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Om Śālakpūrjī Mahādevakī Jai. Devādau Devadeva Viśvamahādevakī Jai. Śrīdīp Nārāyaṇ Bhagavān Kī Jai. Hindu Dharm Samrāṭ Paramahaṁt Svāmī Śrī Mādhavānand Purījī Sadgurudev Bhagavān Kī Jai. Vishwaguru Mahāmaṇḍaleśvar Paramahaṁsa Svāmī Śrī Maheśvarānand Purījī Gurudevakī Jai. Sadāśiva Samārambhaṁ Śaṅkarācārya Madhyamām Asmadācārya Paryantaṁ Vande Guru Paramparām. Gurur Brahmā, Gurur Viṣṇu, Gurur Devo Maheśvaraḥ. Gurur Sākṣāt Paraṁ Brahma, Tasmai Śrī Gurave Namaḥ. Mannātha Śrī Jagannātha, Madguru Śrī Jagatguru. Māmātmā Sarvabhūtātmā, Tasmai Śrī Guruve Namaḥ. Salutations to the Cosmic Self. Pozdrav Shri Alak Purījī Siddha Pīṭha Paramparā. Pozdrav Shri Alak Purījī Siddha Pīṭha Paramparā. Pozdrav Shri Alak Purījī Siddha Pīṭha Paramparā. Om Namah Nārāyaṇa to all the sannyāsīs. Om Namah Nārāyaṇa to all the sannyāsīs, and Hari Om. Good evening to all of you who are present here and who are watching through Swamijī TV. I hope you all had a nice day. Today we will slightly touch on the topic of positivity and negativity, or in our spiritual terms, satsaṅga or kusaṅga. Swami Gajananjī was mentioning this morning that satsaṅga is the saṅgha of satya, the truth, a gathering of spiritually driven people. No matter where we look, we will always find a positive place and a negative place in everything. But before trying to find faults in others, we should try to see how faulty we are within ourselves. For example, we are driving on the road and someone is over-speeding. This is a beautiful example which Swamījī gave a few years back. That person slightly overtakes you and almost touches your car. It doesn’t matter how deep our sādhanā has been in the past many years; at that exact second, some not-so-nice words come out of our mouth, and then everything is gone. Further on, you see a police officer stopping that car, and we get happy: "Oh, finally he’s caught!" But then we see the police officer opens the window, talks, and lets him go. We stop and ask the officer, "Why did you not stop him or arrest him?" He says, "Because the wife in the back was delivering a baby and they were rushing to the hospital." So we can’t really judge a book by its cover. Until we actually know the full story, we should not try to find the bad points. There was a nice young boy named Śaṅkar who was very positive and always in his own zone, not necessarily because of spirituality as one might think. When he was going around the village of Strelky, everyone was very happy with him. But where there’s a positive side, there is also a negative side. Some random people went to him and said, "Oh, Śaṅkar, you know what? In the village, many people are talking about many negative things about you. They think you are always in your own head, that you are mentally sick or something is going on. They are all talking badly about you." Śaṅkar said, "What a beautiful atmosphere in the ashram. The birds are chirping in the morning. We have beautiful satsaṅgs going on, Vishwagurujī’s blessings, and we all have beautiful bhajans." They said, "I think you didn’t hear what we asked you. People are talking badly about you, and you are talking about birds chirping and satsaṅg?" He said, "I am enjoying the satsaṅg, I am enjoying this blissful place, and I like the birds, the nature, and the people around me. Mě se líbí ty ptáčci." The people and the atmosphere we choose can affect our mental state. If we go and sit in a beautiful atmosphere where they are all singing bhajans and having satsaṅg, then our mental development progresses on that path. If we go to the neighboring villages while the satsaṅg is going on, and go for sightseeing or to a pub, then that is a different path we choose. It always depends on the surroundings, but it is your decision at the end of the day. It is our decision what we want to do with our lives. I mentioned it previously, but I will mention it again. Holi Gurujī used to say that there are four types of kṛpā. The first kṛpā is deva kṛpā, the blessings of the devatās, the gods. Out of the 8.4 million creatures, we were blessed to be born in a human body. That is the blessing of the Devatās. The second kṛpā is the kṛpā of the parents and teachers, who bring us up and help us in our lives. The third kṛpā is Guru Kṛpā, which is the highest kṛpā. As Guru Dev always says, "Guru kṛpā hi kevalam, śiṣya ānanda maṅgalam." When you have the blessings of your Gurudev, then the śiṣya, the disciple, is always in ānanda, in a state of bliss and happiness. But the most important kṛpā is kuḍkī kṛpā. Kuḍkī kṛpā means your own kṛpā. Why? Because the guru can show you the path. The guru will tell you this is the right path or this is the wrong path, but he will not force you onto a certain path. So it is our own decisions, our own individual way which we choose. That is why our own individual kṛpā is also very necessary. It is us who choose which path we want to take. It is us who will say we want to go and enjoy the bhajans, or we want to go and enjoy a party. As you know, how kind and generous our beloved Gurudev is. He is very