The International Situation 1989-09-01
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1 सितम्बर 1989
Public Program
मुंबई (भारत)
Talk Language: English | Translation (English to Hindi) - Draft
The International Situation 1989-0901
[A Talk given in response to a request from a Sahaja Yogi. Location unknown. Possibly UK]
The state of our planet, or Mother Earth, is very precarious. On one side we see signs of great destruction at the hands of human beings and which are therefore our own creation.
The potent idea of destruction is at work within human beings, but it creates destructions on the outside. This destructiveness is not necessarily deliberate, but blind and uncontrollable. It is this blindness and ignorance that have to be enlightened.
According to the ancient Puranas of India it is precisely these dark days of Kali Yuga or modern times that are the times for en masse Self-Realization or the Age of enlightenment.
But, we still have many problems from our past or our history that have to be solved beforehand. These have a bearing on the international situation, so first let us see which problem or problems have to be solved.
In international relations, there have been a number of fundamental problems in recent years. In the post-World War the most important political development has been the conflict between communism and the democratic idea. There was a fundamental cleavage between these forms of political thoughts and government, and this has resulted in a lot of constant tensions between East and West. This became one of the very crucial issues of our times for the future of humanity.
In recent years, however, there was a major change initiated, first in China by Mr Deng (Deng Xianping) who began to open Chinese society to the new ideas.
But the most important change came with the arrival of Mr Gorbachev on the world scene. When he assumed power, he obviously made a very thorough review of the situation in his country and came to the conclusion that the old political and economic structure, in accordance with the orthodox communist doctrine, needed to be changed and that change had to be fundamental in nature.
So he gave to the world two new words, “perestroika” and “glasnost”, which encompass some very radical changes.
Is this the beginning of the new Age in accordance with the play of the Divine?
First of all, “perestroika” really means “restructuring”. Mr Gorbachev is engaged in a really great endeavour in totally restructuring the Soviet political and economic system. Accordingly, he has made breath-taking changes within a very limited period of time.
He has also opened up Soviet society by using “glasnost”, which means “openness”.
Now, the democratic world is getting far more news of the USSR and the people of the USSR are getting far better news about their own affairs and those of the rest of the world. Not only that, but many more people are now visiting the USSR without any difficulties.
I should mention that recently about forty Sahaja Yogis from the West went to Russia.
The invitation came out of the blue. We had a tremendous success and thousands of people came pouring in and most of them got their Self-realization. Russia is the first country which has recognized the unique capacity of Sahaja Yoga by granting official status of absolutely independent organization.
Perhaps they have realised that it is only after Self-realization that the inner transformation process is triggered through which ultimately you get your enlightenment. This is our guess. But even on the spiritual level, as far as international relations are concerned, Mr Gorbachev and his new policies have resulted in the lessening of tensions between East and West.
In fact, by a very wise approach, Mr Gorbachev has taken a number of initiatives to demonstrate that he does not believe in East-West conflict at all, but rather in East-West cooperation.
Perhaps he believes that by reducing pressure from the reformed Soviet side, the aim of bringing about a better relationship between the peoples of different parts of the world could be easily achieved, by gradually creating, in this way, a deeper sense of security, world peace could be finally established.
He has shown by his initiatives, with regard to disarmament in particular, that he no longer wants to take a stand on the basis of a mighty military force that has been perceived over the years as a threat to freedom in the West.
He has shown remarkably his courage in the nuclear field and even in the field of conventional forces and has continued zealous negotiations between East and West for overall disarmament.
We should now appreciate how the apprehensions of the West are losing their substance.
This is so obvious today in the views that have been expressed by a number of countries in the Western alliance.
For example, West Germany, who was once the bitter enemy of the Soviet Union, now feels that the changes that have taken place in Russia are not merely cosmetic, but they are fundamental changes. The conclusion is that the West should now respond in a suitable way.
Although some countries have not really responded, the results are evident. Thus, East-West conflicts have now ceased to be the most fundamental point of conflict in the world.
When there is a much better understanding between the two super powers and their allies, this naturally also has an effect on thinking in the NATO alliance. Not that one can say that all the problems are solved, but it is certainly not “problem number one” any more.
Then, what is the problem? The world must decide that it can do to ease the labour pains of the birth of a democratic Russia and also decide how to tell the truth about the problems of the so-called free world without any egotism.
This is a great challenge for the honesty and devotion to peace of the Western world. This is the moment for them to formulate a clear policy as to how to help that process, as well as diligently and wisely working out through profound introspection, how to establish security and peace within their own countries and to curb the self-destructive ventures of their own people.
If this policy is the right one and this process is supported in a pragmatic and humanistic way, then very quickly these changes will be miraculously consolidated and we will see a more humane freer society in the communist world.
