SWAMIJI:  Sometimes it looks like a very pleasant, smooth, honeyed path. Sometimes it looks like an uplifted thunderbolt. In the Upanishads, there is a statement which makes out that God is like an uplifted thunderbolt. Everybody dreads Him. The sun and moon dread Him; the gods dread Him. Everybody dreads this uplifted thunderbolt. That is one aspect of justice. God is justice.

Justice is fearsome, because what justice will do to you, you do not know; so, naturally, you dread justice. But, at the same time, you have a sense of protection from justice. If justice is not there, you will not be protected. So, you have a sense of security and satisfaction that there is justice, but you dread it also, because it may do anything. Your understanding of justice is not so clear; therefore, you have a dual feeling towards it.

Every person born in the world has to pass through these stages of movement, from the three-dimensional world of space and time, to the transcendental Godhead. What sorts of troubles and pains you will have to undergo internally, you cannot know now. You will have to know it only when you actually encounter it. It is a fear sometimes that some important thing, very delicious, delicate, and worthwhile will be lost. The world is being lost. The world is a good thing; we see the world is so nice. We cannot say that it is an unpleasant thing. But, we seem to be giving a goodbye to it, for the sake of something of which we have no idea. This is our fear.

"For what am I searching? All the goods of the world I threw away into the sea, and then afterwards, I am searching for some hazy, vague, unthinkable something, calling it enlightenment, calling it God." Sometimes these fears will grip the soul. It is only in the initial stages that there is enthusiasm; afterwards, there will be a reversion, sometimes. The consciousness will give a kick and say, "Go back to the world. I cannot go with this. It is not possible for me."

The ocean will push the river some miles, sometimes, and the river becomes salty. You must have observed this, in some cases; several miles of the mouth of the river may be salt water because of the force of the ocean, which gives a kick to the river.

But, there are some rivers which are so powerful that they push the sea also two hundred miles. In South America, there is one river called the Amazon. They say it is so forceful that two hundred miles of sea water has become sweet water, by the force.

So, you need not be a little stream that is made salty by the power of the unknown. You can be pushing yourself forward. Why are you diffident? The trouble is, we are accustomed to a very happy, pleasant life of the sense organs in this world. We see beautiful things; we eat beautiful things; we hear beautiful things; we touch beautiful things; we smell beautiful things. This is the world. The world is made up of five things: beautiful seeing, beautiful smelling, beautiful hearing, beautiful tasting, beautiful touching. Minus these, there is no world. Now, you want to withdraw yourself from these beautiful things; then, what happens to you? All the beautiful things go. If all the beautiful things go, what remains? This is the fear.

But actually, what you call beauty in this world is not beauty. It is a distortion, and the senses are misguiding you into the wrong belief that you are seeing nice, tasty, delicious things in the world. The real beauty is elsewhere, which is the origin of your personality, the archetype, as they call it. Your real being is reflected through your mind, which looks like this so-and-so sitting here. So, we are all reflections of our own selves, really. The originals are somewhere else. If the reflections are so attractive, what would be the nature of the originals? Thus, tell your mind, "Do not be afraid. I am going to gain some better thing than what I have here in this world."

But, when you are in a psychological impasse of this kind, the only solution is to go to a guru. Independently, one cannot tread this path. It is not possible. One day or other you will see a dark wall in front of you, or a black curtain, and you will not know how to go. At that time, when you are not able to move forward, go to your teacher and say, "I have this trouble. I am in distress, what do you say?" At that time, whatever the guru says is your solution.

Every student must have a guru. Totally independent marching is not possible. You cannot even pilot an airplane of your own accord without training under some guru; otherwise, somewhere wrong you will go. For everything a guru is necessary. A teacher is absolutely essential, especially in this path where the future is totally unknown to us. We are passing through some track, of which we have no idea at all, and we do not know what is ahead of us. And so, we have to be guarded by the caution of the guru only, and when you have got a competent guru, you should have no problems.

It is not that every day you should go to the guru and put questions, but whenever you have a difficulty which is genuine, poignant, and eating your vitals practically, and you are in distress, at that time only you can tell him that this is the difficulty.

Sometimes, you have to be a little lenient to yourself. Very hard you should not be on always. Do not punish yourself too much. You see, spiritual discipline is not torture; otherwise, if you torture yourself too much, there will be a reaction from your mind and body, and you will get nothing afterwards. Very carefully, you have to tread. Neither you should be over-indulgent in things, nor should you be extreme to the breaking point. Both things must be avoided.

That via media, the golden mean, is sometimes missed in our enthusiasm, and then only we get into sickness, whether it is internal or external. That is why, to guard ourselves from any kind of extreme behavior, a teacher is necessary, who will be teaching you what is proper. A guru is necessary. You go to meet the guru.

Visitor:  What you said about justice - I am not sure exactly what you meant, but to me it meant when you go into the Unknown, the justice is just the Truth that you have to face, right? I am not sure. And, you said it will be justice, but that is where you find the security, also. So, do you mean that?

SWAMIJI:  Justice is a source of security, and also a source of fear.

Visitor:  Right.

SWAMIJI:  You know why it is so. It acts in both ways. It can act either way; therefore, you fear it and also you like it. You cannot exist without it, and, also you do not want to be interfered with by it, too much.

Visitor:  It is the same as the truth, then? The truth is painful, and yet it does liberate.

SWAMIJI:  Yes, it is painful, and yet liberates. Right. It is painful to the bound individual, because it does not want to free itself from bondage, since bondage itself has been taken as a necessary joy. We are in a state of bondage, but we do not think that it is worth throwing it down in one second, like that. We have got our own belongings, including this body. They are a source of bondage, but we would not like to throw them away. Bondage also becomes part and parcel of our existence. For people living in prison for fifty years, that becomes a natural way of living; when they come out, it will be a little odd thing, for some time. So, whatever is there to which we get habituated, that looks normal to us, though it is not actually normal.

There are people who are permanently sick. They are never all right. Always there is some temperature, some stomachache, some lack of appetite for the whole day, and for months together, and that becomes a normal way of thinking. They do not know what health is. That is the manner of our involvement in things. That is why we dread separation from the world of involvements, because that has become something very real and normal for us.

Now, the other thing which is really there, and which is supremely normal, has been always a kind of thought and abstraction for us. Concrete contact with it has not been practicable. We concretely, substantially come in contact with objects which are seen by the sense organs, but we cannot physically contact that which we are contemplating as the Ultimate Reality. It remains mostly as a kind of thought, and we are not able to convince ourselves fully that what we have only in thought is as good as what we can physically contact.

So many kinds of psychologically engendered fears harass us. We cannot get out of these things without practical guidance from a guru.