Radio Interview 1984-09-05
5 September 1984
Interview
Vienna (Austria)
Talk Language: English | Transcript (English) – Draft
Her Holiness Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi
Radio Interview, Oe3 Dabei
05 September, 1984, Vienna, Austria
INTERVIEWER: But I don’t understand too much about that subject, that You as a lady are the teacher, not only the teacher, the founder of a yoga–theory. Is this in common in India, that also women do it? I read that You say that all comes from Mother Nature and therefore are there many women that were teachers in the case You are, or are You in this sense of course a unique person?
SHRI MATAJI: (Shri Mataji laughing) It’s a rather embarrassing question, isn’t it? I think a Mother can do better job than anybody else, in this respect, but you have to have a lot of patience with people, isn't it? Say if it was Christ, He is very nice, He got crucified and finished the job. You see, He was so disgusted and Shri Krishna would take His Sudarshan and kill people. But if you have to really emancipate people, if you have to really see that they get what they have, you have to have real patience of a Mother.
INTERVIEWER: So can You give me some not private details on Your family’s life. I read as well in Your bio, that now Your daughters are married, and then You started to do what You are doing nowadays. So did You influence them as they were kids? Or when did You start to create Your theory, Your yoga?
SHRI MATAJI: No, I was quite aware of it from My very childhood. And I took My birth in a Protestant Christian religion, you see, My father and mother were enlightened people, especially My father was a very enlightened person, and actually he told Me what sort of work I’ll have to do, because what problems I’ll have with human beings, because he told Me how human beings are, their problems are, what permutations and combinations they have. And then as a custom in India I had to marry also and I married a very nice man, and then I had children. And I thought that unless and until I reach a certain age, I should not start talking about it, because at a young age people may not take it up seriously.
But apart from that I had another problem that I found that human beings have certain permutations and combinations of barriers and because of those barriers, if I have to do an en–mass Realization of people, I’ll have to overcome all those barriers at a shot. It means in one lecture I should be able to give Realization to thousands of people and to work it out, you see, I started studying human beings, and tried to see through subtle mind how I could raise their Kundalini, how I could give them Realization, what are their problems. And it took some time for Me to settle that. It so simultaneously it worked out with the marriages of My daughters and themselves settled down and this.
So when in 1970, 5th of May, I saw the way things are happening and all that and I thought this is the right time to open that last part of it, which I had, the seventh chakra, and that when I did it, and that is the point, where I really mastered this en–masse Realization, because so far it was a Realization of one person or two persons. And My father told Me that, “You are born really to give this en–mass Realization to people.”
So You don’t start talking about it or otherwise You’ll create another Bible or Gita, what’s the use. You better work on the system that You understand human beings properly, and You start en–mass Realization, because if somebody is born on the 10th storey, and somebody is born just on the first floor, you see, he cannot understand that person and he attacks that person. So is best is that You raise them higher than from where they are so that they know at least that there is something beyond. And the knowledge of Sahaja Yoga is not today’s, so I wouldn’t call it a founder, it is in tradition of spirituality, it started long time back, the Realization was given thousands of years back in India, but it was given to one or two persons. Even Christ at His time has done a very great work of resurrection and in that He has said that, “You have to be born again.”
So that what is not just a certificate, is a self-opinion that we are born again or is a artificial baptism. It is a real happening, is a living happening within ourselves, which has to take place, about which of course Indians know, because traditionally we are brought up that way. So we know that this happens. And the knowledge of the roots is more in India than here, it is more the knowledge of the tree, we can say, but that exists there. And this happening once takes place you achieve that new dimension which we call as collective consciousness, by which you become collectively conscious. You can feel another person’s centers and you can feel your own centers. And if you know how to correct them and how to correct the centers of another person, mentally you can cure them, physically you can cure them, emotionally you can cure them and also they become the citizens of God's domain.
INTERVIEWER: So back to Your daughters. Do they both also practise yoga? Did You teach them?
SHRI MATAJI: No, they do not, they do not, because I never force them. I said, let them take their own time. In a way good, you see because if My family gets involved, people might think that it is a family enterprise. They are very good girls, very religious, I should say, very balanced, very astute. My husband is also another very great man. But they are not doing Sahaja Yoga. I have kept them out, you keep out of it, but My grandchildren are all born realized, four of them are, and they are great Sahaja Yogis.
So these people are out for the time being, because it's not proper to have them there. Also from another point of view, that when I'm dealing with My children, you see, they might think, they are the daughters of Mataji. So you see - adores them - and try to give them money, or do this, and it will be quite disturbing. So I don’t want that. I just said that now they will come in any case to Sahaja Yoga, I know, but this is not the time. Let people first of all establish themselves properly, because, you see, it gets diverted - the whole attention.
INTERVIEWER: Who do You consider to be the right person for yoga? Is there a group of people that’s easier to be caught by yoga or is it for everybody, or is it a question of the personal education of the mind?
SHRI MATAJI: No, education is not at all required. The simpler you are, the better it is. Sometimes education can be a barrier, because you see you miss the point, as I would say, if you are too overeducated, could miss the point but if you have that intelligence and that innocent intelligence, which is so sharp, it sees the point very easily. But a person who is over-intelligent, can be ego–oriented, you see, and a person who could be say very much conditioned and has ritualistic who has faith, blind faith in things is also difficult.
So you have to have a very simple person who is an open-minded person. Scientific in outlook, I should say, would be better but most of the people I meet are - such kind - are mostly in the villages in India or say places where not so much of so called artificiality, sophistication is gone, they’re normal human beings, and they live down to earth.