I feel that the Russians need real freedom, while the West needs wise self-discipline. Thus, My vision is that these right actions and these appropriate reactions will bear their fruit of a very beautiful world of brotherhood and peace, which will be worthy of its enlightenment.
Crucial and dangerous problem we must face is surely that of religious fundamentalism and we cannot point the finger at any religion in particular. Wherever you see or look you find that the concept of religion has strayed far from the original ideas of its founder.
I have said many times before and I say it again now, on the tree of spirituality many beautiful flowers have appeared as seers, saints, prophets and Divine Incarnations at different times.
Those flowers were nourished by the same sap of Divinity to manifests the fragrance of love for the whole world.
But they were plucked from the tree of life by human beings and now these dead flowers have become so many dead religions without any fragrance or vitality.
Religion is meant to make human beings worthy, to transform them from their state of subjection to their original animal instincts and, after that, to wean them from their tribal instincts, which are based on insecurity, fear and conflict, balancing them to prepare them for their final transformation into enlightened and complete human beings, conscious of divine laws through their connection to God, God Almighty. This was the original intention at the awakening of the various religions in different parts of the world as a message of God to make human beings aware of His power of love, beauty and bliss.
Unfortunately, in the course of time, religion has become the point of the most tremendous conflict. They preach love and blind faith, while they themselves have become money or power-oriented and those in the highest position of these so-called religion and religions do not themselves know God. They have no knowledge of reality.
In this way, these man-made religions have twisted or rationalized the words of pure scriptures. For in their pure form, all religions are created from one universal principle: seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, that is, seek the eternal which is unlimited and use the transitory only with a clear understanding of its limitations.
But on the contrary, in practice, man-made religions are organized for the contempt and hatred of others on the assumption that we are the chosen ones and yet no matter what faith they may profess, these staunch believers are capable of committing any number of sins.
This is because they do not have the consciousness of the guiding principle of the Spirit which spontaneously acts in our attention, only after Self-realisation, which leads eventually to our total enlightenment.
Then the good or higher self, controls the lower or baser self. This, which relies within our reach, on the path of our true ascent, in this Kali Yuga or dark Age in which we live.
Now, what I have found is that instead of uniting people, instead of making human beings good and loving, religions actually turn people into self-opinionated mental acrobats and fearsome defenders of faith.
Of course, the truth in fact defends everyone and is in need of no defence. In the end all one can say about man-made religions is that the tree is known by the fruit it bears.
Of course, as a result, many people do not believe in God. They do not believe in God at all. They believe only what can be scientifically proved, what can be demonstrated to give results.
But if you want to be scientific you must keep an open mind. You must be prepared to consider the evidence of demonstrable truths. Unless and until you have not felt the All-pervading Power of God how can you be at all sure that He does not exist?
If you do not keep an open mind, then it is simply the ego that is covering the pure light of your intelligence. However, I can assure you that the time has come to prove the existence of God by experiencing His All-pervading Power on your central nervous system, that is, on your fingertips.
And so we realize that human beings have to be transformed and have to enter into a higher state of awareness, through inner transformation.
This has to be the last breakthrough of our evolution, which is a living process.
The question before Me is: how make human beings seek the truth and the truth alone, by removing the evil effects of the conditioning of the past and of religions.
This is a very delicate task, because the human ego is so very easily hurt. As I have discovered, no amount of discussion or any mental process can achieve it. So, what is the answer?
It is obvious; the only way is the inner transformation by the living process of evolution in every seeker who comes for his Self-realization.
This will be enough to change the world.
A further important point, that needs to be appreciated, particularly by the free world, is that when freedom is abused it can become demonic. Because the freedom of the rational human being can also be used to serve destructive and evil purposes, either consciously or unconsciously.
In the free world, politicians are very anxious to keep their seats glued to them, if possible, and for that they have to please the voters. This is why the voters are given full freedom to run amok in their own private lives.
They have freedom to drink in their beds or in the pub from sunrise to sunset and from sunset to sunrise, all over again. They have freedom to keep any number of guns they like, to kill each other.
They have freedom to become like primitive people and to degenerate into a mere sex point, rather than a human being if so they choose. They have freedom to get themselves a heart attack from over-work or if not, then from jogging. Freedom to insult their husbands or wives by sleeping with any Tom, Dick or Harry.
They have freedom to destroy their brain cells by listening to heavy, very heavy rock music from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn.
The media have now achieved their final liberation from self-respect, decency, decorum and social responsibility, and have developed the highest expertise in slinging mud at anyone they please, and in preventing truth in the service of political creeds or sensationalisation, to slander and blaspheme the Divine without knowing or caring what sin they are committing.
They have freedom to destroy creativity with negative criticism and perverted values. So that, in order to win public acclaim in any branch of the arts, an artist is obliged to have recourse to something sub-human or obscene.
