Mohanji’s Christmas Message

I wish you a very Merry Christmas!
What I would like to tell you today about Christmas is the whole idea of celebration of oneness with the world. Jesus said you should love your neighbour as you love yourself. You should look at everybody as yourself. There is no separation. And today, if you look at the whole world, we only talk about separations, we only talk about greed – various factors which divide people. It’s time we started looking at ourselves as expressions of every being. Please understand this clearly or repeat after me:

“I am happiness. I am sorrow. I am the light. I am the darkness. I am the strength. I am the weakness. I am life. I am death. I am everything – every aspect of life. I am good. I am bad. I am handsome, beautiful. I am ugly. I am EVERYTHING. Every aspect of life is me. All that you see around is my own reflection.”

How do you know it’s your own reflection? If you get affected, you have something to do with it. If you are not affected by anything around you, that means you are already contained within yourself. However, that’s not the case with most of us. We are affected by numerous factors of existence, for life  changes because of external factors. When we clearly understand that, we then  realise that we are part of the entire  society,  a part of the entire  world, or the whole creation. Every being, every aspect of creation is part of us.

So, during this Christmas, the best you could express is,  you being the whole universe,  you as everything – every being, every emotion, every quality or a conflict. All things are you. And the reason why there are conflicts in life is that they are always rooted in resistance of some kind. When we resist many things in life they block the energy flow;  they diminish us, reduce us and our experience is that of conflict within . Various kinds of sorrows come  out of these conflicts. We want certain things to happen in a certain way, an ideal way, but they do not. . Why is it not happening? There are various factors providing that situation which we experience every day. And largely, we can’t change in one day, what collective consciousness or our own experience over a period of time has created in our life. . That’s because something which has happened in our life today may have a history of many lifetimes, it is  probably not  from  this lifetime. What you experience today might be because of various things of various lives, or various aspects of this life – both are possible, but what you are experiencing today is not an isolated incident ; rather  it is connected to various things, and we  must be clear about that. And how is that aspect  of life sustained or kept alive? It’s only through resistance. When you try to push things away, it affects our equilibrium.

Why should we accept? It is not passive acceptance. Acceptance is always connected to your accepting that it is happening in your life, it is flowing through life, it has to come and it has to go. Acceptance is clarity that a situation will not happen unless there is a cause for it. An effect will not happen without a cause. A situation will not happen without a reason. This awareness is good enough. Actually, this is the only learning  we need; we will  know, “Ok there is a cause, I may not know it, but it’s fine. I am alright with that.” If we are very clear about this aspect of our existence, then everything else will flow. Acceptance has a lot of value in a life of stability, a life of maturity. It is not passive acceptance leading to inertia: “This is happening, I cannot do anything about it, so I am suffering.” This is not suffering. Acceptance cannot have suffering. Acceptance is mature understanding that this is the way it is, this is how it is flowing and this is the situation. Something has created the situation and that’s perfectly alright. You do not know what created the situation. Maybe multiple things created it, maybe it’s connected to various concepts we have cultivated over a period of time, all these are possible. Anything is possible. However, our level of acceptance will strengthen us: “Ok this is happening, let me experience this, then the next one…”

Life means experiences. Reason for taking the body, for taking an incarnation is experience. You are experiencing numerous things of life. All your relationships are your experiences.  You cannot own anybody. You cannot own anything in life. All the materials which you have, which have come to your life are only for your experiences. Various factors of existence in life are all for experiences. Only one thing is happening in life and that is – experience. It is derived out of people, places, materials… Take any aspect of life, everything is providing you some experience. Sometimes you may call it good, sometimes you may call it bad, but at the end of the day, they are all experiences. You cannot change any of those things. You are a bundle of experiences, a memory of all of them.   Your experience aspect of life or maturity is only the collection of your experiences  from childhood  until now. In fact, what you are is a bunch of, a memory of or an impact of experiences.

