Master Says


There is a story in the book of Paramahansa Yogananda. Have you read that book, The Autobiography of a Yogi? If you haven't, you should read it. It is very good for you, to remind you of the spiritual, great Self, to urge you toward noble ideas, make you re-awaken to your real Self and want to find out more about your Greatness. This is a very good book. There are many other books; I just cannot mention them all here; I cannot remember all the titles; maybe I do, but we don't have time. I don't come here to sell books. Many spiritual books are good for you, and that is one of them.

In that book there is a story about a guy who wanted initiation. There was a guy who had very, very bad intentions, who wanted to make trouble for the master, one of the masters in the book. I think he was Lahiri Mahasaya. He wanted to go there and try to prove that the master was fake and wanted to make trouble for him. But before he sat down, the Master already told everyone: "Do you want to look at some pictures?" And all the disciples said "Yes, yes, yes!" So the Master said, "Oh, you should sit behind each other and put your hands on the person sitting in front of you. So that's what they did, including the guy who came with the bad intentions. So they did that.

And after a while, one of the disciples saw a picture of a woman, a very nice young lady, appearing in front of them and everyone else, and then the master asked if everyone else saw the same picture, a woman, including the guy who came. So he was very ashamed, and he said he knew. He said, "Oh". Then the master asked him, "Who is that lady?" and the bad guy said, "Well I know it is my sin. I am married but I have had an extra-marital affair with this lady and I have been squandering money on her. This is no good. I know, but please forgive me. I came here with a bad intention. I wanted to do harm to you and blacken your name, but since you already know, will you please forgive me and would you accept me as a disciple also?" So the master said, "Sure! You have to go home. If you go home and can behave yourself morally for six months, then after that you can get initiation. Otherwise I won't have to initiate you." So three months later the guy went back to the same bad habits, all kinds of bad habits he did before. And just awhile later he died, so the master never initiated him. He tried but he failed.

And it's the same with us! Many times we put things off until tomorrow, all the while, knowing that this world is just a transient hotel, is even worse than the hotel where I stay. In the hotel where I stay, I pay some money and they leave me in peace. They even clean my room, change my towels, and give me soap and everything I need. But in this hotel which we call 'life' we have to work, pay every day, and even if we pay we still have to suffer. We pay every day with our precious time, our precious energy, our precious knowledge, our precious short existence here on this planet, which we should use to recognize our great power, in order to tackle everything with ease and without effort.

We sacrifice all this because they make us so busy. The system in this planet makes us so busy: work from morning till night, work all the time, work weekends as well, and still don't have enough happiness. It's not that we pay and we could have a good room, good maid service, room service or whatever, no, no! We pay and pay and still pay and there's not much happiness in it, more suffering than happiness. Even if we have a family, a beautiful family, a good marriage, we still have to pay for it. We still have to work so much in order to maintain this. We work even in the rainy, stormy weather, in a dangerous situation, in our failing health time, in the time when we are exhausted and didn't sleep the whole night because of kids or worry, or whatever, and we still have to work, and no one takes pity on us, no one!

And if we claim sickness too often, they think we are lying, and maybe we get fired. And then we struggle again, to find another job, which is not very easy at all. So this hotel on this planet is not very kind. It's not doing a very good job for us. If you go into a hotel and you pay good money you expect good service, no? But at this hotel, no! You pay day and night, every day of your existence until your last breath and you don't have good service.

So if you ask me, I advise you to find another hotel. I know one! (Master laughs) I know many hotels. In our Father's Home there are many mansions. They are all empty, all decorated well with the most beautiful furniture and facilities to your liking and many are still empty waiting for you to go there and enjoy every time now. You don't have to go there yet, but you can go and have a look now, and then come back and go for it. During your free time, you reserve time for yourselves like two hours, an hour a day, because you work. We all work for the world, for physical, material needs, but we don't work for our soul needs, for spiritual needs. So therefore we are tired. We are exhausted. Even if we sleep we don't feel that good. But if we meditate, even if we don't sleep enough, we feel great, we feel fully recharged and energized. We can move mountains afterwards.

So, no matter how many people go up there, there are a lot of mansions up there, always ready. There's nothing in this world that we can compare to what we have up there. If we only know how glorious our true Home is, we want to die right away! Excuse me for the expression. That's what it is. Many of the people who visit the other world, Heaven, our true Home, would not like to come back here, for a second. Even the people that they call people who are "clinically dead" and who come back to life, they don't want to go back to this life. After they saw the Light, after they saw Jesus, Buddha in Heaven embracing them with love, their whole being changed. They want nothing on this planet anymore, because that love doesn't exist here.