While going on the morning walk, I was thinking what exactly a road is. They are so common these days, and so beautifully made, we have stopped wondering what they really are. And most of us don't know that there was a time when we had to go through the jungle, through the desert, on our feet, in carts and also over the seas to go from one place to another place. So what is a road? It is a flat strip, very nicely made, over which we can move fast and easily and reach our destination safely in the shortest possible time, whatever be the terrain that we pass through; we may pass through jungles, up and down mountains, over rivers, because a bridge is nothing but a road across a river.
And that is how Sahaj Marg is to be looked at, as a road that the Master has laid for us. We can say it is a royal road through life. I would like to try and discuss with you today that a journey is nothing but travel from the starting point to the destination and all that we see on the way is nothing but scenery, some good scenery, some bad, some difficult, some easy. Similarly life should be looked upon as nothing but a field of events and circumstances through which we pass, and if there is an easy road, accessible to all, that life can have as little impact or difficulty for us as when we motor on the autobahn from one place to the other.
So what is life? Because some people say, "Life is difficult," some people say, "Life is easy," some people say, "Life is enjoyable." Life can be all this, but life need not be any of this. Life is difficult or easy depending on whether you walk across it or run across it. And wisdom says take the easiest way through it. And the difficulty starts when we get
out of
our cars and start wandering around, taking a swim, plunging into the depths. Then, we find that life is a mixture.
So I prefer to look upon life as nothing but events and circumstances, and if you see the sameness of life that human beings seem to undergo, it almost looks as if we are all passing through a fixed piece of territory, the same roads, the same restaurants, the same trees, the same lakes and mountains. Some pass through it fast, some through it slowly, some relax, for some the car breaks down, and they have a lot of problems, too. So it is not enough just to have the road, the vehicle must also be safe and dependable, and of course, accidents can happen any time; so we go through it, and we must see that we drive safely. And nowadays we know how we drive from one place to the other fast, we don't look to this side or that side, and that is the way we should go through life, too. You have seen schoolboys sometimes, in villages, going to school. In India they walk, of course, sometimes five, six kilometres. Some never reach school because there are the mango trees, the tamarind trees, every little distraction stops them on the way, and most children reach school only after lunch time; but inevitably when coming home, they rush fast, because it will be dark. So that is another lesson for us, you see, that if we are going to be distracted by every small thing which is on the way, we are never going to reach our destination. So if we look at life as a fixed scene of events, circumstances, hurdles, then
we will see that they really have no attraction. It is we who endow them with attraction. Nature has nothing beautiful or ugly, as I said yesterday. That is why you can see sometimes four people traveling together in one car: one becomes crazy when he sees a lake, another becomes crazy when he sees a mountain, the fourth becomes crazy when he sees a restaurant, etc. Which of these are really attractive nobody can say, because it is how we react to these scenes that makes it attractive, or non-attractive.
So remember one thing, that all this craziness about beauty, and lovely things, and nature, it really does not exist. Of course the scientists say, "Well, it is all atoms, and atoms are nothing but electric charges." So in the eyes of science, nothing really exists. But we say, "Oh! Look! You know, such a beautiful girl, how can you say she does not exist? She is there, and very beautiful." So how can I deny the existence of such a beautiful thing, or is it attractiveness? The scientist says, "Yes, yes, but you know, it's just a bundle of energy." But this fellow won't give up, he says, "What lovely energy in any case!..." Now comes a third man who says, "This is beautiful? You must be crazy." He does not deny the existence of the girl, he is not bothered about the science which says she isn't there. To him she is not beautiful. Now what is she really? So this is what the ancient wisdom says, "beauty is in the eyes of the beholder." If we accept this as true, a beautiful object exists only for one who sees it as beautiful.
