Love is God

by Chariji, June 4, 2006, Prague, Czech Republic.

Dear Sisters and Brothers,

I am very happy to be in this country for the first time in my life. As a matter of fact, I never thought I would be able to see it in this lifetime. You know the reason, no? You know the reason why I thought like that. But now it is possible for us all to meet, and I believe that there is a purpose other than just meeting and saying hello to each other. Yes? I hope so. All of you must feel that. Because I didn’t come as a tourist, and I know you have not come as a tourist. But it is important not to forget this in the future—that we meet to not just be friends, not just to meet each other and give gifts, not to talk about your countries, but for all of us to explore together the Brighter World. That is our purpose, our only purpose.

So please do not forget that purpose when you go back because when we come here and meet like this and we feel something in our hearts, that is what we must take back with us. You understand? And that must be preserved. And by continuing to meditate and do the cleaning at home, it must grow so that when we meet next time, we come with bigger hearts filled with love for the Brighter World. Slowly that love must become a longing; that longing must become a craving; and then it must become so urgent in its need that it takes us like a rocket, up.

That is the purpose of our meetings, of our meditation and we come together to help each other, to talk about our way, our goal, and also to write in our diaries what you have felt during each sitting here. It’s important. Because after one year, two years, when you read your diary, your journal, you will see how you have progressed. Isn’t it?

So I can only hope that you will remember all this. Remember that we are together because we have one purpose, one goal, and therefore, our languages, our cultures, our nationalities have no meaning, because we meditate out of love for the goal and that love brings us together here, and that love is transmission, and what we transmit is love, not God. People have a misunderstanding, you see. You must remember that everywhere in the world they say ‘God is love’. So there is no difference between love and God. Love is God, God is love.

Now I am not talking about this Western aspect of love. We are not talking here about sex, but about love. The two are completely different. Sex is a way of expressing love. And if it is expressed without love, it is an animal expression, prostitution; and every time we behave like that we are prostitutes, whether we are professionally prostitutes or not. So that should be clear, because we should not go back and say, “Oh, he told us to love.” “Okay!”—not like that. There must be no misunderstanding that while love may end in sex; sex alone has nothing to do with love. You people here, especially need to know this difference—the Europeans, the Americans, the (what do we call this?)—the Occidentals. We have different degrees of a mistaken understanding of this, from a little to total. We have to remember that love need not have sex at all. You understand?

So this is an important lesson which you must carry back with you and try to make your life purer and purer until we have only love, and then it is the language of God. Till then it is a bit of a mixture—adulterated. So we have to remove that adulteration. Adulteration means mixing two things which do not belong together. Like when you put water in milk, or sugar in honey—this is all adulteration. So when you mix sex with love for God, it loses its divinity, its sanctity, its holiness, and, of course, its purpose. This is all, you see.

So I think that is what I have to say. And I will end by saying that if I come to Europe again, I shall visit Romania. [Abhyasis cheer.]

Abhyasi: Thank you, Master.

Master: Yes, I have to thank you. Your pull is so strong. You know, my Master said he never goes anywhere except where he is pulled by the love of the people. So if I come it will be because of you. Okay?

[An abhyasi asks if she may present a poem in Romanian].

Master: In Romanian? Yes, why not?

[An abhyasi recites a poem in Romanian, which is translated into English: In this place which is called world, we are all passing. For what place are we, in fact, in competition? If you reach the man up front, believe me, you are not a success. Only if you take as many as you can with you towards the light, then you will have some meaning in life.]

Master: Bravo!

Here, you know, we are not going anywhere where we cannot go together. You understand? You bring me by pulling me to yourself and I go back hopefully taking you with me. [Abhyasis cheer.]

I hope the others will not be angry when I say that I have a very special inner relationship with what I call the Slavonic people. I don’t know—it is possibly the result from past samskara from previous lives. You know, I came to Europe first about sixty years ago when I had a government scholarship to go to Yugoslavia. I did not know where Yugoslavia was. And it was a place called Split to which I was sent. And, unfortunately in that scholarship letter they had mentioned the subject as plastic food—f-o-o-d, food—and I did not know what that was! So I discovered that there was a Consul for Yugoslavia in Bombay—Consul, Embassy, Ambassada in Delhi, Consul in Bombay. So when I went to meet him, then he showed me a map with Yugoslavia on it, and then I managed to find a book in Bombay. It was to learn English for the Slavs—Dali Vi Znate Engleski. So from a book which was meant for the Slavonic people to learn English, I learnt the first words of the Srpsko-Hrvatski language.

