What Is Servitude?

Yes.

So I'm obviously not throwing this anywhere, but I'm saying that when life slaps us around, it seems very real. To live in faith is to continue to give reality to your intuitive insight, to what the Satguru within is telling you. Do we live like this? How many of us are living like this? Some moments you go away, or some moments you live like this.

Honestly, we live in some moments in faith. Yes, when suffering is squeezing our throat, then we say, 'God, God, God.'

That reminded me of Jesus saying, 'You may say Lord, Lord, but I will not recognize you unless you followed the will of my Father.' So it is not enough when we have no other option left then to call on God. When we have every option available to us, then to be with God is true faith. Of course, when life is squeezing our throat, we still must; that is the only option we have. But then when His grace, by His grace, things get resolved—they always do—then at least we must live in that faith, in that gratitude. But we forget. Then we again boom, 'God, God, God' again. It's like Kabir Ji said: 'Dukh mein simran sab kare, sukh mein kare na koye. Jo sukh mein simran kare, toh dukh kahe ko hoye.' Which means that everybody remembers God in suffering; nobody remembers God in peace time or joy time. Those who remember God in peace never need to go through suffering, you see?

I noticed the flow of this world and how it plays out. God doesn't immediately push us from happiness and things straight into deep suffering. He nudges us, and then if we still don't listen—like a parent saying, 'Come home, come home, come home'—then when she's done calling and the child is just not listening, then the ear has to be pulled home, isn't it? So just like that, I feel like God in His love and mercy also operates like that. I feel like we are given the least possible suffering to turn us to God, to turn us to reality. But when we don't listen, then it gets amped up a bit, amped up a bit more. So in that poking, we must not just neglect it. We must not say, 'Nothing is happening to me, I am the Self.' That becomes then a denial. We must look and see: What is the pride I have? What is the shape that I've taken that is getting poked by this? And we must not amplify the problem by just using conceptual knowledge that we hear in satsang.

So that is faith. Then what else is important for servitude? Humility. Can you be a good servant if you're just like, 'Yeah, what do you want me to do?' treating God like the servant? So your word may be saying 'I'm at your service,' but actually you're hoping that He'll be at our service. Most of spirituality in the world today is like that: 'I'm praying to you God, please make this happen, give me a good job, make my relationship okay.' After praying for how long? Two minutes? You become entitled: 'But I prayed to you also!' So isn't it disguised servitude where we are wanting God to be our assistant? I am saying I am entitled. We must notice this stuff.

The other thing is that we are constantly expecting to make sense of God's ways. But when a scientist says—Niels Bohr said—the universe has no obligation to make sense to us, you're like, 'Yeah, that's fine.' That which is the creation of God will not make sense to us; we are accepting that. But that which is the light of this universe, we are constantly expecting to explain Himself. 'Why did you do this to me? I have prayed to you also, I devoted to you also, I'm such a good person, why are you doing this?' Why do bad things happen to good people? Who are you asking for an explanation from? The one who's playing with these trillions of stars bigger than the sun as if they are grains of sand? We are asking that one, 'Why do you do this?' What capacity do we have to understand His way? This is pride. 'I pray to God but He still didn't listen to me.' What have you made God into?

So it is said that God created man in His image, but actually what has happened in the world today is that man has created God in their image. So we must let go of all this foolish pride and come into humility. We must accept that we don't have any capacity, anything special at all about us. We think we are a bundle of food—we spend all of our life thinking that we are bundles of food—and we want to argue with God? You want to have eye-to-eye with God, look Him in the eye and question Him, 'How could you do this to me?' It is just us. So our humility must be also authentic by the awe that we experience when we meet God. I'm more and more awestruck every day. And so reverence, humility, all of that come naturally because what is so worthy about this foolish man? This mouth doesn't even deserve to utter the word 'God,' but in His grace, in His sheer love, He has made this one an instrument to share His life.

That is humility. Obedience: To be obedient to someone you have to meet them, isn't it? At least have some mode of communication. How can we be obedient to that which we have not met? So live in God's presence. Then the light part has helped you come to God's light; you must live in God's presence. And once you live with the Master, then the Master will guide you. Initially, the guidance will just be the organic movement which is happening to you as you are empty. They are just unfolding. Whatever you take yourself to be—whether it is the universe, the universe is unfolding in His light moment to moment, or even if you take yourself to be the body-mind—then allow the body-mind to unfold moment to moment. That is to live in the no-mind, to remain in the Unborn where already in our emptiness all our problems are gone. Life is no longer suffering, you see? The world, as Buddha said, is suffering? No longer, when you are in the no-mind, empty.

