Topics

Don’t sit on your living room sofa while somebody’s knocking at the door going, “I wonder who that is. It could be Uncle Tom. It could be my friend Jerry. It could be my friend from India—no, and no, he wouldn’t do.... Hmmh, I wonder who it is? Let me call Prem Rawat! ‘Who is at my door?'"

So, go find out! This is what I’ve said. All along, people have said, “Oh, wha’, wha’, wha’...?” Go find out. Know for yourself. Know it for yourself. And that’s being victorious over the self. You make the rules. You make the rules.

Not just somebody’s.... And, do you know how many people there are in this world who have swallowed the idea of heaven, the heaven that you go to after you die, if you’ve done everything right? Swallowed it, “gulp!” How you could swallow such a big horse pill, I don’t know. But you swallowed it—without water.

Oh.... Heaven? There is a heaven—of course there is a heaven. It’s here. And you need to know it! And so, what is hell? Well, if you don’t know it—and you’re not in heaven—guess where you are! And do you get toasted? Yes, you get toasted. Raked over the fire, absolutely—again and again.

And there you are. One day you find yourself totally devastated and destroyed. And somehow you’re put back together again, to have the same experience two days later? Same exact thing: fried, toasted, not any flour, not any oil, just dry-toasted over the great barbecue that you light yourself, that you create yourself. And that’s what happens.

So, the victory over the self: most important, most important. And it’s not so complicated; it’s not sophisticated; it’s not like, “He’eeah-heeeaah, victory over myself."

No—because it’s very simple. First, you begin by knowing yourself. Now that you know yourself, easy to gain victory over yourself. This is not about swords and dragons. This is about, "very simple, very practical."

- Prem Rawat

Just stop for a minute and realize that you are not free unless you really have removed this box that you carry around you all the time.

There’s a box, and this box is full of a lot of noise, a lot of imagination that is not even your imagination—somebody else’s imagination, a lot of ideas. And in fact, this is who you think you are! This is “you!” And this box is the greatest hurdle possible in truly knowing yourself.

You need to know yourself. If you don’t know yourself, you don’t know anything, really! Because it is this being that processes what it knows, or what it thinks it knows. When it does not know itself, the processing is happening by information that has been put there by other people, not you!

The noise that you hear between your ears in perfect silence is the noise that other people have put between your ears. That includes your beloved parents.

We’re not talking about, “You have to hate your parents to get rid of the noise”—no, no. They did it for a very good reason, because that’s what happened to them. That was their reasoning. That’s the reasoning that they’ve always followed.

So, whatever happened to them, they did it to you. And their parents did it because their parents did it. So this is something of your great-great-great, great-great-great, great-great-great, great-great-great, great-great-great, great-great-great, great-great-great, great grandfather’s gift. And I would say grandmother too, but I forgot how many times I said great-great-great.

But that’s the noise. And wherever you go, this noise goes with you. And you can silence all the other noises but you can’t silence this noise—because it’s there. And it defines your good and it defines your bad. It defines your right and it defines your wrong.

It’s you, your life, your existence. You are the major player in this. And if you can understand that, that’s everything.

– Prem Rawat

A guitar, a string, and it is out of tune. And in that state, can it be played? Yes. It will follow all laws of physics. But it will sound better when it is in tune.

When was the last time, my friends, you tuned your guitar? If your song doesn’t sound so well, don’t blame the song. Maybe it is your guitar that is out of tune. And without giving it a thought, you are playing, and you’re playing, and you’re playing—but no matter what you do, it doesn’t sound good.

I am here to encourage you to tune your guitar. It’s not that difficult. It’s not that difficult. All you have to know is what it should sound like when it is in tune. And turn the key and strum, strum, strum, strum. When it is in that harmony—harmony, that’s all! That’s the solution to your problems. All of them. All of them.

In you resides your problem, and in you resides the solution. The two are not separated. You are the coin, and you have two sides: that which is the problem and that which is the solution. You cannot have a one-sided coin.

Ignorance is no big thing if you understand that the other side is knowledge. Emptiness is no big thing if you understand—and only if you understand—that the other side is fulfillment. Lies of the world are not a problem if you understand that the other side is the truth. The badness of this world is not a problem if you understand that there is goodness on the other side.

So you may as well play this instrument whilst you’ve got it, because it’s not going to be available again—and I’m talking about this instrument, this time, this life, this existence.

This is a positive message, not a negative message. This is about you, understanding. Not going, “I wonder why that happened to me.” Because it did! It happened to you because it did. It didn’t happen to somebody else. It happened to you because it did.

Now, can you have control over the past? If you had control over the past, it wouldn’t be called “the past,” would it? Past means “passed.” What do you have control over? You have control over what happens today.

Steer it. Make something happen. Make joy happen in your life. Make peace happen in your life. That’s when peace comes, when there is that recognition and understanding within you.

– Prem Rawat

So it is that when one speaks of that beauty that resides inside of you, there is no clue.

There’s nothing like—if somebody says to you, “By the way, there is the Divine inside of you,” then you go, “Oh yeah, I knew that; I saw that yesterday. When I was looking at the mirror, I just saw the Divine kind of just pulse out and then go back in.”

No. You have no idea. And just because you don’t have an idea doesn’t mean that that’s not what’s happening. It is. And to see that Divinity that resides within inside of you, you would have to come very, very close to yourself.

It is not necessarily in the clues that you will find the answer. But there is a reality. The reality? The answers are within you. Come closer! If you don’t know this, of what I am saying, the reason is, you are so far from yourself, you do not see it.

Do you know how that works? When you’re far, far away, you see a lot more, but with less resolution. When you get closer, you may not see as much, but you see with a higher resolution.

You can look at somebody far, far away, and you may know that there is a person. Then, when they come closer and closer and closer, you might be able to say, “Oh, I know who that person is.”

They come closer, and closer, and closer, and closer, and they—you can get them to a point where you can see the spinach on their teeth! That cannot happen a mile away. It only happens when you come closer and closer and closer and closer.

If you do not know about what is your potential, if you do not know that inside of you are the answers, if you do not know that inside of you is the Divine, if you do not know that inside of you is the miracle taking place all the time, you know why? Because you’re so far away. Come close to yourself.

– Prem Rawat