Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi  

Thredbo, Australia
3 May 1987  

I hope today’s lecture did not shock you very much. I had to tell you about it, otherwise you would not know your importance, your greatness, your responsibilities. But I must warn you about the ghost as I told you, because a mother has to warn about the ghost to frighten the children, that’s important; and the ghost is materialism, as I said, which has become so important. Matter always tries to overpower the spirit, all the time. All the habits are formed because of the matter. Even the habits of drinking, say, habits of taking drugs is nothing but these horrible, powerful material things which are dead are trying to overpower us.

The spirit is paramount, it is the highest thing. Nothing can reach it. It keeps you away from all the skirmishes, all the cheap and superficial problems of the world. Materialism has grown much more today than ever before. It has become very important for people to worry about things that they possess. I find in the West it has grown so subtly and so sophisticatedly that it is difficult even to find out how far we have gone with it. It’s like plastic, which can penetrate into everything and can hold it. This materialism has brought us to the cracking point now, the whole world is bothered about it. First of all there are ecological imbalances. People are watching the trees are dying out, because factories are being created out of proportion, and the factories need all the time something to be fed into them; and they go on and on and on, creating things which are not so much necessary. As I told you, it’s a play of the evil forces which is very much collective.

Say for a factory starts, then clothes are made, for example, then there’s an entrepreneur who comes forward to make the clothes to be sold out. Now he is the one who changes, he starts changing the forms of the clothes in such a way that every year, new lot comes out of that machine, and everybody has pile of clothes in the house, they don’t know what to do with it. These are last year’s, that’s before last year’s, that’s that last year’s – of no use, absolutely useless, all made of artificial fiber. It is hard to find anything natural in all the Western countries wherever I have been, anything that is cotton, anything that is pure silk.

There should be some balance that machines are for us, we are not for the machines. Then new types of machines are coming out now to befool the people, to take advantage of their stupidity I should say, and change one after another things, thus creating fashions. As I’m told in America, every bathroom has a different type of a switch or a handle, you don’t know which one to push. You push one handle and you might feel you might get all the water on top of your head, is a new style. Now I’ve seen the bathroom that I have – it’s very interesting! You must know horse-riding to get into it! And it’s all surrounded by glass, I mean anybody would be nervous taking bath in there; and there are big, big holes you see, just as handles.

Of course these things will again go back, because normalcy works out. Like in our body also, if we do anything extreme we come back to our parasympathetic which balances. So the nature brings you back again to the same thing. Like they said ‛have no marriages,“ then ‛have marriages with men.“ Men having marriages with men, women having marriages with women, all kinds of nonsensical marriage systems they developed. So they must have varieties, you see: ‛How can it be that a woman should marry a man?“ Then an old woman marrying a very young boy, or an old man marrying a very little girl, all kinds of nonsensical things started. Now it’s coming back again. We can’t have many wives, we can’t be with many women, we have to be married to one woman, all those things are coming back – but at what cost? We have got already a disease which is called as killer’s disease; so many problems have been created by this kind of movement towards the left or towards the right.

Before the war started it was more the movement on the left-hand side. All the poets wrote about something imaginary tragic, like the Greek tragedy. I don’t know why there should be a tragedy in Greece. Itself, Greece itself is a tragedy for every one of us! But they created a tragedy – I mean, it’s a horrid stuff that they have created. So everybody is miserable, les miserables all of them, and French people don’t like Me much because I’m not serious. I should not laugh, I should be very serious. When talking about God I should be even worse than a dead body, otherwise they don’t want to listen to you.

All kinds of stupidity started that move to the left, doing all kinds of perverse things. When Mr. Freud came in they said, ‛That’s a good leader for us. Now he’ll give us some more varieties.“

I was in a very big banquet, sitting next to the ambassador of Mexico, and he told Me that ‛I’m told You are against Freud completely.“

‛Yes, I am,“ I said, ‛Jung was a sensible man.“

He said, ‛What is in Jung? He told us what all these our books have told, so what is so great about him that he’s told something the same thing? But Freud told us something new, so he’s great.“

I said, ‛All right. We have never eaten this table, should we eat that because it’s a new thing to do?“ Of course it was not very diplomatic, but I did say because I couldn’t help! This kind of a funny idea – ‛it’s a new idea, let’s have a new idea“ – any new idea, you just do it.

Now in, say, in Rome they have a new idea, that they should wear all the things with the sequins all over. Now the sequins thing you cannot wash much. So today they’ll waste all their money on the sequins, tomorrow they cannot wash it, they’ll get dirty, so they’ll start on something else.

