We are meeting on the auspicious occasion of the 105th birth day of our beloved Master Rev. Ramchandraji Maharaj of Shahjahanpur. We are accustomed to the experience of the shower of grace from the time fortune favoured us by enabling us to start following his system of sadhana. The grace with which he communicates, his love for us all through the sessions of Pranahuti is really something highly personal. It is as though each one of us is dearly whispered into by him and it is an unique feeling we have and would rather prefer to dwell in the thought of his love rather than indulge in other activities. That is our practice when we meditate at home.

The celebration is a different occasion. Here we have several occasions to meditate, contemplate, share and communicate our feelings with fellow travellers on the path. This is an occasion of special fortune for two more days of our celebrations. Not that the love abates then but by then collective enjoyment ceases is a painful fact.

We have always felt his whisper plain, bare, simple, bald, unembellished and yet austere. His message is such that it is never ornate. A few days back an intimate associate of mine asked whether it would not be possible for us to make the modern day enlightened ones or masters see the point of view of our Master and join with us to propagate or more appropriately share the wisdom of the method of the master. I told that I feel they want the subject to be highly articulated in the languages of philosophy and psychology and simplicity in expression is not all that welcome to them. I also informed that some of our associates did send the literature to some one who claimed to be a master or enlightened one but that master did not have the courtesy to acknowledge receipt of the same. Many are the ways of the masters! Be that as it may.

Our Master writes an unsophisticated language. He may even be said to be plain or I may call that plainness is blunt in his expression. Unfortunately the word blunt is associated with insensitivity, which is not what I am attempting to highlight or illuminate, but rather what is most sensitive, juicy, alive and truly sacred. There is a wonderful beauty in his expressions. Like the desert, it has a beauty that arises from simplicity and the need for economy. We are aware that with words, there can be such a maze of ornaments that is capable of obscuring the value of what is communicated. And where there is so much decoration in language we miss to note that there is nothing of significance that is being conveyed.

Yet, the fact remains such articulation and if we may call aesthetics, has become a standard for "sincerity". This is an unfortunate fallacy. This makes people very cynical, suspicious, and the irony is people seem to ignore anyone who does not speak aesthetically. That such should be the fate of our Masters' messages is unfortunate for humanity.

It appears many people have lost the ability to hear plain language. They have become so accustomed to looking for hidden meanings that they assume all communications should have them. Fortunately it is not so for any meaningful communication. It is a joy and an ease not to strain oneself to speak or hear a clear communication.

The real problem here is that the form and structure of the language gets all the attention and nothing worthwhile gets conveyed. But our Master always communicates something of significance and it requires cultured minds, to use his language, to understand these spiritual matters. We find the current day atmosphere is of forms for forms sake. In other words the form is the substance, which is an absurdity that is worthy of contempt. The misfortune is that these ideas are spreading internationally. It is a new religion of sophistication fused with aesthetics and embellishments. It is forgotten that the form should always project or express a function.

When I think of the various gods and goddess that adorn our religious atmosphere I find the form given to each and every deity is distinct and has the qualities that are invariably inseparable from the function that they are supposed to discharge. This is point to which I would like draw your special attention.

When we have fixed up our goal as oneness with God, who ever and what ever that might be and have resolved not to relax till we achieve the same, we have also formed and fixed in our minds the concept of the Ultimate. The word Ultimate should be understood as the last and final state of our being. Please note that it is not a stage but a state. The Ultimate state we were informed by the Master is where we feel 'Nothingness'. He says that Silence is nearer to God. And adds that Silence itself is the seat on which Silence stands. We find here, the Master is difficult to understand. We find the Master getting poetical. It is a poetry which by its very nature implies something and the message is indirect. This causes one to meditate over the meaning and the results can be varied. It is not my intention that Master could have been plain and direct; which mostly he is. Yet some times we find that he resorts to subtleties of language.

