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Oṃ Bhūr Bhuvaḥ Svaḥ Tat Savitur Vareṇyaṃ Bhargo Devasya Dhīmahi Dhiyo Yo Naḥ Pracodayāt. Mahāmaṇḍaleśvarānanda, Śrī Śrī Mahāśvara, Mahāmaṇḍaleśvarānanda, Śrī Gurujī, Śrī Jai, Mahāprabhudīp Āśram. Blessings to all of us, blessings from our Gurudev. Welcome all of you, and me too. Happy to be here. Today was a beautiful day, as usual. Every day is a beautiful day, but there was something especially beautiful: the juniors gave their best in their performances of āsanas and the drama about the Rāmāyaṇa in a very simple but effective way. What I mostly liked was their discipline, and for that we have to thank our dear Sītā from Prakarchī Sovā. We are again on our beautiful path, where we will cross through a beautiful garden with very beautiful flowers, lakes, and many other incredible creatures. Yet we walk through that divine beauty as the king, the owner of that park. You are the owner. And it is said, “Tum Kāyā Nagarī Kā Rājā, Man Indriye Terī Prajā.” You are the king of the city of your body. Can you imagine? Your inner world is full of beauty, beautifully designed, like a metropolis. This park is your city, your world. The merciful Lord gave you everything without asking for anything. God didn’t ask us for a single check or coin. We should be thankful to Him. And He said to your Jīvātmā, “Now you are king of this city.” So, Tum Kāyā Nagarī Kā Rājā—the soul is the king of this city. Man Indriye Terī Prajā—your mind and senses are your people. Mat Kar Iskī Gulāmī—don’t be a slave to them. Love them, take care of them, but do not become a slave. As soon as you become a slave, they will destroy you. What does that destruction mean? Different diseases arise because of our different ways of living. Our weaknesses in many things will lead you to the Narakaloka. The full verse says: “Tum Kāyā Nagarī Kā Rājā, Man Indriye Terī Prajā, Mat Kar Iskī Gulāmī, Ātmā Rājā Antaryāmī, Yah Nagarī Hai Ṭhagān Kī.” Don’t be a slave, O King Ātmā, Antaryāmī, Inner Lord. You should know that in this city, it is the city of cheaters. Oh my God, then why did You put us here, my dear God? God said, “It is a training for you, a trial.” This city is the city of cheaters and will cheat you with many kinds of drugs. Do not leave this city cheated. Don’t let it cheat you. When you are cheated, you have nothing; you go back empty. Therefore, you are walking through a beautiful garden. Wherever you look within, there is beauty: O God beautiful, O God beautiful. In the body and the mind, in the intellect and the discrimination (viveka), in the consciousness (citta), in the awareness, in the cakras, and in the heart—O God beautiful. So wherever you look within your body, it is beautiful. And when you look out, it is also beautiful. In the mountains, the forests, the meadows and deserts, rivers and lakes, ocean and sky are full of beauty. Nothing is ugly. Only the ugliness within you creates ugly thoughts. Behind this beauty, the cheetahs are hidden. Yes, the cheetahs—they are inner cheaters, inner makeup. With this makeup, that beauty will cheat you. Then afterwards you will see the reality, like in the theater play the children performed about the Rāmāyaṇa. So let’s walk through carefully. Now, our mana, buddhi, citta, and ahaṅkāra. We are on that path, and these four are occupied by three qualities. I explained the first two in the last three or four days: mala (impurity) and vikṣepa (disturbances). These are the disturbances. Sometimes we create our own self on our path as a heavy rock. Many of us create a heavy rock we can’t remove from our path. There was one man walking through a residential area at midnight, screaming loudly. People couldn’t sleep, so someone finally called the police. The police came and said, “Sir, what are you doing here? Please don’t make noise. Why are you making noise?” He said, “I’m shooing away all the wild elephants from here.” The police said, “But I don’t see any elephants.” He replied, “Yes, you can’t see because I shooed them away.” So we create certain problems, distress, and inner conflicts like that. Now comes the āvaraṇa. Generally, or literally, the meaning of “āvaraṇa” is a curtain, a cover. Do you remember