Talk by Sir C.P.:

Mr. Subramanyam and dear Sahaja Yogis and Sahaja Yoginis of Delhi, May I say first of all, how very grateful I am to all of you for the honour, kindness and affection you have chosen to bestow upon me, this evening. For me it is an experience which is very wooling and I assure you, I will cherish it for a long time. Sahaj Yoga is now the very life of my wife, whom you call Mataji; who still remains my wife And as Sh. Subramanyamji said, she has played the role of a wife, a perfect wife, if I may say so, a perfect Mother and now a perfect Grandmother and what she is doing now for the Humanity is something which makes me particularly proud and most gratified. Perhaps, I may mention to you that years ago when our two daughters were still little children and they were growing up, we both agreed that our first responsibility as parents must be to bring them up properly, educate them and to see that they are properly married and settled in life and then she would be free to devote herself to the wider family of Humanity. She kept her word and I kept mine. My daughters grew up. Credit for bringing them up naturally goes to her, because I was really very busy with my official duties and she gave me tremendous support by looking after the children, and the house and taking over every possible responsibility except my office work, which I kept to myself. Now, when the daughters grew up, the question of their marriage came up and that was the test of her upbringing and the test of children and so I asked my daughters, “ that now you have grown up, you have travelled widely, you have been abroad to many countries and well educated, it is up to you to decide in what way would you like to get married” . But as my wife had brought them up in true Indian tradition, both of them said, that it was our duty as parents to find proper bridegrooms for them and so whatever we decided was their decision. Living as we were in Bombay, the people there sometimes did not even believe that girls, who have been so well educated and widely travelled etc. would get married in our traditional Indian style and custom, following ancient Indian values. So as parents, we found bridegrooms for them, both are happily married and well settled.Ever since then, my wife has been devoting her time, not only time 1 would say her soul to Sahaja Yoga and I have seen how wondrous her endeavours have been. In a world that we live in, when you look up the newspapers in the morning, you find strife, trouble, accidents and so on. She wants to bring peace, peace in a spiritual sense. Where there is animosity she wants to substitute love for that, where there is bitterness, she wants to substitute harmony for that and bring spiritual development of the individuals. Now, to my way of thinking, the world is in turmoil. Not only in India, there is trouble everywhere. I find that really human being is in turmoil, within himself and outside. And then what is the need of the hour? Rich countries are no better. They might have more material goods but inside they are even more troubled than we are. We, in India have a certain degree of contentment. We have a rich culture behind us, we have wonderful tradition. Our marvellous traditions have a very happy blend of materialism and spiritualism. In the West, spiritualism has declined and therefore, there is more inner turmoil. Everywhere, the people are looking for something. They want to know what is beyond this material world we see; what is our destiny as human beings. There is now, a moment in human history, when some new revolution, spiritual revolution has to come about if the humanity is to be saved, otherwise war, conflict, strife will destroy humanity. It is in this context, I see in Sahaja Yoga the beginnings of a new movement for humanity and I, therefore, wish to assure you that I feel proud of what you are doing as Sahaja Yogis and Sahaj Yoginis—true selfless love for each one, for everyone, true dedication to the ideals which are being promoted and these are wonderful values.I have seen the wonders of Sahaja Yoga in U.K. and I might tell you, what I have seen I lead a very busy life because of my responsibilities but once I was very grateful to my wife and Sahaja Yogis when they invited me to a function, about a month ago and there I saw a group of, may be 200-300 people, old, young, middle aged and children. They all seemed like happy family. They had come from different parts of the country. All were together, happy and cheerful with a face which exuded a certain amount of divinity. They were happy and peaceful, very different from the usual crowd you see, full of tension, anger and bitterness; nothing seemed to affect them. One thing touched me most was that several ladies came one by one, some of them with tears in their eyes, came to my wife, while I was sitting by her side saying, “ Mother, you have saved me and my son, who had gone astray, had taken to drugs and alcohol and has now been saved. He has come back to the family. Now we are a joyous family. How can we thank you enough for this ?” Another lady comes along and says” , My daughter was going the way, we did not like and your Sahaja Yoga has brought her back to the family and now we are a united and happy family again” . To my way of thinking, even if one individual can be saved in this fashion, it is a unique achievement. If two can be saved it is better but if dozens and hundreds can be saved it is marvellous. I feel this is a movement which holds great promise for humanity, provided it is pursued strictly in accordance with your values. Values are very very important, particularly in today’s world. Though, there has been a decline all over the world in these values which established our human society, yet we need to revive our values, and sustain them. I want to assure you that values in India, my own country, and I say so in all humility and sincerity, are about the best as anywhere in the world. There is no country better than India, there are no people better than Indians, if only we remember and become Indians. Being born in India is not enough, we must respect the values, which make India a great country, and Indians, the wise people. Our tradition is marvellous, very very rich. But we sometimes cease to be ourselves. Now, if we become true Indians in