Talks Excerpt 545. Swamiji says spiritual retreats are a grace and a privilege.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

Gurudev [Swamiji’s beloved Guru Swami Nischalananda Puri, and our revered ‘Gurudev’] used to say that when you attend a Yoga Camp (spiritual retreat) you must not become proud and think that you are a ‘chosen one’. You should feel humble that God has chosen you out of so many thousands of people. What are we worth that He has brought us here? We must reflect on these things.

Gurudev used to say that there are thousands of people that are not here at the Yoga Camp.

Master [Sri Ramakrishna] said [click HERE for that story] we are like a clean sheet of cloth, and we dye this cloth with our desires. He said that it is the duty of the laundryman to clean that cloth, to make it white and then colour it according to the desires of the owner. And God is so great that he leaves us to choose the colour – the desire. We may choose colours that attract worldly things [impermanent] and destroy spiritual [permanent] values; or we may choose colours that promote spirituality and destroy worldliness.

Knowing this, we should attract that colour which will be beneficial and valuable in our life.

Then you find others who have treated spirituality in such a way that it has become too familiar to them. They do not appreciate the grace they have and they take it for granted.

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.