The Window and the Door

There’s another kind of a stupid thing, that people ask you to meditate here [Shri Mataji points to her Agnya Chakra]. Is absolutely wrong. ... Nobody should put attention here. Instead, put attention at the Door [Shri Mataji is putting her hand onto her Sahasrara Chakra]. What’s the use of looking at a window? You can’t get out of it, can you? If you have to look at anything be on a lookout for the Door. And the Door is here. The Door of Sahasrara is to be opened out.

H.H.Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, extract from Talk at Shri Krishna Puja, Switzerland, 23/8/86

This remark by HH Mataji makes one think of other things. The hundreds and thousands of seekers and others who are interested in yoga - and meditation, too. Many people come to know of Sahaja Yoga accidentally, while looking for 'something' for relaxing; or for relieving stress; or boredom or any of the different silent ailments that beset our modern society. Then when they realise what Sahaja Yoga can do for them; or better still how important they are in the eyes of God; or how much they can do for their own good and welfare and that of others, they ( I should be saying, we) are genuinely surprised.
We truly start off with fuzzy ideas about God, and ourselves in the pursuit of truth. But it's so wonderful as the wool comes off the eys, bit by bit. That is what is so wonderful about Shri Mataji's teaching and her unique way and powerful way of making us to become our own masters. There are so many people out there pulling wool over the eyes of seekers! Thank God we have someone we trust just like one's own mother.
Like she says: "What’s the use of looking at a window? You can’t get out of it, can you?" Of course, not. But like Christ said: "Seek and ye shall find". Mother points the way to the door. But so many people are stuck at the window, trying to get out - or to get in. And getting ripped off in the process. Not only in terms of their hard-earned money, but also paying heavily with their trust, with their emotions, with their vibrations and their chakras getting damaged in the process. For me Sahaja Yoga has been a simple way to get to know myself better and to find within myself the resources I never ever dreamt were there. I have found peace - or am in the process of discovering the peace within myself, bit by bit, as I master the meditation techniques put at my disposal by Our Mother's teaching for free.
This has not only benefitted myself and my family, but I am now aware of lots of other people and my country, too, who have been beneficiaries of the empowerment I have been exposed to.
Like She says: "If you have to look at anything be on a lookout for the Door".
Makes sense, doesn't it?

A seventh continent composed of waste

I came across this in Sahajsangham, the Francophone Sahaj group and resorted to a Google translation. It's not perfect but it gives the general idea. I also found the URL to the original article.

Enjoy and put attention on problem.

Bokwe

Translation: French » English
Thursday, 3 April 2008 (21h05):

A seventh continent composed of waste Saturday, 29 March 2008

In the North Pacific, ocean currents carry millions of tons of plastic. Their accumulation now covers an area six times as big as France. If Christopher Columbus took today Wednesday with his three caravels from Palos de la Frontera [on the Atlantic Coast of Andalusia] and crossed the Atlantic, it does not stop on the coast of the Americas, since has already discovered there are five hundred and sixteen years. He crossed the Panama Canal in search of India, its original destination. But that does not reach there because, midway, it would fall on a new continent.

This is the "Great plate waste in the Pacific", the "seventh continent", which is currently training between the coasts of Hawaii and North America, from millions of tons of plastic litter carried by the ocean currents. In this region of the globe, currents, turning it clockwise, create an endless spiral, a powerful vortex which swirl waste plastic as the wind does with paper bold in a corner of a place. The vortex, or subtropical gyre of the North Pacific, accumulating for years of plastic
waste from land or from navigation, resulting in its rotation, and the centripetal force, bringing towards its center, an area of low energy kinetics of 3.43 million square kilometers (one third of Europe and more than six times France).

There are already in this part of the ocean six tonnes of plastic a ton of plankton. The ratio between plastic and plankton is frightening, particularly as it is not just waste surface on most of its surface, the layer of plastic garbage this whirlwind reached a thickness up to 30 meters.

Not yet strong enough so that you walk over the formation of this "seventh continent" is not a recent problem, but it is not concerned that there are few. It represents an important area of the ocean, is a sparsely attended by shipping. There is no pleasure yachts, not exploitation by industrial fisheries, and there are only a few tiny islands here and there.

For ten years we assumed the existence of a high concentration of plastic in the area, and Greenpeace gave the warning on several occasions, but it was unclear the extent of the problem until an environmental organization on the west coast of USA, Algalita Marine Research Foundation (FDMA), publish these figures after a survey
conducted over the last ten years. We can not even walk on this huge cake of waste, as Jesus did on water, but the motion makes each day more compact. Its declassification in habitable land is not for tomorrow, but the Earth, or rather the ocean, will face a serious problem.

