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Welcome also to those who are on the webcast. Swāmījī is somehow busy and will come later for the satsaṅg. He asked me a little bit to fill in, however. I was thinking, what to do? He announced that he would translate two bhajans, and I think it would not be fair if I did that. But his topic in the last lecture was about OṂ, and he said he would continue. OṂ is like the root mantra of all mantras. OṂ is the root of the whole creation. I was thinking, maybe it’s good if we practice a little bit. The Kriyā Anuṣṭhāna group has it anyway on the program, but most are not in this group. So I thought, let us do something a little bit different, which is only possible when we are a big group—and now we are a big group. When we chant OṂ, we usually chant in a certain rhythm, with a break together, and start again together. But I would suggest now that we do just one OṂ, all of us together, and then everyone breathes freely and relaxed in their own personal rhythm. In the end, there will actually be no break; one person has a break at this time, another at that time. It will be like one continuous OṂ. Let us do it as a real group experience, listening to each other. It might be a little bit like an ocean: sometimes a higher wave is there, then another higher wave. Sometimes a wave comes to the shore, breaks, and comes to an end. We will end together, but no one will say when. Do you think we can try that? Not too long—maybe five, ten, maximum fifteen minutes. The best is when we all close our eyes and really listen inside and to what is happening here in the room. We will start together and then individually continue so that the sound continues. After some time, we will end, but I will not give a signal for that. Okay, please relax and close your eyes. That’s a variation of OṂ. Now listen to OṂ. If it will help you, close your ears. Finally, together, we sing Oṁ. So, how was it? It’s a great experience, huh? That’s the power of OṂ, the power of mantra. But I think it’s worth thinking a little bit about what it actually means to chant OṂ or to chant a mantra. We say, "I sing OṂ," in the sense of "I create now the OṂ sound," which implies that when I stop, there is no OṂ sound. Is this true? That’s not at all the case. We must understand: OṂ is a reality. The true, original mantra is a reality. It’s a divine vibration which is pervading the universe at all times. So, what does it actually mean when we say, "Now I chant OṂ"? We cannot make the OṂ because it’s already there. What we are doing is imitating the really existing OṂ. Through this chanting, through this imitation of the real OṂ, we come actually in contact with this real divine OṂ vibration. That is what we feel then. All the effects we get from the mantra come because it is a reality which we just activate through our practice. If we don’t do anything, the OṂ is also there. When we are still enough, we can experience it; we can hear it. This is very similar to what Swāmījī said, I think it was this morning or yesterday, when he said, "Cover the ears." Then you hear some sound, and you don’t know from where it actually comes. Swāmījī said, "This is a divine sound, a divine vibration. This is actually the path of Nāda Yoga." Nāda means sound vibration. And you know, Svāmī Chögyam always repeats, "Nāde rūpa para brahma." Sound or vibration is a form of God. So in Nāda Yoga, you do not so much make something, but you actually listen to these really existing sounds. The finest of all, the origin of all sounds, is this OṂ. This also throws another light on when we simply always say, "Swāmījī gave me a mantra." How can Swāmījī actually give us a mantra? He could give us a book—a book is a physical thing which he has in his hands, gives to you, and now you have it. First it is here, now it is there. First it was Swāmījī’s, now it’s yours. You can say, "Yes, Swāmījī gave me the book." But when we say, "Swāmījī gave me a mantra," does it actually make any sense? Was the mantra first here, and now it is there? Did Swāmījī first have it, and now he gives it to you, meaning he doesn’t have it anymore, but you have it? A mantra is not a physical thing. It’s not even in the possession of Swāmījī. It’s simply there. Where is it? It’s everywhere. That means when I say I got a mantra from Swāmījī, I had it already before I got it. The mantra as a vibration was already in me before I got it from Swāmījī. So, what does it actually mean when Swāmījī initiates us? The fact is, he knows; we don’t know. It is like we have inside a big treasure, but we are not aware of it. The master makes us aware of this treasure, which we already have. When he gives us a mantra, it means he gives us the awareness of the mantra we already have. And he gives us instruction on how to become more aware of this. Like when we do the chanting, through chanting we