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I was continuing from this morning about the deepak, the lamp, which Swāmījī lights in all of us. I am talking about sādhanā. So Swāmījī lights the light. I don't know if you know the dīpak we have in Europe, in India—similar to this, but it's a small earthen bowl, and you put ghee inside. Swamiji can light the flame, but you have to keep putting ghee. Ghee is a long procedure to make. You take milk, you boil it, you make it into yoghurt. Then, in the traditional method, you have a beater with a rope and a big stick, and you do this for a long, long time. After that, the butter comes to the top. You take that out, and then you boil it, and keep boiling it until it purifies within us as we continuously and continuously practice. Practice has to be balanced, and it changes. Many people here have been on the spiritual path for a long time, and from their experience, they'll also know that what you were practicing ten years ago is not what you're practicing now. As you become more and more experienced, you start to know what practice is appropriate for which time. For us in India, it's very much a case of which time of year, because there are certain things you just cannot do in certain weather conditions, and there are certain things which are much better to do at other times of the year. It depends on the climate. It depends on the climate of the company you're in, whether it's satsaṅg or kuśa. It depends on your inner climate, how you are. Accordingly, with experience, as you practice more and more, you learn to find the right note or the right key for that particular time, and you learn how to put yourself back in balance when you're out of it. I was liking this idea of balance. When you play an instrument like the guitar, the real masters, if they break a string in the middle of a performance, they don't need to stop and get another string. They can just adjust, and you won't even notice it happened. The sound coming from that guitar is just the same. That's just experience because it's happened to them so many times, either in practice or on stage. They can immediately adjust how they're playing the chord and immediately adjust how they're playing the scale. They'll still get the same notes, but they'll just put their fingers differently. Someone who may be a good player of the guitar but doesn't have that experience yet will be stuck. That's the beauty of practicing continuously for a long time. You can just adjust to whatever is going on, and it just seems to keep unfolding. You have that image of the lotus unfolding and showing its real beauty. As you keep practicing your sādhanā, you start to really realize, "Wow, I'm so glad that I never stopped this, so glad that I kept going." Sometimes it may seem like the lotus at nighttime—it closes up. It may seem like it's not like it was before, not like it was yesterday. Okay, some days it's not so good, but it will be back. When you continuously practice, it will be back. I know from my experience, there are times when Swāmījī is there in Jharā, and when we're having very big functions, there's no way to keep balanced. The program is just crazy. But with time and experience, I've learned it does not matter, because I know the day after it stops, that program, in a couple of hours, if I do the right things, I can put myself back in balance. So then I'm no longer concerned about letting it go. I think in an earlier stage, you get quite nervous: "Oh no, look, I've lost my balance, I've lost my balance." Okay, you've lost your balance, but it will be back. That, again, comes with experience. It comes with practice, and it comes with experimenting. Sādhanā is like a personal experiment. You do something, and you look at what happens, at what the reaction was. Then you analyze it and see: was that useful for me, or was it detrimental to me? Did it get me where I want to go, or did it take me in the other direction? Accordingly, the next time you do it, you adjust based on that result. Then again you experiment, you see the result, and you analyze it. So it goes on and on until you understand completely what affects you and how it affects you, and how, at any particular time, you can get the result that you want. Then, when you can have that balance, you have that base. I don't know if I could explain it properly, but in the meditation I wanted to explain this morning, when you have that base, that balance there, on top of that you can really do the meditation. Because when your core is balanced emotionally, then you have really something on which you can sit and you can think about God, think about your ātmā, and think about Gurujī. You don't replace; you take out the negative things, and you don't replace them with something. You don't really notice that it's half full, that it's unstable. It's only when you start to move around again in the world that it has this chance to disturb you. While you're inside the ashram or while you're inside the program, that's fine because you're not moving in that. But once you go out, then you start to notice. So anyway, this crow came, and he wanted to drink water, but there was only so much water left in the maṭkā. He couldn't reach it, but he was really thirsty. So he started to wander around that area and pick up small stones, and one by one he put the stones into the maṭkā. Slowly, slowly, he put so many stones in that maṭkā that the water level came up to where he could reach it. Sometimes when you're with Swamiji, when you're with the guru, and you wonder why on earth he's doing things, you think, "These things have no relevance to what I want." You start to think