Speech delivered at 3, Sir T. B. Road,
Allahabad on 8th April 1968.
I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity
to speak to you on the great work, which Babuji
is carrying on in this world. His present work
is to disseminate the practice called Sri
Ramchandra's Rajayoga, so that not only we who
are citizens of India but the whole world may
profit by the spiritual work. Ultimately the aim
is to have a new type of people who might be
called divine, who live the life of God on
earth, and make the world a better place and a
happier place to live in. For this purpose he
has propounded a system of yoga, or Divine
connection or union, which would moderate the
influences in this universe and normalize our
lives.
We are living in extraordinary times and the
world is seething with tensions of all sorts
which are results of great upheavals in the
field of politics, of racial relations, of
communal relations, of familial relations and
also individual relations. In the fields of
industry and in the fields of art you have the
same confusion and tension, and there have been
many misinterpretations of innovations which are
considered to be creations-indeed very perverse
many of them-and that is why we are not able to
distinguish between the true and the false, the
beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad.
And in this great confusion we are trying to
create more tensions by emphasizing differences
rather than unities. The struggle for unity,
again, has not been well conceived. Unless the
mind of man changes and his personality is
transformed to become harmonious and integrated
in the real sense of the term, that is to say
integrated from above rather than integrated
from below, we are bound to experience more
shocks. It is in this context that the Sri
Ramchandra's Rajayoga demands our earnest and
urgent consideration.
The Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga is, in one
sense, the ideal towards which all yogas have
striven but have missed. We all know that there
have been several kinds of yoga, and Raja yoga
is also considered to be one of them. We start
with Karma yoga, Gnana yoga and Bhakti yoga. And
we consider that these are practicable to all of
us. However, we know that the sannyasis have a
claim for Gnana yoga; Bhakti yoga is intended
for people who are uneducated; and Karma yoga
for all and sundry. But in ancient times Karma
yoga demanded a knowledge of the technique of
rituals; Gnana yoga wanted a competence in
certain matters; and Bhakti yoga also wanted
competence in certain other respects. But thanks
to our modern reformulations of ancient yogas,
by very well - meaning reformists, we have lost
the meaning of Karma yoga, Gnana yoga and Bhakti
yoga. Karma yoga is social work. Gnana yoga is
Modern Philosophy, and Bhakti yoga is mere
bhajan. May be that all this may lead to
something good; I do not deny that each one of
them has its use in a limited sense. But, by and
large, many of us have felt that they have
become meaningless as ideals to be pursued and
coveted. Therefore, we have been searching for a
real yoga, but here again we have met some
people who have stated that the Raja yoga
propounded and practised by the sannyasis is an
exclusive preserve of sannyasis alone, because
vairagya is demanded as a condition, giving up
of all activities is very necessary. A state of
thoughtlessness must be introduced by force and
by practice. And all types of disciplines are
necessary before you can have union with God.
You all know about that other yoga called Hatha
yoga. It is a peculiar and arduous training of
the physical body, requiring a tremendous amount
of patience, and I should say forbearance. We,
therefore, found that Hatha yoga, again, is
unsuitable for the large mass of mankind.
Now we have Tantrik systems, which have
developed several kinds of techniques, occult in
some sense, mysterious in another sense,
entirely nauseating in a third sense. And
revolting also. All this has set intelligent
man, the thinking mind, a task of finding out
how to connect oneself with God. Much better was
it to deny the existence of God himself. But
then God cannot be dismissed by merely saying
that He does not exist, even if that contention
is maintained with the help of proofs drawn from
natural history and materialistic sources. We
somehow believe that there must be a supreme
force, which is operating in every one of us,
making us live the life, but unfortunately
somehow, for some reason, whatever the reason
that man may try to give, the flow of that
supreme energy into us, or that supreme
consciousness into us, has got arrested, and we
feel as if the sap by which we have been fed is
almost running dry.
Therefore, we wanted some one to give us the
nature and the manner by which that Supreme
Being can be first connected with us. We find in
the message and the method given by Babuji that
not only is it the most simple thing available
to us, and ready at hand, it is something that
will do the work and the task to which it has
been called. Raja yoga, which he has said is
really sovereign yoga, is a yoga where we start
our yoga with relation with God rather than wait
for it at the end of a long and arduous
apprenticeship or discipleship, or Tapas. Our
tapas begins with the help of God; under the
guidance of God; under the guidance of the
Supreme power which goes on giving us the force
and the power and the ability and the capacity
to absorb the Divine element within us. It may
appear strange, but it is a fact that the most
distant Being, and the highest and the Ultimate
Being, has been lodged in the very cave of our
hearts, or rather can be lodged there. We are
yet suffering from the view that God is some one
who is afar and apart from the reality or the
world; that logicians non-mystic view that God
is far beyond us; man's finite mind cannot grasp
it. The Vedic seer was much bigger in this
concept than these little logicians of the Nyaya
school.
