A very important point to remember about our own individual soul

[Guest guest]

Dear souls of the Creator,

 

Namaste - i bow to the Inner Guru who exists in you!

 

i received an email directing me to a site from which i have taken

this article. The reason i chose this article is because it answered

a very important aspect of ourselves i.e., our own soul. And with all

the excellent articles being posted lately i think this is the best

time to drive home a vital aspect of our own soul.

 

When i started meditating on the Adi Shakti late 1993 i quickly came

to realise that we are all living cells of the Creator. i don't know

why and how this realization came but it stayed ever since. And today

i have found out a very important fact in relation to the articles

that have been posted recently:

 

" The soul was not created, for creation means a combination which

means a certain future dissolution. "

 

i truly believe we are witnessing the dawn of a new spiritual era

where all religions are converging. This is because the incarnation

of the Adi Shakti, Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, has given us Self-

realization and so much knowledge to sustain it. And when you combine

that with the knowledge and evidence of the Adi Shakti (Inner Guru),

as presented at http://adishakti.org, then the " Paper on Hinduism " by

Swami Vivekananda will nourish you in mind, body and soul as it is

only a few months ago that i posted this:

 

Dear devotees of the Divine,

 

Namaskaar – I bow to the Holy Spirit who exists within you,

 

After many years i wish to say something that i had always believed

to be true. That is the reason a few minutes ago i questioned my

children Arwinder, Lalita and Kash for the first time ever regarding

this belief.

 

At 12.40 pm today September 9, 2007 i asked Arwinder what form was he

when he used to meet Shri Mataji since 1995. i explained to him i

want to know if he met Her in his physical body, soul or something

else. He replied, " As my spirit " . i then asked him if spirit is the

same as soul. He replied that it is the same thing.

 

Arwinder was told to remember this fact for the rest of his life.

 

i then called Lalita and asked her the same question, but first

informing her about Arwinder's answer that he met Shri Mataji as

spirit or soul. Lalita answered rhetorically, " What's the

difference? " , implying that there is no difference between " spirit "

or " soul " and that it is one and the same thing. Lalita replied that

her answer is the same too, and that it was her soul who used to meet

the Adi Shakti (Holy Spirit).

 

i also told Lalita to remember that fact for the rest of her life.

 

When asked where is her soul, she replied " Within me. "

 

Nearly an hour later Kash was questioned the same but he had no

knowledge that his siblings were questioned earlier. i asked him what

he was when he used to meet Shri Mataji in his Sahasrara (Kingdom of

God).

 

He replied " Myself " .

I asked him to clarify what he meant.

He replied, " As spirit " .

I asked, " What you mean? "

Kash replied spontaneously, " As soul " .

 

There is another reason for my questioning them. A few days ago on

August 31st, 2007 i purchased THE SPIRITUAL BRAIN: A Neuroscientist's

Case For The Existence Of The Soul. Kash (now 26 years-old), Arwinder

(17 years-old) and Lalita (13 years-old) have experienced their own

souls thousands of times over the years. They have given immense,

unprecedented, and irrefutable evidence of Jesus' Kingdom of God

within themselves into which their souls entered daily.

 

As i have said before, " Time is on Her side .... and ours too! "

 

warmest regards,

 

jagbir

 

http://www.adishakti.org/forum/a_neuroscientists_case_for_the_existence_of_the_s\

oul_9-09-2007.htm

 

We must read all the post 2008 articles and this " Paper on Hinduism "

to truly understand that " The soul was not created, for creation

means a combination which means a certain future dissolution. " You

must have faith, knowledge and evidence of your own eternal nature,

which the great Adi Shakti has given us. That is why Self-realization

to me is so different and nourishing from the rudimentary and shallow

version of the Sahaja Yoga organization. i sincerely wish more SYs

and non-SYs will be nourished and enlightend by all the articles so

far, and many more to come over the years.

 

As for me there is no difference between a SY and a non-SY. Self-

realization must destroy this divisive distinction because our souls

are of the same nature and origin.

 

Jai Shri Ganapathy,

 

jagbir

 

 

-

 

Paper on Hinduism

By Swami Vivekananda

Read at the Parliament on 19th September, 1893

E-Text Source: www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info

 

Three religions now stand in the world which have come down to us

from time prehistoric — Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism. They

have all received tremendous shocks and all of them prove by their

survival their internal strength. But while Judaism failed to absorb

Christianity and was driven out of its place of birth by its all-

conquering daughter, and a handful of Parsees is all that remains to

tell the tale of their grand religion, sect after sect arose in India

and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to its very

foundations, but like the waters of the seashore in a tremendous

earthquake it receded only for a while, only to return in an all-

absorbing flood, a thousand times more vigorous, and when the tumult

of the rush was over, these sects were all sucked in, absorbed, and

assimilated into the immense body of the mother faith.

 

From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which

the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas

of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the

Buddhists, and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in

the Hindu's religion.

 

Where then, the question arises, where is the common centre to which

all these widely diverging radii converge? Where is the common basis

upon which all these seemingly hopeless contradictions rest? And this

is the question I shall attempt to answer.

 

The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the

Vedas. They hold that the Vedas are without beginning and without

end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be

without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant. They

mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by

different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation

existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot

it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The

moral, ethical, and spiritual relations between soul and soul and

between individual spirits and the Father of all spirits, were there

before their discovery, and would remain even if we forgot them.

 

The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we honour them

as perfected beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of the

very greatest of them were women. Here it may be said that these laws

as laws may be without end, but they must have had a beginning. The

Vedas teach us that creation is without beginning or end. Science is

said to have proved that the sum total of cosmic energy is always the

same. Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where was all

this manifested energy? Some say it was in a potential form in God.

In that case God is sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic, which

would make Him mutable. Everything mutable is a compound, and

everything compound must undergo that change which is called

destruction. So God would die, which is absurd. Therefore there never

was a time when there was no creation.

 

If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and creator are two

lines, without beginning and without end, running parallel to each

other. God is the ever active providence, by whose power systems

after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run for a time

and again destroyed. This is what the Brâhmin boy repeats every

day: " The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and moons

of previous cycles. " And this agrees with modern science.

 

Here I stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive my

existence, " I " , " I " , " I " , what is the idea before me? The idea of a

body. Am I, then, nothing but a combination of material substances?

The Vedas declare, " No " . I am a spirit living in a body. I am not the

body. The body will die, but I shall not die. Here am I in this body;

it will fall, but I shall go on living. I had also a past. The soul

was not created, for creation means a combination which means a

certain future dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must

die. Some are born happy, enjoy perfect health, with beautiful body,

mental vigour and all wants supplied. Others are born miserable, some

are without hands or feet, others again are idiots and only drag on a

wretched existence. Why, if they are all created, why does a just and

merciful God create one happy and another unhappy, why is He so

partial? Nor would it mend matters in the least to hold that those

who are miserable in this life will be happy in a future one. Why

should a man be miserable even here in the reign of a just and

merciful God?

