Talks Excerpt 562. Swamiji speaks about the benefit of short, intense spiritual retreats.
From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.
When the disciple of the great singer Tansen sang to the king, the king would listen attentively. But he found something lacking in it. The king called the disciple and asked him: ‘How is it that when your guru, Tansen, sings I am naturally transported into another world? My mind becomes calm, my inner and outer vision becomes clear. I even see that this whole world is, as if to say, in the palm of my hand. But when you sing, I do not get that feeling. How is that?’ Do you know what the disciple said? ‘The only difference between me and my guru is that I sing to the worldly king, and he sings to the Universal King. He sings to God and I sing to man.’
Do incidents like this not affect your heart and mind? Is it a fable, a story to waste your time? Have we got better things to do? Can we not try this out for ourselves?
When you are singing in satsang, as long as your mind does not become more subtle with the song, know that there is something wrong. You are not singing to the King of Kings, you are singing to the worldly king.
[At a spiritual retreat – at a secular venue away from the Ashram].
Today we have met on this ground where many people have walked with many thoughts. But there is a challenge: the challenge of dispersing thoughts that bring doubts into our minds; a challenge to bring light where there is darkness and make a shrine of a place that is not normally used for spiritual purposes.
The idea to have these retreats was brought from India by Gurudev [Swamiji’s beloved guru, Swami Nischalananda Puri] and it has the authority of Sri Ramakrishna. Master said that a man of the world should not leave his worldly duties; but once in a while he should go away in solitude for a month, six months, or at least three days. He said, ‘If, for three days and nights you cry for God and God alone, God must reveal Himself to you.’
This is not the imagination or the hallucination of a madman. One who has seen God, is advising us.
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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.