For now, according to figures confirmed by Greenpeace, there are in this region of the Pacific 3.3 million waste of any size for 1 square km of ocean. The total mass of this "continent" is estimated at 3.5 million tonnes, mostly plastic. According to calculations by the FDMA, the area of the plate of garbage has tripled between 1997 and today, and could be multiplied tenfold by 2030.

Litter that poison the whole food chain damage to marine life will soon be irreparable, warn experts. Indeed, plastics are not biodegradable (their average lifespan exceeds five hundred years) and, over time, they simply fall apart in pieces smaller and smaller without changing their molecular structure of one iota.

Thus warning of huge quantities of sand a kind of plastic, for animals, has all the appearances of food. These plastics, impossible to digest and difficult to remove, and accumulate in the stomachs of fish and seabirds, which eventually die from malnutrition. Moreover, these grains of plastic act as sponges, fixing many toxins in proportions millions of times higher than normal, such as DDT (

dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, a pesticide) and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), extremely toxic products. The spillover effects can spread through the food chain and affect humans. Greenpeace has identified at least 267 marine species severely affected by this kind of poisoning.

This problem would have a solution, certainly worthy of the twelve labors of Hercules, but our production of plastics continues to grow at an exponential rate, and would require a radical change of habits. The technique of disposal of these plastics has been known for millennia: the trawl. The task could be entrusted to an important part of the
fishing fleet, which saw its fishery resources decline edging. But the recovery of millions of tons of plastic would cost several billion euros.

S. Basco in the ABC 25/03/2008

Maha Saraswati Tattwa

This feeling that you are Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Brahma samajis etc., has no base. You are nothing but a human being, you are born a human. You have branded yourself that you are something. You are neither Bengali nor Marathi. You are just a human being. By branding yourself you create more problems. This brand becomes so important that you cannot see anything beyond it. Till this catch does not release this blindness will not go because you see everything in such away that only your way is right. In the west it is even more so. If you put anything into their brains and tell them that are good, then they will follow it blindly. The critics there also criticize every art form so much. Another critic will refute what the first critic has refuted. Nothing comes to you from within yourself and your brain. Whatever others have filled in is accepted. Each is branded. By this the ego rises and a person thinks that he is very great personality and very unique from others. He becomes an individual. The essence of truth is that we are all one, are Whole, are a totality. When we go in the opposite to it then you become individualistic and go on becoming more and more separate. This is true that one leaf does not resemble another but all of them are on the same tree. They are all a part and parcel of the Virata. When we separate ourselves then the Swaraswati tattwa, which should become Maha Swaraswati tattwa does not.

When you live in the MahaSaraswati tattwa you start seeing in your daily life that you are the Whole, and we are one. So when an artist creates he makes some such things that one accepts from the heart. All the works that we do of Saraswati should be dedicated and surrendered to the Divine. If this happens then all such works will be immortal. All poems, music, songs, art forms which were offered in the name of God are still living today. Like today’s film music comes and dies down. But the songs of Kabir, Gyaneshwara are still remembered. Through their self-realization they obtained the MahaSaraswati Shakti and whatever they wrote or created that light was of a unique kind. These were creations that united the world into one. One should not only move on Saraswati tattwa as this limits you. One should move on the MahaSaraswati tattwa. If Saraswati tattwa is the seed then the tree is MahaSaraswati. Till you do not make this seed into the MahaSaraswati till then you cannot merge with MahaLakshmi. The gift of MahaLakshmi within you is that you get your self-realization. All the three, MahaLakshmi, MahaSaraswati, and MahaKali, meet at Agnya.

H.H.Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, Shri MahaSaraswati Puja, Calcutta, India, 3/2/92