So what is real beauty? There is no such thing. Therefore there is no such thing as attractiveness. It is attractive to the one who is attracted by it. Similarly food, it is tasty to the one who finds it tasty. This brings us to the consideration of the fact that nothing in these terms of value exists in an object, except what we put into them. Let us deal with a subject like temptation for example! The normal tendency is to say, "Oh, so and so tempted me" or "Such and such a thing tempted me," but wisdom says, "the temptation was in me," in the form of samskaras which had been already created by an earlier action of mine or thought of mine, and which now responds in some mysterious way to another object which it finds attractive. Now if this is a fact, one who has advanced spiritually, whose tendencies, whose samskaras have been cleaned off, he will be able to develop within himself the ability to see or perceive totally objectively. So you understand that. The second thing is for such a person there can be no such thing like attraction or repulsion, nor can there be such a thing as temptation, because there is nothing in him to react to anything outside. See, we are all familiar with the phenomenon of magnetism, for instance. The iron reacts to the magnet. Similarly we have the phenomenon of resonance; where there are two strings, when one is plucked the other will vibrate, only if it is at the same pitch. There also the same principle applies, you see.
Therefore we find the old proverb, "Birds of a feather flock together." So there is an inner response to a thing outside. The response is within us. We must understand this and accept this very clearly. Now on one side you have the dead man who sees nothing, who responds to nothing, and we are very familiar with that. A corpse cannot possibly be tempted even by a Helen of Troy, for instance.
But when we talk of these things, that attractiveness will go, temptation will stop, in a sense we become afraid. Because the human being is attracted to the idea of pleasure and enjoyment, and he says, "What will life be if I don't respond in some way to these things?" But there Master says, "If you respond, don't forget you cannot have control over the response, because the response is because of a samskara, and to say, "Oh no! I will respond to it with a very controlled sequence of events, you see!" — it cannot possibly be done. It is like a man saying, "I will set fire to this big petroleum tank with only one single match stick. It does not matter, because it is only a match stick." So the instrument may be a single match stick, but what is going to burn is a whole petrol installation. That is why very often we find we are bewildered, because we start things in a small way, and they gather momentum, and very soon we have no control over the events or over ourselves. But human beings have very little perception in this matter, and even though we have done small things so often which have led to big, terrible tragedies also, we still behave as if we were little children playing with match sticks.
So the first wisdom of the Master is to say, "My dear friend, beware of initiating an event, because once it is started off, it has its own way, it has its own life." Therefore the wise men don't act. That is why all philosophies speak of a passive acceptance of what is happening to you, because, in some way, when we interfere with these things by an act of our will, a third force is introduced. So you can say it is like an experiment which a scientist is doing in a laboratory. Now suppose a third man comes and introduces some new element into it, and the scientist does not know about it, what is going to happen to the experiment? It takes its own way, nobody knows what it is. So my Master always said, "Our life is our samskaras unfolding in front of us. That is, we carry our life within us. It is not outside." Please understand this very carefully.
You know we have this common saying, "I am going out to enjoy life." It shows very gross misunderstanding of what life is. On the contrary, it is our samskaras spreading our life in front of us as we walk on, and you can consider this spreading out as a sort of a tape which is punched with holes, like you have for your telex machine, for instance! And based on the program punched into that, we respond to what is outside us. So we create our life as we go through it, our pleasures, our sadnesses, our tragedies, our ecstasies, they are created with our own program carried within ourselves. They don't exist outside. This is the most fundamental teaching of Sahaj Marg. Therefore Master says, Babuji Maharaj has said, "Change the program, life is different." Now in these days of computers this should be very easy to understand for the Western mind, because all that you have to do is to take another floppy disk and insert a new program! So easy!! Isn't it? In the East we may not be able to understand this, because we are unfamiliar with these concepts of the computer program, and the ability to change the program. But here in the West every child can do it. Now this is the mysterious foolishness of the human mind; why can't we translate this ability to change our lives ourselves? See, there is one — what shall I say — beautiful aspect if you look at it from the program aspect. It's the beauty of the program that it can beat the programmer itself. You know, for instance, you can program a chess game, and even if the programmer is a competent programmer, and
also simultaneously a grandmaster of chess, he can program a game which will beat him every time he plays it.
So this shows that once we make a program, we are no longer masters of that program. That is why we find ourselves unable to change the events in our lives, the circumstances in our lives, because as long as this program is within us, we have to play the game according to it. So how to change our lives? Not by changing jobs, wives, houses; this is not possible, you see. In the West, we have tried all these combinations, but life has not changed.
