Private
International Self-preparation Group
Message from Krishnaji V
I think we have now got an idea, at least a general
conception, of what the Master is, and we can perceive the beauty of that
idea, and I know we also have the desire, the longing to become part of that
beauty. But before we can achieve, before we can attain, we must develop
naturally certain essential qualities. In some cases we may have to spend
years and in others only a few months at this work. You may have to spend
only a few weeks in acquiring the necessary qualities, if you are sufficiently
observant and have the capacity and the desire to adapt yourselves quickly
and to change. But the first thing above all else as I said in my last message,
is to be happy. We must be so supremely happy that the qualifications,
desires and everything else come as a natural consequence of that happiness.
A friend of mine told me that when I was a
small boy I used to be very miserable and often got upset and unhappy. I
am sure I was often depressed and easily made unhappy, but now I have utterly
forgotten that I could ever be depressed. Now I am happy, and the happiness
which I have gained has produced so strong an effect that it is impossible
for me to revert to that earlier stage. We all tend to get depressed occasionally
- that is to be expected - but that depression should not be a prominent
feature in us, and should not conquer us. Happiness and joyousness, should
be our dominant note. When once you have tasted something really
nice, something that gives you real physical pleasure, then if you taste
anything bitter you instinctively make a comparison with what you enjoyed
on a former occasion. It should be like that with us when once we have tasted
real happiness. We should always revert to it, and the reversion should come
quickly, and not take weeks and months. It is the satisfaction and the after-effect
of that satisfaction that matters, and that is why to me happiness is the
first requisite for a disciple, or for anyone in the world who is striving.
Do not let us think that this is limited to those who are labelled as Initiates
or anything of that kind. For anyone who wants to be beautiful, who
wants to enjoy himself in life, who wants to create, the first thing he must
acquire is happiness. He must be happy and then, as I said, the other necessary
qualities will come naturally, without struggle.
To me then happiness is the first quality.
Then comes desire . . . desire of the right
kind. I am not an exception: I know I have innumerable desires all day long.
I have the desire to go away sometimes and not see anybody .
. . and also other ordinary desires that all of us have. I think
we should have those desires, but we should use them, to change
the quality of our desires. It is no use crushing out all desires and being
desireless. To be desireless is certainly the final stage of perfection, but
we have none of us reached it yet, and if we, at our stage, have the idea
that we must become desireless, that we must kill out all desire, we become
vaguely nebulous and weak. Then we have no will to drive us on, and
that is why, we must have desires even if, for the time being, they happen
to be of the wrong kind. But the nobler and the purer the desire, the nobler
will be our attitude towards life.
In India there is the idea that if you are
to be a spiritual man or woman you must be absolutely desireless, that nothing
must affect you, neither likes nor dislikes. But you can only come to that
stage when you have tasted what the desires bring you in their fruition,
when you have gone through the various results of desire, when you know
what each desire brings. You cannot arrive at perfection in a day. If you
have desires, you can use them to get the right desires; but
if you have not any desire, you will not arrive anywhere, because it simply
means, unless you are quite an exceptional person, that your mentality, your
will, cannot stand up against things.
You generally find that a person who has no
desires is weak. I am referring to the ordinary sort of person who is in
the world and loves the world. When such a person says he has no desires,
I do not believe it. He is not what he pretends to be. He has desires,
but he thinks that he has conquered them all. It is like some of us saying,
"I should like to give up everything to the Masters." If such a person can
do so it is because he has nothing to give, neither money, nor wealth, nor
capacity of any kind, so naturally he can give up everything. But when a rich
man like Henry Ford gives up, it means something. For such people it means
that they have conquered so much of the physical desires, and that they have
realised what it is to conquer, and what it is to sacrifice. You see so many
sanyasis, so many people in the world professing that they have
given up everything. They can do it easily because they have nothing to give
up! They have not got the capacity to lead, or to follow, to admire, to worship
or to adore. It is these many weak followers that hamper every cause. This
sort of giving up is all based on a wrong conception. If you are really
willing to give up everything to the Master, you must first be sure you have
something to give. You have your body, your mind, your capacities, your
devotion, but they must be tested in the fire of experience. You must have
suffered, you must have evolved, you must have created before you can be
worthy to give. But the "giving up" of most people is no better than it
would be if I were to go to one of these Orders which has plenty of money
behind it, and offer myself up, knowing I should then live comfortably all
the rest of my life. That is not the proper desire, the proper motive. We
may camouflage our motive, we may hide it in whatever way we like, but if
we are weak and have no real capacities we have nothing to give. I assure
you there are thousands in the Theosophical Society like that, as well as
in the Star and other organisations.
