Treasures Along the Path

Aligning_Self_Will_with_Divine_Will
Wed, Jun 04, 2025 7:27AM • 18:02
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Divine Will, Self-Will, Guru, Unconditional Obedience, Intellectual Pride, Devotion, Discrimination, Free Will, Karma, Nirvana, Satchitananda, Infinite Bliss, Spiritual Path, Compassion, Intuition.
SPEAKERS
Speaker 1

Speaker 1 00:00
Om Namah, Shivay Om Namah, Shivay Om Namah, Shivay Om Namah, Shivay Om Namah, Shivay Om Namah, Shivay Om Namah, Shivay Om Namah, Shivay Om Namah, Shivay om, Namah Shivay om, namah, Shivay om, namah, Shivay om, I bow to Shiva I bow to that infinite Lord in all forms, in the form of My guru, and also in your form. Remember when Shiva manifests in you. You may not like it always, but what he destroys in you is your delusions, your shortcomings, your limitations. Ultimately, it's the most beautiful aspect of God, because it takes you out of a lesser into a greater. Pralaya and the destruction of all things seems like a terrible thing, my home, my country, my land, my planet, my universe, everything gone, and what you have, however, is infinite bliss. This is the goal of all life, and to find that goal. One thing that is very important is to give up your self will I want this. It's that I with that thought of want circling around it like a vortex, like a whirlpool, that I needs to go now, when I met my guru, he said he wanted me to give him my unconditional obedience. I had never even heard the word guru. The word guru one week before I met him, I read Autobiography of a Yogi. It completely changed my life. But to have anybody tell me that he asked of me my unconditional obedience. I tell you, I was so desperate to be accepted as his disciple that i i It was horrible to find some condition that maybe I couldn't fulfill. I wanted to be completely honest, and I said, But sir, what if I think you're wrong sometime? He reassured me. He said, I will never ask anything of you, that God does not tell me to ask of you. I accepted that, and I gave him my unconditional obedience, and sometimes it wasn't particularly easy, especially when he seemed to be asking of me things that seemed to go against my own well being. For example, He kept telling me to not be intellectual so much to develop devotion. What he was telling me to do was not give up my intelligence. He was telling telling me to give up my intellectual pride. That's altogether different. But sometime after a few months, he began asking me to write articles for our magazine. And I thought, well, here I'm trying to develop devotion. Why should I have to engage my intellect? And I'd been working in the garden, that at least was fine I use my body, but it upset me to have to use my intellect. And I questioned him on this, and his answer was very unusual and very unexpected. Living for God is martyrdom. Well, okay, I accepted it. I accepted him completely. If anybody said anything to me it seemed out of line with truth. I would always say, is that what my what Master said, if the person answered, Yes, I would accept it. So in this case, too, I accepted it. But it was a little thinking before I could understand I did accept it in the sense that I did write articles, and they did appear in the old magazines. And yet I finally realized that what he was saying is, don't rob from one side of your nature to feed another, feed both of them. You should use your discrimination. You should use your intellect, use it rightly. And the way to use it rightly is to develop devotion also. But God will not come to stupid people. You have to have brains of some kind. You have to have discrimination, otherwise, your devotion can go just as eagerly, plunging down wrong trails. It can take you into great delusions to follow your heart can be a great mistake, because the heart can go up or down in its feelings. And if you will go with the heart and let it take you out into Maya saying it just feels so good, you'll just find yourself having to relearn many lessons all over again. When the feelings go up and discrimination comes in and says, Wait a minute that that may be fun, but it's not right. Night, you've got to have both developed. So he was not saying, to starve my nature. This is important. I can't say that beyond that, really, I ever doubted the importance of following him. But sometimes it did take an effort. That was okay. One time he told me that because I had not eaten supper that night, and I was over at his place. He was more aware of it at the time, because they came back and told him I had refused supper. He told me that you must eat, and I tried to kid him out of it. He wouldn't budge. He said, you've become a vegetarian, but your body is still used to a normal, so called normal American diet. He said that if you don't eat regularly and have some proteins, at least of little cottage cheese, paneer, as you'd say, and lettuce in the evening, in your later years, your body will suffer