An old year is gone by and a new year has come, and people joyfully celebrate the arrival of the new year. Do you know how many centuries have elapsed since the history of mankind? There is no use turning back and watching the road traversed – your duty is to watch the road ahead and march steadily towards your goal. It is lack of faith that causes you to lose temper and fly into fits of anger; it is lack of faith in yourself and in others. If you see yourself as truly the undefeatable Divine Self and everyone around you as your reflections, just as the scriptures declare them to be, you will never be provoked to get angry. What you must resolve today in the auspicious New Year is to march steadily on the spiritual path to manifest your Divinity. Resolve to do this one thing – Practice first, and then preach!
Baba talks here about history, centuries have elapsed since the history of mankind. When we contemplate his words it is always a question how to see it in our own life, in thinking about our own birthday we somehow compare inside his words with our own life and that is how we can start to think it over seeing it in our own life, what is the main issue really to get a feeling for his words and what about our history?
If we see the centuries elapsed, the history of mankind and he mentions here that there is no turning back and watching the road in traverse, it is our duty to watch the road ahead of us marching steadily towards the goal.
We can ask ourselves, do we know the goal?
An old year is gone by and a new year has come, and people joyfully celebrate the arrival of the new year. Do you know how many centuries have elapsed since the history of mankind? There is no use turning back and watching the road traversed – your duty is to watch the road ahead and march steadily towards your goal.
We have here two things. The past that is over and history, but we have to be aware of the history and we have to look forward at the road ahead and walk towards the goal. What is different to our state of awareness in the West? Usually we don't know the goal. We are born and we think we live until death, that is not a goal.
We try to forget that we have a goal or that we go somewhere, we just live our life and hope never to die, but everybody has to die, therefore, it is not really in the mind of the Westerners to know the goal.
It is great to know there is a goal and we have to go ahead towards that goal, we have to march towards the goal. We should inquire about it and what we know about the goal we have to reach. The question is not only, who am I? The question is also, where do we go? We have to know the goal and why are we here. These are questions we have to be able to answer.
Swami asked us once in the interview room, 'why are you here?' And we didn't know the answer, because he asked, why did you come here? Why did we go to the ashram in India. And he gave the answer, he said, 'self-realization'.
In that time I was sitting in Darshan and tried to get a feeling for it and in about every Darshan I wondered how it was possible to feel only love and that there was that much love that it felt like the universe was only love, that is not really what we are living in the West, isn't it, to experience the huge universe as love. It was kind of amazing and no wonder that there were lots of people in his presence, that ashram was so big and always more people came to his ashram.
What we will find in most people around us is ignorance about the goal, we don't go consciously and aware into our next life or into liberation. We are born and we know we have to die, but we don't know anything about it, that is kind of normal in a Western mind.
So we have to ask ourselves if we know that there is a goal and how far we are able to see the goal.
It is lack of faith that causes you to lose temper and fly into fits of anger; it is lack of faith in yourself and in others. If you see yourself as truly the undefeatable Divine Self and everyone around you as your reflections, just as the scriptures declare them to be, you will never be provoked to get angry.
In that sentence he talks about bad tempers and that some people get into fits of rage and I always think how awful if we have to live like that. Some days ago it was warm and a beautiful day and the window was open in the afternoon and someone in the neighborhood was shouting as loud as he could, it was a man's voice and I thought, how glad I am that I don't have to be with that guy who was shouting around in such a loud way that everybody in the neighborhood knows now that he has a serious problem and some time later, when his voice was again loud, we heard the echo of a female voice also trying to be as loud as he was and what was less nice, the voice of a child in it as well. Now when the windows will be open again we hear all kinds of things, and it feels like these people are unable to enjoy the beautiful sunshine, the warmth of the divine light.
When listening to Swami's words we get aware of it why we don't need to fly into fits of anger and it is only lack of faith in ourselves and in others. If we would be aware that we are the undefeatable or as we also called it, invincible Divine Self and everyone around us is just a reflection, there would be no need for anger.
It is lack of faith that causes you to lose temper and fly into fits of anger; it is lack of faith in yourself and in others. If you see yourself as truly the undefeatable Divine Self and everyone around you as your reflections, just as the scriptures declare them to be, you will never be provoked to get angry.
That is a wonderful truth. But Swami is mentioning here as declared by the scriptures it is an undefeatable divine self and everyone around us is our own reflection and when it is about scriptures, it is about self-realized higher authority and if everybody is just a reflection of our own self and in the essence we are all one, how can there be any anger provoked. But we need to get aware of the underlying oneness to be able to see it in that way and when we see the truth of it, when we have truth in our thoughts, the right action will be the reflection of it.
What you must resolve today in the auspicious New Year is to march steadily on the spiritual path to manifest your Divinity. Resolve to do this one thing – Practice first, and then preach!
What is he telling us for the new year, if we just start a new year or if we have had our birthday just now, that we should resolve for this one thing, first we practice and then we preach! With other words without practice, we cannot preach and when we have practice, we need to think it over to get to the right conclusion first to even be able to preach.
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