The second thing that happened: to go to Napoli from Bombay. My father booked passage, and it was a Polish ocean liner—Batory, S.S. Batory, the name of the ship. And on the ship I learnt to speak a little by asking, “What is this?” [holds up a glass] “What is this?” [taps table] Like that I learnt about fifty words. Then I went across Italy, and from, I think it was from Milano, I took the Orient Express to Zagreb. It was the 22nd of December. It was snowing heavily. I landed in Zagreb at midnight. I didn’t know where to go. One gentleman came to me and said, “Oh, you are from India?” He was the Dutch Consul in Zagreb. He said, “Do you know where to go?” I said “No.” So he took me in his car and put me in a hotel in Zagreb. I found that all the trains had been suspended for three days because of the heavy snow. So I was stuck in Zagreb—no friend, no language and very little money.

Anyway, that is how this business of the Slavs began, you see. And I thought that there must be something which sent me to such a far place, because immediately after the war it was a very poor country, Yugoslavia. They had nothing except Marshall Tito, nothing. Bread, meat was cheap. Everything else was three generations. If you needed an overcoat for the winter, it was your grandfather’s overcoat. The houses were very small, very poor—no heating. No heating! And life was miserable.

I was miserable for the first two months. I thought it was a malignant fate which had sent me to Yugoslavia. And we were not in Split which is a beautiful city, but in a place called Kastel Sucurac where the factory was located where I had to work. And it is on the seaside. And we had a bitter wind blowing for six months every year, called the bora. It was called the bora. You know the bora? And along with the bora, padakisha—the rainfall. And it was really miserable because the streets were all muddy. We did not have these modern clothes for winter—just woolen. And when the bora blew, it blew right through you. And I know ladies used to walk backwards.

So that was how I entered in this Slavonic world, you know. But later it became fun and I learnt a lot. I learnt to eat only rice with a little margarine because there was no butter. I was paid a stipend to begin with. You know stipend, scholarship, money. It was 5,600 dinar Yugoslav. And there was one hundred and sixty dinar to one rupee. So you can imagine what I got, you know. So it was very tough. But you know, I have always been attracted to a tough life—military sort of discipline; minimum to eat and drink. And you know my bed in my room… I was looked upon like a king because the factory management gave me a single room. Nobody had a single room! It was about one-and-a-half metres by three metres—that’s all. They called it “Oh, sobu! Vi imate sobu!—“You have a room! Bogami,” you know. So I was looked upon like something very special. And most important, I had the only bathroom with hot water in that place. Because they said, “Hindu, you know, they bathe every day.” So I had the only bathroom. That was about one metre by one metre, with a heater. So you can imagine how much luxury I had when compared to the other Yugoslavs.

So why I am saying all this is that through difficulty we come up, you see. My favourite example is the toothpaste tube. If you don’t press it the toothpaste will not come out. Have you tried to shake it and bring toothpaste out? Even God cannot do it. Therefore He presses us, gives us problems, gives us difficulties, with love, so that we become strong, stronger and able to share with everybody, because as you know only in difficult life we share with others.

You know, I was surrounded by farms in Yugoslavia, farmers, and they used to bring some potatoes, some grapes, whatever they could. One apple which they could hardly afford. That is the gift of love. And life was very happy because slowly I learned to speak a little. And you know communication is very important for a human being because otherwise you go mad. In the first week I used to sit there in my room, no use going out because I cannot communicate; nobody comes to me because I cannot communicate. Totally alone. I had a small radio of those days, and I used to listen to Turkish music from Ankara because it was the nearest thing to Indian music. Aaaaaaaa [imitating the singing]. They go like that, you see. And that’s how Indian music is. So that kept me from going mad.

Why I am telling you all this is, we have these Ten Maxims of Babuji Maharaj, my Master. Accept difficulties as blessings. We need them still. That’s why we send children to school. Children don’t want to go to school. They weep; they cry, you know, “Why, Mama? Why should I go to school?” It is suffering. Learning is suffering. And per contra, suffering is learning. And when we do it with faith that it is a gift for us to be able to suffer, our suffering becomes like a flower. It has fragrance and we suffer to share our suffering with others.

So in Sahaj Marg, our meditation groups, we are learning to—what?—love suffering, because it is the only way we can learn to love. You know, during the war, people shared whatever they had. But in time of plenty you will not give one sandwich to somebody who is hungry, or you will give it like that, “Okay”—[gestures giving at arm’s length] which is not good at all for human beings. No human being should have to beg, and no human being should give like giving to a beggar.

We must learn to share. And He, we have to share. But this is a thing where you don’t cut and distribute like bread or apples, but you give completely and you have Him totally. That is why we can give more and more to more and more abhyasis all over the world. Babuji told me that the only thing you can give without losing is knowledge. Because knowledge you can give to one, to a hundred, to millions, and you don’t lose it. He said this is at the human level. And at the divine level, the thing you can give again and again to everybody completely is God, by loving them, because love is God.

Thank you.