 

In the second place, the idea of a creator God does not explain the

anomaly, but simply expresses the cruel fiat of an all-powerful

being. There must have been causes, then, before his birth, to make a

man miserable or happy and those were his past actions.

 

Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted for by

inherited aptitude? Here are two parallel lines of existence — one of

the mind, the other of matter. If matter and its transformations

answer for all that we have, there is no necessity for supposing the

existence of a soul. But it cannot be proved that thought has been

evolved out of matter, and if a philosophical monism is inevitable,

spiritual monism is certainly logical and no less desirable than a

materialistic monism; but neither of these is necessary here.

 

We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity,

but those tendencies only mean the physical configuration, through

which a peculiar mind alone can act in a peculiar way. There are

other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused by its past actions. And a

soul with a certain tendency would by the laws of affinity take birth

in a body which is the fittest instrument for the display of that

tendency. This is in accord with science, for science wants to

explain everything by habit, and habit is got through repetitions. So

repetitions are necessary to explain the natural habits of a new-born

soul. And since they were not obtained in this present life, they

must have come down from past lives.

 

There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted, how is it

that I do not remember anything of my past life ? This can be easily

explained. I am now speaking English. It is not my mother tongue, in

fact no words of my mother tongue are now present in my

consciousness; but let me try to bring them up, and they rush in.

That shows that consciousness is only the surface of the mental

ocean, and within its depths are stored up all our experiences. Try

and struggle, they would come up and you would be conscious even of

your past life.

 

This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the

perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the

world by the Rishis. We have discovered the secret by which the very

depths of the ocean of memory can be stirred up — try it and you

would get a complete reminiscence of your past life.

 

So then the Hindu believes that he is a spirit. Him the sword cannot

pierce — him the fire cannot burn — him the water cannot melt — him

the air cannot dry. The Hindu believes that every soul is a circle

whose circumference is nowhere, but whose centre is located in the

body, and that death means the change of this centre from body to

body. Nor is the soul bound by the conditions of matter. In its very

essence it is free, unbounded, holy, pure, and perfect. But somehow

or other it finds itself tied down to matter, and thinks of itself as

matter.Why should the free, perfect, and pure being be thus under the

thraldom of matter, is the next question. How can the perfect soul be

deluded into the belief that it is imperfect? We have been told that

the Hindus shirk the question and say that no such question can be

there. Some thinkers want to answer it by positing one or more quasi-

perfect beings, and use big scientific names to fill up the gap. But

naming is not explaining. The question remains the same. How can the

perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the pure, the absolute,

change even a microscopic particle of its nature? But the Hindu is

sincere. He does not want to take shelter under sophistry. He is

brave enough to face the question in a manly fashion; and his answer

is: " I do not know. I do not know how the perfect being, the soul,

came to think of itself as imperfect, as joined to and conditioned by

matter. " But the fact is a fact for all that. It is a fact in

everybody's consciousness that one thinks of oneself as the body. The

Hindu does not attempt to explain why one thinks one is the body. The

answer that it is the will of God is no explanation. This is nothing

more than what the Hindu says, " I do not know. "

 

Well, then, the human soul is eternal and immortal, perfect and

infinite, and death means only a change of centre from one body to

another. The present is determined by our past actions, and the

future by the present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting

back from birth to birth and death to death. But here is another

question: Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the

foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the

next, rolling to and fro at the mercy of good and bad actions — a

powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing,

uncompromising current of cause and effect; a little moth placed

under the wheel of causation which rolls on crushing everything in

its way and waits not for the widow's tears or the orphan's cry? The

heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of Nature. Is there no

hope? Is there no escape? — was the cry that went up from the bottom

of the heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words of

hope and consolation came down and inspired a Vedic sage, and he

stood up before the world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad

tidings: " Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! even ye that reside in

higher spheres! I have found the Ancient One who is beyond all

darkness, all delusion: knowing Him alone you shall be saved from

death over again. " " Children of immortal bliss " — what a sweet, what

a hopeful name! Allow me to call you, brethren, by that sweet name —

heirs of immortal bliss — yea, the Hindu refuses to call you sinners.

Ye are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and

perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth — sinners! It is a sin to call

a man so; it is a standing libel on human nature. Come up, O lions,

and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls

immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are

not bodies; matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter.

 

Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination of

unforgiving laws, not an endless prison of cause and effect, but that

at the head of all these laws, in and through every particle of

matter and force, stands One " by whose command the wind blows, the

fire burns, the clouds rain, and death stalks upon the earth. "

 

And what is His nature?

 

He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the All-

merciful. " Thou art our father, Thou art our mother, Thou art our

beloved friend, Thou art the source of all strength; give us

strength. Thou art He that beareth the burdens of the universe; help

me bear the little burden of this life. " Thus sang the Rishis of the

Vedas. And how to worship Him? Through love. " He is to be worshipped

as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next life. "

 

This is the doctrine of love declared in the Vedas, and let us see

how it is fully developed and taught by Krishna, whom the Hindus

believe to have been God incarnate on earth.

 

He taught that a man ought to live in this world like a lotus leaf,

which grows in water but is never moistened by water; so a man ought

to live in the world — his heart to God and his hands to work.

 

It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or the next world,

but it is better to love God for love's sake, and the prayer

goes: " Lord, I do not want wealth, nor children, nor learning. If it

be Thy will, I shall go from birth to birth, but grant me this, that

I may love Thee without the hope of reward — love unselfishly for

love's sake. " One of the disciples of Krishna, the then Emperor of

India, was driven from his kingdom by his enemies and had to take

shelter with his queen in a forest in the Himalayas, and there one

day the queen asked him how it was that he, the most virtuous of men,

should suffer so much misery. Yudhishthira answered, " Behold, my

queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love them.

They do not give me anything, but my nature is to love the grand, the

beautiful, therefore I love them. Similarly, I love the Lord. He is

the source of all beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only object to

be loved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love. I do not

pray for anything; I do not ask for anything. Let Him place me

wherever He likes. I must love Him for love's sake. I cannot trade in

love. "

 

The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the bondage of

matter; perfection will be reached when this bond will burst, and the

word they use for it is therefore, Mukti — freedom, freedom from the

bonds of imperfection, freedom from death and misery.