We cannot that easily understand his words when he says "Love him who loves all" or "This and that have gone now" or 'Divinity is a play and Divine the way.' This does not mean we can ask the Master to avoid such statements and tell us more plainly. Far from it, I have always felt that it is wonderful to have all ways of speaking, including not speaking, in which the Master used to revel for those who know that. Certain times it becomes difficult to reveal the rare beauty of experience and inner understanding in the plain spoken words. Aesthetic speaking may communicate better in some circumstances. Inner revelations many a time demand such expression. In all mystic pronouncements there is invariably certain amount of aesthetics imbedded.

One sentence of his that made me feel miserable when I understood hopefully its meaning is "This is my prayer for all of you." This sentence was preceded by the sentence "May you be bold enough to make these attempts sincerely and seriously." How is it we are prayed for by the great master? What worth did he find in us to merit a prayer for us? This was a baffling proposition for long and I was addressing myself to understand the same.

He while assuring us his help to the best of his capacity all through, was pleading with us to put in efforts and said that would count most. Yet we have a notion of the infallibility of the master once he deigns to help us and we entertain a feeling our effort is not all that necessary. This is one of the greatest errors in the thinking of the devotees who some how believe in the proposition of getting rewards for no effort.

On some occasions bitter words that are not even sugar coated pills are given to us by the master. However our minds are capable of coating the same with honey that ensures total misunderstanding the message. He says very plainly without any polish that "Suffering is the root and the results are flowers which every associate should strive hard to have." This he said in the context of emphasizing the importance of character. Was he asking us to strive hard to have sufferings! How sweet of him!

He said "The way of life should be pregnant with high morals." Morality is not just custom, tradition, usage or convention but is best defined according to me as the individual effort to maintain cosmic order. To experience the inseperateness of our being with others and the universe is the highest moral that I have come to understand and feeling the fraternity with all that exists is the greatest virtue. Surely it is sadhana alone that enables us live up to this as we locate and live with the centre of all existence.

We cannot understand the master unless we go through the practices he has advised. He would say "that the troubles remind us of its silent stage. We get comfort in the state of discomfort. We remember it when it's opposite is there. In this way we develop forbearance and a little bit of peace also." It is true that when we are pricked by a thorn or thistle we remember either the mother or the master as the case may be. The prick is painful and the remembrance of the master grants peace. In the same situation both the opposites are there and few think of master and the rest their corporeal self and its pain. It is Viveka to remember the master and that is what we are asked to practice.

The call was given for using the painful experiences and miseries or afflictions in a more sophisticated and articulated manner by Dr.K.C.Varadachari. He said "he loves us so much that every opportunity is provided for us to grow. When we ask for strength, He provides us difficulties to make us strong; when we seek for prosperity, He gives us the brain and brawn to work; when we ask for courage, He causes danger to overcome; when we ask for love, He sends us troubled persons to help; when we ask for wisdom, He gives problems to solve. The way of the Lord is difficult to understand but when we understand, the joy of awareness has no bounds." But the response from our side has most often been cold and tepid. However that is how real vairagya and forbearance is learnt and there is no easier way.

Master says" Many of you have not yet fully seen the grace of the beautiful flowers of the garden and have not tasted their fragrance." It is our sufferings and miseries that remind us of the master and the nectar of such remembrance is the substance in which the mind is drowned in ecstasy. The garden has the flowers born out of our suffering and who but one with mad ecstasy in the remembrance of the master would ever think of entering such a garden? For that we need courage and boldness and knowing our weakness he with his enormous love prayed for us to develop such a capacity. Still do we Love Him who loves all?

Another very illuminating sentence which is poetical that comes to my memory is "We can only know the unknown when we become unknown ourselves." Surely few would think of being without an identity card. I remember a person who was almost compelled by circumstances to resign from his relatively high post carrying a stature and position in society, wailing that he has no identity card to show any one and was lamenting over his fate. I wonder whether this problem is an identity crisis or identity card crisis. Identity card crisis is far too inferior to the identity crisis through which we go through in sadhana and we come to a stage where the illusory ego is almost dissolved.

