Talks Excerpt 458. Swamiji says: God will not forgive you if you are cheating or lying.
From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.
[At a Yoga Camp/Spiritual Retreat]. Swamiji: Sri Ramakrishna said that once a year we should go into solitude, into quietness and there, whole-heartedly worship God. So we have these Yoga Camps, not to cure any disease, not to give us wealth in the form of material things, but to yearn and cry for God.
We must be like Bhakta Prahlada, like Druva and like other bhaktas and childlike saints who continuously called on God.
For three or four days, we should go into solitude and try, as far as possible, to forget the world completely and to remember God alone. Cry to Him to give you bhakti [devotion] – unmotivated pure love to His Lotus Feet – and to give you jnana, knowledge of God. Knowledge of God only comes when you are dissatisfied with your present condition, and when you know that there is something greater than this transitory world.
We meet at these Yoga Camps for this reason. We try to study the scriptures, to sing bhajans and kirtans, to do japa and meditation, so that our minds get a taste of that great yearning for the Supreme Brahman in the form of our Ishta Devata.
First we must control the mind and the intellect. After that, the world will not affect us when we do our daily work. With [self] control we will be able to overcome all kinds of difficulties. With control, attachment to worldly things will not be in our minds nor in our intellects.
The sciences only deal with hypotheses. And a hypothesis is based on the effect of something which caused it. Scientists have not yet really come to the Source, but one day they will.
Think carefully what it means when you are doing your arati or your sadhana at home. God will not forgive you if you are cheating or lying. He is the one who hears the heartbeat of an ant. Do you mean to say He does not know what you are saying and doing?
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.