 

And this bondage can only fall off through the mercy of God, and this

mercy comes on the pure. So purity is the condition of His mercy. How

does that mercy act? He reveals Himself to the pure heart; the pure

and the stainless see God, yea, even in this life; then and then only

all the crookedness of the heart is made straight. Then all doubt

ceases. He is no more the freak of a terrible law of causation. This

is the very centre, the very vital conception of Hinduism. The Hindu

does not want to live upon words and theories. If there are

existences beyond the ordinary sensuous existence, he wants to come

face to face with them. If there is a soul in him which is not

matter, if there is an all-merciful universal Soul, he will go to Him

direct. He must see Him, and that alone can destroy all doubts. So

the best proof a Hindu sage gives about the soul, about God, is: " I

have seen the soul; I have seen God. " And that is the only condition

of perfection. The Hindu religion does not consist in struggles and

attempts to believe a certain doctrine or dogma, but in realising —

not in believing, but in being and becoming.

 

Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle to

become perfect, to become divine, to reach God and see God, and this

reaching God, seeing God, becoming perfect even as the Father in

Heaven is perfect, constitutes the religion of the Hindus.

 

And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection? He lives a life

of bliss infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect bliss, having

obtained the only thing in which man ought to have pleasure, namely

God, and enjoys the bliss with God.

 

So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common religion of all

the sects of India; but, then, perfection is absolute, and the

absolute cannot be two or three. It cannot have any qualities. It

cannot be an individual. And so when a soul becomes perfect and

absolute, it must become one with Brahman, and it would only realise

the Lord as the perfection, the reality, of its own nature and

existence, the existence absolute, knowledge absolute, and bliss

absolute. We have often and often read this called the losing of

individuality and becoming a stock or a stone.

 

" He jests at scars that never felt a wound. "

 

I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness to enjoy the

consciousness of this small body, it must be greater happiness to

enjoy the consciousness of two bodies, the measure of happiness

increasing with the consciousness of an increasing number of bodies,

the aim, the ultimate of happiness being reached when it would become

a universal consciousness.

 

Therefore, to gain this infinite universal individuality, this

miserable little prison-individuality must go. Then alone can death

cease when I am alone with life, then alone can misery cease when I

am one with happiness itself, then alone can all errors cease when I

am one with knowledge itself; and this is the necessary scientific

conclusion. Science has proved to me that physical individuality is a

delusion, that really my body is one little continuously changing

body in an unbroken ocean of matter; and Advaita (unity) is the

necessary conclusion with my other counterpart, soul.

 

Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as science would

reach perfect unity, it would stop from further progress, because it

would reach the goal. Thus Chemistry could not progress farther when

it would discover one element out of which all other could be made.

Physics would stop when it would be able to fulfill its services in

discovering one energy of which all others are but manifestations,

and the science of religion become perfect when it would discover Him

who is the one life in a universe of death, Him who is the constant

basis of an ever-changing world. One who is the only Soul of which

all souls are but delusive manifestations. Thus is it, through

multiplicity and duality, that the ultimate unity is reached.

Religion can go no farther. This is the goal of all science.

 

All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long run.

Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science today, and

the Hindu is only glad that what he has been cherishing in his bosom

for ages is going to be taught in more forcible language, and with

further light from the latest conclusions of science.

 

Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to the religion of

the ignorant. At the very outset, I may tell you that there is no

polytheism in India. In every temple, if one stands by and listens,

one will find the worshippers applying all the attributes of God,

including omnipresence, to the images. It is not polytheism, nor

would the name henotheism explain the situation. " The rose called by

any other name would smell as sweet. " Names are not explanations.

 

I remember, as a boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach to a

crowd in India. Among other sweet things he was telling them was that

if he gave a blow to their idol with his stick, what could it do? One

of his hearers sharply answered, " If I abuse your God, what can He

do? " " You would be punished, " said the preacher, " when you die. " " So

my idol will punish you when you die, " retorted the Hindu.

 

The tree is known by its fruits. When I have seen amongst them that

are called idolaters, men, the like of whom in morality and

spirituality and love I have never seen anywhere, I stop and ask

myself, " Can sin beget holiness? "

 

Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is worse. Why does

a Christian go to church? Why is the cross holy? Why is the face

turned toward the sky in prayer? Why are there so many images in the

Catholic Church? Why are there so many images in the minds of

Protestants when they pray? My brethren, we can no more think about

anything without a mental image than we can live without breathing.

By the law of association, the material image calls up the mental

idea and vice versa. This is why the Hindu uses an external symbol

when he worships. He will tell you, it helps to keep his mind fixed

on the Being to whom he prays. He knows as well as you do that the

image is not God, is not omnipresent. After all, how much does

omnipresence mean to almost the whole world? It stands merely as a

word, a symbol. Has God superficial area? If not, when we repeat that

word " omnipresent " , we think of the extended sky or of space, that is

all.

 

As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental

constitution, we have to associate our ideas of infinity with the

image of the blue sky, or of the sea, so we naturally connect our

idea of holiness with the image of a church, a mosque, or a cross.

The Hindus have associated the idea of holiness, purity, truth,

omnipresence, and such other ideas with different images and forms.

But with this difference that while some people devote their whole

lives to their idol of a church and never rise higher, because with

them religion means an intellectual assent to certain doctrines and

doing good to their fellows, the whole religion of the Hindu is

centred in realisation. Man is to become divine by realising the

divine. Idols or temples or churches or books are only the supports,

the helps, of his spiritual childhood: but on and on he must progress.

 

He must not stop anywhere. " External worship, material worship, " say

the scriptures, " is the lowest stage; struggling to rise high, mental

prayer is the next stage, but the highest stage is when the Lord has

been realised. " Mark, the same earnest man who is kneeling before the

idol tells you, " Him the Sun cannot express, nor the moon, nor the

stars, the lightning cannot express Him, nor what we speak of as

fire; through Him they shine. " But he does not abuse any one's idol

or call its worship sin. He recognises in it a necessary stage of

life. " The child is father of the man. " Would it be right for an old

man to say that childhood is a sin or youth a sin?

 

If a man can realise his divine nature with the help of an image,

would it be right to call that a sin? Nor even when he has passed

that stage, should he call it an error. To the Hindu, man is not

travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower

to higher truth. To him all the religions, from the lowest fetishism

to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul to

grasp and realise the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of

its birth and association, and each of these marks a stage of

progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher,

gathering more and more strength, till it reaches the Glorious Sun.

 

Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognised

it. Every other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas, and tries to

force society to adopt them. It places before society only one coat

which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If it does not fit

John or Henry, he must go without a coat to cover his body. The

Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be realised, or

thought of, or stated, through the relative, and the images, crosses,

and crescents are simply so many symbols — so many pegs to hang the

spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for every

one, but those that do not need it have no right to say that it is

wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism.

 

One thing I must tell you. Idolatry in India does not mean anything

horrible. It is not the mother of harlots. On the other hand, it is

the attempt of undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual truths. The

Hindus have their faults, they sometimes have their exceptions; but

mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, and never

for cutting the throats of their neighbours. If the Hindu fanatic

burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of Inquisition.

And even this cannot be laid at the door of his religion any more

than the burning of witches can be laid at the door of Christianity.