this morning I spoke about one egg and the baby inside? As long as the baby is in the egg, we don’t see it because the shell of the egg is the āvaraṇa. Nowadays, sonography allows the doctor to find out if the boy or girl is in the womb, but in past times we only knew after the birth whether it was a boy or a girl. Before that, it was covered by that curtain, āvaraṇa. When you have what they call a gray star on the eyes, you cannot see—that is the āvaraṇa. Above us in the rooms, what is there, we don’t see because there is a thick ceiling of āvaraṇa. That is an āvaraṇa of ignorance. We can open the physical curtain and see through the window, but how to remove the āvaraṇa of ignorance? There is only one way: to learn. Vidyā leads to knowledge. Vidyā. As long as you are learning vidyā, studying, you are in the learning process. What we call a school, in India we call a vidyālaya, a place where you learn vidyā; or it’s called a pāṭhaśālā, where you study chapter by chapter. So Brahma Vidyā learning means we are in the learning process, and the fruits of that vidyā become jñāna. Sometimes in India they write on the door of the entrance of the school, on the left side and right side: “Dhyānārtha Praveśa” for entry into school for knowledge, and “Sevārtha Prasthāna” for departure for service. So you go to school to study, to get that knowledge, and what will you do with this knowledge? You go and serve God’s creation—not only humanitarian, but also veterinarian; not only human rights, but also the rights of the animals, birds, forests, and mountains. As long as we lack jñāna, from our learning we get greed and begin to make arguments. If you ask someone, “What are you studying?” the person will say, “I’m studying economics.” What will you do with it? “I’ll find a way to earn money.” You need a director, an organizer, a manager—for what? To manage, to direct, how to get more money. Through this kind of feeling in the world, the so-called learned people, through their talents, began manufacturing. The need was only for one, but they manufactured a hundred. The price falls, and they begin to sell cheaper. They reduce the quality, so it has no good durability and is not long-lasting. Their long-lasting is only bound to a few minutes. Plastic glass: drink the water and throw it away—use and throw. So they said it was a good idea. In an office, how many people are working? A hundred. How many times do they drink water? Minimum ten times. That’s a thousand glasses in one day, so let’s manufacture millions, use and throw. Result? One person said in a conference where I was present, “Use and throw, but where?” On the same earth. Pollution became a problem. By whom? Those learned people, those experts. These are the people who learn engineering and finance and so on. This jñāna, this knowledge, is not perfect. It is connected with ignorance because they are harming the earth. Now, everyone begins to make the glasses, every company. One company produces five million glasses, another produces ten million, some five million, some two million. Now the consumers are fewer in the city, but the manufacturing, the production, was overflowing. You spent money, you produced, but you don’t find so many customers. No problem, no question, no doubt that we are going through this economic crisis. All are silent because quality is suffering, and for quality there is no compromise. Similarly, for jñāna, what you learn in your school—in yoga class, this is also school—will be completed on that day when you can say, “I go to school.” As long as you don’t have jñāna, you have so many vṛttis, so many questions, asking, “Why not this? Why not this? Why didn’t you tell that? Why this?” all the time: why, why… there is no why. Someone doesn’t like it, and you are saying, “Why, why, why?” Then you get a beautiful answer. You said, “Bye, bye,” and others said, “Bye, bye, bye.” Because that was not jñāna. So the āvaraṇa of ignorance, the curtain of ignorance, has many, many layers over our consciousness from many, many lives. One saint said, “Anek janma dhoye manakū, citāī ho to aisī ho.” Many, many lives you will wash your mind, but there are certain spots you still can’t remove. There, you need a special