Humility and Grace: Beggars at God's Door

Sometimes one minute's prayer is enough and you're sitting quiet for half an hour. Sometimes you have to really work at it; you have to get out your Mala and really use that. So we have to see our own temperature internally and decide. But we are not to give up on those days where it seems difficult. When relationships—the days where relationships are difficult—those are the days where we must put in the additional work. Our relationship with God is the most important. He's making us humble sometimes by making it difficult. If it was always that we close our eyes and we go into samadhi—not Maha samadhi, but samadhi—then you just close our eyes and we go into nirvikalpa, just the whole universe vanishes, then next week we'll start thinking we are a saint or something, some great sage. We start thinking that we are the next incarnation itself; we start getting into pride. So many days He just gives us no actual eating, maybe just morsels, you see. But we have to accept that as beggars at His door. And as long as this thing may still poke us somewhere, that we are just beggars at His door, then that is—we still have some pride. We are not even a beggar, nothing, not even a grain of sand at His door. So that kind of inner attitude gives us the patience, the courage, the humility to dive deeper and deeper into the unity, the recognition of Oneness or the sense of merging as one with God.

And always be thankful. The worst mistake you can do is to say, 'Oh, I did my sadhana really well today. I did my practice really well today.' Because what is it that we can do? We can say His name, we can ask the question 'Who am I?', we can offer ourselves up in surrender, but any outcome of that is all up to His grace. I've been trying to make this point for the past few weeks. I hope I'm getting through, because many of us start feeling that it is in my asking 'Who am I?' that my insight is coming. We can keep asking 'Who am I? Who am I?'; we don't know the mechanism of revelation. We cannot unlock the mechanism of revelation through any mechanical effort. In the same way, we can pray and pray and pray, but whether we get to Atma Darshan, nothing makes us entitled to that. That is why His kripa is always—His mercy is always important. And that is very crushing to our ego, our pride, especially our spiritual pride that needs to be crushed.

Look at—I'm making it very simplistic—but Ram Ji doesn't want Ravana in heaven with Him or Vaikuntha with Him. What does that mean? He doesn't want us to carry our pride there. This project is to free ourselves from our pride so that we can be good neighbors. Ego, pride, resistance—all same-same. And never get into this trap of saying, 'My path is better, my path is higher. You all don't know what you're doing.' That brother, that sister may be spending, sacrificing more of themselves to God even if the path is not so looked on so highly. And the values of that time being sacrificed, that life being sacrificed to God's love. So these are all just tips to keep your temple clean, your inner temple clean and well-ventilated, so that you can truly come to Atma Gyan, self-knowledge. Cooking and we are eating, in a way it's a cheat code for you in a way, and for me. And for me because what I taste of God's presence in satsang is not my usual experience. It is in the process of serving you all, I'm being blessed as well.