What Has Life Taught Me?

What has life taught me? Life has taught me how to exclude and include-how to exclude unreality and how to include reality. When I feel that I am of God and for God, I become the fulfilling reality. When I feel that I am of myself and for myself, I become the self deceiving unreality.

Reality unveils, reveals and fulfils. Unreality veils, conceals and kills. Reality expands and transcends. Unreality cries and dies.

What has life taught me? Life has taught me conscience, common sense and God-sense. My heart utilises conscience; therefore, my heart is pure and brave. My mind utilises common sense: therefore, my mind is clear and direct. My soul utilises God sense; therefore, my soul is divine and perfect.

Life has taught me how to live and learn, how to learn and live, how to live and live, how to learn and learn. When I live and learn, I try to jump up onto the topmost bough of the tree instead of climbing up right from the foot. When I learn and live, I do the first thing first-I walk and then I run. When I live and live without first learning the inner lesson and discovering the real essence of my life, I deliberately deceive the divine within me and the divine in others. When I learn and learn, I constantly expand my earth bound consciousness and transcend my earth bound reality.

Life has taught me how to learn, unlearn and relearn. I learn. I learn the song of divine duty. By performing the duty divine, I know that I fulfil the divine within me, the Supreme within me. I learn the song of the childlike heart, for I know that if I have a childlike heart, I will always have the eagerness and inner urge to fulfil the divine by learning and discovering the Reality itself.

Each time I learn something, I march forward toward my destined Goal, my transcendental Goal. When I learn that my life is God Light, then during my soulful prayer and meditation I feel God the Infinite Peace, God the Eternal Light, God the Immortal Life claim me in the inmost recesses of my heart as His very own. At that time, I claim God's Infinity as my length, God's Eternity as my height and God's Immortality as my depth-the depth of my silent being. At that time I consciously become one, inseparably, eternally one, with the Inner Pilot, the Absolute Supreme.

I unlearn. I unlearn the song of self importance and self aggrandisement. As a seeker, I have to unlearn many other things, as well. My mind is full of information and empty of illumination. If my mind is filled with information, then I feel that I am a donkey carrying a heavy load on my back. What I need is not world information, but world illumination. So first I have to unlearn this world information, for in order to get world illumination I need a mind of clarity, a mind of luminosity. Also, I have to unlearn the capacity of the physical mind. The physical mind teaches me how to doubt, how to suspect, how to belittle and how to bind myself and others. When I doubt others with my physical mind, I do not gain anything; at the same time, they do not lose anything. And when I doubt myself, I immediately dig my own grave.

I relearn. I relearn the song of God union, of conscious God union. When I am in Heaven, I am the soul. There God and I are one, inseparably one. But when I, as a soul, enter into the world arena and take on a physical frame, then I enter into the world of bondage, limitation, darkness and ignorance. There I become the body consciousness. If I take the body consciousness as my reality, then I cannot learn anything from life, for the body consciousness is limited, unlit, obscure, impure, undivine. But when I think of myself as the Soul Reality, I get the opportunity to relearn the truth that God and I are eternally one.

Life has taught me how to examine the essence of God's Silence and God's Sound. When I use my human eyes to examine God's Reality, I am totally lost. But when I use my heart to examine God's Reality, my heart immediately sees the true Reality, on the strength of its total identification with Reality. The physical eyes are very often misled, but the inner heart cannot be misled. The inner heart is the direct representative of the illumining soul, which is one with the Source. As long as I use the physical mind, I see others as others; but when I use the aspiring heart there is no you, no he, no she, only I-the Universal I, and not the limited ego. So when I use my heart, I become the Reality. But when I use my mind or my physical eyes, I am quite often deceived, and I remain unfulfilled.

When I do not aspire, my life teaches me frustration, and I push and pull. I push my life toward something, but eventually I come to realise that this something is a goalless nothing. I pull myself toward the little, puny ego consciousness, and I see that I have pulled myself toward an empty reality. But when I neither push nor pull, just offer my existence in its totality to the Inner Pilot, I consciously become what I eternally am: God consciousness.

As a seeker, I know that my life has taught me how to love and whom to love. How to love? Devotedly, soulfully and unconditionally. Whom to love? God in man and man in God. When I love God in man devotedly, soulfully and unconditionally, I become one with God the Unity. When I love man in God, I become one with God the Multiplicity. One is the Source; many are the manifestations of the One. The tree needs branches; the branches need the tree. By loving God, the seeker in me becomes the tree itself and by loving man, he becomes the branches.

Life has taught the seeker in me how to devote myself to my higher part and to my lower part. When the lower part in me devotes itself to the higher part, the higher part gets additional strength for its manifestation. When the higher part devotes itself to the lower part of my being, the lower part gets the opportunity for transformation. Life has taught the seeker in me how to surrender. I surrender soulfully, devotedly and unconditionally to my own higher reality. This higher reality encompasses and embodies everything as its very own, so when I divinely surrender, I feel that the unillumined part of me is surrendering to the fully illumined part of me. When God's Hour strikes and the unillumined becomes fully illumined, and the illumined becomes fully manifested, then my entire being becomes totally divine and perfect.

When I live the animal life, I see darkness all around and feel that this darkness is my only reality. When I live the human life, I see an iota of light and feel that one day I will be able to bathe in an infinite sea of Light. When I try to lead the divine life, I feel that my Inner Pilot has already paved the way for me to walk along the path to His ultimate Reality. At that time, I feel that God's Dream Boat is carrying me to His Reality Shore-the Golden Shore of the ever transcending Beyond.

The soul tells me that life is perfection. We are not travelling from imperfection toward perfection, but from less perfection to greater perfection, to the greatest perfection. In the process of evolution, life is continuous progress. This progress is perfection aiming at the highest Absolute Perfection. When life began from the mineral world, it was the beginning of life's perfection. But there is no end to our progress. Today's perfection is the starting point for tomorrow's higher, deeper, more illumining and more fulfilling perfection.

Life has taught me something sublime: that I am not indispensable; only the Supreme in me is indispensable. Life wants to offer me happiness, and real happiness lies only in this discovery. When someone feels that only the Supreme in him is indispensable, then his life is all happiness.

Finally, life has taught me the most important thing: that God and I need each other. I need God for my perfect perfection, and God needs me for His total Manifestation on earth. This is

the supreme lesson that life has to teach, and I am offering it to each seeker present here.

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April 19th, 1974
8:00 p.m.
Stanford University
Memorial Chapel
Stanford, California