New Era.
1. My humble salutations to the seekers who assembled
on this auspicious occasion of the 138th
birthday celebrations of our beloved Samarth Guru Sri
Ramchandraji Maharaj of Fategarh. None of us here know
anything about Him except through the writings of our
beloved Master Sri Ramchandraji Maharaj of Shahjahanpur
U.P. India. But that is only when we think of the
exterior and the external factors. In our heart however
the call of the Grand Master to reach Him is heard by
all of us incessantly.
2. Recently I was contemplating on the words of our
Master “ My Master Samarth Guru Mahatma Sri Ramchandraji
Maharaj of Fategarh (U.P) India, has remodelled the’
yoga’ in a way that somehow you may come into contact
with the Divine speedily.”(SDG 151) The word
‘somehow’ used by the Master was intriguing. Further the
statement “The blissful time ushered by His advent
introduced a new era of spiritual awakening which
promises a practical solution of the human problem of
existence.” (SDG 117) added further confusion.
3. At the time of the Advent, India was going through
turmoil. Our Grand Masters’ own life was shattered due
to the Nawabs and Britishers. There was what is known as
mutiny and also the world wars. I most humbly submit to
you to go kindly read the story of the life of Rev.
Lalaji Maharaj. I could not think of any blissful
condition ushered at the time of the Advent and for that
matter in the about one and a half century since then.
The time now is no better. All that comes to my mind is
the bondages in which we were and we are. Earlier others
enslaved us and now by option we are getting enslaved to
alien culture and civilisation. As a cynic put it India
lost its independence after gaining freedom. Moreover
our wants and desires have swelled beyond measure that
we are not sure whether there is any sanity still left
in the way we live. However the problem is directly
connected to as to how we live.
4. Recalling the thoughts of my revered father I may
express that there are mainly two ways of living: one is
to live according to Nature and the other is to live
according to Spirit. Human life is not capable of
adjusting wholly to the one or the other. By nature one
may mean the uncultivated, ill disciplined, desire and
instinct driven person. This has been one view from the
earliest times. The other view about nature considers
that it was a paradisiacal state of utmost equality of
all men, out of which flowed the feelings of rationality
of all men. In any case men did not seek liberty, for
the community gave ample scope for harmony without it.
5. Liberty comes in only when we wish to equalize
ourselves with others or seek fraternity which we do not
get from unequals. In any case, what we discover is that
Nature has two faces, the face of strife and struggle
for the elementary needs of life, and the other face,
that looks forward to an era of peace and harmony.
History informs us that when the face of strife and
struggle was sought to be overcome by this ideal
presented by the face of equality and fraternity, there
arose what we call the period or age of nature and
culture.
6. Culture itself has been an unceasing struggle to
enthrone the values of equality and fraternity and
freedom to arrive at the peaceful paradisiacal state. In
other words, it is a continuous process of overcoming
the forces of divisiveness with the power and force of
the ideals of spirit like unity and cohesion which is
the other face of Nature. This we know is the crux of Rajayoga and more particularly the Satyapad where the
lower nature of man is sought to be governed by the
higher nature of man. It is the wisdom gained by the
ancient saints. This wisdom helped us to understand that
the Higher Nature is a state of equilibrium, whereas the
lower Nature is a state of inequilibrium or
disintegration and division. The actual method by which
we live in a cultured fashion which would mean living
according to our higher nature, the object of our life,
is what our Grand Master has bestowed on us. Master
asserts that “My revered master, Samarth Guru Mahatma
Ramchandraji Maharaj of Fategarh, has rendered wonderful
service to humanity in this respect by providing the
easiest means of gaining the object of
life. (Reference: SDG 137)
7. As to the question whether human beings have become
more cultured now than about a few centuries ago the
answer is in the question itself. Nowadays even as
Master would say “People do not know the value of
spirituality, because such things are not infused in
them by the society or parents. However, the present-day
circumstances will mould them to come under the banner
of spirituality. We should try to give them real peace;
that is our duty and our business. A time will come when
they will be forced to come on the proper path by Nature
Herself. It will be for their own good.” I wonder and
sometimes hope that such a time has come now. Seeing the
happenings of the present day I also wonder whether the
rather abrasive statement of my revered father “Men need
not take another body to be brutes; they have become
brutes.” (Reference: Dr. K.C.V. Vol.1 - pg 100) is true.
