What you have heard as universality is nothing but the activity of your own mind in terms of everything outside. The outsideness becomes a universal pervasion, because you have thought yourself as present in other things also - in many things, or in everything - in the entire space, in the whole of time, in the Creator Himself. You can even transport your consciousness to the centre of the cosmos.

Scientists tell us that the world was created by a big bang. All right, but what was there before this event took place? That is the centre of the cosmos. Close your eyes intensely and feel that you are there, at that spot which was there before this event of creation took place. You will feel that you are the Creator of the cosmos.

The world will bend before you, but now it does not bend; now you have to bend before it, because the world has become your boss, and you have become the servant. Why should you be a servant of anybody? It is because you have isolated yourself from that which is controlling you. Transport your consciousness to that which appears to be controlling you. Then, you control yourself at that time, like an elephant controlling itself.

This is a hard thing to imagine in the mind. Yoga is not simple. It is a strenuous effort of the intelligent will of a person to become other than what it is. The worst thing that you can think of is to imagine that you are other than what you are. Nobody likes to be other than what one is. "I am this. Who can be like me? What do you think you are? Do you know who I am?" This kind of talk, this kind of feeling, is the pain of human life. We perish as egos, and nobody benefits us afterwards, because if everyone starts thinking through this egoistic individuality, there will be a clash of purposes. One ego will not tolerate another. This kind of intolerance of egoistic principles among people is the cause of war in the world. Battle takes place, and there is conflict everywhere. This happens because everything is different from everything else. Why is it that one thing is different from the other thing? It is the body that is different from the other bodies, naturally, because the separation of two things is due to the intervention of space.

We must assume that we are spiritual seekers. You are not just business people coming from somewhere to attend a conference here, and going back and becoming business people once again. You are artists, you are clerks, you are officials; you have come here, and you sit here also as officials only - as clerks, bosses, and engineers, as tradesmen - and when you go back, you are that only. You are the same thing as you were. Your coming here has not benefitted you in any way.

Here is a place where you are enabled to enter into a new type of educational process, a transvaluation of values, as you may call it. There is no use living in Rishikesh; you may go to Delhi and stay. You can go to Timbuktu; what does it matter? The place is not what is important. The circumstances that are guiding you in the right direction are what is important. People come to a place like Rishikesh, not because there is some gold or silver flowing everywhere, but because the atmosphere is charged with a facility which enables a person to think in a different manner altogether, in a spiritual way, in a universal way, in a non-subjective way, in a non-egoistic way, in a divine way.

If this process is not possible, then travelling has no mean­ing. It will be only a question of sightseeing, or picnicking. No transformation takes place. A person comes, and he goes in the same way as he came. Any number of times he may come, and he goes as the same person.

The training is not merely verbal and observational. It is not an entertainment. It is an inner necessity felt to become more than what one is. Do you want to become more than what you are, or are you satisfied with what you are? Now, certainly you will say that you would like to be more than what you are. How would you become more than what you are - by having lots of things around you? Suppose you have gadgets and appurtenances and wealth and whatnot, and relations and friends around you. Do you mean to say that, by that, you have become more than you? Rich people think that they are more than what they are because of the money and the friends that they have. No, they cannot become more than what they are by imagining that they are connected with things which are totally different from themselves. Any amount of multitude of B's cannot change the character of A. He will be A only.

So, becoming more than oneself does not mean having many things around you, because things cannot become you. They are totally outside. Any amount of wealth that is heaped like a mountain in front of you will not enhance your personality. It cannot widen your individuality. You will be the same little stupid mini-person, in spite of the large wealth that you have gained.

Mahmud of Ghazni attacked certain parts of India twenty-one times, and he collected a lot of gold. It seems he went to Ghazni and piled up all the gold, which looked like a little hill. You may say that he had exceeded himself in becoming great, but the time came when he had to breathe his last. Death was catch­ing hold of his neck. It seems he was lying down, breathing his last, and gazing at the whole hill of gold, and he died as a poor fellow that he was even before he obtained this gold, because the gold has not become himself; it was outside.

So, you cannot become more than what you are, except by the enhancement of your thought. You are not the objects, the gold and silver, or the relations; you are your mind. It is the mind that is looking like what you are. If this mind can expand itself, then you have expanded yourself.

To be expanded means to be present in a place where you are physically not. Can you be somewhere outside here, outside the location of this little body? Physically it is not possible, because I cannot lift my body and put it there; that is true. But I am not the body; I am the mind. Whatever I am is due to the mind thinking. I may be happy or unhappy, not because the body is sit­ting in one place, but because the mind is happy or unhappy.

The mind should exceed itself beyond the limit of this bodily location. Then it becomes a larger individuality. Man becomes superman; a mortal tends to become an immortal existence. You become wider and wider, defying the limitations of space. It is wider, not in the sense of a measurable, geometrical pattern. It is not that your body has become so thick. That is not actually enhancement of being. It is the consciousness in you that has risen above its location inside the body, and gone out.

