Navaratri 3: Shraddha + Bhakti= Protection

Shraddha, faith.

Unless and until you develop that bhakti and shraddha within you, you cannot rise. You cannot rise above your problems, you cannot rise about your personality; because bhakti is something you cannot impose on anyone, you cannot force on anybody. 
Ah, you can make somebody mad and say that he can do bhakti - he cannot. You have to have all your qualities absolutely intact. You should be intelligent, you should be understanding, everything should be there.

Shri Ganesha worshipping ShivaLingam

But at that time this, the joy of bhakti is within you. And this joy of bhakti when it starts flowing, Goddess Herself enters into your being,
I should say, I have seen people, bhaktas, many great saints in India who achieved a lot of heights. They have gone too far into it, and if you read about them and if you understand them you are amazed how without any help, without any guidance, how could they go that deep and worship Devi?
Worshipping is not just out of sheer reading or some sort of a chanting or anything, but it's the deep attention of your heart, I think it's Spirit.
If the Spirit is awakened within you, you develop the bhakti and drop out all nonsensical ideas, all different things that have crawled into your head, but you just develop the bhakti.
.../...
Now we have through Kundalini awakening reached a very great height, I must say, of understanding of bhakti, the power of bhakti.
The greatest power of bhakti is that it protects you. It protects you. Those people who are suffering from any kind of trouble, any kind of problems, just get out of it because this bhakti of yours gives you the right type of understanding, the understanding of yourself. Also the understanding of surroundings, understanding of the whole universe, I should say.
Why people behave like this, why they are like this: all this can be solved through your bhakti. It should not be blind; it should not be blind but it should be wise bhakti, wise, with wisdom. Only possible through Sahaja Yoga, I think...
.../... But you are very few who have understood what is bhakti and what is shraddha.

In Ghent, Belgium.

So I would say the Goddess gives you bhakti and shraddha - by what? She gives you through your meditation, that you see so many miracles happening in your life and you are amazed how this has happened: "We never expected this to happen. How it has happened? How it has worked out?"

South Italy: Madonna with a stick !

Also She corrects you. 
All the time you, if you are aware, She corrects you and tells you:
"Don't go this way. You are going on the ego side", or She'll tell you, "You are going on the left side." She is the One who corrects throughout.
We get into diseases and all kinds of, we are trapped into all kinds of things; it is because, because we don't have bhakti.
In the bhakti you have to depend on the wisdom of the Mother, wisdom of the Shakti, that She looks after you, She finds you out the way, and She will help you. 
If you start becoming on your own and thinking that "I am all right, I can do this, I can do that," you'll find inevitably that you are wrong, that you had a very wrong idea about yourself and about the Divine.

Bogota, 1994

So, 
what is the most important point, is surrendering. 
The word "Islam" means surrender, but Mohammed Sahib has described what you should have before surrender, is your Realization.
But you have seen even after Realization people take time to settle down. 
But once you are settled down you understand that you are under a protection of the Goddess, that you see every day how it works and how it helps you. Many people who are in Sahaja Yoga, so-called, have great respect for Me but are not fully there. Then they suffer and they have problems, and then they ask Me, "Mother, how is it I have got this problem?" 

 I don't tell them, because you can't tell anything to human beings, you see, they're very aggressive.
But the fact is because, because you are not one with the Divine. And with the Divine if you are one, you'll have nothing but compassion and love, nothing else, and everything you will do so smoothly, so nicely.

Ganesha and ShivaLingam

People may not understand, like they crucified Christ, they did all kinds of things, agreed! but now you should ask for the protection of the Goddess, because that is the greatest quality of the Goddess, that She protects you from all problems, from all troubles, from all kinds of nonsensical, I should say, things that can happen to you. And there's so many things that happen.
I'll tell you, I was told that one of the leaders, a Sahaja Yogi, was killed. I said, "Not possible!" And the fellow was in Rome; he was not killed. So it's not possible that a young man should be killed like that. Of course if somebody is old you have to die; but that he was killed was not a right thing.

