That Absolute Truth
Excerpt from Public Program at The Department of Religious Studies
University of Sydney, Australia, on the 15th of March, 1990
At the very outset we have to know one thing, that truth is what it is. We cannot organize it, we cannot order it, we cannot conceptualize it also with our human understanding. It is, it was and it will be. The essence of all religions, if you bring it down to the one-line essence, is this, that seek the eternal, and treat the transitory with all understanding about it.
The first part is the difficult one: seek the eternal. Eternal is the truth, and what is the truth? Now when I'm talking to you, you are all very well-versed and very well-educated people. I have to request you to have an open mind, a scientific outlook to see for yourself if what I say is the truth or not, experience it, and treat all this talk as a hypothesis. And if it turns out to be the truth, then in all honesty we have to accept it.
There are two things which we may not accept, but they exist. One of them is that all this universe, all this creation is permeated by, nourished by, looked after by the all-pervading Power of God's Love. In these modern times, even to take God's name is too much. This is called as Paramachaitanya in Sanskrit language, in Qur'an it is called as Ruh, in the Bible as the all-pervading Power of God's Love, or the all-pervading Power of Divine. What we call as spirituality, divinity is the essence of that. This is the first truth.
And the second truth is that we are not this body, not this mind, not the emotions, not the ego, nor these thoughts. Beyond that we are the spirit, we are the pure spirit. These are the two things said in all religions, whatever way they must have talked about.
In the olden times when seeking started in India - India has certain privileges compared to other countries. Firstly the climate is so good that you can live in a jungle without much trouble. While in the West we would say people started going outward like a tree, the Indians started going downward into their roots. And they found out, long time back, Sahaja Yoga.
It's not a modern thing, it's an ancient accepted method of getting union with the Divine, which is yoga. Sahaja means "born with you" - saha is "with," ja "born." Born with you is the right to get that union with the Divine Power.
But sahaja also means "spontaneous," because this is the living power that works it out. There is a living power within us which has made us human beings from amoeba stage. And now there's another residual power which has to connect us to the Divine. This is the real meaning of the word yoga. And every human being has a right to get united to that all-pervading power. So this is the last breakthrough of our evolution.
At human level, as you know, we live in a relative world. Some people say this is good, some people say that is good. There's all a strife going on. But if it is the absolute truth there should be no two opinions about it. So very humbly we must accept that we have not yet reached that absolute truth which proves the existence of God, which proves the existence of this all-pervading power, which proves the correctness of what the great prophets, the great incarnations have taught us.
Of course religions have gone into diversions and deviations because of human effort, and they might have been apparently looking to be different, but they were just like flowers on the Tree of Life at different times, according to the timings - Sanskrit the word is for that samayachaa. According to the time the manifestation was there, but they were all created on one Tree of Life. But people plucked it, started saying, "This is mine. This is mine," and with the dead flowers they started fighting. That's how we see today the problem arising.
There was nothing wrong with these saints, nothing wrong with the prophets, and nothing wrong with the incarnations. They all have done whatever was the best for us, and have tried to tell us from time to time at the time of our evolution what we have to do. But mostly they have been dealing with the transitory things, how not to indulge into the transitory pleasures of life, but to seek the eternal...