. The problems from false gurus must be solved. Financial conditions must improve tremendously. One should feel complete peace within and without. The marriages in Sahaja Yoga are 95% very successful and the children are born realised, great saints.

There is another truth which has to be accepted, that there is a subtle power of Divine love which does all the living work. The living process can be explained after Self Realisation. The awakening of the Kundalini takes place spontaneously and pierces through the fontanelle bone area. The Spirit, which is reflected in our heart, gets enlightened and makes our attention enlightened and we see the light of the Spirit spreading in our attention. It happens simultaneously that a cool breeze is felt on the fingertips and the same cool breeze is felt out of the fontanele bone area. This cool breeze is called by various names. We need not argue about names.

In modern times, it is extremely difficult to convince people that there is a way by which one can achieve peace within themselves. The modern mind is so complicated and has reached a conclusion that only through rationality can it solve the problems of modern times. This complication in the brain and the conviction do not allow any idea of absolute truth to penetrate into the minds of the scholars, intellectuals or scientists of this era.

They do not want to talk about anything which has no controversy to argue about or discuss in seminars or international conferences. It is not acceptable to people who are living and enjoying the play of controversies. For example, when I went to Paris first and was to address people about the joy within, everybody warned me that I look very joyous and happy and that this kind of face and attitude would not be acceptable to the great intellectuals of France because they would conclude that I am ignorant and therefore joyous, and if I understand what life is, I should be the most miserable person. I just couldn’t understand how they have taken such a new image themselves that French are the most miserable people. Actually, French think they are very exclusive. Their bathroom culture is the highest. By their rotten value system, they have made themselves and others extremely miserable by making them alcoholic.

When I started my lecture, I addressed the audience “Les Miserables”. Addressing the French as “Les Miserables” I thought would be the most appealing way of approaching them. They became very alert to hear what I was to say. I told them that in Paris, at every tenth lamp-post you find drunken people sitting and thinking about the end of the world, the ultimate that has to happen. If you have a pub at every tenth pole, a prostitute standing just after two or three poles, what else is going to happen to people who, under the guise of saying they are miserable are having drinks as soon as the sun goes down, and some of them even when the sun starts rising?

Once we were travelling from London to Paris via the Hover-craft and we started our journey from Calais. At Lille, we found the houses were all closed at about seven thirty in the evening. We had lost our way, so we knocked at the door of every house which had lights on and we found a drunk man coming out of it or a lady who was completely drunk at the front door to answer our call. They were so drunk that we couldn’t ask them anything. But we just thought it would be better to go to some pub to find our way out. But even they could not tell us where the village pub was. It was a very difficult task to talk to anyone after nine o’clock in that place, which was supposed to be a very fashionable part of France.

On the other side, intellectuals – the elites, are indulging in another kind of drunkenness. They are so conditioned that it is impossible to even mention the name of Divinity to them. As far as the men are concerned, in the West, they are busy with their gambling, drinking and womanising. Women are busy trying to look pretty, at the age of seventy years, to attract men, as any prostitute has to do for her living.

In such a society in which nothing is respected, where is the chance for a person to talk about Divinity? Still, one must say that, in all these Western countries, as a result of this ugly culture, a kind of confusion is created and a revolt against this culture started, but that was even worse. The young people took to all kinds of destructive methods. At long last, after many were destroyed, they jumped into horrible cults and false gurus. Right from religions, to cults and fake gurus who were power or money- oriented. These seekers of peace became absolutely bankrupt financially and mentally. They were all mesmerised.

Those young people who survived were very disturbed and they wanted, all the time, some sort of a sensational game to play, to shock their minds, which are full of conditionings and thoughts as if they were trying to escape from reality and wanted to enter into the illusion of an artificial life. In a way, it is described that these are the worst times (Kali Yuga), when people are in this illusion and in confusion (bhranti). This illusion is very taxing and does not allow people to relax. Thus, though the seeking of truth had definitely started and, despite all these superficial hurdles, Divinity should enter into all these countries in a very big way because they are all genuinely tortured and harassed people by themselves and they are not satisfied with their own circumstances and are trying to seek the betterment of their life.

