Disc 136 Track 2. Swamiji says: Only when God’s grace falls on you, does your discrimination [viveka] awaken.

 To listen to Swamiji speaking, please fully open the post, and then click HERE. 

‘All love comes from God, and belongs to God.’

This track follows on some of the thoughts on its immediate predecessor, Disc 136 track 1, on grace and discrimination

Swamiji: There is one thing missing – and that’s the grace of God. Without the grace of God, even satsang will not give you discrimination. Swamiji says: you may ask me how I’m telling you something like this? Does the scripture say this? Yes, says Swamiji, it does. In many places it tells you that. Hundreds of places it’s told you that. Only when God’s grace falls on you, then your discrimination [viveka] will come through satsang.

What’s the meaning of satsang? It means ‘he who deals with truth’. Swamiji tells the story [I’m paraphrasing it here] of Tulsidas finding the corpse of a Brahmin on a riverbank. In the story, Tulsidas was travelling when he came across a funeral procession for a Brahmin, and the late man’s widow bowed down to him. Tulsidas asked her why she was bowing to him, to which she replied, ‘O lord, I bow to you, because you are the husband of Ratnavali’. Tulsidas was deeply, overly devoted to Ratnavali and aware that his attachment, his obsessive love for her had blinded him, and that he should instead redirect his love to Lord Rama. 

This story highlights Tulsidas’s spiritual awakening and his renunciation of worldly desires, to dedicate his life to God.

Now tell me, says Swamiji, when Tulsidas came across the Brahmin’s funeral procession and he stopped to speak to the widow, what kind of sangha was he looking for? You want to know that answer? Was he not lust-conscious? Was he not wife-conscious? Was he looking for God? He was not [at that stage] at all conscious about it. 

And tell me, when Valmiki [who was a hunter in his early life] went shooting, what kind of a satsang was he looking for? [Click HERE for more on Valmiki’s background].

It just happens that God’s grace falls on you. And out of the wife’s mouth [to her husband on his revival by Valmiki] came the words, ‘Oh, if you had one hundredth of the devotion for God, that you have for this [her] body, filth and dirt, that will die one day, you will go across the ocean of this world.’ 

Then suddenly, in him awoke discrimination. The truth of the words of his wife, dawned on him. So you see, although he was looking for lust, when God’s grace comes, it becomes satsang.

Says Swamiji: In the Bhagavad Gita, it’s also written, that no matter how great a sinner a person is – he can be the greatest sinner, but once he resolves to take to God’s name, know him to be a holy man. 

But let’s look at this. Say I kill fifty thousand people, and one day I decide to take God’s name. You think I’ll forget it [my sins] overnight? It can’t happen, because the habit is like smoking a cigarette. Even if you take a sweet and chew it [as a distraction], you’re thinking of smoking the cigarette. The habit is still there. 

That man will still make certain mistakes, because of his past karmas, samskaras [past birth impressions]. But nevertheless, God will not let him down. God says, I am seated in their heart. In the Bhagavad Gita again he said, I am seated in their hearts and disperse the darkness through wisdom. 

Original Sanskrit: 

“तेषां सततयुक्तानां भजतां प्रीतिपूर्वकम् । ददामि बुद्धियोगं तं येन मामुपयान्ति ते ॥”

Translation: 

‘To those who are constantly devoted to serving Me with love, I give the understanding by which they can come to Me. To show them special mercy, I, dwelling in their hearts, destroy with the shining lamp of knowledge the darkness born of ignorance’.

Without knowledge, you cannot get God, says Swamiji. And without love, you cannot get wisdom. So man must give love and God will give the knowledge. But it is God’s love [divine and unconditional], it is not man’s [conditional] love. That, man must understand. You think you give your son, your daughter, your wife, love? Where did the love come from? Whose love is that? It is God’s love, given back to God Himself. That does not mean that the man on the [spiritual] path won’t make any mistakes. He will make mistakes. But God, who is seated in his heart, at the right time, God will correct him.

An example is given here of Bilwa Mangal, the son of a Brahmin. The father died, but Bilwa was in love with a particular woman [put bluntly, a prostitute]. He was very impatient during all the funeral rituals for his late father, to get away to see his lover. The pandits told him that after the rituals and ceremonies, as is custom, he should remain at home. But Bilwa Mangal somehow sneaked out. 

That day there was a huge storm, with thunder and lightning. But his mind was so concentrated on seeing the paramour that he loved – who was not his wife – that he braved the weather. But when he got to the in-flood river, he found he couldn’t cross it. He begged people to take him across, but they refused. Suddenly he saw a log floating by. He grabbed the log and held onto it and managed to get to the opposite bank. 

When he got to the woman’s premises, he found the gate locked. He jumped over the wall. The woman’s name was Chintamani. She was horrified that he’d come there on the day of his late father’s funeral rituals. What you have done, is not good, she said. You should have stayed at home. Haven’t you got any sense? Swamiji says some people might think she was being very hard on Bilwa, after all his efforts to get to her. [But see God’s grace in action here in the middle of committing the sin]. 

She said in great anger, ‘If this love that you give to me, a woman who is not even worthy to be seen in public, if you gave it to God, Lord Krishna Bhagavan, your position would have been different.’ So, like with the earlier story about Tulsidas, she was the instrument of his ‘conversion’ in thinking, and his rehabilitation, rather than his downfall.

The free-to-read or download, 396 page Flipbook version of Swamiji’s biography is available by clicking HERE. If you’d prefer the PDF version, please click HERE.

These recordings or the excerpts from them, were made from the early 1970s onward, by Mother Radha, a close devotee of Swamiji’s and edited for uploading here by our gurubhai and her son, Brother Tim. Please be mindful that what Swamiji was saying may have been specific to an individual or a group of people with him, at the time.