"So, if I place before you whatever I want to say, it is the path of Divine Grace. It means that if you do your duty properly, whether it is your family duty or your duty in the Ashram, you don't have to ask God for anything. It will come by itself. For example, a Guru is like a father to us, he is more than a father. You don't have to ask him for anything. Whatever he inherits, it will come to us. But we have to make ourselves worthy of that Grace and that Grace can work marvels. All that you have to do is to do your duty faithfully, then marvellous things can come to us.
"If I have not experienced Divine Grace then I will have no right to talk to you about it. It is better to speak from your own experience than to quote from the books. That there is such a thing as Divine Grace, we know. Now I am not referring to our external success, like the many schools we have built. Anyone can do that! And, it is not difficult to get money. It is not difficult to build an Ashram. It is not difficult to print books. But it is very difficult to change your nature. What is important in our life is this transformation."
The reading for the evening was taken from the book, What Becomes of the Soul After Death written by our Divine Master, Sri Swami Sivananda, entitled "Departing Soul Compared to a King".
In his pre-recorded audio message, Pujya Swamiji focussed on the importance of discrimination and dispassion in spiritual life. Pujya Swamiji said, "There are two qualities necessary if you want peace of mind. You must be able to discriminate between right and wrong. If you don't think, then you are going to suffer. You are going to blame other people and blame everyone except yourself. So, this discriminative faculty is lacking. The Bhagavata predicted, thousands of years ago, that in this age people's minds will be muddled. It says how women are going to behave, how marriages are going to fail, money is going to be the goal of life, how girls are going to behave, how children are going to behave towards their parents and how parents are going to behave towards their children and how disciples are going to behave towards their Guru.
"Even if you have discrimination and you don't have dispassion, if you don't put it into practice, then it won't help you at all. You have to try and make some effort to change yourself. Everything is done mechanically. If you think then a lot of your suffering is over. If you think about the Law of Karma. 'Oh, I am suffering today, because of my Karma.' Papa Swami Ramdas says there is no innocent person. Everyone gets his due according to his Karma. If you have done something wrong in the previous birth, then you are going to reap the fruits of the action now or in the future. If you really understand the Law of Karma, you can overcome a lot of your difficulties and you will not create fresh Karma.
"So, discrimination must be there and together with that, dispassion. If you don't have these two then you will not make progress and you are not going to have peace of mind."
On this most auspicious day, we offer our deep gratitude to Sri Gurudev and we thank Pujya Swamiji for his supreme sacrifice and dedication, for moulding us and preparing us to tread the spiritual path and for pointing out the pivotal role of discrimination and dispassion in our lives.
