Salvation in Kali Yuga. Swami Vankhandi Maharaj: Interviews, Satsangs, Teachings, Parables

You move from birth to birth, having one main goal: meeting with God. The heart’s desire to attain unity with God grows stronger and stronger. In each new life, you accumulate merits that bring this possibility closer. It takes more than one birth to attain such darshan. You cannot behold God in an instant.

Bali, responding to Rama’s offer of immortality, said: «I don’t need immortality. You have given me what great munis ask for throughout their life, from birth to birth. I need nothing more. What more would I do, remaining in this body? I have no more desires.» He had no more desires in life and no reason to live. He was liberated.

The «Ramayana» says: «In many births sages and sadhus diligently engage in sadhana, striving to attain mukti, but when the most important, final moment before death comes, they forget the Name of Rama, and as a result they are born again and again.»

It takes more than one birth to reach direct communion with Atma. Sometimes one needs to live several births in the state of vairagya. Right now you’re burning with desire to attain vairagya, but you still maintain love and attachment to this world. But your love should not be divided. Love must be dedicated to one thing. You either love God or this world. Either shreya or preya. Preya is happiness in samsara, shreya is happiness with Ishvara. If you reach for samsara, Ishvara won’t come to you.

You take care of your body, maintain its cleanliness, eat good food. You love your body. But there are people who have become so detached from the world that at first glance they look like they’ve lost their minds. These are free jivas, muktajivas. Death of the body hasn’t come yet, but they have already attained mukti in life. They are considered mad. They can be seen at railway stations or on street corners. They don’t care about their body, they don’t think about it at all and look disheveled. People laugh at them, call them names, but they pay no attention to anything. They live in their joy. They are well. They are blissful. They might even put others’ leftovers in their mouth. They don’t care. If you want to live in vairagya, you must first detach from love for your body.

Choose one sadhana for yourself. Chintan on the Name is a good sadhana. With constant repetition of the Name, you’ll feel changes in yourself. You don’t even need to think about anything else. The Name will do everything for you. Don’t delve into the mechanism of how this happens. Success in one well-practiced sadhana will open all roads for you. For this, you need to choose only one Name, one that’s close to your heart. The energy of this name will give you new experience, new sensations. Knowledge will come about what true reality is. As soon as the power of the Name, peace and joy enter your heart, you won’t want to leave this path, you’ll want to preserve and increase this Divine peace and Divine joy within yourself. For spiritual happiness, everyone needs spiritual energy, peace and joy. One who has this energy, peace and joy attains mukti.

Siddharth: Why did God make everything so complicated? This path to liberation is very complex…

Maharaj: It’s not complex at all. Everything is very simple. Although we think it’s complex. It’s just that in this world, grains of wheat don’t turn into bread by themselves, they need to be ground into flour, kneaded into dough, and baked into bread. Loaves of bread won’t fall on your head from above. In this world, everything is accomplished through work. To perform work, God has provided you with everything and given you tools: body and mind. You just need to get to work. Why were you given hands, why were you given mind? So that you could use them and do your work. You were given the higher mind buddhi for thinking and making decisions. Don’t you want to use this gift? After all, it was given to you to use. Look at mechanical watches, they don’t work by themselves. How many screws and gears they have. How many parts and wires in a mobile phone. Each part has its own meaning, its own purpose. And if you know how to use them, everything becomes simple.

Siddharth: You say it’s simple. But to me it seems like heavy work that requires enormous efforts.

Maharaj: You will experience difficulties as long as your manas is fixated on samsara. Yes, until then it’s difficult. But as soon as you turn the mind away from samsara, everything will begin to come to you naturally. When you wander through jungles without knowing the way, it’s very hard for you. You’ll wander until exhaustion. But as soon as you know the way out, it immediately becomes easy.

Siddharth: Sometimes because of attachments it’s very difficult to get on the right path, even if it’s already been shown to you. For example, even seva and nama-japa-chintan, which you recommend, seem very difficult for a lazy person like me.