actually activate this power of OṂ, and then it can have an effect in us. In the same way, when Swāmījī gives us the techniques and says, "So now you do this, now you do this," and we follow this, then we actually get in touch with these vibrations. As you know, Swāmījī also says there are five techniques, and chanting is one of them, so that we actually feel clearer what it is, how it is. It’s like a broom standing in the corner, and then the master says, "Take it and clean." The broom was already there before, but we didn’t really look at it, and we didn’t have the idea that one could use it for something. This is how I understand when the master gives us a mantra. On the surface, it seems so simple, but when you think about it, it’s not such a simple process. Mantra is the secret. It’s the divine. Let’s maybe continue with a bhajan about mantra. Do you know the bhajans so far that you can spontaneously say which bhajans we have which deal with the topic of mantra? It would be important that we at least have some idea about our bhajans. Let’s just collect. So which bhajans do we have which deal with the topic of mantra? "Dīpanī Rañjanā, Sabatoka Banjanā." Yes, this is actually maybe the nicest, because it is a Guru Mantra plus a full explanation about it. Yes, Mīrā’s bhajan, "Payāojī maine Rāma ratana dhana pāyo." The name of Rāma, the name of God, is the essence of mantra. In our bhajans, we usually don’t actually have the word "mantra"; we often have "nām," which means the name, the name of God. Or sometimes "Rāmnām." Rām is in general also for God. Okay, more? Yes, Oṁkāra Mantra. This is now specially about the mantra OṂ. More? "Hari Nāmābhinna Sukhapāigari." So the repetition of Hari’s name, which is Hari, also God, the name of God—I got all the happiness. Well, "Divāna, Satya Guru Nām." I became like intoxicated in bliss, like crazy life, so through the name of God. "I am Divāna, Satta Guru." I am crazy, God’s name. Okay, but use it in another context: the Guru is hiding. "Teribiti" is maybe the most common bhajan. Yes, but this is about our Guru paramparā. This is about Śrī Alak Purījī, Dev Purījī, and so on. That’s not on mantra; that’s about the Guru paramparā, the Guru tradition. Some more ideas? "Nobody knows how dear the words of the Guru are for me," because we say, "Mūlaṁ mantra, Guru vākya." One more I remember—this you had already. "Bhajore Manva," yes. Repeat all over my mind. Always repeat the name of God, the name of Mahāprabhujī. "Bhajore Manva." "Om Amiśli Pochat. Opakuj Meno Mahāprabhujī. O Meno Bojī." Sorry? As Swāmījī mentions the story of the priest asking the little boy, "Where is God?" And the little boy answered, "Tell me where there is no God." So, I think each word of our bhajans is a mantra, and especially the names of our gurus, they are the mantra. That’s actually true, so we can ask, "Which word is not the divine name?" I think the prize goes to you, but still, in the closer sense, bhajans which directly speak about mantra, about this teaching—yes, I was also thinking on that. So now we have a lot, so now you can choose one of them. Okay? So now, what is the mantra for? Basically, for two things: to purify our mind and to purify our karmas. This is actually already in the word "mantra." There’s a classical definition of what is a mantra. It’s in Sanskrit: mananāt trāyate iti mantraḥ. Here we have manana and trāyate, "man" and "tra," in this sentence. So, what you always repeat, what works in that way that it liberates the mind, purifies your mind, that is a mantra. The effect is actually, at the same time, the definition. So if you all the time, for example, repeat the mantra "Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola," what will be the effect? We all go to here, over the street, to our English. So that is definitely not a mantra because it doesn’t have the effect. But there’s another point. Does it not really mean this purification? Purification of the mind, purification of the karmas. Or as Swāmījī said, not just purification of the mind, but the four antaḥkaraṇas: mana, buddhi, citta, ahaṁkāra. That means mana is here the first of the four. I guess in the beginning, when we started with our mantra practice, many of us were a little bit disappointed because we expected, of course, that now I start practicing mantra and everything becomes all the time, always nicer and easier and better. I think the idea of a spiritual path is often that of a staircase: we start at the bottom, and then with a mantra we come to the first step, and with every practice we somehow go higher and higher and higher, and it’s nicer and nicer. Now, honestly, is this your experience? Maybe for some it might be, but I know for many, it’s not the practical experience. It means we have a little bit to think about what purification really means. I give others as an example: the house in which we might