~~OM~~
September 2 – September 8
- During those first months in America Shree Maa said very little in English. I was Her translator, and most frequently She spoke to me in our own personal mixture of languages which I would strive to interpret into English. One day She stood in front of an altar of Goddess Kali and in extremely clear English said to the Goddess, “All right, are you going to speak or not?” We were all amazed to hear Her utterance and even more impressed when She turned around and began to speak English so sweetly and clearly that there was no further use of a translator.
– from Shree Maa: The Life of a Saint - Shree Maa: I am always happy. When you live with divinity, you are always happy. It makes me even happier when my children are happy.
– from Before Becoming This - The difference between a disciple and a devotee is that the devotee comes to sit at the feet of the Guru but doesn’t change his life. But the disciple takes the wisdom of the Guru and changes his life striving to become a mirror image of the Guru.
– from Gems of Wisdom - Ramakrishna: Protect the Divine Mother in your heart. May you see Her as I see Her and nobody else. You take away all my desires and my anger and my passion.
– from Ramakrishna: The Nectar of Eternal Bliss - Ramakrishna: Give me the eyes of wisdom as protectors so that I am always protected and always be careful not to accede to bad desires and bad thoughts.
– from Ramakrishna: The Nectar of Eternal Bliss - Currently, I like to translate dharma as the ideal of perfection, because every atom of existence has its own ideal of perfection towards which it is striving. Every individual soul is destined to manifest its own ideal of perfection. Dharma is its individual path and every individual has its own.
– from Shree Maa: The Guru and The Goddess - Swamiji is so down to earth and unpretentious that he won’t let himself get stuck in a “holy man” role. In fact, he is constantly breaking the rules about how an enlightened teacher should act. In the Tibetan tradition this is called “crazy wisdom”, a quality many great masters possess.
– from Sahib Sadhu: The White Sadhu
September 9 – September 15
- Shree Maa told us that we must work on ourselves that the desire to “fix things” or help people is part of our attachment to the idea that we have the answers and the solutions our ego.
– from Shree Maa: The Life of a Saint - Shree Maa: If you want peace, see no fault in anyone. Find all mistakes within yourself.
– from Shree Maa: The Life of a Saint - Shree Maa: If you call on God in a true and simple manner, you will know that all you are doing is divine work.
– from Shree Maa: The Life of a Saint - Whatever promotes the health and happiness of those around us can be seen as divine work.
–
- Just doing our best each moment, and completing our tasks so that we don’t leave a mess or problem for someone else to deal with, is the way to live each day fully.
– from Shree Maa: The Life of a Saint - Regular practice is important for the growth of our spiritual lives – there are no short cuts.
– from Shree Maa: The Life of a Saint - Maa’s way is to live in complete simplicity. Her whole life is statement that the important elements of life are the spiritual ones.
– from Shree Maa: The Life of a Saint
September 16 – September 22
- One of Swamiji’s main teachings is that Mother Nature is constantly changing, as is her nature. Change She will and change She must. When we identify with the changes we suffer. When we desperately try to hold on and keep the changes from happening we feel pain. Only when we learn to watch those changes with equilibrium, with the feeling in our hearts and minds that this is the nature of existence, only then do we begin to free ourselves from actions and reactions, which merely prolong the pain of attachment and sow more seeds of the same.
– from Sahib Sadhu: The White Sadhu - Shree Maa: Nowadays, there is no one doing intensive sadhana like Swamiji did so many years ago in India. One of the reasons Swamiji has come to this country is to show how to do sadhana, how to pull ourselves out of the muck of materialism and confusion.
– from Sahib Sadhu: The White Sadhu - Swamiji does not teach one spiritual technique to incorporate into life, but rather, like Shree Maa lives a deeply spiritual way of life, and teaches through his example. His concept of spiritual life is one in which we give more than we take and add value to others peoples lives.
– from Sahib Sadhu: The White Sadhu - Each moment is a festival. Each breath we take is a cause to celebrate. Each breath we take is another chance to remember God.
– from Sahib Sadhu: The White Sadhu - Swamiji is an open channel for receiving divine grace. Whoever is fortunate enough to be open to the divine flow will undoubtedly receive it. It remains up to us to direct the gift toward changing our own lives and sharing our love with all people we meet.
– from Sahib Sadhu: The White Sadhu - When you worship any of the deities, you are worshipping all the other deities.
– from Before Becoming This - Spiritual practices are valuable, because they remind us to live a spiritual life.
– from Before Becoming This
September 23 – September 29
- Worship is the bridge by which we bridge duality and non duality.
– from Gems of Wisdom - Shree Maa: It is very difficult to understand in your head. Therefore, we always say in our country to live in your heart. If you want to change your life, you can do it very quickly with your heart.
– from Before Becoming This - Shree Maa: Of all the planets with human life, this planet has the most duality. Therefore, if you perform spiritual practices, you won’t come back for a long time. Now you are thinking, “Oh, this is pleasure and pain, it’s nice.” But when you leave your body, you’ll feel free and you’ll say, “I’m going home!” If you perform good karma here, you will go to a beautiful place and you will not want to come back. But when it’s time to come back and teach people, you will.
