Every Moment With God Is a Brick in Our Heart Temple - 30th April 2025

But truly speaking, nothing can really hold God. So, all these practices are just like children trying to catch the sun by making, you know, sand drawings or something like that. It really feels like it's so... like what you're trying to capture is so beyond anything that we can fathom. Like we feel like, 'Oh, I'm doing such a big mantra,' and you know, 'I'm saying the beeja mantra and Kleem and all.' It's feeling like, in front of God, what is it? And then you also feel like you're so at the mercy of Him. You can't... you don't know. Like, you have to be ready to wait forever also. You can't push your way. The only way to, in a way, force Him is unconditional love. But then the forcing part has to be let go of before it becomes unconditional. Anyway, yeah. But I truly feel in my heart that that love is irresistible to God.

Father, in my condition, I feel like even to take God as that real the whole day is impossible in my condition now. I feel like I'm living such a swingy way. I'm always...

That is why anyone who ever says that God is no longer a question of faith for me is probably mistaken or lying, because God will always be a question of faith—more largely a question of faith—because we are so designed to take Maya as reality. And to take the invisible, the imperceptible as reality is always going to be a question of faith. Faith in what our heart is showing us, not in a blind belief. Faith is often misunderstood as blind belief. But faith in what we know in our heart as true knowledge is faith. So, it's always going to be that, no matter how accomplished you are in spirituality.

Never heard it like this, but yeah. So this is important. It's not really about how I was seeing it in my... you know, it's more about trusting the heart more. Yeah.

And the mystery remains. It's not that we trust our heart that God is no longer a mystery. Yeah. That's why He's always a question of faith. So, saying that you trust your heart, it's not like in the heart we found the equation E=mc² and now we've solved it. It's always deepening. It's always a deepening question of faith. But in sort of a modern spirituality, we are set up on a treadmill where you do this often enough and then you get a hold, which is not... this is not it. So, you can say, if you look at some modern teachers, they have said, 'Oh, now like you do like this and this, then enlightenment.' And enlightenment, this is enlightenment, and things like that. But enlightenment is also more like a spectrum rather than a final point.

I think it's more like a spectrum of colors and shades, and it's full of learning, inside challenges, many times of dryness, many attacks from the world and the Maya attacks. What has been offered is sort of a finality which is not true. And then what happens is that that's where the frustration comes from for many of us. It's like, 'Why isn't it happening for me? Should have happened by now.' So that 'it' is not really an 'it,' and it is that it is like a rainbow. You can't really grasp it. Very same about this. It's a matter of... so when you think all the time, you get frustrated in spirituality. You get frustrated because you think you're not getting anywhere. Yeah. But that is because you've been led to this idea that 'there' it is something that can be gotten. It's not really about that. It's about just continuously offering yourself up, loving God, inquiring into your true nature. All the paths are valid, but the spiritual marketing that all of us have done inadvertently is what gets us in trouble.

So, like Osho for example would speak a lot about enlightenment as a final sort of destination, and then that can get ingrained in the minds of people. And then it can either be this false sense of accomplishment—like someone will roam around for a few weeks like that, like that—life gives them a slap and then like that, you see? And so it goes really strong. It takes a really strong slap to get you back to earth also. So that is a lot of trouble. And others who are maybe more sincere and humble will keep saying, 'But why isn't it happening? Why isn't it happening for us?' Because enlightenment has been made into some sort of like a grasped thing, but it's not really like that.

What is it called? Like, it is more like: how would you call someone wise? You would not call someone wise because they know one thing. You look at the overall something about them and say, 'This one is very wise.' What makes them so wise? You're not able to pinpoint because he knows this, he is very wise. No. You may give them a PhD. Knowledge is different from wisdom. So, knowledge you may be able to say, 'Oh, he cleared this exam, so he's very knowledgeable,' but there's no wisdom exam. You just get a sense. You get a sense. And usually those people are not calling themselves wise; they see that there's so much for them to keep, so much for them to grow. So, enlightenment is more like that. The sages, which is... I feel also it's a modern phenomenon where we made these categories of enlightened and unenlightened. In the past, it was more like a spectrum. If you look at the past, there was nobody saying he was enlightened, he was unenlightened. They were different, and everybody had one more depth about them. That categorization was not so cruel, so cut and dry. It's become, I feel like, with a little bit of the modernization and a little bit of the westernization, it has become more like the labels are becoming very important.