These are the seekers all over the world. What they are seeking is the peace of their own mind. It is a good news for such people that a unique discovery has been found out by which one can achieve the peace within. One has to go beyond the mind. This was very old knowledge in the East, especially in India, and there were seers in the West who also knew about this knowledge by which one can achieve that state of Self- Realisation. In England William Blake, Moliere in France, De Maupassant in France, and many other poets like C.S. Lewis, and certain persons in America, have been endowed with this future vision of Divine life entering into human beings.

One may not believe, or may believe, but the fact is that, in human awareness, what we have reached is a stage where we do not know about the absolute truth. This is the reason why there are so many types of philosophies and ideologies and people want to have different types of religions which are exclusive and they fight with each other and finish the fundamentals of religion.

Now, whatever I have to say need not at all be accepted blind- folded. We have had enough troubles with blind faiths. But if one has an open mind like a scientist, one should look at it like a hypothesis, but once it is proved, one has to accept that there is a subtle system in our body for our last breakthrough in our evolution. Firstly, one has to know that our creator is the greatest organiser.

In the human body, there are three types of nervous systems. The first one is the central nervous system, the second one is the sympathetic nervous system which has a left and a right side, and the third one is the parasympathetic nervous system.

The sympathetic nervous system is for emergencies. For example, if one sees a tiger in the forest, one starts running fast. At this emergency, the heart beat increases tremendously. This is done by the sympathetic nervous system. But it goes back to normal by the working of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is in the middle of these two left and right sides. In medical science, I don’t know if they have reached the conclusion or not, that the left and right sympathetic nervous system act in opposite directions, as they are complimentary.

For example, the left sympathetic nervous system is nourished by a subtle channel, called the Ida Nadi (Moon channel), and the right side, by a channel which is called Pingala Nadi (Sun Channel). This Ida Nadi gives the human being his emotional side. In one’s subconscious, the past is recorded beyond this Ida Channel. The subconscious is the past, today’s past, then is the past of yesterday, the past of this life, past of the last lives and ultimately the past which was the one which came from all that was created since Creation took place, the collective subconscious. All these areas are placed vertically one after another and not horizontally. For our ascent one does not have to pass all these subconscious areas as said by many psychologists.

The other one, which is the Pingala Nadi, works for the physical and the mental, meaning intellectual work of human beings. In the centre is the parasympathetic, which is formed by the loops from both left and right sympathetic nervous system. So whenever the sympathetic nervous system is exhausted because of emergencies, the parasympathetic relaxes and nourishes these two channels and ultimately helps these, the sympathetic systems. Wherever these loops meet, the energy centres thus formed are known as Chakras. These loops correspond to genes which are also affected by our day-to-day activity of left and right sympathetic nervous system.

The central one, which is the parasympathetic, is nourished by another channel, called the Sushumna Nadi (Channel of Ascent). Whatever we have achieved in our evolution is recorded and is established in this central nervous system. For example, human beings are higher and have more sensitivities than animals have in certain areas. If you want a dog or a horse to go through a dirty channel, it won’t object, but a human being cannot go through that. So human beings have developed a sensitivity to dirt, filth and bad smell, while the animals don’t have that. There are so many things one can show where human beings are much more sensitive to which animals are not. All this sensitivity is expressed through the central nervous system. So all that we have achieved in our evolutionary process is being expressed in our being through the central nervous system.

There is one more residual energy which is coiled up and remains potential in the triangular bone called the sacrum. Residual energy means that it is the basic original energy which has not gone into division. When the Divine Energy falls on the brain of the fully developed foetus, then in the prism-like brain it falls into three categories. It happens due to refraction. The energy that falls on the sides of the brain cross over to form the sympathetic nervous system. But when the Divine energy falls on the summit of the brain which is like a prism, the original energy, without any refraction, passes through and coils down in the Sacrum bone as Kundalini. Perhaps the Greeks knew that it was a sacred bone, so they called it the “sacrum”. This original, complete energy is coiled into three and a half coils which is in a resting potential state. The subtle system we have within ourselves is built-in. In the process of our evolution we have seven main energy centres on the spinal cord, and also in the brain. When this fourth energy channel (which is called the “Kundalini” in the Sanskrit language) is awakened like a primule in a seed, it passes through six centres and ultimately pierces the sixth centre fontanele bone area (which is called “bramharandra”) and connects human awareness to the all- pervading power of Divine Love. Thus one develops the fourth dimensional awareness. This is how the Kundalini achieves this Yoga. When this Kundalini rises, She changes the database of the genes and a transformation in the personality takes place. The six centres (Chakras) are cleansed, nourished and enlightened which is reflected in the genes which are three each on the two sides of the loop.