Start with that level of obedience. Then you may notice that some guidance is coming. You may be talking to a friend and you may find your mouth saying something from a different place, and you may wonder, 'Where did that come from?' And all of us would obviously love that, because who doesn't want to share satsang with others? But can we not follow our own satsang? So if God can guide us, if God can guide others, why can God not guide this life? So there we go from organically allowing God's presence to move this life—which is the end of all trouble anyway—to truly becoming His servant by following His guidance in the heart. And that is what is important: not to look at Consciousness as if it is some scientific force. Can magnetism speak to you? No. Electricity speak to you? No. But can God's presence speak to you? Of course it can. So remain empty and follow God's guidance.

But when He guides you, projects may not seem like they are the simplest. Like Hanuman Ji was given the most difficult project: go alone to Lanka and give Sita Ma a message; go get the Sanjeevani booti from the north of India, fly into it. And of course, the strength to accomplish the project will also come from God, but we must not wait for that first. The mind can make that into a block: 'Okay, if you're going to ask me, then give me the strength also.' That is also a lack of faith, because is God not intelligent enough to know that if He's asking you, then you will need to be given the strength also? So in all cultures, all traditions, we have these examples of those who are guided by God to do the most difficult things. Whether it is Hanuman or it is Moses or Abraham or it is the Prophet Muhammad. Wherever you look at it, you find true servants of God. Guru Nanak Ji and especially also the later Sikh Gurus who went through a lot of torture.

I'm starting to see how true spirituality is worlds apart from the self-help type spirituality where we say, 'Oh, this practice is not working for me anymore because I used to find so much bliss and peace, now it's dropped.' All this egoic sort of idea of things. Whereas obedience should seem risky. Faith should seem risky. What are you risking for God? Where are you drawing the boundary for God, saying, 'All this is fine, you see? For you I will come to satsang twice a week, sit there for three hours listening to the ramblings of this man, but don't go beyond that. That's all I can give you.' What do you think will happen if you draw this boundary? Then you're saying the rest of it, 'I'm on my own,' is it? So this wanting to be on our own, unmeddled by God, is the only hell there is. I feel separation from God's light is the only hell there is.

Where do you draw the boundary? Can we draw a boundary for the Creator, the Preserver, and the Dissolver of this universe and say, 'No, no, your scope is till there; my relationship, my money, my health, and my intellectual pursuits I will handle'? And then when we say, 'But I attend satsang,' then isn't that just like what we call in the corporate world a 'tick in the box'? Like guilt alleviation, that I haven't really given up my life for that which I know in my heart to be reality, the truth, but I do attend satsang from time to time. The idea of this is not to make anyone feel guilty or unworthy, but just to shake you up a bit away from a lip-service, big-words type of spirituality into a true spirituality from the heart, moment to moment.

The mind will make all this sound very radical, but actually it's very natural. If you truly love somebody from your heart, would your life not be fully dedicated to them, devoted to them? Doesn't all the aspects of faith, humility, obedience come naturally when we're deeply in love, willing to do anything for the Beloved? But what is worth loving? That which is real, that which is giving light to this world, that which is gifting us our breaths. Or prove me wrong and say, 'No, no, this is all biochemical reaction, the brain does all of this.' Then explain your life using the brain as the construct. Intuitively you have a sense that a long-lost friend is going to call you—brain does that? Intuitively you have a sense of what is auspicious to you, where you have to be, where you don't have to be. Something brings you to satsang in spite of the fact that your mind could be resisting so much—is your brain doing all of that? 'I just happened to be at the right place at the right time, I could have been in a million other places and it opened up something for me'—is that biochemical? Explain your life with all of its miracles, which once they happen we consider tiny, but if they didn't happen then we would say, 'Oh, my life is so miserable.' We are in so much denial about a living presence which is so clearly and apparently here.

So how to be obedient to God's will? Everyone has told us we must be obedient to God's will. I've said often that the word 'Muslim' itself means the one who follows God's will. Islam is to follow God's will. And the stories of Lakshman, Hanuman, Bharat—all of them are beautiful because they were so devoted to God that they would follow His will even at the cost of great danger, great risk. Abraham, Moses... that's why Kierkegaard said, 'No risk, no faith.' At first I didn't like it, but it's all the Self, what risk? When I truly dove deep into that statement, I realized that just that one line can set fire to our spirituality, bring fuel to our spirituality from a comfortable lip-service spirituality to really potent, life-changing transformation where it is not 'God for me'—'What is God doing for me? How can God help me?'—but 'Me for God.' 'I'm available to you, Father. What would you have me do? I'm here as a mere instrument of your grace. Guide this instrument as you see fit.' And learn to trust His silence more than the highest pointing from the head.

