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Part 1: Thirty Years of Yoga in Daily Life: Grace, Dedication, and the Guru’s Boat Oṁ Karatā Prabhudīp Karatā Mahāprabhudīp Karatā He Kevalam Oṁ Śāntiḥ Śāntiḥ... Hari Om, dear brothers and sisters. Hari Om, my dear friends, dear colleagues. About ten or fifteen minutes ago, Swāmījī called. He safely landed in Vienna, and he sends many, many, many greetings to all of you, and many, many blessings. Hari Om, dear brothers and sisters, and all present. Fifteen minutes ago, Swāmījī called them to the Danube and sent them His blessings and love. It seems that as Swamijī is getting older, he is getting faster. For me, it was a great honor to be invited on such an occasion: thirty years of Yoga in Daily Life. I was actually curious why in the world Swāmījī would choose me specifically to come here from there. And then I actually called and said, “You should come here on Friday.” Then I asked the organizers to send me some details about Yoga in Daily Life in Slovenia. Yoga in Slovenia had an amazing start. In Pohorje, you had His Holiness, our dear Holy Gurujī, Hindu Dharma Samrāṭ, Śrī Svāmī Madhavānanda Purījī Mahārāj. And that is, well, definitely a miracle. After that, everything started to go much faster than before. In 1990, in Ljubljana, you had the first public lecture by Viśvagurujī. In 1990, in Ljubljana, you had your first public lecture on Viśvagurujī in Slovenia. And in that same seminar, I actually got my mantra. So, I can say I am as old as Yoga in Daily Life in Slovenia. So, it became clear that I am supposed to share my experiences with all of you, my dear brothers and sisters. Paramaguru Swamijī, Marujanāma Sudāryo Aj, all the highest gurus, all Swamijīs, you have purified, you have purified, you have made my life successful. Dūbatī Jagame. In this world, it’s not only the world, it’s the world that constantly goes down. It’s always sinking. Dūbatī Jagame is the sinking world. What did he do? He gave us protection. He protected us. Now our bhajans are a mixture of Hindi and Marwari. Originally, they were in Marwari, but during the singing, as always, the language changes, so now there are quite a lot of Hindi words in them. This bhajan is sung by nobody else but by our Master Mahāprabhujī to Devpurījī. And of course, you all read Līlā Amṛt, and you know who Mahāprabhujī was and what he could do. He is singing to his guru, Mahāprabhujī is singing to Devpurījī, that with my eyes full of tears, I am so happy to see you. You have the translation, of course, in your bhajan books. And what Mahāprabhujī did, what Devpurījī did for Mahāprabhujī, is what Swamijī, Viśvagurujī did for us. He brought the boat of satsaṅg. What is satsaṅg, you all know. In short, it is being with good people, thinking good things, studying good things, and all of that actually helps us to come to the divine. So what would happen to us if Swāmījī did not come? First, we would be completely unaware of all these things that are happening, but unfortunately, the suffering would not stop. Now, we are aware of this. Of course, we are still suffering. With awareness, we have the option to go out. Out where? Out of this Lākh Caurāsī, out of this circle of life and death. Pārasamaṇi guru nāma hai, śiṣyā dhātu suvarṇa hoy. This jewel of Guru Mantra, which I received and all of you, or most of you received, it is like pāras in this bhajan. Pāras is that alchemical stone which turns everything into gold. So this name, the Guru’s name, the Guru Mantra, turns us into gold. In this bhajan, the Guru Mantra is called pāras, which is a stone that turns all iron into gold. Of course, this mantra has more power than pāras, than the alchemical stone, the alchemist’s stone, because it makes you a guru. So only the guru has the power to make you somebody else’s guru. Now, it’s very popular that we don’t need gurus. We are all gurus. There is no need for gurus. We have Google. Why do we need gurus? I will give just two examples. You go to the court and say to the judge, “I will defend this person against the crimes he committed.” And the judge will ask you, “Who are you?” “I downloaded all the books, I read all the books on the law that exists in Slovenia. What more do I need?” And then, of course, you will finish in jail. Or go to any hospital and say, “I will do the operation on this guy. I studied all the books there are. I practiced on cats, dogs, and rats on the streets.” And then you finish in a mental hospital. This is not possible. It is not possible to become a doctor without a guru, without a university. It’s not possible to become a lawyer without a university. How is it possible to reach the highest of the highest state without a Guru? We were now going to Badrināth, to one of the four holy places of North India. And if we didn’t have Swāmījī, we would have no knowledge that there is something called Badrināth, or Haridwar, or Ujjain, or Yamunotri, or all these holy places. So Mahāprabhujī continues, “He created a swan from the crow.” How? With the Soham mantra. The Soham mantra, which you are all very aware of, comes into our yoga in daily life system. It’s part of our prāṇāyāma practice, and it’s part of