We have to be normal people as Sahaja yogis, to understand that we’ll not allow matter to supersede us. Now today just to celebrate the Sahasrara Day in full way, I thought of wearing a sari with many chakras. It has some symbol, it’s symbolic thing; and the starry sky that you see all over, to represent that, the blue color. Blue color is the sign of depth. It has some symbol. It’s not without any symbol, without any meaning, that you wear anything because some factory’s producing these things in bulk and they must be sold. We should be out of all these things. These things should not touch us, these things should not impress us, but we should laugh at them. Oh, there is now a new craze has started, another one, and now they are looking like scarecrows everywhere, I find. I mean, they can be used for that purpose very easily! It’s terrible the way things are working out.

But the worst thing that happens with materialism, that your attention becomes very superficial, very superficial. You go on watching everything, you read every sign board. If you have missed one you’ll turn around, ‛I’ve missed one,“ so you must read that. The whole attention is so superficial. You are looking at women, women are looking at men, men are looking at – I don’t know what they are looking at. The attention is so stupid and so foolish, and I have seen in their eyes the bhoots are passing from one to another. It’s absolutely evil to put your eyes to such a strain. Christ has said, ‛Thou shalt not have adulterous eyes.“ How many Christians there are who have, who haven’t got adulterous eyes? So what you find that the whole thing becomes extremely superficial, even the religion. All religions have become anti-God, these are all anti-God activities. They have nothing to do with God, they have nothing to do with religion, they have nothing to do with dharma as we call it. They are making all kinds of advertisements that they are very religious, that they believe in God, that they are doing all good things.

Christ, who lived under very meager circumstances, was born in a manger. If you go and see the property of Pope you will be amazed and aghast. He has more property than even the tsars had, even the great kings of China had. And now they are hand-in-glove with mafia – still they are heads of the religion. Same in India, the way religion is preached with all nonsensical things going on. There’s no sense in what they are talking; the Hindu religion, the Sikh religion – and the Islamic religion is another nonsense. It has nothing to do with God, it’s all anti-God activity. It just forces people, it just frightens people and makes them suffer, and uses all the property, the wealth that they have. What is the interest of a person who is religious in the property of other people? Why should he be interested in getting the property of another person? He should not be. On the contrary he should be happy to see that somebody is happy, well-off with his children, enjoying a nice happy life. But there’s no end to this greed. The greed is so much that it’s impossible to call these people religious by any chance, and they are the ones who are talking on religion.

Then the other side of it – not only the greed, the lust. The lust is so obvious, is so vivid that one cannot believe that these people have anything to do with religion. So it follows with the superficiality, once you get materialistic.

Then materialism also gives you certain ideas that you must have legs like this, you must have nose like that, you must have eyes like that, you must have body like that, so everybody starts working on that. In America in the morning if you get up, everybody is running on the streets, whether old or young. Some people died of heart attacks on the streets. They said now they are having a new craze, what is it called as, jogging. And I had an Indian girl with Me, and she said – she woke Me up, she said, ‛Mother, get up, get up!“

I said, ‛What has happened?“

‛Something gone wrong in this place.“

I said, ‛Why?“

‛Everybody is running.“

I said, ‛They are jogging.“

‛No, no, even old people are running. How can it be something like that?“

I said, ‛It is, that’s their style. You forget it, let Me sleep!“

Everything should be done in a way to keep fit and to keep all right, but not just to sort of fall into the traps of these people who are spreading materialism. I told one lady – she was very thin already, and I said, ‛Why are you thinning more?“

She said, ‛Because the modern clothes don’t fit you.“

So I said, ‛Is it it’s that according to the modern clothes you are going to make your body?“

She said, ‛You have to, otherwise how will you wear the dresses?“

I said, ‛This is horrid, absolutely horrid“ – horrid system that they force people to wear the dresses, whatever their standards are.

It has killed all the arts, all the hand-made things, all the real things. It has brought everything artificial, everything superficial. The attention is so superficial. Just now I was watching a film, some sort of an American film: everybody was sick, everybody was mad. I mean, I couldn’t understand how could any human being behave like this? I have not known people like that Myself, but they showed a sick man behaving in a very sickly manner, supposed to be a hero. All these advertisements, all these newspapers, all this media, all of them are just here to create sensations in your body, some sort of a sensation. It has to be a sensational thing, because they think that you have become matter. Unless and until you give some shocks to the matter, it won’t move. And that is what they have brought you to, that’s where we have landed into – a state of matter.

So we have no feelings, we just don’t talk to anyone, our hearts are frozen. We feel afraid to talk to human beings. We cannot tolerate our children. In London in every, every week – in London city, not I am saying England – they are killing two children every week. We have no love for our children, we can’t bear our children. We have no love for each other, no love for cooking, no love for doing something for your husband, husband has no love for doing anything for the wife. All the time what pictures they show is husband and wife fighting, all the time – how can there be? There’s no love, there’s no affection, there’s no kindness. What is the fight going on?