They have freedom to burn their skin in the summer sun and to sleep without clothes like animals in the winter.
Freedom to preach the religion of sex or gay liberation. Freedom to get cancer or AIDS. They have freedom to take a black magic spell and spoil their own and others’ innocence. Freedom to indulge in any habit they choose, except so far drugs, but maybe tomorrow drugs will be made free as they are already in Amsterdam.
They are free to accumulate as much money as they like, regardless of the means. They are free to look stupid and weird, to be the last word in idiocity, to walk and talk in society in the most ghastly and crude manner, without even blushing. Every woman has the freedom to attract the looks of every man, like a prostitute, and every man is obliged to look young forever and so never maturing and reaching the heights of wisdom. In this way, the so-called liberated or permissive society, have reached the very limit of their decadence and their self-destruction.
So this so-called freedom has its built-in polarity of enslavement and destruction, which manifest side by side. And yet so often people are blind to evil and no explanation is of any avail.
If you try to tell them that they are damaging or destroying themselves, they will just say, “So what? What’s wrong?”
The slow suicide or the gradual decay is done in the name of freedom. But a free society must not mean that human beings are allowed to do what they please regardless of whether it is evil or good. One has to be aware of the importance of preserving goodness.
So let not the free world believe that its battle is against communism. It has a battle on its own country, on its own hands, which it has to face. If it does not recognize that it is itself its own greatest problem, there will be terrible conflict of destruction or survival.
And it is the abuse of freedom in the West that is in My view the fundamental problem facing the world today.
I hope that the Russians will keep their wisdom and their discretion intact and aim for freedom to ascend and not freedom to destroy themselves as the West is doing by creating a host of plagues, such as football hooligans and the mafias, all in the name of freedom.
If, in a free society, young people and people of mature years can openly take to degrading ways, then there must be a fundamental disease in that society. Therefore, at a time when the communist countries are making a wide-ranging review of their situation, the Western world also needs to make the same kind of fundamental review of itself.
A solution has to be found to its most urgent problem, which is the abuse of its own freedom.
A further pressing problem is that of the environment. The very existence of human beings is now being threatened. People have now become aware of the damage that has been done to the environment and of the depletion of the ozone layer. Why do we still have acid rain?
Why do we have often disastrous climatic problems around the world? We have to find the answers to these problems. It is an extraordinary thing that in the developed world you cannot now be confident of getting proper food to eat.
Every day there is a new scare about salmonella or a new product is put onto the banned food list. So, now food poisoning has become a very serious issue. What does that indicate?
We have to know that this is the extreme of industrial development, by which we have become slaves of machines. Machines are created for our own use and yet we have become the victims of machines.
We have to change the balance between machine-made and hand-made goods and take more to natural things. Machines create things like plastics, which have no natural vibrations and which are actually injurious to human beings.
But how to achieve this is the problem. How to reduce the consumption of such useless things, like plastic, in our daily life?
Another problem we have is that of relationships between people in society. The rapport between husband and wife or between one human being and another has become very artificial. They can no longer relate directly and simply to each other, but have to have something in between, in order to have a relationship at all.
Like the television or a squabble, just to make the link. There are some people I’m told, who prefer to talk to the refrigerator, rather than their husband or their wife, because it won’t aggress them. So much so, that in developed countries, people’s pets have become more important than other human beings.
They have their dogs in their beds, on their dining room tables, but they will push their babies out into another room. They will entertain their dogs or their cats at their own table for their birthday, while thousands of human beings cannot find enough to eat.
This is a funny sort of society that we have developed and we can see that first of all we have lacked maturity to understand that we are not individual but we are part and parcel of the whole. Our freedom has not given us the chance to mature, to also know that this world is created by God – He did not create nations.
You find very old men running after young girls, old women running after young boys. This is unnatural.
There is a terrible increase in child abuse and the destruction of innocence going on. It is as if they cannot bear anyone to be innocent.
People cannot even grow old naturally. The other day I saw, for instance, several octogenarian actors and actresses doing a rock and roll and shake sort of a dance. They had no need to; they were shaking themselves quite naturally with the walking sticks in their hands.
All these things might appear funny, but they are in fact very serious and a country which is filled with such immature, insane, sick people will explore anything, regardless of its value for our growth and our ascent.
It is people who make society and it is the society that preserves the country. So all these crazy things that come from this sort of freedom have to be brought round and cured or these countries will be ruined in no time.
To My mind, there is only one solution; that is the transformation of human beings. Now this transformation is possible, here and now, and on a mass scale. I would like to show you on another occasion how it can be done and how to work out the emancipation of human beings, spontaneously and effortlessly and without paying a penny for it. Let Me show you one day, how through Sahaja Yoga you can transform yourself and change the world.