provided by the Swami's representatives, Lee Myers and Rebecca Paxton of La Jolla, California.
My father, Hyman Sarfatti, was born in Macedonia in 1914.His father came from Italian Sephardim said to be descended from the French Merlin Rashi de Troyes. He spend his infancy in a cave
escaping the battles between the Turks and the Bulgarians not unlike what is happening now in Bosnia. My Aunt Esther
says that my father as an infant kept asking her in Ladino "Yo quero agua! Yo quero agua!" Esther repeatedly brought Hyman water from the well. He spat it out every time and kept asking "Yo quero agua! Yo quero agua!"
My father explains his odd behavior by saying that he is an "old soul" who was fully conscious at his birth. He was asking for the enlightenment of the "spiritual waters" not the "material waters".
The Saints or Sons of God in all ages incarnate on Earth solely for the purpose of teaching and guiding human beings to the spiritual path back to God and His Kingdom, our true and Eternal Home.
The Soul within us is part and parcel of the Lord and of the same essence. True religion implies the spiritual path which takes us back to God and becomes One with Him. The term Yoga means exactly that - Union with God.
Spirituality is the common denominator of all religions. Over time, more importance is given to ritual prayers, ceremonies, religious holidays and dogmas, than to the real teachings of their respective Spiritual Masters. They all speak in different words essentially the same spiritual truth, which is the common heritage of all religions. Unfortunately, the followers of every religion interpret their respective teachings in their own way, delete and interpolate them, and build organizations and churches that emphasize ritual prayers, ceremonies, dogmas and holiday celebrations. Thus, the followers and their priesthood forget or ignore the real teachings and disiplines, becoming grossly materialistic.
God-realization or Self-realization implies the merging of our individual souls back into God, or becoming One with God, without at the same time losing our identity as a part of God or a Son of God. This life in Eternity (i.e., Eternal Life) knows no death, decay or sorrow. The life with God is the ever-lasting and ever-renewing self-affirmation of fully conscious illimitable divinity. This is the purpose of the spiritual path; to gain spiritual freedom and attain Eternal Life, our ultimate destination. We must yearn to attain God, the One and only Reality. Nothing is real but God.
How to become spiritual? - by fasting, prayer and meditation. Only supreme faith in God can assure abiding peace. Our bodies are the Temples of the Living God. We can only find God or realize God within our own bodies. Meditation, fasting and prayer is the process of involution by which we gain the experiential knowledge of God and finally merge into Him. This is the true meaning or definition of Salvation and Eternal Life in God, or Cosmic Consciousness. This is the true inward spiritual journey or spiritual path. Here is where we find true peace of mind, satisfaction and happiness.
Our search for these things is generally in worldly achievements and
worldly possessions. The more we run after these outer things, the
more we generally become frustrated and unhappy. The worldly
materialistic life degenerates into an endless round of ephemeral
pleasures and pain. The world is really an illusion. The only one
and true Reality is God and the life in God, with God and only for
the sake of God. The world and the worldly life has no intrinsic
worth. It is only a stage or a school in which we learn - a learning
process by which we learn to differentiate between the unreal and the
real.
After many incarnations we finally reach the one in which we start on the spiritual path. If we do not attain God in that particular one, then we come back on Earth and continue from where we left off in the previous incarnation until we reach the Goal - the highest prophecy stored for us in the archives of the Almighty. God is the Goal, and we go from unconscious God to conscious God. We are all God - everyone of us - in the process of becoming God [1]. This is the whole reason, the one and only reason for the Creation. If every soul in the universe attained God-Consciousness tomorrow morning at 9am, then the whole universe, known and unknown, would literally disappear at that moment. God's purpose would be fulfilled and their would be no reason for the universe to exist. God is the beginning and the end of everything. Nothing exists outside of God - not even a single atom or molecule.
In the beginning only God existed - no universe, nothing. Then God spoke the Word AUM, the spiritual sound and the whole universe came into existence. As the Bible says "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Scientifically speaking, the Big Bang theory is absolutely correct. The universe came into existence at the AUM- Point - the Word of God.
Buddha's state of Nirvana means release from birth and death or Salvation or God-Realization through the Eight-fold Path to Perfection. It is the same goal of Christ or Krishna or of any other great Saints. God is the Goal and the only Reality. There is only one truth and only one God. We must release our soul from the mind-heart and the senses in order for the soul [2] to merge into God.
involution
to free it from bondage.