‛Why did you spoil the carpet?“

She said, ‛No, I didn’t spoil the carpet, the children spoilt it.“

‛Then why didn’t you clean it?“

The fight is on – for what, for the carpet? What is this carpet? Is it a permanent stuff? But what is important, they have to sell the house tomorrow. They have to sell the house, the carpet must be neat, so everything is sellable, everything has to be sold, even the wife, husband, children, everything. They have to be made in such a way they are sellable all the time. Whatever you buy: you buy a diamond – all right, it should be sellable. If you want to buy anything precious it must be sellable, you’ll be surprised. So nobody can have something that is not standardized. All the rest, I don’t know, goes into waste I think in these countries. You have to have everything standardized. Nothing you can have for your own joy, for your own happiness, for your own using, for your own love for it. You give somebody some present, say for example you give somebody a gold ring, immediately that person will go to the shopkeeper and ask the jeweler is it gold or not; whether it is, the price is all right or not, what carat gold – everything. They will not see to the beauty of the thing. They will not see to the way the feelings are being expressed. What they will see is whether it is sellable or not. ‛Later on if I want to sell it, even the presents, if I can sell it it’s better to find out.“

So the whole attitude towards life is that everything is valued in money, everything is valued in money. ‛What is the damage? How much it will cost? How much we have to pay?“ How much for the child-bearing? If you will have one child, how much it will cost? Immediately they’ll go to the computer and find out how much it will cost. Now, like I’m speaking so I should find out how much it will cost My throat, that if I’m speaking so many words, like there’s a computer for it. You put in the computer, you’ll find out it will cost you five lozenges. All right, charge five lozenges to the Sahaja yogis!

There’s no feeling. Even they sing, when they walk, even when they do any work there’s no feeling and there’s no involvement at all, no involvement of any kind. The artistic work that was done before cannot be done today – why? It is because there is no feeling, there’s no involvement, there’s no feeling that, that this is my work, I’m doing it; I’m doing it to present my own feelings, to express myself, it’s my own thing. There’s no feeling.

Imagine, you have seen, so many of you have seen now Ajanta. This was built in ten centuries, cut from top to bottom. How they must have planned it, how they must have organized among themselves in ten generations, how they must have painted it. And there’s nothing – no city, nothing, no television, no food. How they lived there? They lived on dedication and love of Buddha, whom they had never seen. Such personalities they were, such involvement. Once they took up something they were absolutely dedicated with it. But such people are lost today because of materialism. Most important thing is how much money you get out of everything – there’s no end to it. And then what you take to is thieving. All these big, big people – the prime minister, today I was told that this Marcos, the great prime minister, Filipino fellow gave all his paintings to another thief from Riyad. They’re all thieves. All these big, big johnnies supposed to be there are thieves. Why, what are they lacking? What are they afraid of, why do they do that? They are afraid that they’ll be found out that they are thieves, so they are doing all these wrong things. They are collecting money because they know they have to run away one day. All right, so they must organize in such a way that they should have all these things planted in some place where they can always get hold of. But why become the thief first of all? You become the prime minister, make a name out of yourself, your history will remember you. No, they cannot think of those things, they just think of the present. Sahaj way! It’s to make money. When you are on the throne, make the money as much as is possible.

This money is going to bring them bad name. In the progeny they will not be remembered, people will not take their names. If they take their names they will have a headache. So what’s the use of leading such a life? Even today human beings in general are not so degenerated that they put statues of a drunkard or statues of a man who has been a thief, who has been managing the whole country and selling it off to somebody else. There are no statues of such people. Nobody remembers them. People don’t like them, such people are hated. And even if there are statues of such people – I’ve seen that of Stalin – they remove them.

So this idea of materialism has grown like a ghost now into the minds of people, that matter is more important; that materially if you are all right, you are all right. The other side of it is that you must show that you don’t care for matter, that you are not bothered, like these anti-culture people. But no, materialism is within them, it is engrained in them, it’s in their blood, they can’t get out of it. By showing off that we make our hair in such a manner that we don’t need a barber, or else we dress up with dirty clothes with holes in it to show that we don’t care for matter – it’s not so. By changing the matter you do not change the inside within yourself. Inside is changed when you look at the matter as a witness.