be living. For many years, we have lived in this house, but we do not use the whole house because under the roof, there is a part which is closed and we don’t use it. Since many, many years, you were never ever there in this—we say, Dachboden; I don’t know what this is in English—attic. So now, let’s say your family is a little bit expanding, and you think, "I need a little bit more space," and you remember that. Maybe we can make this a nice room. So now, after many, many years, you walk up, open the door. What will you see now? A little bit hard. After so many years, there will be such a layer of dirt, and not only that: spider webs, maybe some mice or rats running around, and really dusty. And you go in, look around, and suddenly you see so many things which you completely forgot, which you put many years ago there: some old furniture, some old pictures, some old photos. Start looking at that—ah, my old girlfriend, thirty years ago—and memories come up, and so many things are now affecting you, not just physically that you are coughing, but also mentally. So now you see what work it will be to clean that. You have only two choices: either you quickly close the door and go down again, but then, of course, the dirt will not be removed; it will even become more. Or you say, "Let me do it." So now you take a broom, and with this, of course, the dust which was peacefully lying on the ground now comes in the air, and you start coughing, and maybe you get even an allergy or asthma. And you start to remove all these old things which were there. But with everything which you take in hand, some memories come up. And you start naturally thinking, "Can I really remove that, or maybe I should keep that?" So many, many decisions: should I remove this? Should I remove this? So this is a practical process of purification. There was some dirt, there were some old impressions in our mind, but they were not active; they didn’t affect me. Now, when I start the work to clean that, suddenly I am confronted with it, and now I have to deal with this. That means this old energy suddenly is awakened in me. Just you see an old picture, you forgot that person, but suddenly it’s present again. Purification means a process of confrontation. Purification means a conscious process of facing it and letting it consciously go. And that’s sometimes not so easy, but now everyone has a different attic, with different dust and with different memories there. That is why when we all together practice the same practice, the experiences are completely different individually, according to what are your individual karmas, what are your individual things in your mind. Now, someone might find some beautiful things there and have really beautiful experiences. And someone else might start crying, and it might be hard. But it has to be removed. One day it has to be done. So now, when you don’t give up and you really go through, one day it’s clean. Then you can make this room beautiful and invite all your friends for the housewarming party, and they will say, "Oh, it’s so beautiful here. Why didn’t you invite us earlier?" And you smile because they don’t know how hard it was to get it so clean. So that’s the yoga. That is our practice. Especially when we do intense practice, like here through the Kriyā Anuṣṭhāna, or now the new techniques that Swāmījī is giving us. Swāmījī gives us the tool. Swāmījī gives us the guidance. But it’s our job now to do the cleaning. And Swāmījī therefore once very honestly raised the question: "It seems that those who go on the spiritual path are sometimes less happy than the others who don’t care at all." So, in the background of what I just tried to explain now, we understand. So the question comes: is it now really right, what we are doing? One day we have to do it. As I said in the beginning, you can, of course, close the door again, but then the dirt will just increase, and one day we have to do it. So this is actually the spiritual path. And the more we now have cleaned it, the more the blissful experiences really come. So sometimes we have really to go down, to go into something, so that then we feel the progress. And then we can come to another experience: the feeling of happiness, maybe even bliss. But we don’t know why. That’s the opposite: before we were suffering, and we didn’t know why; and sometimes now we’re happy, and we don’t know why. As it says, happy without good reason. So that says now we got more in touch with our inner self. Because this was only the first step: the cleaning of our qualities, the cleaning of our karmas. But when this is done, then we can go through deeper to us, and we get more in touch with what we really are. And this is called Satchitānanda. Ānanda, the bliss. That means we get in touch with our inner self, and we don’t need anything to make us happy because we are already happy. But we are