My humble salutations to the seekers who assembled on this auspicious occasion of the 138th birthday celebrations of our beloved Samarth Guru Sri Ramchandraji Maharaj of Fategarh. None of us here know anything about Him except through the writings of our beloved Master Sri Ramchandraji Maharaj of Shahjahanpur U.P. India. But that is only when we think of the exterior and the external factors. In our heart however the call of the Grand Master to reach Him is heard by all of us incessantly.

Recently I was contemplating on the words of our Master "My Master Samarth Guru Mahatma Sri Ramchandraji Maharaj of Fategarh (U.P) India, has remodelled the 'yoga' in a way that somehow you may come into contact with the Divine speedily."(SDG 151) The word 'somehow' used by the Master was intriguing. Further the statement "The blissful time ushered by His advent introduced a new era of spiritual awakening which promises a practical solution of the human problem of existence." (SDG 117) added further confusion.

At the time of the Advent, India was going through turmoil. Our Grand Masters' own life was shattered due to the Nawabs and Britishers. There was what is known as mutiny and also the world wars. I most humbly submit to you to go kindly read the story of the life of Rev. Lalaji Maharaj. I could not think of any blissful condition ushered at the time of the Advent and for that matter in the about one and a half century since then. The time now is no better. All that comes to my mind is the bondages in which we were and we are. Earlier others enslaved us and now by option we are getting enslaved to alien culture and civilisation. As a cynic put it India lost its independence after gaining freedom. Moreover our wants and desires have swelled beyond measure that we are not sure whether there is any sanity still left in the way we live. However the problem is directly connected to as to how we live.

Recalling the thoughts of my revered father I may express that there are mainly two ways of living: one is to live according to Nature and the other is to live according to Spirit. Human life is not capable of adjusting wholly to the one or the other. By nature one may mean the uncultivated, ill disciplined, desire and instinct driven person. This has been one view from the earliest times. The other view about nature considers that it was a paradisiacal state of utmost equality of all men, out of which flowed the feelings of rationality of all men. In any case men did not seek liberty, for the community gave ample scope for harmony without it.

Liberty comes in only when we wish to equalize ourselves with others or seek fraternity which we do not get from unequals. In any case, what we discover is that Nature has two faces, the face of strife and struggle for the elementary needs of life, and the other face, that looks forward to an era of peace and harmony. History informs us that when the face of strife and struggle was sought to be overcome by this ideal presented by the face of equality and fraternity, there arose what we call the period or age of nature and culture.

Culture itself has been an unceasing struggle to enthrone the values of equality and fraternity and freedom to arrive at the peaceful paradisiacal state. In other words, it is a continuous process of overcoming the forces of divisiveness with the power and force of the ideals of spirit like unity and cohesion which is the other face of Nature. This we know is the crux of Rajayoga and more particularly the Satyapad where the lower nature of man is sought to be governed by the higher nature of man. It is the wisdom gained by the ancient saints. This wisdom helped us to understand that the Higher Nature is a state of equilibrium, whereas the lower Nature is a state of inequilibrium or disintegration and division. The actual method by which we live in a cultured fashion which would mean living according to our higher nature, the object of our life, is what our Grand Master has bestowed on us. Master asserts that "My revered master, Samarth Guru Mahatma Ramchandraji Maharaj of Fategarh, has rendered wonderful service to humanity in this respect by providing the easiest means of gaining the object of life. (Reference: SDG 137)

As to the question whether human beings have become more cultured now than about a few centuries ago the answer is in the question itself. Nowadays even as Master would say "People do not know the value of spirituality, because such things are not infused in them by the society or parents. However, the present-day circumstances will mould them to come under the banner of spirituality. We should try to give them real peace; that is our duty and our business. A time will come when they will be forced to come on the proper path by Nature Herself. It will be for their own good." I wonder and sometimes hope that such a time has come now. Seeing the happenings of the present day I also wonder whether the rather abrasive statement of my revered father "Men need not take another body to be brutes; they have become brutes." (Reference: Dr. K.C.V. Vol.1 - pg 100) is true.