Second aspect is that life means expressions. Christ consciousness means your ability to express compassion, unconditional love, sharing, caring, purity.  These are higher aspects of human existence. You have your awareness – first of all the awareness that you were born, that you are an incarnation, you are alive, you have a body, you have a society, activity, a character, a constitution… This is the level of awareness that we fundamentally have and that awareness should lead you to your highest expression. That is the state of being Christ. When you express compassion, kindness, unconditional love, sharing, caring and selflessness, in other words, the  highest aspects of existence, which are not  for your personal selfish gratification, that makes you one with the Christ’s consciousness. Look at a mango tree.  It is situated in one location,  gives shade and shelter to birds and various creatures,  gives shade to all the people who walk that way; it also provides food which is its fruit   and releases oxygen into the environment. It is only giving. It does everything for another person’s benefit. And the mango tree is not affected by who eats its fruit, or who uses the shade. Just like that, when our existence is for the world, we completely dissolve. We stop being our selfish incarnation.

Otherwise we are only thinking about what more we can have from this world. That’s the illusion which we talk about, the Maya. Maya is the relative truth, the illusory aspect of the existence, one that makes us  believe that more materials can make us happier. We believe that more money can make us happier. We believe that if we have a particular relationship, a love relationship or a connection with something or somebody, if we move to another location,  it will make us happier. Please remember, if you look at your own life from the childhood till now, what actually made you happy are those momentary things and they never stayed. They were momentary pleasures. For example, when you have  a great meal,  at that point in time you are very satisfied and happy. But  later, you become hungry again.  You went  on a picnic to a particular location, saw some sights,  took some pictures against the backdrop, you are happy for some time. Then you want more. So, nothing stays. No happiness is permanent. This is important to understand.

Hence, to understand the consciousness of Christ, it’s that in every place, you are yourself. Your happiness is completely situated inside. You are fully happy with everything around you whether it is good, bad or ugly. “Happy” not in the sense that you are accepting everything passively but that you understand that this is the situation provided by various factors of existence of the past – past lives as well as the past of this life. You are here now and it   cannot be changed. You cannot change this situation, this time, the space, the awareness, the environment- and that is fine. That’s the level of acceptance we are talking about. When you are talking about Christ’s consciousness, that level of acceptance: situations are provided, God-given. They are a gift of God. If we understand that as a gift of God, then we are happy and settled within: “Let me be here.” What did Christ say? “If it is Your will, let it be.” That means you are surrendering to the highest will. Actually, when talking about the highest will, God does not interfere  in our life, just like your soul. Your soul is the energy which moves you, motivates you, leads you. This is the aspect of you which is actually making you experience  your entire   life, but again, the soul is not experiencing. The soul is only providing and facilitating the experience. It is completely neutral. It has never interfered in your decisions, your pleasures, sorrows or happiness. Soul has never ever interfered in anything. Just like that God never interferes in your personal life, in your likes and dislikes, in what you do for a living, in what you are. God does not interfere. God is the platform which provides all this. If your soul has given you  life, God has given life to the universe. Universe is where we exist. And we are  only a tiny particle of  the  whole universe. Because we are so preoccupied with our incarnation,  we are deluded that this is existence.

This existence is also temporary. For example, if you look at the past, billions of people walked this earth before us. If you look at the last 100 years, many people have come and gone. If you take the next 100 years,  many  including us will come and go. Many more people will come. And “the platform” keeps  providing for all these people. Everybody comes and goes, people have experiences, and they have happiness, sorrow, a lot of things to talk about. We also develop ownerships: my father, my mother, my husband, my daughter, my dog, my furniture, my house, my car… all these attachments also come as part of the incarnation.   In each incarnation, deep within  we know that we are here just like tourists, for a period of time, as we came here for a period of  time and will have to leave after that.   There is nothing we can own   in this journey; you can own no relationships, father, mother, children, property, nothing. It is not yours; it is all part of your experience pattern, part of your plan of experiences. If you look at it from this understanding, your life’s transitions and the encounter with various people, gave you certain experiences. . The same people can give you a good or bad experience. At one point in time, a set of people give  you good experience, at another point in time, the same set of people   give  you bad experience. At the end of the day, these are all experiences.  Finally each of it is just an experience. Furthermore, nobody stays. Everyone  comes and goes. Some people decide to go because of their mind, some, because of their life. Life took them away or even death took them away. All this is possible. Everything is possible. That is the level of acceptance we should have to be in Christ’s consciousness.