 

To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is only a

travelling, a coming up, of different men and women, through various

conditions and circumstances, to the same goal. Every religion is

only evolving a God out of the material man, and the same God is the

inspirer of all of them. Why, then, are there so many contradictions?

They are only apparent, says the Hindu. The contradictions come from

the same truth adapting itself to the varying circumstances of

different natures.

 

It is the same light coming through glasses of different colours. And

these little variations are necessary for purposes of adaptation. But

in the heart of everything the same truth reigns. The Lord has

declared to the Hindu in His incarnation as Krishna, " I am in every

religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever thou

seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and

purifying humanity, know thou that I am there. " And what has been the

result? I challenge the world to find, throughout the whole system of

Sanskrit philosophy, any such expression as that the Hindu alone will

be saved and not others. Says Vyasa, " We find perfect men even beyond

the pale of our caste and creed. " One thing more. How, then, can the

Hindu, whose whole fabric of thought centres in God, believe in

Buddhism which is agnostic, or in Jainism which is atheistic?

 

The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole

force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in

every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the

Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son

hath seen the Father also.

 

This, brethren, is a short sketch of the religious ideas of the

Hindus. The Hindu may have failed to carry out all his plans, but if

there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will

have no location in place or time; which will be infinite like the

God it will preach, and whose sun will shine upon the followers of

Krishna and of Christ, on saints and sinners alike; which will not be

Brahminic or Buddhistic, Christian or Mohammedan, but the sum total

of all these, and still have infinite space for development; which in

its catholicity will embrace in its infinite arms, and find a place

for, every human being, from the lowest grovelling savage not far

removed from the brute, to the highest man towering by the virtues of

his head and heart almost above humanity, making society stand in awe

of him and doubt his human nature. It will be a religion which will

have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, which

will recognise divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole

scope, whose whole force, will be created in aiding humanity to

realise its own true, divine nature.

 

Offer such a religion, and all the nations will follow you. Asoka's

council was a council of the Buddhist faith. Akbar's, though more to

the purpose, was only a parlour-meeting. It was reserved for America

to proclaim to all quarters of the globe that the Lord is in every

religion.

 

May He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura-Mazda of the

Zoroastrians, the Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah of the Jews,

the Father in Heaven of the Christians, give strength to you to carry

out your noble idea! The star arose in the East; it travelled

steadily towards the West, sometimes dimmed and sometimes effulgent,

till it made a circuit of the world; and now it is again rising on

the very horizon of the East, the borders of the Sanpo, a

thousandfold more effulgent than it ever was before.

 

Hail, Columbia, motherland of liberty! It has been given to thee, who

never dipped her hand in her neighbour's blood, who never found out

that the shortest way of becoming rich was by robbing one's

neighbours, it has been given to thee to march at the vanguard of

civilisation with the flag of harmony.

 

http://www.celextel.org/

[Guest guest]

, " jagbir

singh " <adishakti_org wrote:

 

" When i started meditating on the Adi Shakti late 1993 i quickly came to realise

that we are all living cells of the Creator. i don't know why and how this

realization came but it stayed ever since. And today i have found out a very

important fact in relation to the articles that have been posted recently:

 

" The soul was not created, for creation means a combination which means a

certain future dissolution. "

 

 

Dear All,

 

Shri Mataji revealed some interesting things about the soul and about cells. She

says that as far as 'collectivity' is concerned, we are cells in Her Body and

She, the Divine Mother, has awakened us:

 

" So, we come to collectivity - to understand that you are cells in My Body and I

have awakened you. " (Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi - Plaw Hatch Seminar, 'The New

Age' - Plaw Hatch, England - 15 November, 1980)

 

[We know that Shri Mataji has established Sahaja Yoga on earth. But what is

Sahaja Yoga? Is it the organisational abilities of some Sahaja Yogis who have

taken over the running of an organisation, or is it more subtle than that? Shri

Mataji explains in the passage below, that Sahaja Yoga is not just a fashion

(which some people may think it is) - that Sahaja Yoga is not just a cult (which

some people may think it is) - and that Sahaja Yoga is not just an alternative

method (which some people may think it is). She says that it is not even an

organisation (which some people think it is), but that IT IS AN ORGANISM! Shri

Mataji clarifies that IN THIS ORGANISM OF SAHAJA YOGA, the spirits of the cells

are enlightened - 'Sahaja Yoga being about the sprouting of the spiritual

seeker's being, through kundalini awakening']:

 

" Sahaja Yoga is not just a fashion, cult or alternative method. Thus there is no

organisation as such in Sahaja Yoga: there is no membership in Sahaja Yoga

except that we had to have a nominal Trust. By that Trust we have to operate for

legal affairs, but it has no permanent list of names of people - there is no

dead organisation but a living collective single organism. The body has the

cells and after Self-realisation the spirits of the cells are enlightened by

Sahaja Yoga. The seeker's being has to actually be sprouted by kundalini

awakening. Then, becoming [that] is important! " (Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi -

first small English book, Chapter 1 'Sahaja Yoga')

 

[shri Mataji describes the perfect mechanism within human beings, that operates

similarly to a remote control. She says this mechanism has seven loops which is

called the " Soul " in the scriptures]:

 

" There is a very perfect mechanism placed along the spinal chord, [which is]

like a remote control and it has seven loops which is called " 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, by controlling the inner atmosphere of the cell,

through the receptor. When this SOUL is challenged by the wrong deeds of a

person, it acts on the receptor of a cell that would [otherwise] ultimately

disturb the inner atmosphere of the cell - [and result in] changing 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 'autosomes' (which are for the physical aspect),

can get into changes like Kobe steaks or broiled chicken. Even in human beings,

it goes into shapes of the body which can be acquired by physical, emotional or

mental activity. These genes could be partly inherent - not being in a proper

series before birth, according to the nature of the mother and father, because

of our day-to-day life, especially in modern times - which disturbs the inner

atmosphere of the cell. Thus, disturbances change the series of data bases,

indicating the total character - [whether] genetically inherent or acquired by

the person. " (Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi - book/Meta Modern Era, Chap. 10 'Message

of Metascience' - 29/09/95)

 

" Only in the light of the Spirit can 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 coordinated 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! " (Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi - book/Meta Modern Era, Chap.

7 'Peace' - 29/09/95)

 

regards to all,

 

violet

 

 

> Dear souls of the Creator,

>

> Namaste - i bow to the Inner Guru who exists in you!

>

> i received an email directing me to a site from which i have taken

> this article. The reason i chose this article is because it answered

> a very important aspect of ourselves i.e., our own soul. And with

all

> the excellent articles being posted lately i think this is the best

> time to drive home a vital aspect of our own soul.

