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Parama Guru Swamiji

The necessity of the Guru and the comprehensive system of Yoga in Daily Life form the path.

The world is constantly sinking, and the Guru provides the protective boat of satsang. This association with good people and thoughts leads to the Divine. Without this guidance, one remains unaware and trapped in suffering. The received Guru Mantra is the transformative power, the alchemical stone. One cannot reach the highest state without a Guru, just as one cannot practice law or medicine without proper training. The system created is an encyclopedia beyond mere physical postures. It integrates all aspects of yoga—āsana, prāṇāyāma, meditation, and the ethical principles—which many modern adaptations neglect. This practice requires dedicated effort, not just theoretical knowledge. The authentic spiritual lineage, passed through self-realized masters, is a rare gift. The essence is to practice diligently and remain steadfast in this proven path, not chasing popular trends.

"The jewel of the Guru Mantra... turns us into gold."

"How is it possible to reach the highest state without a Guru?"

Filming location: Kranj, Slovenia

Oṃ karta prabhudeep karta mahā prabhudeep. Oṃ śānti śānti śānti. Hari Om, dear brothers and sisters. Hari Om, my dear friends and colleagues. About ten or fifteen minutes ago, Swāmījī called. He has landed safely in Vienna and sends many, many greetings and blessings to all of you. It seems that as Swāmījī gets older, he only becomes faster. It was a great honour for me to be invited on this occasion, celebrating thirty years of Yoga in Daily Life. I was curious: why in the world would Swāmījī choose me to come here? He called specially and said, "You should come here on Friday." I then asked the organizers to send me details about Yoga v vsakdanjem življenju v Sloveniji. Yoga in Slovenia had an amazing start. In Pohorje, you had His Holiness, our dear Holy Gurujī, Hindu Dharmasamrāṭ, Śrī Svāmī Madhavānanda Purījī Mahārāj. That was definitely a miracle, and after that, everything began to progress much faster. In 1990 in Ljubljana, you had the first public lecture by Viśva Gurujī. At that very seminar, I received my mantra. So I can say I am as old as Yoga in Daily Life in Slovenia. It became clear that I am meant to share my experiences with all of you, my dear brothers and sisters. Paramaguru Swāmījī, Marujanāma Sudhāryo Āj. O highest Guru, O Swāmījī, you have purified and made my life successful. This world is constantly sinking; Dubati Jagame is the sinking world. What Swāmījī did was give us protection. Now, our bhajans are a mixture of Hindi and Marwari. Originally they were in Marwari, but during singing, the language always changes, so now there are quite a lot of Hindi words. This bhajan is sung by none other than our Dister Mahāprabhujī to Devpurījī. You have all read Līlā Amṛt and know who Mahāprabhujī was and what he could do. Nirma Lavara Nenahejī is singing to his Guru; Mahāprabhujī is singing to Devpurījī that, with eyes full of tears, he is so happy to see him. You have the translation in your bhajan books. What Mahāprabhujī did, what Devapurījī did for Mahāprabhujī, is what Swāmījī Viśvagurujī did for us. He brought the boat of satsaṅg. What is satsaṅg? In short, it is being with good people, thinking good thoughts, and studying good things. All this helps us come to the Divine. What would have happened to us if Swāmījī had not come? First, we would be completely unaware of all these things. Unfortunately, the suffering would not stop. We are aware of the ebb and flow of life. We still suffer; our karma is evident. But with awareness, we have an option to go out. Out where? Out of this Lākā Caurāsī, this circle of life and death. This jewel of the Guru Mantra, which I received and most of you received, is like Pāras in this bhajan. Paras is the alchemical stone that turns everything into gold. So this name, the Guru’s name, the Guru Mantra, turns us into gold. Of course, this mantra has more power than Pāras, because it makes you a Guru. Only the Guru has the power to make you someone else’s Guru. It is very popular nowadays to say we don’t need Gurus, that we are all Gurus, or that we have Google. I will give just two examples. If you go to court and say you will defend someone, the judge will ask, "Who are you?" If you say, "I downloaded all the law books; what more do I need?" you will finish in jail. Or go to a hospital and say, "I will operate on this person; I studied all the books and practiced on cats and dogs." Then you will finish in a mental hospital. It is not possible to become a doctor or a lawyer without a Guru, without a university. How then