One has to know what is the ultimate goal of our life. The ultimate goal of our evolution is to become the Spirit, which is the reflection of God Almighty in our heart. That is self identity and also self knowledge. Also, one becomes one with the all-pervading Divine power of love. Our awareness is enlightened by the Spirit and Divine vibrations start flowing through our central nervous system enlightening our being. We also feel the cool breeze of the Holy Ghost, which is the all-pervading power of Divine love, coming out of our fontanele bone area as well as flowing through our finger tips and our hands.

The seeker becomes thoughtless and thus calm and peaceful. Automatically the seeker starts behaving in a very holy and righteous manner. All bad habits which are destructive drop out. The innocence and compassion overwhelms the nature of the seeker. All perverted sex styles normalise and even the eyes and attention become devoid of lust and greed. The seeker now knows the absolute truth on his finger tips. The eyes shine as a glint of flame brightens them. Time loses its grip over the personality and ageing stops. Action becomes inaction, so that even when the realised soul acts, the action through the ego disappears. The conditioning of the past due to the birth surroundings which were binding, completely drop out and a new holy culture is expressed in the individual. The collective life of Sahaja Yogis becomes the theme of very beautiful enjoyment. The Sahaja Yogis get powers of giving realisation to many. That is how Sahaja Yoga has spread to 65 countries.

This is the proof that something has happened to the people who have got this awakening within them. This awakening is long awaited by the seekers of truth as the last breakthrough of our evolution. For this, you cannot command, you cannot pay, you cannot disrespect.

Some people, who are not seekers but are very arrogant, or maybe stupid, demand Self-Realisation. For such people to have Self-Realisation, I have found it is very difficult, whatever one may try, and it doesn’t work for days together with such complicated, difficult people.

The second type are the cruel people like Hitler, or the people who have been possessed by cruel sadistic ideas. It is difficult for all such people to get their Self-Realisation. But I was amazed that in this world, there are so many people who are ardent, pure seekers born in these modern times (Ghor Koli Yuga). They may be having some human failings, but this Kundalini surpasses all these hurdles and gives a second birth to these people. Actually, Kundalini is everybody’s individual Mother. She has, as if tape recorded all the information about our past and about our inspirations, also our aspirations. She is the individual Mother of everyone and loves Her child and is anxious to give the second birth to Her child. She understands us, She rises when She confronts the Divine Reality and pierces through this fontanele bone area, which was regarded as a very difficult task once upon a time.

For this you don’t have to stand on your head, you don’t have to starve, you don’t have to fast, you don’t have to chant, nothing is needed, but a humble heart which is surrendered. To achieve this happening is the blessing of the Divine.

You are cut off from the idea of Divinity thanks to great intellectual work put in by many stalwarts of literature, philosophy, politics and economics. Despite all these efforts, there are people who have realised that it has not brought peace, harmony or benevolence to them. Also on a human level, it is impossible to think that there could be peace in this world because of aggressive or oppressed people. To many, there is no hope in the future. The only way is to take to Sahaja Yoga if one really wants to save the world.

The Spirit, which is the reflection of God Almighty, is the source of absolute truth and joy. But this Spirit does not shine in our awareness when it is in the human state. Only after Self- Realisation, does our awareness get enlightened by the Spirit. Thus, to find pure love, peace and joy of absolute truth, one has to become the Spirit. This is the first thing we have to understand and accept because we are not this body, this mind, this intellect, these emotions, these conditionings or this ego. We say: “My, body, my mind” etc., but is this “me” which we refer to as “my” ..

We see all these beautiful flowers and trees and fruits and all kinds of living work happening, all kinds of seasons changing, and we do not even think: “Who does all these things?” There is the all-pervading Divine power of love, also called “Ritumbhara”, which does all these miraculous things, which we take for granted and never even think about it. If you ask the Doctor, “Who runs our heart?”, he would say “It is the autonomous nervous system”, but this autonomous nervous system has got the auto behind it. And who is this auto which runs it? They will not be able to answer. They are honest not to answer but there is an answer to it. It is the soul which controls all such vital things in our being.