Christ’s consciousness is total acceptance of  every situation in life. Jesus could have saved himself from the cross. He had that power. However, he chose to go through the process and stick to his teaching. What he was telling people was, “Whatever your possessions are, whatever your positions are, they are all temporary. What you give, you have. Undoubtedly, you have only that which you deliver consistently and with conviction. And for that message to be implemented – if an  exit  as dramatic  as the one  in Jesus’ life had to happen, it was  the best thing  because there is no other way in which one  could  exit and  leave a compelling message that could not be ignored; an exit that people really felt for and could not ignore the impact of the exit. That is probably why, if you take as an example Lord Rama, who was an avatar with full awareness; he was in the forest for 14 years; his wife was kidnapped, while the person who orchestrated the kidnapping, Ravana, seemed to have a great life.  He was a bhakta of Lord Shiva, he had all that he wanted, but in the end Rama had to come and kill him. When you go in the path of the negative – selfishness, greed, hatred… if you walk on that path, initially you may feel some kind of success, you may feel great, but eventually it pulls you down and leads you to a reduced frequency. It simply reduces your frequency to the level of anger, hatred, jealousy, comparison… the aspects which make you alienated from the truth. In contrast, an experience which makes you feel one with the whole universe – compassion, kindness, love, no separation – that’s your highest human experience possible in a human body. You definitely have that option.

You do have an option of having the highest possible experience. While you are in the body, this is the best you can do. Much of it is accepting yourself with all your weaknesses and strengths, you do not pretend in any way. All of us have weaknesses. Don’t try to hide them. Not in the sense that you quickly display it, but in the sense that you don’t have to hide them i.e. pretend that you don’t have them. That is a burden. Whenever you pretend, whenever you hide, it becomes your biggest burden because then your entire mind and energy is preoccupied with what is being hidden. Instead, you just live with acceptance, you have weaknesses, you have strengths, everybody has them, live with that awareness. Do not try to be perfect, to say that only perfection will happen out of your existence. It’s not true. We have made mistakes. We will make mistakes. We might have fallen many times before we learnt to walk. Mistakes are part of our existence, falling is part of our existence, so called “failures” – when what you expected is different from what happened, our expected result did not happen, are part of our existence. People get depressed. Nowadays because of extreme pressure on achieving  only success, children are committing suicide if they fail an examination! This is the tragedy of our existence. This is a non-understanding factor of our existence. We can fail, what’s the problem? Why should we always be successful? We can always have both sides. It’s about both sides. Life is about duality. There is success and failure, happiness and sorrow, there is night and day. Life goes on like that.

When you clearly understand that this is the way life operates, then you will be peaceful with yourself. That is acceptance. That being Christ – being Christ’s consciousness. Total acceptance, total contentment with what is available, what has been given, as a gift. The food that came to your table is the medicine for you. That means the food which comes easily to you is the medicine meant for you. That’s what you deserve. What you deserve you get, what you desire you may not get. In life your eligibility factor decides what you get. Eligibility factor means that which  you have cultivated over a period of time. Imagine you have cultivated a lot of seeds, over time eventually they become fruit. That initial factor is essential. The right step – that of selflessness. If you live for the world, the world will live for you. If you do not live for the world, then the world will not care. Why should the world care about you if you only live for yourself, for selfish reasons and selfish gratifications? Please remember. We use this platform called the Earth. We use this earth for our purpose, for our gratification, for our pleasure.  Please pay back. The only way you can pay back to earth is to share what you have. Nobody says you should not experience or enjoy anything life provides you. This is alright. Life has provided you numerous objects enjoy them if you could.