We are very impatient with God. For years I've said we are more impatient with God than we are with Domino's Pizza. Domino's, you place the order, you wait 30 minutes, and sometimes you give them extra. No, God... 'I prayed to God, nothing happened.' How long were you empty? For a second? Because that's how much time God wants. But this is about risking our whole life and accepting that silence if you have to, because that's what love means; it's unconditional. So we must get away very, very far from the popular notion of God which is a wish-fulfilling genie. Just like, pray to God, rub the lamp, genie will come: 'What do you want, my child?' I think it has to be the other way around by a much greater degree. Every moment be available to God. For that you have to live in His light, live in His presence. How will you live in God's will if God Himself has been relegated to a concept in your head? No, it has to be a living presence, a living reality.

So that is obedience and prayerfulness. Now, most of us have a notion that we can't pray to God for something, you see? But you are happy to sit and worry about that for a long time. 'I'm worried about my job, I'm worried about my children.' So we sit and worry, worry, worry. But because actually it is 'not good' to go to God to ask for something specific, 'I'll not pray to Him for that.' This is an absurdity which is a mental creation. If you're going to sit and worry, you'd rather sit and pray. Because what do you think—that God is not noticing your worrying? That it's a hotline like, 'Oh God, I'm praying, so now He listens'? No, He is the light in which every moment of our life takes birth. What do we think we will hide from Him? What the mind can know about you is nothing compared to the one who is breathing you, who is birthing you every moment. So it's very good to have your head bowed down and pray to Him rather than sit and think fruitless thinking. Bow down and pray doesn't mean that you must always pray for something specific; you can pray for His grace, His love, His mercy, His guidance. And then your prayer, when it is truly authentic in your heart, becomes a communion—not just a communication, but actually it deepens His presence.

How do we pray? I'm learning to pray over the last three or four years, you see, and I feel like I'm just scratching the surface. But how do we pray? Some of us pray very dramatically: 'Oh God, please hear my call!' as if you're on stage performing some Shakespeare or something. He doesn't need... you don't need to pray like this. He's not like He can hear only Shakespearean-type English. It's not true. You don't have to become like that. So that's one end of the spectrum where we become very formal, like we're sending a letter to the Prime Minister. And then other people, they pray like, 'Yo bro, why haven't you done this?' It has a certain sweetness to it if it is coming from innocence, it's fine. But both of those are... I wouldn't recommend, although either of those are better than not praying. I can just pray naturally: 'Father, I'm concerned about my child, please guide him or her to make the most auspicious decision.' To pray without pretense. Because in our prayer itself, sometimes the pretense makes it like we're not really buying the fact that God is actually listening. We're just doing it because it may be the right thing to do. But you're not doing it as if you know you're talking to somebody who's sitting in front of me—and this is much more intimate than sitting in front.

So before you have any other tactics for anything in your life, you can bring it to prayer. If you don't use tactics and you're open and empty, then that itself is prayer. But don't let your mind use that. Your mind can use that and say, 'No, no, you don't need to pray, you're just empty,' and then two minutes later you're worrying about it again. So be honest with yourself. This is like golf in the sense that you only compete against your own handicap. So nobody from outside needs to come and judge you and say you're not prayerful enough, you're not obedient enough, you're not honest enough. You don't need to lie to yourself. If God's presence is a reality for you and He's here right now, rather than bringing it to your head, why would you not bring it to His presence? And don't let your mind convince you that this is not worthy to bring to God, this is not good enough, this you can handle on your own. See, that 'handling on our own' is the original sin. Then we started to believe that we have the capacity to judge good and bad, right and wrong, to not live everything out of surrender to God. Do you feel that Hanuman would have said, 'No, no, this I don't need to take to Ram Ji inside my heart, I'll just deal with this myself'? It is said about Hanuman that he opened his heart and there was Ram and Sita. What did that depict? Of course we must take it literally as well, but he's talking about all of us. God is there in your heart; why would we not live that way?