When the Kundalini rises, as I said, she pierces through the fontanele bone area and connects us to this all-pervading power of Divine love, which is doing all the living work for which we need not pay, we are not obliged and in no way do we even think about it. Thus, this vital power starts flowing within our being and all our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual problems are solved as our genes are put in order.

There are seven centres which are the subtle energy centres on the central path of our ascent, (Sushumna), as shown in the figure on the last page. But there are subsidiary centres also, as you can see from the figure. These subtle centres were created within us through our evolutionary process. These centres give, on the left hand side, our emotional nourishment, and on the right hand side, our physical and mental nourishment.

When this power, known as Kundalini, rises and passes through six centres, it nourishes these centres which are meant for our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual requirements. The centres reflect their new state on the genes. These centres are enlightened, thus, we get our physical side corrected, mental side corrected, emotional side corrected and also our spiritual side corrected. Once it pierces through the last centre, which is the fontanele bone area, which was a soft bone in our childhood, it becomes one with the all-pervading power of Divine love. A cool breeze of the Holy Ghost, like very beautiful vibrations, starts flowing through your fingertips. You can also feel the cool breeze coming out of your fontanele bone area. This is the first experience of Self-Realisation.

The second experience is that, when this Kundalini rises, she creates a state of thoughtless awareness (Nirvichar Samadhi). Human beings are always thinking about the future or about the past. If one tells them that you have to live’ in the present, it is not possible. One thought rises like a wave and then another thought rises. These thoughts rise and fall, but they have only come from the past and the future.

When the Kundalini rises, these thoughts elongate. There is a space, very small, between the thoughts (vilamba) which spreads out and a state of complete silence is created. Then we are in the present, but without thoughts, without any worry, without any anger and we stand in the present, which is the reality. Actually, the reality is in the present because the past is no more and the future does not exist. When we are in this state of present we become absolutely calm and peaceful. That is how we achieve inner peace. This peace can be achieved collectively when thousands of people get the awakening of their Kundalini.

For example, when we are standing in the water, we are afraid of the rising waves. But if we can get into a boat, we can watch the rising of these waves and we become a witness of those frightening waves. On the contrary, we can enjoy them. In the same way it happens, that when we rise to the state of the present, we see all the problems that are surrounding us and we watch them, we become the witness and we are once and for all out of those problems. We also know the solutions and we solve them. At that stage, we are not bothered about the future or about the past, but we are enjoying the blessings of the present, which is the reality and we are thoughtlessly aware. We are very aware but thoughtless (Nirvichar Samadhi). Whatever we see is imprinted on our memory like a photograph. This inner silence opens our heart. All the ego and conditionings start dissolving in the ocean of rippleless silence. For example, if I own a beautiful carpet, it is a problem to preserve it. It is worse if it belongs to someone else. I would look after it and worry about it. But if I could become thoughtlessly aware, then I look at it without any worry. Thus, the joy of the artist who has put in the creation of the carpet starts pouring into my being from the fontanele bone area. Very soothing, relaxing waves of joy that enthral me. All the thoughts that come to us at this stage are Divine thoughts like inspirations. If we want to think, we can think, if we don’t want to think, we need not think. This is the state which we call, in Sanskrit language, as the fourth dimension awareness, (turiya). This turiya state sometimes starts establishing itself after awakening for hardly a few seconds, then it goes on increasing and a person can achieve complete peace within his own mind.

First we try to enter a boat from the ocean. In case we get into the boat and we know how to swim, we can jump back into the waves and save many others who are frightened of getting drowned. This is the second state in which we achieve a state which is called “doubtless awareness”, where there is no doubt about oneself. One is fully self confident and can awaken the Kundalini of others, can cure others and can stand on one’s own position of turiya without getting disturbed by the surroundings. This state is called as “doubtless awareness” (nirvikalpa samadhi) where one has no doubts about oneself or about the divinity that is working through the being.

Moreover, the all-pervading Divine force is at work. Once we are connected with that force, it protects us. This Divine power is the ocean of knowledge, is the ocean of miracles, the ocean of bliss and the ocean of love, it is the ocean of compassion, but above all, it is the ocean of forgiveness.

