Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi  

Cabella Ligure, Italy
8 July 2001  

Introspection, love and purity  

You don’t know how your Mother feels to see so many people who have become, really, gurus, themselves. They have been seeking the Truth in very difficult times. They have been wanting to know what is the Truth. And this difficult time, itself, has served to act upon your minds that, what is happening in this world, whatever we are seeing around us, in the whole world also, there’s something definitely very wrong and we have to go beyond.

In the seeking, one thing is very important: that the person should have a great devotion about it. And also untold miseries you have to go through. Seeking is when within yourself also you are struggling and outside also you find nothing satisfactory. This is how the seeking has a double edge. In that seeking, when you are trying to get to the Truth, it seems [that] it’s a very difficult thing. But you can’t help it, because you are not satisfied with what exists around you.

See the world today – it’s full of strife. All kinds of strifes are there. People are fighting for nothing at all, for land, killing human beings. Land, can it create human beings? They are fighting in a very collective manner, thinking they are doing very great service to humanity.

The thinking today, of human beings, is not at all deep, it’s very superficial, and that’s how you find this world full of turmoil; every day, every minute you can find [this]. They are killing so many human beings, they are torturing, in a very large scale. Formally, of course, the saints were all tortured – tortured by all kinds of different stupid ideas of something being higher and something being lower, something being good, something being bad. Under such ideas they combined together and worked out all kinds of aggression all over the world, all over. Not only that, but also in the families, in the institutions, in the organisations, thinking that they were very right, they were very good, and they tried to aggress other personalities.

So, many people thought [that] it’s better to fight it back, and they started fighting it out collectively. It doesn’t work out. This fighting doesn’t work out, because fighting begets nothing but murders, killing. Thus many people were killed. Buddha talked to people of non-resistance, and there’s history about it – that in one of the great universities in Bihar, when the aggressive people came in, they killed all the saints in the name of aggression, and they all died. Maybe that might have achieved on a very subtler level some sort of punyas, but in this Kali Yuga, it is not going to work out. What is the resistance you can put in against such people? How can you fight them?

It’s an impossible situation to convince anybody that they are aggressive and they are nowhere near the Truth. Because nobody wants to accept such a thing. And so whatever they are trying, all over the world, to convince others of their follies, are completely failing. And thus this struggle, this war-mongering, cannot be cured.

We have to accept that human beings are not at that level to understand what’s wrong with them, they do not want to accept. To them, aggression is the only way they can propound their own goodness. So what is the solution? The solution is that we should give all of them Self-realisation. They should get their Self-realisation, then only things will improve.

Now, you might say that ‛Mother in those days of strife and struggle and fighting?“ It will work out. Circumstances will tell them. Life will be so difficult with all the time weapons hanging on their heads, that they’ll have to also seek the Truth. It has to be done very genuinely.

If they are seeking the Truth, they’ll be surprised that this world is one, all human beings are one, and that is the destiny of human beings. But for that, so many are to be killed, so many are to be destroyed, because they don’t learn a lesson in an easy way.

Now your job is to give them Self-realisation, and change the people. That’s the real thing you have to do as gurus. But what are we doing? We come to Sahaja Yoga with what idea? We are working only on the periphery. Firstly we are worried about ourselves: how we can prosper, how can we become better off? Also there is greed. We do not see ourselves: if we are aggressive, if we are trying to trouble others, if we have wrong ideas about ourselves, how we torture others.

So first of all you have to cleanse yourself and accept your own problems, your own misgivings. These are to be faced. And challenge yourself. What are you doing? You are a Sahaja Yogi, how can you hate someone? How can you trouble someone? How can you torture someone? This is the beginning of introspection, and it’s very important.

I can make out a person who meditates, in the real sense of the word, and the one who just ‘meditates’. You should not deceive yourself. If you are deceiving yourself, then how can you become a guru? For becoming a guru, you have to, first of all, be very honest within yourself, and find out what are you doing, what are you up to, what have you done.

