Guru Sri Subramanium the founder of Skanda Vale and Somaskanda Ashram urges us to stop daydreaming and start living consciously from moment to moment with love. From a Swiss Seminar in 2003.
“Use your senses, don’t make them so dull! Worship the Lord with all your might, with all your strength. If you sit there saying ‘God, I love you’, [Guru mimes a dreamy, sanctimonious prayer] it hasn’t even gone beyond your nose. Old fancy-pants hasn’t got anywhere!
You need power and strength to worship God. That is the training the human being has to have. To begin to use all of you, not one fraction of you, to worship the Lord. Focus your mind.
All the time, focus; don’t make your mind lazy and inactive. The mind is a buffoon, it’s lazy. If it can get away by doing nothing, it will.
I look at you… yes, you are contenders for spirituality, to come to know God. But, my God, you won’t change! You won’t want to change because you think ‘I’m very happy as I am’… You’re not happy, you’re bloody miserable!
You’re sitting there, daydreaming about God. Wake up!
I would never sit here daydreaming, I want to see God. I’ll do everything to see God. I won’t encircle myself with a phony belief.
Pie in the sky spirituality
You call yourselves Christian. Is it? No, you’re atheists! So now you have chosen another ‘ism’ called Hinduism, Mohammedism, collecting all these ‘isms’, so that you can tranquilise yourself to do nothing.
How many more ‘isms’ must you have before you really say to yourself, ‘I really want to make an effort to come to know God’?
Divine friends, start with yourself. Master your senses. Don’t ever hand your mind and your body to somebody else. You have power, you’re born with power. The Paramatma, the divinity that is embodied in you is urging you on and wants to enter in a relationship with the totality of God.
So, you come here, and you say every seminar, ‘Oh, I am definitely going to change’. In ancient times they used to persecute themselves, calling flagellation. They used to beat each other to acquire grace from God. They might call it a quirk, if you start beating yourselves, and say that something’s wrong with you, but at least you will suffer some pain.
Divine friends, you are too comfortable. You are too comfortable, too complacent, you’re over-indulgent in every way, and you want God?
A little discomfort for you, oh my God…advertise it, all your friends will know.
You need to have a little bit of discomfort; you need to sacrifice something in your life to come to know the power of God, because your senses have been pampered for the last so many, many, many years. Now put the senses through the roller; make them slim, nice, and make it work. And when I say make it work, make it focused, all the time.
Have you ever asked yourself ‘Where is my mind? What is it doing? Is it floating around the place?’ Are you focused, ever, in your senses?
Stop dreaming about sex and get focussed!
If you are not focused, well, if you are making love, for heavens’ sake make love properly. Know that your partner loves every minute of your loving. Give a lift up to your partner.
None of your partners enjoy your company anymore, they are looking around. Do you enjoy your partner? How many of you are satisfied with your partner? What have you done to hold your partner?
You look at your partner and see God in that human being. Worship the Lord all the time, and the beauty of every person is the beauty of God embodied in that person.
Before you can discover the totality of God, you must discover the God in you.
Don’t ignore anybody. Extol the virtue of God in all of creation; you’ve created some image of God in a very comfortable position, and you don’t want to cast him out of that position; don’t do that.
God is vast, God is in your eyes, God is everywhere in your whole being. Extol the virtue of God in everything.
If you can occupy your mind and focus your mind and praise God, in all his creation within you and without you, then you have begun to change and move away from just having your head tucked between your legs and talking of sex all the time.
Spend a fraction of a minute about sex in the day, a fraction of a minute, the balance…extol the virtue of God in you. Look at yourself, in others, your partners, that which is beautiful in the flowers…in his garden.
If you have too much testosterone, then offer it to the Lord. He knows what to do with it, because kundalini will rise in you, and the power will be the opening of the chakra of your mind, enabling the Lord to sit on top of your head.
No more guilt or dwelling on the past
Don’t live in fear, what you have done can never be undone; the past is beyond recovery, the present is at hand. Sanctify it all the time, purify; because you are the architect of both pain and pleasure. Guilt, don’t have guilt. What are you guilty about?
Not a leaf falls from a tree without the Lord knowing it; the impulses that are generated by you, already have reached the ether. Instead of guilt, replace it with immense love and be joyful for everybody.
There’s one thing that is going to happen all the time: everything is impermanent, nothing is permanent. Shake yourself and say ‘I’m going to throw all these fears in myself, and I know my Lord knows it. I’m willing to exchange all my fears for the love of God’.
