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Śaraṇā ke dayā dayālu bera tu par lagā de. Śaraṇa tu merī mitā, śaraṇa tu japā tap nāo ve mujh se. Yehi Prabhu arjhe, japā tap nāo ve mujh se Prabhu arjhe. Karuṇā nidāna tui ko dur hata de, karuṇā nidāna tu ko dur hataade. Guru de, śaraṇa tumhā da merī mitāade. Karke dayā dayālu bherā tū par lagāde Tumma merī tāruḍe, śaraṇaḥ śrī dīpā dātā, śaraṇaḥ gatiyu terī. Śrī Dīpā Dātā, śaraṇah gatiyu terī. Arzamān gīlālaki Śrī Rāmkā namratāde Gurudev, śaraṇatumā, śaraṇatumā. Karke dayā dayālu Tērā Tūpār lagāde, kar ke dayā dayālu kera tū pār lagā, śaraṇatu. Śrī Deep Nārāyaṇ Bhagavān kī jai, Viśva Guru Mahāmaṇḍaleśvara Paramaṁ Śrī Svayamāśvarānandjī Gurudeva kī jai, Śrī Śrī Maṅgīlālji Mahārāj kī jai. It seems last night the children were listening well. I have a beautiful story from this morning. We were on the morning walk, and our leader on the morning walk is one little girl, Pushpa. Last night she got a peach, and she enjoyed it. Yes, it was quite sweet. And as it was part of the prasāda from the satsaṅg, she told her father afterwards that she would take the seed from that peach, and when they got home, she would plant it. And then, when that tree grows, she can take the seeds from the other peaches and also plant them. So maybe we’ll soon have a billion peach trees. How fantastic, how wonderful. But that’s what it’s all about. That really is the essence of what we do when we do our sādhanā. Just plant one by one, one by one, and let it grow. And when the fruits come, they will come. But we’re in the present, and at the present we can plant. There’s one beautiful story; it comes from England. I can’t remember if this comes from Oxford University or from Cambridge. And there they have this great hall for having their meetings and presentations. More than 350 years old, and the roof is made from wooden beams, huge wooden beams, which are oak. Those beams had become rotten. This is a story from about ten years ago. The beams have become rotten, and they need to be replaced. But they were so big that they could not find oak beams big enough to replace them anywhere. Eventually, someone in the team that was trying to find a solution thought, "Why don’t we ask at the university, the person in charge of the gardens?" And when they asked him, he started laughing and said, "I’ve been waiting for you." At that time, it had been told from one gardener to the next that these are the trees for when they need them for the hall. And he said they’ve been ready for 40 or 50 years. They’re already big enough. We just have to put them down and then make the beams. That, I would say, is planning in advance. How fantastic. Every action which we do comes to us later on. Every karma which we do, whether it’s good or bad, later on we will eat the fruits of that karma. Whether it will be in this life, whether it will be in the next life, or a hundred lives later. But everything we do now is like a legacy that we give to our ātmā later on. Just like this building has gone from one owner to the next owner. And whatever parts were not taken care of, then that becomes the difficulty for the present owners of the ashram. And these treasures, like the trees that are there that have been taken care of so well, are now the treasure for the current ashram. Think about your own actions, your own life for a moment, in that perspective, that you are actually going to be handing it on. Everything that you do does not just affect this body, which we are in now. It affects the next step on our journey, and the next step, and the next step. If you’re doing something that you wouldn’t give to someone else, why give it to yourself? I sometimes think of it like this: this ātmā is like a child, my own child. But my actions, these physical actions now, what I do, that will be given to that next, it will grow up, and that will go to that next part of my journey. For all those people here who have children, they know that they would like to give their children something good. And why not also give something good to yourself? Make every action, every sādhanā, every practice which we do something that’s really worthwhile to give to the next journey, the next part. What happened in the past, we can’t change. But we can think about what we’re doing right now. It’s why it’s such a treasure this time, that we have this time when we have an opportunity to have sādhanā. Gurujī is constantly saying, "Don’t waste the chance, don’t waste this treasure." Who knows if you waste it now, if it will come again? Or if it does come again, how long afterwards? Will it come? How much will you have to go through in between to get there again? When you get something really valuable, you just don’t throw it away. You take it and you put it down in the office so that it will be safe. But this valuable thing which we have, this priceless jewel which we have, this human life, and to have a Gurujī, and to have this chance again and again, we need to remind ourselves of that practice. And it might now be one seed that we plant, that one apricot, a peach, but from that peach tree... How many more seeds are going to come? And then we have the chance to plant them and plant so many seeds, and then that will again produce so many more. Things that are good, things that are nourishing for your spiritual development. Slowly, slowly, you’ll just be full of that name and full of your mantra, full of that joy and that love. We have in Australia a lot of bushfires, forest fires. They’re hard to start, and they’re hard to put out. Actually, when they start, it has to be very hot, and it has to be very windy. But once they start burning and they get into the trees and get very high... As you know, here, when you have a fireplace in the house, if the