The Universe Inside (Part 1 of 2)

by Shri P. Rajagopalachari

When you think of Australia and India as the Commonwealth and the Republic, we create division. As my Master used to say, "God did not create Australia. God did not create India - He created." We are dividing it into bits and pieces. And whenever you divide what is whole into parts, there is always a bit of trauma in it - a feeling of separation, a feeling of loneliness. Like we have a family, and one of the family goes away and you think, "Oh, he has gone and I am here." But suppose someone has the misfortune to have an attack of amnesia, for instance. The brother may be right in front of you but you don't know he is a brother. Your father may be in front of you but you don't know he is your father. All you need is to erase your memory and everything is gone. You don't know you're in Australia; you say, "What is Australia?"

So you see, this business of remembering is very important. You have no brother unless you remember him. Isn't it? You forget him and he is gone. Like computers - a false move and everything is gone; then you have to feed the information in again. Now, if you don't restrict this business of brother and sister to a physical family, we are all brothers and sisters. Here again the isolationism is on our part: "My brother is only one who is born to my mother." Because we share a common parentage, we have brothers. But what about our sharing a common human heritage? We are all human beings. Should we not feel a greater sense of brotherhood? That instead of having a small family, of two brothers and a sister and a mother and a father, for me now the whole world is peopled with brothers and sisters and therefore I can be fearless wherever I go, I can find joy and happiness wherever I go, I can find love wherever I go. Not because love has any special attribute, but because, once you accept this fact of a human brotherhood, it does create love. Then you don't have to remember individually, "This is my brother. This is my sister." Everyone is brother and sister. Then we get out of so many of these human frailties like selfishness and fear of each other, or shyness.

Yesterday somebody told me, "People here are afraid to meet you." I said, "Why on earth should anybody be afraid of meeting me when they don't even know me yet?" It's like a person who is afraid of a tiger who has never seen a tiger before, or a snake when you have never seen a snake before. And the most stupid fear is the fear of the devil, whom we have never seen and whom we shall probably never see. He doesn't exist.

So we are giving life to things we have never seen, we have never known, we have never felt, and saying, "Oh, but I am afraid." And I said, "Well, I should feel afraid because I am jumping into a den of lions here." Any one of you could do something which I could be afraid of. Somebody could punch me in the nose. Somebody could call me a stupid Indian, which I am. Somebody could say something else: "Why the hell does this blighter come all the way to disturb us, to drag us out of our world," etc. - resent the need to be here, resent the need to listen to all this blah-blah about remembrance and Sahaj Marg, etc. It's really silly, you know, because for me, I need to talk about it when it is something other than myself. Just take a small example: suppose I ask him to stand up and say, "Say something about yourself." He cannot really speak about himself. He can only speak about qualities; he can only speak about physical things. "I am six feet tall. I am white. I am Australian. I love wallabies." "But what are you? I want you to speak about your Self." He won't be able to say a word because he doesn't know anything about his Self yet.

So nobody can speak about himself or herself unless that Self has been awakened in you and you can guess, "By Jove, I do have a Self!" Now we can speak about that Self. It has no form. It has no name. It has no attributes. How would you describe it? "I am happy." How can I describe my happiness? If I am happy because I ate ice cream, I can tell you, "Yes, I am happy because I ate ice cream," or, "Somebody gave me something," or, "The weather is nice," or perhaps even, "Because I am going away in a couple of days." Isn't it? But when I am happy in myself, by myself, with myself, how will I explain that happiness to you except to say, "Try it"? And how can I be happy by myself, with myself, in myself, not dependent on anything outside me? It can happen only when I have gone into myself, found a Self there within me who is now enough for me. He is everything. I don't need to go out of my Self. This Self within me is 'me' in a sense, and 'not me' in another sense. Now these two senses have to be integrated, that he is 'me' and not 'me' - both have to go. He is neither 'me' nor 'not me'. If you look at it one way, he is 'me'. If you look at it another way, he couldn't possibly be 'me'.

Now when I begin to cultivate this relationship with the Ultimate Brother who is within me all the time, who is my companion forever, who is with me under all situations (of danger, of peace, of war, of sorrow, of misery, of shame, of faith), I begin to appreciate that here is somebody who is eternally with me, who doesn't judge me, who doesn't criticize, but whom I have been criticizing all my life as something external to myself - a God whom I don't know, a God whom I am afraid of, a God who I hate sometimes - and then I realise how unfair I have been to Him who is within me, precisely because I project him outside and create a God who doesn't exist at all.

So the secret of existence is to know that God is within me. I don't have to seek Him outside. Don't call Him 'God'. Call Him your elder brother. Call Him your Self - with a capital 'S'. Then you will find that you don't need to go out of yourself to look for satisfaction, peace, love, contentment, because it is all right there. Then comes this marvelous transformation, you see, that when it is all there and it is infinite and eternal - because He has been with you even through this life, however sordid it might have been, however noble it might have been, it doesn't make any difference to Him - then you begin to reflect these qualities. We stop judging; we stop criticizing, because That which is in me is within you, too.