the path of wisdom, which our forefathers laid down for us and we really develop spiritually ourselves the way this lady, my wife, is propagating, I have no doubt at all, that a wonderful spiritual uplifting is well on the way.With these few words I want to express my deep gratitude to all of you for the love that you are giving my wife, because you represent a fulfilment of her dream; it was her dream to build up a certain togetherness—a togetherness of spiritualism, a certain awareness of ultimate reality. Therefore, your presence here is to me the embodiment, the fulfilment of a dream she always had. I want to thank you for all the love and affection you have for her. I thank you very much for the kindness shown to me today. I can only say that if in any way, my activities can be of slightest assistance to her, she has them; she has all her time for Sahaja Yoga and I am very happy about it. I wish she had not 24 but 48 hours in a day. Whatever is available, she devotes herself in a very nice way. It is always embarrassing to talk about one’s own wife, but this relationship is just a fact of life and there is a higher relationship that you have with her.There are many qualities in her, which you may not perhaps see. She has believed in not taking but in giving always. You know we have relations of all kinds, some are well to do; many not so well to do; some are poor, some are in need and whoever gathered within our precincts at any stage of our service life, whatever we had, it was always shared between my children and other childrens in exactly the same way, and there never was a slightest difference between our own daughters and other daughters or sons who had gathered. This was from the very beginning. This is the kind of person that she has always been and therefore, I am not surprised that she is flowering into a spiritual person. Divinity is her own right. This is not something which has just happened today. It has been there for sometime. It is becoming known more, now. The movement is spreading. It is a movement which is voluntary. U.K., France, Germany and other European countries, Australia and of course, India is the motherland for this. May this movement grow. May more Sahaja Yogis participate in its activities and may we revive in India the great Indian spiritual values of which we should justly feel proud. I shall conclude now, by thanking you for the honour you have done me today and the very thoughtful gift which you have chosen to present to me—Goddess Lakshmi. May Goddess Lakshmi shower on you all her blessings—Always.

Later Talk by Her Holiness Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi:

It is very embarrassing in this way to speak about Mr. Srivastava. Today, I am very happy that you are honoring him because if he was not supporting me I could not have done anything. Apart, from that, as he said about values, I have yet to come across a person who has values as Mr. Srivastava himself has. The difference is that you can imbibe values after self-realization very easily, but even before self-realization he has them. He is a very honest man. He bought ships worth crores and crores of rupees and never he thought of any kind of dishonesty and he is a man of great discipline. I think what we lack is discipline. As it is, the countries which are disciplined have themselves grown very much and helped others to grow. But if Sahaja Yogis do not have discipline of Sahaja Yoga, then Sahaja Yoga will be like any other nonsensical institution Mr. Srivastava’s discipline is so great that I do not know how he manages it. For example, for time, he is so particular, so also for consideration of others, for attending to his work, to see the people who come to see him. to see what he has to say, how far to say, what to say at the right time. There is so much Sahaja in him, so much inborn in him that at the right time, he will say the right thing. And above all the brilliance, he has, so much that he comes to the right conclusion immediately. He was not a realised soul, now I think he has touched the Sahasrar. But even before this, he would reach the right conclusion. As you have seen about Sahaja Yoga also, he has taken a right attitude. To take the right attitude is only possible, if you are really intelligent otherwise, those who are not, cannot Pure intelligence means that there is no bias of ego or super-ego, no conditioning and you could see it in its pure form. You can see that he has allowed me to work. To accept that I should do all this work is in itself a very big sacrifice for a man. None of you would allow your wife to leave you for 3 months. It is a great sacrifice but because he has seen that this is the way, he not only allows me, but you know how generous he is about everything. We see things and even understand rationally that this is good, still they are not identified with ourselves. While I see in him, his own discipline; when he rationally accepts something or thinks that it is correct then he just does it. This is something which you have to learn from someone who has done this all his life. I used to be amazed, as to how he used to identify! There is so much integration in his actions and his understanding. This is something which really surprises me, because after realization after great Tapasya, one can achieve such a integration. We say one thing and do another, like so many people who criticise this, criticise that but when it comes to them, they will do themselves the same. If he has risen high; many people say that it is Mataji’s blessings even if it is partly that; still I would say that anyone like him would rise, specially in a country like ours, where people see the honestly and integrity and high moral character as something special. Since I have come to India this time, he has been honoured by so many institutions and so many people that I was amazed, how much he is respected. After all, he is like any other bureaucrat, otherwise but the way he is identified with the ideals. He is a man of ideals. I am not an easy wife to live with because, as you know, I do not allow any hanky-panky in my own life. When he joined Indian Administrative Service, you won’t believe that he was first selected in Indian Foreign Service. He was getting much more pay but I told him that first we have to serve our own