Master states that "Sometimes these things come and go but we should grasp them and make them permanent with us. From there you rise above." The experience of becoming totally unknown to ourselves is one of the feelings during meditation and almost all those who practice the system have expressed the same. But we do not grasp that unknown status of ours and miss the message. It is this that I have been pleading for when I was asking the aspirants to own up the experience. Why is it that after experiencing the state of Void or Null during the meditation, we still keep an attitude of love toward God or Master? The obvious answer is that 'I-consciousness' persists. It disappears in the state of Samadhi or Void that we no doubt have, but it comes back. The 'I' never disappears on its own. It is the love for the Master or God that keeps us anchored in our path. However the goal does not require to be changed and our aim is to have oneness with God and not just love for God.

Only when we own that type of experience which comes and goes, do we really imperience the Divine. The call is there, the experience is there and yet it is our unprepared ness to lose our identity and become unknown by relinquishing all our ego and identity that is the barrier.

I agree that many an aspirant cannot confirm the true value of what I am speaking by agreeing or disagreeing with it. This requires that there is a need to examine whether it is true or not within one's own Being. Once it is felt as true in one's Being it becomes beautiful. Satyam or truth is always associated with beauty or Sundaram. In meditation when we try to look into our own Being we invariably leave behind all that is false. When we work with the mind keeping it in the lower mental plane, falsehood is automatically born. It is the true mind or Being that is what is retained when there is no-lower mind. The only way to access the true mind is meditation and silence.

Fortunately Silence is the secret that is not hidden from anyone and as we know Silence indeed speaks.

It is 21 years after Masters' physical veiling and His presence is now felt more vividly and experienced more intensely than ever before, making many of his statements to this effect true. This is no surprise for those who have faith in the Master, Sri Ramchandraji Maharaj of Shahjahanpur, U.P India as a supra temporal being, working out as the Eternal Master, our spiritual destinies with the super consciousness of the highest variety native to the Central Region.

We are clear in our understanding that the Special Personality is special mainly because there is no Persona or Mask for him as we all have. This point we have had occasions to note earlier many times in our books and meetings. We are clear that we are not subscribing to any personality cult and make one man/woman as the focal point and a point of adoration and consequent flattery. We are doubly sure, what with the ready response from the source, that there is a Divine Consciousness which is ever ready to answer our call and that is expressing itself as the Consciousness of Sri Ramchandra, a consciousness that includes all and excludes none, that which is all love and grace and ever willing to modify and transform our consciousness by its association we have during our meditations and otherwise through the influx of Pranahuti. For others the Real Teacher of all, "Time" will give its lessons. All shall have the message sooner or later.

It is a matter of practical experience of many aspirants in the path of the Master, which we call PAM in order to stress the importance of the process of Pranahuti, rather than any person, from where it is confusedly identified to be emanating from, to feel and get absorbed in the transcendent calmness and quiet that is uniquely divine. We experience very vividly the 'Centre that is yawning towards the circumference' even as the Master asserted. Calmness or quiet by itself is good but when it is tinged with the quality of the Divine, it is only the imperience that can explain to our hearts the intensity of the attraction of the Centre and no words can clarify any point in this regard. We have tried to explain the nature and process of Pranahuti in our article published in the journal Imperience.

When we do get absorbed in meditation due to the effect of Pranahuti, and when we contemplate over our condition we find that we were face to face with the profound and overwhelming primordial ground of Reality itself. That is when we find, no where our little self, and we are not even aware of the borders of vast space that is experienced, nor awareness of the time, that is the real ground of all experience. This is the place and time, if it is permitted to use those words, where the Base or Origin is presented to us by the Master out of his extreme love and consideration to lift us beyond the petty differences and squabbles that consume our time and other resources normally. We are then not aware of ourselves, our relations and relationships, our anguishes and animosities. Deeply entertained emotions of love and hatred equally disappear; attitudes of revenge loose their roots, if only we are attentive to the Ground that is exposed to us by the benevolent Master.