he should put more water in the maṭkā so I could drink. He's putting stones. Or he's putting some problem in front of you, or he's giving you something to do, some duty to do, which you think has nothing to do with quietly meditating. But what he's doing is just bringing up that water level, so that one day you'll be able to drink from what's already inside. It's such a beautiful story, and I'm so glad the kids get to learn it. I don't know if they understand its meaning. So here in the ashram, when you're doing certain things, when Swāmījī says to do certain duties or that he wants something to happen in the ashram, and you may think, why on earth does he want that? He's just filling up your maṭkā. A third story about the maṭkā. I had a concept the other week to write a book about maṭkās. They still make maṭkās in our local village in Jadan. Some people, when I get the chance, I take them to have a look because it's one of the most simple things you can ever imagine. In our village, they're actually made by the husband of our cook, Janaki, who some of you may know. What he has in the house is a stone which is just balanced on one point, and it's in the middle of the floor. He spins that. There's a small spot in the stone, and he spins it with a stick. There's nothing else to it. That's his potting wheel. There's no mechanical parts or anything like that, and that stone is so well balanced that when it starts to spin, it doesn't stop. Same for yoga practice. Then he puts on the stone the clay and starts to mold the maṭkā, but in quite a small size, and he makes lots of those. Then he starts to make them bigger. How he makes them bigger—and Swāmījī often uses this imagery about how he's working with people—he has a big stick; it's flat, like a very thin cricket bat. In the other hand, he has a piece of cloth curved in the shape like the inside of the maṭkā would be, and he puts it inside the maṭkā. Then he keeps beating it and slowly bringing it out as he beats it, and at the same time, the clay compresses and the size increases. That's how he makes the maṭkā. If you don't beat it, it won't work. And if you don't support it, it won't work; it'll just collapse. If you don't have discipline, then you don't have sādhanā, and if you don't have love, then you don't have sādhanā. They have to be together, and that's how they make the maṭkā. After that, of course, Swāmījī enjoys this bit too: then you put them in the fire. That's another thing. But you see, people bringing up children: if there's no discipline, then it doesn't function, and if there's no love, then it doesn't function. Something that's really troubled me in the last weeks in India is that they stopped having year 10 examinations in schools because children were committing suicide due to the pressure. I only find it sad because it's got nothing to do with the exams, but it's the fact that the parents don't have a relation with their children. They've been using this, but they haven't done this. If those kids can't come home and tell their parents that they weren't as successful as they would like to be, then there's some problem there between them. That balance is not there, probably. It's the same here, I don't know, but that balance has to be there. You can't make a maṭkā without one or the other. So sādhanā, I think, for everyone, it's a different practice. I know my practice; it's probably not your practice, but we're all very similar. As they say, same same but different. It is truly the other principle of sādhanā: the guidance we get from Swāmījī. You can read it in books, you can know the theory of what to do, but if the guidance isn't there from the guru, especially at certain points when you just get stuck, then you're just stuck. You can't go around it. That's where we're so lucky. In India, they have children who don't like to study very much. They like to just read the summary and get all the answers, and then remember them completely off by heart and write them in the exam. They call them pass books because they'll pass. Swāmījī sometimes reminds me of a pass book. Because he takes every aspect of knowledge from all the scriptures, from our paramparā, from his yoga practice, from his realization, from the Bhagavad Gītā, from the Upaniṣads, from the Rāmāyaṇa, from everything, and from other religions as well. Then he just filters it all and gives it to us in a teaspoon and says, "Drink this." That's a passbook. Then you only have to take the medicine. Fantastic. The other choice is to read all those things and get that realization, and then you get the same teaspoon. It's quite amazing; we're so lucky. The other thing, as you practise and keep practising, is there's one concept in the bhajans about the parasmani. Parasmani is the stone which turns lead into gold. It's also in other cultures, I think. They also have alchemy, where you learn to turn mercury into gold. When you think about how they do that, they do it by exactly the same method as yoga. It's by making a fire so pure that it can make that transformation. We make that fire; we have to make that fire so pure that we will make that transformation. What I think and find is that the stone which turns everything into gold is just in our inner attitude. When Gurujī is working inside you and it starts to blossom your sādhanā, then everything is golden. Even if somebody comes to you and they're giving you so much trouble, then it's just a golden chance to see how you deal with it. If someone comes to you and they're just beautiful, you think, "This is the best company I've ever had, this is fantastic," it's just a golden chance to be with someone who is beautiful. And if nobody