That is why it is so essential to have desires
of the right kind, desires that produce, that create, that give you energy
to act. Then you can do things; then you can give qualities that are
worth while, even though you have nothing else to give. Then your gift will
be welcome, for the Master does need each one of us. He needs us with the
qualities we have evolved, The things that we have experienced, for He knows
then that we are capable of a certain definite usefulness to Him.
Just imagine a man of the world, one who has
really conquered, who has mastered the world, who has gained all that the
world can give of honour, of glory, of university degrees, and of distinction.
If such a person gives it all up it really means something. I do not say
that you should chase after those glories and wait till you have acquired
them, before you can give yourselves up to the Master; but I do say this:
We must have capacities, a right sort of devotion, and a right
attitude of mind before we can give up ourselves or the world.
It is so much easier to give up the world than
to live in it. I often want to retire into the mountains, for that would
be much nicer, much pleasanter than getting tired out in trying to adjust
oneself to one's environment, or being tactful when one is surrounded by a
number of people. When one gives it all up and retires, one has not to face
any of these things. It is much the easiest path, but through the easiest
path one does not evolve. It is through knocks, through suffering, through
being uncomfortable in mind and emotion that we evolve. It is the constant
friction that matters in life, and the moment we seek a comfortable path of
self-satisfaction or contentment we make no further headway. You know what
happens to a river which is a side branch or backwater. It just goes in there
and stagnates. It has no outlets. There it breeds mosquitoes and collects
green slime and there it remains for ever and ever until an outlet is dug
by somebody. And this is what happens to all of us unless we have the right
sort of desire, the constant urge to go and hurl ourselves against things.
That is why desire is so essential, not the
wrong kind of desire, not the commoner desires, the usual physical desires,
desires of passion and all that kind of thing. Those also we have to go through
and get them over as soon as possible. For most of us they are over
- at least I hope so. When you have experienced those desires you know that
they are useless, for they can never give you real and lasting satisfaction.
Most of you know that; hence you must have gone through those desires and
passed beyond them. But to have experienced and conquered them develops your
will and gives you a certain amount of understanding and sympathy with other
people.
To have no desires, to be utterly desireless,
is an ideal which we shall attain the more quickly because we have gone through
so many desires. For my part I feel that the physical desires do not attract
me any more, that they no longer cling to me, but there are other and subtler
desires too which I shall soon overcome. But I am very glad I have had those
desires for I know now what it means to struggle, what it means to avoid
them; I have learned by experience how to be clever in avoiding them and
what to do and what not to do. That experience gives me strength and when
I see those desires coming along, they leave me absolutely unaffected. I
am not saying this to put myself on a pedestal or to pose as a big person;
on the contrary these things are supremely easy if we but exercise our will:
We can leave all these desires behind us and forget them.
Another thing which we should all have is common
sense. You have read over and over again in Bishop Leadbeater's and in Dr.
Besant's books about common sense and how you should use your own intelligence
and your own judgment and never be carried away by anything that happens,
and how you should not accept anything until your mind and your intuition,
until your whole being accepts it. We think - I don't know why - that if
certain people make statements that we must accept them or else our
souls will go to perdition. Yes: they will go to perdition if we accept
them without reason, without feeling convinced about them. It does not matter
who makes the statements, they may even come from the very highest source.
If you do not agree, be honest. Use your common sense and try to understand
the meaning before you accept anything.
Spirituality does not mean that you should
accept anything or admit anything before your mind and your emotions have
accepted it. The explanation of this is simple. Until a statement becomes
a part of your very nature, acceptance of it is mere hypocrisy and that
is the last thing the Master wants from us, for it is an unbeautiful thing.