for it. And so I did follow his his directive. After trying to jolly him out of it, you might say, but I took it still very seriously, and when he said that, I did stick to it, I say, Oh, this because so many people come to the guru think, well, I have my own will, And this is something that Boon himself. A brother disciple said to me one day. This is saying number or conversation number 334 Boone said, I don't feel it would be right to submit completely to Master's will. It's important for me also to develop my own will. Otherwise, how would I How would it be called free? I quoted these words to the master later on, without mentioning Boone's name, to get his comments on the subject. Boone's idea seemed to me completely twisted. The master understood instantly to whom I was referring. He marveled, but as long as he is bound by moods and desires, he is not free. I don't ask people to suppress their own will. Those who do what I say, however, find an increase, not a decrease, in their freedom. For what I show them is God's will, freedom comes from tuning your will to the dictates of wisdom. Sister ganamata used to run up and down doing my will. One day, a few of the more rebellious sorts said to her, why do you always do what he says? You should express your own will? Don't you think? Sister answered that, it's a little late for me to change. She was an old woman by then, and I must say, I have never been so happy in my life as I have been since coming here. The master chuckled. I never bothered her again. Well, Master said that when I before I came to my Guru, I used to follow my own whims and desires. When I attained my will to my guru's God. Why? Wisdom guided will, then I found my freedom, and this is what we're talking about. Free will doesn't mean doing what you like. Free will means being able to do what is right for you. Somebody may be perfectly he may have never taken drugs in his life. He may just be. He may feel I'm I don't have anything influencing me, and I would like to take a drug, fine, but there may come a time when he finally can't give up taking drugs. That's not so fine. I remember, I was in Provincetown on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. I was 20 years old at the time, and there was a group of us, about 20 or more, of us in a room, and the one young, one young man from New York, was pushing marijuana, and he was trying to get everybody to drink it and smoke it, and he was saying it doesn't affect anybody. It's not habit forming, and it's very blissful and all this. And he gave a good talk. Somehow I felt there was something wrong. It's as if there was some sort of evil entity in the room. I wasn't on the path yet, and I had no reason for saying I didn't like it, but I just wouldn't try it. There does come a time when your own karma prevents you from doing certain things that, in the long run, could be harmful to you, even though you've not, even though you're in a new body and haven't learned those things, you don't have to try everything, but much of that understanding comes with you in this life. You know certain things you come very soon, after just a little bit of suffering, to understand that this is a this is a veil of suffering this world that if I can suffer once, I can suffer a million times. This is what brought Buddha to the spiritual path. Seeing a sick man, an old man, a dead man, in each one, he was told by his charioteer, this is the human lot. Everybody is subject to them. And he thought, with such colossal disadvantages, how can anybody enjoy living in this body? And he determined to seek God. And finally he Well, he wanted to find the truth. Is how the story is told. And that is how he came to sit under the people tree, the Bodhi tree. And I was at that spot in Bucha, and there He sat down and wrapped his fingers on the ground. Yeah. I mean, he said he swore, as long as I have not yet solved the mystery of life, I will never move from here. And at the end of 40 days, Mara, Satan appeared to him in all sorts of seductive forms. And Buddha looked on it calmly, and he rapped on his with his knuckle on the ground three times he said, Mara, I have conquered you. It all disappeared and he went into nirvana, which was more than nirvana. It was the absolute bliss. Who, who has nothing, would want to share that with people? People with all their suffering, at least have an equal amount of pleasure. They have neither pleasure nor suffering. What would be the advantage of that to sort of become totally unconscious and unaware? That is not the goal of life, that's somebody's misunderstanding along the way, Nirvana means that you overcome all these qualities that keep you bound. But in Nirvana, as ratashi, my guru's chief disciple, he said there were three days where he was in complete darkness. He didn't want anything, he didn't dislike anything, but he was in nothingness. This was the state of nirvana. And then gradually, out of the darkness, a