comes, it's a golden chance to be with yourself. And if a thousand people come, then it's a golden chance to see how your sādhanā reacts and how you react when you're around a lot of people. Everything is golden. It's like you put on these glasses that are just gold color, and you see, oh wow, there's gold, and there's gold, and there's gold. That's that parasmānī which the Guru makes. Even in some of the bhajans it says, but do you realize that he's not aiming to make that? He's aiming to make you the one who can make that. He doesn't just want to make us happy, but he wants us to get to the point where we can also give that same knowledge to other people. There's no difference there. The guru just wants to give everything he has to those who can take it. In one of the bhajans that we'll sing tonight, there's the line that the guru makes the rain of knowledge. You see here, everybody has a tank outside their house to catch the rain because there's not a lot of it. That's the same question. You just have to make yourself so open and open your heart when he's giving that knowledge, when he's giving that rain, so that as much of it as possible you collect. It's only a question of, you know, that rain will continue and continue, and it will be as heavy as you require. It's just a question of how big your capacity is to collect it. Rain doesn't just fall here, or it doesn't just fall there. It falls on the whole area, and it falls indiscriminately on whoever's around. Then it's just a question of rainwater harvesting, of how much each of us chooses to harvest. When we have pre-monsoon in India, then in the months before it, we're just ploughing the fields. You don't know if rain's coming or not, but you plough the fields there because it breaks the earth. Our earth has a lot of clay inside it. If you don't break the earth, the rain will not go inside; it will just roll off the surface. So we plough all fields, even if we're not going to plant them, so that the rain has a chance to soak in. That's another aspect of our sādhanā. Swamījī comes here once a year. So in the meantime, we do sādhanā; we plough our fields so that when he comes, it will be open. We try to keep ourselves pure. We try to also remove the weeds from those fields. There, we actually plough the fields once more before planting. It's from the Vedic times. He's making a sacrifice. He's making a yajña. As part of the yajña, you know the story? As part of the yajña, he's giving two cows. There's a donation to the Brahmins who are doing the yajña. His son says to him three times, "Look, father, look, you're doing this yajña to try and get something really good, and you're giving your oldest cows. Why aren't you giving the best ones?" His father's not very happy with his idea. Then he says, "You know, at least if you're not going to give the cows, then what are you going to do with me? Who are you going to give me to?" This is the son saying to the father. In the story, his father gets so angry with him that he says, "I will give you to death," and the kid just walks off and goes and finds Yama, the god of death, and stands outside his house. What I take out of that scene of that Upaniṣad is, people often say, "Okay, look, I'll do my work now. I'll do this now. I'll enjoy this now, and afterwards I'll practice yoga." That's like giving the old cows as early as we can. We give that sacrifice of our time because then that will benefit us for the whole life. Whereas, if you wait until later on to do that, then you're missing whatever it may be—two days or ten years or fifty years or whatever—that benefit which you could have, that would be with you that whole time. In that Upaniṣad, for that little boy to think of such a thing, it's just so incredible. He goes on afterwards to be waiting outside Yama's door, and because he's not greeted properly, he gets wishes from Yama. He offers him every richness you can have. He just says, "You can have everything." The boy says, "I want enlightenment." And Yama says, "Look, you'll be the greatest king of all. You'll have this and that. You can have hundreds of horses and dancers, and riches and gold." And he just said, "No, I want enlightenment." So it goes on and on until, in the Upaniṣad, Yama explains enlightenment to him. You know that one, no? Amazing. But the point is, the time is now. In one saying we have in Rajasthan, which means: if you should do it tomorrow, do it today. And if you should do it today, then do it now. Unfortunately, when you're in India and you have some experience there, I think they're saying a little bit the opposite. They say, which means: if you should do it now, then do it tomorrow. And if you should do it tomorrow, then God knows when it's going to happen. You know, the time is now. Another question that always comes up about sādhanā is, "There are things that are disturbing me, you know, what to do about them?" A little while back, Swāmījī gave me a duty to sit with Avatārapurī and sometimes these two boys and learn the Rāmāyaṇa, to learn to chant the Rāmāyaṇa. There's one śloka in there; we were doing Sundarkaṇḍ, which is a time when Hanumān goes to Rāvaṇa's fortress to tell Sītā that Rāma is coming for her. She's sitting in a garden; she's a prisoner. It's like a garden full of Māyā. Hanuman goes there, and he's met her. He's told her the message which he should give. Then he sees all around are these Rākṣasas, these guards of that fortress. They're carrying with them what they call Brahmāstra, which are the divine weapons, which probably, if you'd have an equivalent nowadays, it would be nuclear bombs on a stick, which is what they have. He's looking at them and thinking, you