is it possible to reach the highest state without a Guru? We were recently going to Badrināth, one of the four holy places of North India, with Swāmījī. Without him, we would have no knowledge that such a place as Badrināth, Haridwar, Ujjain, or Yamunotri even exists. Mahāprabhujī continues: "Kovāse Haṁsa Kiyājī"—he created a swan from a crow. How? With the mantra SOHAM. You are all aware of the SOHAM mantra in our Yoga in Daily Life system. It is part of our prāṇāyāma and meditation practice. Soham, soham, sahaham: That Divine Self, that God, is me. How does Mahāprabhujī talk about his Guru? Śrī Nārāyaṇa Puruṣottama. Nārāyaṇa is one of the names of Viṣṇu. Puruṣottama is the highest, another name for the ultimate God. Śrīde Puruṣa Bhagavān. To invoke his master, he calls him Nārāyaṇa Puruṣottama Bhagavān, giving him such high epithets. Many of us have a problem calling him Swami Viśvagurujī. Why should we? Because it sounds better than "the ultimate God." And you have to translate it into every language, because it is true: Vishwa Guru is the Guru of the whole world. Many of you have travelled with Swāmījī around the world. Swāmījī has travelled fifty times around the world. In every country he visits, there is an ashram. Even in Cuba, they invited him to help make the whole country vegetarian. So, how would you call the teacher of the whole world? For Swāmījī, "Viśva Gurujī" is not a title; it is a statement of fact. Mahāprabhujī says that whatever he did, whatever there is, is by the grace of Devpurījī. I can say that whatever I am now is by the grace of Viśva Gurujī. I started here in Ljubljana—well, here is Kranj, but it is very near. Everyone says it is near, unless you are going at four o'clock in the afternoon, then it is about an hour apart. From Ljubljana, I went to Koper. Many of our friends are here. As a young disciple, I asked Swāmījī, "Can I become a sannyāsī?" Swāmījī very politely said, "Yes, of course, but you have to be ready; you have to prepare yourself properly." So I received sannyāsa. It took me only eighteen years, from 1990 to 2007, preparing with Swāmījī, as our dear brother Yogeshjī and many of you know. When you get promoted—and now I am twice promoted, having become a Mahāmaṇḍaleśvar—you can guess there are two options: you get a little work, or you get more work; fewer duties, or more duties. With Swāmījī, of course, it is more duties. I have been living in India for the last twenty-something years. I had three months of free time in a whole year. Then I became a sannyāsī and got three weeks of free time a year. Now I am a Mahāmaṇḍaleśvar; I have three days. It is an improvement. I am slightly scared about what the next promotion will bring. Because I live in India, I see so many of you there all the time, so I am very familiar with many of you. In thirty years, you have managed to establish 108 yoga centers and have 500 yoga teachers. I know it sounds unrealistic, but numbers are numbers. How is this possible? Through your work, your dedication, and, of course, having someone to guide us. For so many years, I have studied many things. I am lucky to have Swāmījī to push me in the right direction at the right time. It is like coming to a library with so many books, wanting to choose some, and suddenly Swāmījī appears and says, "No, take this one." Of course, I did not do it like that; I actually asked Swāmījī what to do. So I can tell you with 100% certainty that the system he created, which we all practice as Yoga in Daily Life, is truly amazing. You all know yoga is very famous in the world nowadays. Ninety-nine percent of people practice āsanas. Around ten percent practice prāṇāyāma, and maybe one percent meditation. And what about the rest? I am not thinking about the rest of the people, but the rest of yoga: Yama, Niyama, Dhāraṇā, Pratyāhāra, Dhyāna, Samādhi—the parts of Rāja Yoga. What about Bhakti Yoga? What about Karma Yoga? What about Ayurveda? What happened to these things? Swāmījī never allowed āsanas to be the only guiding principle. How many of Swāmījī’s lectures are about food, about our eating? How many times has he told us to please start learning cooking again? In this fast-food era, you just go and get a pizza bite and that is it. Yama and Niyama, our inner and outer behaviour—I will not ask how much we follow this; that is for you to decide. I am just trying to convey the complexity of our system. I think the first book came in 1990 or so. There was one before that printed in India. Yoga in Daily Life is one of the rare books that immediately includes the negative effects of āsanas. In India, they like to exaggerate. For example, if I said 10,000 people came to my lecture, they would remove one zero and think it