So to achieve proper ascent, one should forgive everyone without thinking about that person. That is, you have to say in your heart “I forgive everyone”, at least three times. When you say that, you should not think about those people whom you have to forgive, because thinking about them itself will give you a headache, so the best thing is in general to say: “I forgive everyone”, at least three times, every day. Because whether you forgive or you don’t forgive, you don’t do anything, but if you don’t forgive, then you play into wrong hands. As it is, you have been playing into the hands of wrong people and torturing yourself while they are enjoying themselves. So now, it is high time that you get out of this burden. For that, you have to say: “I forgive everyone”.

The second thing is, that you have to also understand, that if you have been seeking the truth, you cannot be guilty of anything. Because of the desire of seeking, all your guilt has finished, so there is no need to feel guilty or to confess anything to anyone. Once you are seeking reality you have already got rid of all the guilts that have built up in your mind. Most of the guilts are artificial. There is no need to have any guilt in your mind, but people carry it on as some sort of a fashion. The guilt is of the past and as the past doesn’t exist, one should not bother about it. Whatever mistakes you have committed, you should have faced them when they were executed, but now it is of no use, bothering about those guilts which were of the past. Thus, please say to yourself, “forgive myself”. You have to say: “I forgive myself”, because this Divine power of love is the ocean of forgiveness. So you have to forgive yourself fully and not waste your time any more about feeling guilty. If you do not forgive yourself, then the centre on the left Vishuddhi gets caught up and such a jeopardy of this centre takes place that it gets completely closed and the Kundalini cannot rise. There are people who feel very guilty even about their forefathers who have committed a lot of wrong towards others.

Secondly, the Agnya Chakra on the optic chiasma gets into a mess if you do not forgive yourself or others. This centre is very constricted. If you don’t forgive yourself or others, then this centre cannot be opened, and it is very essential that this centre should somehow open for Kundalini to pierce through. Once you forgive everyone without thinking about them, you feel very much lighter. But, when the Kundalini rises through the Agnya Chakra, she will make you thoughtlessly aware. So please forgive yourself and everyone, without thinking about them, three times a day every morning and every evening before sleeping. It is like a prayer.

When you stand in your present, you are surprised how peaceful you become. There is no disturbance or turmoil in the back of your mind and you enjoy that peaceful state as a great blessing of joyful existence. For establishing this peace within oneself, one has to try, every day, to become thoughtlessly aware. Those things which are created by nature or by human beings, which are beautiful, will automatically make you thoughtlessly aware. You will watch everything without any thoughts entering into you, but the joy of that creation which acts like an abstract energy filling into your being and you feel extremely joyous subjectively and not as a result of any objective or deliberate reaction from the mind.

The world needs people who have been bestowed with this peaceful, blissful joy in their hearts, who, later on, make others the same way and form a planned or organised society, or a group, or a new race, which enjoys this peaceful state of being. In this peaceful state we are not running away from the society, we are not denouncing anybody, but we are now like a baked pot which cannot absorb any marks on it any more, because it is fully baked. So we become. very mature people of awareness which cannot be dented, which cannot be spoiled, which cannot be tarnished by any other negative force. Thus, the establishment of global peace can only come through people who have achieved this state in modern times, which is very special and I call it a blossom time. In the Bible, it is described as the last judgement, also in the Koran it is called as Kiyama (the resurrection time). Otherwise, it is artificial to believe that human beings forming a group or an organisation that can create this global peace. The time has come for many people to get their Self-Realisation and I am sure the day will come when these newly born, in the realm of Divine love, will spread peace and also create global peace.

With the light of the Spirit, the human beings get rid of all artificial and false things which haunt the human mind. Firstly, fear disappears from the mind of the seekers. For example, when we go through very bad traffic, we are worried about it, but if we are sitting on top of a mountain watching the traffic, we would not be disturbed by it. In the same way we watch the turmoil and strife which is in our mind and we do not get distracted at all Thus, the fear that we have of death, of any other thing, just disappears and we live an eternal life in the present. We enjoy every moment of our life and try to give this joy to everyone.