forgiving. He always forgives all our mistakes and says, "Here you go, I give you another chance." It doesn’t matter how many times we mess up in our lives; it’s never too late. You can always come back and say, "Gurudev, I did this, but now I want to go on the right path." That is why the saints are always known to be very merciful and generous. Most probably, all of us have done certain mistakes in our lives. But whenever we come to Gurudev, we touch his feet, he takes our bad karmas, and he touches your head with his hands and gives you positive energies and blessings. That is why it is said, "Guru caraṇamaya adasattiratahe, Veda Purāṇa gatahe." Basically, in the Gurudev’s lotus feet are all the pilgrimages of the world. The Vedas and the Purāṇas say that if you don’t have time to go and visit all the pilgrimages around the world, you come and surrender to Gurudev, and you get the same or much more blessings than you would from all the pilgrimages. So it is our choice which path we want to choose. Once upon a time, there was a king going through his kingdom in his chariot. I am trying to explain through short stories today; we are having a few short stories with the same motive. I like stories because when I was younger, it was much easier to understand things through a story than through straightforward training. The king saw a farmer family: the farmer, his wife, and his kids. It was very hot, the sun was beaming straight on the field. There was one beautiful tree, and after the farmer took a break from working hard for half a day, the wife and kids came and brought lunch for him. Not everyone is as fortunate as others. The king eats on golden plates and has all different types of food he can think of, in a huge palace with a table for twenty or thirty. But many nights, the king sits alone eating his meals while people serve him. The farmer and his wife took the chapati in their hands; they didn’t even have a plate. For those who don’t know, chapati is an Indian type of bread. They had no vegetables, nothing, just onion on the chapati. They were eating dry chapati, onion, and water, but they were all laughing and talking in a happy mood. The king asked his secretary, "How come they are so happy? He is working in the hot sun, eating dry chapatis, but they are all so happy, laughing." The secretary said, "Your Highness, the farmer is not a part of the 99 Club." The king said, "What’s the 99 Club?" The secretary said, "Give me 99 golden coins." The king gave the bag of 99 coins to the secretary, who said that after six months he would show the results. At night, the secretary put the bag of 99 coins outside the door of the farmer’s house. In the morning, the farmer went out, saw the bag, took it inside, opened it, and was astonished. "Golden coins! I am very blessed. God is graceful on me." He started counting: one, two, three, four, six—in all languages: jedna, dva. After counting, he ended up with 99. He said, "I think I made a mistake while counting. Let me count again." In the morning, the farmer hadn’t had his coffee, so his brain wasn’t functioning. He counted again; again it was 99. He called his wife. In India, we call the wife the home minister because she’s the one who’s ruling, actually. Swamiji once said that if all the women of the universe unite, they can convert the Kali Yuga back to Satya Yuga. This is the power of Śakti. The wife came and counted ninety-nine. He said, "Why was that stupid person so stupid that he put 99? He should have put 100. 100 sounds better." He decided he would work much harder, day and night, to get one golden coin. But to earn one golden coin, he would have to work for years. After a week, his wife said, "What should I do with my husband? We have 99 coins. We can live much more happily and have all the things we need, and he’s running after one coin." She took two coins out of the bag and went on a shopping spree. In the evening, the husband came back. Every day’s routine before dinner was that he would count the coins. Before, the priority was family, happiness, joy. Now the priority was golden coins. He counted and it was 97. He started shouting and making a fuss in the house: "Two coins! Someone stole my two coins! Who is it? Who is it?" The wife said, "I’m fed up, so I took two coins and went shopping. I bought vegetables and groceries for the next two months, so we could eat much more than chapati and onion. I had already had enough of that. I took the coins to buy vegetables, and now we have food to eat for two months." The husband said, "Don’t you see I’m working every day so hard to collect money for that one golden coin? Don’t you see how I hold on all day to earn that one gold coin? And you took two coins and went shopping?" The wife said, "It was for our own stomachs, you know, for our family. It’s not that I went and spent it for others." This continued, the fighting increased, and every few days she took one coin and another coin. So when people say money can buy happiness, you can see that it’s not so true. Later, the secretary took the king near the farmer’s house. Standing