Building God's Temple in the Heart

So I hope you're getting a sense of what sadhana, a spiritual practice, is, which at this stage is collaborative, isn't it? Or at least let's admit that it seems collaborative. Who directs the agency of this 'me'? We'll come to that a little later. For the moment, it seems sufficient to say that I turn inwards. I offer myself, I give my consent for God to take over. I make myself available. And that act of love is reciprocated by the act of love from the Atma, from the heart, which pulls us inwards into the heart itself. How was that? How was that offering of ourselves done? Sometimes in just an inward glance, sometimes in the question, 'Who am I?', sometimes in repetition of a prayer, sometimes with just attention to breath. All the spiritual practices bring us to this point.

This is the process of dissolution. We dissolve in this process and as we are dissolving in this process, the mind will try to make us scared. How many of you feel that? I had this report in satsang in the past that 'this much is all right but I'm not ready for more. I'm a bit scared.' I don't know if I can teach it more than this. You can have that before earlier.

Know that you have nothing to fear. That which is dissolving is not true anyway. It only seems to be true. They are only obstacles to love. Allowing ourselves to remain in this holy love, to remain in this photo booth of the Atma, to remain in this photosynthesis, in this magnetism. Whichever force we want to draw a parallel to, it is us giving—like a good way to conceptualize it would be us giving permission to God to build His temple in our heart. This permission for Him to build His temple in our heart because we are ourselves incapable of building it. At best, we pretend to offer bricks for the temple through our acts of love.

The only problem is that we can never report about the progress of the temple construction. Why? Because we cannot sense it. Our senses are too small. We cannot conceptualize it. It is beyond sensory and conceptual knowledge. Therefore, we have to rely purely on intuitive insight, on heart knowledge. And that is why in this journey many times it can feel like nothing is happening. It can seem like there is dryness, no sweetness. There is boredom. But if you remain reliant on the heart, He will keep at it in the most patient and courageous way.

Why is it important to have a concept about the inner temple construction? It's a helpful concept because the mind will tell you there is much important work to be done on the outside. Our work has to be fixed. Our money situation has to be fixed. Our relationships have to be fixed. Our body has to be fixed. We need to learn a lot more. So all of this it will tell you is the work that has to be done. What are you doing? It tries to bully us like, 'What are you up to? All this work is going. Your life is passing you by. You're missing every opportunity. And you're not even having fun. You're just sitting here getting bored.'

So when you remember the words that the most important work in your life is to allow your heart to become a temple of God, to allow this construction to happen, so your life itself becomes holy. Your life itself becomes immersed in this light. What greater gift can you give to yourself or to the world than this? So when we hand over ourselves to Him, He does the work in our heart. Is there any way that you can bypass this whole process? Suppose you don't have time and you have a lot of money. Can you go somewhere, give them like a billion dollars and say, 'Just, I'm giving you all this money, just make the temple in my heart'? Can anyone do it? Nobody can do it. Even our teachers, even the sages can only bless this process. Only by His will is every brick in this temple constructed, only on His time.