However, please remember: more materials do not mean more enjoyment. It probably means less enjoyment. For example, you have a buffet on the table. You can only eat what your stomach can contain. Even if you like all the dishes on the table, you may not be able to consume them. Why? Because of your capacity. More materials, money, relationships, do not essentially mean you have more experiences. It only means you have more choices. These choices are an illusion, too, because they are all temporary. Nothing stays. For example, when you were a child, you played with many toys happily. Now you are not interested in playing with them. As you grew up, you had various gadgets to “play with”. They gave you pleasure, some kind of stability, happiness, at some point in time. Even if you regularly use a mobile phone, you do not use it when you sleep. Say, you purchased a beautiful car, a Rolls Royce; you can only drive from one point to another. You cannot sleep in it all the time or use it all the time. Just like that, everything has its time and space limitations, its experience aspect, and they change.

Life is about changes. Acceptance means accepting those changes gracefully. When you gracefully accept those changes, it changes you. It gives you contentment. If you resist them, saying, “This is not what I want, I want to change things. I want to move things,” then you will always have conflicts with something. That is what sustains the pain. Otherwise pains will come and go. Nothing stays. If happiness comes, so does pain. They don’t stay. Situations come and go, they happen and dissolve. This is the way life goes. We must be very clear about this aspect. Today, I am talking. Another time I do not know whether I will be alive to talk. I talk today because I am alive. I can talk, that is why I am talking. Who knows how long I can talk! And that’s about it. Tomorrow, if I am able to talk, I will do so. If you are able to listen, you will listen. Life is as simple as that. Every situation has given you a chance for an experience. Don’t deny it. If you deny it, that is the biggest mistake you are making in your life because you are using your mind, your analytical aspects and then you choose not to have an experience. In the bargain, you have guilt. Guilt happens when you could not experience a particular thing at a particular time, or you could not utilise something which was provided by life at a particular time in a particular way, or you feel later that you could have done better. That is all connected to impossibility i.e. it is not possible. You have to experience this talk at this time. Tomorrow I will not be able to talk in this mode.

Everything is kept on time. Time is like the walking belt at the airport. When you walk, the belt also moves so that you don’t have to walk as much. Similarly, time keeps moving, it continuously moves, you can run over it, you can walk over it, you can stand on it, but it is still moving. Time takes you forward. This is exactly how our life exists. This is why we need to have acceptance. First and foremost, acceptance is that you have to experience life using your senses – eyes, nose, ears, mouth and skin.

Second, to experience everything you have only one mind. Five senses and one mind. When mind is with the eyes, you see. When mind is with your nose, you experience smell. When mind is with your tongue, you experience taste. So our experiences are limited to our mind and the presence of mind. At another time it may not be possible because if your mind is elsewhere and you are eating, you may not even know what you ate unless the food is too spicy or very bad in taste – then you will definitely bring your focus back. Otherwise you will keep eating; like your mother’s food, the food provided by those closest to you, you may consume – almost thanklessly because we have taken it for granted. We have thus taken for granted many things in life, “Oh, it will happen, it will continue, this is all fine”. That is one of mistakes we make. It is not being conscious, it is not our acceptance, but it is a passive life, a passive existence. Passive means almost like dormant, i.e. you have not lived it. Passive aspects of existence mean that we have not connected to that part of life. It is happening. In hindsight you know that it happened or you probably know that it is happening but you are not actually being that experience at that time. The experiences which we talk about, the true experiences happen only when your mind is available and present. That is why I always say that when you do one thing, do only that. Don’t worry about the other aspects. If you are eating food, just eat. When you play with your children, just play. When you talk to somebody, just talk to that person; so that at every point in time your experience has a completion, absoluteness. That is being in the present and that is acceptance of a situation.

Now if something “wrong” happens in life, “wrong” in the sense that it does not bring you happiness, just have patience with that situation, then that situation changes. When it changes, then you are in a different mode. Everything that has come will also go. Nothing stays.

