Picture: The great Master Mahasaya and his Divine Romance.

As an aspirant for truth and realization you either qualify or disqualify yourself, based on the purity of your yearning for God. Grace can give you an experience in upliftment, peace, bliss, joy or some tremendous realization, but this is only the beginning of your journey.

To make continuous progress you must ever apply the methods a qualified preceptor gives to you. Without this application the source of Grace will be dammed up and the flow of spiritual living waters will dry up. Without the flow of these living waters aspiration will evaporate; for without Grace no real progress can be made.

For every slip and fall on the path you can trace it back to a falloff of intensity in your spiritual practice. If you find that your practice is dry, that temptation or doubt has crept in the back door and made itself home in your mind, then let the alarms sound to awaken you to the fact that the liar and thief has made inroads.

Only Light can dispel darkness, only knowledge can dislodge ignorance, and only your sincere desire for God can make you know Him. Make sure you have a love affair with the Infinite, and worship your Heavenly Father-Divine Mother with all of your heart, strength, mind and soul and you will find the sacred Presence a loyal and constant lover that will make you qualified to be an enlightened Being.

Krishna Playing His Flute: calling all back to God

painting by Gargi/Lakshmi of Anandashram

Recognizing the Presence of God is something many have difficulty in doing, and doing so consistently. It is not that God is far away from you, that is not the problem. In fact, for the brain the opposite is true. The Presence of God is so familiar that the brain has ceased to cognize it.

Let me give you an example. Your eyes take in photons bouncing off every object in the room in which you sit, however your brain has learned to filter out much of what you see as not worth noticing, or another way of saying it, it has become efficient in processing what seems relevant. So, instead of seeing everything in the room within your 180 degree viewing range, your brain only sees certain objects. If someone walks into the room you may notice them only, and while your eyes have been seeing the chair as well as all other objects in the room, it only notices the chair when the person sits on it. The real truth is that what you see is really a complete fabrication by your brain.

All of your senses function in much the same way. Your brain, being efficient, only presents to your conscious mind what it thinks is required and what it can make sense of. If something is not deemed useful, the brain does not see it. There are other faculties of the brain that are also turned on or off depending on what are useful. Your ability to recognize certain sounds, appreciation of beauty, intuition, or God-consciousness are abilities of the brain that may never have been turned on because it was deemed not relevant to your situation.

A spiritually oriented child may never lose the faculty to recognize God, while a more earthy child does not see the value in it, so that ability quickly drops away. The Self may be like a breeze you do not notice, or some fixture of a room you have grown familiar with, or any other countless phenomena going on all around you that you simply do not notice.

In the book The Science of Religion Yoganandaji makes the point that all human beings seek out happiness, and that only through God-experience can anyone find lasting happiness; therefore knowing God is a universal necessity that has been largely unrecognized. When the value of God-experience is truly known, the search for triggering the part of the brain that can see and feel God begins.

Because the brain is not used to seeing the value in knowing God it overlooks what it already knows; much like seeing but not seeing the chair in the room. Spiritual practice is learning the necessity to know God. Until the brain fully appreciates the value of Bliss, Light, and intuitional Wisdom that can only come from the Divine Presence it will treat the whole idea like a foreign concept that it chooses not to see or feel.

If your brain does not recognize the supreme value of God-experience, do not think it is because you do not have that ability. Rather, slow the mind down and feel what is already present within you. Learn to perceive the sacred behind all other experiences, for it is the vital life within that makes life possible. God is not absent because He is distant; rather you do not see Him because He is so very close to who and what you really are.

Picture: Jesus driving out the money changers from the Temple

Love and truth must go together, or neither can be whole. There are facts devoid of love, but facts in and of themselves can never be truth. Facts can be used as a weapon to hurt and destroy, but this is not truth. To know truth we must behold not only the facts, but the soul; about which the facts are but one facet.

For instance, you may know some facts about someone you know, and in anger you throw those facts at the other person without kindness, consideration or understanding of the entirety of that one, and you may say, “Well, it is only the truth!” But, it is not the truth.

When you see the whole person your understanding and compassion grows. You are not focused on a fact, your see the person in the context of who he or she is in his soul’s evolution. Inevitably, this leads to love. You may then pronounce facts, but now it has merged with love and it leads to the truth.

When Jesus drove the money changers out of the Temple he was not just in a rage. First of all he loved God, and he knew so many pilgrims came to the Temple to worship Him as well. All this commerce, shouting out their wares of doves and lambs for sale was not worship, it was changing the feeling of worship into something else. So it was love for God, love for the pilgrims, and ultimately love for the merchants at the gate; for they were creating karma for which they would have to pay and Jesus was powerfully bringing their attention to this. It was forceful, perhaps even violent, but done with love from beginning to end.

So love is not always meek and mild, but it is always humble; surrendered to God. Be sure before you pronounce something as the “truth” that is has merged with love, for only then does it deserve its name.

