The Hidden Wealth in the Heart

by Chariji, January 21, 2013, Chennai, India.

Dear sisters and brothers,

Sister Rosalind has already welcomed you, and I add my welcome to it. She reminded you all that you have travelled great distances, undertaken considerable trouble in coming here, spent some money also, and come to what she described as, “the floor and the mosquitoes and the heat of India”.

My welcome to you is to undertake a much longer journey. It involves no tickets, no spending of money, and when you reach your destination, there is no hard floor or mosquitoes or heat. This is a spiritual journey which makes demands, which are sometimes not merely difficult, but which need every ounce of our inner strength to keep us on the way. Journeys by the body make us use physical strength, motivated by the ego, often motivated by desire, whether it is for money or position or power. I don’t think we travel otherwise.

Even someone living alone in the wilds in a log cabin, stays there to hunt, to trap all winter, so that when the summer comes he can sell the skin and the pelts for money, to buy more food, to kill more things in the next winter, and this goes on, winter after winter, until the end comes to him. In a sense, if I may say so, in our endeavour to pursue our goals, purely material goals of satisfaction, pleasure, dominance, we waste ourselves in the sense that all that we are doing wastes us. We lose our inner self, we lose our ability to love, we lose our sense of compassion. We have no more, at one stage, humanity left in us. That is why there is so much callousness in this world, unconcern, inability to look to others, look at others, see what they need. Even the medical system, the nursing sisters, they all do it for money. I have seen in hospitals, here and abroad, how callous these people get, because they are so used to suffering, so used to death, that it is easy to draw a sheet over the face of the dead person and walk away whistling or smoking.

We have not kept our humanity with which we were born, whereas spirituality says you must become more and more human, until you are so completely human that the next stage is what we call divinisation – not to become God, which we cannot, but to become as close to God as possible, as like God as possible. Because in all religions we say, “God is love.” He does not love. He is love. Honey is sweet whether you taste it, or an Indian tastes it, or an African tastes it; honey tastes the same. Therefore, God’s love is universal. His love can be felt by anybody – a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist. It does not matter what you are. It is because of that we pursue… I mean when we begin life we follow what our parents are doing. If they are Christians we are Christians; if they are Catholics we are Catholics; if they are Jews we are Jews. We do not choose. But when we come to a later stage (as my guru says, eighteen years old), we have to make the choice of whether we stay in religion – which was not chosen by us but by our parents, who did not choose but chose what their parents chose. And it goes on up the line like that until you wonder who chose what.

So we have a right at the age of eighteen to choose religion or to transcend religion. We do not give up religion. We don’t abandon it, because it is the foundation on which we grew up. But, like the foundation of a building which goes in and is buried under soil and is never seen again, yet it upholds mighty structures like the skyscrapers of America. Our roots are in it but the tree is above, the branches are still above, and that is where you have the flowers and the fruit. So if we stay only with the foundation… It is sometimes a very sorrowful thing, when we travel along the roads and see houses which have not been completed – just the foundation is there because the man who owned it did not have enough money. When does our construction stop? It has stopped, I mean, in the case of most of the population of this world; which they too have stopped with the foundation. And what was the currency they needed to build a further edifice which is visible, which is strong, which can accommodate people to do their jobs, to be merciful, to be kind, to be loving, to share? It is only love.

So if the currency for worldly work today, to achieve anything, whether you are building a ship, or travelling across the desert on a camel, or just enjoying yourself with a bottle of wine and some caviar or what else you have, it is always money. In the material world, currency is money. In the spiritual world, it is love. I wish to emphasise this because people say, “Difficulties.” Well you have difficulties in the physical world, too. You may have beautiful roads, lovely buildings, air-conditioned rooms, but are you happy? How many of you are happy in your lives? People who have everything in the world, they still want more. Why? Because there is no satisfaction here in the heart. With love that is not the case. Satisfaction is here in the heart, not here in the head.

The unfortunate thing with modern love anywhere, especially in the West, is that love has been transferred to the head and the hearts are empty. Spirituality of course is not meant to bring back love into your heart for worldly pleasure, titillation. It is not for that. It is so that you may know that for the first time, what I have been thinking – because most of us think we are loving, we think we are loving, but most of us are only tolerating our partners for fear of losing them, even in marriage. “Will this last?” I have performed more than almost two thousand marriages, and many of them ask me, “Chariji, will this last?” At the time of marriage! What a tragic thing. You are being married and you ask me, “Will this last?” Is it to be blamed on the people? Is it to be blamed on the system? Is it to be blamed on a culture or a society, on civilisation, so-called? Who is to blame? You are to blame because you have transferred love from the heart to the head. You think about love. You do not choose with your heart, you choose with your head; so does your partner, and this changes all the time. And one day, tadang!