Another aspect of Christ’s consciousness is zero ownership. You don’t even own your body. You have taken your body for a particular time. That is why I said that if you look at the last 100 years, so many people have come and gone, in the next 100 years  many will come and go. We will also become history. Some may remember (us), some may forget. And people who lived with you will also go. Everybody goes behind the curtain of time at some point in time. There will always be fresh set of people on the screen, on the stage. If you want to leave your signature on earth, it has to be through giving. How much you deliver to this world,  will become your legacy. That is how people will remember you. Why are we talking about Jesus 2000 years after his exit? Because he delivered his own life for the sake of his conviction. What he was saying is, “I am everything. I live it. I am you. I am here for serving. I am not here for selfish pleasures. I am not here to accumulate more wealth. I am not here to have more bindings or control over things. I am here to give. I am not controlling anything. I am not possessive of anything. I am not bound by possessions. I am not bound by positions.

That’s the message he conveyed. And that made sense to people because this is true to everybody, to all people. Lord Krishna walked on this earth with a lot of energy and power and still walks the earth with a lot of energy and power. Why do we still talk about Krishna? Why do we worship him? Why do we love him? It’s because he loved every aspect of existence. As a child he loved the childishness, pranks of a child (he was fond of eating and also stealing butter). He loved pranks and everybody loved them. In His youth He loved the romantic aspect; in fact He celebrated it. We all have a romantic aspect in us. When you say, “a beautiful flower”, in other words when we appreciate something, it is the  romance in us talking. While all of us have a romantic side, over a period of time, just to be an adult we have completely discarded that aspect. When we appreciate and love something, when we say good things, it is coming from the beauty and the sense of love in us, the romance aspect of us. Krishna made it exemplary. He completely lived it and he asked the world to romance life. That’s the best way to live. Imagine that Krishna aspect is not happening in our life today, we will not understand that it is ok to be everything in life. Then He was a great ruler. He ruled the country with great warmth and a sense of justice. Everybody was completely at ease. A true ruler / king is the one who ensures that everyone sleeps peacefully – not only human beings, but also animals and birds – that every aspect of creation has peace in their state, in their existence. That is the right ruler. Krishna made that possible. Everybody was peaceful in his country, in his empire. Then He was a great philosopher. From a stage of sinking, going into depression, He made a warrior out of a person (Arjuna). That is the connection.That is the conviction. You can see a lot of people tired of life. They say, “I am tired of life. I do not want to live anymore. No good things are happening.” They are in a completely depressed state. From there bring a purpose out, serve the world, do something for the world. Give life to life. Give life to every being around you. “Life” in the sense of activity, brightness,  confidence to everything around you. That level of delivering life to life made Him a complete, powerful philosopher. Therefore look at every aspect. All great masters had something to deliver and they delivered great messages.  Thousands of years later we still worship Him and respect Him. This is the secret. What you deliver honestly, truthfully and with conviction, generations will talk about; generations will be inspired by it. If we only earn something, own some gadgets, materials in life, all one can say is, “Good for you”.  It might be a great for your personal life. You have more money, cars, or materials than your neighbour and you may be the richest person around. But when you die, you leave everything behind. So all your life you probably lived an illusion. I am not saying this is not good. I am saying whatever life has offered, accept it gracefully with both hands, “Give it to me and thank you very much for it.” There is no point in saying “I want this, I want that”. That is a type of resistance because you are only postponing it. Something that has to come to you will come to you; be it a situation, a time, a space or material, anything which has to come to you will come to you. What you experience is your personal experience, but what you are able to share with happiness, with a clean heart, with purity, that stabilises you. This is Christ’s consciousness. Not to share because you are better than another one – that is ego. If you think you are better than another one and give something to them, it is ego. Ego is also a blockage in us. If you stop having something then you feel depressed. That’s the other side.Serve without expectations. Serve without conditions. That is Christ’s consciousness.

Please make a decision today if you could, that you will give more than you take. You will always give or share more than you ask for. We always ask for more and more from the Earth, I want this, I want that, and you feel it will give you more happiness. It’s probably not true. When you give more, you get more wealth inside. You will actually be rich inside. If you are rich inside, that is your wealth. “Rich inside” means your ability to share. Just make that decision – always be rich inside and be in Christ’s consciousness.