was 1,500. If I said 1,000, they would say only 100 came. That is why the negative effects of āsanas are rarely mentioned; people would not practice if they heard there were negative effects, ignoring the positive ones. Swāmījī was one of the first to include the negative effects for every single āsana. Then there was Level One, which was my favourite level in the old book. He made it last three months, so long. But then, with age and these white things coming from our heads, it becomes more important than ever. And then, of course, we have yoga for back pain. I am always amazed that yoga for back pain can help 90% of people within three days, although those who are helped often stop practicing and prefer injections and tablets. We have so many proofs. Each and every one of you has proof that Yoga in Daily Life works. But do we practice? Because yoga requires practice on top of āsanas. We have prāṇāyāmas. Swāmījī combined both Patañjali Yoga Sūtras—where Patañjali says only inhale, exhale, and holding the breath are prāṇāyāma—and Haṭha Yoga texts like the Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā, Gheraṇḍa Saṃhitā, and Śiva Saṃhitā. These are the bases for practices like Nāḍī Śodhana (first, second, third, and fourth levels), Kapālbhāti, Bhastrikā, and Brahmari. For every single prāṇāyāma, it is written: "Please practice between 5 and 15 minutes, and then you can extend to 45 minutes or whatever you want." It is so rare to find people who practice like that. Outside of class, in life, they do Anulom Vilom Prāṇāyāma (Nāḍī Śodhana, third level), Kapālbhāti, and Brahmari, and within three to five minutes, all is finished. "I'm done, okay, let's go." India is an amazing place. Perhaps something similar happens here. We have no time for anything, unless there is chai or coffee on the table; then suddenly time expands. We have five minutes for praṇām, half an hour for chai, and then we have to go to work. After prāṇāyāma, we have meditation: eight levels, each with a minimum of two to five different techniques. In our book, we have around forty different meditation techniques. I tell you this because it is thirty years of Yoga in Daily Life, so you know what is in our book. It is not just a book; it is an encyclopedia of yoga. Recently, from America—everything starts from America, our guiding star—something called a franchise became famous: McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, and so many others. In the same way, they started doing yoga. If they do not want to pay for a franchise, they just change a few āsanas and postures and say, "This is hot yoga," "This is left yoga," "This is right yoga," "This is upper yoga," "This is down yoga," so they do not have to pay anybody. That is why it is important, unfortunately, for us to say we are practicing Yoga in Daily Life, not just "yoga." For example, in India if I say "I practice yoga," they ask, "Do you practice power yoga? Bhikṣājī yoga? Any other yoga?" In our yoga we have meditation. And now, from America, because meditation became obsolete, something new came: mindfulness. Mindfulness is really amazing because in the English language there is one word that explains the same thing, and it is much shorter: awareness. In all our meditations and prāṇāyāma we say, "Be aware of your breath." So if you want to be more Americanized, you can say, "Be mindful of your breath." These are all advertising tricks, introducing something old as something new. It is like a tablet; the inside is the same paracetamol, but one is called Lekadol, another Mekadol, another Tekadol. In approximately five to ten years, instead of mindfulness, it will be "blindness" or something else. I would not bother too much with that. We have all this in our meditation. I went through a few mindfulness courses, so I know what I am talking about. It sounded like something new, and 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 prāṇāyāma." He said, "Do all day and be aware of what you are doing." If you are doing that, then you have been practicing mindfulness for the last thirty years. If you do not do that, then changing the name will not help. So we have āsanas, prāṇāyāmas, meditation, Haṭha Yoga kriyās, explanations of Karma Yoga and Bhakti Yoga, and a short section on food. Why is the food section so short? Because we would need around 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: Kriyā Yoga. We have a separate book, Hidden Powers in Humans, about that. But Swāmījī never said—except to a few people during initiation into Kriyā—that these techniques involving chakras are actually Kriyā Yoga techniques. Because then others, 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, Prāṇāyāma, and meditation. Everyone