Sometimes we are touched. It is not because of the master, I don't think. People make a big deal out of any master, call them even the supreme Master; but I think, it is you that makes things happen with your sincerity, your openness of your deepest intelligence and love within yourself that you'll experience some time or another on different occasions, this kind of blissful experience. We sometimes experience this, less or more in some degree, through deepest prayer and/or sometimes when we are in very deep sorrow or experience some untold sufferings - we feel that the blessing from God is very near.
Meditation or contemplation is just another kind of opening our sincerity and longing to be a kind of receiver for the abundant blessing and love which is always present throughout the universe. Perhaps sometimes coincidentally or through the arrangement of the highest intelligence, we feel more blessing in some places or in encountering someone special Maybe because that someone is also in the same frequency with us, in the same sincerity, longing and openness to God like we are. At that moment, the two united forces experience the blissful feeling or the so-called awakening.
Many of our people in this world think they are okay. They don't need to change their lives, don't need to do anything, don't even need enlightenment. Therefore, they don't search for it. Even if the teacher or a good friend, unconditional out of love and devotion, comes to them, to their door, they still reject him.
That's what makes our world the way it is, still now. We have not learned the unified power. Many of us have not learned yet to use the greatest blessing that is in abundance everywhere in the universe, just have to stretch out our hand and fetch it, and everything in our life will become smoother, all our desires.
Many of us always blame God, or blame circumstances or situations that are unfavorable to us. Many things we ask are not given. We blame the society, sometimes the governments, our parents, even our schools, anything we can lay our hands on. But if we stop to think deeply or fairly a little bit, we should think: What do we contribute to the society, our nation, the world at large to make it become a better place; instead of waiting for it to be better by itself, which is sometimes impossible.
God doesn't create us here so that we just lay in our rose bed everyday, waiting for bread and butter. We are here to learn, to learn to grow as well as to learn to use our limitless power of love and creativity in order to make a better world wherever we happen to be incarnated. If we do not learn to do this, then we have to return again; and that is what people call reincarnation. The unfulfilled desires or the unfulfilled mission, which is dormant within us, will be always awake inside, reminding us time again and again that we have not yet finished our job.
Many people think that we are okay, we are doing right; but we aren't, we are not truly okay. One fifth of the population of this world is hungry. Another large portion of the population, our brothers and sisters, are undernourished. That is according to scientific research, it's not from me. You can read that in the newspapers or demand for the proof. Many portions of our beautiful planet are still suffering under war, conflict, violence and many other disasters manmade or by nature. It's because we are not okay.
Even sometimes, we can't do our hair alone, just to talk about small things. We don't know how to clean the house properly. Sometimes we can't even help some people in need the way they want it. We make more mess out of our good intentions. Even if we want to help, we can't. That's why many projects are failing, many good leaders have become kind of almost useless, despite their very, very best intentions to help the world and their people. Why? Because we are not okay. We are not okay the way we should be okay, not the way we think we are okay.
If everything, many things in our life go wrong, if many of our desires go unfulfilled, if our next-door neighbor suffers, or if we suffer in any way, that's because we are not okay. It is time that we face up to our own shortcomings, our own accumulated, undesirable habits in order to reshape our beauty, our Godly nature so that we can do what we want to do in perfection, or at least, near perfection. At least, don't make a mess out of our good intentions whenever we want to help or we want to better ourselves, our family or our environment.
Enlightenment is not an advertisement from our disciples for you or anyone to come and just to research, or maybe curiously see what's going on. It is a way of life, it is a survival fact. It is a necessary ornament in our life here and after.
If we have any religious beliefs, we know there is life after death. If we don't have any religious beliefs, we should know that there is life after death, because there is a lot of medical research on death, near-death or after-death experiences. This kind of information is available to us nowadays, in abundance. Many books about enlightenment and about bettering our inherent powers, etceteras, are available in the markets. These are good for us; yet in a sense, not always that good. The Americans, the ones who read a lot and love to read, are very intelligent. They hunger for knowledge so they read a lot. I read a lot, too - before, between and I still continue to read. It is because sometimes I have to know what's going on, what's the trend in the society in order to respond to it or to explain, to kind of solve some of the doubts which result from these books or intellectual food.
Why I said this, is that sometimes all this information is not always good for us. Because we love to read, we eat everything from the intellectual supermarket, and sometimes we have indigestion or we stuff our brain with all kinds of intellectual information without truly having personal experience. So, we think we know. "Oh! Yes! I know, Yogananda - the light. I know what it is, Sant Mat - light and sound. I know Master Ching Hai. She teaches the same. So I don't have to come and listen to Her."
It's not that we come to listen. We must come so that we have the true experience, if we already did not have; if we had some portion of the enlightened experience, but we do not know how to go further with it, how to nourish it, or how to live with it or to integrate this enlightened wisdom into our daily productivity in order to serve the world.
We must make our world into heaven, not run to heaven; because everywhere is heaven. God created only heaven, until we messed about with our computer brain, kaput one; I mean damaged, or not very in order. Enlightenment is the way to put ourselves back in order. It's not a kind of far-fetched heavenly mythology the way we think, but it is just daily experiences of our great resource of love and wisdom, which God bestowed upon us before we arrived in this physical dimension. If we think that heaven is somewhere high above the clouds, then we are in trouble; because we have to wait at least sixty or a hundred years in order to go there. With suffering and all kinds of misery in this world, we don't have to do that.
Life is meant to be joyful for the children of the Most High. If you are the children of the king or the president, now you go to school, how do you feel? You have guards, you have a special Rolls Royce, you have all kinds of privileges, even all the school look upon you with reverence, love, admiration, envy and many things. You feel you know your status.
In the Bible, it is stated that we are the children of God, and He's king of all kings. Now, we live in this kind of life and we worry about pennies, everything frightens us - even just a bullet, that big. One thousandth of your weight could frighten you into losing your sense of dignity and even begging for your life. We'd do anything just to be alive, just to keep this physical body functioning. This is not a life of dignity. This is not the life of the children of God, if we truly understand what God means. God is the owner of the whole universe and we are the children. Can you believe it?
Just talking about it and never knowing it, is not the way of enlightenment; and we think we are okay! As long as there is one person suffering in this world, as long as there is still war and famine going on in our neighborhood, we are not okay; because we share the responsibilities of this house that we live in. It is a big family, extended, because we can't live together in one room and we don't have to. We need variety. We need different talents in order to make the world colorful and interesting. That's what God wants us to do.
We have so much talent, each one should contribute something. Even with all our talents we can't contribute as much as we'd want or we can not be as useful as we'd like to be; because we are not yet okay. We lack something. We lack the true wisdom, the true love which lays sleeping within each of us.