So we are not just creating a spiritual society here, or trying to. We are creating, shall I say, a society of sane people. Sane, sanity! Mens sana in corpore sano. A sane society which knows that we love with the heart, we work with the heart. That is why human beings are described by the heart. He or she is cold hearted. He is lion hearted (lion de coeur), warm hearted, generous hearted, big hearted, small hearted. We don’t describe men by (that is for the police or for immigration) your height and your weight and the colour of your eyes. Love does not bother with these.

When there is love in the heart, we have wisdom. When it is here in the head, we don’t even have knowledge; we have only foolishness. Because in this computer, like in the ordinateur (computer) that you have in your office, when marriages are fixed by computer, which I believe they have been doing first in America, I mean, what are you trusting your future to? Two photographs on the computer – “He is two metres, one centimetre; I am one metre ninety-eight centimetres. We are both Caucasian. I like the look of the photograph. He seems to be gentle, he seems to be kind, he seems to be loving.” So the computer marries us and voila! After three months the computer disengages us. Kaput!

So you see, we have handed over to machines most of the things that we used to do ourselves before. We can no longer multiply, we can no longer divide in the mind, we need paper and pencil or a computer. We do not know multiplication tables any more. Some people ask me what are multiplication tables. I am tempted to say, “Shame on you! You have forgotten your roots?” The computer has made us lose touch with our own self. We first forgot our mathematics because our calculating machines gave us answers up to infinite digits. It could calculate the trajectory of a shell.

You know, on board the ships in the old days they used to have a sextant, they used to have a compass, they used to have a clock which was mounted in such a way on gimbals, so that even if the ship was swaying, it remained constant so that the time was not altered, because they needed the time to know where they are on the ocean. There was human technology in it, not human-created technology but human-installed technology by God himself.

Today you have the GPS, captains are idle, crew is idle. And sitting where you are, you know where you are, you don’t need a map, you don’t need a compass, you don’t need a sextant. Similarly, our aircraft, they are able to calculate how many miles you have travelled, how many miles are left to go – GPS again. And now with Google, everybody is wise, though remaining fools. Where is Constantinople? Tap-tap-tap, and it says it is the former name of Istanbul, during the Ottoman Empire. “Wow! He knows history, he knows geography. How brilliant!”

The white man (or white men) invaded America and conquered it (the very first white men), not by loving and embracing the local culture, giving faith to the people, but by having a wooden leg or a false eye or knowing when the next eclipse was coming, which the ignorant people, who were natives, did not know anything about. So when they were going to be boiled for the next meal they just took out their [false] eye and said, “If you do this, all of you will lose your eyes,” and put it back. Instantly he was the Great White Father.

It is still being practised today. “I know everything because I have Googled on my telephone. I don’t have anything here in the head.” Even this heart we have lost. This heart we lost was the greatest tragedy of our lives, which condemned us to being mere animals with two legs, and when we lose this head, we are like robots depending on machines, depending on I don’t know what else.

“Am I happy?” Maybe you will have to ask yourselves sometime. And Microsoft or somebody else will decide – Google, it will decide. It will say, “Tell me the difference between nineteen and eleven.” You tap it out on your computer and you say eight. It will say: you are miserable, or you are happy, or you are ecstatic.

People today talk of their sex life. I don’t know what it means. There is no such thing as a sex life. Sex is the culmination of love. It is an expression of love only. But today it is desire. There is no love. People who don’t love each other are having sex, day in and day out. I see in the movies, people meet for the first time at lunch and are in bed in the evening! It is like instant coffee. It’s instant sex, with equal effect; it doesn’t make you sleep. It makes you worry whether this will last. And it doesn’t last. You are prepared for the next sex encounter, which you hope will last. The sex lasts because you change partners and the sex is alive, but you are forty, the women are forty. They have no children, they have no husband, they have no home. Then they go to somebody for help and they say, “What should I do? I want a child.” He says, “My dear, you are too old to have a child now. What were you doing for the last twenty-five years when you could have had a child?” “My partner did not want.” Bravo! So, you see what life has become. If you are sensible you will cut sex completely out of your life until you find the right man or the right woman. Marry and then only have sex.