Picture: Happy song when released from the tiny cage

Jesus answered, “Who Is my mother? Who are my brethren?  …Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.” (Matthew 12: 48-50). In this episode from Jesus’ life he makes clear that spiritual connection is more important that blood ties.

This can come as a great test for the aspirant; not just with family but also friends, business associates, even what strangers might think of you if they knew your deep spiritual nature. The fear of what others think, how they might judge you is a tyrant that never releases you from a self-made prison of what others expect and what judgements they may have.

To free yourself from this prison you must make what God thinks more important than what others think. There are times and situations that can really test your loyalty to God and your spiritual path.

One of the things Mother faced, that would be very difficult for many, was when she left for Anandashram in 1957 without any idea of whether she would return or not. Her daughter was pregnant with her first child. As much as Mother loved her children I can only imagine that this was a pull for her to stay, that her daughter would have very much wanted her mother there through the pregnancy and after the birth. However, today we are all the great beneficiaries that Mother chose God’s direction over familial considerations.

Each of us face the tyranny of what others think, and in order to have complete union with God you have to make the clear choice for Him alone.

Prakriti: Divine Mother

It is through the Divine Mother that all creation has come into being; without Her there would be no expression of God. Therefore we give great homage to the Divine Mother.

Divine Mother is manifest in all women, for they are the embodiment of all that the Divine Mother is. Therefore we give homage to all women as manifestations of the Divine Mother.

It is in those women who give birth that we exist as a human race, it is the mother who loves and cares for us through the most fragile and important times of babyhood and childhood. It is our mothers who will love us especially, even as the Divine Mother, whether we are naughty or good. Therefore we give special homage to our own mother.

And all those who give the love of the Divine Mother to this world can change this world. Ireland was rife with violence for decades until the mothers of Ireland marched in solidarity and said, “No more,” and the violence subsided and stopped. The courageous love of mothers is a mighty force.

To the Divine Mother and all Her manifestations here on earth, today we give special honor and recognition to you. Pronams, I bow to the Light in you.

Picture: Hitch your desire to the highest star there is.

A sacred feeling resonates in me from the Loon Lake Retreat. The atmosphere was thick with Divine Vibration from dedicated yogis magnetically drawing in higher and higher vibration. There was healing in body, mind and soul from this charged environment. My only unfulfilled wish is that all could be with us! Of course you can be there in Spirit, but we like it when it is manifested in body as well!

There is one topic of note that I think you may find very interesting. The Title of the Retreat was, “Does God Have Desire?” And while we cannot re-enact the entire Retreat here, I will say something about desire nature.

Certainly it can be said that God has desire when He sets this entire creation into motion. Everywhere about us there is beauty and wonder and awe in beholding what the Creator has accomplished. All evolution of this universe from the coalescence of stars and planets to the diverse biological species up to mankind represents a gradual order, splendor and balance that defies “randomness” of creation.

Enter mankind and you find the expression of desire for survival, satisfaction of pleasures and expression of self through dominance and structure. In addition to these basic expressions you add creative inventiveness, appreciation of loveliness, caring-ness and compassion. In some you see only the desire for the basest passions, in others a nearly unbearable sensitivity for beauty in music, art and great thought.

The highest expressions of humanity is seen in great spiritual souls; Rama, Krishna, Loa Tzu, Buddha, Christ and Mohammed to name a few. Their desire reached across all time and space and touched, nay embodied, Infinity. When seen in the context of little human desires, their desire for Truth, Realization, Bliss and pure Existence dwarfs anything previously known. These great spiritual luminaries held such an immense desire for God, for Realization, that it could only be fulfilled by an Infinite Consciousness. In evolution, these great ones took desire to a whole new level.

As aspirants we often find ourselves at war with lower desire nature. The problem from an evolutionary sense is not desire itself, but that we have locked onto little tiny human desires that cannot possibly fulfill the vast desire our Soul has for God-realization; we sell ourselves short.

Rather than curb or kill your desire, hitch it to the highest star there is, Self-Realization; not just to the little clods of earthly human desires. Expand and intensify your desire until it wants only God. Don’t be fooled by cheap imitations, but tap into the biggest desire there is. Reach out for Satchidananda: pure Being, Consciousness and Bliss with all of your heart, strength, mind and soul!

Picture: Hanuman showing that only Rama and Sita are in his heart

The impetus to experience God must take on at least the importance of the work you do, money you make, things that you buy, the food that you eat and the air that you breathe. If you cannot say that it is at least as important as those things, then you have not purified the mind enough. Pray to the Infinite for Grace so that you are so inspired that you cannot live a moment without the Divine Presence permeating your entire Being. Find the sweetness of the Divine Name singing itself in your heart, mind and soul. Practice Kriya Meditation so deeply that you enter into the eternal Silence of your Soul. Make the Presence of God so essential that He is with you every moment of every day. Pierce the veil of separation and see that it is the Divine Mother’s radiance behind the varied masks of creation. If you feel no urgency for these experiences, if time is passing you by and you have not a steadily increased ardor for God, then pray with all that you are for God to awaken Himself within you.