>

> When i started meditating on the Adi Shakti late 1993 i quickly came

> to realise that we are all living cells of the Creator. i don't know

> why and how this realization came but it stayed ever since. And

today

> i have found out a very important fact in relation to the articles

> that have been posted recently:

>

> " The soul was not created, for creation means a combination which

> means a certain future dissolution. "

>

> i truly believe we are witnessing the dawn of a new spiritual era

> where all religions are converging. This is because the incarnation

> of the Adi Shakti, Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, has given us Self-

> realization and so much knowledge to sustain it. And when you

combine

> that with the knowledge and evidence of the Adi Shakti (Inner Guru),

> as presented at http://adishakti.org, then the " Paper on Hinduism "

by

> Swami Vivekananda will nourish you in mind, body and soul as it is

> only a few months ago that i posted this:

>

> Dear devotees of the Divine,

>

> Namaskaar – I bow to the Holy Spirit who exists within you,

>

> After many years i wish to say something that i had always believed

> to be true. That is the reason a few minutes ago i questioned my

> children Arwinder, Lalita and Kash for the first time ever regarding

> this belief.

>

> At 12.40 pm today September 9, 2007 i asked Arwinder what form was

he

> when he used to meet Shri Mataji since 1995. i explained to him i

> want to know if he met Her in his physical body, soul or something

> else. He replied, " As my spirit " . i then asked him if spirit is the

> same as soul. He replied that it is the same thing.

>

> Arwinder was told to remember this fact for the rest of his life.

>

> i then called Lalita and asked her the same question, but first

> informing her about Arwinder's answer that he met Shri Mataji as

> spirit or soul. Lalita answered rhetorically, " What's the

> difference? " , implying that there is no difference between " spirit "

> or " soul " and that it is one and the same thing. Lalita replied that

> her answer is the same too, and that it was her soul who used to

meet

> the Adi Shakti (Holy Spirit).

>

> i also told Lalita to remember that fact for the rest of her life.

>

> When asked where is her soul, she replied " Within me. "

>

> Nearly an hour later Kash was questioned the same but he had no

> knowledge that his siblings were questioned earlier. i asked him

what

> he was when he used to meet Shri Mataji in his Sahasrara (Kingdom of

> God).

>

> He replied " Myself " .

> I asked him to clarify what he meant.

> He replied, " As spirit " .

> I asked, " What you mean? "

> Kash replied spontaneously, " As soul " .

>

> There is another reason for my questioning them. A few days ago on

> August 31st, 2007 i purchased THE SPIRITUAL BRAIN: A

Neuroscientist's

> Case For The Existence Of The Soul. Kash (now 26 years-old),

Arwinder

> (17 years-old) and Lalita (13 years-old) have experienced their own

> souls thousands of times over the years. They have given immense,

> unprecedented, and irrefutable evidence of Jesus' Kingdom of God

> within themselves into which their souls entered daily.

>

> As i have said before, " Time is on Her side .... and ours too! "

>

> warmest regards,

>

> jagbir

>

> http://www.adishakti.org/forum/

a_neuroscientists_case_for_the_existence_of_the_soul_9-09-2007.htm

>

> We must read all the post 2008 articles and this " Paper on Hinduism "

> to truly understand that " The soul was not created, for creation

> means a combination which means a certain future dissolution. " You

> must have faith, knowledge and evidence of your own eternal nature,

> which the great Adi Shakti has given us. That is why Self-

realization

> to me is so different and nourishing from the rudimentary and

shallow

> version of the Sahaja Yoga organization. i sincerely wish more SYs

> and non-SYs will be nourished and enlightend by all the articles so

> far, and many more to come over the years.

>

> As for me there is no difference between a SY and a non-SY. Self-

> realization must destroy this divisive distinction because our souls

> are of the same nature and origin.

>

> Jai Shri Ganapathy,

>

> jagbir

>

>

> -

>

> Paper on Hinduism

> By Swami Vivekananda

> Read at the Parliament on 19th September, 1893

> E-Text Source: www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info

>

> Three religions now stand in the world which have come down to us

> from time prehistoric — Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism. They

> have all received tremendous shocks and all of them prove by their

> survival their internal strength. But while Judaism failed to absorb

> Christianity and was driven out of its place of birth by its all-

> conquering daughter, and a handful of Parsees is all that remains to

> tell the tale of their grand religion, sect after sect arose in

India

> and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to its very

> foundations, but like the waters of the seashore in a tremendous

> earthquake it receded only for a while, only to return in an all-

> absorbing flood, a thousand times more vigorous, and when the tumult

> of the rush was over, these sects were all sucked in, absorbed, and

> assimilated into the immense body of the mother faith.

>

> From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which

> the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas

> of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the

> Buddhists, and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place

in

> the Hindu's religion.

>

> Where then, the question arises, where is the common centre to which

> all these widely diverging radii converge? Where is the common basis

> upon which all these seemingly hopeless contradictions rest? And

this

> is the question I shall attempt to answer.

>

> The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the

> Vedas. They hold that the Vedas are without beginning and without

> end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be

> without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant. They

> mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by

> different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation

> existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot

> it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The

> moral, ethical, and spiritual relations between soul and soul and

> between individual spirits and the Father of all spirits, were there

> before their discovery, and would remain even if we forgot them.

>

> The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we honour them

> as perfected beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of

the

> very greatest of them were women. Here it may be said that these

laws

> as laws may be without end, but they must have had a beginning. The

> Vedas teach us that creation is without beginning or end. Science is

> said to have proved that the sum total of cosmic energy is always

the

> same. Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where was all

> this manifested energy? Some say it was in a potential form in God.

> In that case God is sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic, which

> would make Him mutable. Everything mutable is a compound, and

> everything compound must undergo that change which is called

> destruction. So God would die, which is absurd. Therefore there

never

> was a time when there was no creation.

>

> If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and creator are two

> lines, without beginning and without end, running parallel to each

> other. God is the ever active providence, by whose power systems

> after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run for a time

> and again destroyed. This is what the Brâhmin boy repeats every

> day: " The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and moons

> of previous cycles. " And this agrees with modern science.

>

> Here I stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive my

> existence, " I " , " I " , " I " , what is the idea before me? The idea of a

> body. Am I, then, nothing but a combination of material substances?

> The Vedas declare, " No " . I am a spirit living in a body. I am not

the

> body. The body will die, but I shall not die. Here am I in this

body;

> it will fall, but I shall go on living. I had also a past. The soul

> was not created, for creation means a combination which means a

> certain future dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must

> die. Some are born happy, enjoy perfect health, with beautiful body,

> mental vigour and all wants supplied. Others are born miserable,

some

> are without hands or feet, others again are idiots and only drag on

a

> wretched existence. Why, if they are all created, why does a just

and

> merciful God create one happy and another unhappy, why is He so

> partial? Nor would it mend matters in the least to hold that those

> who are miserable in this life will be happy in a future one. Why

> should a man be miserable even here in the reign of a just and

> merciful God?