chimney is long, then it sucks the air up. And that same way, when the forest fire starts to get big, it sucks air from behind and pushes itself forward afterwards. Once it gets big enough, it doesn’t matter anymore if there’s wind actually in the area or not. It has its own force, and it just keeps moving forward and keeps moving forward. I was explaining to some people when we were in Budapest that near where I live in Sydney, there’s a national park that goes for about 80 kilometers down the coast. In Sydney, where I lived, there is a national park that is about 80 kilometers from the city. We were sitting casually, watching this fire from the safe side. It was huge, it was such a śakti, it was so impressive to watch. And this river would have been wide like the—is it the Danube? What is the name of the river in Budapest? If you know how wide it is in Budapest, it was like that wide, the river. So we were very comfortable where we were sitting. The fire came down to the river. And the next minute, it was burning in the trees on the side that we were on. And I remember almost everybody saying it once, "Oh my God." Can you imagine that Śakti pushing and pushing? It jumped the river, as wide as the Danube, like it wasn’t there. Because of that wind that was behind. Now, when we do sādhanā, it takes time, it takes effort, but it takes so much effort to get good sādhanā going, to get the regularity, and to get the constancy in our practice. But when you’ve managed to develop that discipline and it’s running, it pushes itself the same; it develops its own wind. I’m sure you’ve all experienced it sometime, when you’ve managed to have a really good routine in your sādhanā, a really good practice for a few weeks or a month together. Or like your kriya, when you’re practicing it for years and years and years. And you’re never missing a day. On the day when you may be sick, or you may be exhausted, or you may be tired, it pushes itself through because you can’t imagine not doing it anymore. It takes effort to start so that you can appreciate just how special that is, what you’re doing. But once that fire is big, once it’s really lit, then it pulls itself, it pulls itself. So it’s that effort which we have to put in to keep moving, to develop our discipline, to maintain discipline. And if we’ve done that and we do that, then in the hard times, when we will start to have a difficult moment, then it will pull us through. Triśūla deep nārembha kohana kīrī. Push fire mode. Just fires. Some may have heard this story, but perhaps it’s also an opposite use of the fire as an example. But there is one saying in Hindi that your strongest point is also your weakness. You need wind in order to get the fire started. But that same wind can also blow out the dīpak. Anyway, this story comes from my youth when I was about 20 years old. My auntie and uncle had a farm. It was in the countryside, and it was just for holidays. There’s a hundred acres, half of which was forest, and it was going up quite a large hill. And after that, there was national forest for a long way. And on the farm, there was karma yoga to do. And part of that was, there was one type of weed, one grass, which they didn’t want to have there. So we would dig it up and then burn it. It was extremely dry there, as there had been a drought already for four or five years. I don’t think that in Europe you can imagine what a drought is. I once saw a photo in the newspaper of one girl. She was four years old. This was in the western part of the state where I live, where it’s quite dry. She was four years old, and she was looking up at this rain. And in the story, it was explaining that it was the first time she’d ever seen rain, and she was four. The place where she had lived had not rained for four years. That’s a drought. It’s like trying to explain to a child in Jardin school what the ocean is. These things they just cannot conceive. Anyway, so it was quite dry, but it was in the winter and there was no wind. It was a good day for burning this grass. Of course, as soon as I lit the fire, a wind came. But no problem. It was small. This was nothing special. But it started to go over here in the grass, and then there in the grass, and there in the grass, and there in the grass. And I went down to the house and got a big woolen blanket. You can’t use water because there isn’t any. And so I was running and putting out these small fires here and there. But when I would go and do it over here, there was more going there, and when I’d come here, there was more going there. Just like Brits. And you cannot put Brits out with a blanket. But I was trying. I was really running, and I was sweating, and I was exhausted after 20 minutes of just running all the time here, and then here, and then here. Eventually, it had crept up the hill, and it got to the trees. And then a similar thought came into my head as to when that fire crossed the river. I thought, oh my God. Because now it was beyond my control to try and stop it. So we called the local fire brigade. Now, this place where this farm is, you also, I don’t think, can understand what it means to be alone in Europe. About 60 kilometers from this farm, the road stops, and it’s just a dirt road all the way. And there’s a sign that says, "Warning: there’s no petrol, there’s no food, and there’s no other services available for 256 kilometers from this point." There are other farms, but they’re one or two kilometers apart here and there. So the local fire brigade is actually some of the farmers from the area, and they have one truck for fighting fires. Some of them are 20 kilometers away, some are 30 kilometers away. And of course, they’re all out farming, so by the time they come to their cars and start coming, it takes time. The first