The imperience that we have does not permit us to be satisfied with the necessity to evolve individually but it impels our Being to personally participate in the Divine task of transformation and that call from the inner self becomes imperative. Having submitted our Egos and also surrendered our will in favour of the Divine Will, we find ourselves presenting bare and naked before the powerful and omni-potent energy that is intent and determined to modify and transform the human consciousness. The propulsion is experienced intimately every time the Pranahuti is offered and we find ourselves left with no option than to evolve. The human destiny to evolve out of its petty limitations, self imposed invariably in all cases, is not something that is pre-determined but the imperative to participate in the Divine plan is sought to be made clear by the process of Pranahuti. Without Pranahuti this imperative to evolve, may at best be felt by the most clear and vivid intellectuals as we have seen in the pronouncement of many Advents/saints/scholars and scientists of the modern day or yesterdays. If human transformation were to wait for the evolution of the perfect intellect in all, it may as well be concluded such a transformation is out of question, at any rate in the near future. That is what we have seen in the Indian Six darshanas and a host of other philosophies of the east and the west and the endless arguments in the favour of one or the other point of view.

In the state of consciousness that may be called as Void, we find there are no binds for us in any manner and we also feel that there is a spiritual awakening and a compulsion that get generated in us due to the death of Ego or 'I' ness. When the relentless will of the separate Ego yields to the Divine which is felt as an imperative impulse to evolve in our consciousness we find meaning for our Being. This impulse has always been there and was clouded all this time as we were engrossed in our Ego agenda.

Due to the influx of the will of the divine as Pranahuti we become alive to the greater call and develop an attitude of renunciation which is the real vairagya. This is not renunciation of the Ego's agenda due to failures or dejections but a conscious decision to efface the Ego and live for the Divine, by the Divine and in the Divine.

Renunciation from all attachments that our Ego has developed in the course of its creation of its own universe is in no way connected to the various modes or orders of social life but a condition of consciousness in which it realizes its spiritual absoluteness. Here ethics and spirituality coalesce in the attunement of the individual to the structure of the cosmos. Man becomes one with creation, being freed from the bondage of attachment, convention and anxiety. The aspirant fixes his attention on nothing but the Infinite and is ill equipped to know nothing other than That or Tam. For one who has fixed for himself such a goal the duties of the Brahmacharin, Grhastha and Vanaprastha are not progressive stages of self-sublimation and self-transcendence but a compliance to the social order that a civilized society has developed to bring an ethical and moral order and each one of the stages actively assisting him in leading a life of total dedication to the Divine with an attitude of due attachment which is the real and natural meaning of Sanyasa.

The three basic cravings, called Eshanas in the Upanishads, which correspond to the psychological complexes in the form of desire for wealth, fame (with power) and progeny through legitimate sex, are overcome in the graduated educational process constituted by the stages of life. This becomes much more easy with the constant affirmation that is had about our real nature during meditation supported by the process of Pranahuti that nothing here belongs to us and also by adhering to the philosophy that is advocated by our Master to treat every one and every task of ours as those entrusted to us by the Divine as a trustee.

One who takes to a detached look at things and events and relations, is the real aspirant in our system, for whom there is nothing more important than the discharge of all duties as divinely ordained. He by virtue of being a real human has got to discharge certain duties as a trustee is the noblest of the thoughts that our Master has given us. For us there is nothing here to own and possess but every thing is to be partaken of, rather than enjoyed, with a feeling that there is nothing except the Absolute in reality, expressing itself here in the past and the present. The anubhava or experience is a non personal unified enriched consciousness that swells into the future expressing itself in a more glorious manner. Those who tend to see values in the past are right but yet stagnated. And those who live the same values modified to suit the present days are those who practice the right. But those who enrich the values keeping in view the needs of the future with a vision that is holistic are those who are the forerunners of the future.