our meditation practice. Puruṣottama is the highest; it is also one of the names of the ultimate God. Śrī Devpurījī Bhagavān—then he put again, like a mister or a holy Śrī, and then Devpurījī’s name, and then Bhagavān, again God. So, to just invoke his master, he calls him Nārāyaṇa Puruṣottama Bhagavān. He gives such high epithets to his master. And many of us have a problem with Viśvagurujī. Why should we now call Swamiji “Vishwagurujī”? Because it definitely sounds better than the ultimate gods. And then you have to translate it into every language, because it’s true. Viśvagurū is the guru of the whole world. Many of you went with Swamiji around the world. Not too many, obviously. Swamijī traveled fifty times around the world. In every country he visited, there is an ashram there. Now, even in Cuba, they invited him to help in making... So, how would you call the teacher of the whole world, who has so many places that he visits? For Swāmījī, Viśvagurujī is not a title, it’s a statement of fact. Śrīdīpā kahe danyā Devane, mara sukvalā bajāsā bakāj, sarakāj Mahāprabhujī says that whatever I did, whatever there is, is by the grace of Devpurījī. I can say that whatever I am now, it is by the grace of Viśvagurujī. I started here in Ljubljana—not here. Here is Kranj, but anyhow, it’s very near. Everybody says that you’re very near, unless you’re going at four o’clock in the afternoon. Then it’s approximately one hour apart. Many of our friends are here. And as a young disciple, I said, “Swāmījī, can I become a sannyāsī?” Swamiji very politely—and I said, “Yes, of course, but you have to be ready. You have to prepare yourself properly.” So I got sannyāsa, obviously. It took me only eighteen years. So from 1990 to 2007, I was preparing. With Swamiji as our dear brother, Yogeshji can know very well, and many of you know that when you get promoted—because now I’m promoted, and I’m twice promoted—I became Mahāmaṇḍaleśvara. So, you can guess, there are two options. You get less work, or you get more work. You get fewer duties, or you get more duties. With Swamiji, of course, it’s a little duties. I’ve been living in India for the last twenty-something years. I had three months of free time in a whole year. And then I became a sannyāsī. Then I got three weeks of free time in a year. Now I am Mahāmaṇḍaleśvara. I have three days. Improvement. Maybe I’m slightly scared about what the next promotion will be about. So, because I live in India, I see so many of you in India all the time. So, I’m very familiar with many of you. In thirty years, you managed to make 108 yoga centers and have 500 yoga teachers. I know that it sounds, how to say, irritating. Realistic, but the numbers are numbers. How is this possible with your work? With dedication. With dedication. And, of course, what we have is somebody to guide us. For so many years, I have been studying so many things. And I’m lucky that I have Swamījī to push me in the right direction at the right time. It’s like coming to the library, and then in the library there are so many books, and then you want to choose some books, and suddenly Swāmījī appears and tells you, “No, take this one.” Of course, I didn’t do it like that. I actually asked Swamījī what to do. So I can tell you with 100% surety that the system which he made, or which we all are practicing—Yoga in Daily Life—is really, really amazing. You all know that yoga is very famous in the world nowadays. 99% of people practice āsanas. Around 10% practice prāṇāyāma, and around maybe 1% practice meditation. And what is with the rest? I’m not thinking about the rest of the people; I’m thinking, what’s with the rest of yoga? Yama, Niyama, Dhāraṇā, Pratyāhāra, Dhyāna, Samādhi—parts of Rāja Yoga; what is with Bhakti Yoga, what is with Karma Yoga, what is with Āyurveda, what happened to these things? Swamijī never allowed āsanas to be the only principle that guides us. How many of Swamījī’s lectures consist of food, about our eating? How many times has he told us to please start learning cooking again? Because during this fast food, you just go anywhere, get a pizza bite, and that’s it. Yama and Niyama, the inside and outside behavior. I will not ask you how much we are following this. It’s a different topic, that’s for you to decide. But I’m just trying to convey the complexity of our system. I think the first book came in 1990 or something like that. There was one before that was in India, printed in one book. And this is one of the rare books; Yoga and Daily Life is one of the rare books that includes immediately the negative effects of āsanas. Because in India, they like to exaggerate. For example, if I come to India and then I would tell them there were 10,000 people at my lecture, in their minds, they will remove one zero and say, “OK, it was around 1,000, 500, 2,000.” If I tell them there were 1,000, they will say, “Oh, only 100 came.” So that’s why the negative effects of āsanas are rarely mentioned. And because people would not practice it—oh, there are negative effects, I will not practice. They will not look at the positive effects. So Swamījī was one of the first ones who included the negative effects of āsanas in every single