Not very long ago, not twenty-five centuries ago but perhaps a century ago, it was the custom to fall in love, court, walk hand in hand along avenues and riverbanks, muttering, as they say in the English language, sweet nothings until the man went on his knees and proposed. And they were married, and then the honeymoon introduced sex to the two. Not very long ago. But today, we have sex; we have ‘couples’, as they call them in Europe. “We are a couple.” It means you are sleeping together without being married. They have children, you see, all because we put sex before love.

We put money before happiness; we put power before well-being – all the material things that the world of the West (and now more and more in the East) puts before us as things to be desired. The head again, you see. So our societies are miserable, our economies measured by people who don’t know anything but work on the computer and say, “Well, this year your gross product is only four percent. It was eight percent last year.” Misery! Condemned to weakness, condemned to frustration.

You see what is going on in most countries, USA included, countries like Turkey, like Portugal. What is happening to them? Where has the money suddenly gone? You can understand when a man is healthy and he is suddenly sick. You can understand when people divorce each other. But a society which was affluent – where everything was available, where people enjoyed anything that was available – now suddenly you can’t buy anything. Everything is beyond your capacity to buy. Where has the money gone? I have asked some economists this question and they are not able to answer.

How does an affluent society suddenly become a poor society? Is it the people’s greed for consumption? Is it their greed for happiness at any cost? Consumption without production, as I have seen in many countries in Europe, where I am told they keep fields fallow, without production, without growing crops, for which they are paid by the governments so that the price of grain or whatever can be kept high. You don’t grow anything on your field, and you get money for it so that the price of grain is kept high. The more and more this spreads, the higher and higher the price goes. You have money but no grain because at some stage there is not enough production of grain. Voila! Misery, starvation and heads which don’t understand what is going on.

So, we bring all these upon ourselves by putting our happiness into things, into places, into events. The soul is dead. And if there are people who look at a sunset and say, “Uh, it happens every evening,” their soul is dead. A man looks at a child and says, “Don’t want children.” The soul is dead. I was once in a country with my Master in Europe. We were having a seminar and a couple in a car with three children, came from another country to see my Master. They went around the city looking for a hotel with rooms. Every hotel said, “Yes, we have a room, but if you have children, no, we have no room.” This is the state of countries in Europe where you are wealthy, where the beds are luxurious, to give you better and better sex, as they call it. But not the products of sex. No children. Wonderful societies, beautiful churches – no religion, no God. What do you think of such a place, such a society where children are not welcome? If children are not welcome, where are the adults of fifteen years more coming from?

So, you have to think a lot and live, as my Master says, in tune with nature. If you live an honest life free from desire, you are never in trouble. The simple things of this earth were created by God: sunlight, sunshine, air to breathe, water to bathe in. Societies don’t create these things – societies destroy these things. Environmental change – it’s a big subject today. How are you to change the environment? You can make more gardens, grow more trees. But you are cutting down. Arable land is being destroyed to build more and more factories, to bring more and more consumption to you. Isn’t it? So living in tune with nature means living in such a way that everything else has a chance to live, whether it is an insect or a beast or trees. They have a place in your life. If one day there are no trees in England, or France or Germany, it would be as good as being in Saudi Arabia – desert! At least they have camels. You won’t have camels.

So, spirituality teaches us to put our life back into our hearts, which makes us more and more human every day, which gives us more and more understanding of what love is, what friendship is, what tolerance is, what compassion is, what mercy is, what sharing is. This head says, “Don’t share. You become from owning a thousand to a million to a billion. Don’t share.” This heart says, “Give what you have and you will get.” So the heart is there to give, whether it is love or anything else. This head is to get, to have. So this mind creates the desire to have more and more, whether it is material things like money, houses, cars, or emotional things like sex, lipstick, whatever. Whereas this heart gives us ‘being’: how to be good, better, noble, angelic and ultimately divine.

So this is what spirituality is about. I don’t want to speak to you more, because you have all been abhyasis for some time and your presence here shows that you would be willing to continue. But you must continue with the right understanding of what you are doing and why you are doing it. Are you here just because two more people are here with you? Are you here because it is an adventure for many of you? Perhaps many of you are coming for the first time to India. Or are you going back with this hidden wealth in the heart increased manyfold? I hope it is the latter.

Thank you.