It is very important to note that the first centre Mooladhara, meaning the support of the root, lies below the Kundalini. This chakra acts on the pelvic plexus which has the function of excretion: One of the functions is sex. As this chakra is below the Kundalini, it does not play any part in the ascent. On the contrary, this chakra stops all its activity at the time when the Kundalini rises to give the union (yoga) with the Divine power and we become innocent like children.

As the Kundalini rises into the third part, next to the Nabhi Chakra, we become absolutely righteous. This area, which we call as the ocean of illusion, is enlightened by ten principles of mastery. The great masters have created these ten centres of commandments which are enlightened and we become holy. There is no need to be strict in one’s behaviour. We automatically become really spiritual. Like an egg becomes the bird, we are born twice. In Sanskrit a Yogi or the one who knows Brahma, meaning the all-pervading power, is called Dwija and a bird is also called Dwija, meaning twice born. There were Abraham and Moses and all the ten primordial masters who have been born again and again on this earth. Zoroastra has been born five times and also so many of these were born in different places in different countries to guide the people to take to religious life to establish the necessary balance for the ascent.

But talking about religious life, it does not work out. By reading scriptures we get lost in the web of words (Shabda Jalam). We innately feel the existence of universal pure religion within ourselves after awakening when the Kundalini rises into this part called the ocean of illusion (Bhavasagara). When this centre is fully enlightened and established in spirituality, we become automatically righteous. We respect our value system, we become moral, we become honest, non-violent and we become innately compassionate. All these qualities start becoming so evident within ourselves that we change and get transformed into a new being who is extremely -righteous and who is like a saint. To such a person, there is no need to talk about the “do’s and the don’ts”.

When this centre of Swadishthan, which is the second centre, is enlightened, then our creativity increases tremendously. We have had many artists, musicians, painters, builders, architects, and all kinds of creative people who have suddenly become world famous and have achieved a very high level of creativity. This Swadishthan centre, on the left hand side, gives us the knowledge about the Divine laws, how they act and how we have to harness these powers within us and how we should use them for the benevolence of oneself and the benevolence of others. This Swadishthan Chakra comes out of the Nabhi Chakra, which is in the centre of your navel. The SwadishthanChakra moves like a lotus in this ocean on all sides. And when it comes towards the left side, it nourishes the left side by destroying the negative forces of the left side. These are created by the wrong practices in spirituality. This is the centre which is for pure Divine Knowledge (Shuddha Vidya). The Divine Laws, their working and their use are all human problems which are manifested in one’s central nervous system and automatically one becomes capable of solving these problems for one’s self or for others. But when it moves to the right side, it gets directly connected to the Pingala Nadi, by which it transforms the human intelligence into a very wise balanced awareness. Many children who were not doing very well in their class, were also sent away by teachers out of school, but after getting realisation they became very good students and started standing first in their class. Many students got scholarships as well. Most of the boys who come to Sahaja Yoga obtain first class and sometimes first class first position. It sharpens the brain, it makes it intelligent, much more than normal, but it doesn’t create a cunning aspect of intelligence or the arrogant ego. On the contrary, such students or people who have been helped with Sahaja Yoga become extremely humble, kind and compassionate.

One has to be cautious in life not to go to extremes. But a modern life is such that people go to extremes until they get some sort of a reaction to that. You see so many people sitting in the sun after one o’clock, after lunch, sometimes for hours together and that time the sun affects their skin. They can get skin cancer but they continue to sit like that until they get skin cancer. Every habit seems to be of the same nature. For example, the Grand Prix is one of the worst sports one could think of, where somebody actually has to die to please the audience, just like the Spanish bull fighting. Now the women of Spain have taken to bull fighting. So the futuristic people who are really indulging in such extreme behaviour on the right hand side really become subject to many diseases like liver problems, severe constipation, asthma, massive heart attacks, paralysis, diabetes, blood cancer, kidney non-functioning, etc.

All problems created by extreme behaviour on the right hand side or on the left hand side can be corrected by bringing the play of the Kundalini because, when the rises, she pulls the attention towards the centre. Thus, a person becomes a very balanced personality and doesn’t go to extremes into anything. moreover, all the ego-oriented habits drop out. Also, habits which exist because of conditionings disappear. So person becomes a free personality and he sees himself in the past and laughs at himself.