āsana. And then there was level number one, which was my favorite level in the old book. And then he made it in three months. So long. But then, somehow, with age and these white things coming out of our heads, it becomes more important than ever. And then, of course, we have yoga for back pain, in case we have any more problems. Part 2: The Depth and Practice of Yoga in Daily Life I am amazed, and I am always amazed. Yoga for back pain can help 90% of people within three days, and although the people who are helped know that, they stop practicing and come to prefer injections and tablets much more than practice. We have so many proofs—each and every one of you, not just me, has proof that yoga in daily life works. But do we practice? Yoga requires practice. On top of āsanas, we have prāṇāyāmas. Swāmījī combined both the Patañjali Yoga Sūtras—because Patañjali says only inhale, exhale, and holding the breath are prāṇāyāma—and the Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā, Gheraṇḍa Saṃhitā, and Śiva Saṃhitā, all of which are foundational texts for yoga. To practice Nāḍī Śodhana, there are first, second, third, and fourth levels, and then, of course, the other names we know: Kapālabhāti, Bhastrikā, and Brahmari. And in every single prāṇāyāma, it is written, “Please practice between five and fifteen minutes.” Then you can extend to forty-five minutes or whatever you wish. But it is so rare. Very few people I meet practice like that alongside their life outside of yoga. They do Anuloma Viloma prāṇāyāma, which is Nāḍī Śodhana third level. Then they do Kapālabhāti, then Brahmari, and within three minutes, all is finished—five minutes at most. “So, what can you do? I’m done. Okay, let’s go.” India is a very amazing place. Perhaps something similar is happening here: we have no time for anything. Unless there is chai or coffee on the table, then suddenly time expands. So we spend five minutes on prāṇāyāma, then half an hour on chai or coffee, and then we have to go to work. After prāṇāyāma comes meditation. There are eight levels of meditation. Each level contains a minimum of two to five different techniques. So in our book, we have around forty different meditation techniques. I mention this because it is the 30 days of yoga in daily life, and you should know what the book contains. It is not only a book; it is an encyclopedia of yoga. Recently, from America—everything starts from America; America is, how shall I say, our guiding star—a franchise model became very famous. McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, and many others. In the same way, some people began to practice a little yoga, and when they did not like it or did not want to pay for a franchise, they changed a few āsanas and altered some postures and said, “This is hot yoga, then this is left yoga, this is right yoga, this is upper yoga, this is down yoga,” so they do not have to pay anyone anything. That is why, unfortunately, it has become important for us to say we are practicing “Yoga in Daily Life,” not simply that we are practicing yoga. For example, if I say in India, “I am practicing yoga,” they will ask, “Do you practice power yoga, or Bikram yoga, or any other yoga?” In our yoga, we have meditation. And then, of course, from America something new came because meditation became obsolete: it is called mindfulness. This is truly amazing, because in the English language there is one word that explains the same thing and is much shorter: awareness. In all meditation, we already say, “Be aware of your breath.” So if you want to be more Americanized, you can say, “Be mindful of your breath.” This is all, how to say, advertising—how to present something old as something new. It is like having a tablet and then giving it a new name. The inside is the same paracetamol, but one is called Lekadol, another Mekadol, and another Tekadol, and so on. And then, in approximately five to ten years, instead of “mindfulness” there will be “blindness” or something else. I would not bother too much with that. We already have this in our meditation. I have attended a few mindfulness courses, so I know what I am talking about. It sounded like, “Oh, something new.” Then I thought, “Okay, that is in this level, that is in that level—what is new?” I never heard Swāmījī say, “Please sleep the whole day and then just do āsanas and prāṇāyāmas.” He said, “Do all day and be aware of what you are doing.” If you are doing that, you have been practicing mindfulness already for the last thirty years. And if you do not do that, changing the name will not help at all. So we have āsanas, prāṇāyāmas, meditation, and then techniques of Haṭha Yoga kriyās. Then there is explanation about Karma Yoga and Bhakti Yoga. And we have a short section about food. Why is the food section so short in our book? Because we would need about ten books to fulfill all our recipe desires, but we already have many cookbooks. Then we have a small introduction to the most interesting part of our yoga, which is Kriyā Yoga. And we have a separate book, Hidden Powers in Humans, about that. However, Swāmījī never said—except, of course, for a few people when we have initiation in Kriyā—that the