However dispassionate consideration of the progress we have made so far makes us say that the modern man or rather man living in the modern world is placed in an advantageous position today more than ever to meet the demands of our higher nature which we apprehend in the form of our ideals of civilization or spirituality. This is due to the fact that several religious have already prepared the grounds for the perception, cultivation and habituation to the ideals of religion and spirituality-each in its measures and also each in a broad sphere of taming the instincts of pugnacity, separatism, egoism and brutal way of living not only with one's own family members but also with neighbours and aliens. Religious injunctions though they have prohibited many uncivil ways of behaviour have moulded only slowly and negligibly our inner and personal life. It is true that in some cases it has been otherwise, in one's personal life one has indeed been restrained and self-controlled but in the mass or in public life many have run amok if not wild. It is a fact that man has not been able to transform his animal nature, or sublimate it in any way and this is our problem in transforming ourselves.

Though we are not living in any law of the jungle as Dr.K.C.V. would put it "yet man is untamed in parts, rational in a few, and the application of rationality in all spheres of human behaviour, personal or social, individual or collective has been tardy and perilous." However it is not proper to consider the higher and the lower Natures in us as opposed to each other and that there is hardly any possibility of bringing about harmony between the two. Most religions and philosophies wisely or unwisely have fostered the oppositional view of these two natures, so much so they have vowed to exterminate the lower nature. The misfortune however is that the processes they adopted to exterminate it has been precisely the manner of the lower nature. The repression of the lower mind was sought to be done by the higher using the methods of the lower or the higher is given a role similar to that of the wolf draped as sheep or the brute concealed in the robes of a saint.

Two ways were open, one that meant withdrawal of man from the society following the laws of the lower nature and the other was to struggle with the forces of the animal with the help of reason, dialectics, and bring about a mental change in social thinking. The former led to the cult of themonk and the monastery, in every religion, and the other to the academies, institutions of education and ashrams, where righteous thinking, higher rationality that showed the values of cooperative living, purposive self-control to bring about personal and social change. But as ironically renunciation was tried to be yoked to educational techniques, indeed education was taken over by the ashrams and sannyasins and fakirs so much so rationality was made to suit the monastic will. In fact with all the will to bring about a change in human nature by transforming its sensate and animal nature, it had inculcated the dogma or axiom of renunciation of social life or societal life as the sine qua non of spiritual liberty or freedom or even rationality. However with the enlarging of the spheres of activity of the monks, monk ethics and social psychology said to be ethics of a higher Nature or spirituality more and more began to take the shape and form of the lower nature. This is one of the major disturbing factors. It has unfortunately led to the conviction that human nature is by nature corrupt and despite heroic and martyric efforts to bring about lasting change towards divine life, it tends to revert to its animal basis as more secure for its continuance. The problem is all the more important for the sadhakas who desperately attempt to conquer the lower mind and its vagaries. Reason and rationality seem to fail us in the path.

Thus we are compelled to go beyond the ordinary dilatory tactics because self-interests dominate over true justice. Truth is not a compromise of standpoints, it is something that arises out of the intuition that develops and grows and is awakened into being through these processes. However human character demands a change of approach of attitude towards its own well-being. When this becomes the habitual way by being constantly chosen as such, despite gravest provocations then we can conceive of a time when it could become universal. Thus individual transformation is paramount to human transformation. The claim of the path of the Master is that through the process of Pranahuti the tendencies of the lower mind can be controlled and modified. Many studies made by the ISRC have proved this point and they should grant us the courage and wisdom to continue in the path with determination.

In fact modern man has quite a few choices- the Gandhian Way of life dedicated to non-violence and reasoning, a total abjuration of the ways of violence which he designated as animal reversion: the Aurobindonian Way of the Supramental Transformation which involves the bringing down of a superior mind or super-mind into almost every human being so that he begins to think and act in terms of the laws of the supermind or cosmic consciousness: a way of life as expounded by the Sri Ramakrishna-Vivekananda order, taking up the service of humanity as the service of God in man. There are many more such paths and new ones that are coming up by the day even as the mushrooms. However in all these paths the discovery of the soul of man or search for it has been an eternal one, it came to one person here and one person there in early times, but the problem is confronting every one simultaneously now.