So it is the protection, not only physical, mental, emotional, but spiritual protection comes to you; spiritual protection, in that what you do is that you don't do wrong things, you don't kill anybody, you don't torture anybody, you are not rude to anybody. That is the situation into which you all can enter, because you are Sahaja Yogis. You can achieve it, you have a power to do it, because you have so much shraddha and so much understanding that you have reached a certain state of protection, of growth, of wisdom.

Now first test your wisdom, you must test your wisdom:
"If I am doing this, is this wise? Is it good?
Why I'm doing it?"
First test your wisdom. Then you'll find out that many things you do which are wrong, which should not have been done. But first your wisdom must develop, and you must see that your wisdom works and helps you.
.../.... But if you have the wisdom, then you will immediately know that this is wrong. Apart from that you will be saved from all kinds of problems. It's a fact, I have seen with so many people like that who have been saved, not only from death, but from all kinds of catastrophes, all kinds; and I was amazed how these Sahaja Yogis are helped by the Divine.

 The Bird of Athena can see  through the Night

Divine is a power, everywhere it exists, 
but it will only help the people who are Sahaja Yogis, who are divine,
not the people who are not; it will never help them. 
On the contrary it might punish in a way that is never expected.

Introspect!

So one has to be careful to test oneself, what I call introspection.
Have you been wise in dealing with certain problems?
What has been your style? Is it money-oriented, or it is domination-oriented?
What sort of a power it was that you were working under?
You have to introspect to find out. And you'll be amazed, very much amazed that even in the name of God you can do wrong things.

 .../... First, overpower yourself!
You have to know yourself first of all. What's the use of overpowering others? Those who do not know how to overpower themselves are always miserable, always in trouble, because it reacts. 
If you try to overpower others, it reacts.
For that you have to be absolutely introspecting, again and again I have been saying this,
that:  introspect!

(2002-Oct-27: Navaratri Puja, Lake Piru, CA, USA)

Navaratri 2 : COURAGE, NOT FEAR !

I'll tell you a story about somebody in America.
He is a very old Sahaja Yogi, Indian.
He came out of his shop, where he was working, and got into his car - there was one man sitting with a dagger. And he hit him with the dagger on the center Heart. And this fellow started bleeding. He said, " I don't know what happened to me, Mother. I got such strength, I caught hold of him and I started fighting with him, and I took the dagger from him. He had the handle and the dagger came into my hand.
And the fellow ran away. But still I was not worried about my bleeding.
What I did - I called my colleague who was coming out of the car, I ran after him and he took me in his car for half-an-hour searching that fellow."
They didn't go to the police, and then, they went to the police.
The police was surprised - the whole shirt was full of blood. He said, "Nobody would believe." Even the police was shocked. "For half an hour you were searching this fellow. Why didn't you come to the police?" He said, "It would have taken half-an-hour for you to come, so we thought, better do it ourselves." See the courage!
Then, of course, he was taken to the hospital, and he was all right. Just they stitched him up. But he is all right. That is the sign of a person who can never get any one of these horrible diseases, because there is no fear in his mind, of any kind. And, he is an Indian, he said: "I have never even slapped my own children. I have never fought with anyone. I am not a wrestler by any chance, nothing of the kind. But it happened." He says, " I don't know how, from where I got this shakti; and how I did it, I just don't know."

"  they were never afraid of attacking someone"

There are many stories like this they can tell you about Sahaja Yogis, and about so many saints, how they were never afraid of attacking someone when somebody attacks them, or of protecting themselves from all kinds of horrible things with their courage.
This is something one cannot believe sometimes, but it is happening, every day, I get letters from people how they have been courageous.

Imam Hussein at Kerbala.

If you believe in the Goddess, then know that She is extremely powerful; She is very intelligent; and if She has to protect you, She will protect you out and out, in such a way that you will not know how you have been protected. 

But this faith has to be developed.

Faith has to be developed by experience also, how you have been protected always; how you have been helped always; how you came out of so many crises.
But despite that if you get upset, worried, if some clouds appear in the sky of your life, then if you get upset, that means you are still weak.
So first thing, if you are really worshipping the Goddess, then you should have no worry at all of any kind, and you should have no fear at all. Go ahead, fearlessly.
Whatever you are doing, do it fearlessly.
But at the same time I have to tell you the other side, that one should not go about like a zombie, it doesn't mean that; saying all kinds of nonsensical things of the right side.