know, there's hundreds of them, and they've all got these weapons, and I'm here and I'm unarmed. In the next śloka he says, he says: if I think that they're those weapons, then they'll be those weapons. If I think that they're not those weapons, then they won't be those weapons. It's all in my mind. All these things which you think are disturbing your practice, they are here. As soon as you don't think that they're a problem, then they're not a problem anymore. You may think that there's such an issue that you cannot possibly get over it. But the question is only of how you relate to that. If you give it that name, that this is my enemy number one, that this is the weapon that's blasting my sādhanā into small pieces, then it is. And if you just don't see it as that, you know, if you'd see it, for instance, that instead of a nuclear weapon on a stick that it's a lollipop, then it is. After that, Hanuman, in the story, basically just starts to laugh and starts to dance around in that garden because he's realized he hasn't got a problem with them. That's in our sādhanā. Those things come up for everybody. Everybody has their issues. It's not so easy that you can just think, "Okay, you're a lollipop, Hari Om, done." But as much importance as we want to give them, that much importance they have. And better that we give the importance to the good things than we give to the things which are negative, and think on those good things. Another thing about sādhanā: there tends to be a conception that tapas and sādhanā and practice is something that's hard. I also think that's a similar thing to what Hanuman is saying there. That's a matter of our own perception. Don't ask me why I was reading a book by... who is that? There's one, like a motivational speaker, someone, Robbins. Anthony Robbins? There's one line in there: there's nothing more dangerous than a toxic metaphor. It's so true. I saw that in Jādam, and we discussed that line quite a lot in Jādam. You know, because there's a big difference between saying, "This is hell, I'm just surviving," and saying, "This is heaven, I'm blossoming." You know? It doesn't take much to say those two things, but the reaction which it triggers off inside you is very, very different. Everyone will have their own examples if you think about it. Think about how you say things. This year in summer it was so hot at night, and I was lying there and I thought, "I don't know how you're supposed to sleep." I thought, well, I have one choice. I just really seriously thought to myself, I love sleeping in hot weather. I don't know how long, because I didn't even notice, but I think in about five seconds I was asleep. After that, that problem was gone. Okay, I love it, good, excellent. It may not always be as easy as that, but I hope you get what I mean. If you look at something and say, "Oh, he's giving me hell, you know, he's pushing all my buttons," it's a bit different to looking at that person and saying, "He's my greatest blessing, bring him on," you know. I'm learning something here. It's that gold thing again. He's a golden chance for me. "I'm so busy that I just don't have time to do anything," you know. "I'm so busy that I don't have time to think about negative thoughts." Same thing, but one is positive and one is negative. There's nothing more dangerous than a toxic metaphor. That's great. Another thing that I wanted to say—I've been thinking about saying it, I will say it also in jhāran—is sādhanā makes you change. That principle is there, that we all change. As you're doing sādhanā in a big community like this, one issue comes up that you may have felt, and you may have dealt with or not dealt with, and that is that you change, but other people remember how you were. It's very important as a community that we all let the past go and live in the present. If someone said something to you, if someone was in a process where they were completely firing, and they said something to you two years ago, that is not the person who's before you. You know, if they're doing it again, then that what's before you, that is there, that is real. But you have to also give ourselves the chance to change, and we have to also respect that everybody else can change, and everybody else is changing. When you're in that, that's very difficult because those people are with you every day. I'm lucky when I have the chance now to come back, and I see people now, how they are and how they were two years ago, or five years ago really, when was the last time that I saw everybody? It's quite fantastic to look and see how people are shining quite differently than before. On the other side, people say that when they come to Jhara, but as a community, it's hard to see. You just see that, oh, he's always asking me to do this, and, you know, when's he going to stop bothering me with it? But yeah, okay, everybody has made mistakes. Everybody has probably done things on the path that are just explosions, that are not really coming from them. It's something coming out. It's some weeds coming out. It's up to us whether we hold them against somebody and actually hold it to ourselves, rather than them holding on to it. There's one story I think Swamījī has told many times, so probably everyone has heard it. There were two sādhus and one lady, and there was a river that was swollen with water, and one of the sādhus carried that lady across. After three or four years, the other sādhu says to the first one, "I still can't get over what you did." He says, "What?" He said, "You carried that lady across the river, and you're not allowed to touch women." He says, "I put her down four years ago. You're still carrying