one to arrive was an old man, about 80 years old, called Selwyn. He was the local legend. He’d been born on the farm which he was still farming. And he never liked going to the city. But the city for him was the town which had 10,000 people, some 100 kilometers away, so I was really from a city. And he came in his truck, like his pickup, with his two dogs in the back, which always rode in the back, and he had with him this backpack with the water inside and this pump, you know, with the spray. But you have to imagine, this had 40 liters of water in it. It was huge, and he’s 80 years old, and he was walking up the hill faster than we were going up the hill this morning. And he got out, and he started walking up the hill. I was up the hill a little bit. He didn’t really stop to look at me. He just walked past, thinking, "Stupid city boy, I guess." He just said, "What the bloody hell’s going on here?" I just said, look, he walked up the hill. He didn’t do this. He did nothing. He just had to look around very casually. I can’t describe how nervous I was because it was already going up in the trees, and it was starting to move up the hill. And okay, when it’s on our property, it’s all right, but when it starts to go into the whole forest and destroys other people’s farms, I didn’t think I’d be very popular. But he just walked up the hill and was walking through the trees, like he was on a morning walk with us. Inside, I’m screaming, "Do something, please. Come on." After about twenty minutes more, the truck arrived. They actually had a fire truck with the proper tank and the pumps and everything, and these fellows also arrived and just parked the truck, and they also started walking up the hill. And I was inside thinking, "Truck, water, fire." There were three or four of them, and they really just walked up the hill casually talking and started to have a look around. They’d been there before, they’d seen it, I don’t know what they were looking for. They walked and talked and went here and there, up the hill above the fire. Still, basically ignoring the fire. They were still ignoring the fire. And then, after some time, they agreed on something, and they came back down and took the truck and drove up the hill. And there they went, about 200 meters up the hill from where the fire actually was. They got out some rakes for removing the leaves. I was thinking this is not a time for one of Swamiji’s Karma yoga actions, cleaning the garden or something. And then they started to clean one road that was there, to clean all of the leaves, all of the grass, everything off of it. There were a few trees lying across the road, so they took a chainsaw and cut them. And moved it to one side so it was completely clear. What they did next really killed me. They went to the truck and took out some chairs. They sat down, looking down the hill at the fire, and they just sat there waiting for it to come. I was really thinking, please, you have a truck, it has water in it, use it. And they casually talked to each other about what was happening in the village, what was happening on their farm, what was with their daughter, and who was studying where, and they were happy as such. Slowly, the fire was coming up the hill, and my heart was going like this. And when it was maybe from here to the wall away from them, then they started to get up out of the chairs, put the chairs in the truck, got out the pipes, and were waiting. Of course, when the fire came down, there was nothing to burn. And this wasn’t yet a fire that was flying up to the top of the trees, so they just very casually, wherever the fire would jump that trail, they would just put that out. And within an hour, the job was done. It was just so simple. Now, why do I say that story? We’re not going to have that here. It’s far too wet. It’s far too wet here for that to happen. But you know what Swāmījī was telling us in the last two days on Skype? Don’t concentrate on your fires, but concentrate on your mantra. Clear that space, you know. Reinforce your good things. Reinforce your positive aspects. Reinforce your sādhanā. We cannot run around and put out all of our vṛttis, but we can make a barrier with which we can stop them, and that is with our qualities, our positive qualities, our spiritual qualities, by making them stronger and more and more within us. That slowly they take over our being and start to be the things on which we act all the time. When you’re meditating, if you try and put out every vṛtti, every thought that comes into your head, within five minutes, you end up with a hundred more vṛttis than you had before. But whenever you realize that you’ve lost your track or lost your concentration, if you go back to your mantra, you go back to your breathing. That is the way that then those vṛttis have no fuel with which to burn and with which to keep going. If we have our faults, if we have our negative tendencies, whatever they may be, rather than give them too much attention, concentrate more on what is positive within us. Develop it, cultivate it, grow it again, like Pushpa is doing. Plant the seed so that a new tree will come. There will be more seeds, and you can plant them, so that slowly the whole garden will be full of those trees. To end the story, after they’d finished with that fire, they came back down to the house. Where was our house? In the truck, and Selwyn came up. He hadn’t said anything in between to me, and he just said, "I hope you’re going to give us a cup of tea." There was no comment about how stupid I was, there was no comment about the drama that had just unfolded just now. Let’s have a cup of tea and forget about it, and move forward. They didn’t comment on the stupidity that I did, what could have happened. They just asked me for a cup of tea.