So we must become prayerful. And if all of this is sounding like too much—'Oh, I'd rather just be open and empty, I can't be this, this, this'—no, I'm just saying target any one of these. Target any one of these and the whole table comes closer; pull at any one leg. What else is important? Gratitude. We live in gratitude for what we have. Are we grateful for the fact that the heart is beating? You must drown all entitlement in gratitude. God has taken such good care of us in spite of our extreme foolishness. This man here, of course, is extremely foolish—silliest ideas we have—and yet God's grace doesn't leave us. He never abandoned us, even when we've thought we were abandoned and we've complained. But do we spend a moment in gratitude?

There was a survey done in America and they said that the average Christian in America prays for ten minutes every day. And that number they were presenting as a very small number. India is supposed to be the hub of religion and spirituality, but I feel like if you were to do a survey, our number will be much smaller than that. Do we unconditionally just love God for ten minutes a day? And I'm not saying that ten minutes is enough, but it's a start. Without wanting anything, just to deepen in our love for God. And that is the beauty of love: although we cannot produce it—you cannot say 'I created this much love'—you can actively love. Nothing can get in the way if you want to love God. You can actively love God. And is that you loving God or is that God loving you? Nobody can say; it is the same. But are we going to go with our mind's objections? Just this man, foolish as he may be, is telling you: you can love God. Try it out. Try to love Him.

Servitude mixed with this love is Bhakti. There is no Bhakta who is not a good servant, and there is no Bhakta who doesn't love God beyond his own life. So that is how you honor the insight. It is worth this honoring because what you are discovering by God's grace historically has been extremely rare. Sometimes we don't realize its value; we just feel like, 'Okay, nothing happening to awareness, it's just there.' Our Consciousness is just like a beingness—use all these big words—but do we realize how many lifetimes people have struggled and what sadhana and tapasia has happened before this Darshan has been made available? And the problem with simplicity is the mind can always come and say, 'What's there? Everyone has this, everyone is this.' It's very easy to use big words, but to really honor, as Guruji has said, to honor this discovery... why should we honor it? What is the need to honor? 'Everyone is awareness, who is to honor who?' Don't let this one that is resisting in this Advaita mind... that one must become a Bhakta. Don't waste your life and waste a moment. It is not too late today, but it will be tomorrow.

The opportunity does not come again and again. What is Kabir Ji doing? Is he trying to use fear tactics and scarcity principles with spiritual marketing? No, there's no reason to doubt him like that; he did not want anything from us. Why is he saying the opportunity does not come again and again? Because if you look back at history, it's very rare. God-realization, Self-realization... growing up when we used to hear these terms, we used to feel that's one in a billion. It's only with the advent of internet and you can search satsang and Advaita Vedanta—which was supposed to be kept in secret. Upanishads mean to sit close and to share in secret; don't spread this outside. Now it's fully available by God's grace, but the immensity of it should not be forgotten. Because the mind will not give up playing. You may have an awakening experience, you may have ten, but how many truly become free? In being with Guruji so many years and being in satsang for more than a decade now, you've seen many awakening experiences, but how many have really become free? And what has been missing from that freedom? What is the inability to stay with the insight? It is because of the lack of servitude, the lack of love. To make it into more an academic endeavor or a scientific sort of 'I came to awareness'—that is my thing—is very... who are we talking about? You're talking about the Absolute in which Consciousness is born. Don't just reduce that or normalize that or regularize that because we know these words.

Entitlement we must throw out this instant. Because you could have lived the most sattvic life and still not have a right over God. Nobody can go to God with rights; they can only go head bowed down. So nobody must ever believe that they were worthy of grace, they were worthy of entitlement of enlightenment, they were entitled to it because they were so good in their inquiry and they were so good in their love. Stay away from this pride, because this pride will turn off the fire and you'll become just parroting robots. Parroting robots—what you heard in satsang, what you take to be true—there's no real authenticity if the fire is burnt out because of pride. And that's why I was saying the other day: don't gauge yourself, don't benchmark yourself, but if you're going to, then benchmark yourself on servitude. Have I taken God to be real or has it become all about me? It's a very important question. Have I taken God to be real or is it all about me? Am I living as if I am somebody and something? How do I recognize that nothing in the story of this universe—even this tiny universe—my role is not even that of a two-second extra? Nothing. One in seven billion, one in so many trillions. Have I used the tools that grace and the Masters have made available to us? I prayed my heart out and not left anything for myself. Just pray it, pray it, pray it. And do I remember to give thanks for every day? Our life is full of grace and miracles. The only two things: miracles that we recognize and miracles that we don't yet recognize as being miracles. We may look down upon things, we may be ungrateful for them, but at the passage of time we realize we're so thankful that that happened.