Maharaj: A lazy person won’t achieve anything. You must overcome laziness. Mother Earth always says that holding high mountains is not heavy for her, but carrying a lazy person is very heavy. A lazy person is doomed to failure.

Siddharth: Well, actually in some matters I’m not so lazy. For example, I take up work with great joy and enthusiasm when I need to conduct an interview like this one now, or translate some interesting and useful book. But there are types of activities that simply don’t interest me. For example, sweeping floors.

Maharaj: This is pride speaking in you. You find it beneath you to sweep floors. Boring and uninteresting. This is understandable. But on the path of yoga, one shouldn’t hurry and try to fly to the clouds immediately. In conquering manas, one must act gradually, at the speed of an ant crawling along a path, moving from one twig to another, not rushing to the clouds like a bird. Don’t jump, don’t hurry, first master one thing, accept changes, then move forward. Such is the path of yoga – it’s not done in leaps and bounds, it’s a progressive process. You need to take on the work that life places before you on your path. You need to gradually learn new things and abandon old preferences and ideas.

Remember: when you do a good deed, even if it’s not very prestigious or interesting, by bringing benefit to others in a moment of need, you yourself attain happiness. The more good and mercy you create, the more good rains down on you. To those who do seva without expectations of reward, the Lord gives everything necessary and more. The fruit never remains in the roots, it grows and ripens on the branches in its own time.

During the Ashwamedha yajna ceremony conducted by the Pandavas, there was much work, everyone had to take on certain duties. And Krishna chose for himself the duty of clearing dirty dishes from tables and pouring water on people’s hands so they could wash them after eating. And this was the Lord Himself! For a sevak there is no unprestigious work. All seva is equally honorable and important – whether you serve in a temple or clean toilets. Seva is seva, in any form. Its value is measured by necessity.

Siddharth: The other day you said that seva can be very different. It can come from body, mind, word and thought. After all, what I do is also a kind of seva?

Maharaj: Of course, any kind of activity can be seva – whether it’s physical work, intellectual labor or work connected with word and communication. It can also be service for the benefit of plants, animals, birds, not just people. Singing devoted to God is also a form of seva.

Look at ISKCON representatives. They walk the streets, sing songs in praise of God, chant the mantra «Hare Rama Hare Krishna,» and this too is a form of seva. That’s why they have so many centers around the world. They are devoted to their path and always look happy. Indeed, when you serve the Lord in one way or another, you are happy inside.

You can do seva in thoughts too. Even if you repeat God’s Name silently – this is also seva. There are three types of seva – from body, from word, from thought. Though, no matter how you look at it, any type of seva is still connected with the activity of the body. Moreover, even if the body has no strength left, you can still do seva – sing mantras, bhajans and kirtans.

Siddharth: So there’s no direct path to God? For example, coming to a Guru and asking: Maharaj, please give me a direct experience of Divine presence! Maybe not self-realization, but at least a glimpse of God, so that through this experience I could, for instance, rid myself of pride and attain vairagya…

Maharaj: Everything is by Shiva’s will. And if you concentrate on God with love, devotion and faith, on repeating His Name, on seva, then He Himself will reveal His face to you. You will see Him and be able to perceive Him directly. You will have direct experience. But in our tradition, it’s forbidden to artificially induce this direct experience of God in people. It’s considered criminal to do this, for example, to advertise an ashram, to talk about how we can give such magical experience… This is a very personal experience for everyone. So we don’t do these tricks and don’t give direct experience of communion with the Divine. Look around you: how many flowers, trees, plants, what diversity of forms, what amazing play of colors – red, white, green, yellow! These flowers, these fruits that surround you – is this not a miracle, is this not a manifestation of Divine creation?! All nature that surrounds you is that very image of God that you so want to see for a moment.