We have six enemies, as I have told you, and we justify all these enemies. We think, ‛It is alright! After all I did this because of this. I had to do it“. Somebody would say, ‛I was poor, so I had to be dishonest.“ Another would say that, ‛I had to tell lies.“ Another would say that, ‛I had to be immoral.“ This is the biggest thing human beings have, is justification! Animals don’t have, they have their fixed ideas, they have their fixed nature. But human beings can do all kinds of wrong things and can justify it. This justification doesn’t help you in your ascent. ‛I did this because of that…“ It never helps you! One should try to introspect and see for yourself what is the justification.

So when you start supporting yourself in doing all kinds of opposite things, how can you rise? How can you ascend? All the time you are trying to descend! So purification within is only possible if you can see yourself clearly. If you can’t see how will you purify? If I can’t see in the mirror, how will I see what’s wrong with my face?

So when you start seeing the Truth, and comparing yourself with that, then only you can clear out yourself. But the identification should be with the Truth. For example, you see in the mirror your face and you find something wrong, you are not identified with that wrong, but you are identified with your own face, and so you clear it out, cleanse it out. In the same way, if you are identified with yourself you cannot get rid of it.

When you are climbing ahead into the new path of righteousness, of goodness, of compassion and love, you should see yourself, watch yourself: what are you doing? Where are you going? How far you are stupid? You should not cheat yourself. Let others cheat you, let others do whatever they like, let others try to kill you, but don’t you kill yourself! You don’t cheat yourself. So you have your self-respect, and you have your self-honour, which you value more than anybody else. And you don’t yield to anything that will spoil your image in the mirror. This is the first step of introspection.

Now what helps for this introspection is your sense of love. Can you love a person who is distressful? One who is aggressive? One who is hot-tempered? One who cheats you? Can you love such a person? You cannot. Then how can you love yourself when you have these qualities, when you do this to yourself? So the first thing is the pure love for yourself, pure love. It’s such a great thing to have pure love. Like, you may like to have a very nice bed to sleep, you may like to have a very beautiful house, you may like to have all the wealth of the world, but all this, will it make you love yourself? If you love your Self, you don’t want anything, because you enjoy your Self! To enjoy your Self is the greatest enjoyment.

So, now you have got Realisation – means you know what you are, you know what beautiful thing you are. When that is so, you should try to love your Self. And when you start loving your Self, you are not bothered about all non-sensical things. Now this pure love is one of the most beautiful things you have which you can do to yourself.

When you are selfish you are not loving your Self, when you are unkind, you are not loving your Self, when you are aggressive, you are not loving your Self, because you are loving all these bad thing. But your Self is pure. It’s absolutely pure and beautiful. And it loves all that is beautiful and good.

So this is the beginning of your Self-realisation: when you realise how important is your Self. You don’t have wrong ideas about yourself, you don’t justify all the wrong things you do, because you understand that it’s a blemish on your Self. Face yourself in the most honest manner and you will be amazed to see how nice it is. Just to see the pure Self shining within you.

When that Self starts shining, you start seeing many other things which you have not seen so far. And one of them [that] you see is that love is not only for yourself but for everyone. It’s a pure love for everyone else. It’s not only for yourself. It’s very surprising: when you really love your Self, then your love is for your Self, and you start spreading that love in such a manner that you beautifully love others. You don’t love for money, you don’t love for some advantage, for some power, or for some gain, but you love for love; because pure love is so joy-giving, it’s so joy-giving that, if there is any such thing that, ‛I love somebody because I want to possess that person, because I am something great, and if I love somebody then that person should feel absolutely obliged.“ All these ideas are absolutely of no avail.

Really if you love, then you just love. You love everyone. You may say, ‛Mother, how can you love a crook?“ You need not go his way, you need not be with him, need not have anything to do with it. But if you have pure love, then he can change, she can change. If they do not, then you don’t bother. Those who come into the ocean of love, those who are really pure, loving, people, they are your friends. They are the ones who are needed on this earth. Not the people who are crooks, who cheat you, who try to dominate you – they are not the ones needed. What we need are the people who are completely drenched into the purity of love.

So, from love we go to another point which is purity, and the purity is a subject which has been talked about by many people: that you should be pure, you should be absolutely open and people should know everything about you. I don’t think that is purity. Purity is that which purifies others! If you are a pure person then others will be purified. They have to be purified.