As consciousness is pure subjectivity, we cannot look at ourselves sitting here. You cannot see yourself sitting somewhere else. Be careful about that. The consciousness is pure subject. It cannot become an object. So, when I say the consciousness in you has to expand itself, and you have to become more than what you are, it means to say, your 'I-ness' has to become a larger 'I'. It is not by possession of things which are external, because the 'I' is not outside; it is yourself only.

So, it is a very difficult thing to imagine what all this is. It is a very hard job, because we have been thinking wrongly right from our childhood. All these things look very new to us. It looks impossible, practically. Many feel that the realisation of God is not for them, that they have to take many births. Well, you may take many births, but it is not necessary, provided you are able to think from the point of view of that which you are aspiring for. You can obtain anything in the world, provided you have become that which you are longing for. Anything that is really outside you will not come to you. Any amount of longing is no good. Everything will run away from you, flee from you; you will obtain nothing if you go on thinking, "I want something which is not me."

You have to know that you can want only yourself. You can possess only yourself, you cannot possess somebody else. But, that somebody else also will come, provided that you have become that somebody. Then, that somebody ceases to be somebody, and you become that. You become universally operative. It is impossible to imagine this condition. You may be wondering how it is possible for you. If this is not possible for you, the very purpose of your existing in this world has no meaning; otherwise, you will be leading a meaningless life of drudgery, poverty, helplessness, and foolishness, and leave this body as foolish as you were when you took birth from the mother's womb. And, you will take another birth in order to continue this same foolishness with which you have left this body.

Death is not a solution to the problems of life. It is only a continuation of the problems. It is like escaping the eye of a creditor from whom you have borrowed a lot of money. How far can you go? The creditor will pursue you wherever your are.

A little calf, which has lost its mother cow in the midst of a large crowd of cows, moves zigzag, running hither and thither. Somehow it finds its mother, and will not rest until it finds its mother; similarly, your actions will pursue you wherever you go. So, death is not a solution to difficulties. Your debts cannot be cleared just because you have died. You will carry the debts, because debt is an obligation of the mind. It is not an obligation of the physical body. So, the body may go, but the mind that has obtained that credit will take it, as a very powerful magnetic energy following it, and you have to pay the debt in the next birth, with a redoubled force, with doubled interest.

Nobody can escape the facts. If you have done something wrong, it will come back on your head; if you do something good, it will come to you also, but we are not thinking of good and bad here. We are thinking of liberation from the thralldom of individual existence.

Whatever I have told you may look very strange, because it is impossible to think like this. The highest blessedness is the most difficult treasure that we can imagine. You have to become more than what you are, other than what you are, in the sense of an expanded being. You have to be larger, not by an increase in the width of your physical body, but larger in your dimension of thinking consciousness, so that you do not think only one thing, you think all things at the same time. This is the process prescribed in the Yoga technique of finding oneself outside oneself. From that point of view of the location that is external, so called, you look at yourself here, so that your attachment to this body has gone. The karma of this body will not attach itself. You are totally free. You become a super-physical viewer, rather than a physical observer.

If this technique can be extended further and further, into a wider field of comprehensiveness of all things in the world, you become a world person. This is what they call a superman. The world becomes your body. You can imagine what you will be feeling at that time. Your little consciousness, clinging to this little body, will cling to the whole world, and pervade everywhere, and everything will be your external form.

Can you imagine what it would be like to think in terms of the whole world as yourself? You cannot do that because you are unable to transfer the consciousness of your physical existence and make it enter into the substance of the universe. There is a great difficulty in becoming other than what one is. So much is the attachment to this body! That is why you cannot bear one word of talk against this body.

Yoga is difficult; sadhana is very hard. Sadhana is the supreme effort that you have to put forth in honestly seasoning your psychic operations and, as I mentioned yesterday, start thinking spiritually, and not psychologically. The psychological mind projects itself as an observer of another object. The spiritual mind considers itself as the very thing which it observes, so that the relationship between one thing and another is abolished, and it becomes a relationless, ubiquitous, expanded consciousness.

You are not a person; you are not a son or daughter of somebody. You are an element of consciousness, which is what has taken birth, which is what will go outside from this body and incarnate itself as another body. This so-called ' myself' will not go to the next world; it will be thrown away here. So, if this so-called 'myself' has been thrown away, then what are you, really, that is going to the other world? Why do you not think of it now itself? If you are certainly not what is thrown out at the time of death, why do you think it is you now? Even now it is quite different from what you are. How is it that it has become impossible to think like this? If this thing that is thrown out at the time of death is not you, as you know very well, then what are you? That thing is the crucial matter here. On this you concentrate, and see that instantaneously you will be liberated from the finitude that has been injected into you by wrong thinking.

Education is the process of right thinking in the direction of the pervasion of yourself higher than what you are. An educated person becomes more than what he is; he does not continue to be the same idiotic person as he was. Education is the art of larger being, rather than acquisition. This is a very difficult technique, but if you can succeed in it, you will be the most blessed person.