Siddharth: Interesting, why in your lineage is this considered a crime? After all, there are Gurus who give disciples their first acquaintance with Divinity, this glimpse of «Anubhuti.» And thanks to this experience, the disciple receives a kind of reference point, a starting point, and now knows exactly what to strive for, which direction to go. For example, in these lineages they give shaktipat11.

Maharaj: Shaktipat is given only if the disciple is ready for it and worthy of it. It doesn’t happen that a Guru gives shaktipat at the very first meeting. One must walk a long path of sadhana, special preparation, accumulate special powers and endurance, reach a certain level of understanding. Only this way and no other. Sometimes after receiving shaktipat, unprepared people go mad. If a person hasn’t walked the path of sadhana, they can lose their mind, unable to bear the power of this force.

Siddharth: So if someone comes to you who sincerely believes in God, is mentally prepared and has gone through sadhana, then you can give them shaktipat?

Maharaj: Yes. I can. But the person must already possess enormous endurance, stamina, special energy to receive shaktipat.

Siddharth: And how does it happen in your case: does something spontaneously trigger and somehow transmit itself through your body to the disciple? Or do you first see that yes, this disciple is ready, and after that intentionally give them shaktipat?

Maharaj: The disciple must first pass a test, endure verification.

Siddharth: What kind of test?

Maharaj: A disciple’s readiness can be tested in different ways. Well, for example, someone might say an offensive word to the disciple, and if they flare up and start arguing. This is a sign that this disciple isn’t ready for shaktipat. Anger has destructive power, it burns a person like fire. A hot-tempered person, prone to taking offense, won’t endure, will simply go mad if given shaktipat. For the fire of their anger will rise to the surface.

Siddharth: Do you specially create situations of quarrels and conflicts in the ashram on a subtle level? To test your disciples?

Maharaj: No, I don’t arrange anything specially myself. I just observe. And observation shows me what progress people are making in their sadhana, how much love for God they have. After all, when you have strong love for God, you don’t have any desire to quarrel with anyone. You simply don’t need it. Shanti [peace] is the most important thing. And if they have raga and dvesha [attractions and aversions], there will be no shanti. We have many conflicts in our ashram, people quarrel, shout at each other, take offense. I watch this. I say nothing, let them quarrel. For I have no preferences. But I don’t arrange anything. All these situations are created by Devi, the Goddess. This is her play. We have a Goddess temple here. This is her doing.

One who loves God has no time for conflicts. One who lives advaita, has a non-dual view, never conflicts with anyone. For them, the opposites and extremes of existence are erased. For them there is no difference – important work or not important. All work is important. Here at this moment there are dirty dishes, they need to be cleaned. And they will clean them, because it’s for the good. They don’t find it offensive or shameful, they accept any such work as seva. This is non-dual attitude to reality, advaita-bhava. Small or big, dirty or clean – in every facet of existing phenomena, a person with advaita-bhava sees one God in everything – in every opposite. So why should they take offense and conflict?

Sadhana gives understanding of this. Become a sadhak, and you’ll achieve such an attitude to life. When the mind is cleansed of dirt, you won’t commit anything bad anymore. You will be balanced. But if there are preferences, attachments in the heart, they will spread like waves and transmit to others.

Suddenly Maharaj turns to the Russian devotee present at the interview, who knows neither Hindi nor English, and through the translator asks: «Do you understand everything?» She answers: «Only in the heart,» and the translator adds that later all this will be translated into Russian and that this is Siddharth’s seva – to bring this message to Russian-speaking people.

Maharaj: The «Ramayana» says: «Most of all I love those who do seva for the benefit of others.» Everyone loves sevaks. If you possess the quality of a sevak, everyone will love you. A sevak never considers themselves higher or more worthy than others. They have no ego. An egoistic person will never be able to engage in true seva.

