The Water of Life

by Chariji, July 23, 2007, Tiruppur, India.

I have a bad throat. I never heard of a lion having a cold, you know, but this one has! So my roar may be a little grating, rough, but you’re all used to it.

I am very happy that this meeting, and what I have heard here from the various people responsible for the Mission in Canada, the USA, in South America, has given my dying flame of hope in my heart a revival. It is as if a long night of stagnation has ended in these countries, and we will see the sun rise and grow stronger and stronger over a few years before it attains a full strength.

I remember with some regret that many years ago there were more than three thousand abhyasis in the U.S. We have actually slipped to about eleven hundred, I think, and we are now on a fresh wave of growth. And I am happy that Girish said we have about three thousand abhyasis back again on the slate. But that is where we were ten, twelve years ago, and now begins the growth, shall we say, wave. And all that is necessary is not hard work, is nothing very special about it. All that is necessary is co-operation.

In our school when I was probably six years old, we were told a story of how you could break one twig very easily, but you tie twenty twigs together you couldn’t break it. You needed an elephant to stamp on it. We can consider ourselves twigs, or even less than twigs. All that we need to do is to get ourselves bonded together into one solid group. There is no more mutual support and all this blah-blah of Western civilization, you know. We have too much talk about differences that prevent co-operation, whereas I believe that co-operation removes differences. When we are one, there are no differences. When we are like the wolves around a campfire, you know, moving around the perimeter, just you see their eyes glinting, then there is no co-operation. There are mighty wolves, hungry wolves, fierce wolves, but of what use is it to us? Let them sit down hungry and howl, you know. [He howls.] And you have a pack of wolves. That’s what I want, hungry wolves. Because of the Canadian Mission, I love wolves, I love bears. I hope I don’t face them face to face alone because I don’t want to be, you know, hugged in such an embrace by a bear that it exists and I don’t! And I can’t outrun a wolf anymore, never could.

But my idea is, you know, there must be an inner hunger to bring us together like a pack of wolves. And that hunger is more correctly defined as a thirst for spirituality. What must bring us together is a thirst for spirituality. “I cannot live without it.” You know man can go hungry for forty days, fifty days—no big deal. But you can’t remain thirsty; twenty-four hours, forty-eight hours, you’re dead. I want a thirsty pack, fierce, roaming the country. Not howling, but the clarion call of Sahaj Marg, “Come unto me, all of you. Here we are a strong, powerful pack of thirsty people. We will find the water for you, the water of life.” Not water that merely satisfies thirst, but the water of life, aqua vitae. And let it become bigger and bigger. That should be the motive, you know.

I suggest that you adopt a wolf as a symbol for your growth. You know, Rome has a symbol of wolves because it is said that wolves [suckled the young] Romulus and Remus, which is a very apt symbol because we have to grow generation by generation. And it has been already more than three generations since Babuji stepped onto the U.S. soil for a brief visit of three weeks way back in 1972. If you look at it one way, which is that of a statistician presenting statistics to a gullible Board or, shall we say, a general meeting, we have grown a lot. It’s like a man who says, yesterday there was no abhyasi, today there is one—infinity growth. Today there is one, tomorrow there are two, hundred percent growth. Percentage growth figures are generally for cheating, for misleading, and to get a vote. I want solid figures—numbers. You know, in America numbers are what we talk about all the time. Bottom line. Numbers. Santosh can tell you more about it than I can. I want to see numbers.

Somebody asked Babuji Maharaj once in Munich, “Why do you want more? Are we not enough?” Twenty abhyasis in Munich! I was thinking whether Babuji would be able to give a credible answer to that question. But he was, you know, a man from There, not easily pulled down by a pack of wolves. He said, “I come from Infinity, my mind is Infinite, I want Infinity in front of me.”

And you know, we are not a commercial organization, we are not in this to convert people, we are not in this to make money. We are here to bring nice, cool, potable water of life to the people of the Americas. And I hope they will respond. But it is your job to see that they are thirsty. Pick out the thirsty ones. Feed them drop by drop. You know, when Mahatma Gandhi used to break a fast of forty days, he used to take just a sip of orange juice because if he took more he would have died. It’s like a man going in a diving bell deep into the ocean. When coming back it takes hours, when going down it takes only a few minutes. If you come out too fast you have what they call—what do they call it?—the bends. The oxygen in the blood is released and it chokes up the veins and the arteries and you die. So, stage by stage, stage by stage.

That is why Sahaj Marg, its practice, the development takes so much time. There is no instant process in spirituality. If anybody says there is, he is a liar. And if you believe it, you are too gullible. There are many people going around saying one sitting, you are done. This is a process which Babuji has aptly, correctly, honestly defined as ‘towards infinity’. In infinity there is no time. There is no measurement, “How far have I come?” Even if you have come half infinity it is still infinity ahead of you. That is the definition of infinity. We march on and on. We don’t look for rest because every rest costs me a great deal of time even though I am in infinity. There is no rest. There is no satisfaction. We cannot look back and say, “I have done more than half.” In infinity there is no more than half, there is no less than half.

So let us remember we are on a journey which is neither long nor short, but Infinite. It does not take time in the nature of minutes or hours because we are not in time, we are out of time in Infinity, Eternity as it is called. And we have a guide who is moving ahead of us to show us that it can be done. He’s an old man wearing a cap, Babuji Maharaj, and if he can hobble along, stumble along, and keep looking back to see whether we are there, we must be there to say, “Yes, Master, I am there.”

Thank you.