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Suvaṁ Karoti Kalyāṇam Ārogyam Dhana Sampatti Śatru Vinaśāya Dīpam Jyotir Namastute Dīpam Jyoti Parabrahma Dīpam Sarve Mohanam Dīpanam Sajjate Sarvam Sandhyā Dīpam Sarva Satyam Om Śāntiḥ, Śāntiḥ, Śāntiḥ Śrī Dīp Nārāyaṇa Bhagavān Kī Jaya, Śrī Śrī Deveśvara Mahādeva Kī Jaya, Śrī Mādhav Kṛṣṇa Bhagavān Kī Jaya, Viśvagurū Mahāmaṇḍaleśvara Paramaṁ Svāmī Maheśvarānanda Purī Jī, Mahārāja, Kī Jaya. Suffering—humanity’s most enjoyable toy. Why is it most enjoyable? Because it seems that with suffering, you gain a kind of baggage tour. Suffering brings you somewhere, though you don’t know where, but we like it so much that we entertain it all the time. Looking around, wherever we go, looking into the faces of people, there are two signs that reflect the human state of mind and his satisfaction in this world. One is the forehead, and one is the mouth. When you look around, just observe how many people have the corners of their mouth turned up and how many have them turned down. Does it say something to us? Okay, we are happy when somebody is smiling. Actually, it happens automatically. It goes up. But then when a human relaxes again, his muscles become relaxed, and we are there where we are, where we are standing. Suffering is great. It’s a great tool in our life. Although everybody says, “No, we don’t want it. It’s not good. It’s painful,” I know the outcome. Slowly, we grow wiser with every experience until we become a wise person. And a wise person is one who doesn’t need to make the same experiences in life anymore, because he already knows the outcome, the result. He knows when he puts an action, what will be the reaction. He knows the karmic consequences. If we know when we act what the reaction is, we start to think twice, and we start to realize that both go together. There is no action without reaction, and there is no reaction without action. So, on the long, long way towards human evolution, we accumulate quite a big heap of suffering and pain. And it’s not only physical pain; it’s mainly mental pain. What gives us trouble is also a great teacher. It teaches us not to avoid it, because you cannot avoid pain in general. It is more to look towards how we deal with the pain, how we can accept the pain, and how we can utilize it for our own advantage. Imagine your life is settled, comfortable, and content, with no big problems, neither money problems nor relationship problems. No social problems, a little bit of spirituality here and there—fine, good. But does it bring you further? You will feel comfortable. What pushes you? Only when you reach a certain point in your life, a kind of realization. And most of us reach it through suffering or through painful experiences, where wisdom starts to blossom. Then we really start to think: how can we proceed on our path without creating too much pain to ourselves and others? We are all living in this world, and this world is a world of the mind. It is created by our mind, by our own mind, and by our collective mind. There are different philosophical ways, different spiritual traditions. But in general, we believe that this world is not only a world consisting of things that we can touch, that we can approach with our senses, but behind that, maybe, is something more. Now, all that we can approach with our senses is connected with time and space. Although scientists have been telling us for quite a long time that even time and space are illusions, different spiritual schools have known this for many thousands of years. Time and space—we move with this body within time and space. And we call it Māyā, illusion. Yes, easy to say. Give me a hammer. Try it on your head. How does the illusion feel? Great. This illusion, or this Māyā, what we call it, is everything that we can measure. We can measure it. Even the universe we can measure. So the universe also falls under this category. Take a tape. You can measure everything here with a tape. Take a weight. You can measure everything. So that which we can measure, a measurement, is Māyā. And what is beyond that? Maybe also Māyā, a different type of Māyā. Who knows? Only those know who reached there, who were there, and who came back and tried to tell us, with their own words and with our words, about this other existence. They say, “Yes, it’s there,” because they experienced it. They are all going in that direction to increase your output of adrenaline. The push, the kick—that’s it. But you can’t increase this over time. There is a certain limit because the body has its limit. The nervous system has its limits. These things come from outside. But there is another type of kick. What once you experience, you don’t want to miss it anymore. And that kick comes from looking inside through meditation. It also goes through the nervous system. But at that point, you start to trust your nervous system. Because you slowly prepare yourself through certain practices, through certain guidance, for this kick. Let’s call it a kick. Sounds good. And then when you start to go on the inner journey, suddenly you realize there is much more than what we see, what we hear, what we smell. There is much more than what our mind can provide, or our intellect. New worlds will open. But this comes when one gets tired of this world. When one gets tired of the experiences, and when a certain longing starts to develop. A longing for something that doesn’t change, what is more permanent? What is more real? What is not that five-minute kick, and then you want it again? It needs a longing. We have so many longings also in this life, here and there, in this and that, if you look around. How strong is the longing of a lover for the beloved one? How strong can this be? It can be crazy, irrational. But it is the same longing, only it can be transformed in another direction. There is a beautiful story about that from Tulsī Dās, who wrote the Rāmāyaṇa. Tulsī Dās was already famous as a Sanskrit teacher, as a learned person, and he was happily married and very fond of his wife. He was so fond of his wife that he couldn’t stand to be separated from