It happens with us that a young person from a village goes to university, gets higher education, then gets a good job, and that’s it – they already consider themselves above everyone in their native village. They find it beneath them to simply take a broom and sweep in their own house, they’ll consider it beneath their dignity. It’s even awkward for them to bring a glass of water to a guest who has come to their house. Parents will both sweep the floor and serve water, but they will remain sitting. I’ve seen such things.

Siddharth: But many people do seva to earn respect from others…

Maharaj: You can’t approach seva this way. Seva is done selflessly, a sevak never expects reward, praise or encouragement. You simply do good, that’s all. Animals have a subtle ability to sense sincerity and true kindness. Look at our dogs, for example. We feed them, give them water, take care of them, and they respond and answer us with mutual love. Animals and birds understand everything. And trees, plants understand everything.

There’s such a story. Two biologists, an American and a German, were conducting research related to studying the emotional state of different plant species. The American scientist had his own laboratory where instruments were attached to tree roots, registering plants’ reactions to changes in the environment and surroundings. Once his German colleague came to visit, she had a knife in her briefcase. Before she could approach the laboratory door, the needle on all the American’s measuring instruments began pointing to red. This is the color indicating feelings of anxiety and danger. Then the American asked the woman to show if she had any weapons with her, and she admitted she had a knife. But when she removed the knife from her bag and took it away, and took a water hose in her hands instead, the instruments’ needles began showing green.

Plants and trees know and feel everything. Trees experience fear of violence and acutely sense others’ intention to harm them – to cut or saw them down. And if someone cuts down a tree, other trees growing nearby cry and suffer.

Japanese people never pick flowers. They only pick up fallen flowers or fallen petals. The Shastras say: if you need to pick a plant, talk to it, bow to it, explain to it – why and for what purpose you want to pick it. After such a conversation, the plant won’t feel pain. If you approach and roughly pick it, you’ll cause it suffering.

Siddharth: Do you directly feel your unity with trees and plants? Do you understand their language? They’re not much different from us?

Maharaj: They’re no different at all. The external form is different, but we exist with them in a unified space of consciousness, though at different levels. We are all one.

There was such a sadhu in Maharashtra state named Namdev. Once he was baking roti in the courtyard and went into the house for a minute to bring ghee. And then a dog, while he was gone, came, grabbed the roti and went further down the street. Namdev saw this and ran after it shouting: «Lord! Bhagavan! Where are you going? What about the ghee? Let me spread ghee on your roti, it will be tastier that way!» For Namdev, God was manifested in the dog. This was long ago. Back then, sadhus didn’t call a dog a dog, they addressed it as God.

I once planted a tree by our gates. It’s still growing there. And once during bad weather, one branch of this young tree was strongly bent to the ground by wind and pressed down by a log. I was sleeping in my house at night, and I dream that the tree is crying. Crying and crying. I could hardly wait for morning. In the morning I got up and went straight to this tree. I see – the pressed branch is lying on the ground. I removed the log from it, freed it from the weight, and it immediately rose up, even flew up. And it became so joyful. Trees, they understand and feel everything. This tree is still growing by our gates.

If you love someone, you feel and understand them. Unity of consciousness arises between you. It’s the same with animals. Sometimes I lie down to rest, and he [points to one of the dogs] comes at 11 AM to wake me up. If I forget to give him food on time, he comes and wakes me. Animals sensitively feel your attitude. They feel your love. You can’t show hostility and fear toward them. They pick up on such attitudes toward themselves very well.

All living beings understand the language of love. Chetan-atma, consciousness at the level of Atma, exists in everyone, it’s expressed through the feeling of love.

It was once predicted to a raja: tomorrow at noon Death will come to you in the form of a black snake, and you will die from its bite. When the raja woke up the next morning, he sat by the main palace gates. He placed gold and silver saucers beside him, poured milk into them and waited. Death came crawling as a snake and saw: the raja sitting in lotus pose, hands folded in pranam, and all around him were refreshments in gold and silver dishes. Death was amazed – no one had ever welcomed him so warmly! The snake began to drink the milk, and the raja continued to sit, showing no fear. His face radiated love and respect. Then Death appeared before the raja in its true form. «Well,» it said, «I gift you another 25 years of happy life. Thank you for the refreshment!» Such is the power of love – when you love, there is no fear. In a state of love at the level of chetan-atma [self-consciousness], you can communicate even with the consciousness of a snake.

