Rev. Babuji Maharaj’s Birth Anniversary Celebration, 30 April 2012, Chennai, India
Rev. Chariji: Remember Him, Emulate Him:
To break the profound inner silence of meditation with even the wisest of sayings is an intrusion on our spiritual life. So I would like to, or I will try to, keep this short by referring to a series of messages from my Master where he speaks to us about the necessity to celebrate such occasions with the fervour of love and faith - fervour! He says the sole purpose is to remember the great personality, and not to honour him or try to ennoble him, or to publicise him. The only purpose is that we may remember, and in remembering him, remember his life as if he were present with us today, which is constant remembrance. It must not be a memory of the past but it must be a memory yet living in the present, and that is why constant remembrance is so difficult, because perhaps even the word ‘remembrance’ makes us think of the past. We must be living with that personality at least during this meditation, so that we can prolong that when we go out of here. That is true of all meditation sittings, but this is very especially true, significantly and importantly true, for our spiritual life.Remembering him does not mean just remembering him but his life, as I said, the way he lived, his simplicity. When I first went to Shahjahanpur in 1965 (I think for Basant), in my imagination while on the travel to Shahjahanpur, between Delhi and Shahjahanpur by road (an eight or nine-hour journey in those days), I had imagined a big ashram - a huge square structure, ground plus three floors with an inner square courtyard; all the floors full of beautiful rooms; comfortable in a modern sense, and only one gate like an elephant gate through which we would enter. Of course, you can imagine how I must have felt when I faced the actuality of my Master’s home! A big iron gate, and a smaller iron gate through which I entered; a huge muddy courtyard with a small part of it paved with bricks laid edgewise in a herringbone pattern; roughly laid, no level surface, no cement floor. And the house - old furniture, old dhurries [mats] on the floor, and a master sitting in a dhoti and a banian [vest] even though it was cold. Later on, of course, he went in and had his bath and put on his sweater. Simplicity!Simplicity means not to exceed from the sphere of need to the sphere of want, to the sphere of covet and possess - utterly simple: a need. The food was simple - but the meditations cannot be described. I have written about some of these things, so it would be redundant to speak of them again and again, but simplicity was one of the factors to which he gave great importance. “Sahaj Marg is simple,” he said, “the ways of reaching God must be simple, therefore the teaching must be simple, the practice must be simple.” We don’t need anything except ourselves to sit and meditate. We don’t need puja vessels, an idol to worship, what we call the saamagri [articles] of prayer - nothing is necessary. The one thing that is important, without which meditation lacks meaning, lacks purpose, is the heart. Is your heart with you when you meditate? That is the most important question.Once I remember I asked Babuji Maharaj, “Why do you say, ‘The heart must be with you when we come here’?” He said, “Parthasarathi, we are only fifteen or twenty people here in this room, but I can see at least three people whose heart is where they came from; only the body is here. Even when they are meditating, they are meditating on their families, on their work, and not on divine light in the heart.” So, without simplicity, this intense concentration on the heart within the heart becomes impossible. We are thinking of so many things: “My car is out on the street. I don’t know who is doing what to it.” “My children - I don’t know what is happening to them.” So, you see - bare necessities.Do we remember him and try to emulate him? ...
So, to remember the Master does not mean just to say, “Ah, I remembered Babuji Maharaj.” In remembering him did you feel his presence? Did you feel the effect of his life upon yours? Has his life touched yours so that eventually, like two circles merging, we start from the edge and then slowly merge until there is only one circle? Is it happening to us? Forget all this talk of God and so many values of life: “We should be comfortable to meditate.”
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