her." You can't see your hair growing every day. But if you see somebody after six months who had no hair a little while ago, it grows, it grows. I never dreamed I would speak for such a long time in my life. That's sādhanā. In one of the bhajans, Gurujī has written—because today is Gurujī's birthday, so this evening we get to see Swāmijī's satsaṅg, and then Gurujī's bhajans, so I think we're in a good place—in the bhajan which everyone will know as "sādhana-carā, karo hari pyāra," it's talking about jñāna-yoga, but the same elements are there in whichever type of yoga. First is viveka and virāgya. Viveka is discrimination. Last night we were talking about the swan drinking the milk. That's the representative of viveka, of discrimination, of being able to settle the two things out, taking the milk out from the water. In the imagery of Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, her vehicle is the swan because knowledge rides on viveka, on discrimination. Without discrimination, you cannot have knowledge. And Virāgya—you know, we're not here to forget about this world and to not care for our families or not care for other people, you know, that everything's nothing. But it's a matter of being able to love and keep your balance, and when you can keep your balance and love, you can actually love more than when you're doing it unsteadily. If you try and throw something to someone while you're on a boat that's wobbling like this, you've got very little chance of getting it to hit the spot. If you throw it when you're on the shore, the accuracy is much better. We get our balance inside, we learn to love ourselves, and on that basis, we can really give to everybody that we want to give to. Vairāgya, non-attachment, also for me is about not caring about anybody or anything less, but about caring about everybody and everything as much as you care about the thing that you care about the most. If you could say your parents, you know, you love everybody on one level, you love your parents on another level. Now, it's not my idea of Vairāgya to give up the love of your parents. My idea of Vairāgya is to love everybody so much that this all comes on one level, on their level, on that highest level which you have, for whoever it may be, for your parents or for your guru or for your children or whatever. If you just take that which you love the most, and then imagine trying to get to the point where you love everybody else that much, that would be such a joy, that would be such a love that's just exploding from inside you, and for everybody. In the Bhagavad Gītā, Kṛṣṇa is telling what the qualities are. It is in the Pārā bhakti-yoga: what are the qualities of the true bhakta for him? And he says, "adveṣṭā sarvabhūtānām," the person who doesn't have any enemies and is the same for everyone, who is the same in happiness and in sadness, and is constantly fixed in devotion, compassionate to everyone, and without ego. In the first śloka, it also says this whole world is one. It's all one energy, and when you realize that, then how can you be jealous? Because if I have it or if you have it, it's all ours. It's all one. How can you be jealous? And how can you love or hate? Because it's all one. It's all me, and it's all you, and it's all Swāmījī, and it's all Paramātmā. You cannot say, "He's got what I haven't got." We've got it; it's just in his pocket, and it's not in my pocket. When you can see things in that way, you are quite peaceful. But that love, just let it go. It's inside all of us, and just open it, and there's no fear that it will ever finish. Because as much as you put out, it just, like the weeds in our garden in Jhara, as many as you pull out, there's still more. It just keeps coming back up, coming back up, and coming back up. And love is like that. You just give and give and give, and it just keeps generating itself inside. That is sādhanā. It's through the practice for purifying, and you generate that love inside yourself, love for yourself and love for everything. Then he talks about in that bhajan—just because it's basically about sādhanā—the sat-sampatti, samādhi, śraddhā, or titikṣā. That dharma is self-discipline. We have to have it. There's no getting around it. We have to have some self-discipline when we're doing sādhanā. In the beginning, as I was discussing with someone just before, in the beginning when you start on the path, it has to be more strict. Then, when you understand yourself better, you can relax sometimes according to situations, and then still bring yourself back on. As in the bhajan we were talking about last night, you have the horses, and you have to put the bit to control them so that they'll go in the right direction. That discipline you have to have, because our senses are quite loose generally, and they want to always go in different directions. When we unite them together, then we have a power which we can use for our sādhanā. And śraddhā. Śraddhā is trust: trust for our path, trust for the teaching which we're practicing, trust for the guru, and trust in ourselves, in that belief that we can do it. Titikṣā means steadfastness, just to keep going. As we said, sometimes the results are not there, but just go and go and go. Titikṣā and trust together, regarding trust and faith and that hope. I had one beautiful experience once in a place in Rajasthan. There is one tiger reserve called Ranthambore. In the middle of that reserve, there is one temple to Lord Śiva—to Gaṇeśjī, sorry, to Gaṇeśjī. It's the place where everybody in Rajasthan sends the first wedding invitation. They always send first to Gaṇeśjī. There's a post office there. There's nothing there, one temple in...