Can I say one more thing? The more I'm like trying, the more I feel like I don't have that focus. I feel... I really... I don't know how to say it. Like, it has to become more from moment to moment. Okay. Okay. Even this becomes a distraction. I'm saying, yeah, it can become a report card, and you've spoken about the checker. I feel like now hearing you, I feel like even if sounding very sincere, it's not... I don't feel like it's dying time.

Yeah, we can't really place ourselves in that way, that 'I'm trying hard' or 'not so hard,' you know, 'somewhat' and 'some.' All these things are very difficult to quantify. Suppose all day I forgot about God, but I remember that I forgot about God now. So now, at the end of this moment, was the day wasted or was it spent well? You can't really say. That's what I'm saying. It's impossible to really quantify what we really have. Like, we don't really know anything about time anyway. What we really have is just this moment. This moment. This moment. Either it can be like inspiration or it can be an excuse, and we only know in our heart what it really is.

Everything I've ever said in Satsang can either be inspirational or it can be used by the checkered guy, all of those things. We can never really... only when it's heartfelt, and the spectrum is much broader than true and false. That's the thing—much broader than the very blunt instrument. So, 'this is right, this is wrong, this is how it is, this is not how it is.' It's very primitive to look at things as just 'this is how it is, this is not how it is.' The two corners of the room. Then you broaden that by saying it could be both this way and that way. Then you would say it could be neither this way nor that way. But the fifth is where it leaves our mind without moves, our intellect without moves, and then we truly become heartfelt. It doesn't mean that we get into some sort of like zombie mode. It's just that we are not holding things tight.

Sometimes what happens is when you hear about a thing like the fifth, you want to get into it. Yeah. This is all right if it happens naturally. If it's forced, then it's not really authentic. It's more like we are losing our grip on our conceptual life. Losing 'Am I like this?' or 'Am I lazy?' or 'Am I enthusiastic in my spirituality?' I don't know. You know, one day we had something like this: just soften, soften that. No position. Soften it up, soften it up a little bit, you know? So you can't really... so it becomes... it loosens up instead of it becoming... yeah. Yeah. And also like the empty position, then you don't really get into... the big trap is to get into an empty sort of position. This is not a true emptiness.

It's more like we are losing our grip on our conceptual life. Losing 'Am I like this?' or 'Am I lazy?' or 'Am I enthusiastic?' My spirituality—I don't know, you know. One day we had something like this: just soften, soften that position. Soften it up. Soften it up a little bit, you know, so you can't really... so it becomes... it loosens up instead of becoming rigid. Yeah. Yeah. And also, like the empty position, then you don't really get into the big trap, which is to get into an empty sort of position. This is not a true emptiness. The true emptiness is just a loosening, a loosening. But we get a sense because when you do it actually, then you see that.

Then you can... Father, it's so helpful because it's just so helpful. I don't realize that I've actually taken on a very strong position, and then now when you just say it like that...

Yeah. And that's one thing that, like in Ecclesiastes—one of my favorite songs also—in everything there's a time, turn, turn. So there's a time for this, there's a time for this, there's a time to be soft on ourselves. There's a time to be hard on this. But that can only come from here. So just lighten, lighten, and allow that inner compass to lead us.