Matter has a purpose. You should know the purpose of the matter. If you know the purpose of the matter then you have value, your value system is correct. For example, this has its own purpose: it has a purpose that it must deliver the lecture properly. But if this purpose is not served, it is no good. In the same way everything has a purpose. What’s the use of buying fifty artificial blouses, or thirty-two thousand shoes as this lady had, Mrs. Marcos, when she’s not going to use even two out of them? It has no feeling, it has no meaning, it’s selfishness, it’s self-centeredness. It’s thinking about yourself all the time.

Now you want to give Me a sari. In Marathi it is called as ‛pot zakaych,“ means they’re covering the womb of the Goddess, the stomach of the Mother. Because She’s put us there, She has given us birth, so we must give Her something to cover it – is a very humble way of saying it. Now you give Me a sari – I don’t know when I’m going to wear all these, but whatever it is – just give Me a sari with a feeling, and maybe I may never wear it, I may wear it also. But the progeny will see what you have given to your Mother. I’m not going to carry it with Me, nobody’s going to carry the matter with them. But it had a purpose, it had a meaning, it had emotions behind it. It was given in a puja when so many people gathered, you gave to your Mother. When people will see it they’ll be so very happy, ‛Oh, the Sydney people gave this,“ or ‛the Australians gave on this Sahasrara Day.“ See, even the vibrations flow. Just that – this is what it is.

Now, it has no purpose if you put something up in a puja which is not necessary. It has no purpose at all, it has no feeling, it has no meaning. It is valueless. For example if you put this up, say, into My bathroom, it is useless – specially this one, because I can’t even sing there! Quite frightening. Thank God it’s being screened by Sahaja yogis because they know My conditions, you see, but it’s so sweet to see the way they have covered it, because they know their Mother would be quite nervous to have a bath in a glass bathroom. That’s all. That shows, you see, that feeling, that understanding about Me. That fills My heart with such love, such oneness with you that you understand Me, that Mother may not like, you see, this kind of a glass business. It’s so sweet to do those things for Me.

Little, little things here and there, whatever we do for others are so suggestive of our love, of our feelings. And this is what you have to express today, not the materialism. We don’t have to express that, that we were very rich people or that we had lots of diamonds and we had ornaments – nothing. That is not needed. Know we were people of great feelings. What they brought for Christ was leaves of palm, palm tree; singing ‛Hosanna, hosanna!“ like the way you were singing today. What these palm trees are? Even today they are remembered. They’ll be remembered eternally, the palm trees that were used for this. They didn’t think about it, they didn’t know what to get at that time. Whatever was available they got it, and started singing ‛Hosanna, hosanna!“ to Christ.

All these little, little things become so important, because you have given value to it. A little piece, a little clay if you take and put art into it, put your feelings into it, then that becomes expensive. Even economics can show that it has become more expensive. But if you give with feelings and if you give it to someone with your love, even that adds to the value; to that person it’s very valuable.

It is remarkable sometimes how little things just move the whole ocean of My love into a turbulent, happy, joyous, loving heart. I sometimes feel that how these little things that they do and care for Me, express their love, just moves Me to the highest point of joy. Then it’s not the matter that is important, it’s not how much you have spent is important, it’s not how it has been brought is important. What is important is how much thought you have given to it; and that is what is lacking, that there is no thought. We think, but we do not give thought – it’s two things, different. We just go on thinking, thinking, doing nothing. And to give a thought to a thing is a sign of depth and understanding.

When the matter is given thought, then it becomes important. Without the thought it is useless, it is sellable all the time, everything is sellable. It has no meaning, it has no value. I hope you will all get out of this ghost, and get out of the clutches of these entrepreneurs who are trying to rule you. Try to have things which are full of feelings, which are having some meaning, and also try to give it to others things which can express your love. Matter has one great value, that through matter you can express your love, you can express your feelings for a person.

Now today at the last minute I was just struggling to get some presents for you; I mean, it was such a struggle, you can’t imagine. I was in a big mess there, the house was in a mess and all kinds of things happening, the puja in the morning. Until about twelve o’clock I could not leave Pune. So there was no question of buying anything in Bombay. So I had to do in a very short time through other people’s help some sort of purchases, and I’ve been able to buy some few things for you, so please accept them as a token of My love for you. Moreover I’ve brought some mangoes, quite a lot of them, and this your custom authorities have taken them away. I was very unhappy and they could see that. I said, ‛What’s this, are you going to eat these mangoes?“

They said, ‛No, we are going to fumigate.“

I said, ‛After fumigation you give it to us, for My children I’ve brought.“ So they understood it and they agreed. So I hope we get the mangoes for you on Monday. After all it’s a small thing, but after all this is the time for you to eat mangoes!

Have you got the presents here? …. So I have left it to James’ wisdom to name them for people whom he wanted to give the presents, and we have smuggled them nicely into your country. Because we had a mango problem, they allowed us to bring the rest of it!