It is only such persons who remain as gems and jewels in any society irrespective of the fact whether they are recognized as such by others. They are the excellent workers, supervisors, managers, doctors and are there in every calling and vocation. They are all in fact doctors of Divinity serving others with a total dedication to the divine. Because of the basic renunciation they have acquired due to the constant awareness of the Bare Ground where their total nakedness is exposed, they hold on to nothing, thus making it possible for them to develop the great virtues of Dharma (abiding by the Divine law), Dana (going even beyond the Law by resorting to self less offering), Tyaga (sacrificing ones own interest like King Shibi and Karna).They are the ones who can be considered to have understood the real meaning of the words 'due attachment' so often used by our Master.

The 'due attachment' from my humble point of view is the attachment to the Divine; which can never become undue, what with our puny status in the scheme of things. It is the glory of the Divine that it chooses to offer opportunities to the human beings to simulate the Divine. That is the origin of Masters. What a great Master we have who exhorts us always to imitate him and become Masters in turn and we become a source of inspiration for others. There is no challenge greater than the one which asks us to be Divine. To become Divine is our birth right as the seeds for the same are already sown waiting to be nourished and nurtured. Those who respond to this call by working for the same incessantly and without any remission are the ones who get enriched by the very active presence of the Divine sprouting in each and every pore of being fulfilling the Divine promise of bringing out a transformed human being. Such are the ones who are fit for service to lead others to and in the path of the Divine.

Amongst our gathering for those who have eyes to see and hearts to feel there are quite a few such souls and my prayer is that such souls may increase and bring more Peace and Harmony.

The path of meditation has always been considered in tradition as superior to the ritualistic religious discipline worshipping either the sakara or the nirakara forms of the Divine. Those who have had the experience of the Real Ground but yet do not continue in the path are bound to return to the path and reach the goal, according to tradition in seven lives. Those who have moved in the path of meditation and yet missed the grace according to tradition reach the goal of no return to birth in one more life. Those who have moved in the path of meditation and had the grace of God never return to birth. My request has always been to recognize the merit of the path by experience and acknowledge the same. Do not judge the value of this system by the imaginary notions of what reality is; do not judge the merits of the system by dogmas and beliefs created by people who had little practical experience; do not get guided by notions held by guru kitabis. Having known the path it is our duty to follow the same with single pointed orientation, refusing to entertain notions and beliefs however ancient they might be. Ekagravrtti in this context is a necessary precedent for effective sadhana. As for Masters grace we have it in abundance. The path of no return is here and it is for us to accept, follow and pass on.

Those that had the taste of the Void or Nothingness, when they reflect on such an experience with the required extent of devotion and love to the Master are sure to resolve the basic bonds of

1. Awareness of independent existence that starts the moment the Jiva is born and gets strengthened by the customs and educational inputs of the society and culture which promote "I" ness. The aspirant who beholds the Truth in its naked ness leaves this illusion and gets out of the bonds of I and Mine. These are the people who can be considered as Saintly because their actions depend on the natural responses rather than based on preconceived notions and prejudices. Their aim happens to be universal good.

2. The second important bondage they get rid of is the bondage of rituals and practices that go by the name of religious customs. This is due to the natural consequence of the perception of Ground or Reality as it is and they come out of their rituals and customs and do not cling to them setting aside the logic that 'because they are old and therefore there must be something good in that'. They also understand that these customs have been changing according to the times and their insistence on these to continue as they are is morbid. The suffering due to this bondage itself is something that only the person who goes through it knows and blessed are those who are not chained or imprisoned by such routines and rituals as they do not have to work with their intellectual and pseudo intellectual chattering in their mind always.

3. The third most important bondage that gets loosened because of the experience of the Real Ground is the clinging to associates, associations, customs and habits, companions of play and game and clubs, relatives and relations of all kinds. All these tend to be perceived as totally irrelevant to the task on hand. Those who face the Truth Eternal start leaving out all that is not relevant to reach the goal and go about their task of owning up the condition of the Real through constant remembrance of the experience they have had during meditation.

I feel that our gathering has many such souls totally dedicated to the cause of the Master/Divine and feel immensely happy to be in their company for a couple of days now. The joy is inexpressible and that is mine as well as, I am sure of all of you.

My humble salutations at the feet of the Master and of all of the associates of the Master.