next to a tree about ten meters away with the chariot, for half an hour straight they could hear them shouting at each other. The secretary said, "This is the 99 Club." We should be grateful for what we have in our lives. We should be grateful that we have clothes to wear, a roof above our head, and a bed to sleep on. Days will come when we might have millions, and days will come when we might not even have ten euros. But we should try to be satisfied and content with whatever we have. Sādhanā, Mālā, Guru Bhakti... when you have the grace of Gurudeva... or with one pizza or anything. We should try to be okay and content with it; it doesn’t matter what we have. There were two brothers, two children, who decided they wanted to meditate from tomorrow onwards. They said, "Not tomorrow, day after tomorrow." In Hindi we have a saying which means, "What you are planning to do tomorrow, do it today, and what you are planning to do today, do it now." The elder brother woke up at 4 a.m. the next morning and started meditating. He was sitting like this, and with one eye he was opening and checking if his brother had woken up or not. Later, after he was done with his meditation, he went to his father and started shouting, "He didn’t wake up, and I was meditating, and this is not fair, and you should have woken him up!" He was just shouting. The father said, "If the result of your meditation is being jealous and angry, it was better that you continued sleeping." So instead of trying to find something wrong with someone else, try to find what is wrong within us. For us, the neighbor’s garden is always greener. The universe is full of Māyā. We are walking and our neighbor has a cycle; we will say, "Oh, I wish I had a cycle." When we have a cycle and our neighbor has a motorcycle, then we will wish for a motorcycle. Then it will be a car, then a private jet versus economy class. There are many options. This is the Māyā Jāl, the spider net of Māyā. It is very easy to get stuck in that net, and no matter how much you try to get out, it’s hard. It would be much easier to think differently. Instead of saying, "He has a cycle and I am walking," he could have thought that there are some unfortunate people who are maybe disabled and can’t even walk, so we should be grateful that at least we can walk. Instead of seeing the negative side, we can see the positive side: I am grateful that I can walk. It is written in the Upaniṣads that when we try to find faults in other people and point our fingers at others, their sins come to us. If we are wrong and they didn’t do anything, and we were blaming them, then all the sin comes to us. Even if they did something and we were still pointing fingers, half of the sin comes to us. And when we are pointing one finger at others, three fingers are pointing back at ourselves. There was a great king who wanted to do something good for the community. He decided to feed all the Brahmins and cooked beautiful food. He organized it; he didn’t cook himself, but called all the people from his kingdom and said, "Please come and eat the food." They had an open kitchen, and there was an eagle flying with a dead snake in its mouth. The snake fell into the food, the food became poisonous, and the Brahmins who ate it started to get sick. Up was the God who writes the good karmas and bad karmas, the bookkeeper. He said, "Okay, so who should I write this to? Whose fault was it? Is it the king’s fault? No, because he didn’t have bad intentions; his intention was to feed the people. The cook? Not his mistake. It fell from above. It can’t be the snake’s fault because the snake was already dead. The eagle also didn’t do it purposely; it was unintentional, it fell out of his mouth." At the same time, more Brahmins were coming into the kingdom, hearing there was Brahma Bhoj, food for the Brahmins. There was one lady there who said, "Don’t go to the kingdom. The king is trying to poison all of you and kill all of you." The bookkeeper said, "It’s the fault of the lady because she is blaming it on others, on the king, when it was not even the king’s fault." This is human nature: we are pulled towards negativity more than to the positive side. It is much easier to go into kusaṅga than to go to satsaṅg. For the kusaṅgīs, the satsaṅg is boring, and it’s much more fun for them to go and party, dance, and enjoy in the club. In everything, you can search for the negative side, but it is much better for us and for our development to search for the positive side and follow that path. Even animals can feel the energies. Once upon a time, there was a saint meditating near a beautiful lake. Every day when he meditated there, all the swans would come and gather around him. There was a hunter trying to catch those swans every day to sell them to the zoo. He was never successful. But he saw that there was one Mahātmājī sitting there, and the swans came near him, so he decided to talk to him. He went to the Mahātma and said, "Gurujī, praṇām. I have one brilliant idea for you, for the well-being of humankind and for the beautiful children who come to see the