8. However dispassionate consideration of the progress
we have made so far makes us say that the modern man or
rather man living in the modern world is placed in an
advantageous position today more than ever to meet the
demands of our higher nature which we apprehend in the
form of our ideals of civilization or spirituality. This
is due to the fact that several religious have already
prepared the grounds for the perception, cultivation and
habituation to the ideals of religion and
spirituality-each in its measures and also each in a
broad sphere of taming the instincts of pugnacity,
separatism, egoism and brutal way of living not
only with one’s own family members but also with
neighbours and aliens. Religious injunctions though they
have prohibited many uncivil ways of behaviour have
moulded only slowly and negligibly our inner and
personal life. It is true that in some cases it has been
otherwise, in one’s personal life one has indeed been
restrained and self-controlled but in the mass or in
public life many have run amok if not wild. It is a fact
that man has not been able to transform his animal
nature, or sublimate it in any way and this is our
problem in transforming ourselves.
9. Though we are not living in any law of the jungle
as Dr.K.C.V. would put it “yet man is untamed in parts,
rational in a few, and the application of rationality in
all spheres of human behaviour, personal or social,
individual or collective has been tardy and perilous.”
However it is not proper to consider the higher and the
lower Natures in us as opposed to each other and that
there is hardly any possibility of bringing about
harmony between the two. Most religions and philosophies
wisely or unwisely have fostered the oppositional view
of these two natures, so much so they have vowed to
exterminate the lower nature. The misfortune however is
that the processes they adopted to exterminate it has
been precisely the manner of the lower nature. The
repression of the lower mind was sought to be done by
the higher using the methods of the lower or the higher
is given a role similar to that of the wolf draped as
sheep or the brute concealed in the robes of a saint.
10.
Two ways were open, one that meant withdrawal of man
from the society following the laws of the lower nature
and the other was to struggle with the forces of the
animal with the help of reason, dialectics, and bring
about a mental change in social thinking. The former led
to the cult of the monk and the monastery, in every
religion, and the other to the academies, institutions
of education and ashrams, where righteous thinking,
higher rationality that showed the values of cooperative
living, purposive self-control to bring about personal
and social change. But as ironically renunciation was
tried to be yoked to educational techniques, indeed
education was taken over by the ashrams and sannyasins
and fakirs so much so rationality was made to suit the
monastic will. In fact with all the will to bring about
a change in human nature by transforming its sensate and
animal nature, it had inculcated the dogma or axiom of
renunciation of social life or societal life as the sine
qua non of spiritual liberty or freedom or even
rationality. However with the enlarging of the spheres
of activity of the monks, monk ethics and social
psychology said to be ethics of a higher Nature or
spirituality more and more began to take the shape and
form of the lower nature. This is one of the major
disturbing factors. It has unfortunately led to the
conviction that human nature is by nature corrupt and
despite heroic and martyric efforts to bring about
lasting change towards divine life, it tends to revert
to its animal basis as more secure for its continuance.
The problem is all the more important for the sadhakas
who desperately attempt to conquer the lower mind and
its vagaries. Reason and rationality seem to fail us in
the path.
11. Thus we are compelled to go beyond the ordinary
dilatory tactics because self-interests dominate over
true justice. Truth is not a compromise of standpoints,
it is something that arises out of the intuition that
develops and grows and is awakened into being through
these processes. However human character demands a
change of approach of attitude towards its own
well-being. When this becomes the habitual way by being
constantly chosen as such, despite gravest provocations
then we can conceive of a time when it could become
universal. Thus individual transformation is paramount
to human transformation. The claim of the path of the
Master is that through the process of Pranahuti the
tendencies of the lower mind can be controlled and
modified. Many studies made by the ISRC have proved this
point and they should grant us the courage and wisdom to
continue in the path with determination.
12. In fact modern man has quite a few choices– the
Gandhian Way of life dedicated to non-violence and
reasoning, a total abjuration of the ways of violence
which he designated as animal reversion: the
Aurobindonian Way of the Supramental Transformation
which involves the bringing down of a superior mind or
super-mind into almost every human being so that he
begins to think and act in terms of the laws of the
supermind or cosmic consciousness: a way of life as
expounded by the Sri Ramakrishna-Vivekananda order,
taking up the service of humanity as the service of God
in man. There are many more such paths and new ones that
are coming up by the day even as the mushrooms. However
in all these paths the discovery of the soul of man or
search for it has been an eternal one, it came to one
person here and one person there in early times, but the
problem is confronting every one simultaneously now.