still on the way. It means it’s not all the time, but sometimes we can have this experience. So this is then a sign that an important step in the purification has been done, and now we feel this inner happiness. Let’s sing a happy bhajan. Then we will sing some happy bhajans. Maybe some of you would like to share some experiences: chanting OṂ today, or some other experiences on the purification path, which we call yoga—purification of our karmas, purification of our mind. But in this purification process, one point is main: it’s actually purification of our relation to the guru. And you sing our bhajans, which are the essence of Mahāprabhujī’s and his disciples’ teaching. I could answer, which bhajan is dealing with the guru? So, our inner relation to our guru—this is what we have to consider all the time. You have come to the guru, surrendered, to get guidance. But now the question is, do we really take it? Do we really put it into practice? And that means now, not only when the guru is physically present, but in every life situation, to apply the teaching even when physically he is not here. Swāmījī gave a hint and said, "Oh, many of my disciples, they are vegetarians most of the time, but sometimes they say, some fish or so. Swāmījī is not here. He doesn’t know." And then Swāmījī said, "When they think on me, then already they call me, and I’m already there." And on another occasion he said—it was in Jarden—he looked around when we welcomed him and said, "In some auras, I see some fishes swimming." You see, we often sing the same about the guru, but we sing mostly about the mantra. As I said, the guru gives us the mantra. And when we don’t think deeply, we think really it’s like a book: he has it, he gives it to me, and now I have it—like the book would be, the mantra would be a physical thing which changes the place. The same mistake we make with the guru: we think the guru changes the physical place. What do you think about that? That you say, "Oh, the guru is now there. No, now he is there. Oh, he is in another country. He is not in this room." It’s the same misunderstanding about the guru which we have about the mantra: that we understand the guru as a physical person who would be in one place, meaning not in the other place. And that is also not right. Where is the guru? The guru is a level of consciousness. Everywhere. In the end, we have to realize: when it’s everywhere, it’s also in me. To get in touch with the inner guru, and when we are aware of this, then we know he knows everything. Not only that, when we think of him, we call him, but already before that, he is already there. This is not a small thing to realize. I remember, on one Guru Yoga teacher seminar—it was about twenty years ago—Swāmījī said in the beginning something that I didn’t understand. He said, "Whatever we practice in yoga, whether it be mantra or kriyā or meditation or whatever, it aims at one point: to understand the Guru." I thought, huh? I thought it’s about self-realization, to understand myself. So at that time I couldn’t get it, but it was Guru Vākya, obviously very clear, very decided Guru Vākya. So I put it in the waiting, like in a folder to be dealt with later. And I think this is actually the right thing to do when we don’t understand. Just now, two or three days ago, Swāmījī spoke about that: how should we deal with something when the guru says it and we don’t understand? Mostly, we come with quick judgments and quick reactions. But when we don’t understand, we should actually have a waiting status. Try to understand. Why can we not understand? Because we don’t yet have enough experience to understand it. So, give time. That means our life, our spiritual path is that on which the experiences grow. That means it doesn’t help us if we hear more and more and more lectures now, but now it helps us in our practice, our sādhanā, and, very importantly, also our karma yoga. You see, those who are, for example, in India in the ashrams, they are in a special situation. They can do direct seva there. And Swāmījī is actually not so much teaching them because, as you know, when he comes there, mostly he speaks to the Indians in Hindi, and most of our people don’t understand anything. And then he says, "You do this, you do this," and it must be ready now. And sometimes, because I was there now many years, I thought that’s somehow unfair: Europe, here, is giving some beautiful, long lectures, explaining everything, and to us, he is not even explaining it. He just lets us work. But that’s the point. This is much more. Because when Swāmījī is teaching you something, it is absolutely in your hands how much of that you put now into practice: first of all, how much you understand, how much you then apply, and you really do. But in an ashram situation, you are directly told to do it. And this is a practical experience. Based on this, your