HOW TO RECEIVE GRACE?

 

You could never become enlightened without the Grace of Divinity. You cannot even move a finger without the Grace of Divinity, and enlightenment itself is Grace. With the Grace from Divinity, which pours in you and through you, you become that Grace. How can you become that Grace or receive Grace if you do not do anything about it? If you are hungry, you have to eat food. If you are thirsty, you have to drink water, so action is involved in drawing Grace. The flower grows through the Grace of God, but you still have to nurture the flower. You have to use fertiliser and water it, and prune and all these things must be done for the flower to grow.

You are all beautiful flowers. Some perhaps a bit wilted. Ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine percent of the human flowers in the world are wilted. We have to admit that. Because to have that infinite Grace and be filled with Grace, you are perfected in the relative sense. We have to nurture the flower of this human life through spiritual practices. We make ourselves ready, and then Grace automatically comes. Never aim for Grace or demand Grace. Then you will become a beggar. “O Lord, give me your Grace.” You are Divine. You do not need to be a beggar; you are a King.

YOU HAVE TO PREPARE YOURSELF

This beggar was a Sage, and the King heard so much about this poor man. The Sage was a beggar, but he was such a spiritual giant. The King heard about him and invited the beggar to his Palace. Very reluctantly, this beggar went to the Palace. As he was shown into the Palace, he had to wait in the Anteroom until the King was ready to receive him, but the door was slightly ajar, and he heard the King praying, “O Lord give me greater wealth in my treasury. O Lord, give me greater lands. Let my Empire grow more and more. O Lord, grant me this and give me that.”

This beggar was listening to the King, and when the King came out, he spoke to the King a bit and started walking away. So, the King says, “Please, great Sage, do not walk away from the Palace; I will give you anything you ask for”. So, the beggar replied, “I do not beg from beggars”.

You do not need to beg, but you have to prepare yourself. You do not need to pray for the fresh air to come into this hall, open the windows, and your spiritual practices will open the windows. The readiness must be within us; everything will come, and those deserving will receive more. The more you deserve, the more you will get. Never demand and never beg. It does not work. I have said this before, make your garden beautiful. You do not need to call the butterflies. If a garden is beautiful, the butterflies come on their own. You cannot demand or command the butterflies to come. So, we do our spiritual practices to integrate our bodies, minds and Spirits.

WHERE IS GRACE?

Grace is not outside you at all, and Grace is within you. Grace is another name for God, and another name for God is the Spirit, the Kingdom of Heaven within, the Spirit, that is, Grace.

When our mind is concentrated through our spiritual practices, when our mind is one-pointed, and our bodies, through our practices, become calm and receptive. The contrary thoughts that lead us away from Divinity no longer existent. That does not mean you blank out your mind. It means that through our every moment of the day, the remembrance of Divinity is there, and with practice, it becomes automatic. I drink this glass of water, and I am drinking God. I eat food; I am eating God. How can I, this little “I”, eat God? No, it is God combining himself with God himself.

That only comes from the realisation within us that “I am Divine, and everything around me is also Divine.” It is just through concentration, and one-pointedness of the mind with the help of your Tratak practices, that you can become firm in the belief first and then the knowledge and then the realisation that no things are apart. There is nothing apart, and everything is in its oneness. The most extraordinary illusion man suffers from is the sense of his duality or his apartness.

THE SENSE OF APARTNESS DEVELOPS FRICTION

When that sense of apartness develops, friction develops. All problems in your home or with friends, or in the community or the country, or one country warring against each other is because the Hindustani thinks he is different from the Pakistani, or the Arab thinks he is different from the Jew, or the Englishman believes he is different from the German. It is not true. This is the illusion that man has created with his mind. Yet that very mind taken to its proper height and subtler level can make one realise that this mind, too, in its imaginary relative form, is also Divine.

Do not search for God somewhere up there. What is up there is down here? In actual realisation, a combination is formed of that up and that down. It is only a matter of vision; therefore, it is an illusion. If you are standing up, this will look down, and if you are standing down here, that will look up. But if the two are combined, there is no up and no down. It is just here and now as we breathe, and every breath you take is nothing else but the Grace of God. Every morsel of food you chew is the Grace of God. Every time you take a footstep, it is the Grace of God.

SPIRITUAL PRACTICES ARE NECESSARY TO BECOME SELF-REALISED

God can be defined in so many ways. To me, God is very subtle energy pervading everything existing. Some people that believe in Maya or illusionism say this world is unreal, and I say no, this world is not unreal because how can unreality ever exist in reality? If God is omnipresent and omnipotent, where is there a place for unreality? So, you are real, and I am real; God is real because we are all nothing but God, in other words, Grace.

Spiritual practices are essential to becoming self-realised. You are preparing the way. You are sweeping the path so that that almighty, ever-existing, eternal Grace could embrace you. That path does not lead outside, it leads inside, but there are all the impurities that clutter the way to the royal inside. Spiritual practices cleanse the path. No homemaker is going to cook a nice meal in a dirty pot. She has to scrub the pot first with steel wool. You got to scrape to clean the pot, and sometimes the scraping process might be hurting the pot. Who knows? It is also made of the same molecules that you are made of. Everything has a feeling, though not expressed, because it has no mind. So, when we start on the spiritual path and scrape away all the dirt accumulated through many, many lifetimes, perhaps or even in this lifetime, it is not easy. Therefore, one has to have perseverance, grit, and determination.

WE TEACH HOW TO COMBINE SPIRITUALITY WITH MATERIALITY

As you know, in anything in your worldly life, being a success in your business or whatever job profession or being a successful housewife or a mother, you have to work hard to achieve your goals. These are worldly ambitions. Read the business theories of people like Andrew Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Henry Ford, Paul Getty, multi, multi-billionaires, and others. You will find that they worked to achieve what they wanted to achieve, and they achieved that. But their attention was only aimed at external things. Their attention was not aimed at eternal things, and none of these people was happy. Henry Ford died shivering in the cold, and despite all his millions, there was not a single person to help him at the end when he was suffering.

We teach how to combine the inner self with the outer self and integrate spirituality with materiality until you make that very external materiality be spirituality too. We teach how you deal with it and how you can realise the factor within yourself that everything is Divine. Jesus said, “Give to Caesar what belongs to him and God what belongs to God.” They were two sides of the same coin. Do you see how Caesar’s wealth and God’s Grace are combined in that one coin?

WE ARE ALL SEEKING HAPPINESS

Life itself has its heads and tails. All the scrubbing we do with our spiritual practices can bring us greater and greater joy within ourselves, for there is not a single person on earth that is not seeking happiness. They all want happiness. But if thinking is wishful thinking, then happiness will not come. Happiness requires effort. If the husband does not try to make an effort to be nice to his wife, there will be squabbles and vice versa. Every time the wife says an angry word, perhaps the husband will fight against it. Why did you say this to me and blah, blah, blah? Why does the husband not think that if the wife says an angry word to him, have I not also had a hand in it? I must have done something that makes her angry. As the saying goes, if you love your wife and she loves you, you will know that you are one soul in two bodies. You are one.

… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang UK 1984 – 11