Another thing that happens to a person who gets his awakening is that he forgets all the artificial barriers of life, like racialism, nationalism, communism, capitalism, and all “-isms” drop out and he becomes a part of the universal religion and universal kingdom of Divine love.

The universal religion is innately enlightened and is the expression of the inner being which conquers all the doubts in our mind and makes a clear picture of what is wrong in our systems, our family, our country, and our world, why is there no peace? It understands the reason and it does not identify itself with anyone of the conditionings of any “isms” as one is not a slave. It is the light of the Spirit which is the reflection of God Almighty in our heart and is absolutely free and is all-knowing. In this light we understand that there is something wrong within us, within our families, within our societies, within our countries and that is why we are suffering. For example, I met a lady in Switzerland whose child was a victim of cot death. She had become a full fledged drunkard because of her grief. I asked her how her child died and after great deliberations, she told me: “The baby was two months old and was sleeping in the next room in the night while we both, my husband and I used to sleep in the other room. One early morning I suddenly discovered that the baby was lying dead in her cot. This really shocked me. I fainted with grief”

That was the first time I learnt that in the West the parents sleep away from small babies. Their children sleep in other rooms even when they are hardly a year old. If the child is crying out of hunger or thirst or out of some discomfort or gets suffocated, both parents are away in the other room without any clothes because sex life is most important. She told me: “We sleep without clothes so we keep the children out of the room.” Firstly, I could not understand why in the biting cold of Switzerland, couples sleep without any clothes. For a baby of two months, what does it matter if the mad parents do not wear any clothes. She told me: “This is our culture”. This sex oriented culture has taken the lives of so many small children who may not know about these cultured parents before they are born. Why were they born in countries where parents do not want children? The way the men and women think, talk and indulge in sex is really sickening. They get exhausted and become impotent. With their sex life they are like eunuchs in India, who only talk about sex. After Self Realisation, parents change. They are very attentive and loving towards their children. The sex, money and power oriented culture becomes spirit oriented: very beautiful, loving, sharing and compassionate, forgiving, and joyous family life-styles emerge. Because in the light of the Spirit, they see the darkness of this ugly culture. They take to a very sensible balanced and moral sex life. Most of the children born to them are born realised and are very intelligent, obedient, very loving and wise.

On the central path is placed, behind the sternum bone in the spinal chord, the fourth centre, which is called the Heart Centre – “Anahatha”. It has two other subsidiary centres, one on the left, one on the right. The central centre of the heart is called Anahatha Centre because the sound in the heart of “lub dub” is created without any percussion. Though it has a left side and a right side. This centre is very important, because until the age of twelve years, this centre creates, in the sternum bone, the antibodies which are then circulated in the whole body and they are under the remote control of the sternum. Whenever one feels frightened or is under attack, this sternum bone starts pulsating and giving messages to the antibodies, which are called as “Ganas” in Sanskrit. These antibodies fight the disease or the attacker. The centre heart in the central position is the one for our immune system. When we commit sins against the Primordial Mother, that is, indulging in wrong type of perverted sex habits, alcohol, drugs, internal stress from anxiety and fear of oppression, then this centre goes into jeopardy, making our immune system weak thereby losing it’s power to help fight the diseases of the person.

On the left hand side, the centre of heart looks after the heart itself. This is the centre where God Almighty is reflected as the Spirit, which actually, later on after realisation, enlightens the attention. This centre is caught up when people exert too much physically and mentally and also drink heavily. Thus, this heart goes down into a kind of a position where anything can trigger the heart attack. Especially in young age, if people play too much tennis or any such games, they become the victims of massive fatal heart attacks. This is connected with the problems of the liver, of the second centre which we call Swadishthan. The futuristic people have dry natures or hot-tempered aggressive natures. They become prone to a heart attack which is massive even later in life. This type of people who are vulgar, crooked, cunning and of vile nature are always in danger of massive heart attacks.

The left heart is connected to our worldly mother, the right heart is connected with relationship we have with our worldly father. This centre gets into trouble if the father is dead early or has left the son or daughter in childhood or ill-treats the son or daughter early in life. On the contrary, if the son and daughter disrespect the father and are those who commit sins against the Father, God almighty, by thieving, cheating, deceiving, telling lies, violence, killing, etc. All such activities put the right heart in great trouble.

