Swami Veda Bharati at the lecture at the Museum of European Art in September, 2000.
Swami Veda Bharati at the lecture at the Museum of European Art in September, 2000.
Clarence/New York (meaus) 'What will the next thousand years be like? Please do tell me, Prophet! I planted thorn bushes -- will I reap lilies? And I raised my children to be pirates; will they be wise and will they sweeten the bitter seas?' so ask men and women of our time.
From the western shore of England to the eastern shores of Japan, from the snows of Alaska to the island of Tierra del Fuego in South America, from the pyramids of Egypt to the Cape of Hope in South Africa, men and women have the same question on their minds, generation after generation.
The answer is simple, but they are all hoping for a miracle which will not happen.
They are hoping for the miracle that where one has sown thorn bushes, one might reap lilies. Where one has brought up the children as pirates, that they would grow up to be wise, gentle and loving beings.
The Prophet from the far-away heaven roars the answer, and the Sage within echoes it silently in our hearts: 'The next thousand years will be whatever you have chosen today to make of them. Uproot the thorn bushes now, and plant lilies instead. Then, the paths of your generations will be paved with soft fragrant petals.'
Thus starts the high point of a remarkable lecture given in Clarence, New York by Swami Veda Bharati. He is a disciple of Swami Rama of the Himalayas who has done much to combine the ancient wisdom of the East with the technical know-how of the West for the benefit of all. Swami Veda himself started lecturing at the age of 9, and by the time he was 13, he addressed crowds of thousands of people in India.
Since then, he has lectured on all aspects of the science and philosophy of yoga and meditation for 53 years. He has written a number of books such as Superconscious Meditation, God, Mantra and Meditation, Meditation and the Art of Dying, Sayings, The Light of Ten Thousand Suns. He is also the author of the most authentic contemporary commentary on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, (Volume I has 500 pages and Volume II over 800 pages) and is an esteemed meditation master and spiritual guide. As the head of one of India's foremost orders of the monks, he is one of 27 most respected swamis in all of India with her one billion people. He lectures virtually in the United States, Canada, Germany, Italy, Holland, India, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and other countries.
'God bless everyone, everyone's beauty of the spirit,' greets Swami Veda the audience, having first led them through a special guided meditation. 'It is that beauty that turns to Love. And Love brings us all together. You know what the definition of 'love' is?
In this entire universe, there flows a single stream. It is a stream of consciousness, like sparks of a fire, like drops of the ocean. Like the rays of the sun. You and I are the sparks, the drops, the rays. When one flame of the fire, one spark of the fire knows 'I am fire', that is love. When the drops of water, each drop of water knows 'I am the ocean', that is love. When each ray of the sun knows 'I am solar', that is love.
Because then, it is not the corporal capsule, the body, it is the continuum of the field. And wherever the continuum of the field is experienced, that is a place of love -- be it a family, be it society, be it a group.
And even more so, when we close our eyes, fill the hollows of our senses with the divine stream, it is then that consciousness breaks its bonds which have been imposed on it, and the consciousness flows as one field. When two or three of five or fifty sit and meditate together, though they are not looking at each other, the stream of consciousness becomes one. And that is why in the meditation state we experience such serenity, and the feeling of the sublime that we commonly forget when we depend only on the sensations of the body. You may say that meditation is the only experience of Love. Love that can be loved without opening your eyes, Love that can be loved without touching the walls, but the energy field that then transcends the walls, breaks through the walls of the body,' explained Swamiji.
And then he continued: 'In all our activities, the ups and downs, the momentary sorrows, the momentary joys are jagged edges, not sine waves and smooth curves. The sine waves and smooth curves of live we have lost somewhere, and made the emotions our jagged edges. And each moment weighs heavy. But there is another way, the way of lightness and the way of light. The way of ease. And the Path of Shreyas, the Path of Good, is the path of ease. And when one walks on that path, there is none of this feeling of burden being carried.
And when a Buddha, an Enlightened One, a Boddhisattva, a Sage, a Master, carries the sorrows of the whole world and works in compassion not only to remove the tears, but to remove the causes of the tears, not from one or two, but from all the beings of the entire universe, from a blade of grass to Brahma, it is said, he does not find that a heavy task. A mother may find the task of wiping the child's ears to be a heavy at times, but a compassionate sage does not find the burdens of the sorrows of the entire universe as a heavy load upon him. It is natural to him.
And that is why my Master, Swami Rama of the Himalayas, said; 'Jesus suffered on the cross; Christ never suffered.' And when you have a level of enlightenment, your vision of the universe becomes grand. About this present universe, astronomers tell us, and ancient Sanskrit philosophers and visionaries of the cosmos both tell us. Some look through the Hubble Telescope, and confirm the vision that the ancient sage had without the telescope, in the interior of his mind, and described this span and the scope of this universe. In this universe, there are 100 billion galaxies. In a galaxy, there are 100 billion stars, solar systems. Some of you walked in the sun today. At any given moment that the sun is shining, is the sun up there in the sky?
You have no way of knowing. It was there eight minutes ago. There is no proof that it is there now. And it certainly is not there now, where you are seeing it. It was there eight minutes ago, when the light from the sun started, at the speed of 186,000 miles per second, and it took it eight minutes to reach our eyes. So we know the sun was there eight minutes ago, but we have no way of knowing whether it is still there. This is so much for your realities that you take for granted.
You walk out in the night and you see the stars, are they there? The light of some of those stars that you are seeing, started from those stars a billion years ago, at the rate of 186,000 miles per second. How many seconds in a billion years? That many miles away. The light started from that star, journeys through what curved spaces, and finally reached here our eyes. The star was there a billion years ago. It is probably not there now, but you are seeing it...great prophets who can see a billion years in the past.
The prophet and sage who walks in the awareness of this relativity of time and spaces, speaks in the awareness of that relativity. His consciousness at all times contains this universe view. And that is the difference between me and the Enlightened One.'
At this point, Swami Veda Bharati, a devoted and tireless disciple of his Master, Swami Rama of the Himalays, read to the audience his remarkable poem The Perennial in the Millennium. 'The poem is virtually a manifesto for the spiritually minded people of the world today. Its forty-nine short, but thought-provoking and inspiring stanzas present a vision of what the human society could look like a thousand years from now -- if we only will it so today.
'The Perennial, the eternal wisdom and knowledge of the Guru Lineage will always be there. Two thousand years from now, the main religions of today will be forgotten, just as the immensely popular religions of the past are all gone today, without a trace. New prophets will appear and bring a message better suited to the new civilizations and the new cultures of tomorrow. But the perennial tradition, the tradition of the Himalayan Masters, will still be there, continuing to guide the humanity as the ever-lasting, ever-pure, ever-true fountain of spirituality,' concluded Swami Veda.
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