techniques of the cakras are actually Kriyā Yoga techniques. He never said that, because then those who are interested only in so-called Kriyā Yoga would come, and people need to be ready. Unfortunately, we have to be prepared through Karma Yoga, āsanas, prāṇāyāmas, and meditation. Everyone would love to reach samādhi instantly. The problem is: would anybody come back? All these are techniques of meditation. Meditation is like sleep. If I ask you now, “Please fall asleep within three seconds,” can you do it? It is the same with meditation: it just happens. We have forty meditation techniques in our book, and hundreds of meditations with Swāmījīs can be found in all centers. We are missing only one part: practice. Practice makes perfect. Luckily for us, the book Yoga in Daily Life did not remain just a book. It became, how shall I say, our basic necessity. Of course we should remember it, but it does not matter even if we do not remember—we can always check it. But what we have, what is not in the book, is our spiritual lineage. More than before, Swāmījī recently started to say that he is not a Sattā Guru. Well, he is, but we cannot tell him that now. Because many of us, or some of us, started to feel that we are now gurus. You see, it is very strange: you have Swāmījī as your master, and then you sit on a level beside him at Kumbha Melā. It is a very uncomfortable situation. But then you know that this is only the outer part, because what matters is what is inside. Our lineage began with Alakhpurījī. You have all heard Swāmījī’s lectures about that, and many of us have already visited Alakhpurījī’s cave. Just imagine how fortunate we are that Alakhpurījī decided to show himself to Devpurījī, and then Devpurījī came and taught Mahāprabhujī, and then from Mahāprabhujī via Holy Gurujī to our Viśvagurujī. It is rare. Usually we have heard about Bābājī, about Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṁsa and Vivekānanda, about Yogānanda and Yukteśvar. There are two types of lineages in India: lineages like ours, in which all masters are self-realized, or those that are simply namesake. For example, the Śaṅkarācāryas, Mahāmaṇḍaleśvaras, and many Mahants of various āśramas—they are just titles transferred from successor to successor, without the requirement of inner knowledge. Of course, inner knowledge is important, but self-realization is so hard to come by that they bypassed it. So we are very lucky that we have Swāmījī still with us. I really hope that he stays with us for more than a few years—maybe ten years, or a hundred years, or five hundred years. We should be optimistic. Maheśvaraṇandajī, Juga Juga Jīvo Maheśvaraṇandajī, Śrī Dīpadāyālu Ke Amṛta, Śiṣṇitvaraso Ānanda, Prabhudīpadāyālu Ke Amṛta. I have the honor, or duty, or luck—you can call it what you like—to live in the Jaipur āśram, and I have close contact with Swāmījī. Fortunately, much, much less than Yogeshjī, who has a bigger ashram. There are so many things you witness about our old Swāmījī. He is now officially seventy-four. That first number is good. The number of things he remembers and takes care of is still approximately ten times what I remember. What I like best is when I call Swāmījī to ask him something and begin with a question, and then he gives me the answer halfway through the question. But I want to ask the question, so I keep going, and the question goes on and on, and Swāmījī is like, “Okay, I already answered; can you please stop?” And then he repeats the same answer at the end. And some part of me is mindful of my behavior—I cannot say “aware” because that is not popular. I have many such experiences, and tomorrow maybe Yogeshjī will share some of his—he has a hundred years of work in Jadān. But I have known Swāmījī for the last thirty years, obviously, and I can say that he now has ten thousand times more energy than before. So I believe we should follow yoga in our life and follow what he says. I think we should always follow Yoga in Daily Life and its words, because if this is what we will achieve, I think it is quite useful. The best part of our life is knowing that we are here and that we are doing what we were born to do. It does not matter what we physically do, because ultimately, if we cook, we need to cook tomorrow, and the day after, and so on. And if we build something, will it stay for ten thousand years, a hundred thousand years? Will anything last forever? That is not under our control. But today, this is under our control. How you feel now is under your control. I am very happy to be here. I am happy that you have managed thirty years. I pray to all of you to continue and not change just because something becomes popular. Let us be the disciples who dig one well at one point, and not in a hundred places. Thank you for being here, and thank you for being with Swāmījī. And with these words, I will finish the webcast. Greetings to all your friends around the world. And we can start with the prayer: Śrī Dīp Nārāyaṇa Bhagavān, Kī Jaya. Devādhi Deva Deveśvara Mahādeva, Kī Jaya. Śrī Śrī Alakh Purījī Mahādeva, Kī Jaya. Vindādhāraṇa Samarasa Mātr̥kṛṣṇa Bhagavān, Kī Jaya. Viśvagurū Mahāmaṇḍaleśvarānandajī, Sattva Gurudeva, Kī Jaya.