Introducing the Successor

October 23, 2011, Mumbai, India

Dear brothers and sisters,

I have managed to come here originally for just today, but I will be here till tomorrow morning so that we can have three satsanghs together. One, we have just completed; one, this evening; and the third one, tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning will be at 7.30. I may come back again to visit some centres in Maharashtra later, perhaps the end of November or something like that, I am not sure.

My purpose now here is to introduce to you my successor, Mr Kamlesh Patel. You have already received information about this through email, through Sahaj Sandesh, et cetera. I don’t need to tell you how you have to cooperate, knowing that our spiritual progress depends upon the guidance that we receive. You know Sahaj Marg – the tradition of the Masters. (Many of you have received, are receiving I hope, messages on your computer every morning.) So commencing from, if I may put it so bluntly, Lord Shri Krishna himself – that is where we accept the Sahaj Marg parampara [lineage] as having begun: from Lord Krishna to Lalaji Maharaj, and so on.

It is important that we accept the Master’s decision in respect of the person who will succeed him – because that is how the river flows. The river flows from high to low. You cannot make a river flow through your back garden or bring in a river of your choice. We profit by whatever water we get. I hope many of you will be convinced that today, in this world, it is difficult to find someone to guide us on the spiritual path. Long ago, when I first met Babuji Maharaj, he told me, “It is today difficult to find anybody who talks really about spirituality.” People talk and talk and talk about so many things, and unless the listener is really an avid listener, seriously interested in his or her spiritual growth and understands what spirituality means – how it is different from religion, how it is different from culture – we tend to get mixed up. And we begin to think that our guru must speak our language; he must belong to our culture; he must be a local patriot, and so on and so forth.

A guru is one who is capable of guiding us – it may be anybody. And who chooses that ‘anybody’ is the guru, who has found somebody capable of continuing the training that he has offered. Those of you who would have read I think Babuji’s work, Voice Real – there is a sentence which says, “There shall certainly be one after me who shall give you the same training that I am giving you myself.” So, you see, that is the promise of the continuation of the Sahaj Marg parampara into whatever length of time those above have decided it should continue.

So it is important that we don’t even think of all these things. A student cannot judge his professor. We accept. And when the professor thinks you have outgrown him, he will hand you on like a schoolboy, class by class. So please accept, obey and progress.

Thank you very much.