Above the heart centre is the centre which we call Vishuddhi, in the spinal chord, above the depression between the two cervical bones. The Vishuddhi centre stands collectively for communication. This centre when too active much on the right side, results in the person becoming extremely arrogant and aggressive in his speech and behaviour. Such a person can become a good orator, but is completely dry in his address. Such a person, who is suffering from over-activity of the right side Vishuddhi Chakra, may use very harsh words, raise his voice like a roaring lion and dominate people with his hard language. There are many other physical symptoms which start with a hoarse voice leading up to no sound in the voice. The left side of this Vishuddhi Chakra goes into jeopardy when people feel guilty. Such a person becomes very shy, timid and sly. The centre of this Vishuddhi Chakra is the one which when one is in trouble lacks communication and the person cannot enjoy collectivity and cannot sing. Too much indulgence in feeling guilty can cause angina of the heart. If that is not caused, cervical cancer may develop. If this centre is out of order and there are some other centres combined with it then a very complicated medical case is created beyond the realm of doctors.

There is another shoot of Vishuddhi between the eye-brows called the “Hamsa Chakra”. This chakra is for the power of discrimination. When enlightened this gives Divine discretion. When overloaded with decision-making without discretion, one can develop sinus or a shooting headache on one side. When- this centre is caught up, one should understand that one should not eat things that can spoil the throat, like sour things or things which are very sharp on the tongue.

The centre of Agnya is a centre at the crossing point of optic chiasma in the brain. This centre has got two petals and, one governs the pineal body and the other, the pituitary. The pineal stores all the conditionings as super ego while the pituitary creates ego. The two balloons of ego and superego are placed in the opposite direction by this crossing at the optic chiasma, where the Agnya Chakra is placed. Thus the right handed person has his ego balloon on the left side of the brain, while the left handed person has his conditionings and superego balloon on the right side. If a person is paralysed on the right side then, we should know that the left side of the brain is affected. I am not sure if this is accepted by medical science. When you think too much we get into problems with this centre on the right side, where the ego goes on bloating into bigger and bigger balloons on the right side of the brain and covers our complete discretion. The conditioning that we have from childhood goes on mounting on the left side and creates problems. But if one has visited the wrong type of religious people and so called fake gurus or cults who try to mesmerise people, one can become fanatical. These conditionings have no truth in them, but as we are groomed into them, we just accept them. As we grow, these conditionings also grow and sometimes they render very bad effects on our psyche.

Now the last centre is the limbic area. It is topped by the fontanele bone area, which is the area for our last breakthrough, Brahma Randhra. This centre – Sahasrara is most important with one thousand petals, meaning that there are one thousand nerves. When enlightened, they look like one thousand flames burning very silently and quietly with different colours. There is a big controversy about the number of these petals. This makes the understanding of Sahaja Yoga impossible for many doctors who are argumentative because of their limited knowledge. In the Bible, is said that: “I will appear before you like tongues of flame”. Of course, it has been described in many books in Indian scriptures as well. When Kundalini crosses over the seventh centre, she pierces through the fontanelle bone area which again becomes a little softer, as it was in childhood, and this Kundalini joins, or becomes one, and unites with the all-pervading power of Divine love. As a result, we start feeling the cool breeze of the Holy Ghost on our finger tips, later on our hands, and also out of our fontanelle bone area. This is. the first time we feel the all- pervading power of Divine love.

People move from one side to another side like a swing, or we can say, like a pendulum. But they cannot stay in the centre. That is only possible when the Kundalini establishes itself completely in connection with the all-pervading power of Divine love. As a result of this extreme movement on both the sides, we create problems for ourselves and for our society.

On our fingertips, we can feel our own centres and the centres of others, as shown in the figure. If we know how to cure your own centres through your self-knowledge, we can also cure the centres of others. Automatically our human awareness achieves collective consciousness by which we know about the Chakras of others. Now we speak the language of Chakras and understand others and their problems by the Chakras. The extreme right side is for our extreme futuristic personality or for the collective supraconscious and the extreme left side is for our collective subconscious. In the present, when we ascend through the piercing of the Kundalini into all-pervading Divine Love, we achieve the realm of Super Consciousness.