So true brotherhood can come out of a recognition of the fact that inside, in our Selves, we are all the same. It is only the covering that is different. You know, you can buy the same thing and wrap it up in different coloured gift paper, like you give the children at Christmas time. Whatever may be the content, you like to make the package as attractive as possible so that the child grabs it. So here we have different packings around us. Some very nice, some not so nice, but these are our ideas of good and bad. Somebody says, "White is beautiful," somebody says, "Black is beautiful," somebody says, "Grey is beautiful," somebody says, "Tall is beautiful," somebody says, "Short is beautiful." So what is really beautiful? Because again, this is a purely human idea. If God created this world and this universe and everything in it, I can't see how something can be ugly and something can be beautiful. Like Australia and India, ideas of beauty and ugliness are our creations. I have seen people in Africa, you know, beautiful, bronze, tall, with a bearing like a queen, and they say, "The white people, they are insipid. They have no colour."

It is just a matter of what you are used to or what you are conditioned to think. Suppose from childhood you are told that the white races are the most brilliant. You become a racist, like in South Africa we have this apartheid. Thank heaven it is gone. Or a dictatorship, where they are told, "This form of government is the best for you," as happened in the USSR. Thank heaven that, too, is gone. Or like in France, where they are always talking of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and they have none of these things! They never had these things. They never had liberty. They never had equality. They never had fraternity. Even today they don't have it. It's a myth, and to celebrate that myth they need a lot of fireworks. They must celebrate the day of the Bastille; they must celebrate the murder of a poor innocent queen. You see how many lies we are perpetrating all the time to prove that, "I am great," "My nation is great," etc. The Germans with their racial superiority, which made them murder millions of Jews - the Aryan race. Well, if anybody has a claim to be an Aryan, I have a better claim than any German to be an Aryan - but I don't go around shooting Jews or putting them in charnel houses or roasting them to death.

So we see again, ideas of inferiority and superiority are our creation. There is no such thing as inferiority and superiority. No human being can be superior to another human being. But when we evolve to recognize that which is my Self, to accept that which is within myself as the true 'myself', then we find that all these externals drop off. That which is inside is what matters, and in that there is no difference between us. Therefore in spirituality we have no divisive tendencies, no hatred for others, and if these negatives don't go first, the positive cannot come into being. I cannot love unless hatred is removed. My Master said that beautifully. He said, "What is all this problem of loving? Just remove hatred and love is there." And that is true of everything. Remove disease and health is there. We don't create health; health is normal to us. Remove foolishness and wisdom is there. We are born wise, we are born healthy, we are born wealthy - there is no question about this. I don't mean 'wealthy' in terms of dollars, but with a wealth that is within me - a wealth of capacity, a wealth of possibilities, which can make me create anything in this universe, including the universe itself. Because it is a very real and a very true thing to say that we each create our own universe. There is no such thing as a single universe outside of us. Each one of you has a different universe, a different world. Some are living in a world of dreams. Some are living in a world of fantasies. Some are trying to live, and not really living yet. So to say, "There is one universe out there," is as nonsensical to say as, "There is only one human being."

Now when can we inhabit, all of us, the same universe? When we all have the same universe within us. Therefore spirituality says the external universe, however vast, however enormous, is yet limited. Even mathematics or physics defines the universe as some sort of a finite infinity - which is absurd! It is playing with words - 'finite infinity'. How can infinity be finite or how can the finite be infinite? But, even accepting that it is a finite infinity, inside me is an infinity which is infinitely infinite - no more nonsense of 'finite infinities', but infinite infinities. Inside you is the true universe, and if that universe is full of fear and lack of faith and lack of love, I find the outside universe a faithless universe, a universe without love, a universe without faith, because we project outside what is within. You see in the mirror your own face. You cannot see anything else. Nobody has ever seen another face in the mirror except his or her own. Isn't it?

So we see the universe in the way we see it because that is all that we can see, and that is all we will continue to see for as long as we are what we are today. The universe changes when I change. But foolish people - you know, educated foolish people, people with degrees, doctorates, whatnot - try to change the universe, and then think that the inside will change. It is impossible. You cannot change a blade of grass!

So spiritual wisdom says, please change yourself. Create in you all that you are seeking from outside, and then you will find that the outside has become what you are inside. Therefore saints don't see misery outside. They don't see lack of love outside. They don't see lack of faith outside. They say, "This is a beautiful universe. It is God's kingdom. He created this. It is wonderful beyond imagination." And then along comes one of us and says, "Swamiji," or "Master," or "Guruji," "How can it be so? I see it differently." He says, "You see differently because you have not yet learned to see in yourself all that is there - the wealth of the universe itself, every possibility in the universe exists within you. Every time through which the universe is going to pass is within you. Eternity, which you think of as outside, is within you. The Eternal, which you think of as God, is within you." Then we understand that eternal life does not mean continuous life prolonging into an infinity of time. 'Eternal' means to rise beyond time, beyond the ideas of a beginning and an end. In fact, time is born out of eternity. Then we can be fearless. We can have faith. We can afford to jump into a den of lions knowing that, after all, what can they do? They can growl at you, roar at you, and you throw a stick at them and they run away.

To be continued next month ...