A Glimpse Of Your Soul

Sat, 16/06/2012

Antwerp, Belgium

Life has to be seen from a larger perspective.
What is life? How long are we going to live here? What is the truth of life? We should put some light on this. And when we do this, the gist comes to doing meditation. See, in all our temples, this is what is shown to us, God sitting with his eyes closed, steady, in meditation. That meditation, we should all do because meditation has a lot of importance in life.

Lord Buddha said, ‘Life has sorrow and sadness, but there is a way to come out of sadness.’
Lord Mahavir said, ‘Repose in the self; the nature of the soul is happiness.’
For both these messages, the way is meditation. Discontinuation of sadness and attainment of happiness, both will happen through meditation.

(A volunteer makes an announcement requesting some people from the audience to change their parking space.)

No problem; life is full of interruptions only.
This is what we need to do. We need to keep moving. We park somewhere and then we move again.
Now if you park in a wrong place, you need to move it sooner, and if you park in the right place, you have freedom; you can move it when you want to. Similarly, you have to park your mind also in such a way that it is in a safe place.
If you have parked your mind in your own garage, nobody can tell you when you should move it. But if you park your mind in somebody else's garage, they will be after you. Even then if you do not move, the police will come.

In the same way, don’t give your life's authority in somebody else's hand. If you give it, this is what will happen. You will have no freedom. You lose your freedom. And when you lose freedom, the next thing you lose is love, and compassion, because someone who is stifled, cannot express their compassion or love.
So take care of the car called mind which drives you.

You should drive the mind rather than the mind driving you. What do you think? Is it correct?
What does wisdom do? Wisdom empowers you to drive the mind, how you want to drive it. Otherwise you are not in the driving seat, the mind is driving. It is an automated car which goes on its own. You are sitting, wondering that you want to go left, and the car is going right, and you feel helpless.
Most of our life is like this. We don’t know what we are doing, we don’t know what we want, and we don’t know where we are going. The car is simply going, and we are sitting in the background saying, ‘I want to go left’, and the car is going right. Isn’t this happening?
We are being driven by something else. So we need to take a look at, ‘From sitting behind, how I can jump into the driving seat. How can I make that leap’, and that is what spirituality is. That is what the essence of all the scriptures is.

You read the Bhagavad Gita, then this is what you will come to understand. Over time, this is the essence that will come to your hearing, i.e., your soul is imperishable; repose in the self. This is the essence.
The same thing has been said by Lord Krishna in the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, that the soul is imperishable.

You might say, ‘Okay, all that is good, we have read this, understood this, but Gurudev this is what we are unable to use in life.’
I address this to all those people sitting here, the older ones. Have you ever felt that you have aged? Answer, all the mothers, the older people sitting here. Did you ever feel that you have grown old? No! One never feels that one has aged.
Our small children have grown up, but we feel that we have still remained the same. This is how we feel; we have not only grown old, we are the same - this is a glimpse of the soul.
See, within us there is something that has never changed. The body has changed, the mind has changed, and the intellect has changed, but there is something in the mind that has not changed. We get a narrow glimpse of this, here and there. But when you go in meditation, then this is understood much better. Then such a smile will come on your face, that no one will be able to wipe it off.

This is not the first time we are here. We have been here so many times, met so many times; so many times we have taken birth. I know it, maybe you do not know. Whether you do know or not know, I know we have met before; we have come before. You do not remember, you have forgotten.

Our life is endless, and it does not end here. After this, we will come again. We are infinite, endless; there is an element in us that is eternal. A small glimpse of this is achieved when you realize that nothing has happened to me, nothing has changed in me.

Go deep into meditation; everything else will keep coming and going; but one should meditate.