Do you really believe that God has not the power to destroy you? God can destroy you at any time; if you had been so aggressive and destructive in yourself, the Lord God will prevail then. Master your senses, have a direction for your senses, where they are going. You tell yourself what to do, don’t let the senses tell you what to do.
Your mind has been tranquilised! Don’t live in a tranquilised state; be strong in your mind, be strong in your personality.
Extol the virtue – don’t let anybody run you down. Your nature – true nature, is Divine. All the senses that you’ve got, are not functioning well; it’s just like a machine that needs a bit of oiling and mindfulness and the need not to indulge in it.
You think I can function as I do if I spend time just …’you’re growing old, you’re damned useless’?
I have no intention of wasting my time in my life, never. I have got enough grace from God to do His work. Linked to God, he tells me what to do, so I am here, for you Divine friends: not to pick your pocket, but to pull the sluggish nature that exists in your brain and replace it with heightened mindfulness.
I want nothing from you but the sincerity of your conviction
I don’t want anything from you … I’ll tell you what I want from you, to see the shining human being within you, the Divinity within you. The human being full of confidence. Say ‘I know what I want, I want to know God’. Not just believe God…not to believe, but to experience God. Spend time.
You’re entitled to call yourself a Christian only if you identify yourself with Christ.
It’s a deception to say you’re a Christian and do nothing about your identity with Christ. I would be audacious if I call myself a Hindu, or Buddhist, or anything, without identification with that aspect of God.
I follow every single persons’ mind when they present themselves to me, to find out what you really are, who you really are; whether you are presenting a veneer of spirituality. Change your nature. Transform it!
Now, I’ll share with you some of my experience with God. When the Divine comes to me my whole body changes.
My identity changes because I have surrendered myself to the Divine. Transforming my mind and taking it and changing it as the Lord wants. To do that, you free yourself from all the attachments of the world.
You are more educated than I am. I have no education and I can sit here and give you a discourse because God is feeding me the knowledge.
Why? Because I am not clinging to the wealth and prosperity that you are doing. Does not your Father in Heaven know what you really want? Do you really feel let down by God? Is it because you have not spent time to come to know him, really?
If you see the wealth and prosperity of what happens in the community in Skanda Vale – not because we have enticed people to pick their pockets – because they get feedback from the monks and nuns and ourselves in the excellence of worship of God. The more you worship God, you train your mind how to master your senses.
Be yourself – don’t feel guilty
You’ve been given the wrong formulae; in order to come to know God you have created guilt in your mind. Love God. God is compassion – identify yourself with that compassion of God, and be compassionate to other lives.
Don’t think you are the best thing that has ever been invented since creation; you’re not! God is! The power of God, within you and without, is the power and grace of God.
Be proud within you, that you have an inheritance greater than anything that you can ever do. You have to be proud about your achievements; don’t be this funny humble lark… you know, humble is a word used by people to describe monks. They’re humble [puts hands together] …but I’m not – because I’ve got Shakti and power in me and have got God inside me. Why should God be humble?
I am here to shake your foundation
I’m not asking you permission to do it, but I will do it anyway. And that’s what I’m doing to you now. Not humbly, but saying ‘wake up! You’re fast asleep!’ And you call it religion… Hey loverboy! [points to devotee]
Wake up! The wake-up call is on you now! The alarm bell is ringing. What are you going to do for the rest of your life? Just daydream? Hey, you all daydream about religion?
No. Every seminar you will come and sit exactly in the same position and hope that somebody will do something to you. Better still, why don’t you sit on a cracker, then I can hear you explode! At least something will happen! And then you will feel the results of it.
Worship the Lord with all your might, with all your strength.
Divine friends, don’t daydream. Make your mind work, there’s power in your mind. And if you use that power, you can send those very vibrations that you create straight to God.
Don’t be afraid, what have you got to be afraid of? Because you have been taught to be fearful. Instead of going all the time to God and saying, ‘God, I’ve been a thorough idiot. I’ve made so many mistakes in my life – you know all about it, let me share it’.
And that’s what sathyam means.
[Guru starts singing] ‘sattya swaroopini ma, jaya prema swaroopini ma, ananda dayini hridiya viharini, moksha pradayini ma’. Sattya swaroopini, absolute truth.
For liberation, you need absolute truth. Then you will have peace of mind and immense love. Love, love, love. Why are you afraid of love? You can change your whole being with love. But learn to say ‘No’.
Guru: No, I don’t want to turn up the world because it is an empty task, when… just look at you. I can’t even move your mind let alone the whole world. Wake up. Your wake-up call has come.”
Guru Sri Subramanium
