Q    We know that God is Love; surely God does not create all this killing, suffering in the world; surely man did that by his own sin?

A    Well, sister, from where has the sin come?

Q    It is man's wrong doing, breaking the laws of God.

A    How does man happen to do wrong things when God has created all love?

Q    That is what I often wonder?

A    Everything has come from the Lord. All that you see in His creation. Even the mind has come from Him; the Negative Power has come from Him. He has put the whole creation under the charge of Kal, the Negative Power. And Kal takes care of the whole creation, so he has made his own rules to keep souls here. We have to abide by those rules while simultaneously disentangling ourselves on our way back to the Lord. There is nothing which has not come from the Lord, and when God is all Love, from where has the evil come? Negation of Love becomes evil. When the sun is there, the shade is there. The sun has only light, but the sun also creates the shade.

Q     I wonder if this world was not in the beginning a Garden of Eden and we people were just like children playing with our toys and having a happy time until we got jealous of each other, wanting each other's toys, and so forth?

A     Maybe, but whatever seed of jealousy came in us, it also has come from the Lord. Nothing has come from outside.

Q     That is what seems so confusing, because it all seems so wrong?

A     We often feel that when God is all Love, from where did evil come? That is what we mean. The sun is always in the sky and it is always shining; then from where does the darkness come? It is only when that side of the earth that is facing the sun that there is sunshine, and even then, sometimes the clouds interfere, but we have daylight just the same. When we have no love for the Lord, when our face is turned away from Him, there is evil.

Q     Master, in the four cycles of time, like the golden age, the silver age, the copper age and the iron age, did the sousl in the golden age have physical bodies at that time? Was it on earth?

A     Sister, this is just our clafssification. You can classify this into four ages, or you can classify it into twenty ages. This is, after all, just our own classification. Body is there in every age.

Q     Will you please tell us what is meant by dissolution, and the grand or major dissolution?

A     I think that all this is mentioned in our books. By dissolution is meant the end of the physical universe. Grand dissolution is the absorption of everything, even beyond the astral plane, back into its origin. The final dissolution when He is finished with this 'play', when and if the whole creation ceases, will be when everything is merged back into Him, the source of everything. Saints have tried to explain this to us through the medium of language, but the intellect cannot comprehend all this, so we should not get confused. The saints do not want us to get entangled by thinking about these things. We should concern ourselves only about this physical universe and make use of the means which the Lord has provided for our escape from it and our ultimate return to Him.

Q      After merging back into the Lord, does msn maintain a separate consciousness?

A      In merging, it is still separate. Being in it, you are separate from it. But you are not conscious of your consciousness. There you just merge yourself. Even in wordldly love, when you are with your beloved, you forget yourself completely and want to please only the beloved. You are so absorbed in the beloved that you do not even think about where you are or what you are, even in these physical or worldly emotions. The spiritual is much more fascinating, absorbing; it is much sublimer and nobler. The bliss of merging into the Supreme Being cannot be expressed in mortal language. There is no thought of individuality, consciousness, or anything else. It is all Love, all Bliss, for, in merging, we become the Supreme Being and He is All, He is everything.

Q      Then there is just one consciousness?

A      The Lord is one. When we merge back into Him we become the Lord. We become a part of Him. A drop has its own identity when it is in the mud. When it leaves the ground by means of evaporation, it still has its own identity, separate from the ground and separate from the cloud. But when it merges back into the cloud, it becomes the cloud. That minute part of the cloud becomes the cloud by merging into it. When we love the Lord, we do not like to remain away from the Beloved. We lose our identity by merging back into That, and yet we remain separate from That. For instance, if you merge the flame of a lighted candle into the flame of a fire, can you differentiate whether it is the flame of the fire or the flame of a lighted candle into the flame of a fire, can you differentiate whether it is the flame of a fire, can you differentiate whether it is the flame of the fire or the flame of the candle? When you take the candle away from the fire, you have an independent, individual flame. But when you take it back into the fire, it merges into the fire and is no longer a mere candle light. Similarly, the soul merges into the Lord.

Q      Actually, it is the mind and not the soul that does not want to give up its identity?

A      That is right. Mind is the stumbling block. This ego does not like to lose its identity. We always want to observe that I am so-and=so, I am so-and-so, I am so-and-so, and it is the 'I-ness' that we do not want to lose. WE perhaps think that we have developed it in this modern world, and that it is something quite unique, but the fact remains that the ego is a great stumbling block in our way. This is what we have to lose.