would love to get to samādhi just like that. The problem is, would anybody come back? Also, meditation—all these are techniques. Meditation is like sleep. If I told you now to go to sleep within three seconds, would you be able to? It is the same with meditation; it just happens. We have so many techniques, forty in our book and hundreds you can find in all centers with Swāmījī. We are missing only one part: practice. Practice makes perfect. Luckily for us, this book, Yoga in Daily Life, did not stay just a book. It became a basic necessity. Of course, we should remember it, but it does not matter if we do not; we can always check. What we have that is not in the book is our spiritual lineage. Even more than before, Swāmījī recently started to say, "I am not a Satya Guru." Well, he is, but we cannot tell him that now because some of us have started to feel that we are now gurus. It is very strange. You have Swāmījī as your master, and then you sit beside him on the same level at the Kumbh Melā. It is a very strange, uncomfortable situation. But you know that is just the outside; what matters is what is inside. Our lineage started from Alakapurī. You have all heard Swāmījī’s lectures about that, and many of us have visited Ālak Purījī’s cave. Imagine how lucky we are that Ālak Purījī decided to show himself to Dev Purījī, who then came and taught Mahāprabhujī, and from Mahāprabhujī via Holy Gurujī to our Viśva Gurujī. This is rare. Usually, we hear about Bābājī, Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṁsa and Vivekānanda, Yogānanda and Yukteśvar. There are two types of lineages in India: lineages like ours, where all masters are self-realized, or lineages that are just namesakes. For example, Śaṅkarācāryas, Mahāmaṇḍaleśvaras, many Mahants of various āśrams—these are just titles transferred to a successor. It does not matter about the knowledge; inner knowledge is important, but self-realization is so hard that they bypass it. It is just a transfer of names where self-realization or knowledge has no special role. So we are very lucky to have Swāmījī still with us. I really hope he will stay with us for many more years—maybe ten, something like that, one hundred years, five hundred years. We should be optimistic. I wish him to stay with us for five hundred years. Let us be optimistic. God bless you. I have the honour, duty, or luck—you can call it as you like—to live in the Jaipur ashram and have close contact with Swāmījī, though much, much less than Yogeshjī, who has a bigger ashram. There are so many things you witness about our Swāmījī. He is now officially seventy-four. 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 to ask Swāmījī something. I start with a question, and Swāmījī gives me the answer halfway through my question. But I want to ask the question, so I continue, and the question goes on and on. Swāmījī says, "Okay, I already answered, can you please stop?" Then he repeats the same answer at the end. Some part of me is mindful—I cannot say aware, because it is not popular—of my behaviour. I have so many of these experiences. Tomorrow, maybe Yogeshjī will share some of his; he has a hundred years of work in Jadan. I have known Swāmījī for the last thirty years, and I can say he now has ten thousand times more energy than before. I believe we should follow Yoga in Daily Life and follow what he says, because if this is what we will achieve, I think it is quite useful. The best part of our life is that we know we are here and we are doing what we were born to do. It does not matter what we physically do. Ultimately, if we cook, we need to cook tomorrow and the day after. If we build something, will it last ten thousand years, one hundred thousand years? Will anything be forever? It is not under our control. But today 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 of Yoga in Daily Life. I pray for all of you to continue and not to change just because something else is popular. Let us be disciples who dig one well at one point, and not in a hundred places. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being with Swāmījī. With these words, I would finish. Greetings to all your friends around the world. We can start with the prayer. Viśvakuru māmalai śupāra samayāśanajī sattva gurudeva kī jaya.

This text is transcribed and grammar corrected by AI. If in doubt what was actually said in the recording, use the transcript to double click the desired cue. This will position the recording in most cases just before the sentence is uttered.

The text contains hyperlinks in bold to three authoritative books on yoga, written by humans, to clarify the context of the lecture:

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