So God can be brought into the heart of man.
Not only can He be brought, but He is willing to
come in if you can call Him. You can give an
opportunity to Him; but your idols of the cave
and the idols of the tribe and the idols of so
many sorts prevent that God from entering your
heart. Our conceptions are like walls raised
between Reality and ourselves, and since you
cannot break the walls yourself, somebody has to
make holes in the wall you have created. And
that is the function, which befalls a teacher of
Yoga. He has to pierce through your walls of
misunderstanding, of obstruction - the sheaths,
which you have raised between Reality and
yourself. Well, I do not enter into the
discussions or the descriptions as to how these
walls have ever come between God and us, both
from within and from without. The imageries may
not help much, but we know that going outward
and outward we do not come across Reality, and
it is rather difficult to go inward and inward
to probe into the depth of Reality.
Well, these have confronted people and
produced all sorts of tensions, and when we can
go neither inside nor outside, our concern is
with our neighbours against whom we make all
complaints and spend our whole lifetime in
beating each other, and quarrelling with each
other. In fact, we are indulging in a very
senseless play because we have no other place to
go towards. That is why the confusion today is
we have not been able to go either upward or
inward, or even outward properly. All our
knowledge of the world has not opened us up. All
the scriptural literatures have not helped us.
They somewhere show a dim, far-off glance of an
infinite beyond, but of its possibility here and
now we have hardly any. That is the reason why
this Raja yoga was propounded by Shri Babuji.
For him, as I said, the easiest thing is to get
the highest consciousness into you. I almost
venture to think that that is the bringing of
God to his home in the heart of man! And this is
done in a simple way taking the old system of
trying to bring the ultimate manas, the first
thing that is brought out in creation in its
nascent form, and introducing it into the heart
of the little, blindfolded and severely
ensheathed mind of man, and it can do the job
well. And when that Supreme Mind, the mind of
God - of course God Himself might have no mind,
but He uses the mind in his creation, and that
mind finds its affinity with the mind within us,
of which it is a product-when that Supreme mind
is introduced into the heart, this little mind
joining with it enjoys a peculiar sense of
release of tensions; a kind of unsheathing of
the sheaths seems to happen; a penetrating
beyond the walls that have been raised by you,
so that it can flow out and flow within. So
tensions are removed at once. And man has a gaze
of the Infinite, which he pursues afterwards
with tremendous devotion. The bringing of the
Highest consciousness or mind into the heart of
every individual is done by a special process
which was, at one stage, common knowledge to all
the great men, but which has since been
forgotten. It had to be brought back. And now it
had to be brought back under circumstances which
are quite different from those ages; and for
this purpose Babuji has devised or invented a
method by which it could be introduced with the
least amount of sophistication; the least amount
of knowledge on your part; or even faith, as he
puts it, or any duty or work that you have to
do, in the sense of a ritual or rite. It is done
simply, by merely sitting before the Master. And
the process by which it is done by him is called
transmission. Once this transmission takes
place, the mind within opens up towards this new
frontier. Calmness settles on it. Harmony seems
to develop between himself and his members. And
afterwards he finds it developing in a larger
sphere. Even natural events and oppositions
yield to this new force introduced into the
heart. This is the power of transmission which
Shri Ram Chandraji-Babuji-has perfected, and has
been using on all types and grades of
people-intellectuals, non-intellectuals, learned
men, ignorant men, the rich and the poor,
without any difference whatsoever. And the
results have been, from my own experience for
the last twelve years, uniformly of the same
order-the de-tensioning of man.
It is not that you will see God face-to-face
as some might say. There are no visions offered;
and there is no need for visions in this marga.
Experience is not vision. Vision is only one
type of experience. Experience is much deeper in
the heart; and a peculiar kind of activity of
harmonized existence comes. It may not be very
sudden. It is not expected to be sudden. It has
to become natural, so that your body might
become accustomed to this new dynamism and this
new movement which has taken place, thanks to
this transmission.
This is the unique thing found in this
system, and which is not found in any other. If
they had, they have forgotten it! And the Raja
yogins who have been writing all these books,
and translating Patanjali's Yoga Sutras again
and again, most learned men, and commented on
them also, missed the most important thing
namely, that you cannot control your mind with
your efforts, you can only control your mind by
creating more tensions.