13. Science has created its own problems. The scientific
pragmatic age has produced astounding problems of
knowledge and technology and has made an earlier appeal
to God almost impossible. We are today either atheists
or agnostics. Man has been made to feel that within him
alone lies his salvation whether there are gods or God.
This dependence on one self on personal commitment to
live rationally and peacefully with one’s neighbours
with the minimum of needs fully attained - not at all
impossible as he thinks it – is absolutely the one thing
that the modern man cares for. The way of life according
to science forward-looking, pragmatic and growing must
be all sufficient to him. However the limits of science
are found in the human personality itself – the serious
problems of post-life or after death, the conscience
within that seems to throw a shadow of itself on the
future after life. But these may be exceptional to some
men at present, it was a very common problem or enigma
in the past – in the lives of the monks and sannyasins.
This, science has not yet been able to solve, not to
speak of undertaking to face. The world is too much with
us: death poses no problem for it appears to be solution
to problems not only regarding oneself but also of
others as well. Liquidation of opponents even like the
liquidation of unfits would be as it has been a quick
solution.
14. This is surely a cynical solution. Spirituality and
mysticism promises that men enter a greater life after
death and a more lovable world would be their new home.
God indeed has been said to reign there. Whatever the
religion it has been at pains to reveal that a good
life, a life of virtue and character maintained through
all kinds of trials will lead to a world of happiness
and release or freedom from all the sorrows that befall
the good here. We have come to regard that this hope is
perhaps a sheer wish-fulfilment idealization. We seem to
have no alternative except to strive to make this world
itself a godly world – but that is precisely the problem
and challenge to the modern man. Short lived hopes just
melt away when the lower nature quietly but ruthlessly
has its way of shattering them.
15. The only way then open to us is to find out a method
by which the lower nature can automatically be
controlled and also reveal the future of man after his
life is over. Death may have its terrors but life has
revealed it so much that we would rather welcome the
regions of death. The spiritual way precisely promised
to unravel this mystery. The technique of linking
oneself with the core of Reality that embraces both the
life and the death is perhaps the only way. Yoga is said
to be the description of this process of linking one
with that central Reality. So far in the history of Yoga
the paraphernalia of preparations for this linking have
been more ardently cared for than the actual linking
itself. None of the so-called yogas or means of
connection with God has actually brought about the same.
Neither selfless works, nor deep thought processes or
intellections, nor mere devotion helped. Nor have mere
change of nomenclatures helped. Ritual mysticisms have
not produced the results. The yoga at the time of the
Advent and perhaps even today has been reduced to a
theatrical operational method – so much so it has become
the bye-word for self-hypnotisms or megalomaniacal
behaviour. All sorts of supra normal miraculous things
are claimed for it. This has been rather unfortunate.
16. A way of union with the Ultimate Reality discarding
all these paraphernalia or miracle-mongering or claims
will have better chance of bringing about a change of
real attitudes or of consciousness itself. This is
precisely what the new method of Rajayoga of our Grand
Master Sri Ramchandraji of Fategarh has done. The
process is scientific, verifiable, easy and simple. It
is the special method by which the divine consciousness
or ultimate thought force is transmitted into the heart
of the seeker after union, that produces the
illumination of both the here and the hereafter. This is
transmission of the supreme or ultimate consciousness
which is presumed to be the primal cause. This
transcendental thought-force called Prana or life itself
is capable of bringing about the proper moulding of the
lower nature in terms of its own nature which is the
highest and thus confers on the human organism,
inclusive of the senses and the mind a peace and calm.
The goal is not just a kind of thoughtlessness or a
feeling of Void or nothingness but the experience of
real being beyond thought itself, individual, cosmic and
even supra cosmic. Once the human organism is made
responsive to this inner deep and fundamental Real Being
by the introduction or ingression of the Ultimate then
they become responsive slowly but surely to the Reality
which has been uniformly experienced as the peace that
passeth understanding. The Ultimate Being does not
refute science or matter but makes it the vehicle for
its own supreme functions which are of the highest
Nature, Peace, Reality, Harmony and efficiency that does
not bring down the return of the gross condition.
17. This
is a method without dogma or ritual, and pure and simple
spirituality that does refute matter which is but its
nether form. Since our beloved Master Babuji Maharaj has
started the propagation of this system through all means
available it now stands proved by the various studies
the ISRC has done and continues to do, that this could
be done with all human beings who feel the call of the
higher nature and train themselves with the help of the
persons who know this art of bringing down or
introducing this highest Spirit into their hearts