>

> In the second place, the idea of a creator God does not explain the

> anomaly, but simply expresses the cruel fiat of an all-powerful

> being. There must have been causes, then, before his birth, to make

a

> man miserable or happy and those were his past actions.

>

> Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted for by

> inherited aptitude? Here are two parallel lines of existence — one

of

> the mind, the other of matter. If matter and its transformations

> answer for all that we have, there is no necessity for supposing the

> existence of a soul. But it cannot be proved that thought has been

> evolved out of matter, and if a philosophical monism is inevitable,

> spiritual monism is certainly logical and no less desirable than a

> materialistic monism; but neither of these is necessary here.

>

> We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity,

> but those tendencies only mean the physical configuration, through

> which a peculiar mind alone can act in a peculiar way. There are

> other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused by its past actions. And

a

> soul with a certain tendency would by the laws of affinity take

birth

> in a body which is the fittest instrument for the display of that

> tendency. This is in accord with science, for science wants to

> explain everything by habit, and habit is got through repetitions.

So

> repetitions are necessary to explain the natural habits of a new-

born

> soul. And since they were not obtained in this present life, they

> must have come down from past lives.

>

> There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted, how is it

> that I do not remember anything of my past life ? This can be easily

> explained. I am now speaking English. It is not my mother tongue, in

> fact no words of my mother tongue are now present in my

> consciousness; but let me try to bring them up, and they rush in.

> That shows that consciousness is only the surface of the mental

> ocean, and within its depths are stored up all our experiences. Try

> and struggle, they would come up and you would be conscious even of

> your past life.

>

> This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the

> perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the

> world by the Rishis. We have discovered the secret by which the very

> depths of the ocean of memory can be stirred up — try it and you

> would get a complete reminiscence of your past life.

>

> So then the Hindu believes that he is a spirit. Him the sword cannot

> pierce — him the fire cannot burn — him the water cannot melt — him

> the air cannot dry. The Hindu believes that every soul is a circle

> whose circumference is nowhere, but whose centre is located in the

> body, and that death means the change of this centre from body to

> body. Nor is the soul bound by the conditions of matter. In its very

> essence it is free, unbounded, holy, pure, and perfect. But somehow

> or other it finds itself tied down to matter, and thinks of itself

as

> matter.Why should the free, perfect, and pure being be thus under

the

> thraldom of matter, is the next question. How can the perfect soul

be

> deluded into the belief that it is imperfect? We have been told that

> the Hindus shirk the question and say that no such question can be

> there. Some thinkers want to answer it by positing one or more

quasi-

> perfect beings, and use big scientific names to fill up the gap. But

> naming is not explaining. The question remains the same. How can the

> perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the pure, the absolute,

> change even a microscopic particle of its nature? But the Hindu is

> sincere. He does not want to take shelter under sophistry. He is

> brave enough to face the question in a manly fashion; and his answer

> is: " I do not know. I do not know how the perfect being, the soul,

> came to think of itself as imperfect, as joined to and conditioned

by

> matter. " But the fact is a fact for all that. It is a fact in

> everybody's consciousness that one thinks of oneself as the body.

The

> Hindu does not attempt to explain why one thinks one is the body.

The

> answer that it is the will of God is no explanation. This is nothing

> more than what the Hindu says, " I do not know. "

>

> Well, then, the human soul is eternal and immortal, perfect and

> infinite, and death means only a change of centre from one body to

> another. The present is determined by our past actions, and the

> future by the present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting

> back from birth to birth and death to death. But here is another

> question: Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the

> foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the

> next, rolling to and fro at the mercy of good and bad actions — a

> powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing,

> uncompromising current of cause and effect; a little moth placed

> under the wheel of causation which rolls on crushing everything in

> its way and waits not for the widow's tears or the orphan's cry? The

> heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of Nature. Is there no

> hope? Is there no escape? — was the cry that went up from the bottom

> of the heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words

of

> hope and consolation came down and inspired a Vedic sage, and he

> stood up before the world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad

> tidings: " Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! even ye that reside

in

> higher spheres! I have found the Ancient One who is beyond all

> darkness, all delusion: knowing Him alone you shall be saved from

> death over again. " " Children of immortal bliss " — what a sweet, what

> a hopeful name! Allow me to call you, brethren, by that sweet name —

> heirs of immortal bliss — yea, the Hindu refuses to call you

sinners.

> Ye are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and

> perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth — sinners! It is a sin to

call

> a man so; it is a standing libel on human nature. Come up, O lions,

> and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls

> immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are

> not bodies; matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter.

>

> Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination of

> unforgiving laws, not an endless prison of cause and effect, but

that

> at the head of all these laws, in and through every particle of

> matter and force, stands One " by whose command the wind blows, the

> fire burns, the clouds rain, and death stalks upon the earth. "

>

> And what is His nature?

>

> He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the

All-

> merciful. " Thou art our father, Thou art our mother, Thou art our

> beloved friend, Thou art the source of all strength; give us

> strength. Thou art He that beareth the burdens of the universe; help

> me bear the little burden of this life. " Thus sang the Rishis of the

> Vedas. And how to worship Him? Through love. " He is to be worshipped

> as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next

life. "

>

> This is the doctrine of love declared in the Vedas, and let us see

> how it is fully developed and taught by Krishna, whom the Hindus

> believe to have been God incarnate on earth.

>

> He taught that a man ought to live in this world like a lotus leaf,

> which grows in water but is never moistened by water; so a man ought

> to live in the world — his heart to God and his hands to work.

>

> It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or the next world,

> but it is better to love God for love's sake, and the prayer

> goes: " Lord, I do not want wealth, nor children, nor learning. If it

> be Thy will, I shall go from birth to birth, but grant me this, that

> I may love Thee without the hope of reward — love unselfishly for

> love's sake. " One of the disciples of Krishna, the then Emperor of

> India, was driven from his kingdom by his enemies and had to take

> shelter with his queen in a forest in the Himalayas, and there one

> day the queen asked him how it was that he, the most virtuous of

men,

> should suffer so much misery. Yudhishthira answered, " Behold, my

> queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love them.

> They do not give me anything, but my nature is to love the grand,

the

> beautiful, therefore I love them. Similarly, I love the Lord. He is

> the source of all beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only object to

> be loved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love. I do not

> pray for anything; I do not ask for anything. Let Him place me

> wherever He likes. I must love Him for love's sake. I cannot trade

in

> love. "

>

> The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the bondage of

> matter; perfection will be reached when this bond will burst, and

the

> word they use for it is therefore, Mukti — freedom, freedom from the

> bonds of imperfection, freedom from death and misery.

>

> And this bondage can only fall off through the mercy of God, and

this

> mercy comes on the pure. So purity is the condition of His mercy.