You are beautiful when you are natural, and you are certainly
not natural when you are hypocritical, when you just follow blindly something
which you do not feel, which you do not understand, which does not really
appeal to you. I assure you it does not matter who says it, what messenger
or what writer gives it out, you must use your own common sense and
your judgment before accepting it. Blind obedience or blind following, no
Master, no Teacher has ever asked. One can see why; it is because
He wants beauty; He demands that you shall evolve; that you shall develop
yourselves so that you shall become creators of the beautiful; that you may
be examples and not mere copies. You must develop; that is
the fundamental thing; and when you accept and swallow ideas blindly, you
do not develop; you just stagnate; you become narrow; and that is why it
is so essential to have and to stand by common sense. It does not mean that
when you do not accept you should create trouble, that you should shout from
housetops that you think everybody is wrong! No: you should just keep quiet
until you are convinced for yourself. Everything will come right; nothing
can go wrong; even though we all think everything will go wrong,
I assure you nothing will go wrong if we have the right attitude. A river
may go through filthy soil, yet in the end it will reach the sea. So that
is why I say that we all need to use common sense. And using common sense
does not mean that we should become obstinate, that we should become dogged
or aggressive. It simply means that we must not throw ourselves into anything
that we do not accept or change ourselves into something of which we cannot
see the object and meaning.
If someone tells you to do a certain thing
against your conscience, (and you know and I know that the Masters never
do that) please take it for granted he is not a Master. No Master would
ever say, "If you do not do this, you will go to damnation." And another
thing is, we should never accept any labels, unless we feel that they represent
a reality for ourselves. But if you do not accept them, keep quiet. Give
the other person every opportunity to prove himself worthy of the label attached
to him. You will see as time goes on, there will be more and more of this
sort of thing, of these distinctions and these segregations. In a way it
is natural; they are bound to be, and they are right. Even if you dislike
labels or consider those that have them, unworthy, keep quiet and do not
make trouble. It is so much better to keep quiet about things with which
you do not agree; it is so much more beautiful, and all will come out right
in the end; - things always do, I assure you.
And that is how we must learn to use our common
sense. We must train our minds not to accept anything passively or blindly,
no matter how great the person who speaks to us. You cannot work effectively,
you cannot become spiritual, if you merely walk blindly by the instructions
of another. You must be able to trace the road by the river, you must be
able to see the signposts, you must be able to see the path for yourself before
you can tread it properly. And we must use our minds, not to stir up discontent
in others, but to produce an inner dissatisfaction in ourselves, so that
we may become eager to change of our own accord. That is where our work lies.
Reformation must come from the intimate knowledge which each one of us possesses
and from the desire to change, to become more beautiful, more glorious and
more noble. And you can only do this if you use common sense all the time.
Occultism or spirituality is the essence of
common sense, and the simplicity of it is so natural. A thing is beautiful
because it is simple and not complicated; a complicated thing is rarely beautiful.
The simplest method, the direct method is the quickest method of taking
us to the heights of spirituality and we can only find it through common
sense and not by high-sounding words, or extraordinary labels.
I do not want to make you put your hands to
your heads and feel that you should get discontented with things as they
are. But if you are discontented, then find out the quickest means to get
out of that state. If you are contented, go ahead. But mind that your contentment
is natural, that you have solved the difficulty for yourselves, that you have
conquered the problem, and that you have got on top of the difficulties and
not merely shirked them. Contentment should not mean that you just shut your
eyes to the difficulties. The mind that is always questioning, though it
is dangerous to do so, has its value, because it means that you will find,
you will know for yourself what perfection means. That is why you have got
to note these things with a mind that is the ultimate perfection of common
sense. And you must have desires of the right kind so that through desires
you can train your will which must be like steel, literally like steel, so
that it does not bend to anything. I do not mean that you should develop
obstinacy; anyone in the world can easily develop that. But you must have
a will of the right type, that will carry you forward the moment you have
seen your goal, that will put aside everything that stands in the way. Then
you will attain the ideal.
J. Krishnamurti