her. But one day it happened. His wife decided to visit her father some distance away. And when Tulsī Dās came back to the house, she wasn’t there anymore. Oh, Rāma, there she is gone. So he inquired and found out she had gone to her father’s. Now, darkness was already there. It was cold, it was rainy. But you know, love can be so blind and mad. He didn’t care for that. He ran out of the house, heavy rain, walking here and there through the forest. He came to a river. He had to cross the river. How could he cross the river? So he jumped in, and he swam and he swam, and he got a little exhausted, and suddenly he saw some kind of something swimming there. He got caught up in that, and it was slowly drifting him to the other shore. He was so focused on his aim that he didn’t realize it was a corpse, half burned. No problem. Reaching the other shore, he went off and off. Finally, he reached the house. It was already night. He looked up. There was light on the veranda, but everything was closed. How to get up? There was a kind of creeping plant. So he started to climb up, one after the other. So focused he was that he didn’t realize there was a big snake hanging there, but no problem. Finally, he reached the door and opened it, and there was his beloved wife. He was standing there with the snake in one hand, you know. She looked a little bit surprised. What’s going on? That’s it. But then she told him, “Look, you are so mad, so crazy. Why is that? If you would just invest a small part of that longing, which you have for me, towards God, where would you be now?” This really kicked him. He got a kick, and the story goes that shortly afterwards, he left his family and went on a parikramā around India for fourteen years. Then he came back, wrote the Rāmāyaṇa, became famous, and is even remembered nowadays as a great scholar and a very learned person. But it took that push. The longing was the same; it was just directed in a different corner. This longing can bring us very far, and it can bring us to certain areas that we cannot even imagine exist. And there is a beautiful bhajan written by Mahāprabhujī. It’s Guruvarame Jalūn Saunādeś. Here Mahāprabhujī talks about a country that cannot be so easily approached, but once you are there, you don’t want to come back, because everything is there, everything is contained in there. This is a very strange bhajan, because you cannot categorize it. But it contains some very, very specific points on our journey. Guru varame jalun saunade śloka laje sabhā dharcha ke kalpanā, dhara ke dera ganābhis. It translates, “Let me go with you to the highest world.” This world has no attachments inside. It means it is free from time and space. It cannot stick anywhere. It is complete detachment. And Vairāgya is the means to reach this world. It means if you take Vairāgya, if you renounce—actually you have para-Vairāgya—then you will be there immediately. It is necessary to have renunciation to reach something, to achieve something. Without that, we always get stuck in that spider web of attachments. It’s very sticky, like chewing gum, you know. You try to put it somewhere, and still it’s there. It doesn’t leave you so easily. Universe, desha, ame janamana, marana, karma, kalankana, ilesh. In that world, there is neither birth nor death. So you don’t die there, and you’re not reborn. It’s just you exist. Mahāprabhujī karatā he kevalaṁ akhaṇḍa ujjala, janda sūrajināiśeṣa. There is an incredible light shining, and there is no sun, no moon. There is also no form and no color. Rāṅganārūpa Anupānadī, Nahi Bonche Rāṅganāriṣ, and neither a king nor a beggar can reach it. Neither a king nor a beggar. It doesn’t matter what you are in this life. So-and-so, I am this, I am that, I am a professor, I am a king, I am a beggar. You can’t go there. You can’t reach this place without grace, what we call Guru Kṛpā. That’s the key. You can try as much as you want. You can come up to the door and knock there. Maybe somebody will open and just try to look inside, but it doesn’t mean that you will get inside. In this world, there are living the great saints, the great Siddhas, the perfected ones, those who achieved perfection on this planet. Āgama Deśame Santabhīrāje Paramparā Ādeś. This is the world of the saints and the great Siddhas, and we are greeting them. Univo Deśame Amīyā Jaratahe Satgur Indra Śureś. And there is a nectar of wisdom that is flowing all the time, the nectar of wisdom. It’s endless. We can get a kind of substitute ourselves from this nectar, which starts to drop from the Bindu. If you practice enough in Keśrī Mudrā, 10, 15, 20 years, you will get a taste from that. Śrīdīpā Kaheparā, Eṣamāna Bhāve, Thirunai Janamardareś. Mahāprabhujī says, “This level, this world, my mind likes very much.” Actually, he expresses something that is not expressible, which is beyond form and name. He has to find some kind of words in this world to express it. So he says, it is very near to my mind. Sarasin Hasa Abha Biraje Esavu Begamadesh. Sitting there in this āsana, on this seat, there is no suffering, no fear anymore. All is done, all is finished. All suffering is ended, all fear. If you look closer to yourself, whatever feelings you have, if you dig deep enough, you will come to one feeling, and that is fear. When you conquer the fear, it is done. But fear is that kind of guard that maybe also protects something. It protects you from looking at something that you can’t manage. But once you face it and overcome it, it’s done, it’s purified. And in that world, what Mahāprabhujī is talking about, there is no fear. And we see all the great saints and Siddhas, they were and are fearless. Nothing can move them, nothing can destroy them, nothing can distract them. Because fear governs the world, and it is the root of our suffering. So this is a beautiful bhajan that Mahāprabhujī tries to explain a little bit, or to tell us about the world he was living in twenty-four hours. And in that world, he would not like to get out anymore. So we started from the suffering, and we came to the bliss. So suffering is the motor, the fuel, towards the bliss.