Quotes by Sri M

“In your relationship with the spiritual teacher, please be frank, truthful and clear. Don’t try to bluff, because it does not work. The teacher may not tell you so, but he knows and understands. So, be very frank.”

“Every day when you wake up in the morning, or go to bed at night, look at yourself and say, ‘where am I, what am I doing? How many falsities are still in my life? Am I really doing my sadhana sincerely?’ People say - I don’t have time. We have time for everything else. The fact is that urgency for sadhana has not arrived.”

“While we practice our sadhana, if we sometimes get some powers, see lights or hear sounds, do not think that God is going to come! There are many people who have many powers, but have not yet had the darshan of the Lord. It is not the same; it could also be separate. There may be someone who shows no capacity for the so-called ‘siddhis’, but might have had the darshan of the Lord.”

“Satsang is critical because you become the company you keep. If I live with people who talk about the Truth or want to find out what it is; who do japa and kirtan and bhajan, then I will become like them in due course. It may take time. If I continue to live with people who are planning which drink to have next, I will become like that. It is but natural.”

“Sai Baba of Shirdi would say ‘Allah Malik Hai,’ or ‘Ram, Ram’ when people went to him with their problems. No one could say whether he was a Muslim, Hindu, or a Christian. His basic message was to unite, to bring people together, because Allah and Ram to Him were the same, though we call God by different names.”

“When I wake up in the morning, the first thing that I recognise is that I exist. And then the world exists. I see everything around. But that first feeling that ‘I am’, that awareness that ‘I am consciousness’ bereft of ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that’ in its pure form is what we mean by the ‘atman’.”

“Experiencing life through the sorrows and pleasures, the pains and happiness that the body and the mind go through, one evolves into a better and cleaner entity before it touches a level that cannot even be called human, but divine.”

“The practice of yoga is the way of finding that happiness which is our true identity. We discover that we are not what we think we are, but something entirely different.”

“There’s an English saying – 'blind leading the blind’. It is an ancient statement and comes from the Mundaka Upanishad – ‘andhenaiva nīyamānā yathāndhāḥ.‘ It refers to those who have learnt only theoretically and think they know. When such people lead others into spiritual matters, it is like the blind leading the blind.”

“In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that one of the most important qualities of a devotee of mine is 'sarva bhoota hitey rataha' - compassion for all beings. Here, Krishna is not speaking as Krishna, a person, but as the manifestation of the Supreme Being.”

“Live with the understanding that the entire universe is pervaded by that blissful Supreme Being and we are a part of that! This is not a fantasy that needs to be worked out in our minds. It is a fact and the actual process through which it is possible is known as sadhana or meditation.”

“Energy - once its work of creation, preservation, and destruction is done, still remains whole. This is not possible when we think of energy in the daily world. We work and we feel tired. We say, 'some of my energy is lost'. But here, the whole Cosmos is spun out of this energy, which keeps working tirelessly and yet remains unaltered.”

“Krishna represents love, thus love is a comprehensive panacea for all ills. If you really understand it’s meaning which is utter selflessness, not love for my own sake but love for Love’s sake, only then, it is a panacea for all problems. This is very rare. When Kabir Das wove, everyone thought he was weaving cloth. Actually, he was weaving from the warp and weft of love and devotion.”

“We need eyes to see an object. But we cannot see our own eyes except as a reflection in a mirror. Yet, we cannot say that the eye does not exist. It is because of the fact that the eye exists, we see things around us; similarly the ‘Atman’ or Consciousness. It is only because of this root identity that we are ‘alive’ and ‘conscious’. To realize this true identity is the main purpose of meditation.”

“While you are on the spiritual journey, two essential steps have to go side-by-side. One, is sitting down and doing your sadhana; the other is to examine your life - see what you are and how you behave with people.”