The powers of a person who is born again

Now what are the powers of a person who is born again? First of all, such a person is a tranquil, peaceful person; he becomes automatically righteous, automatically. I don’t have to tell you, “Don’t do this and don’t do that.” That’s finished now with Moses. No more of that. As soon as you become the Spirit, you just give up all those things that are destructive for us, automatically. No pressures are needed, no warning is needed, nothing of the kind, automatically, because the spirit is the light, you get your enlightenment. Supposing I am holding a snake in my hand, and it’s not light. Somebody tells me it’s a snake, I say, “No, it’s a rope, I am holding on to a rope.” But when there is a light I just drop it. In a simple way, nobody has to tell me, I see the light and it drops out. In the same way, you are an enlightened person. You can make out what is truth and what is untruth. For example, you see someone, even from Indian jails, some people who have just come out of jails, they don’t know what to do with themselves. So they walk out with saffron clothes to Germany, maybe to Australia also, and they become great babajis here. Now these great babajis sit on some of the important places in the city and everybody is surrounding them, giving them money, giving them their lives, you see, all big talk of love going on and everything. Is he a realized soul or not? How will you find out? You don’t know whether he’s a realized soul or not because you are not at an absolute point. You are still in a relative understanding. Because this person is wearing this kind of a dress, is sitting very quietly there, so he must be a babajii. You cannot recognize a person, whether a person is true or not. You can’t recognize me, either, whether I am telling you the truth or not. Unless and until you become that absolute being, you cannot make it out. Then what happens, that when the kundalini rises and pierces through your fontanel bone area, then you also start feeling on your fingertips – these fingertips are nothing but the sympathetic nervous system centers, which are indicating of the truth. If the person has got cool wind or cool breeze coming from that person, then he is a real one. If he doesn’t have, then he is not. There are many persons who claim to be great, but they are not – ultimately we find out and we are shocked the way they are. We don’t know, how is it our brain has failed, how is it our brilliance did not show clearly what was wrong with this gentleman? Because we are not that. We have to accept humbly that we are still at a human awareness and we have to be at a spiritual awareness. That’s the dimension we have to get, otherwise we cannot judge things properly.

In this country now we have certain problems, in this whole world we have problems – problems of atom bomb, every day you are hearing about this problem and that problem: all created by human beings. Imagine, intelligent, such good people have created problems for themselves: killing each other, preparing bombs and things like that; protecting each other – I mean, no animal does that. Only human beings are trying to protect themselves from each other. They’re all the time worried who is going to attack them; not sure of themselves. The reason is they haven’t reached that state of absoluteness. The time has come now, the time has come for you either to take to constructive working out of the problem, or the destructive. By discussions, by arguments, by anything you are not going to achieve anything unless and until there’s a complete transformation in the human mind. And transformation is only possible when you become the Spirit, because Spirit is the universal being within you. And you become collectively conscious – means, you start a universal feeling; you just start feeling another person on your fingertips. And if you know how to correct it, you have corrected that person. This is only the play of love of God; it’s so simple, even children can do it. Many children when they put their fingers in their mouth or their thumbs in their mouth, according to Mr. Freud it’s something nonsense, but according to us they are suggesting what centers you are catching. To understand your own children you have to be a realized soul because the understanding is still not matured. Unless and until you become a realized soul, you are not a mature personality to judge anything. At that level, whatever you judge will have another point of view. You can take ten small children who are realized souls – we have many like that – and hide their eyes. Now ask them, “What’s the wrong with this particular person?” They will all raise one finger meaning this, or this finger. If this finger, means that person feels guilty for nothing at all (it’s the Vishuddhi on the left-hand side) or the right, means he talks too much and he has problems here.

This knowledge becomes your own. This is one of the powers I have described to you that you feel the collective consciousness within yourself. Whatever you achieve in your evolution is a living process. It is not a dead process, it’s a living process by which your central nervous system can feel what is around you, what is within you. What you call the parasympathetic nervous system gets activated, and you can understand the parasympathetic while, if there are any doctors they will tell you that they don’t know much about parasympathetic. Now all these things happen to you and even if you are a child, you can manage the show.

The second power that you get is that you can raise the kundalini of another person like one enlightened light can enlighten another person. But we cannot deal with people who are nasty, who are superficial, who are stupid, not meant for that. It is meant for people who are seekers, who are intense: they are the chosen ones and they are called as ‘seekers’ nowadays. They might be drug addicts, or they might be anything – doesn’t matter. They have been truly seeking; they have taken something wrong as right or they might have done some mistakes – doesn’t matter. Everything is forgiven. They will get what they want because they have been intensely seeking, truly wanting to be the Spirit. This is the pure desire of the person that works out – not a person who is just wanting it for the sake of some sort of a selfish or some sort of a power-oriented ideas.

Now the third power one gets is this, that a person becomes absolutely dynamic. He works very hard in the office time; he can do things which he has never done before. I know of somebody who has never done anything artistic, suddenly he started painting. I know another one who has never known what is poetry because he’s a chartered accountant; he has been dealing with money all the time. Suddenly he started writing poetry, that too in Urdu language which is such a difficult thing. Such dynamism one develops.

Talk by Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, who founded Sahaja Yoga, Public Program Brisbane, 5 May 1987

ON ATTENTION AND BARAK OBAMA

On the 25th October i received an e-mail from a yogi brother in the US, who wrote and said:


"Bandhans for Obama, this one looks (like)the forces of good vs the forces of evil, and what a statement will be made, so soon after the murders of MLK, Malcolm X etc, the USA elects its first black president. Commentators here are referring to this as the 'post racial era'. Let's hope they are right."