By the ordinary textbook method of Raja yoga,
without transmission, you can only create
tensions, and as Sri Krishna said, it requires
quite a large amount of abhyasa,
vyavasaya-cultivation and culturing, or
ploughing shall I say, before you can bring the
mind under check. But checking the mind is not
our goal. It is only the means. And Yogascitta
Vritti Nirodhaha doesn't at all give the full
definition. The real thing is, if you connect
yourself with God then everything will follow
from it.
So, first let me be connected with God, with
that Ultimate force, which is called by Babuji
Pranahuti or transmission. The offering of the
very breath of Brahman into you. It is manas
that has become prana, as the Upanishad puts it,
and it is by that you are all living. But the
prana with which you are all living has become
so enfeebled, so much so that you would like to
give up this type of prana even. How to give new
life to you? You have to get it from the source
again. And he is certainly a god who can bring
that source back into my heart! To re-enliven
one, make one feel a new man with a new life,
and a new possibility for mankind - that is the
reason why this pranahuti principle of
transmission is very important. If you have all
the other things with you and not this they are
like dead things with you. Instruments which
have no meaning, methods which have no value;
but if you have this all of them get built up,
and you find everything makes for your
harmonization and integration. This
prana-ahuti-many of us think that this pranahuti
is merely the offering of argya into the fire,
the ghee into the fire. And in our eating we
always feed the five pranas with some food and
call it pranahuti. But what is it that you are
offering into this fire of the heart, which has
fire of a greater life and an immortal one? I
believe God himself offers his very breath into
us, that is, His mind which is resting in peace
which is unfathomable, and which cannot be
broken by any amount of confusion. That is what
is fed into us. You may call it the sacrifice of
the Purusha in the language of the ancient Veda.
The Supreme consciousness is offered into you.
And this we call the supreme thought, the
supreme mind; and when that is introduced our
Yoga starts. The others are preliminaries, and
as Master has, I think, written somewhere, the
real initiation comes long afterwards when the
connection between you and the Ultimate is
established.
I have suggested, in a way, that the very
touch of the Master's life force into one is the
beginning of a yoga that will not terminate till
the final, complete yoga is had. We start with
yoga, we culminate in identity, in union. Such a
Sayujya is beyond any description. But we start
with it. We grow more and more with it. All the
sadhanas become natural to us. The so-called
yama and niyama are naturally established in our
system because they are basic elements and
characters of the Ultimate consciousness which
has come to dwell within us; which has come to
operate on our very urge. Our organism is not
something repellant, something karmically
determined by blindness and darkness and
ignorance. An omniscient, omnipotent force, such
as the prana of the Divine, the supreme mind,
the supreme thought, when it enters into our
whole being, every one of the several parts of
our body and mind get new force, new direction.
They become truthful. They yearn for the
infinite Brahman. They neither steal nor rob,
nor cause injury. Their cleanliness is natural
to them. Their devotion to Reality is perfect.
And God almost dwells in them, because they have
surrendered willingly, freely, to be moulded by
the Divine light and the Divine force. But even
that is not something which you are asked to do.
It does it quietly, naturally. And may be it
appears fantastic, it appears almost that I am
speaking something in exaggerated language, but
I may confess to this that slowly,
imperceptibly, many of our abhyasis have changed
for the better. And to them there is no effort
to speak the truth; there is no effort to
practice brahmacharya, or an effort even to love
God; or effort for devotion. Knowledge comes
naturally. Action comes naturally. We are
established in the yoga of gnana and karma and
bhakti in a natural way. And all the controls
over the several portions of one's body also, I
believe, if wanted, come naturally to us.
The Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga then takes us
naturally to this point of a normal evolution of
the human being to the most high spiritual
stature by developing his moral virtues. Indeed
Shri Ram Chandraji has prescribed, in his Ten
Commandments, the practices which might be
helpful for bringing about and preserving the
force and effort which the Divine makes after
the pranahuti has been given, or during the
period during which it is regularly being given.
These commandments are rather instructions,
which he would like one to practice as a way of
co-operation with him so that one's higher
evolution may be made easy and swift. But even
these instructions sometimes appear conventional
to me, because one naturally becomes resigned to
the will of the Master, and one does everything
as if effortlessly. Occasions for one's choice
of events as to how one has to do, and how not
to do certain things become infrequent.
Occasions for going wrong normally do not occur.
It seems, as it were, that the Master is looking
on all the time. And, therefore, you feel the
omnipervasive presence of the Master with you.
The Divine consciousness and Presence will be
vouchsafed to you whether you are asleep or
awake. It is a phenomenon, which I have
experienced again and again. That is why I speak
with a little amount of pride that it has been
possible for me to experience these things which
I felt were beyond my reach.