Science has created its own problems. The scientific pragmatic age has produced astounding problems of knowledge and technology and has made an earlier appeal to God almost impossible. We are today either atheists or agnostics. Man has been made to feel that within him alone lies his salvation whether there are gods or God. This dependence on one self on personal commitment to live rationally and peacefully with one's neighbours with the minimum of needs fully attained - not at all impossible as he thinks it - is absolutely the one thing that the modern man cares for. The way of life according to science forward-looking, pragmatic and growing must be all sufficient to him. However the limits of science are found in the human personality itself - the serious problems of post-life or after death, the conscience within that seems to throw a shadow of itself on the future after life. But these may be exceptional to some men at present, it was a very common problem or enigma in the past - in the lives of the monks and sannyasins. This, science has not yet been able to solve, not to speak of undertaking to face. The world is too much with us: death poses no problem for it appears to be solution to problems not only regarding oneself but also of others as well. Liquidation of opponents even like the liquidation of unfits would be as it has been a quick solution.

This is surely a cynical solution. Spirituality and mysticism promises that men enter a greater life after death and a more lovable world would be their new home. God indeed has been said to reign there. Whatever the religion it has been at pains to reveal that a good life, a life of virtue and character maintained through all kinds of trials will lead to a world of happiness and release or freedom from all the sorrows that befall the good here. We have come to regard that this hope is perhaps a sheer wish-fulfilment idealization. We seem to have no alternative except to strive to make this world itself a godly world - but that is precisely the problem and challenge to the modern man. Short lived hopes just melt away when the lower nature quietly but ruthlessly has its way of shattering them.

The only way then open to us is to find out a method by which the lower nature can automatically be controlled and also reveal the future of man after his life is over. Death may have its terrors but life has revealed it so much that we would rather welcome the regions of death. The spiritual way precisely promised to unravel this mystery. The technique of linking oneself with the core of Reality that embraces both the life and the death is perhaps the only way. Yoga is said to be the description of this process of linking one with that central Reality. So far in the history of Yoga the paraphernalia of preparations for this linking have been more ardently cared for than the actual linking itself. None of the so-called yogas or means of connection with God has actually brought about the same. Neither selfless works, nor deep thought processes or intellections, nor mere devotion helped. Nor have mere change of nomenclatures helped. Ritual mysticisms have not produced the results. The yoga at the time of the Advent and perhaps even today has been reduced to a theatrical operational method - so much so it has become the bye-word for self-hypnotisms or megalomaniacal behaviour. All sorts of supra normal miraculous things are claimed for it. This has been rather unfortunate.

A way of union with the Ultimate Reality discarding all these paraphernalia or miracle-mongering or claims will have better chance of bringing about a change of real attitudes or of consciousness itself. This is precisely what the new method of Rajayoga of our Grand Master Sri Ramchandraji of Fategarh has done. The process is scientific, verifiable, easy and simple. It is the special method by which the divine consciousness or ultimate thought force is transmitted into the heart of the seeker after union, that produces the illumination of both the here and the hereafter. This is transmission of the supreme or ultimate consciousness which is presumed to be the primal cause. This transcendental thought-force called Prana or life itself is capable of bringing about the proper moulding of the lower nature in terms of its own nature which is the highest and thus confers on the human organism, inclusive of the senses and the mind a peace and calm. The goal is not just a kind of thoughtlessness or a feeling of Void or nothingness but the experience of real being beyond thought itself, individual, cosmic and even supra cosmic. Once the human organism is made responsive to this inner deep and fundamental Real Being by the introduction or ingression of the Ultimate then they become responsive slowly but surely to the Reality which has been uniformly experienced as the peace that passeth understanding. The Ultimate Being does not refute science or matter but makes it the vehicle for its own supreme functions which are of the highest Nature, Peace, Reality, Harmony and efficiency that does not bring down the return of the gross condition.

This is a method without dogma or ritual, and pure and simple spirituality that does refute matter which is but its nether form. Since our beloved Master Babuji Maharaj has started the propagation of this system through all means available it now stands proved by the various studies the ISRC has done and continues to do, that this could be done with all human beings who feel the call of the higher nature and train themselves with the help of the persons who know this art of bringing down or introducing this highest Spirit into their hearts.