But if you have to do something, do it with clear-cut ideas, and also without any fear. 

(1994, 10-09, Navaratri, Cabella.)


FOR MORE ON THIS QUESTIONS, CLICK: http://swayamblog.blogspot.fr/p/how-not-to-react-and-fight-lessons-on.html

THE GODDESS OF CONFUSION: your discriminating power is challenged.

So, one can get possessed by any such idea. See, like Hitler: he got the idea that he is the monarch of everything and he has every right to destroy the Jews. And he was destroying, he destroyed so many people.
But what happened at the end?- he was using swastika which was the symbol of Shri Ganesh, and with that he was fighting. But luckily it so happened that the Mother entered into his mind. 
By that he lost: bhraanti, illusions, he lost the power of Ganesha, how to use it. And he was using stencil, and because of the stencil the second, I should say, printing of swastika was the other way round, which was for destruction. So he printed the other kind of swastika. As a result he got destroyed.

So this is the bhraanti part, that She enters into your mind and puts you into a bhraanti, means into an illusion. You commit mistakes.
If it had not happened so many people would have been finished by now. So She enters into the mind of such people who are trying to destroy human beings, who are trying to destroy anything, and puts ideas in such a manner that they die or they get self-destruction.
That's why it is written that She is a bhraanti within us. She creates such an illusion within us that, that a person who tries to be harmful, to be troublesome, to be destructive gets destroyed.
All kinds of things She can put, and that's how so many people have survived in this world. Otherwise so many would have been finished, and there would have been the kingdom of the Satan. But it's this Goddess is the one who saves us.
Symbolically they have said that She has killed so many demons. Actually She has, it's not that She has killed them in a symbolic way. There were demons and demons: Even today we have demonic people, and all of them will not only be killed but will be finished forever. .../...

Now supposing there is a person who is very demonic, who is going to destroy everyone. Then, the people who are wise will understand, but those who are not will take to her and get destroyed within. Like this thousands of people have been destroyed, because they didn't see the right point, they couldn't understand what is right, what is wrong.
So this idea of right and wrong also is completely confused by Her, so that those who are wrong type can be destroyed.
We don't want them on this earth: those who are troublesome, who are destructive, who are argumentative will be all destroyed. But by themselves only they'll destroy, so it's not necessary for the Goddess to do that.
So this is the one which many people ask Me, "Why it is said that 'bhraanti rupena samsthita'? Why does She exist as an illusion?"
This is the reason, that your discriminating power is challenged.
But if you are a Sahaja yogi, real Sahaja yogi, then you can feel on your fingertips if the person whom you are following is a good man or a bad man. And then you can tell others also that "don't!"
So many seekers are destroyed like that. Wrong type of gurus came and they just followed them. Stupid they were, absolutely stupid gurus, and these were stupid people. I don't know why they followed them. It was so obvious that they were just after some sort of a Rolls Royce or something. And I have seen them so mad that they can't get out of it.
.../...  Now the time has come for all of us to understand that you are all Sahaja yogis, and you have a very big responsibility - very, very big responsibility that you should do what your enlightened conscience tells you. Take to your enlightenment and live under that light, and don't jump in the darkness.
And by that you will also understand who is the right person, who is not the right person.

It's a - even in Sahaja Yoga this negativity can work. It works; and one should not get involved into any negative thoughts of others or negative doing of others. 
I's a warning today I wanted to give you all, because you people are very much there to enjoy.

Look after your attention - where does it go? There're so many beautiful things: see the flowers so beautiful, see this thing they have made so beautiful, it makes My heart jump with joy; while some people don't even notice.
The other day I asked somebody who had made that flower arrangement. "Which flower?"
I said, "The one that was there."
"-Which one?"
So I told the names of the flowers: "We never saw!"
Where were you looking but that you couldn't see the flowers?  - Because your eyes are so stupid that they cannot see the beauty. They are engulfed with all kinds of negative things.
2000, 10-08, Cabella.

"If you are... a real Sahaja Yogi... then you can feel..."