This morning, I wrote back to him saying :

Remember what you wrote to me some time back?
I then quoted the above statement from his e-mail, and continued to say:

So they were right, and your wish has been granted. So this is the beginning and let's work together for the process to take shape properly with our attention.

It is so important for us to realise what we can achieve with our attention. HH Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi has spoken a lot about the power of our attention. When people have achieved Self-Realisition their attention is also enlightened by the Spirit. The consequences of this change are tremendous and we can enhance our ability to become agents of change - as Obama has been calling on American people (and other citizens of the world) to become. What does HH Shri Mataji say on Attention?

19.3.08
Global Attention
Advice given by H.H.Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi:

"So now our attention should be global. If Sahaja Yogis put their attention, you see, global, you don't know your powers, how important it is. Just put your attention now, say, to South Africa in the Natal where they are having all these problems of suppression. It will help - very much help, you don't know. Things will subside because through you this all-pervading power, paramchaitanya, will focus itself there. You are the one who can focus. You should have your global attention there and you should see for yourself very serious problem. I'm doing on My own whatever is possible. For that you must read newspapers, but not all the nonsense of the newspaper, but see where is the problem is, what is happening. Because you're in Sydney , but you're responsible for the whole world. Wherever you are, you are responsible for the whole world."
(Talk at Picnic in Lane Cove River Park, near Sydney, Australia, 5/4/94)

“But it is important for you to know, that now you're not an individual but you have become a global personality, a global personality. You are not an individual, you are a global personality and sitting down here, you are working out all the global problems. You are not a small person now, who is only worried about your own children, about your family, about this and that - no. This mind of yours has expanded - expanded like this that it works automatically for all the problems of the world. You know for a woman, I read newspapers, especially women seldom read newspapers; they think it is stupidity to read newspapers. But I read and I read those where my attention is needed. I've seen it works, but all of you put together, if you understand, that it is your responsibility to correct all the destructive forces, to put them right, you just have to collectively meditate on the points where you find there is a big problem. Now the problem mainly is because of religions.”
(Easter Puja, Istanbul, Turkey, 1994)

Here in South Africa, people are also hoping for Change. The US elections were followed very closely and with great interest. In fact all over Africa Obama's election has become a beacon of hope for chage. Can we translate that into reality? Yes we can. If we beleive what HH Shri Mataji is revealing to us about our potential to become agents of change. It would be interesting to relate little things we think we have achieved just with using our own attention. It's going to be coming soon from this space. So watch this space! Attention! On your marks! Get Ready.....

I shall remember for a long time

I shall remember for a long time my first trip from Victoria Station to Oxted (Surrey), where Shri Mataji is living. I am sitting in a second class coach of one of those cute little British trains, considering half afraid and half amused: “Hey Greg you might be on your way to find the grail in your cute little blue and yellow train or you might put yourself in a mess once again. Well, she sounded quite nice on the phone”. The train reaches Oxted. I register a couple of fast heart beats but I am more excited than anxious. Somebody is waiting for me at the station: he looks pretty normal. Through a lovely and quiet countryside, I walk to HH Mataji’s home. I ring the bell: the ddor opens. HH Mataji comes into the hall. “Mes hommages Madame”… I offer my homage. I had bought flowers at Victoria Station.

What happens when I meet HH Mataji is rather stupefying. In a few minutes I feel I am known by somebody who makes me feel like “back home” or “the return of the prodigal child”. I am welcomed by somebody endowed with essential goodness, simplicity and love. It is difficult to express these feelings. I do not know HH Mataji and yet I know her. For the first time, since a long , long time I feel completely relaxed and begin to speak to her with absolute confidence and simplicity.

She is asking me questions about my family, my health and why I have only a little shirt because I am going to catch a cold. I answer. I tell also that I have been looking for something, it is truth I guess, but I have not found it and I am tired. She smiles. She says smilingly, “I will have to test you.”I burst out laughing, “Oh you can test” – How was the travel? – the travel was alright. We take a cup of tea. Her voice is so sweet, so tender. I can feel she is absolutely honest. I am wrapped in a deep, soothing motherly love. And I become very fond of her. Everything is so simple. Everything will be alright. The house is silent. Sunshine enters through the window. She says she knows me. I know she does. She does: it is strange and beautiful. Within myself, something resurrects, something I had almost forgotten: my own goodness, my own dignity. I am so very happy. Peace has come in me. Mataji who are you? She wears a white saree.

We did not spend hours talking. After some time I entered a new state of consciousness in the only way that my intelligence could accept: I knew that this little mind could not comprehend Reality but that Reality should comprehend it. It roughly happened this way.

Extract from ‘The Advent’ by Gregoire de Kalbermatten:

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