Q      Can the conscious personality be projected to God-realization, leaving the body at will and returning after gaining this desired goal of God-reliazation, and know of it?

A      That is what the spiritual practice is for. We are trying to withdraw ourselves at will, to be there, and to come back at our will, and be here. That is the whole object of meditation.

Q       I  have heard that some schools say there are seven bodies, and some schools say there are three bodies --- physical, astral and casual. Can you comment on that, please?

A      Brother, I only know that according to Sant Mat literature there are three. I have not heard or read about the seven.

Q      What is the final goal? Is it where God and I are one? What does this mean, exactly? Is there a sense of individuality?

A      The idea is, "I and God are one.""I and the Father are one." The soul is the essence of the Lord. It has come from the Lord and it will merge back into the Lord and again become one. (Maharaj Ji explained at length about the drop of water merging back into the ocean, the drop of water in the mud merging back into the cloud, and so forth, as has already been explained elsewhere, so is not repeated here). All of us and the Father are one. There was nothing besides the Father when He creaed the universe. Everything was one and that One was, is and always will be the Father, the Supreme Being. The creation is His projection, and when He again withdraws everything into Himself, it again becomes one.

A     Ultimately there will be no difference. As yet there is a great difference between the drop and the ocean. But when the drop merges into the ocean there is absolutely no difference.

Q     Can one reach perfection in his life, or does one have to die to go back to the Lord?

A     Sister, we have to die daily to go back to Him.

Q     What do you mean, I do not understand?

A     When death takes place, what do we feel? First our feet become numb, then our legs become numb, then our thighs and th elower portion of the body becomes numb. Still the soul is in us, still we are conscious, we are still living, life is still within us. When we withdraw the current up to th eeye center, the soul leaves the body, and we say the person is dead. In our spiritual practice, we do the same while living, the only difference being that the connection is not severed and we come back into the body after meditation. It is a method of dying dialy. Some Christian saint said, "I die daily." That means that he daily practices the withdrawal of teh consciousness right fro his feet up to the eye center, in order to follow the spiritual path within.

We are not to die physically to meet Him, but we have to die daily in our spiritual practice to meet Him. We have to withdraw our consciousness up to the eye center. This is dying while living. Then only we will be on the real path. We are not to leave the physical body permanently in order to go back to Him. If we are not able to achieve our destination in this life but are on the path, it is possible that we may achieve it in the next life or in still another life; but we need not wait until after death in order to meet Him. We have to be on the path while living in a human body, and the aim is also to meet Him during our lifetime.

Q      If one fails to reach God-realization in this life, will he have another chance?

A      The Lord does not find excuses to send us back again and again. He gives us quite a fair chance to make progress on the path. In fact, it is our attachments that are pulling us down every time. Generally, if we are not much attached to the world, even though we may not make much headway towards Home, we are given another chance to loosen those attachments. But we have to do that by meansw of spiritual practice while we are in the human form. However, if we have not found a Living Master and refuse to travel that path, refuse to think about the Lord, have absolutely no devotion for Him, have no desire whatsoever to go Hom, we will not continue to get a human body; we hve to go down into a lower species. We then get that form in which we can satisfy all the unfulfilled desires and cravings that come in our mind every day.

It is our karmas and desires coupled together that bring us every time into birth and death. Whatever seeds we sow, we have to come back to reap. Whatever we desire, we crave, and we do not get or sublimate while in this world, we have to take birth to satisfy those unfulfilled desires and cravings. So, unless we clear our karmas, unless we clear ourselves from all these desires and cravings, we cannot escape from birth and death. We do get a chance. The Lord is more merciful. He always helps us and gives us chance after chance to make the best use of our life. But if we refuse to make use of that chance, naturally we have to go down into the lower species.

Q     If a person were to be cut off from life before he makes progress in Nam, what happens?

A     Sister, it depends upon many things but mostly on our desires, our cravings, our longings, our karmas, our attachments and the grace of the Master. Even if we have not made much progress during our life-span but we have not many unffulfilled desires, we have not much attachment with people, places or things --- if we have no strong attachment, nothing can bring us back here. We are then taken to certain stages inside, and from there we can work and make our way up. On the other hand, even if we have progressed to some extent inside, and we still have very strong attachments with the world, we are brought back to cleaer those attachments, to get rid of those attachments and make further progress and go back to Him.