So we hear, like you were also mentioning, when we listen to satsang, we can either feel bad about or judge ourselves, or the other way could be that we take inspiration. So can it not be that the inspiration sometimes can also be from the mind? Because that's why I'm saying that even in this, also sometimes there's a time to be hard on yourself, sometimes a time to just be inspired, sometimes... and so it's very difficult to put these things in boxes. And even that, sometimes you need to put things in boxes and sometimes... I'm just asking, is that you repeat the first point that you were mentioning yesterday when you were making your point and you were talking about how at the hour of death, there is... it sounds very silly, but there's Yama that comes. And a lot of people talk about experiences of how they see somebody at the hour of death, and it almost sent like a chill down my spine. Like, I was starting to feel that there's no guarantee, no matter what I do, for me to see Krishna at the end of it. Like, there's no way that... and because there's no security here in any way.

Neither is there any security that it has to always boil down to that. Right now, it has to always boil down to that. If you keep spending a lot of time concerned about the outcomes, then actually, in the concern for the outcomes, you miss a chance to love God in this moment, or to pray, or to inquire, to whatever feels right in our heart in that moment. So somewhere, if you need like an underlying principle that keeps us alive to the moment, we can use the underlying principle that He is the most merciful. And so many sages have told us that all we need to take is one step towards Him and He takes a hundred towards us. So we need some sort of reinforcement to keep our spirit alive to it. Sometimes we can get very disheartened, and that disheartenedness also prevents us from just being free in our love for God.

So in this Madhurya, that's what I'm learning, because my whole spiritual life has been so much about Dasya Bhava. So now, like, yeah, but would this be my stance with my beloved, or would this be my stance with the father-type figure or master-type figure? And trying to... so that's bringing some ease. And this is also God's grace, that when this ailment came, it also provided a path of some ease, that it's not so stressed out that you love. And it's a two-sided love. You just ask for forgiveness and say, you know, 'Sorry I wasn't able to call You, but I'm calling You now. Forgive me.' You know, this kind of stuff. So, it's a lot more free in that way. But you have to see in your heart what your sense is in this particular phase in your lives.

To see... you would say there was a lot of guilt in your...?

Not really guilt, but more like a sense of doing the right thing. I don't feel like I beat myself up too much in the past. It was always like, 'What is the Dharma in this one?' Now it's more difficult. This one, this new phase, is very difficult to put in...

But you compare it to like the most beautiful sort of human relationship of love. And from there, that's why this Braj tradition I love so much, because there all these views also... freshly, I think, because the crowds and all increase more, but just offer yourself up to God. Offer yourself up to Krishna or Radha. You don't have to worry so much whether what you're wearing, what you're eating, what you are doing, what you are... so we have to be very careful that this can be again, like we said in the beginning, it can become excuses or it can become inspirations. So you know, this has become worse and worse with words because I don't know how to share anything.

How do we get a sense of what the Bhava is? I mean, like how you were sharing to get a sense of it, but just by being...?

Carry this with you. Carry the question with you. God is merciful enough to show us in time with patience.

Can you repeat? Carry it...?

Carry the intention to know what is the right path for me in this moment, and then you'll see that over a few days or weeks you feel that. I've seen it's always... there's never a question that I've carried in my heart which is not answered. It may take some time, but You always show me the way. Always.

Can we really say that in every single human situation—seven billion people, how many seconds every day—that one human may not be held by having a belief which is just in their head? It's like a godly belief, at least like a spiritual belief, that they believe that Ram is taking care of them. Maybe it helped them in that moment. They don't really know it in the heart, which is the belief they have.

That's true. A big switch from where I started. I'm saying that I'm really starting to soften up all of these. I'm saying that I don't know what to say anymore because they say, 'Just have faith,' and 'Don't believe that.' Sometimes somebody may be helped by having a belief. Who's to really say? The best we can do in a way is to look at the predominant sense and make that like a box and offer that; otherwise, nothing really can be spoken. So, what I felt predominantly at every point of time is what has been spoken. But now in this break time, post-retirement time, loosen up on all of these.

Retire?

Yeah. Well, some things do happen where you feel like God is... if a child comes from Delhi and she feels like one interaction in satsang, whatever it was, turned her towards God in some way, then who am I to claim retirement if God is making these things happen? Not making strong claims about that, but something here is enjoying retirement.

So bad, huh? And now I think you should. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much.