How

> does that mercy act? He reveals Himself to the pure heart; the pure

> and the stainless see God, yea, even in this life; then and then

only

> all the crookedness of the heart is made straight. Then all doubt

> ceases. He is no more the freak of a terrible law of causation. This

> is the very centre, the very vital conception of Hinduism. The Hindu

> does not want to live upon words and theories. If there are

> existences beyond the ordinary sensuous existence, he wants to come

> face to face with them. If there is a soul in him which is not

> matter, if there is an all-merciful universal Soul, he will go to

Him

> direct. He must see Him, and that alone can destroy all doubts. So

> the best proof a Hindu sage gives about the soul, about God, is: " I

> have seen the soul; I have seen God. " And that is the only condition

> of perfection. The Hindu religion does not consist in struggles and

> attempts to believe a certain doctrine or dogma, but in realising —

> not in believing, but in being and becoming.

>

> Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle to

> become perfect, to become divine, to reach God and see God, and this

> reaching God, seeing God, becoming perfect even as the Father in

> Heaven is perfect, constitutes the religion of the Hindus.

>

> And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection? He lives a

life

> of bliss infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect bliss, having

> obtained the only thing in which man ought to have pleasure, namely

> God, and enjoys the bliss with God.

>

> So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common religion of all

> the sects of India; but, then, perfection is absolute, and the

> absolute cannot be two or three. It cannot have any qualities. It

> cannot be an individual. And so when a soul becomes perfect and

> absolute, it must become one with Brahman, and it would only realise

> the Lord as the perfection, the reality, of its own nature and

> existence, the existence absolute, knowledge absolute, and bliss

> absolute. We have often and often read this called the losing of

> individuality and becoming a stock or a stone.

>

> " He jests at scars that never felt a wound. "

>

> I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness to enjoy

the

> consciousness of this small body, it must be greater happiness to

> enjoy the consciousness of two bodies, the measure of happiness

> increasing with the consciousness of an increasing number of bodies,

> the aim, the ultimate of happiness being reached when it would

become

> a universal consciousness.

>

> Therefore, to gain this infinite universal individuality, this

> miserable little prison-individuality must go. Then alone can death

> cease when I am alone with life, then alone can misery cease when I

> am one with happiness itself, then alone can all errors cease when I

> am one with knowledge itself; and this is the necessary scientific

> conclusion. Science has proved to me that physical individuality is

a

> delusion, that really my body is one little continuously changing

> body in an unbroken ocean of matter; and Advaita (unity) is the

> necessary conclusion with my other counterpart, soul.

>

> Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as science

would

> reach perfect unity, it would stop from further progress, because it

> would reach the goal. Thus Chemistry could not progress farther when

> it would discover one element out of which all other could be made.

> Physics would stop when it would be able to fulfill its services in

> discovering one energy of which all others are but manifestations,

> and the science of religion become perfect when it would discover

Him

> who is the one life in a universe of death, Him who is the constant

> basis of an ever-changing world. One who is the only Soul of which

> all souls are but delusive manifestations. Thus is it, through

> multiplicity and duality, that the ultimate unity is reached.

> Religion can go no farther. This is the goal of all science.

>

> All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long run.

> Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science today, and

> the Hindu is only glad that what he has been cherishing in his bosom

> for ages is going to be taught in more forcible language, and with

> further light from the latest conclusions of science.

>

> Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to the religion of

> the ignorant. At the very outset, I may tell you that there is no

> polytheism in India. In every temple, if one stands by and listens,

> one will find the worshippers applying all the attributes of God,

> including omnipresence, to the images. It is not polytheism, nor

> would the name henotheism explain the situation. " The rose called by

> any other name would smell as sweet. " Names are not explanations.

>

> I remember, as a boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach to a

> crowd in India. Among other sweet things he was telling them was

that

> if he gave a blow to their idol with his stick, what could it do?

One

> of his hearers sharply answered, " If I abuse your God, what can He

> do? " " You would be punished, " said the preacher, " when you die. " " So

> my idol will punish you when you die, " retorted the Hindu.

>

> The tree is known by its fruits. When I have seen amongst them that

> are called idolaters, men, the like of whom in morality and

> spirituality and love I have never seen anywhere, I stop and ask

> myself, " Can sin beget holiness? "

>

> Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is worse. Why does

> a Christian go to church? Why is the cross holy? Why is the face

> turned toward the sky in prayer? Why are there so many images in the

> Catholic Church? Why are there so many images in the minds of

> Protestants when they pray? My brethren, we can no more think about

> anything without a mental image than we can live without breathing.

> By the law of association, the material image calls up the mental

> idea and vice versa. This is why the Hindu uses an external symbol

> when he worships. He will tell you, it helps to keep his mind fixed

> on the Being to whom he prays. He knows as well as you do that the

> image is not God, is not omnipresent. After all, how much does

> omnipresence mean to almost the whole world? It stands merely as a

> word, a symbol. Has God superficial area? If not, when we repeat

that

> word " omnipresent " , we think of the extended sky or of space, that

is

> all.

>

> As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental

> constitution, we have to associate our ideas of infinity with the

> image of the blue sky, or of the sea, so we naturally connect our

> idea of holiness with the image of a church, a mosque, or a cross.

>; The Hindus have associated the idea of holiness, purity, truth,

> omnipresence, and such other ideas with different images and forms.

> But with this difference that while some people devote their whole

> lives to their idol of a church and never rise higher, because with

> them religion means an intellectual assent to certain doctrines and

> doing good to their fellows, the whole religion of the Hindu is

> centred in realisation. Man is to become divine by realising the

> divine. Idols or temples or churches or books are only the supports,

> the helps, of his spiritual childhood: but on and on he must

progress.

>

> He must not stop anywhere. " External worship, material worship, " say

> the scriptures, " is the lowest stage; struggling to rise high,

mental

> prayer is the next stage, but the highest stage is when the Lord has

> been realised. " Mark, the same earnest man who is kneeling before

the

> idol tells you, " Him the Sun cannot express, nor the moon, nor the

> stars, the lightning cannot express Him, nor what we speak of as

> fire; through Him they shine. " But he does not abuse any one's idol

> or call its worship sin. He recognises in it a necessary stage of

> life. " The child is father of the man. " Would it be right for an old

> man to say that childhood is a sin or youth a sin?

>

> If a man can realise his divine nature with the help of an image,

> would it be right to call that a sin? Nor even when he has passed

> that stage, should he call it an error. To the Hindu, man is not

> travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower

> to higher truth. To him all the religions, from the lowest fetishism

> to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul

to

> grasp and realise the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of

> its birth and association, and each of these marks a stage of

> progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher,

> gathering more and more strength, till it reaches the Glorious Sun.

>

> Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognised

> it. Every other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas, and tries

to

> force society to adopt them. It places before society only one coat

> which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If it does not

fit

> John or Henry, he must go without a coat to cover his body. The

> Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be realised, or

> thought of, or stated, through the relative, and the images,

crosses,

> and crescents are simply so many symbols — so many pegs to hang the

> spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for every

> one, but those that do not need it have no right to say that it is

> wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism.