So, it depends on the individual situation. Generally, we will never go backwards. There are no failures in Sant Mat. We always go ahead. If you do not make any progress in this life, you will get another life in which to make progress.You will be born under much better circumstances, as far as meditation is concerned, as far as devotion to the Lord is concerned, not from a material point of view. If you do not make progress, you will get another birth to make your way up ---- to improve yourelf. YOu will be in still better circumstances for meditation. Ultimately you will have gone every step, every part of the way forward, not backwards. So, there is nothing to fear. We should try to do our best during our life-span and then just leave the rest to Him.

Q      Maharaj Ji, in this morning's discourse it was mentioned that some people waste the human body, a very precious thing. Now would it be considered to be wasted by a person who has lived a good life according to his own spiritual views, as opposed to someone who has not done so --- would that person automatically have to go back on the wheel of " eighty-four " (eight million, four hundred thousand species), or could he possibly return in the human body to go on spiritually?

A     Yes, he can. By 'waste' we mean not attending to our meditation, not makinguse of this human form to realize the Lord. If our direction of travel is not towards Him, but is reversed towards the senses, we are wasting our human form. But if we are not a slave of the senses, and yet we are not doing anything to realize the Lord, we are doing good things, we are trying to be helpful to people, we are doing everything that we can for the massses, then we are building good karmas which will take us back into the human form again. We are given chance after chance to make the best use of this human form, but unless we make use of the human form in the right sense, we can never get out of the cycle of transmigration.

Q      We find people throughout history with different grades of intellect and intuition. I would like to hear your comments on that.

A      Yes, people can be of different calibers of intellect. Fellow travelers on the path can be of different grades of intellect, or of different stages of advancement spiritually also. But as long as the road is the same, it does not make any difference whether you have covered ten miles or fifty miles or a hundred miles because, if in this life you have covered ten miles, naturally you start again from the end of that ten miles in the next birth, and then cover perhaps another fifty or sixty miles or more, until ultimately you reach the goal. As long as the road is the same, the teachings are the same for us. So, basically, we can try to understand and follow the teachings under the guidance of a Living Master.  


Q     This evolution, we are told, comes up from the grain of sand, plant life, animal life and the human -- are we to understand that every material thing in this universe will finally have to get back to God?

A     Only the Souls,

Q     Is there not a soul in a grain of sand?

A     No. For exmaple, there is o soul in this water, no soul in this stone, no soul in the air, no soul in the fire; yet all of these things are mde up of one of the five elements. The whole creation is made of five elements. Yet, if you take those elements individually, they have no souls. Plants have souls, insects have souls, bird have souls, the animals have souls, and of course human beings have souls. They can make their way up to the Lord, after having attained the human form, but not this metal, for it has no soul.

Q      Have these other creatures the same soul as human beings have?

A      Oh yes, the soul is the same. That same soul can be in a human form or in any other living form.

Q      Is spirit in everything that holds it in shape and that goes back to God? How does one differentiate between soul and spirit?

A      These are only different terminologies. Some people use them very loosely. Some people mean different things by these words. Some philosophers never differentiated beetween the mind and the soul. They just took it to be one. But now, some modern philosophers have differentiated between mind and soul. Indians always have done so. Consequently, sometimes these terminologies are used vaguely.In the Bible the "Holy Spirit" or "Holy Ghost" is used to denote the Shabd or Nam, and the Word or Logos means the same thing, as is also the Sound Current or the Audible life Stream. So, the word "spirit" can mean the Shabd and it can also mean the soul. Some people may refer to it as mind, but mind is not soul; it is something entirely different, as previously explained.

I tell you actually that wave of the Audible Life Streamor Word or Logos or whatever you want to call it ---  that is soul, and it is that which keeps us together. Without that, neither the body nor themind can function, for it is the very life of the mind and the body. This body is made up of the five elements -- earth, water, fire, air, and ether. All these five elements are inimical to each other. The earth dissolves in water, water is evaporated by fire, and so on. Yet wwith the aid of the soul, the ray of the Lord, or you may call it spirit, all these elements are collected together to make the human body and we are functioning in this world. The day that the Lord withdraws that spiritor soul from our body, all these five elements will again separate and merge back into their own individual origins. The earth merges back into earth, water into water, and so on. It is the Spirit, Nam, shabd, Soul or whatever you may call it that keeps us alive; that is what enables us to function; so we are concerned with that things, whether you call it soul or spirit. It is the soul that is the life and activates the body and the mind. The moment the Lord withdraws the soul from the body, it becomes useless and decomposes. The words 'soul' and 'spirit' are simply different terminologies to express the same thing.

