Remembering Him Always

by Chariji, January 9, 2005, Dubai, UAE.

Dear brothers and sisters: What Captain Chakrapani shared with us is a wonderful example of divine help which is always available. My Master used to say that we cannot even breathe without His help. We're always breathing, so we think breathing is very easy, and we don't call for help. But my Master said, "If His help was not there, you could not breathe." Now there are people who have a heart attack and they have difficulty in breathing, and then they call for God's help. Similarly, when we are walking we don't think we need God's help to walk; but suddenly there is paralysis and the man cannot walk, and he prays and prays for help to walk.

So we take for granted our existence, human existence, because things have become so natural to us to do, like eating, breathing, sleeping, waking up, that we have almost come to the level of forgetting God, forgetting His existence. Only in moments of crisis we remember Him. My Master said, "Why don't we remember Him all the time instead of calling for help only when we are in moments of extreme danger, or there is a crisis-financial or health-wise? If you could remember Him all the time, there would be no crisis, no danger, no life-threatening situations. When the end of life comes, we would pass off as if we were going to sleep." The famous saint Kabir says the same thing in one of his famous dohas [couplets]. He says, "Everyone thinks of God when we are in distress, in misery, unhappiness. But if we could think of Him when we are happy, there would be no time to be miserable at all."

So this is the principle that we have of constant remembrance-remembering Him always, with every heartbeat, with every breath-not in an artificial way that "I remember God, I remember God"; not like that. But it becomes something like the screen as Babuji used to say: when you project a film, a movie, there is a screen behind it. We don't know the screen is there because we are looking at the movie. Similarly we must have behind us something on which the whole of life passes-and that is constant remembrance.

Meditation must lead to constant remembrance. There should come a time, a stage in our development, spiritual development, when meditation no longer becomes necessary because we are always in remembrance of God. And that is a very high level of spiritual achievement which I hope He will bless all of us with.

Thank you.