country and not go abroad to foreign countries. He accepted to join I.A.S. not because I asked him to but because he thought it was proper that we should serve our motherland. He suffered a lot in I.A.S. but he still stuck to his ideals. I think, one should really imbibe from him this discipline of mind. This discipline of the mind is that, whatever one should accept with one’s mind, should be in one’s action. You should be proud of your virtue. As you know, what company and status he has but he does not drink a drop of wine. One may just say that it is because of Mataji. But, 1 have never told him to do so. Of course, I have said that I don’t like drinking, but I have never told him not to drink; I am not in that way interfering at all. I have never told him about Sahaja Yoga also in this way. But it is his own understanding. If the people have that intelligence, then it would not be necessary for us to go round to persuade them.Another thing is that when I was a child, my mother used to say that only Shankar can marry you, the way you are innocent and the way you are generous; because I saw anybody poor or needy I would take out everything from my mother’s Bhandar (store) and give it. She would say “ I do not know whom you would marry; the poor fellow will have to be poor like Shankar because you will give away everything that he will have” . But I am like that, it is my Nature. If anybody says, I like a thing, I will forget and will give it to him. He has a complaint that I have even given away our engagement ring. But from one side I gave from other side it came. Now he knows that. This nature of mine is not easy for any husband to tolerate; the way I am generous. Again, my over-loving nature for all of you. He understands that, I have tremendous feeling for you. Of course, when you come and disturb me, the people have been disturbing me much more now. Something happens, they must think of Mother, they must come. The emergency exists always; somewhere with somebody. He has been very patient in going through all this. He can understand me as my husband. He has all those qualities from his childhood. He is a self-made man, absolutely honest person, he never tells a lie, no hanky-panky, he never gossips I hate gossiping myself and he never gossips. Again, he has created an image in his international world that it is a family that he is looking after. So you people also have to understand, if you have to be Sahaja Yogis, you have to imbibe all these Values, otherwise Sahaja-Yoga will be completely doomed. Sahaja Yogis have to come up, they have to decide that they have not to tell lies, they have to be honest, they have to believe that the God, the almighty is their father and he is going to look after his children. We have to change the map of this world, particularly of our country. It needs people of character and people who are fearless, who will face life as honest people. We have not lost anything; you have seen that with God’s Grace when we had nothing also, we were happy. Once we had a theft and all my saris and all his clothes, everything was lost, nothing was left. As we had little money at that time and he had no clothes, so I told him to have his clothes first and I could’nt buy them for myself; I had only one silk sari for seven years. But we managed it and it worked out so well after that. Whether you have it or not, is not the point, the way you live your life is important.Also, it is not easy to be my children, because I know what you do, I know everything about you. I also correct you, you know that. But when you are sticking to me, it also shows that you belong to a category of people, bent upon evolving and being better people through inner transformation. To be a Sahaja Yogi is not an easy thing; that you can pay some money and become members and become Mataji’s disciples. Even where you have become my disciples, you have to pass certain tests and you have to work hard for it, you have to do a lot of Tapasya, living in your family. That you have been doing, so I feel very happy and proud of you as I am of him (Sir C. P. Srivastava) and I would like you to see how he has led his life. You can ask people, how he is so honest, so good, so compassionate, to all the people. Whatever are our defects, we should see them first of all; we should not see the defect of others. We, Indians have particular type of defects, which we should try to cure. The other day, in our program, some people came, who are starting an agitation in Maharashtra. I told them, “ there is no use of starting an agitation because when you had the Govt., what did you do ? At the most, you would, form the Govt. again, what will you do then ? They replied, “ what could we do now, some sugar magnate has taken so much money, has hoarded all the things and has raised the prices and now he is cashing because he has been paying for the election !” I said, “ Now you decide, from the Sahaja Yoga point of view, that you will not vote for a man who gives you money or sells votes for money. Even for food, we sell our votes; we do not have self-restraint”. At least Sahaja Yogis must start. Let us all combine together and decide that neither will we have any dishonest methods from any corner, at any cost nor will we have anyone elected whom we know is not honest and upright. We will have to fight it, then only our country is going to improve. Now, to begin with we will have to do some sacrifices, as you have seen I had also to sacrifice. But it is not so difficult to sacrifice. I could see other women who had such a lot of ornaments and this and that but I have never felt like having these. Instead, I am proud of the fact that my husband is a man of virtue. This was the greatest ornament and pride that a woman can have. In the same way all Sahaja Yogis and Sahaja Yoginis must think of virtues. We have a little bit to assert our will power; everybody has little weaknesses. Instead of justifying it, they should just try to assert own will-power to cure it. I am sure a day will come when Mr. Srivastava will see this country changing in real fashion, as he himself has been changing and may be one of these days, he will work side by side with us. We need such people who are seekers of divinity, and have come on this earth to transform this pattern of things. May God bless you.