Many of the experiences recorded in some of
the Upanishads get a confirmation, and you find
that the system, which our Master has
propounded, is sublime, simple, and very easy to
practice by everybody. This is the normal
method. The extra-normal or artificial methods
are where you are asked to practice these
things, and even if you practice them for twenty
years and thirty years, yet we have got many
people who will tell you that they have had
falls, disillusionment, and so on. And I know of
so many men, who have come away from some other
system feeling, at the very first touch of this
system, that they have been made perfect and
pure.
So you see that the Sri Ramchandra's
Rajayoga, this unique system of simplicity,
dependent upon an acceptance and trust as my
Master would put it, that the Divine force which
he gives as the breath of your breath and the
life of your life, and the eye of your eye and
the ear of your ear, and the mind of your mind,
can work a transformation of your entire
personality, structured as it is and fed as it
is on the normal experiences of the world. Such
a change is unbelievable. I concede that it is
very difficult to believe that such a thing
could happen. But if you can believe certain
unbelievable things which are not even credible,
and which you cannot verify, I am not asking too
much when I request you to give this a chance to
see whether it can transform you.
The method is merely to sit before the Master
and get or ask for his pranahuti-transmission,
and see whether it will not bring a state of
peace and calm. A state of self-recollectedness
where the thoughts do not fly about
meaninglessly. And where you can tolerate the
whole worlds' thoughts for they do not interfere
with the calmness and placidity of your inner
being; and where you gradually enter deeper and
deeper into the levels of consciousness which
have been told by the Upanishads. And the
promise given by the Yoga Sutras that you enter
into a samprajnata samadhi where you are in a
non-sensory, non-mental state of thought which
is called Prajna in the Upanishads, and taken
bodily by the Yoga Sutras - Samprajnata. And
when you go to the 'turiya' state, still higher,
you come to a state when you transcend the
prajna-asamprajnata samadhi. And when that state
occurs you almost enter into what is called the
sahaja-avastha-that is normal to, and natural
to, a person who has got to the highest
possibility of release from the prakritic soul.
Then he has gone beyond the prakriti, and the
trigunas of the prajna, and he enters into that
asamprajnata samadhi--non-mental, non-sensory,
non-prakritic state, which is natural to the
Self-that is the Purusha. And all this is done
with the help of the Divine force which has come
down from above. In this system, then, the
Master, starting with this transmission, takes
you gradually, tenderly and yet very cautiously,
step by step, beyond the circle of maya, beyond
the circles of ego, beyond the circles of
splendour to the very Central Being, which is
the natural state which ought to be attained,
and which can be attained by this process alone.
There is no stress on faith. There is only an
emphasis on a continuous process of development,
evolution, transformation, and finally, perhaps,
even a transcendence. That supreme transcendent
state which is called the Central state is
something which is, for the first time, rendered
possible whilst yet within this body by the
techniques and methods devised or invented by
Shri Ram Chandraji, our Babuji. That is a very
good thing, that with such small beginnings the
greatest thing can be achieved. For we are
working with the greatest and most sovereign
principle in creation-the Divine mind which has
been brought down, thanks to the efforts of
Babuji, in such a way that it can be given or
administered into almost everybody, whatever the
status of his evolution in any other system or
in any walk of life. We are expected to train
ourselves as householders, not as renouncers.
Why should we renounce, just to get this? And if
it comes why should we renounce it? The only
renunciation is the renunciation of the will to
live in the idols, which you have created and
worshipped. All that is demanded of you, if
anything at all, is a willingness to open
yourselves for this great experiment in the
divinisation of man. It has been tested again
and again in the past, and it is in that sense
most suited to our modern age; to our modern
temperament; to the complexities that have come
down to us in such measure as were undreamt of
in the past. It has given us a way, and a
meaning to our lives. And I only pray that this
benefit which he has given to some of us and
which he is yearning to give to all people will
be fruitful and successful. It is something
which I feel to be a blessing that has come to
us because the transformation of man, the
harmonization of man, the birth of an integrated
individual, and their continuous birth in our
country and elsewhere alone can bring about a
transformation in the world crisis and tensions;
and man would be fulfilling the goal which he
has set within himself of becoming a wise man,
but one who yet lives humbly and in holiness, in
God, for God, by God. I do not know if there is
anything greater to the living in God, for God,
by God. Some have emphasized they can live in
God; many of them have stated they live for God;
but who lives by God? And with the very force
which God has given to us? And this third thing
is most important. We mean to live our lives
with the force, with the breath, with the
vision, with the audition, and with the
conscience which He gives us as men determined
to achieve perfection in this world and in
yonder worlds. Fear we have none. There can be
no fear in this system. God is not feared but
loved; and love, as he puts it, is the pranahuti
for him - a self-offering of himself into the
fire of your hearts.
May you all profit by this great transmission
of my Master.
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