– from Before Becoming This - Maa says, “If we are gentle, loving, kind and honest in our dealings, that is spiritual.” She teaches that true spirituality does not come wrapped in exotic packages, but in the fabric of everyday deeds and ordinary actions.
– from Shree Maa: The Life of a Saint - Practice discrimination. Ask yourself which desires will bring you closer to God and which ones will take you further away from your goal.
– from Gems of Wisdom - Our teachers are always carrying out their idea of enabling every home to be a place of worship. They show us that it is possible to know God directly through worship, meditation, study of sacred texts, and through serving others.
– from Shree Maa: The Life of a Saint - There is no one who is not on the path. Every individual soul is progressing in accordance with its own dharma. We have no right to be judgmental about others, even if it appears they lack harmony and balance.
– from Shree Maa: The Guru and the Goddess
September 30 – October 6
- A human being is one who can control his mind.
– from Gems of Wisdom - Please decipher and weigh the ultimate principles of all existence. Sort through the ultimate principles of all the ideals of creation. In order to realize the ultimate ideals of existence, life should be dedicated to spiritual discipline.
– from Gems of Wisdom - Real human life is devoted completely to spiritual evolution. In order to devote ourselves to the realization of these ultimate ideals we need to cultivate some attitudes like peacefulness. Peacefulness in your nature is the foremost amongst energies. Cultivate peace. You, yourself, will understand if your actions bring peace, or are actually leading you in another direction.
– from Gems of Wisdom - Cultivate wisdom. In order to know God, it is most efficient to study the Sanskrit language. In the Sanskrit language there is an illumination of the wisdom of the soul. From the study of Sanskrit certain attitudes arise and become illuminated. The attitude of wisdom in all ideals of perfection are One. These vibrations become apparent in the study of Sanskrit.
– from Gems of Wisdom - When you realize wisdom, then you will illuminate truth, consciousness, and bliss, within which, there exists no distinction of individual attributes. Especially among paths or ideals of perfection, no discrimination exists.
– from Gems of Wisdom - Always strive to maintain a relationship with the attitude of Truth. When we remain steadfast in the attitude of the ideal of perfection, then our ideal becomes firmly rooted in strength, our ideals become stronger. The sense of satisfaction and contentment reside within. When contentment dwells inside, then outside is characterized by the illumination of light, and we disseminate light in every direction. That illumination is the highest Ideal.
– from Gems of Wisdom - Strive to contain ego. Maintain the recollection that God within you is performing all action. Remember who you are. Who am I? I am nobody. Remembering Truth is meditation. In what ever circumstance you reside, remember who is residing there, and there will be no concept of gain or loss, difficulty or comfort.
– from Gems of Wisdom
October 7 – October 13
- Devotion and wisdom are not separate paths. If you love (bhakti) something or someone then you strive to learn (gyan) more about this object or person.
– from Gems of Wisdom - When you look at him, (Swamiji) his skin color and everything is totally dissolved, and you’re looking at the personality beyond the caste, creed and color. You see a human being who is what all world leaders and people who are working for world peace want to be. He’s not the physical self, he’s that one universal personality common to the whole world.
– from Sahib Sadhu: The White Sadhu - At the same point in his puja every day, and at a different time of day while his eyes were closed and he was performing meditaion and doing japa (reciting the mantra of the deity), a man dressed in orange clothes with an orange turban wrapped on his head went up to Swamiji and put a mala (garland of flowers) around his neck and smeared his forehead with ashes. I witnessed this daily for nine consecutive days. On the last day, Swamiji started his puja while the doors were still locked. And yet, even with the doors bolted shut, the same man still came and placed a garland around Swamiji’s neck and smeared his forehead with ashes.After we left the temple and headed back to our rooms that last morning, Shree Maa turned to us and said, “Did you see that man who put ashes on Swamiji’s forehead and put a mala around his neck?”
“Yes,” we replied.
“That man was Shiva.”
– from Sahib Sadhu: The White Sadhu - The subtle body contains the samskaras, the tendencies that formulate your next birth. It attaches itself to the causal body.
– from Before Becoming This - We have three levels of consciousness: the gross body the subtle body, and the causal body. The subtle body is called the mind, the world of thoughts, ideas and dreams. The causal body knows the totality, and that allows enlightenment. When the causal body merges into the universal, you become one with God. You become a jivanmukta, liberated while in the body.
– from Before Becoming This - Everyone is divine and an avatar of the Supreme Divinity. We just have to wake up to our divine nature.
– from Gems of Wisdom - She (Shree Maa) shared her nightly routine of feeling herself cradled in the lap of Vishnu, He who sustains and preserves all. On a wakening in the morning, she instructed us, that we were to bow to ourselves in the mirror, while acknowledging the divine energy that resides in each of us, and ask the Goddess to make our eyes her eyes, our hands her hands, and our feet her feet throughout the day.