experiences grow, your jñāna grows. So just go through the practical process, and after a year or maybe two or five years, suddenly you are the one who explains to others because, based on your own experience, suddenly the things are so clear, and you cannot understand anymore how it could be unclear. A typical case: we see there are certain videos from Swāmījī, and I don’t understand. No one is there to explain, and I forget. So now my practical path continues, and after a year or two, it happens that we see the same video again, and suddenly everything is so clear. So who explained you? It is a practical path. So the practical life experiences are actually our training. It’s also an aspect of the guru. So in this sense, everyone who tells you something, who brings you into a certain concrete situation, is an aspect of the guru. It’s just a question of whether we are aware enough of that. Let me tell you a small story. There was a yogī, quite advanced, living in the Himalayas in a cave, meditating, completely secluded from the people, living a really simple life and doing the sādhanā. He lived in a cave there, and he had an altar, but he wasn’t too much caring for that. So, as some have in the household, not really order and clean, he was a little bit neglected. So now in his inner vision he realized that some people from the closest village are approaching, coming to bring some prasād and to have satsaṅg with him. With his inner vision, he realized this, and then he realized that this little bit neglected everything, a little bit dirty—so we come back to this point of cleaning. So he said, "Okay, I will make it nice." Very carefully now, he cleaned the altar and everything, and there, in this cave, he cleaned a little bit. After some time, he looked around and he was quite satisfied. So, like, okay, now they can come. And now suddenly he realized what he actually did: all the time he was neglecting that, and now suddenly when the people come, he wants to show off how beautiful everything is. And he realized that is cheating. No, I don’t want that. So he went out of his cave, took a handful of dirt, and threw it on the altar, making everything as it was before. And then he welcomed the people. This story became known and went from mouth to mouth. Several years later, this story came to a master, and he was very impressed by that, and he said, "This handful of dust was the greatest offering which was ever done on the altar." Because with this dust, he has offered his ego, not to pretend anything. Be as you are. Honesty. Or, as we call it in yoga, how we call it, satya—this is one, remember I gave this lecture about the yamas and niyamas—this is the second principle of the yamas and niyamas. Satya is not a small thing, because sat is God himself. We spoke already about getting in touch with the inner bliss, ānanda, but it’s called sat-chit-ānanda. Sat is the divine truth, the eternal truth. So by living satya, we are actually making a step in the direction of the sat, of the divine reality. There’s a second story about the same yogī. He was, together with other monks, invited to a house. There were now many monks invited, and they were placed at a long table, a little bit according to their, how to say, honor and age, like Mahāmaṇḍaleśvara and so on, you know. Then they started serving the food at the other end of the table. And he observed how they were bringing the food. And then he saw that they brought pots full of beautiful yogurt, and he loved yogurt. And they were giving quite graciously, quite a lot. But he saw the pots were quite small, and in his mind he could calculate that it wouldn’t last until he arrived. So he was thinking, "I won’t get anything," because they give all to these higher Mahāmaṇḍaleśvaras and so on. It’s a concrete situation. How often we have similar thoughts in our daily life. It’s just a question, and this is what he had. Suddenly, he became aware of his inner thoughts: what stupid thoughts are going on? And when he realized how greedy he was, how selfish, how much ego is there, then he turned his pot upside down. And of course there was enough yogurt because they had many pots; they brought the second, the third, and the fourth. And then they came to him and wanted to serve him the yogurt which he loved so much. He said, "No, thank you. I have eaten already." Just in every concrete life situation, think how I can apply this teaching from Swāmījī. So these two stories gave an example of how to apply the principle of satya in concrete daily life situations. Now, I hope that soon we will have the darśana of Swāmījī. So, maybe we can sing another bhajan. Try to call Swāmījī now. You know, we have one saying in bhajans and also in our prayer. Do you know what it means? Please, now is my turn. Now is our turn. Please, Swami, I request you to come now to us. "Asakhāruṁ Sakhī Nisakhī Guru Neba Mere."