little light appeared, and that light came closer and closer and closer, and he saw one of the gurus after the other, until finally he merged in the infinite. But the Satchitananda that Shankaracharya explained is the goal of life, this is a mistake which Buddhists have made. Buddha did not he could not have been unconscious, for example, and have compassion. Compassion comes out of being conscious. Kindness comes out of being conscious, bliss comes out of being conscious. You don't lose consciousness. What you lose is the ripples of consciousness that disturb the consciousness of your union with God. Ultimately, the goal of life is Satchitananda union with the infinite bliss, ever existing, ever conscious, and as my guru added, ever new bliss. Now, to find that bliss, you must get rid of this thought that I want and I will. And don't think that you have a free will just because somehow you have enough money to do it Do as you like. That's not free will. Free Will does not mean being able to do something totally unpredictable. The life of Buddha was predicted. The life of Jesus was predicted. The lives of many great masters were predicted before they were born, and they followed those lines. The death of Jesus on the cross was predicted long before he was born, and he himself said that he had the free will not to go through that experience, but it was the Divine Will that he do, that he do so, and so he did so. Great masters do not go against that Divine Will. They don't do what they want. They do what God wants through them. My guru always acted according to what God wanted. My guru never asked anything about this, but what others what the divine within him told them to do. Now the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And what happened was that when his disciples did follow His will, they found bliss, they found inner freedom, and when they didn't follow His will, they couldn't attain anything. And most of them fell away, and some of them stayed there and were loyal in their way, but they couldn't quite swallow everything that he said. They had their they had their own idea as to what his will was, and they have con gone on saying this is what he wanted, but he said publicly what he wanted, which was exactly the opposite of what they're saying. So in fact, we must understand that the Guru's will is not always the way we see it. We must not only presume that we've understood his will. We must try inwardly to attune ourselves any strong idea that you have that makes. You think that, that you know His will still always have the sense, the common sense, to ask yourself, Am I sure any thought that you have hold it up to your higher self, you will find if you do that, there will come, for example, there was a letter I felt that I ought to write to somebody. I felt that she needed this letter. But when I wrote it, I asked Master, is this right? And I felt there was, there was a restlessness there. I felt no better not. It's important to understand whatever felt you have offer it up to God, or if you have the great blessing of having a guru, then that's God's Will much more actively manifested to you. And if it isn't right, there will be that little restlessness. And I have seen even highly advanced disciples sometimes saying, No, this is his will. When he I know it wasn't his will, he said what his will was, and they've gone against it. Well, that's all right, but they will. They haven't left the path, but they won't come out of it. Yet. It'll take them more lives to get out of it. I say that we should follow absolutely what the guru says. And since you aren't able to ask him in person. You can ask him in meditation, but do if you have devotion to Him, it would be good to select one great master, and this is a great master of our times, one whom I can channel to you in my limited capacity, ask him mentally, whatever you do, search his teachings and see if there's anything that conflicts with it, because some things will seem to then try to go more deeply and see, well, what did you really mean? How is this a contradiction to that? It may not be, because what he said to one person may be right for that person and not right for everyone, when I spoke about these disciples who think that they know His will and that they go against what he said, What he said was said publicly, so it's for everybody. So that's why I say it can't be right even for that person. It should be that we try to score, go over his teachings with a fine tooth comb and seek what the real truth is. Always inwardly, from your intuition, feel what is the response? Is there a certain peace and affirmation, or is there certain restlessness you can develop that just like a muzzle the more you seek to use your intuition, the more you see it will be yours. So always feel, in a sense, as if your life were a cloister, like this song, long I've called you my lord. Long I've called you do that through your life. Joy to you.