Now supposing you have certain ideas about yourself: you think that you are very highly placed as a Sahaja Yogi and that you are full of love. Maybe it’s all imaginary. Does it purify others? Does your purity purify others? Can it give them awakening? Can they be Realised-souls? And then, how much do you value the purity, the power of purity? And how many people you give Realisation, to or you have kept it to yourself? How many places you have been to spread this purity? Purity has to be spread. And without any doubt, in your own purity, you should do it because it’s a very, very powerful thing. Purity is very powerful. It may not act on one or two persons, it doesn’t matter. There could be some very, very nasty, horrible fellows – it doesn’t matter – but it will have an effect on very many sensitive persons who want to become Sahaja Yogis. You have to just test it: how people like you and how they are impressed by you.

The Paramchaitanya, this All-pervading Power of Divine Love, flows through you, because you are pure. If you are impure, then it will stop at different chakras; it won’t work. So purity of temperament, purity of love – what does that mean? That you love somebody because that person has got spirituality, you love that person because there is purity, and you go to places just to spread the purity among people. A pure person will never create a problem. It’s the impure person who every day can start with this problem or that problem and that problem.

So the character of a yogi is to worship the purity of your own and the purity of others. It’s true that we have to face ourselves every day. It’s true that we have to correct ourselves every day. It’s true that we have to separate ourselves from ourselves to see how far we have done, how far we have gone, what are we doing, what have we done.

So the difference between the ancient time’s guru and modern time’s guru is that the ancient time’s gurus didn’t care if they gave Realisations to people, it was not their style, most of them. Only they cared for themselves, nicely sitting down somewhere in the Himalayas, away from all the madding crowd, and enjoying themselves! But you must share this enjoyment. I think that is the sign of a good guru. The one who cannot share, only looks after his own pleasures, or looks after his own ashram, you can call it, or looks after his own family, looks after maybe some disciples he has. The attention has to be for the whole world!

In Sahaja Yoga, now, it has reached such a stage that you have to worry about the complete humanity. It’s not only you, or few Sahaja Yogis, or many more Sahaja Yogis, but all over the world, whatever is the problem, you people have to solve it. But first get out of your own little, little problems. I get letters from people, especially women, saying their husband is like that, and husband does that and their children are suffering, and all that. Now, you are a guru: means you are such a high, highly electrified person with spirituality – why should you worry about all these nonsensical things?

And the consciousness that you are purified and that you are a pure person should make you very humble. But it’s just the opposite of it – normally people, if they are anything, they become very proud and think no end of themselves. If they have, say, one power, they become like that. If they have some talent, they become like this. If they have some eminence they become like this. They do not become humble by that. By that achievement they become extremely, extremely proud, arrogant. Absolutely in a very wrong shape! But you, you are a Sahaja Yogi and you should not mind anything that will bring down your purity.

So, you can call yourself as ‘gurus’ if you want to. I need not say that you are a guru. But you have to, first of all, make yourself your disciple, you must look after yourself first of all. You have to see for yourself, ‛Have I got the qualities? Am I the one who can really do all this?“ All this introspection within you should be with a very clean heart and understanding, because you are not incarnations, which are born absolutely pure, but you are human beings and you are rising to the level of those incarnations. So you have to cleanse, you have to watch yourself, see for yourself and then understand if you are a Sahaja Yogi. Have you got the beauty of purity and love?

Now this love is not relative, is not conditional, is not limited, but it is absolutely like an ocean. And you like to swim in that ocean, you like to be drenched in that ocean of love.

Formerly guru meant a person who is standing with a big stick. He used to hit everyone. Anybody did anything wrong – they used to hit and beat them. We had gurus in music also, and different, different types of gurus we had in our country, and their speciality was that they used to absolutely oppress the disciple, control, and then teach the knowledge of music, maybe, maybe wrestling, maybe anything.

But in Sahaja Yoga it’s very different. Even the spiritual gurus who were real were like that – very harsh. They used to throw stones at such people. All kinds of things they used to do. But then, in that, they didn’t mean anything bad, but the method I didn’t like.