So what does Master say? In his usual benevolence, in his enormous mercy, charity, he says, "Give me the program, I will change it for you." Now unfortunately it is not a disk that I can put into an envelope and mail to him. It is within me, it cannot be taken out. So spirituality says, "Go to your MASTER and SURRENDER at his feet, because he is the only person who has the key to unlock your programmed chest and remove it and change it for you, reprogram it for you."
The Master says, "Do you want a change of program or do you want something which will not have a program at all?" Because he is a Master, he can make it work without a disk. But we are still used to these things, all these normal human tendencies, and then we have the situation where an abhyasi says, "Babuji, can I enjoy life for ten years more and then come back to you?" But then we must realise again a program has been put into us, and again we lose control over it, because the program takes over.
So what is this freedom which we think we are having? We all claim we are free. We can go where we like, do what we want, enjoy what we choose. Now it is my suggestion that these are all false. There is no freedom at all. Because even though I may be a slave of nothing else, yet I am a slave of my program, and it guides me inexorably the way it wants. Now, unfortunately, here we cannot blame an IBM or an Apple, you see and say they created the wrong program, because here the programmer is ourselves, myself. So normally we should be able to do the reprogramming ourselves.
This is what happened in the old days when Sahaj Marg did not exist, and we had to work for thousands of years, under most difficult circumstances and, in some way, try to remove this program without having any effects. I already told you that it took forty-five years to move from the first point to the second point by self-effort of the highest order, and that was only the first step. So, given our program and our own self to operate it, it would seem that there is almost no possibility of changing the program by ourselves. So it becomes inevitable that we accept the idea of external assistance, and that is what the Master is. He is one who helps us to change our program, or to erase it altogether, and says, "Your program will be the same as my program. Then your life will be parallel to mine. You'll walk the same road that I am walking, you'll go to the same destination to which I am going, which means nothing but that we can walk hand in hand together to the destination." So this is the enormous benefit of accepting a guide, a master, because no more have I an inexorable program to follow. He takes me on. But to do this, we must
be prepared to want to become like him, and to like or accept the destination to which he is taking us.
Most human beings don't seem to be attracted by this thought. Therefore we are left with the only other alternative, to follow our own life! There is no third way, you see. Because many people ask, "Can we not have a balance between spirituality and our own life?" ... They find the word 'balance' very attractive, but here I don't know what it means. It is like trying to operate the computer with two different programs running at the same time; I don't know if it's possible, because then all predictability will be lost, and we don't know where we are going.
So why am I saying this? There are only two choices before us. To be as we are, content with what we are going to be, following the way we have created ourselves to a destination which does not exist, because it is going round and round in circles — because Sahaj Marg says, "As you go the same path again and again, the same samskaras are going to deepen more and more, and nothing is going to change, except that you probably live the same life more and more intensely every time." No destination — it's like going on one of those giant wheels in fairs which children ride, and like a wheel, there is no exit point until you come back to the starting point. Then you have to wait, you see! Once a life is started you have to wait until it ends, when a possibility of a change perhaps might exist. This we find in parables, you know, mythological parables dealing with death, where the soul crosses a river, loses its memory of the past, exists for some time somewhere, and when the time comes for it to return, it is offered a choice of what it would like to take for the next life. Some parables say, not all, some parables, that the mysterious thing is, we choose the same thing again and again! That is why death does not erase samskaras. Many people say, "Oh, if I had another chance, I could live life differently." Wisdom says, "No," because all that happens in death, or during the life after this life ends, is that it's a period of rest, because the soul is unable to bear the bhoga of the samskaras any more. This body is cast off. The soul rests, relaxes, gains strength and comes into this life again, trying to work off the samskaras once again. Very nice!
So life is the second chance, not death! But as we live once again, we are adding more samskaras ... so the inevitability of renewing the same cycle again and again. This cannot possibly be denied or broken except by external circumstances which says, "Stop this nonsense, get hold of this wheel." But then if you cling to the wheel like children and say, "No, I like it so much!" the Master says, "Don't forget, once you are above the ground, you have no choice, again you have to complete the whole circle."
So the moral is that once you are in life, there exists no force in the universe which can