Q   In the case of people or children who are born with handicaps, cerebral palsy or mental retardation --- if we try to talk to them or to educate them, are we interfering with their karma? Is it right for us to try to aid them, or should we not interfere?

A    Sister, the question of interfering with karma does not arise at all. It is the mother's duty to set a child right, to explain to him the right way to live in this world. One is actually failing in one's duty by not trying to teach that child what is wrong and what is right. When the mother does her duty to the best of her ability, and then she leaves everything to the karmas, they will take care of themselves automatically. But we should not think that we are interfering with their karmas if we are trying to explain to them their disability, or the right way of life, and trying to help them in every way. We have to do our best to make them good and disciplined children, good citizens, to face life, and then leave it to the Lord. What comes out of them should be left to their karmas, after we have done our best to help them.

But we cannot justify our indifference under the garb of karmas. That attitude shold not be there. In fact, we would be interfering with their karmas if we did not try to teach them and help them. We have learned by experience, by age and maturity, and it is our duty to impart the benefit of these experiences to them, even though we may sometimes have to be quite stern in disciplining them.

Q      Maharaj Ji, if a soul's life is very short in this birth, would it return again? Why is it that life was cuty short? Their karmic debt must have been very light, but does that mean that they have been initiated already and will not return any more, or will they have to come back in another life and pay off some more karmic debt, which they have not been able to pay off in this life?

A       Our span of life depends upon our karma, and if on edies at birth or at a very young age, it is because that was the fate allotted to that particular life. That doesnot mean that after having this human form, that soul goes back to the Lord. Even though that soul has had no opportunity to make new karma in this life, there is still the Sinchit or store or reserve load of karmas from which the fate of the next life is determined.

Our karma can take us down to a lower species and our karma can also bring us back to the human form. It depends upon our attachments, our desires and cravings which we have not been able to fulfill or sublimate during the life-span, the "seeds" which we have sown and have to come back to reap the fruit thereof. All this determines where we have to go, and it does not mean that if we die young, we must go back to the Lord. No, that is a wrong conception. It hardly makes any difference whether we die young or old. Our karma, our desires and our attachments determine where we have to go as well as the span of that life and whether to a lower species or whether to come back to the human form.

Without initiation, without spiritual practice, nobody can get release from birth and death. Whether we die young or whether we die old, we have to pave our way, we have to travel on that path, we have to reach a certain stage before we can get rid of this birth and death, and that we can do only by meditation. So, it makes no differnce whether we die young or old. Sometimes in our life-span we are reaping the fruit of what we have sown in the past, and sometimes we are sowing new seed,but we have to comeback to reap again. Those who die young naturally get little chance to sow for the future, but all the same they may have reserve karmas, and they have to come back into this world in order to clear them.

Q     Maharaj Ji, what is the meaning of a new-born babythat comes into this world and dies immediately? Would you please explain?

A      Sister, that is also due to karmic relationship with the mother, with the father, with the doctor, with the world and with so many people. It was not in that baby's destiny to see life; yet he has had karmic relations with so many people in theworldin the past, for which he has to come back into this world, butnot to live here. This is all according to previous karmas. For example, when themother has conceived, she has to go for help to so many people -- the doctor, friends, relations, hospital, and so forth. That is all due to the karmic relationship of the child with those people, through the mother, through the father and through their friends, in addition to that relationship with the mother and father. That all has to be cleared and yet the child is not destined to live, so it dies at or soon after birth.

Q      If children are born with a specialknowledge, they know more than the average child, and they grow up to bephysicists or letus say, greaet men, has it anything to do with their previous lives? What made them superior to the average person?

A      What we are and what we are going to be, naturally has something to do with our past life. That is what is known as destiny or fate. We bring it with us into this world. Destiny or fate is something with which we are born, which we are going to face in this life-span. Naturally, it has an associatioin with our past life.

Q      In other words, it is true that there is something in his capacity from before that makes him superior, from a previous life?

A      Yes, that is right.