There was a story about a person who was supposed to be a great guru, and I went to see him. I had to climb quite a lot because he lived in a small, little cave. And, when I reached there, he was very angry with himself, he was going on like this, like this (Mother is shaking Her head). And it was raining so I was completely drenched, and I went and sat in his little cave. Then he came back and he asked me a question. He said, ‛Mother, it was raining. Normally I can stop the rain, but you wouldn’t allow me to stop the rain. Why?“ I could have told him, ‛Because of your ego,“ but I didn’t. I told him in a very sweet manner that, ‛See, you are a sanyasi, and you got a sari for me. If I had not got drenched, I could not have taken your sari from a sanyasi.“ He completely melted! He had tears in his eyes and fell at my Feet. So the technique of Sahaja Yoga is like this. It’s not anger, it’s not repulsion, it’s not hatred, but the technique is such by which you suggest your love.

This is how one has to understand the difference between a Sahaja Yogi guru and other gurus. No question of beating your disciple, no question of scolding them, no question of shouting at them. Love is the most powerful thing. Of course it doesn’t work on some people, I agree. Forget them. But it works in most of the people because God has made us out of His love, and we have a capacity to yield to that love and to enjoy that love.

So, for a Sahaja Yogi, what he has to do is to understand the powers of love. The powers of love, if you can understand, it will grow within you. Some people have, some people don’t have. Try to understand [that] this Paramchaitanya is nothing but is [the] power of God’s love – or you can say, Mother’s love. This power works so beautifully, in such a secret manner, that you call it as ‘miracle’, because you can’t see how it has worked out.

So, the first and foremost thing is, try to develop the sense of love within you, the understanding. There is one problem: it is always misunderstood. Pure love can be very easily understood, that it gives you joy, that it helps others to improve, and it works in a very subtle manner.

Now try to remember when you came to Sahaja Yoga. Try to remember how you got your Realisation. Try to remember how you started growing. These are like the seeds within us of love, which sprouted. Slowly and gradually we started the showers of blessings of love, then we started enjoying it and understanding it.

Now at this stage when we are about to become gurus and we are already gurus, we should be nothing but the embodiment of love. It’s a very different theory I am telling you. No guru will accept this -those who are already accepted as gurus all over. And the knowledge, knowledge they give you, is the knowledge of very subtle things. All the knowledge that you have got in Sahaja Yoga has been already told by those gurus, long time back – somebody has told this, somebody has told that, somebody has told that – but all the knowledge, the total knowledge about your being, your chakras, everything, which you know now, is with you. That is the Truth. You have the complete subtle knowledge which nobody had before. Because maybe these gurus did not want to give, or maybe these gurus did not know, themselves. All the knowledge of Sahaja Yoga is simple, very subtle and is real.

Now, after having this within you, it should not be just mental, it should be spiritual. And to make it spiritual, what have you to do is to love. When you love others, you will start working on them. Then you will find out, with your knowledge, that there’s something wrong with this fellow: what is wrong? He has this chakra, he has that chakra. This is the combination, that is the thing. But a Sahaja Yogi doesn’t get angry on that point, he tries to cure that person, he tries to improve that person. He doesn’t say, ‛You are very bad! You are horrible!“ No! No! He takes up a challenge that, ‛With my pure love I can cure.“ It is so simple for him. Not like any doctor or anybody who has certain great qualifications that he would come and ask for the fees and that he will charge you this money – nothing! He knows what’s wrong with you and he knows how to cure it, and he does, that way.

So, you are not afraid. Apart from [the fact that] you are not afraid, that person who is with you also is not afraid, because of your temperament, because of your nature: the way you are handling the patient, the way you are talking to a person who has come to know about the Truth. And thus you give him, also, the Truth. Also you teach him what the Truth is.

And the truth is very simple – that you are the Spirit. This is the truth, is revealed loud to another person. Thus you realise yourself, by giving Realisation to another person, what you have done is to give him the Truth itself, absolute Truth.

I know [that], these days, people find it very difficult to find any time for Sahaja Yoga, for spreading Sahaja Yoga. They are looking out for holidays. Whatever it is, whatever is happening, I am very sure, with your great powers that you have, you can really show great, great success, very great success, and this success can bring forth the vision I have of saving the humanity all over the world.

May God bless you.