Question: Why are we separated from the spirit and are we at birth?

Shri Mataji: We are separated because of ignorance. We started becoming, from amoebic stage to human stage, developing our awareness - better and better and better. Like a reflector we are. So the reflector is improving gradually and the reflection of that spiritual life shows better and better, till we reach a human stage. Now, here we come at this stage in the process, of the living process, and then we become connected and that ignorance is finished.

We are not separated as such. We are looked after. Like, there is darkness in this room but you are not separated from light. Only you have to switch on. There is no punishment or anything done to you, no, because you have come from that. Your awareness has started improving.

Question: You keep talking about the living process. This can happen while you’re alive - it doesn’t happen when you die?

Shri Mataji: No, not. You have to live, you have to have a body. If you don’t have a body, this realisation doesn’t take place.

So some people talk of the dead gurus and all that. It’s not possible. You have to get it when you are living. You have to have the body. Body is the temple, as you can say, that if there is no bulb, you cannot get light. There may be light but you have to have a bulb. It has to come in the form of a human being, not in the animals.

Public Programme (PP) 21st November 1981, New York, USA

"Some people have an idea that once you become a guru you need not maintain everything, it is maintained by itself. It is not.

Agreed that the spirit definitely enhances the beauty and the health of these elements but at the human level there is always a greater force that is trying to destroy it. So till we have completely become the spirit, there is always a chance of this destruction working it out.

One may say, why this balance needed? And this is an important question which we should be able to answer all the people who ask us. Without the balance, you cannot ascend. If you cannot ascend, what’s the use of our becoming human beings?

For example, everything is God but nobody is aware. At the human level you become aware - means everything exists, everything is there but it is not aware. Say, there is a stone. That is also God but it is not yet aware.

Like say, this area is completely dark and we are blind. There is nothing to be seen, to be felt or experienced when you are in that condition. Actually one thinks that darkness is the truth, that ignorance is the truth. But when the sun comes up and the light comes in and your eyes open, you start seeing everything. You start becoming aware. So at human level you are aware at the highest point."

4th July 1982, London, UK