>

> One thing I must tell you. Idolatry in India does not mean anything

> horrible. It is not the mother of harlots. On the other hand, it is

> the attempt of undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual truths. The

> Hindus have their faults, they sometimes have their exceptions; but

> mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, and never

> for cutting the throats of their neighbours. If the Hindu fanatic

> burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of Inquisition.

> And even this cannot be laid at the door of his religion any more

> than the burning of witches can be laid at the door of Christianity.

>

> To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is only a

> travelling, a coming up, of different men and women, through various

> conditions and circumstances, to the same goal. Every religion is

> only evolving a God out of the material man, and the same God is the

> inspirer of all of them. Why, then, are there so many

contradictions?

> They are only apparent, says the Hindu. The contradictions come from

> the same truth adapting itself to the varying circumstances of

> different natures.

>

> It is the same light coming through glasses of different colours.

And

> these little variations are necessary for purposes of adaptation.

But

> in the heart of everything the same truth reigns. The Lord has

> declared to the Hindu in His incarnation as Krishna, " I am in every

> religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever thou

> seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and

> purifying humanity, know thou that I am there. " And what has been

the

> result? I challenge the world to find, throughout the whole system

of

> Sanskrit philosophy, any such expression as that the Hindu alone

will

> be saved and not others. Says Vyasa, " We find perfect men even

beyond

> the pale of our caste and creed. " One thing more. How, then, can the

> Hindu, whose whole fabric of thought centres in God, believe in

> Buddhism which is agnostic, or in Jainism which is atheistic?

>

> The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole

> force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in

> every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the

> Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son

> hath seen the Father also.

>

> This, brethren, is a short sketch of the religious ideas of the

> Hindus. The Hindu may have failed to carry out all his plans, but if

> there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will

> have no location in place or time; which will be infinite like the

> God it will preach, and whose sun will shine upon the followers of

> Krishna and of Christ, on saints and sinners alike; which will not

be

> Brahminic or Buddhistic, Christian or Mohammedan, but the sum total

> of all these, and still have infinite space for development; which

in

> its catholicity will embrace in its infinite arms, and find a place

> for, every human being, from the lowest grovelling savage not far

> removed from the brute, to the highest man towering by the virtues

of

> his head and heart almost above humanity, making society stand in

awe

> of him and doubt his human nature. It will be a religion which will

> have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, which

> will recognise divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole

> scope, whose whole force, will be created in aiding humanity to

> realise its own true, divine nature.

>

> Offer such a religion, and all the nations will follow you. Asoka's

> council was a council of the Buddhist faith. Akbar's, though more to

> the purpose, was only a parlour-meeting. It was reserved for America

> to proclaim to all quarters of the globe that the Lord is in every

> religion.

>

> May He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura-Mazda of the

> Zoroastrians, the Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah of the Jews,

> the Father in Heaven of the Christians, give strength to you to

carry

> out your noble idea! The star arose in the East; it travelled

> steadily towards the West, sometimes dimmed and sometimes effulgent,

> till it made a circuit of the world; and now it is again rising on

> the very horizon of the East, the borders of the Sanpo, a

> thousandfold more effulgent than it ever was before.

>

> Hail, Columbia, motherland of liberty! It has been given to thee,

who

> never dipped her hand in her neighbour's blood, who never found out

> that the shortest way of becoming rich was by robbing one's

> neighbours, it has been given to thee to march at the vanguard of

> civilisation with the flag of harmony.

>

> http://www.celextel.org/

>

[Guest guest]

Sahajayogi,

 

i have a few questions and comments.

 

You say: " The truly wise know, the body is a small part of the soul. "

 

[Could you please say how this is so?]

 

 

You say: " When are you going to stop pandering your children? "

 

[Could you please give more detail. Who is the " you " you are

referring to, and which children are you referring to? Also, what do

you mean by " pandering " ?]

 

 

You said: " You remind me of a pimp " .

 

[Again, who is the " you " you are talking about? And what (to you) is

a pimp? And why do you consider that person to be a " pimp " ?]

 

 

Btw. please give us your first name, so things can be a bit more personable.

 

kind regards,

 

violet

 

 

 

, sahaja yogi

<sahajayogi2004 wrote:

>

> The truly wise know, the body is a small part of the soul. When

are you going to stop pandering your children? you remind me of a

pimp.

>

>

>

> Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with

Mobile. Try it now.

>

[Guest guest]

Luciyogi,

 

What is your proof that he is Ishmael?

 

violet

 

 

 

,

" lucyyogiy " <lucyyogiy wrote:

>

> He is Ishmael,Violet! --- In

,

> " Violet " <violet.tubb@> wrote:

> >

> > Sahajayogi,

>

[Guest guest]

Luciyogi,

 

i got your proof that the person that calls themselves sahajayogi2004 is

Ishmael. Thanks for that. That would probably explain why he is so against

Jagbir's children having given evidence of the incarnation of Shri Mataji

Nirmala Devi. He just does not like to leave Jagbir alone, it seems.

 

regards,

 

violet

 

 

 

,

" Violet " <violet.tubb wrote:

>

> Luciyogi,

>

> What is your proof that he is Ishmael?

>

> violet

>

>

>

> ,

> " lucyyogiy " <lucyyogiy@> wrote:

> >

> > He is Ishmael,Violet! --- In

> ,

> > " Violet " <violet.tubb@> wrote:

> > >

> > > Sahajayogi,

> >

>

[Guest guest]

Sahajayogi2004,

 

Luciyogi has sent evidence that you are Ishmael. You have been banned from this

forum. Therefore, please do not bother answering any questions. Also, please do

not bother Jagbir. He is only doing his job.

 

violet

 

 

,

" Violet " <violet.tubb wrote:

>

> Sahajayogi,

>

> i have a few questions and comments.

>

> You say: " The truly wise know, the body is a small part of the

soul. "

>

> [Could you please say how this is so?]

>

>

> You say: " When are you going to stop pandering your children? "

>

> [Could you please give more detail. Who is the " you " you are

> referring to, and which children are you referring to? Also, what

do

> you mean by " pandering " ?]

>

>

> You said: " You remind me of a pimp " .

>

> [Again, who is the " you " you are talking about? And what (to you)

is

> a pimp? And why do you consider that person to be a " pimp " ?]

>

>

> Btw. please give us your first name, so things can be a bit more

personable.

>

> kind regards,

>

> violet

>

>

>

> , sahaja yogi

> <sahajayogi2004@> wrote:

> >

> > The truly wise know, the body is a small part of the soul. When

> are you going to stop pandering your children? you remind me of a

> pimp.

> >

> >

> >

> > Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with

> Mobile. Try it now.

> >

>