INTERVIEWER: Youth in Western Europe, in America is looking for a destination or for a destiny, not for a destiny, but they ask...
SHRI MATAJI: Seeking for the beyond, yeah.
INTERVIEWER: So doesn't this also mean that Western philosophy doesn’t offer a proper way for the beyond, for the way there, as more and more get in some case included in Eastern philosophy, if we say in general yoga is Eastern philosophy. Do you see that the high-industrialized western world has a lack of ways to offer to the mental human being?
SHRI MATAJI: That's what I was telling the other gentleman also that, you see, the Western civilization is like the tree outside, and the Eastern understanding of the Spirit is like your roots. So there is a continuity, I mean I cannot separate one from another, you need the tree and a tree needs the roots also. Roots must have the tree, you cannot do without it, so both things are complementary to each other. But when there is an imbalance, like a tree grows too much beyond, and it doesn’t reach its source, then there could be a destruction. And that's what exactly what has happened in the West, that you have overdeveloped yourself, and that overdevelopment has led you to a problem, because you are exhausted the Mother Earth, exhausted your energies, exhausted your brains, everything is at an exhaustion point. So now it's better to get to the roots. So when you get to the roots you find, you have not reached the source. And where is the source? Source lies within yourself, in the human being himself and that source is to be found out. And that source is the Spirit, which all the great saints, all the great incarnations, in their own traditional way has one after another have expressed and told. But everybody has misunderstood and made a mess out of it. We have organized God, we have organized Christ, we have organized Mohammed Sahib, we have organized everyone, but They are living things, you cannot organize Them.
INTERVIEWER: But if I'm a top manager of Ford, of IBM, am I really the person to do Yoga, doesn't it mean, if I am one part of this highly industrialized western world, that the Eastern philosophy is offering me any time. Isn't there an either or?
SHRI MATAJI: No, you become really dynamic because, you see, you become a witness of the whole play, you see this play. So you become dynamic, there is no pressure, or tension, you become just dynamic, you understand everything in all dimensions. Apart from that you develop a balance, you know how far to go. I mean, you don't overdevelop something. You develop a proper, what we should say, a balanced development and that’s what is necessary, that we have lost the balance.
INTERVIEWER: Isn’t there some way - don't you know many people that want more of yoga than yoga can give. So doesn't yoga also have in Western Europe a point that it doesn't give to the individual that so, people think, well I can reach so many things by yoga and don't realize that they can just find themselves.
SHRI MATAJI: You see, yoga is a big misnomer in the West, people don't know what this yoga is. Because even if you read Patanjali , it is said that you have to get to your Self–Realization and then how to grow in your Self–Realization. Once you start growing in your Self–Realization, you develop such a personality that you see the whole world as one. You reach your wholesomeness. And when you reach your wholesomeness the complete balance and the curative sense comes in. Like you see, if there is a problem in My left finger, I’ll try to rub it, all right, I rub it and I soothe Myself, whom am I helping, whom am I supporting, what is a developing country, what is a developed country, you see? You need something from the developing and you have to have the developed. So the whole thing is, that we haven’t got the wholesomeness. We are not integrated. The whole world is not integrated so far. It's only possible when you reach that point, which is within us, which is collectively conscious, and that is the Spirit. Once you reach that point, you hit the collective consciousness, and when you become collective, you understand the wholesomeness of yourself.
So what people are seeking here in yoga, is really something that is brought from there by people who don't understand. Yoga means union with the Divine, it means union with the Divine. When you become one with the Divine, the Divine starts flowing through you and you become part and parcel of the whole. You become. It's not question of just taking a certificate. It's not running on the street or standing on your heads, it's not yoga. It’s just one 16 th and 16 th part of something we bid that you have to understand that, if there is a problem, physical problem, what exercise particularly you have to do. But that, too, is only possible when you get your Realization. Before Realization you don't know. Where you are sick people don't know. They go mad, but they don't know that they are getting mad.
So the craziness that you find or the imbalances you find is lost, because we have just turned our faces to that thing called the Spirit, because we could not reach there with our mental projection. So what we have to do, is just take to this new dimensional approach by which you become that thing that you have to become, for which you have come on this earth. And that, if you get it, you are there.
You have so many dimensions. I mean now for Me, you know, I’m a wife of a person who has to shake sometimes hands with 600 people on one side (Shri Mataji laughing) and I have to deal with people on that level, and that sort of people and I am also doing this, I have decorated My house. I mean, I can do 1000 and one thing and still I’m very relaxed person.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, yeah.
SHRI MATAJI: So what you have to achieve is everything what we talk of, see, now we talk of democracy, we talk of communism, though both are artificial to My mind, because unless and until you have something, how are you a capitalist? You have nothing. What do we have? We have nothing but plastics. What do we have? You see, when you have something like I would say, I’m a great capitalist because I have all the powers, (Shri Mataji laughing) all right and I’m the greatest communist, because I must distribute. So, in essence, I am the real capitalist and a real communist. So all your ideas that are, are really the glimpses of that great truth. Communism is - I’m the greatest communist, I'm the greatest capitalist. All your ideas about economics is, now economics is so sensible, that it says that in general wants are not satiable, in particular they are. So that means the want, that means this matter is not going to give you satisfaction. So where is the satisfaction? It is in the Spirit. You see, everything aims at that, points at that. But one should see the point.
INTERVIEWER: Thank you!
SHRI MATAJI: May God bless you! Thank you!