zoo. They will see these beautiful swans in the zoo. Here, only you are watching them. There, the children and everyone else will see them. All the swans are attracted to you. Could you please do me a favor?" The saint said, "What?" He said, "I will give you a net. While you are meditating, open your eyes slightly, see when the swans are near you, and throw the net on them and catch them." First, the saint said, "No, no, I will not do that." The hunter started again: "Don’t you feel bad for those children who will come to the zoo?" After a lot of convincing, the saint agreed. The next day, he started opening his eyes a little bit, not focused on his dharma of doing tapasyā, and he had ill intentions in his mind. When he opened his eyes, no swans came. The energies are so powerful that even animals can feel the difference between positive and negative energy. As human beings, we have something between our two ears and vivekā, discrimination. I think we should try to use it slightly and see which is the right path and which is the wrong path. You can go as deep as you want into the deep hole of negativity, or you can see the positive side and fly high. But it again all comes to the fourth kṛpā, which is kuṭakī kṛpā. It is our own kṛpā, our own decision what we want to do with our lives. The guru will not force you; the guru will not push you. The guru is there to show you the right path, to show you from darkness to light. He can help you as much as you want, but he is not going to hold your hand and force you towards something you personally don’t want to do. At the end of the day, it is our decision what we want to do with our lives. If our ultimate goal is to reach and become one with the Supreme Self, then I think we should try to see the positivity in everything. If we see that right path, then eventually, with the blessings of Gurudev and with proper sādhanā, proper techniques, living style, and satsaṅg, we can progress in our spiritual growth. I think today’s topic was quite clear. With this, I’d like to ask to sing the new bhajan. One second—should we repeat the mantra from yesterday? Because Swāmī Madhvarām Purījī would also like to have a flute meditation. If I teach a new mantra today, it will take slightly longer. So we can just repeat yesterday’s mantra once, scratch our heads a bit, and after our brain starts functioning, we can have a beautiful bhajan and meditation session. Hariyo na karma na na prajā yadāne na tyāge nain pare na na kām ne hitam guhāyam. You see, even without you realizing, we did the second one. Did you all have dinner? Then, some energy? Okay, so let’s do the first śloka again, but a little bit louder so I can hear you from the back, please. I hear you, I hear you. Vibhrājate tadyatayo viśanti, na karmāṇā na prajāyā dhanena, na tyāgenaike amṛtatvam ānaśuḥ. Pareṇa nākāmanī hitam guhāyām vibhrājate tadyatayo viśanti, na karmaṇā na prajāyā dhanena, na tyāgenaike amṛtatvam ānuṣaḥ. Pareṇa nākāmanī hitam guhāyām. Na karmāṇā na prajayā dhanena tyāgenaike amṛtatva mānuṣāḥ. Pareṇa nakam nihitam guhāyāṁ vibhrajate yad yatayo viṣanti. Na karmāṇā na prajayā dhanena tyāgenaike amṛtatva mānuṣāḥ. Pareṇa nakam nihitam guhāyāṁ vibhrajate yad yatayo viṣanti. Na karmāṇā na prajayāṁ na tyāgenaike amṛtatvaṁ manuṣo. Pareṇa nakam nihitam guhāyām vibhrājate tadhyatayo viśante. Om Śānti, Śānti, Śānti. Om Śālakpurījī Mahādev, Kī Jai. Devādedev, Devēśvar Mahādev, Kī Jai. Hindu Dharma Samrāṭ Paramahaṁsa Svāmī Śrī Madhavānanda Pūjya Satguru Dev. Bhagavan Kī Jai. Now the bhajan, and then Swami Madhura Purujā’s. Well, due to the many people coming to me in the past two days since we had this evening relaxation here, it seems you really like to lie down and relax. So, shall we? Yes, please, lie down. Spread your mats. Or no mats, it’s warm ground. If you have a mat, lie down on it. You have a place here, and in the front is a place if you need one. The best would be that you can look up to the sky. Try to make yourselves as comfortable as possible. Especially for our dear Anuṣṭhān friends, this will be a very welcome presentation. You know the position for Yoganidrā, but it will not be very long, so don’t worry about covering with too many blankets. Take a couple of long, deep inhalations and exhalations. Feel and relax the whole body. Feel your body from your toes to the top of your head. Become aware of the contact of your body with the floor, or better to say, the ground, the earth, the element beneath you. The earth that we call the mother, Mother Earth. Feel her warm, caring love, and that she is willing to take all the tensions out of your body, out of your mind. Just let go, relax. With every exhalation, as if the body is becoming heavier and sinking deeper down to the ground. Through the observation of your natural breath, slowly withdraw into your inner space. Let your thoughts be free, holding nothing, resisting nothing. Once you feel your body and the ground beneath, feeling your breath, you can open your eyes and look towards the sky, the vast empty space, looking up to the sky. Feel the space, be happy, and sing with me.