Siddharth: You spend most of your time sitting by the fire. Do you also communicate with the fire?

Maharaj: Yes, of course. It has an element of Divine consciousness. This is Agni-Dev. If I offer it refreshment, it accepts it. If you simply place an offering in the temple, it remains untouched. Offer refreshment to the fire in dhuni, and the fire eats it. In our temple we do not offer sweets to the Deities. We offer prasad to Agni Deva through the medium of dhuni. If the sweet prasad is left in the temple, then the ants eat it. Some dedicate their puja to fire, some to dhuni. It doesn’t matter to whom you do puja. You can dedicate puja to a tree.

Siddharth: Maharaj, you already know many Russian people, have met with many. Is there any message you could pass on specifically for Russians?

Maharaj: I have already conveyed all meanings and messages to Russian people – both during my trips to Russia and here, sitting in the ashram. Do nama-chintan, do seva, look at everything from the position of love and compassion, treat everything with kindness and love. One who has love in their heart is capable of much. God comes where there is love. A bee sits only on the flower that is filled with honey-bearing aroma. Ishvara comes only to one whose heart is filled with love and bhakti. He comes to no one else.

Maharaj, 2015

Third Conversation: Practice

The next day, again around noon, Maharaj was sitting with devotees and talking about something mundane, and then fell completely silent. We sat nearby, with the recorder ready – in case there was still an opportunity to talk with Maharaj once more. The silence continued, and then I gave a sign to the translator. She addressed Maharaj like this: «Can we have another satsang?» He replied, surprisingly, that throughout this time, nothing but satsang had been happening. This indicated that satsang was perpetually ongoing in his presence, even if it’s not obvious. After all, the word satsang itself translates from Sanskrit as «connection with Truth,» «communion with Truth.»

However, Maharaj still allowed us to put a lavalier microphone on him to answer a few more questions.

Siddharth: Is repetition of the Name the main thing you recommend? The main sadhana for everyone?

Vankhandi Maharaj: Even Tulsidas wrote many years ago: when Kali Yuga comes and humanity becomes mired in sin and sinks into the darkness of ignorance, the spiritually seeking person will have only one path left – to keep attention on the Divine and repeat God’s Name. The Divine Name will become the only ray of light, the guiding thread that will lead a person to the pure shore of Truth. Tulsidas called the repetition of God’s Name adhara – the foundation and core of human spiritual practice. Otherwise one cannot stand firm.

What matters here is your attitude towards this practice. This sadhana will only work when you invest spiritual fervor, love, and firm faith into this process – shraddha, prem, and vishwas. These three components – the heat of your heart, love, and faith – ignite the spark, activate the Name, infuse life into It and fill It with power. The Name comes alive, gains power and immortality. It becomes the Name of Paramatma for you.

And then, on the wings of this Name, you either fly to freedom or achieve the fulfillment of samsaric desires and aspirations. That’s up to you. Whatever goal you set in your sadhana. If you want worldly happiness and success in samsara, the Name will give it to you. If you want mukti, It will help you attain mukti.

Someone from the gathering: And what if you want both?

Maharaj: It doesn’t work that way. You can’t catch both birds with one hand. I said yesterday that if you have tea in your glass and you want to drink milk from this glass, you’ll have to pour out the tea.

Siddharth: On one hand, I realize that mukti is most important for a person, that it is the only true goal of human existence. But on the other hand, I still have some unfulfilled worldly desires. I still want something from this world although I would prefer to be liberated and as soon as possible. What would you recommend in this case?