– from Shree Maa: The Life of a Saint
October 14 – October 20
- If you raise someone up you yourself find progress. We are not climbing a ladder of success or pulling people down to reach our goal. We are networking and helping each other.
– from Gems of Wisdom - Maa explains that as the mind becomes more absorbed in mantras and one pointed that the world naturally leaves you. You do not renounce the world, the world renounces you. Old patterns knock on your door and you are not home because your mind is currently focused on God.
– from Shree Maa: The Life of a Saint - When we take birth, we come into this body with its five elements. The body is not eternal. There are five organs and five senses. When we take this body on earth, our actions are different. We forget ourselves when we live in the maya, this duality. Then a certain time comes to wake up.
– from Before Becoming This - Question: Does the Guru have a responsibility to her/his disciple.Answer: Of Course. If the Guru gives a disciple initiation, it is a big responsibility. You have to take care of the disciple for many lifetimes.
– from Before Becoming This - Hinduism says, “Yes, every object of manifested existence is divine. It can reflect divinity to anyone who wishes to perceive it. So worship God in any form you choose to see as divine.” The point is to worship, practice, meditate, contemplate and remember that there is a divine power which is superior to us.
– from Before Becoming This - You become the person your are striving to become. You can see the progress. You can watch yourself and begin to like yourself a little bit more each time you cut a bond. You feel a little bit more independence, a greater freedom every time you put aside one of those bonds of attachment.
– from Shree Maa: The Guru and the Goddess - We are endowed with maintaining the ancient traditions by acting as an example to the next generation. We should start by increasing our recovery rate. Let’s first start by cultivating enough resistance so when we fall down we pop right back up again. We are moving towards the ultimate goal of being so rooted in faith, that no one can ever shake our roots.
– from Shree Maa: The Guru and the Goddess
October 21 – October 27
- Every being manifested, and every moment that comes to birth, comes to birth because of unfinished business. There is some reason that it comes into manifestation, and the arrows we have shot will land. When the stimulus does come, do we act reflexively, or do we control ourselves and design a response that will bring us closer to what we want in the furtherance of our goals.
– from Shree Maa: The Guru and the Goddess - There are many techniques to get more control over yourself. If you can identify the emotion, you can repeat the bija mantra that corresponds to the emotion. In this way you get control of the emotion. Then you can recite the mantra of the attitude that you want to replace the emotion with.
– from Shree Maa: The Guru and the Goddess - If we act with attachment in duality, then we can only produce egotistical or attached behavior. If we surrender that action, free from attachment, we can aspire to live with the laws of universal dharma.
– from Shree Maa: The Guru and the Goddess - Maa says that from your devotion wisdom will be illuminated.
– from Shree Maa: The Guru and the Goddess - Make peace. The eternal religion is pure love, pure truth. We cannot have world peace without individual peace. Faith in wisdom and God bring the highest peace.
– from Gems of Wisdom - Ramakrishna: As long as I remain a devotee and this apprehension of “I” remains, my identification as a devotee remains. At that time I have a belief that God is a perceivable entity and that I can have a relationship with Her. But if you allow worldly ideas to intrude, then this attitude of “I am a devotee” disappears. Then you believe “I am an actor” instead of “I am a devotee.”
– from Ramakrishna: The Nectar of Eternal Bliss
October 28 – November 3
- In the Puranas it is written that Hanuman was such a strong devotee that for his benefit God assumed the form Rama.
– from Ramakrishna: The Nectar of Eternal Bliss - Chanting and studying the scriptures leads us to our divine selves and motivates us to give up our selfishness.
– from Gems of Wisdom - Question: How do you feel about debt?Answer: We are seeking freedom. When you incur debt, what you are saying is, “I am going enjoy today and pay tomorrow.” So you are obligating your self tomorrow for today’s pleasure. We would say that’s not a good idea from a spiritual point of view. If you encumber yourself for tomorrow, then you won’t be free today. You have obligated yourself to spend time working in the marketplace in order to pay for yesterday’s enjoyments. You are borrowing karma.
– from Before Becoming This
- Question: Does debt affect your mediation?Answer: Absolutely. You have to go work to do what you don’t want to do to pay off what you enjoyed yesterday.
– from Before Becoming This
- Inquiry: But even if we didn’t have debt, we’d still have to go to work to pay for lodging and food.Response: Not necessarily. You might create a different standard of life and spend less time working. Then you would work for God instead, and whatever you need will come to you.
– from Before Becoming This
- When the contemplations rise to the throat, the vishudhi chakra, all ignorance and all foolishness are renounced in favor of listening to the Eternal Truth of God and Words of Wisdom.
– from Ramakrishna: The Nectar of Eternal Bliss - The sixth residence (of consciousness) is the Ajna chakra in the forehead. If your awareness goes there, you have Eternal Vision of the Supreme Divinity. Still a little “I” remains.
– from Ramakrishna: The Nectar of Eternal Bliss