spot remover. So it is said: the rock of jñāna, the soap of vairāgya, and the beating of viveka, along with the water of bhakti, devotion, can remove these spots. That is jñāna kī śilā (the rock of knowledge), vairāgya kā sābun (the soap of detachment), and bhakti rūpī jal (the water of devotion). Then you can remove these spots. And “Anek janma dhoye manakū, citāī ho to aisī ho”—you have to wash for many, many years. So let go with you bhakti, tyāga, vairāgya, and jñāna. The āvaraṇa is blindness; āvaraṇa is darkness; āvaraṇa is an obstacle. And this āvaraṇa is very hard to remove. Many of you know, in almost every country, this happens in certain seasons: you are driving on a beautiful road, on a beautiful highway, and suddenly a thick fog appears. Hardly can you see five to ten meters. This year, many of us experienced being in the Kumbha Melā. The police were running in front of my car to move the people because the fog was so strong. And people walking couldn’t see who was the next person in front of them. After the bath, suddenly there was no fog. This is called the āvaraṇa. So jñāna kī bātī, the light of knowledge, removes the fog of the āvaraṇa. Thus, mana, buddhi, citta, and ahaṅkāra are involved in these three qualities. All three—mala, vikṣepa, āvaraṇa—are not good qualities. Unless we remove these, our development will not be right. We will learn, but we will be manufacturers. That kind of manufacturing will not be good for you, not good for anybody, and not good for our earth. God has given us something that is called ātmā, the immortal. Ātmā is immortal—that is God-made, or part of God. But there is something immortal that is man-made, and that is also immortal: plastic. No one can kill plastic. No weapon, no fire, no water can destroy it. Fire will burn it, but it will remain in the atmosphere. So you see the difference: God-made knowledge makes the immortal ātmā realized in that way, but man-made knowledge also creates immortality in plastic. It is said that in each and every atom, God is omniscient and omnipresent. But man-made plastic is also in each and every atom—you see, man-made, omniscient, omnipresent. The difference is this: that is harmful, and the other is neutral, not harmful. So āvaraṇa, ignorance, creates things which are always harmful, and knowledge always creates things which bring liberation, beauty, harmony, oneness, and happiness. Therefore it is said: Jñānī se jñānī mile, kare jñān kī bāt; A wise one meets the wise one and they talk about wisdom. Dhyānī se dhyānī mile, kare dhyān kī bāt; They discuss the divine, about God, about wisdom. A dhyānī se a dhyānī mile, yato ghumāya laṭ; And a fool meets a fool, then either boxing or kicking—this is the difference. So when humans meet, they greet: Char Mille, Chosat Khele. When four meet, then sixty-four blossom. When four come together, then sixty-four blossom. This is a poem to your eyes and to my eyes. Eye to eye when they meet, of the wise ones, then sixty-four blossoms open. Every one of us has thirty-two teeth in our mouth—unless the doctor has pulled them out. So when friends, the wise ones, the good ones meet each other, they smile and laugh: thirty-two and thirty-two, sixty-four. Or gāthā se gāthā mile, donkey to donkey, they sew the back and begin exercises. This is the knowledge. Therefore, Jñāna Gajah—tomorrow I will search for this bhajan of ours, of one great Swāmījī. The nourishment, the food of knowledge, is so rich, so rich that it makes you immortal. In this bhajan, “Amarho Jisko Khane Semitai Hoto Yatsio,” which makes you immortal, that is a real sweet. If you are tired of the world of illusion, then be like this. And there is something very sour, and that is nothing, but it is very strong, which can spoil our desires, like lemon spoils milk—that is vairāgya. But Mahāprabhujī said, “Rang bhi satsaṅg nahī̃ lāge, bhajanak rang ve rāge nahī̃ ho ve na satsaṅg.” I give over to Gajanam Jī. “Ve rāge konī ho ve na satsaṅg.” Thank you, Vāraṇajī Mahārāj. So, the next webcast will be the next day, morning, tomorrow, 10 a.m. Till then, I wish you all the best. Have a good rest. Dīpa Nārāyaṇa Bhagavān Kī Jai, Dev Puruṣa Mahādeva Kī Jai, Satguru Svāmī Mādhvānandjī Bhagavān Kī Jai.